We All Killed Grandma (22 page)

She was looking at me now, her eyes wide.

I said, “I hurried through the dark kitchen and just as
I got to the entrance to the hallway, there you came batting out of Grandma’s study, the gun in your hand, running to the front door. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; I couldn’t even call out to you. I couldn’t get my feet going again, either, for seconds. And then I went into Grandma’s room and found her lying on the floor with a hole in her forehead.

“So, Robin, I had much more reason to believe
you’d
killed Grandma than you had to think
I
killed her. I was close enough that I knew the shot I’d heard came from that room and I was within sight of the door of it within seconds. And you came running out with the gun and—It knocked me for such a loop that I didn’t even realize that you had no motive to have killed her. If I thought of that at all, it must have been that
you’d
gone insane instead of me.

“I stood there until I heard your car start and then I went to the phone and called the police. I think—I’m not sure because this is the one period of a few seconds I’m still hazy about—that I was going to tell them I’d just killed a woman and they should come and get me. But the shock caught up with me then, with a bang. The shock of thinking you insane and a murderess. Somebody on the telephone was asking me my name and I couldn’t remember it. Or anything else.”

I said, “That’s why I had a compulsion against going to a psychiatrist since then and why I couldn’t remember of my own free will—my subconscious mind didn’t
want
me to know what it thought it knew. It wouldn’t let me remember. Until tonight you told me what really happened and the truth was something I could face. Then the block was gone—although I had to try for hours before I could take my first step through the fog.”

I asked, “Do you believe me, Robin? My part of the story, I mean, the fact that I didn’t kill her?”

“Yes, Rod.”

I turned back to Henderson then. “Why did you kill her, Mr. Henderson? I thought you were the only real friend she had. But you must have or you’d have had no reason to tell the whopper you told. You said you saw me go in the front door and kept watching and a moment later
saw me pick up the phone in the study. Either my story or Robin’s, taken separately, can disprove that. The time it took me to go upstairs to look in Arch’s room, then to the garage and to wire around the car lock and start the car, then come back in—it would have been at least five minutes, maybe ten. And if you’d been watching you’d have seen Robin in the study; you’d have seen her enter the house and leave it. So unless both of us are lying, and in collusion, you were lying then. Why did you kill her?”

He took a long swallow from his drink, sighed, and put down the glass. He said, “I had to, Rod. I didn’t want to; I tried to work things so I could avoid it. When it happened—well, I found out I’m not a murderer, or at least not a very good one. I knew, even at the moment I pulled the trigger, that I wasn’t going to fight it out if I was ever even suspected. I’m too old, too tired for that. If the police had ever asked me, ‘Did you kill Pauline Tuttle?’ I’d have said ‘Yes’.” He smiled very faintly. “But they never asked. Now, when you and Robin have told them your stories, they will ask. And that’s that. In fact—” He opened a drawer on his desk and I leaned forward to jump, but it was only a sealed envelope he took out of it. He pushed it across the desk to me. “In fact, you might as well take them this when you go to them. It’s been ready, in case. It tells everything except why, and that I’m not going to tell. I think I’d like another drink, Rod. May I make us another around?”

“I’ll make it,” I said. I went to the cabinet.

He said, “I want you to believe this; I
didn’t want
to kill her. I worked for weeks to work out a way to get something out of her safe without having to kill to get it. I watched night after night, timing carefully, and I thought that I had time to cut through the screen the moment she left to get her glass of warm milk, get inside and out again before she got back. I picked Monday night because Arch was out of town. I cut the screen and went in; I got the gun out of her desk and went to the safe—and she came back too soon. I had to shoot her.

“I went back home and got in bed and then after a little while I heard what sounded like a couple of backfires and then, less than a minute later, something that
sounded, by contrast, like a real shot. I got out of bed and went to that side of the house—and by that time you were standing at the telephone, Rod. No, I never saw Robin or knew she’d been there. But I thought fast—I figured you’d just walked in and had picked up the gun and it had gone off in your hand. And it occurred to me that the police might suspect you; they generally start by suspecting anybody who finds a body. And I didn’t want you to have trouble, so I got dressed and went over there. And told the story I told to clear you. I didn’t know whether you’d have told about firing a shot accidentally, so I didn’t mention hearing it. But I did tell about hearing a shot at half past eleven to set the time—the right time—of the murder as being before you got there.”

I finished making drinks and came back with them.

I said, “But
why,
Mr. Henderson?”

“If I told you that, Rod, the whole thing would have been—useless.”

“You mean, even as it stands now with us ready to turn this confession over to the police and tell them what you’ve just told us, it wasn’t useless?”

“Exactly. I’m sorry.”

I took a sip of my drink and thought a moment. I said, “I’ve
got
to know why, Mr. Henderson. And as long as we have your confession that you did it there’s no reason why we have to tell the police the reason if you tell us under our promise not to tell. Won’t you trust us?”

I looked at Robin. She nodded.

