We All Killed Grandma (2 page)

I started to say I didn’t and then realized that I did. I don’t know why, but I’d never got around to reading the newspaper accounts of my grandmother’s death; I hadn’t even thought about them. So I said yes, I’d like to see it.

She got her purse from the closet and hunted through the rubble women keep in purses until she came up with a folded clipping. There was a two-column head on it:

PAULINE TUTTLE

SLAIN BY BURGLAR

A Tuesday date-line and the story:

Mrs. Pauline Tuttle, 64, of 1044 Chisolm Drive, was shot and killed at about 11:30
P.M.
last night in the room of her home which she used as an office. A safe in the same room had been rifled and the screen in the window was cut through from the outside. Police believe the crime to have been the work of a professional burglar who shot Mrs. Tuttle when she walked into the room while he was at the safe. The burglar fired twice. One shot was wild; the other struck Mrs. Tuttle in the forehead just above the left eye, and death was probably instantaneous.

It was, according to information secured by the police, the almost invariable custom of Mrs. Tuttle to work in the first-floor room of her home which served as her office from approximately eight o’clock every evening until after midnight. It was her habit, at 11:30
P.M.
, to leave her office and go to the kitchen to warm a glass of milk and return with it to the office to continue working for another half hour or longer. It is believed that the burglar had been watching from a place of concealment and when Mrs. Tuttle left her office to go to the kitchen he cut his way through the screen into the room where, a few minutes later, he was interrupted in his depredations by Mrs. Tuttle. This reconstruction of the crime is borne out by the fact that a broken glass in a puddle of milk was found beside the body just inside the door of the room.

The crime was reported by Roderick Tuttle Britten, 28, of 407 Cuyahoga St., grandson of the victim. He entered the house shortly after midnight, found the body and telephoned police. From emotional shock Mr. Britten suffered an attack of amnesia and was unable to account for his movements prior to his arrival at the house or recall his reason for having come there. The police found him waiting for them, dazed and confused and, they state, he had been drinking heavily. Police investigation, after direct questioning of Mr. Britten had proved futile because of his attack of amnesia, proved that he had been elsewhere at the time of the murder and he was released in the care of the family physician, Dr. George Eggleston.

Besides Mrs. Tuttle and her killer, the only other person present in the house at the time of the murder was the housekeeper, Mrs. May Trent, 45. Mrs. Trent was then sleeping in a room on the third floor and was not awakened by the shots. Archer Whaley Britten, half-brother of Roderick Britten and ward of Mrs. Tuttle, lives in the house but was in Chicago on the night of the crime and did not learn of it until his return this morning.

Mrs. Pauline Tuttle, the victim of this shocking crime, is well known in real estate and financial circles in this city. Moderately wealthy and eccentric, she entered business eleven years ago at the age of 53, on small capital, and operated shrewdly and successfully in the buying and selling of real estate and securities. Her fortune has been variously estimated at from a hundred thousand to half a million dollars. Known as “Grandma Tuttle” to hundreds, she has been described by her competitors in business as “a small-scale Hetty Green.”

Funeral services will be held…

I didn’t read the rest of the final paragraph. Funeral services had been held, day before yesterday. And strange they had seemed to me, not knowing anyone there except those who introduced themselves as people I’d known for years. Not even knowing—I’d nearly laughed once; I remembered the joke about the stranger who had walked into a funeral parlor and had whispered to someone, “Whose funeral is this?” And the man had whispered back, as he pointed to the body in the open coffin,
“His!”

And it was funny, too, that I could remember a joke I’d probably heard years before and couldn’t remember my friends and relatives who were there at the funeral, and could feel no grief for my own grandmother who was dead, because she was a stranger to me. A tall woman with thin gray hair, gaunt and with a sharp face, a nose like a beak.

And funny that the name Hetty Green in the newspaper story meant more to me than Grandma Tuttle’s name. I knew who Hetty Green had been, an elderly eccentric rich woman, in fact the richest woman in America, who had died early in the century and who had been the boldest
and ablest woman financier of her time, who had managed all her own property personally and had left a fortune estimated at a hundred million dollars.

