Флетчер Флора - Leave Her to Hell

The scream was not loud, not long, and there was no shadow and no sound by the time Lawler and I reached the porch. I was faster than he, running on longer legs, and he was a step behind me when I threw open the door to see Constance Markley hanging by the neck from the hands of her husband.

Interrupted in murder, he turned his face toward us in the precise instant that Lawler fired, and in another instant he was dead.

Constance Markley began to scream again.

She screamed and screamed and screamed.

I had a notion that the screams were two years old.

It took a week to get things cleared up. I stayed in Amity that week, and then I went home, and the first thing I did after getting there was to go see Lieutenant Haskett.

“Hello, Percy,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“It’s all right. I hear you’ve been pretty busy. Sit down and explain the connection between that mess at Amity and the mess you called me into up at Colly Alder’s.”

“What makes you think there’s a connection?”

“Isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what makes me think so.”

I sat down and fished for a smoke, and he patiently rubbed his bald head with the knuckles of one hand while I found the smoke and a light and got them together.

“Graham Markley killed Colly and Rosie,” I said. “It was the result of a situation that developed from his killing of Regis Lawler two years before.”

“You can skip the Lawler killing. I’m briefed on it.”

“Okay. The point is, Colly knew Markley had killed Lawler, and he lived comfortably off the knowledge for a couple of years. He was discreet in his demands, and Markley apparently preferred to tolerate a nuisance rather than risk another murder at that time. Besides, Colly was incriminated himself, and probably Markley thought he might be useful in certain ways. Then I got on the trail of Constance Markley, and Graham Markley put Colly on mine, and Colly got his wind up. Like Markley himself, he was afraid that Constance knew all about the murder of Lawler, and Colly had made himself, besides a blackmailer, a kind of accessory. He could see the possibility of a long prison term ahead of him if Constance was found and the truth came out. So he decided to go for a big bundle and get out, and that was his mistake. Markley could be pushed only gently, and only so far. He went to his meeting with Colly, and he killed Colly and killed Rosie, and I think it happened just about the way I told you that night.”

“A very savory character. Lovable. How did Colly learn about the murder of Lawler?”

“He’d been gathering evidence for Markley concerning Constance and Lawler. Apparently Markley planned to use the evidence to beat an alimony rap if it became necessary. Alimony and blackmail seem to have been the big problems in Markley’s life. Besides murder, I mean. Anyhow, the night Markley went to Regis Lawler’s apartment and killed him, Colly was outside and saw him arrive and saw him leave later. Colly was supposed to be tailing Constance, I think, and I don’t know certainly how he happened to be waiting outside Lawler’s place. Maybe he’d lost Constance and intended to pick her up there if and when she came that night. Maybe he knew she’d show up eventually and just came on ahead to short-circuit the job of following her. However it happened, he was there and saw Markley, and you can imagine the jolt it gave him. Right away, being Colly, he began to sniff something. As soon as Markley left, Colly went up to Lawler’s apartment. He found Lawler dead, just as Constance was to find him later, and that was the beginning of Colly’s affluence. The beginning of his own death too.”

I took a breath, and Haskett knuckled his skull and squinted at me dourly.

“You got any evidence to support this?”

“No. But it fits. It’s neat.”

“It is. Convenient too. It’s always a help if you can hang several murders on one guy. Sort of tidies things up in a hurry. Well, it won’t hurt Markley to take the rap. You can only execute a man once at the most, and you can’t even do that if he happens to be dead.”

There wasn’t a lot to say after that was said, and after a while, being very tired, I went home and went to bed, although it was still daylight, and I slept with only a few bad dreams until the next day, when I went up to the apartment of Faith Salem. I made a point of going when the sun was on the terrace. Maria let me in, and I crossed the acres of pile and tile and went out where Faith was. She was lying on her back on the bright soft pad with one forearm across her eyes to shade them from the light. She didn’t move the arm when I came out.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Hand,” she said.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Excuse me for not getting up. Will you please sit down?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Thanks.”

I sat down in a wicker chair. It was very warm on the terrace in the sun, but the warmth was pleasant, and after a few minutes I began to feel it in my bones. Faith Salem’s lean brown body remained motionless, except for the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breasts in breathing, and I suspected that her eyes were closed under her arm.

“So it was Graham after all,” she said.

“That’s what you suspected, wasn’t it?”

“In a way. I had a feeling, but it was a feeling that he had done something to Constance. I can’t understand why he killed this man.”

“Not because of the affair. He didn’t care about that.”

“Why, then?”

“As I told someone yesterday, there seemed to be two big problems in Graham Markley’s life. Alimony and blackmail. They both happened to him more than once. As for the blackmail, Regis Lawler was the first to try it. It went back to something that happened about three years ago. Graham Markley and Constance were driving back from the country. They’d been on a party, and Graham was drunk. He hit a woman on the highway and killed her and kept right on driving. It was a nasty business. Constance isn’t a strong person, nor even a very pleasant person, and she agreed with Graham that it was better to keep quiet about the incident. It’s easy for some people to rationalize that kind of position. Then, in due time, after the death of her child, she met Regis Lawler, and she wanted to do with Regis just what everyone actually assumed she had done. She wanted to run away from everything — her marriage, her guilt, everything associated with her child’s death, all the unhappiness that people like her seem doomed to accumulate.

“Apparently Regis let her believe that he might be willing to go along with this, but he had no money. Silas Lawler told me that Regis stole seventy-five grand from a wall safe at the restaurant, but it wasn’t so. It was only a rather clumsy lie Silas used to make their running away plausible. What really happened was that Constance told Regis about the woman’s death on the highway, and Regis tried the blackmail, although he actually had no intention, it seems, of going anywhere at all with Constance. The blackmail didn’t work. Whatever passes for pride in an egoist like Markley would never let him hand over a small fortune to his wife’s lover, although he could and did submit to blackmail for a while under other circumstances. He went to Lawler’s apartment and killed him.

“When Constance went there later the same night and found his body, she knew immediately what had surely happened. Her own burden of guilt was too heavy to bear in addition to everything else, and so she escaped it by becoming another person to whom none of this had ever happened. It was something that could only have happened under certain conditions to a certain kind of person. She became you, the one person she had ever known that she completely admired and envied, and she went back to the place where she had, for a time, been happier than she had ever been before or since. She became you, and she went back to Amity.