Seconds ticked by on Henderson’s desk clock. Then he said, “She was a bitch, Rod, in business dealings at least. An avaricious bitch.” He said it calmly, quietly, not vindictively. “I started out helping her and then discovered that and cut loose. My son Andy was just hanging out his shingle then and I talked her into letting him do her work; he needed it to help him get started. And then five years ago, Andy made a mistake—”

“He told me about it,” I said.

“He didn’t tell you the truth, I’m afraid. He’d had a bad loss or two and was desperately in need of a few hundred dollars. He didn’t come to me because I happened to be short just then—although I could have raised
it had I known. Instead he pulled what I honestly think is the only dishonest deal he’s ever pulled or ever will pull. He dragged down on a deal he was handling for Pauline Tuttle—five hundred and seventy dollars was the exact amount. And, of course, she caught him at it. She was talked out of sending him to jail only by Andy signing a full confession—plus my raising the money to make full restitution. Which, by the way, Andy has repaid me long since.

“But that was the start of it, Rod. She wouldn’t trust Andy any more, of course, but she made me—under threat of using that confession and ruining Andy’s career—do her legal work for her ever since. For free—I haven’t sent her a bill in all that time. Not only that, but she’d make me play casino with her—and what a lousy game
that
is. God knows what pleasure she got out of playing it, knowing I hated it—unless it was sadistic pleasure.”

He waved a hand. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I learned recently that because of her cardiac trouble she didn’t have long to live, I asked her what about Andy’s confession, what arrangement had been made to dispose of it in case of her death.

“She laughed, Rod, and said that would be up to her executor. And her executor is Hennig, who’s my worst enemy and who doesn’t like Andy either. He’s scrupulously honest financially—I’ll give him that—but he hasn’t an ounce of mercy in him. He’d pretend he was doing his duty by turning that confession over to the police—and he’d ruin Andy’s career completely; he’d see that the matter became known even if the police refused to prosecute after so long a time.

“And she had, probably, only months to live, Rod. That’s why I had to get that confession back right away. I wanted to make it look like an ordinary burglary, if I could—but I couldn’t open a safe so I had to work it as I did. That brief trip to the kitchen each night was the only time she ever left the safe open while she wasn’t in the room and I knew that safe was where she kept the confession. And—well, that’s that. I’ve already told you the rest. The confession is burned; I did that the moment I got home with it. What’s going to happen now isn’t going
to help Andy—but he’ll ride through it as long as my reason for killing her isn’t known. Even Andy doesn’t know that and won’t guess when he learns I killed her.”

“And what makes you sure Andy will ever learn?” I asked him.

I looked at Robin but I couldn’t read her face. I said, “Give me a few minutes, Mr. Henderson; just wait here, don’t do anything.”

I took Robin by the arm and led her outside to the sidewalk, out into the rain again. I said, “I’m not going to the police. Are you?”

“I—do you really mean you think we should—?”

“I mean I think he’s a good guy who got backed in a corner. He tried not to kill and when he did kill it was from an even more justifiable motive than self-defense—it was in defense of someone else.”

“It’s a big thing to decide, Rod, so quickly. Can’t we—sleep on it?”

“No,” I said. “Not even together. Robin, there’s a man in there waiting to find out whether he’s going to kill himself. You know, you could tell, that he wasn’t going to wait for the police. That’s why he had that confession ready, so they could find him dead. Do you want to make him wait all night? Could you sleep until you decide?”

“All right, I’ll decide. Whatever you decide.”

“But you must realize one thing. If we keep quiet, we’re making ourselves accessories to murder.”

“I don’t mind that, Rod. She was selfish and hateful. And Mr. Henderson didn’t want to kill her.” She smiled faintly. “But here we’re making our suspicions of one another true. I thought you’d killed her and you thought I had. Now that we’re accessories we’re guilty along with the real killer; we all killed Grandma.”

I said, “I’ll be back in a minute; it’s better if we don’t both go back in there. You wait in the car.”

I was back in less than a minute. I said what there was to say and got out quickly. It’s not good to watch a man crying.

Robin still stood there in the rain; she hadn’t walked toward the car.

I said, “Robin, will you marry me again? I know now
that I can let you have children, and that was the main reason we broke up.”

“But—but not the only reason, Rod. Shouldn’t we think it over a while? And—what are you going to do about Arch, what he did to you?”

There was a taste of bitterness in my mouth, but not from thinking about Arch. My eyes followed Robin’s to the lighted upstairs front window of the house next door. Arch was home.

I said, “Yes, I know the matter of children wasn’t all. And the rest of it won’t change, Robin. It’s just the way I am. You think, right now, that I should go up there and knock hell out of Arch. But I’m not going to. I feel sorry for Arch. I feel sorry for anybody who could love money enough to do a thing like that to get money. And even if I could hate him I wouldn’t enjoy hurting him. So I’m a softie, a Milquetoast, and I won’t ever get rich or be important because I don’t enjoy fighting.”

I said, “That won’t change, Robin. I love you to pieces but if you want some other kind of guy from the kind of guy I am then there’s nothing I can do about it.”

I guess I forgot that I had a car there. I turned and walked away down the long sidewalk into the rain. I walked nineteen steps before I heard her voice, “Rod, wait!” and the click of her heels on the concrete, and I turned and breathed and lived again.