Стив Хокенсмит - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 6, June 2006

She sat in the chair, adjusted her skirt, then gazed directly at me with the loveliest pair of violet-blue eyes that I had ever seen.

“I didn’t want to come here, Dr. Karlins,” she said with a shy smile. “My friend, Dean Ness, talked me into it. I don’t think you can do anything for me, but Dean is very persuasive. He’s hard to turn off when he gets an idea into that handsome head of his.”

I had talked to Dean the night before. He was a man I’d known at college and met several times a year at parties and S.C. football and basketball games. He’d phoned to ask if I thought I could do anything for the girl. His story was that she was completely broken up about the death of the young millionaire and refused to start living her own life again. When I asked him what his interest in the matter was, he had been blunt.

“I want to marry the girl, damn it. I asked her to marry me before she ever met David Landmaier, and I want to marry her, still. I don’t have much chance if she keeps mooning over the jerk’s death. I can’t compete with a ghost.”

I told Ness that I could usually desensitize people to freeway phobias, airplane travel fears, and to cigarette withdrawal pangs, but that desensitization to death was quite another matter. However, I agreed to see the girl out of sheer curiosity more than anything else. I’d been reading about the case in the morning papers for weeks.

“I talked to Dean Ness last night,” I said. “He thinks you grieve too much and too long.”

She frowned slightly and made a little gesture as if she were waving away a wisp of smoke in front of those incredible eyes. “Dean is confused. He thinks I’m mourning for poor David. What is really bothering me, Doctor, is the prospect of being convicted of David’s murder. The police are convinced I had something to do with it. I haven’t told Dean about that. I’m ashamed to.”

I leaned back in my chair and thought about what I had read of the case. Miss Anderson’s story was that she had been playing tennis at the time of the murder. The courts were just outside her apartment at the Westbay Club in West L.A. She claimed she suspected nothing when she first walked into her apartment, rackets in hand. Earlier, she had told David Landmaier to go in and mix himself a drink. When she did not see him in her livingroom and tried to enter the kitchenette, the swinging door pushed against his inert body. She was confused as to what happened next, but said she had not gotten a clear look at the scene in the kitchen. When she saw Landmaier’s head and upper torso and a lot of blood, she backed up and started screaming. The papers went on to say that he had been shot with a small caliber weapon and had bled to death. Some shattered glassware seemed to indicate that Landmaier had been mixing two drinks when he was murdered. No one had been seen entering or leaving the apartment’s two entrances except Elizabeth Anderson.

“Why do the police suspect you, Miss Anderson?” I asked. “From what I read, you have an excellent alibi. The girl you were playing tennis with—”

“Is an excellent friend of mine,” she snapped. “David was a strange, eccentric, weird young man. He was worried that someone was going to marry him for his money, so he settled over a million dollars on me when we became engaged, against my wishes. He also insisted on making a new will leaving me all of his money. It’s at least ten million after taxes. The police seem to think that can buy a lot of alibis.”

“Suspicion is not enough. They have to have concrete evidence.”

“They have some evidence which convinces them that I am guilty, and it’s making them work around the clock to prove it. I was followed to your office. They follow me wherever I go.”

I waited for several seconds while she stared angrily at a ceramic ash tray on my desk, then she went on.

“When I found they suspected me of shooting David, I volunteered for a lie detector test, even before I consulted a lawyer. It made me furious to think that anyone would suspect me of murdering for money so I went down to Parker Center under my own power and took the test. It just made things worse.”

Elizabeth Anderson turned that high-voltage glance on me again, but this time those incredible eyes were full of tears.

“When I got finished with the test, they said I had displayed guilty knowledge of the murder, and really began to crowd me. I could tell they were convinced that I had either done it myself or had it done, but they would not tell me what I had said that made them feel I was guilty.”

“Do you have any idea what it could have been? You must have reacted to something they feel only the murderer or an accomplice could have known.”

She glared at the ash tray again and began to clench and unclench her hands. “I’ve spent the last five days trying to figure out what I could have said. There were several odd words. The operator asked me if they meant anything to me, and they didn’t. I’d never heard of any of them.”

“Try to remember the words,” I said softly.

“They were nonsense words like in Carroll’s Jabberwocky, words like frabjious, calloo, callay, and maxnome. Then he asked me if I knew a lot of men and he rattled off about ten or fifteen names; names like Henry Mow, Randy Rome, and Max Tone. Funny thing! They all had single-syllable last names. But I didn’t know any of them.”

“You might have known one of them and forgotten. That would cause a reaction on the polygraph.”

Elizabeth Anderson shrugged her shoulders and turned to me. “I don’t see how you can possibly help me, Doctor, unless you could go to the police and find out what I did on that test that convinced them I’m guilty of David’s murder. As my doctor, could you do that? Would they talk to you?”

“I could try, Miss Anderson. I don’t think I can talk to the police directly, but I have a brother who knows the lieutenant in charge of the West L.A. area. They rode a patrol car together twenty years ago. I’ll see if he can do anything for you.”

We left it at that, and I went on with my practice for the rest of the afternoon. When we closed up for the day I drove over to my brother’s bungalow in Mar Vista and had dinner with him and his family, then tossed the whole business into his ample lap.

Danny raised his bushy, gray eyebrows about a foot when I finished my pitch to him. “You mean to say that you want me to ask Lieutenant William Steele how his boys are conducting a murder investigation. Mike, old buddies or not, I’d bounce twice and land in the Pacific, at least halfway to Hawaii. You know how he feels about private detectives interfering in police matters, and you, especially, know how he feels about you.”

“I’m not asking you to inquire about the case, Danny. I want you to ask Steele if he would be willing to discuss those lie detector findings with me. As a clinical psychologist, I may be able to help the police. If the girl has guilty knowledge, I may be able to find out why for him. I have her permission to do this. He cannot ask her the questions that I can under therapeutic conditions.”

“And he can’t ask you to tell him or the court anything that will incriminate your patient.”

“True enough, but if I can prove or show that there is an innocent cause for her so-called guilty reactions, wouldn’t that help the case for him? He may be chasing the wrong fox.”

Andy thought the matter over, then agreed to try.

Next morning, I was granted an interview with Steele at headquarters and went in to see him with profoundly mixed feelings. We had, it might be delicately put, a strained relationship. While going to college, I had done some work for my brother’s private agency, and while in the army I had spent nearly a year in military intelligence doing investigative work. Steele had the false notion that I was now operating a clandestine, unlicensed detective agency in the middle of his district behind the facade of a clinical psychologist’s office, so I was positive that if I had approached him directly about the Anderson girl, he would have blown a fuse.