We All Killed Grandma (6 page)

I went in. Joe, the guy with the red hair and freckles, came to meet me. He grinned first and then looked a bit disappointed. “Did you decide to take the Linc tonight, Rod?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I can wait till morning. Do you get
off at six, Joe? You said you started at nine in the morning.”

“Sure, I get off at six.”

“It’s almost that now. How’s about having dinner with me?”

“Why—I’d like to, but I’ll have to call the wife, see if she’s got any plans. Want to wait a minute?”

I waited while he phoned. He came back leaving the receiver off the hook and said, “She’s got a pot roast just about ready. Says she’ll break my neck if I eat out, but why not bring you home with me. Okay?”

I hadn’t thought of the possibility of Joe’s being married, for some reason. But there wasn’t any way out now, so I said okay. I waited around until he’d washed up and then we went out the back way and got in an old Buick in the lot back of the garage. I wasn’t too crazy about the idea; I’d just wanted to talk cars with Joe.

It was all right, though. Joe had two kids, but they were nice kids and I liked them. His wife knew something about cars and even the kids knew more than, say, Arch did. We talked cars and ate pot roast and then Jane, Joe’s wife, took the kids upstairs to put them to bed and then Joe broke open the bottle I’d insisted on buying on the way out and we drank brandy and talked cars some more. Just what I’d been looking for, an evening with someone who hadn’t known me well enough to make me feel strange in not remembering them. I had a hunch I knew Joe now as well as I’d known him before—and I was genuinely meeting his wife for the first time. Pretty soon she came back down and joined us and we talked cars some more; it turned out she knew a Continental from a Zephyr and knew my Lincoln was a Continental because Joe had told her about it. It turned out, too, that she knew more about cars than about drinking; two brandies made her sleepy and she went upstairs to turn in at nine o’clock. What seemed like a few minutes after that I saw that it was eleven. I tried to phone for a taxi, but Joe insisted on driving me home.

It wasn’t until after he’d left me that I realized that I still didn’t know his last name. It didn’t matter. Maybe I hadn’t known it before.

I slept that night for the first time since Monday night without dreaming vague dreams that I couldn’t remember even in the instant of awakening, only that I had been dreaming and that the dreams had been bad.

I got up so early that I had to kill time drinking four cups of coffee so I wouldn’t get to the garage too early. Joe would be on at nine and I allowed him half an hour to have the car checked and ready and my timing was right The Linc was downstairs at the gas pump. It looked new and shiny and like a million dollars.

I spent the morning driving sixty miles toward nowhere and then sixty miles back and at a few minutes before noon I parked in front of the address Arch had given me for Pete Radik. It was an old building that had once been a rich man’s mansion and was now a rundown rooming house. It had probably once had a spacious yard, but now it crouched, cowering, between two tall new apartment buildings.

I went up the steps and through the door. There was a hall and a table at one side of it on which lay incoming mail and there was a bell button with a card beside it that said “Ring for Landlady.” I had neglected to ask Arch about the location of Radik’s room so I was about to ring for landlady when a door opened across the hall behind me and a voice said, “Rod. Come in.”

He was short and plump and cheerful looking. He grinned at me and said, “From what I hear, I should introduce myself. I’m Pete.” He stuck out a hand and I took it. I liked him.

His room wasn’t big, but there were two overstuffed chairs in it. I took one and he sprawled himself in the other, throwing his legs up over the arm.

He said, “Let me brief you. Peter John Radik, Pete to you. Twenty-seven, single, unattached. We’ve known one another four years. Don’t remember where or how we met first time—touch of amnesia on my part, although I could probably remember if I tried hard enough. We’ve been fairly close friends for about three years—seen one another an average of once a week or thereabouts. I had dinner with you and Robin, sometimes bringing a current girl friend, maybe once a month. Sometimes repaid by having tickets
for a show for the three—or four if I was dragging a femme—of us. Principal mutual interest, conversation—about practically anything. Details later, when and as they come up—unless you want to ask me any specific ones now.”

“Not right now,” I said. “That’s the most sensible way anybody’s introduced himself to me yet, Pete. I’ve got a hunch we’ll be friends again—even if I never remember the first time. What did Arch tell you on the phone? That you’re to talk me into going to a psychiatrist?”

