A. Fair - Up for Grabs

“I haven’t the least idea,” Breckinridge said. “But I want to find out — and I intend to find out — even if I have to go to the Chief.”

Sellers hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, I guess you folks are all accounted for. There’s no reason to detain you.”

“On the contrary,” Breckinridge said with dignity, “I am substantial citizen and a substantial taxpayer. If there is any police activity involving Foley Chester, I am interested in it and I feel I am entitled to know what it is.”

“We’re waiting for him to come back,” Sellers said. “We think he may have murdered his wife.”

“Murdered his wife!” Breckinridge exclaimed, horrified.

“That’s right,” Sellers said. “We’re pretty well satisfied that he planned a deliberate premeditated murder.”

“Where is his wife?”

“We’ve recovered her body. It’s being held. So far there’s been no publicity. We’ve got to release publicity within the next twenty-four hours or so. We’d like very much to question Chester before we have to face any publicity.”

“Oh, my God!” Breckinridge said.

“What’s the matter?” Sellers asked.

“Publicity!” Breckinridge exclaimed.

“What about it?”

“The faintest breath of publicity on a charge of that sort and we never will settle the insurance case.”

Breckinridge looked at me accusingly. “The price of settlement,” he explained to Sellers, would go up astronomically.”

Sellers said, “We’re going to sit on it as long as we can, but it’ll be bound to break one way or another. Chester took out a pretty good insurance policy on his wife.”

“How much?” Breckinridge asked.

“A hundred thousand bucks,” Sellers said. “He did it, however, by having his wife insure his life at the same time he insured his wife’s life. They called it family insurance and the policy went through all right without arousing any suspicion. In fact, the idea of the policy originated in the mind of the Insurance salesman who had called on them and talked about death taxes these days and all of that. He sold them the policies.”

“How long was it in force?” Breckinridge asked.

“For, over a year,” Sellers said, and then added, “If it weren’t for what I’m pleased to call some damned brilliant police work this would have only been a routine case. Chester would have disposed of his wife, taken the money and been on his way.”

Breckenridge said to me, “This cooks our goose Donald.”

“Not yet,” I said. Let’s remember we haven’t heard Chester’s side of the case yet.”

Sellers said sarcastically, “The boy genius speaks. He knows more about the case than we do and he hasn’t even heard the facts yet.”

Breckinridge said, “What are the facts?”

Sellers said, “After a while, Chester and his wife weren’t getting along so well. There were disputes, little altercations here and there. Mrs. Chester decided she was going to San Francisco and told Chester she might never come back. They had quite a scene. Mrs. Chester packed up, went down and loaded the bags in her car. Chester was so mad he wouldn’t even help her; he stood and watched. People in some of the other apartments saw it and thought it was pretty damned churlish.

“Then,” Sellers continued, “when she’d packed the car, she jumped in, slammed the door, and tried to start the car.

“The car wouldn’t start.

“Now, it happens that morning Chester had put his car in the garage for repairs and was driving a rented car. Mrs. Chester wanted to take it. Chester wouldn’t let her have it. Mrs. Chester went to a drive-yourself car agency, rented a car, arranged to turn it in San Francisco, arranged with the garage to come and get her car and repair it, and then she was going to fly back and pick it up. She was that mad at Chester, she was getting out of there right then.

“She drove up in the rented car, transferred her baggage, and took off for San Francisco. All of that we know and can prove.

“The next morning Chester turned his rented car in and went to pick up his own car.

“When he turned his rented car in, the people checking it over noticed a couple of places where the paint was off, indicating the car had hit something.

“At first Chester denied he had hit anything. Then he suddenly ‘remembered’ that he might have brushed against a cement gatepost in visiting a friend in the country. He said the scrape had been so slight that he hadn’t even noticed it.

“Well, that was a good story but there was a little triangular chip out of the glass on one of the headlights and a little color had rubbed off on the car so that the man who inspected it had an idea Chester had probably scraped against a parked car. He asked Chester about it, and pointed out that Chester was fully covered by insurance, but Chester said that he hadn’t anything to report and then apparently, as an afterthought, suddenly snapped his fingers, and said, ‘By George, that’s what happened. I had the car park and somebody must have scraped against me.’

“So the car rental people let it go at that.

“But Mrs. Chester didn’t show up on the appointed date in San Francisco to turn her rented car in. After four or five days the car people began to get nervous. They interviewed Chester, and Chester told them frankly that he hadn’t heard from his wife since she left; that as far as he was concerned he didn’t give a damn. That she had had two or three affairs since they’d been married; that he was no angel himself but that his wife wanted a double standard. She wanted freedom for herself, but wanted him to toe a chalked line, that he was damned good and sick of it, and, as far as he was concerned, he was just as happy the way things were and he didn’t care if she never came back, and since she had signed the contract with the car company, the company could do whatever they damned pleased about it.

“Chester said he was going off on an extended business trip an might not be back for three or four weeks, and as far as his wife was concerned he wasn’t going to worry about her, and the car rental people could do the worrying about the car.”

Breckinridge said quietly, “We knew in advance that going on a business trip but thought he’d be back by now.”

“Do you know where he is now?” Sellers asked, becoming suddenly deflated.

“He was going up through the Northwest, up Washington, Montana, Idaho.”

“You didn’t get an itinerary?” Sellers asked.

“No, we didn’t. You see, he had had this accident and he reported it all right, gave us a full statement and we asked him where we could get in touch with him if we wanted an elaboration of his: statement. He told us, very frankly, that he was going away, that he had had some domestic trouble, that his wife had left him and probably would file suit for divorce and that was all right by him.”

“Okay,” Sellers said, losing assurance by the minute, “everything moves along fine and there wouldn’t have been anything to it if· It hadn’t been that this missing rented car showed up wrecked at; the bottom of a ravine way down below the Tehachapi Grade. And that would have been all right if the car hadn’t caught on fire.

“By the time the car was found, the wife’s body was somewhat decomposed, and, if it hadn’t been for the fire, would have been very decomposed.

“Well, we had a post-mortem on the body and it turned out that Mrs. Chester had been dead before the fire started. The doctor thinks at least an hour before the fire started, perhaps quite a bit longer.

“Well, that was still all right, but we went and impounded the rental car Chester had been driving. They had replaced the headlight and painted over the scratch marks. We went up to the road where Mrs. Chester’s car must have gone off and made an inch-by-inch search. We found a piece of glass broken from a headlight. We feel sure it was the piece chipped out of the headlight lens on the car Chester was driving. However, the evidence there is not as robust as we’d like to have it because of the fact that the headlight lens had been replaced. But we can prove it’s from the same type of headlight used by the company from which Chester rented the car he was driving.