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

“Sometime early this morning, Liz overplayed her hand. She told you that she was pregnant, and that you were the father of her unborn child. She wanted money, didn’t she, Charley?”

Bartel shook his head angrily. “You’re nuts. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sober,” I said, “Liz probably wouldn’t have attempted blackmail. Had you been sober yourself, you might not have killed her. But you weren’t sober, and you did kill her.”

“You’d better be able to prove that,” Bartel whispered vehemently.

“Mrs. Donald’s arrival this morning, just as you were leaving, tore it. The only thing you could do then was try to bluff it out. Give people the impression that you had been notified of the death and that you were out here in the line of duty.”

“Prove it,” he repeated tightly.

“You sent Mrs. Donald home not because she was distraught after you let her find Liz but because you wanted her removed from the area. Mrs. Donald would tell us that there was only one car in the yard when she drove up, and that it wasn’t yours.”

“Prove it!” he rasped. “Liz was pregnant. Don’t forget that. That’s a hell of a good motive for suicide.”

I shook my head. “Liz wasn’t pregnant, Charley. She just told you she was.”

Bartel stared. “Who the hell was the genius that figured that out?”

I turned to Hardy, who verified my statement with a nod.

Bartel turned back to me and laughed. He jabbed a thumb at the coroner. “You ain’t going by what that ambulance chaser tells you, are you? How the hell would he know? It takes a pathologist to conduct an autopsy, and he sure as hell ain’t no pathologist. He ain’t even a good undertaker.”

“I’m good enough to know she wasn’t pregnant,” Hardy replied calmly. “Other doctors will back me up. Any bets?”

I stood over Bartel. “She sandbagged you, Charley,” I told him. “In doing so, she left you with a motive that couldn’t possibly fit anyone else.”

“You can’t prove a word of it! I deny everything. You’ve got nothing!”

“We’ve got everything,” I told him quietly. “We’ll print her car, and we’ll find plenty of your prints. We’ll print her shoes, and we’ll find your prints on them too. We’ll print every bottle in this house and we’ll find some with your prints. Unless I’m mistaken we’ll find Liz Peterson’s prints on the same bottles. We’ll...”

At first, as I watched his narrow body shaking, I thought he was coughing. Then he buried his face in his hands and bobbed his head hopelessly. “Somebody shut that sonofabitch up,” he moaned. “Just shut him up and leave me alone.”

If people weren’t constantly talking too much and thereby getting themselves killed, a frightening depression would occur in a business that shall remain nameless. Which makes it something of a dilemma, therefore, whether to cheer for Lurline or her garrulous bat of a mother in this — ah — slice of life — here presented for your entertainment. Ugh!

Lurline Cassidy finished sewing the scrap of veil on her little black hat. Then she held the hat up, turning it, appraising it.

Across the green-walled rectangle of the hotel room, Lurline’s mother, Martha, was busily painting a cigar box. She liked to give the boxes she decorated to friends or acquaintances on birthdays and Christmas.

“Everybody sends cards,” she enjoyed saying with a supercilious tilt of her head, a smug dilation of thin nostrils. “I think it’s so much nicer to give something you’ve done yourself.” Long fingers touched pale, henna-dyed hair. “It conveys so much more.”

Martha was talking as she painted — as usual, whenever her daughter got home from the department store where she sold ladies’ dresses, marked down. Also as usual, she was talking about Hollywood, about the scandals of the old days, when she had been a young widow and Lurline, her hair tediously arranged in Shirley Temple ringlets, had had tiny bit parts and been the family meal ticket, something she still was.

Martha interrupted her chatter to regard Lurline, noted the hat and said, “really, that’s very clever — almost like a new hat.” Then, shaking her head, “It’s a pity you had to take after your father instead of my side of the family. You were such an adorable moppet. If only you could have stayed that way a year or two longer, I feel certain as I’m sitting right here that you’d have been a star.”

“Yes, Martha,” Lurline replied dutifully. She seldom bothered to point out her mother’s inconsistencies any more. They occurred so frequently, and the arguments that resulted when she did try to straighten Martha out invariably ended in confusion, recrimination and tears.

She arose and tried on the hat in front of the battered hotel dresser’s mirror. The wisp of veil that just shadowed her eyes gave a touch of glamour to her prematurely old, over-made-up face. But like her mother, whom she closely resembled, she was still a small, rather dainty, sapless creature with thin lips and board-flat bosom.

She had an hour before she was to meet Jonathan on the corner of Lexington Avenue. She didn’t dare let him come to the hotel and call from the desk downstairs. Martha was always dead set against her having dates or any hint of romance with anyone she considered ordinary. And Jonathan Calder sold shoes.

Martha was still talking about Hollywood, still dabbling at the cigar box. She had, somehow, rambled all the way back to the William Desmond Taylor murder, more than thirty years in the past. “Think of it,” she marveled in her dry, terribly cultured voice. “A great career like Mary Myles Minter ruined — wiped out as if by a blackboard eraser — just at a breath of scandal. Such a pity! And Mabel Normand, too.”

There was a pause and Lurline decided to take the plunge. “Martha,” she said, “I think I’d like to go to a movie.”

Martha lifted her brush from the box. “I think that would be just lovely,” she said. “I’ve been sitting in here all day. What shall we see? They say that French picture— Oh, what is the name of it?”

“Mother.” Lurline knew that using mother instead of Martha, which her mother preferred because it made her feel younger, would halt the unending flow of chatter. “Mother, I want to go alone.”

The older woman’s patrician pose vanished. She suddenly appeared thoroughly hard, cruel. “Lurline, you’re lying. You’re going out with a man. What is it this time — some ribbon clerk?”

It was close enough to hurt. Shoes were not in a higher class than ribbons. Lurline started crying.

“And you can stop sniveling,” said Martha decisively. “You can’t fool me with those tears. You’re not a good enough actress.”

Anger made Lurline’s throat feel tight and caused a little vein to jump just below the left corner of her jaw. Yet, in her own ears, her voice sounded small and ineffectual as she said, “Maybe I’m not a good actress, but I’m a woman — a woman thirty-three years old, and I—”

“Twenty-seven — you’re twenty-seven years old, dear.” Martha’s bland serenity made the incredible lie almost convincing. “You’re only twenty-seven, Lurline, so there’s still lots of time to wait for Mr. Right to come along. It’s your future — your happiness — your security — I’m thinking of. You can’t afford to throw your life away on some— some—”

Lurline turned and fled from the room. She tried the bathroom door down the hall, but it was locked. She cried harder because she had no privacy for her grief. In this wreck of an old New York hotel, she and her mother shared bathroom and kitchen privileges with the other residents of the sixth floor front.