“He kind of hinted at it. Why don’t you want to?”

“Well—there’s only one way he’d treat me, isn’t there? Hypnosis.”

“Probably the quickest, if it works. It doesn’t work in all cases, and you’d have to get a man who was good at it.”

“What the hell else would he try? There’s no other angle of attack that I can think of. I mean, he can’t put me on his couch and make me go over my early life. I don’t remember it. I’m a little less than four days old. Those four days wouldn’t give him much to analyze—and anything before that would be hearsay evidence.”

“He still might be able to do it. You say there’s no other angle of attack. There are several. One is your current aversion to psychoanalysis in general and hypnosis in particular. He could make you realize the reason for them.”

“Which is?”

“Which might be that you’re afraid that you killed Grandma Turtle.”

“I—don’t think so. And the police are sure I didn’t.”

“More sure than you are. I’d say you know yourself well enough, even after this short an acquaintance, to feel sure that you didn’t kill her sanely, deliberately. But you’re probably afraid—consciously or subconsciously—that you were insane. You’re afraid that you’d give yourself away under hypnosis—give yourself away to yourself, that is. The fact of your giving yourself away to someone else, to the psychiatrist, wouldn’t be a factor because if you knew that you killed Grandma Tuttle, you’d give yourself up.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know you. I know damned well you wouldn’t commit a murder, drunk or sober, sane. And that if you found out that you’d gone insane and committed one, you
wouldn’t let yourself run loose for fear it would happen again.”

“I—I guess I wouldn’t. But, damn it, I still don’t want to be psychoanalyzed or hypnotized. Doesn’t amnesia always either wear off or end suddenly of its own accord?”

“Almost always, especially when and if the causes for it are removed. Listen, Rod, let me tell you one thing. You didn’t kill her. I’m sure.”

“How can you be sure?”

“The same reasons the police have—plus knowing you, plus a plain knowledge of psychology. You as a conscious, sane murderer I can’t picture at all. And you as a psychopathic murderer doesn’t fit the picture.”

“Why not?”

He dug a pipe and a pouch of tobacco out of his pockets, arching himself in the chair to get at them. He said, “You were drunk. You were drunk because Robin was getting her divorce the next day. Damn good reason, and you wouldn’t have got pie-eyed for a lesser one. Now out of that drunk—which concerned Robin and not Grandma—nobody could convince me that you suddenly got the idea to kill your grandmother, sanely or psychopathically. There’d be no reason for it, and even a psychopath operates on what looks to him like reason.”

“Suppose I thought I had a reason. Suppose I got the sudden hunch—right or wrong—that Grandma had something to do with Robin’s divorcing me. Maybe that she engineered it. Paranoia gives people wilder ideas than that.”

“But you weren’t paranoiac. That’s nothing that hits people suddenly and I’d have noticed the signs. You were always nervous, mildly neurotic in a few ways, but damn it you weren’t even incipiently paranoiac. Besides—all right, suppose you’re drunk and get that sudden wild idea. I’ll buy that, as a remote possibility. I’ll say there’s a chance in a million you might have gone there and shot her. But not even that much chance that you’d have worked out all the details that make it look like a burglary. Cut through the screen—from the outside. Open the safe and take the money out. Take it and the gun you shot her with away and hide them so well that they haven’t been found yet.
Then go back and pretend to discover the body and phone the police. And—nyah! Too ridiculous to talk about. Especially while you were drunk. Sane or insane you couldn’t have worked out all those details—and well enough to fool the police—while you were drunk.”

It did sound ridiculous, the way he put it.

He stopped a minute and got his pipe going again; it had gone out while he was talking. He shook out the match and tossed it at the open window behind him; it missed and fell to the floor.

He said, “Newspaper stories always get a few things wrong, and that’s all I got to go on. Mind talking about it, answering some questions?”

“Shoot.”

“What’s the first thing, chronologically, that you remember?”

“I was standing with a telephone in my hand, in a lighted room, and apparently I’d been talking into the telephone. Somebody had just asked me my name, I remembered that, and I was trying to answer. I couldn’t think of it. I remember how silly I felt, trying to think of my own name and not being able to. And I was aware of being pretty drunk. But the shock of not remembering my own name—well, that’s the first thing I remember.”

