Richard Deming: Tweak the Devil’s Nose

For a long time she made no comment. Her hands worked together as though she were kneading dough and her face assumed a pinched, angry expression.

Finally she said in a furious voice, “That woman! You say drinking companion, but loving companion is more like it! He told that skinny redheaded thing!”

“Oh, so you knew he was having an affair with Mrs. Jones?”

“Mrs. Whore is more like it,” she said hysterically. “Snatching other women’s husbands when she’s got a perfectly good man of her own.” Then she seemed to realize she was reacting exactly as we wished, and sullenly drew her lips into a thin line.

I asked, “If you knew your husband was seeing Mrs. Jones, how does it happen you never compared notes with Mr. Jones? You don’t impress me as a woman who would accept a situation like that without some action.”

Her lips began to tremble, and suspecting she was going to cry, Warren Day glared at her so belligerently, she was startled into changing her mind. Just being in the same room with a woman was trial enough for the inspector. A weeping woman was more than he intended to bear.

“I did try to talk to him about two months ago,” she said in a shaky voice. “But she’s got him so fooled, he’s stark blind. He said women my age sometimes begin imagining things about their husbands, and he was sure when my period of adjustment was over, I’d realize Willard was a good husband. I guess Willard had told him I was beginning to have female trouble, and he thought my suspicions were just part of the sickness. His talking down to me like he was a doctor or something made me so furious, I never mentioned it to him again.”

The inspector cleared his throat as a signal to me he was ready to take over. I leaned against the wall and waited.

He had decided to drop the silkily villainous approach in favor of impersonal brusqueness. “We’ve strayed from the original point a little, Mrs. Knight. It’s useless for you to deny your husband told you all about the scrape he was in the evening Lancaster was killed, and you deliberately concealed that fact from the police.”

Her head gave a frightened shake. “Not all, he didn’t tell me. Just that he’d borrowed a lot of money to invest in stock, and one of the other stockholders was going to let it out the next morning that the stock had a false value. He said he was ruined and might even go to jail, but he never told me who the man was who was causing all the trouble. He never mentioned Mr. Lancaster’s name.”

Without belief Day asked, “Then why did you deny knowing anything about your husband’s affairs?”

“Willard told me to. I lied about what happened the next morning too, but I had to. When he saw the headline about Mr. Lancaster’s murder, he told me he was the man who had intended to ruin him. He said he could dispose of the bad stock if he had twenty-four hours, and if the police came I should stall them off to give him time. What else could I do? I didn’t want Willard to be ruined and have to go to prison.”

The inspector said dryly, “This is the second plausible story you’ve told, Mrs. Knight. First you know nothing about your husband’s stock-market jam, then when you get caught in the lie, you suddenly know half the details. Just enough to explain the lie, but not enough to make it possible that you killed Walter Lancaster.”

The woman’s eyes widened with a mixture of astonishment and indignation.

But before she could speak, the inspector hammered at her, “I think your husband told you the full story, including the name of the man who was going to ruin him and the information that he was dining at El Patio that night. And after your husband left the house, I think you drove out to El Patio, hid in the bushes and shot Walter Lancaster in order to save your husband from ruin.”

“Why we don’t even own a car!” Mrs. Knight said indignantly. “Nor a gun either.”

Momentarily the inspector looked disconcerted. Then brushing the objection aside with the remark that cars are easily rented, he drove straight on, ticking each point off on his fingers as he made it.

“First, your motive for killing Lancaster was as great as your husband’s. If Knight crashed financially you crashed right along with him. Second, you had opportunity while your husband was at his ‘board meeting.’ Only your unsupported story puts you home all evening. Third—”

Mrs. Knight’s mannish voice abruptly interrupted him. “I thought the same person who killed Mr. Lancaster killed Willard too. Am I supposed to have saved Willard by murder one day, and killed him the next?”

“Exactly,” the inspector said with relish. Drawing on his vast knowledge of feminine psychology, which totaled zero, he explained. “I imagine you loved your husband, and women are always shooting the men they love. In Homicide we never get a case of a woman shooting some man she doesn’t like. It’s always the guy she loves. You loved Knight enough to kill for him, so naturally you loved him enough to kill him. The age-old motive of jealousy. He was out with Mrs. Jones the night he got it.”

Gently I thrust a thought into the discussion. “How about the attempt on Fausta, Inspector? That was by a man.”

Day turned to glare at me, thought a moment and suddenly looked happy again. “Listen to her voice,” he said. “Imagine it coming over a telephone.”

Thoughtfully I examined the woman, who gradually seemed to be nearing the bursting point. “You mean it could pass for a man’s? Possibly. It’s pretty deep and husky.”

Mrs. Knight reached her bursting point. “I never heard anything so ridiculous in my life!” she half shouted. “Accusing me of killing my own husband, plus a man I didn’t even know! You’d do better out on the street looking for real murderers than trying to scare an innocent woman.”

Both of us merely looked at her until her anger deflated. Then she said in a small voice, “Besides, even if I could imitate a man’s voice over the phone, I couldn’t have passed for a man in a barroom. It was a man who ordered that drink for Miss Moreni.”

The inspector pounced. “How do you know what almost happened to Miss Moreni, Mrs. Knight?”

She looked confused. “It was in the paper.”

Slowly the inspector shook his head.

“On the radio then.”

Again there was a slow headshake. “It was deliberately kept out. Only the waiter’s death was reported.”

Much as it pained me, I was forced to destroy his beautiful dream. “Don Bell had it on his broadcast last night, Inspector. So it’s probably in the morning papers too. I haven’t seen them.”

Apparently neither had the inspector. Pointing his thin nose at me, he let it gradually drain of color.

Just before he burst, I said reasonably, “I didn’t give Bell the item, Inspector. And you’ve still got a pretty good case against Mrs. Knight.”

For a few moments Day did not trust himself to speak. Finally he rose from his chair and said in a strangled voice, “I think we’ll continue this downtown, Mrs. Knight. You are under arrest on suspicion of homicide.”

The woman made no objection whatever, but I got the impression this was not a tacit admission of guilt, but simply the result of not knowing what to do about the matter. As the inspector started to lead her out, it occurred to me his logical case might fall apart from lack of proof unless he got a confession.

I stopped him by asking, “Think you’ve got it solved finally, Inspector?”

He swung about to stare at me with suspicion. “Don’t you, Moon?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s a nice logical case, but it does have the weak point Mrs. Knight mentioned. It was a man who ordered that drink for Fausta.”