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

“But, I... I—”

“Goodnight, Mr. Pruyn. Officer Barnhart will show you out.”

From the door of his office, Norman Bendix watched the two figures recede down the narrow hall.

An odd one, he thought, a real odd one.

He pulled the Ford out of the police parking lot and eased the car into the evening traffic.

So easy! So wonderfully satisfying and easy. Oh, the excitement of it — his sojourn into the Lion’s Den. Almost like the excitement with the knife. That bit about the kick in the stomach. Dangerous, but wonderful! He remembered the Lieutenant’s look when he’d mentioned the kick. Delicious!

Emery Pruyn smiled as he drove on. Much more excitement was ahead. Much more...

It hardly can be considered a surprise when a lady of questionable repute is found in a bedroom with her shoes off. Even in a bedroom not her own. But why go through all that trouble of hanging the loose lady so tightly from the closet door? These murderers — always thinking up something new!

The phone woke me. Outside it was still dark, but in March that could mean anything. My watch was on the dresser. It was nearly eight.

Tillie Monroe, the switchboard operator at Devensville, seemed agitated. “Sheriff Marking,” she said, “you’re wanted out at the Williamson place right away. There’s... someone’s dead.”

The Williamson spread is twelve miles northeast of Devensville. My place is nearly five miles south of town. Besides being sheriff of Martin county, I ranch.

“Who is it?” I asked, fully awake now.

“I don’t know. Some woman. Hung herself. Leastways, that’s what they say.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m leaving right now.” I hated to admit that I hadn’t had breakfast. “Get hold of Sim Baker, Tillie, and tell him.”

“Well, mercy sakes, Tom,” she said irritably, “it’s him that’s a’ callin’ you. He’s on the line now.”

“Would you mind,” I asked her quietly, “if I talked to him?”

“Yeah, Tom,” Sim broke in. “I’m right here.” Sim is my deputy.

“Right where?”

“At home. I just found out about it. Called you up as soon as I heard.”

“Don’t wait for me,” I told him. “Go on out. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

Outside it was still gray and a blanket of dirty cloud-film lay motionless over the prairie. Underfoot the thin layer of ancient snow was hard and discolored, pock-marked here and there by occasional shoots of sturdy prairie grass stubbornly ignoring the winter elements. Above the eastern horizon a faint tinge of pinkish hue proved circumstantially the existence of the sun.

I took the jeep. There wasn’t enough snow to hamper driving, but the roads between my place and Williamson’s were rugged and I still hadn’t gotten over babying my new Buick.

Sim was waiting for me in the Williamson yard when I drove up. His Model-A was parked, near the house, next to a battered-looking, dusty 1946 Chevy. I parked and he climbed in beside me. He’s a compact man of sixty. A handsome head of white hair sets off his craggy face, and when he greeted me. I could that he was wearing his gleeming teeth. We sat in the jeep and smoked while he filled me in on the details.

“It’s Liz Peterson,” he said. “Know her?”

I knew her. Twenty-five or six, married twice, divorced twice, a drinker, a party girl — the town tramp.

“Couldn’t be sure at first,” he continued, “’way her tongue and eyes are stickin’ out, but it’s Liz all right. Hung herself on the closet door in one of the guest rooms upstairs.” He looked at me sourly. “Bartel is here, makin’ like Dick Tracy. He looks kinda’ rough. Wife’s outa town right now, visitin’ some folks in Denver. Bartel’s probably been tom-cattin’ pretty late these nights.”

I nodded. Charley Bartel is the Devensville Police Chief.

“Only three, dudes stayin’ here right now,” Sim said, “an’ they’re all in the same party. A woman an’ two men. They got separate rooms — if that means anything. The woman’s a real looker, an’ one of the men looks like an actor. Other one’s an old codger, fifty or so.” Sim looked at me and the expression on his face was wink-sly. “Charley’s been snoopin’ around the woman like a bird dog.”

I grunted. Despite the fact that he’s a married man, Charley Bartel is proud of his carefully cultivated “lady-killer” reputation.

Sim threw his cigarette outside and began at once to build another. “Mrs. Donald found the body. They’d been a party last night, I guess. Bottles an’ glasses strung out all over the place. She’d tidied up downstairs and went up to the guest rooms. Most of ’em empty this time of year, but this bein’ Saturday she dusts ’em anyway. Later, after the guests is up, she usually goes back upstairs an’ straightens out their rooms.

“Anyhow, Mrs. Donald barges right into this room that’s supposed to be empty an’ that’s how the body was found. Hangin’ on the closet door an’ damn near lookin’ Mrs. Donald in the eye.”

He paused long enough to light his cigarette; then, holding the dead match in one hand and the live cigarette in the other, he leaned back and sighed loudly. “Oh, lessee. What else? Oh! Yeah. Well, Charley comes out here by hisself and sorta takes over. After he damn well felt like it... that’s around seven-forty-five or so... he calls me up an’ asks am I up yet? Then he said that it looked like he had to do all the police work that’s done in this county, an’ asks if I’d mind callin’ the sheriff an’ gettin’ him out of bed an’ gettin’ him out here to do his job like he was elected to do?”

Sim exhaled a stream of smoke. “That’s when I called you. And that’s about it. I called up Pete Hardy, told him I had a coroner job for him an’ to get hisself out to the Williamson place. He says, ‘I know, I know all. about it’, but he ain’t showed up yet which shows how people listen to me.”

I nodded absently, said nothing.

“Ed Williamson just got back from Rapid City. Flew in this mornin’ in that little plane of his. Bought some cows up there, I guess; He was real upset about the hangin’, a’course, an’ it didn’t help none when he walked in an’ caught the chief samplin’ some of his best drinkin’ liquor.” Sim chuckled heartily at the memory, then sobered. “By the way,” he said, “Ed says to tell you that he’s in the den and to drop around when you have time.”

We climbed out of the jeep then, walked across the yard to the impressive looking white-frame-and-brick house. This country is so big that most things in it look small. The Williamson house looks big.

Sim led the way upstairs to the death room. The blonde woman in the tight-fitting green dress was hanging from the closet door. Her nylon-clad toes missed scraping the floor by perhaps four inches. The rope around her neck snaked its way over the top hinge of the door and out of sight. The door was closed.

A yard from the suspended woman lay an upended straight-back chair. Beneath her reaching, searching toes — and two feet back away from the door — lay a pair of black, high-heeled pumps, tilted over on their sides: The backs of the shoes were bent, in and down, as though they had been small for her and she’d been forced to jam them on without a shoe horn.

In the middle of the room, his hands on his hips, stood Charley Bartel. Charley is a natty, smallish man of forty. He looks his age. He glanced at us briefly, muttered something under his breath, and looked away. I didn’t want to get into a jurisdictional dispute with him, so I didn’t ask him what he was doing this far from town. “What does it look like, Charley?”