“Not even a few seconds sooner? Someone asking you?”

“Well—no. I mean, I don’t remember the question or the way it was worded. But I had the telephone in my hand and I knew someone had just asked me who I was.”

“Your first reaction?”

“Annoyance. The kind of mild annoyance you feel when you’re trying to think of a word or a name and you just can’t think of it.”

“Aphasia. We all get touches of it now and then. But—go on.”

“I looked around me. And there was a dead woman lying on the floor—and I still couldn’t remember who I’d been talking to on the phone or who I was or what anything was all about. It was the God damnedest feeling. I’d never seen the dead woman before in my life, as far as I knew. Or the room.”

“You knew right away she was dead?”

“There was a bullet hole in her forehead, over one eye. There was a lot of blood on the rug under her. And the way she lay there—yes, I knew she was dead. Then the telephone was talking in my ear. With a man’s voice. ‘Hello, hello! Are you still there?’ And I said, ‘I’m still here.’ ‘Who is this? Who’s calling?’ And I said, ‘I—don’t know.’ The voice got tough. ‘Listen, Mister, you just reported a murder. Are you crazy?’ I said the only thing I could think of that made sense; I said, ‘You’d better trace this call and send someone here.’ I put the telephone down on the desk with the receiver off the hook so he could trace it.”

Radik’s pipe had gone out again and he was puffing at it, trying to get it started again. He gave up. “For someone as confused as you must have been, that was pretty clear thinking. Especially drunk. How much had you had to drink?”

“How the hell would I know?”

He chuckled. “That sounded like a trap question, but I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, has it been learned since where you did your drinking or how much of it you did?”

“No to both questions. Do you think, Pete, that I’d have gone off on a solitary bender or that I’d have hunted company to drink with?”

He thought that over a minute before he said, “Damned if I know, Rod. That would have been the first time since I’ve known you that you deliberately set out to drown your sorrows—if that’s what you did do. Ordinarily you’re not a solitary drinker, but that could have been an exception because of the circumstances. But why worry about it? If you were with someone, you’ll find out sooner or later. If you don’t find out, it’s pretty good proof that you were alone.”

It sounded sensible.

S
UNDAY
afternoon, five o’clock. I left the Lincoln—with several hundred miles on it since I’d got it yesterday morning—in front of 407 Cuyahoga Street, home. I’d had a room there since Robin and I had separated a month before. Over Arch’s protests, he’d told me; he’d wanted me to come and live with Grandma Tuttle, as he was doing. But I’d wanted privacy and a place of my own. At least, those had been the reasons I’d given Arch, and they were probably true, if not all of the truth.

Number 407 Cuyahoga was the name of the place as well as the address; it was an apartment hotel, mostly bachelor and mostly respectable. The elevator was upstairs somewhere, so I started for the steps until Rosabelle’s voice called me. “Oh, Mr. Britten, there’s a call for you.” Rosabelle is the redhead who works the day shift on the desk and switchboard. She was holding out a slip of paper and I took it and glanced at it. A telephone number, one I didn’t recognize, for me to call. I said, “Thanks, Rosabelle,” and stuffed it into my pocket.

“It was a girl’s voice,” she said. Trust Rosabelle to have noticed that; I had learned—or relearned—that much about her in the last five days. She said, “But she wouldn’t leave a name, just that phone number.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call it from upstairs as soon as I get there.” And I went on up the steps. I hoped the call wasn’t from Robin, to cancel our dinner date two hours from then.

My apartment was a one-room and kitchenette deal, but I’d found only coffee and its accessories in the kitchenette part, so obviously I hadn’t used it to get any of my own meals. Cream for coffee and a few cans of beer constituted the sole contents of the refrigerator.

I picked up the phone as soon as I was inside and said, “Okay, Rosabelle, you can try that number for me now. Spring four eight three seven.”

A voice with a thick Teutonic accent answered the ringing. A man’s voice. “Yess. Who you vant?”

“Rod Britten speaking,” I said. “Someone from that number phoned me and wanted me to call back. A woman’s voice.”

“You must have wrong number, no woman here.”