Dr. Eggleston, when I’d been talking with him after he’d examined me, mostly to be sure that my amnesia had not been the result of any head injury, had used the very phrase the newspaper had used, “a small-scale Hetty Green,” in answer to a question I’d asked him about who and what Grandma had been. I’d said, “Doctor, how can I remember who Hetty Green was when I don’t remember—except that you tell me you’ve been our family doctor for fifteen years—who you are?” He’d answered me, “There’s nothing strange about that, Rod. It’s typical of general amnesia. You’ve forgotten all the events of your previous life, everything that happened to you personally and the people you knew personally, but you retain your acquired knowledge. You probably remember everything you learned in school, for example, but probably don’t remember what school you went to or who your teachers were. You remember about Hetty Green because you never knew her; if she’d been anything to you personally, part of your life in any way, she’d be blanked out with the rest. That’s common in general amnesia, Rod. There’s a kind known as complete amnesia but it’s rare; if you’d got it you’d have forgotten your acquired knowledge as well. You’d have forgotten your vocabulary—aphasia—and have to learn how to talk all over again. Not to mention how to feed yourself and dress yourself. You’d be starting from scratch.”

I’d said, “It’s bad enough this way. Say—what kind of work did I do, and will I be able to do it again?”

“You work for the Carver Advertising Agency, Rod. Writing advertising copy. I see no reason why you won’t be as good at it as you were before. You’ll have to get your bearings and remeet your employer and fellow employees, of course, and they’ll have to be a bit understanding while you reorientate yourself, but I think you’ll be all right. And, in all probability, this condition is temporary anyway. If it’s not physical—from a head injury or a brain tumor, and sometimes even then—people with amnesia almost always recover, even without treatment. Sometimes their entire memory returns as suddenly as it left
and sometimes gradually they begin to remember one thing after another until they have it all back. You have no physical injury, Rod, and there’s no reason to assume a brain tumor or other organic cause. It’s obviously from shock, and psychic. Which puts it outside my field; I’m going to send you to see a psychiatrist after you’ve had a night’s sleep.”

“I don’t want to see a psychiatrist,” I told him.

“Why not?”

I’d said, “I don’t know. I just don’t.”

That had been at about four o’clock in the morning, Tuesday morning, after the police had finished with me and apparently didn’t suspect me; Dr. Eggleston had come down to the station and had driven me home—that conversation had been in his car.

But now it was Friday and I was at Robin’s. Nothing, no faintest memory of a childhood episode, had come back to me yet. It meant nothing to be sitting in an apartment in which I’d lived for two years, in a chair I must have sat in a thousand times, talking to a beautiful woman with whom I had slept more than seven hundred nights.

And Robin was holding her hand out for the clipping, seeing that I was no longer looking at it. Robin Trenholm, who had been—so everyone told me—Robin Britten, Mrs. Roderick Britten.

I gave her the clipping.

“Are the facts in it straight, Rod? Or do they have anything wrong?”

“Pretty straight,” I said. “Probably farthest off the beam in their estimate of Grandma Tuttle’s fortune. Arch has been looking into that angle of it with a man named Hennig, a banker, who is executor of the estate, and says that after taxes and expenses and stuff there’ll be probably less than forty thousand left.”

“You and Arch share it equally?”

I nodded. “No other bequests, not even a cent to the housekeeper who worked for her for ten years. I’m trying to talk Arch into us giving her a thousand out of it anyway.”

“And if Arch doesn’t kick in, you’ll probably do it out of your share.”

“Why not?” I said. “What’s a thousand out of nearly twenty? And she’s got it coming, working there that long. Or is it a change of character for me to feel like that? Was I a tightwad before?”

She looked away from my eyes on that. She said, “Damn you, Rod.” But not vindictively. “All right, you came here and I let you in; I suppose I might as well make a noise like a hostess. Will you have a drink?”

I nodded and started to say that, if she had it, whisky and water was what I liked. But I remembered in time not to say it.

