Роберт Артур - Alfred Hitchcock’s A Hangman’s Dozen

I asked, “Any idea where he went when he left the house Friday evening?”

“I thought I had. But I decided I was wrong when I saw her go off shopping Saturday morning.”

“Who?” I inquired.

“Mrs. Cooper, next door. She always goes downtown shopping Saturday morning. Get’s all dressed up and leaves about eleven. When I saw her leave at her usual time, I figured I was wrong. She’d hardly have left him alone over there.”

Sam said, “You mean you thought your husband might have spent the night at the Cooper home?”

“Naturally,” she said. “Helen Cooper was his latest interest. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that.”

“Oh?” I said. “Including Mr. Cooper?”

“Well, maybe not him. But everybody else did. It was common gossip.”

I asked her to be a little more specific and she gave us the names of two neighbor friends whom she said would confirm what she had said about her husband and Helen Cooper. We also questioned her about her husband’s last movements, but she wasn’t very helpful on that point. She said she had watched him walk up the street in the direction of King’s Highway and go right past the Cooper home. If he had later doubled back, she hadn’t observed it.

We thanked her for her co-operation and let her go home.

“Let’s check with those neighbor women now,” I said to Sam Wiggens.

It was noon when we finished this chore. Both neighbors whose names Mrs. Marks had given us verified her contention. They said Marks had often been seen going into the Cooper home, when George Cooper wasn’t there.

We caught some lunch before driving back downtown. Instead of immediately returning to headquarters, we stopped by the morgue, which is just down the street from police headquarters.

Dr. Allan Swartz was the coroner’s physician who had performed the post mortem. We found him in his office.

“You want medical terms or lay terms?” he inquired.

“Keep it simple,” I said. “Sam didn’t have much education.”

Sam looked at me. “Sure,” he said. “Sod went all the way through grade school with honors.”

“He had his skull crushed by a blunt instrument,” Dr. Swartz told us. “That good enough?”

“Fine,” I said. “Were you able to fix a time of death?”

“You couldn’t even fix a date of death in a case like this. Unless you can tell me when he had stuffed peppers for dinner.”

“What do you mean?” I inquired.

“The body’s been under some kind of refrigeration. He could have been dead a week.”

Sam and I looked at each other. Sam said, “What’s the least amount of time he could have been dead?”

The doctor shrugged. “A few days. Last Friday night, Saturday morning, maybe.”

We thanked him and returned to headquarters. Stopping by Central District, we checked George and Helen Cooper out of their cells and took them upstairs for further questioning. Cooper was sober now and had an obvious hangover. It left him in a less co-operative mood than he had been in yesterday. When his wife took a seat, he refused one, preferring to stand and stare from me to Sam and back again with a truculent expression on his face.

“Well?” he asked. “Have you officers completed your investigation?”

“Just about,” I said. “Except for a few questions.”

“Just how thorough an investigation did you make?”

His tone caused me to examine him curiously. “What do you mean, Mr. Cooper?”

“I just wondered how you cops worked. When somebody confesses to a crime, do you let it go at that, or do you go out and do a little digging?”

“We do a little digging,” I assured him.

He opened his mouth to say something more, then winced and felt his head. “Wow! You got any aspirin?”

Sam said, “In my locker. Over here.”

He led Cooper across the room to his locker, then over to the water cooler for a glass of water to chase the aspirin.

I said to the woman, “Couple of things came up since we talked to you yesterday, Mrs. Cooper.”

“What things?”

“You forgot to mention how friendly you were with Henry Marks.”

Her face stiffened. “What do you mean by that?”

“Seems to be common knowledge in the neighborhood that he—”

“Gossip!” she interrupted indignantly. “Is that the way you policemen work? Go around listening to gossip?”

“One way.”

“Well, it isn’t true. I bet I know who started that rumor.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“That little vixen, Viola Marks. She’s so jealous, she’d even slander her own husband to get even.”

“Even for what?” I asked.

“For being better looking than she is. She hates me for it.”

Sam and George Cooper came back from the water cooler. Cooper said, “If I ever take another drink, I’ll kick myself — hard.”

“Feel better?” Sam asked.

“Not yet. It takes a while.”

I said, “I was just telling your wife about some new developments, Mr. Cooper.”

Helen Cooper said loudly, “Don’t you dare repeat that slander!”

Cooper winced and gave his wife an irritated look. “Do you have to yell?” He turned to me. “What slander?”

“It’s hardly slander,” I said. “We’ve pretty well established that your wife was carrying on an affair with Henry Marks.”

Mrs. Cooper got an outraged expression on her face, but her husband’s reaction seemed to surprise her out of saying anything. Instead of showing either astonishment or indignation, he merely gave an interested nod.

“You knew?” I inquired.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Merely suspected. I’ve caught him in the house a time or two. Helen insisted he’s been passing at her and she’s been resisting him. She’s begged me not to make an issue of it because she didn’t want trouble with neighbors. She said she could handle him all right. I guess I’m a henpecked husband. I let her think I believed her, when I really didn’t at all.”

“George!” she said in a shocked voice. “How can you say that?”

He ignored her.

I said, “Another development was that Marks had been dead three days at the time you were supposed to have your fight.”

This managed to surprise him. “Three days?” he said without understanding. “How could that be?”

“Why don’t you ask your wife?”

He turned to stare at Helen Cooper, who raised her chin and refused to meet his gaze.

“He’d been lying there dead for three days?” he asked slowly.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

The woman screamed at me, “You’re lying!”

Cooper put his hands to his ears and walked halfway across the room to sink into a chair. His wife stared after him, then shifted her gaze back to me when he looked at her.

In a tense, but lower-toned voice she said, “Why do you think he had been dead three days?”

I said, “The coroner’s physician says so.”

“He made a mistake.”

“Hardly,” I said. “Marks’s body lay in your house all that time. Don’t try to make us believe you didn’t notice it.”

Nervously she worked her hands together, trying to think of a way out. “I just had the day wrong, is all. George killed him on Friday. In all the excitement, I just—”

Her voice trailed off, when we both unbelievingly shook our heads.

I said, “Why don’t you save time by telling us about it, lady?”

She looked hopelessly from one to the other of us. Finally she said in a whisper, “I didn’t mean to do it. Honest I didn’t.”

We waited.

“It was spur-of-the-moment. When he said—” Her voice failed.

“When he said what?” I prompted.

Drearily, all hope now gone, she said, “He told me he was going back to her.”

“His wife?” Sam asked.