Харлан Эллисон: Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Later, in the outer room, he muttered a few broken words to the detectives.

“It’s Mildred, all right,” he said. “Mildred — oh, my God...”

They had taken the rope from her once lovely throat. They had unwound the coils from beneath her knees and straightened her body. With alcohol-soaked gauze they had cleansed the ugly wounds on her face and breast. There was nothing they could do about the deep indentations of the skull. The black vacant hollows where her front teeth had been battered back into her throat were charitably concealed by her bruised and torn lips. Little was left of the face, but even as it lay in a pathetic heap on the morgue table, the girl’s body still looked from a distance slender and young and oddly alive in death.

That night Perry Williams once again repeated all he had gone over so often before. He told it in a broken, harsh voice. A voice which seemed to cry out for vengeance.

“That day, November 21, Mildred went to work as usual in the Whitehall Street shoe store where she was a clerk. She left before noon, and that is the last I ever saw of her until tonight. I can’t understand it — how she happened to be in that trunk in the Griffin house. We used to live there a few months back, you know. And police had searched that house looking for her after those mysterious telephone calls.”

Officers nodded gravely. Later, they questioned Williams about his injured arm and the scratches on his face. He explained that he had fallen and hurt himself.

Williams was permitted to go home and detectives were at once assigned to check his story about falling, as well as to establish his whereabouts on the day his wife disappeared.

Meantime, officers were holding three men and a woman for questioning. Within the last few hours they had interviewed more than a dozen persons, and they had turned up a mass of amazing evidence. The difficulty was, unfortunately, that it might be of inestimable value once they had found the killer — but it failed to point to the killer himself.

Detective Superintendent McKibben called a conference in his private office with detectives and plainclothesmen who had worked on the case, before interviewing the people he was holding.

“Here’s what we know,” he began, “at this point. These are the facts we have without dispute. To begin with, Mrs. Williams disappeared on November 21st. She started for work and that was the last seen of her, until the day her body turned up in the Griffin basement. The only clues we have are negative, with the exception of one. The positive clue is the fact that rope has been found in the Griffin house similar to the rope which bound the corpse.

“The negative clues are the facts that the girl’s expensive wedding and engagement rings, as well as a valuable breastpin, were still on the corpse when she was discovered. That and the medical examiner’s report that she had not been criminally attacked.

“This would tend to eliminate either a robbery or a sex motive for the crime. There is no insurance angle; she left virtually no estate. She was not murdered for money.

“The wounds would indicate that she was killed on or near the spot where the body was concealed. Now a strange angle enters the case at this point. You all remember that at the time of her disappearance, that is, a few days later, her relatives began receiving telephone calls saying that she was being held captive in the Griffin house.”

He stopped for a minute and eyed the detectives listening to him.

“I’m not blaming anyone,” he went on. “But two of you men searched the place at that time. Unfortunately you were looking for a live woman — not a dead one. Now I want to know one thing — does anyone remember seeing the trunk in the cellar at that time?”

A tall, thin detective stepped forward.

“Yes,” he said. “I helped search the house and I saw the trunk. I didn’t investigate it. The fact that she might have been murdered never even occurred to me. I wasn’t looking for the hiding place of a dead body. But the trunk was there then.”

“Which,” McKibben said, “adds another unusual angle. The killer must have made the phone calls. And it is a strange thing for a murderer to first conceal a victim and then attempt to tip off the place of concealment.”

He stopped to light a cigar and the officers could feel a tightening in the room’s atmosphere while they waited for him to go on.

“So far,” he continued, “we have no known motive for the crime. But somewhere there must be a motive. Murders don’t just happen. From this point on, I will review exactly what we know of the victim herself, of her husband and of the people who were connected with them in one way of another.

“Detective Taylor has interviewed the girl’s mother, Mrs. J. J. Allen; her grandmother, Mrs. W. W. Smith; and her aunt, Mrs. J. T. Neal. Each of these three relatives were very close to the Williamses. All three agree on two definite points.

“The first point: Perry and Mildred Williams were a happily married couple. They were never known to fight, there was no jealousy of any kind between them. They were very much in love with each other. The second point: Neither Perry Williams nor his wife had any relations with any other person. Mildred was a perfect wife and neither before nor after marriage had gone with any man other than her husband. They were a model couple.

“On the other hand, Mrs. Smith, the grandmother, has one unusual piece of information to contribute. For a period of three to four months before the girl’s murder, she had received a series of poison pen letters. Frequently the letters were accompanied by clippings from Dorothy Dix’s newspaper column. The clippings were all along one line — advice for women to stay away from other women’s husbands. The letters were vicious indictments against Mildred herself — warnings that she must stay away from another woman’s husband.

“Now, from what we know of the victim, it is a complete mystery why she should have been sent the letters. We are certain that she never did go near another woman’s husband. Thus, we can draw but one conclusion at this point. Whoever sent the letters must have been a psychopathic case who imagined that Mildred Williams was a bad woman.”

Again the chief of detectives stopped for a minute. His assistants by this time realized the technique he was following. Unable to draw any leads from the clues he had at hand, he was, by a series of psychological deductions based on definite facts, attempting to discover the criminal by the process of elimination.

“There is just one more thing,” he went on. “I refer now to the telephone calls which were made to relatives of the dead girl soon after she disappeared. The calls were all along the same line. The phone would ring and then whoever was making the calls would either hang up, or else would wait a minute or so and offer the information that Mildred Williams could be found at an address which later was to prove mythical. The only time the correct address was given was the time the Griffin house was mentioned.

“There is but one of two deductions here. First: The calls were made to mentally torture the husband and relatives of the girl. Second, the more logical, the person making the calls, probably the killer, was having a battle with his conscience and intended to confess or at least see that the body was found and put the family free of anxiety. And then, at the last moment he lost courage.

“Inasmuch as the phone messages likely came from the person who had, previous to the murder, written the poison pen letters, we can safely assume that our killer not only suffered from a persecution complex but very likely suffered from a bad conscience as well.

“There is just one more pertinent fact. Analysis of the handwriting of the letters indicates a woman. A man’s technique in a like case would have been more direct action. And, as far as the victims of the phone calls are concerned, the voice, although highly muffled, sounded to be that of a child or a woman!”