She’d know that. She knew what things I liked and didn’t like better than I knew.

She walked toward one of the doors and it opened and gave me a quick flash of kitchen white before it swung shut after her.

She’d be busy for a few minutes and that gave me a chance to look around. I stood up and walked to the other door. It opened quietly and it led to the bedroom. I didn’t go in; I just stood in the doorway. There was a big double bed in the far corner and it was strange to look at that bed and realize that I didn’t recognize it. Like the living room the bedroom was well, but not expensively furnished. There was a door opening from it that no doubt led to the bathroom. I wondered if we’d had a tub or shower or both but it didn’t seem worth investigating.

I closed the door quietly. I was studying one of the prints, the Van Gogh, when Robin came back carrying two drinks. The one she handed me was whisky and water. I thanked her and sat down again and she sat down again, too. With a drink in her hand she looked more relaxed, less as though she expected me to stay only a moment.

She said, “What do you want to know, Rod?”

“About us,” I said. “About what happened to our marriage.”

“Why? It’s over now. It was over before you got amnesia. And in case you’ve forgotten—I mean, you
wanted
to forget it. So now that you have, why not let well enough alone?”

“I’ll remember sometime.”

“All right, you’ll remember sometime. And the farther in the future, the less it will matter.”

I took a sip of my drink while I hunted for words. I said, “I’ve got to know who and what I was. It’s a lost feeling not to remember. The two years I was married to you must have been an important part of my life. Ditto, the reason or reasons why you divorced me. Especially because it was so recent. Was it a month ago? I think that’s what Arch told me.”

“We separated a month ago. The actual divorce was Tuesday, only three days ago.”

I sat up straight. “You mean it was
since
—” And then I didn’t see how that mattered, so I thought a moment. I said, “Listen, Robin, how’s about briefing me from the start? Where did I meet you? How long did we know one another before we were married? That sort of thing. It’ll help orient me.”

“I was working for the Carver Advertising Agency when you started there as a copy writer three years ago. I was Mr. Carver’s private secretary. You asked me for a date the first week you worked there. We actually had our first date a month later. We went to see—”

“Wait,” I said. “Why the month interval? Was I a slow worker? Or were you playing hard to get—or what?”

She laughed a little, and suddenly a chunk of tension was gone. And I’d been right that one of the things for which her lips were made was laughter. It was a nice laugh, nice to watch and nice to hear.

She said, “Not exactly either of those things. It was—well, your first request was too casual, too disinterested, for me to—care to accept. A girl has pride, and, you see, I was second string. Has Arch mentioned Vangy Wayne?”

I shook my head.

“Evangeline Wayne, a little blonde who works for Carver too. She—well, I won’t go into detail about her or I might sound catty. I guess I couldn’t talk honestly about her and not sound catty. Anyway, you dated her first—I think about the second day you worked there. And you were seeing her fairly regularly by the time you first got around to asking me to go out with you—probably because Vangy had other plans for that evening.”

“But by a month later,” I said, “it was different. How? Had Vangy given me the brush-off or the other way around?”

“I never asked and I never cared. But by then you weren’t going with Vangy any more. And you were barely speaking to one another at the office. So that made it a little different. Besides, the second time you asked me to go out with you, you gave it a little build-up; you weren’t so casual about it. That helped.”

I tried to get some memory out of the name Vangy, but I couldn’t. I took a sip of my drink and said, “Go on, Robin.”

“Well—we kept seeing one another, more and more often. Six months after that we were engaged and a year after—I mean a year after we first met; it would have been about five months after our engagement—we were married.”

“Did you quit work then?”

“Not for the first year of our marriage. Neither of us had anything saved up and we decided—or I talked you into it—that we’d both work the first year so we could have a nice apartment and nice furniture and a nest egg in the bank before I quit work and—” She stopped suddenly and took a sip of her drink and I got the impression that she’d started to say something she didn’t want to finish and that the drink was just an excuse. I could have been wrong.

She looked at me again. “So—well, we got along all right that first year. I guess we were pretty happy. But then things started to go haywire between us, after I quit work.”