Борден Дил - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 1, No. 12, December 1956

At last Dolan looked at me. “It stretches the imagination.”

“It does,” I agreed.

“Can we get a confession?”

I shrugged. “That depends.”

He waved his arm wearily. “It doesn’t matter. Be a little cleaner, maybe, but... what the hell. First, show us, Marking.”

I led the way up to the death-room. Liz was gone. So was the rope. But I told them. “When I examined the body this morning, I noticed that a section of rope inside the closet was frayed. The fraying was not caused by opening and closing the closet door. That simply won’t hold water.”

Dolan frowned. “How so?”

“Well, to begin with, when the door was shut, it would pinch against the rope and hold it in place. In other words, there’d be no slippage, and the hinge could hardly fray the rope. Now, when the door was opened, it’s possible that the weight of the woman’s body might cause the rope to give a little and scrape itself against the hinge. But in that case, the frayed portion would have been on the outside of the door, not on the inside. ”

Dolan nodded. “Sounds reasonable,” he said.

“And if it wasn’t suicide,” I went on, “it had to be murder.”

“But how was the job done?” Jim asked. “There was no sign of a struggle.”

“I figure Liz must have been pretty drunk, if not completely unconscious. He slipped the noose around her neck, then pulled her to the closet. He opened the door and threaded the drag end of the rope over the top hinge. Then he went around to the other side of the door and towed on the rope until he had managed to pull her off the floor.”

Dolan nodded again. “That must have been the way it happened,” he agreed, reflectively. A new thought struck him. “What makes you think we’ll find his prints on her shoes?”

I lit a cigarette. “Liz wasn’t any lightweight,” I said, “and hoisting her off the floor hadn’t been as easy as he had thought it would be. When he finally got the job done, her feet didn’t clear the floor by more than four or five inches.

“She may have been drunk when he hooked the rope around her neck, but she sobered up fast and died hard. She was fighting for her life and she wasn’t passing up any bets. I figure she slipped her pumps off and eased them down onto the floor upright. By stretching her toes, she could reach the backs of the shoes and stand on them. That would account for the indentations we found in the backs of the pumps. It couldn’t have been much support, but it must have relieved some of the tension from the rope; and it was probably keeping her alive.”

“And he pulled them away?”

“Sure. That’s why we found them where we did — lying together and only two feet away from the door. If she’d lost them in her struggles, they’d have been scattered and probably further from the door.”

Dolan sighed. “That about ties everything in place, Tom. And real neat too, if it holds up.”

“I think it will.”

Nervously Dolan began pacing the floor, ticking off his assets on the fingers of his left hand. “I can show a motive,” he said, “and I can prove opportunity and ability.” He stopped pacing suddenly and turned to Sim and me. “Let’s do this thing by the numbers. Sim, round up the coroner and the Chief. Get them in here. Let’s lay all our cards on the table and see what we’ve got.”

As Sim was leaving, Dolan turned to me. “It’s circumstantial without a confession. I can get first-degree without it,” he said with a smile, “but I’d rather have the confession.”

Charley Bartel trailed Pete Hardy into the den. Sim tagged along behind them. Dolan leaned against the closet door where Liz had hung a short while before. Gib looked at the coroner. “You’ve finished your examination?”

Hardy nodded. “It didn’t take long.”

“What’s your conclusion?”

Hardy tipped his head and raised his eyebrows. “There ain’t a mark of violence on the body. Outside of the rope marks around her neck, I mean.”

“Are you going to order auautopsy?”

The coroner blinked. “I ain’t give it much thought, Gib. I can.”

Dolan lit a cigarette and nodded to me.

“Charley,” I asked, looking at the little Chief, “how did you know Liz was pregnant?”

He shrugged. “Heard it around somewhere, I guess. I don’t know.”

“Her roommate hadn’t heard. She didn’t know a thing about it.”

He shrugged again. “She wouldn’t.”

“Her friends at the Virginia Cafe, where she worked, hadn’t heard about it.”

“They wouldn’t either.”

“But you would?”

“I did,” he answered defiantly.

“What time did you get here this morning?”

Bartel squinted at the ceiling. “Oh... must’ve been around seven, I guess.”

Dolan ashed his cigarette delicately. “Who called you?”

“Nobody.”

Dolan frowned. “Then what were you doing out here at seven in the morning?”

Bartel smiled. “I come out here every day while Ed’s been away. Look things over, see that the furnace is okay, make sure everything is in working order. Why?”

“We know. Ed told us,” I said. “But there are a few questions I’d like to ask you.”

He seemed curious. “Such as?”

“How did you know that rope was tied around the door knob?”

“What the hell are you talking about, anyway?”

“About this morning, Charley. When Sim and I first came. I asked you how it looked to you. You told me then that the rope was tied around the inside door knob. How did you know?”

“Why I’d... I’d already opened the door. How the hell do you suppose?”

“But later, in the kitchen, when I suggested that we take the body down, you told me I should know better. You said the coroner would skin us alive if we moved the body before he had seen it.”

“So?”

“So if you opened the door, like you just said, how did you know the rope was tied around the door knob? How did you know it wasn’t merely slipped over the hinge and dangling on the inside and that the body wouldn’t fall when you opened the door? Then you’d have been responsible for moving the body.”

“Why, I...” he sputtered. “I assumed the rope was tied.”

The coroner looked angry. “You’d be a hell of a lot better off if you quit ‘assuming’ things and started using your head.”

“Okay,” Bartel choked. “Okay. I made a mistake. But the rope was tied and the girl’s body didn’t fall. No harm done.”

I let it pass. “You knew Liz Peterson pretty well?”

“I knew her,” he admitted.

“Ever date her?”

“Once or twice.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“About fifteen minutes ago,” he snapped.

“I mean alive.”

“Four, five days ago, I guess. Maybe longer. How the hell should I know? I don’t keep track.”

“But you didn’t see her today, or last night?”

“Alive?”

I nodded.

“No.”

I moved close to him, close enough to see the tiny beads of perspiration on his forehead, almost close enough to smell the fear. “How did you get out here this morning, Charley?” I asked him.

“I... I drove.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Ain’t... ain’t it outside?”

I sighed. “Why don’t you save your wind, Charley? Your car isn’t here because you didn’t drive it out here. You came out with Liz Peterson, in her car, last night after all the gin mills had closed. You knew Ed was gone. You knew the guests would be in bed. You knew you could have all the free liquor you could drink and, afterwards... you knew there were plenty of spare bedrooms upstairs. But the one thing you apparently didn’t know was that Mrs. Donald showed up every morning at seven.