The Oxford Book of American Det (60 page)

He veered out away from them in another pretzel-twist, flashed up toward the fifth, the one above. Something sparked in the darkness of one of his own windows where he’d been just now, and a shot thudded heavily out around the quadrangle-enclosure like a big bass drum.

He passed the fifth, the sixth, got up to the roof. He’d made it a second time. Gee, he loved life! The guys in his own windows couldn’t get him, he was over them in a straight line and there was too much fire escape interlacing in the way.

I was too busy watching him to watch what was going on around me. Suddenly Boyne was next to me, sighting. I heard him mutter: “I almost hate to do this, he’s got to fall so far.”

He was balanced on the roof parapet up there, with a star right over his head. An unlucky star. He stayed a minute too long, trying to kill before he was killed. Or maybe he was killed, and knew it.

A shot cracked, high up against the sky, the window pane flew apart all over the two of us, and one of the books snapped right behind me.

Boyne didn’t say anything more about hating to do it. My face was pressing outward against his arm. The recoil of his elbow jarred my teeth. I blew a clearing through the smoke to watch him go.

It was pretty horrible. He took a minute to show anything, standing up there on the parapet. Then he let his gun go, as if to say: “I won’t need this any more.” Then he went after it. He missed the fire escape entirely, came all the way down on the outside.

He landed so far out he hit one of the projecting planks, down there out of sight. It bounced his body up, like a springboard. Then it landed again—for good. And that was all.

I said to Boyne: “I got it. I got it finally. The fifth-floor flat, the one over his, that they’re still working on. The cement kitchen floor, raised above the level of the other rooms. They wanted to comply with the fire laws and also obtain a dropped living room effect, as cheaply as possible. Dig it up—“

He went right over then and there, down through the basement and over the fences, to save time. The electricity wasn’t turned on yet in that one, they had to use their torches. It didn’t take them long at that, once they’d got started. In about half an hour he came to the window and wigwagged over for my benefit. It meant yes.

He didn’t come over until nearly eight in the morning; after they’d tidied up and taken them away. Both away, the hot dead and the cold dead. He said: “Jeff, I take it all back. That damn fool that I sent up there about the trunk—well, it wasn’t his fault, in a way. I’m to blame. He didn’t have orders to check on the woman’s description, only on the contents of the trunk. He came back and touched on it in a general way. I go home and I’m in bed already, and suddenly pop! into my brain—one of the tenants I questioned two whole days ago had given us a few details and they didn’t tally with his on several important points. Talk about being slow to catch on!”

“I’ve had that all the way through this damn thing,” I admitted ruefully. “I call it delayed action. It nearly killed me.”

“I’m a police officer and you’re not.”

“That how you happened to shine at the right time?”

“Sure. We came over to pick him up for questioning. I left them planted there when we saw he wasn’t in, and came on over here by myself to square it up with you while we were waiting. How did you happen to hit on that cement floor?” I told him about the freak synchronisation. “The renting agent showed up taller at the kitchen window in proportion to Thorwald, than he had been a moment before when both were at the living room windows together. It was no secret that they were putting in cement floors, topped by a cork composition, and raising them considerable. But it took on new meaning. Since the top floor one has been finished for some time, it had to be the fifth. Here’s the way I have it lined up, just in theory. She’s been in ill health for years, and he’s been out of work, and he got sick of that and of her both. Met this other—“

“She’ll be here later today, they’re bringing her down under arrest.”

“He probably insured her for all he could get, and then started to poison her slowly, trying not to leave any trace. I imagine—and remember, this is pure conjecture—she caught him at it that night the light was on all night. Caught on in some way, or caught him in the act. He lost his head, and did the very thing he had wanted all along to avoid doing. Killed her by violence - strangulation or a blow. The rest had to be hastily improvised. He got a better break than he deserved at that. He thought of the apartment upstairs, went up and looked around. They’d just finished laying the floor, the cement hadn’t hardened yet, and the materials were still around. He gouged a trough out of it just wide enough to take her body, put her in, mixed fresh cement and re-cemented over her, possibly raising the general level of the flooring an inch or two so that she’d be safely covered. A permanent, odourless coffin. Next day the workmen came back, laid down the cork surfacing on top of it without noticing anything, I suppose he’d used one of their own trowels to smooth it. Then he sent his accessory upstate fast, near where his wife had been several summers before, but to a different farmhouse where she wouldn’t be recognised, along with the trunk keys. Sent the trunk up after her, and dropped himself an already used post card into his mailbox, with the year-date blurred. In a week or two she would have probably committed

‘suicide’ up there as Mrs. Anna Thorwald. Despondency due to ill health. Written him a farewell note and left her clothes beside some body of deep water. It was risky, but they might have succeeded in collecting the insurance at that.” By nine Boyne and the rest had gone. I was still sitting there in the chair, too keyed up to sleep. Sam came in and said: “Here’s Doc Preston.” He showed up rubbing his hands, in that way he has. “Guess we can take that cast off your leg now. You must be tired of sitting there all day doing nothing.” MARY ROBERTS RINEHART (1876-1958)

Mary Roberts Rinehart’s early life, though painful, could hardly have been better devised to produce the sort of writer she turned out to be. When she was nine, her father killed himself after failing as a salesman. Her mother took boarders into their Pittsburgh home to make ends meet.

Young Rinehart began writing for her school paper and entering stories in Pittsburgh Press contests. She earned a nursing degree, worked on the hospital wards that dealt with the blue-collar and bar-fight traffic, married a doctor, bore three sons, and did not return to writing until she was thirty. Within three years, her second book,
The Man in
Lower Ten,
became the first detective novel to become a national best-seller in the United States. In the wake of this phenomenal success, she accompanied her husband to Europe, where he studied his specialty. She applied her writing skills to articles about politics and medicine, became a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, used her nursing credentials to avoid the military ban on reporters at the front, and won herself a second national reputation.

Home again after the war, she wrote ten more best-sellers, numerous other books, articles and short stories for the big-circulation ‘slicks,’ and two smash-hit plays. In addition, she found time to take part in the woman-suffrage movement and to spread public awareness of breast cancer.

Rinehart changed the course of American detective fiction by infusing into the puzzle the personal details that produce in readers a strong identification with the heroine, thereby causing them to share her fear, bafflement, and final triumph.

Despite its brevity,
The Lipstick
provides a look at the usual characteristics of Rinehart’s stories. The narrator is a self-reliant young woman whose eye for domestic detail (the lipstick) leads to the solution of the crime. Rinehart uses a bit of romance, a touch of humour, about as much development of minor characters as was typical of the genre in her day, and an adversarial relationship between the heroine and the police.

This short form doesn’t sustain a device that Rinehart popularised in her novels—

maintaining suspense by keeping the plucky heroine in constant jeopardy. Critics called this the ‘Had I But Known’ tactic, and scoffed at it. But it worked.

The Lipstick

I walked home after the coroner’s inquest. Mother had gone on in the car, looking rather sick, as she had ever since Elinor’s death. Not that she had particularly cared for Elinor. She has a pattern of life which divides people into conformers and nonconformers. The conformers pay their bills the first of the month, go to church, never by any chance get into anything but the society columns of the newspapers, and regard marriage as the
sine qua non
of every female over twenty.

My cousin Elinor Hammond had flouted all this. She had gone gaily through life, as if she wakened each morning wondering what would be the most fun that day; stretching her long lovely body between her silk sheets—how Mother resented those sheets—and calling to poor tired old Fred in his dressing room.

“Let’s have some people in for cocktails, Fred.”

“Anything you say, darling.”

It was always like that. Anything Elinor said was all right with Fred. He worshiped her.

As I walked home that day I was remembering his face at the inquest. He had looked dazed.

“You know of no reason why your—why Mrs. Hammond should take her own life?”

“None whatever.”

“There was nothing in her state of health to cause her anxiety?”

“Nothing. She had always seemed to be in perfect health.”

“She was consulting Dr. Barclay.”

“She was tired. She was doing too much,” he said unhappily.

Yet there it was. Elinor had either fallen or jumped from that tenth-floor window of Dr. Barclay’s waiting room, and the coroner plainly believed she had jumped. The doctor had not seen her at all that day. Only the nurse.

“There was no one else in the reception room,” she testified. “The doctor was busy with a patient. Mrs. Hammond sat down and took off her hat. Then she picked up a magazine. I went back to my office to copy some records. I didn’t see her again until...”

The nurse was a pretty little thing. She looked pale.

“Tell us what happened next,” said the coroner gently.

“I heard the other patient leave about five minutes later. She went out from the consulting room. There’s a door there into the hall. When the doctor buzzed for the next case I went in to get Mrs. Hammond.

She wasn’t there. I saw her hat, but her bag was gone. Then—then I heard people shouting in the street, and I looked out the window.”

“What would you say was her mental condition that morning, Miss Comings?” the coroner asked. “Was she depressed?”

“I thought she seemed very cheerful,” the nurse said.

“The window was open beside her?”

“Yes. I couldn’t believe it until I...”

The coroner excused her then. It was clear that she had told all she knew.

When Dr. Barclay was called, I was surprised. I had expected an elderly man, but he was only in the late thirties and good-looking. Knowing Elinor, I wondered. Except for Fred, who had no looks whatever, she had had a passion for handsome men.

Beside me, I heard Mother give a ladylike snort. “So that’s it!” she said. “She had as much need for a psychiatrist as I have for a third leg.” But the doctor added little to what we already knew. He had not seen Elinor at all that morning. When he rang the buzzer and nobody came, he had gone into the reception room. Miss Comings was leaning out the window. All at once she began to scream.

Fortunately, a Mrs. Thompson arrived at that time and took charge of her. The doctor had gone down to the street, but the ambulance had already arrived.

He was frank enough up to that time. Queried about the reason for Elinor’s consulting him, he tightened. “I have many patients like Mrs. Hammond,” he said. “Women who live on their nerves. Mrs. Hammond had been doing that for years.”

“That is all? She mentioned no particular trouble?” He smiled faintly. “We all have troubles,” he said. “Some we imagine; some we magnify; some are real. But I would say that Mrs. Hammond was an unusually normal person. I had recommended that she go away for a rest. I believe she meant to do so.” His voice was clipped and professional. If Elinor had been attracted to him, it had been apparently a one-sided affair.

“You did not gather that she contemplated suicide?”

“No. Not at any time.”

That is all they got out of him. He evaded them on anything Elinor had imagined or magnified. His relations with his patients, he said, were confidential. If he knew anything of value he would tell it, but he did not.

Mother nudged me as he finished. “Probably in love with her. He’s had a shock. That’s certain.”

He sat down near us, and I watched him. I saw him come to attention when the next witness was called. It was the Mrs. Thompson who had looked after the nurse, a large motherly-looking woman.

She stated at once that she was not a patient. “I clean the doctor’s apartment once a week,” she said. “That day I needed a little money in advance, so I went to see him.” She had not entered the office at once. She had looked in and seen Elinor, so she had waited in the hall. She had seen the last patient, a woman, leave by the consulting-room door and go down in the elevator. A minute or so later she heard the nurse scream.

“She was leaning out the window yelling her head off. Then the doctor ran in and I got her on a couch. She said somebody had fallen out, but she didn’t say who it was.” Asked how long she had been in the hall, she thought about a quarter of an hour. She was certain no other patients had entered during that time. She would have seen them if they had.

“You found something belonging to Mrs. Hammond in the office, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I found her bag.”

The bag, it seemed, had been behind the radiator in front of the window.

So that was that. Elinor, having put her hat on the table, had dropped her bag behind the radiator before she jumped. Somehow, it didn’t make sense to me.

The verdict was suicide while of unsound mind. The window had been examined, but there was the radiator in front of it, and the general opinion seemed to be that a fall would have to be ruled out. Nobody mentioned murder. In the face of Mrs.