Эллери Куин - Blow Hot, Blow Cold

Nancy’s feeling of uneasiness began to assume the shape of alarm. Call it unreasonable, call it absurd, call it anything, it had grown too disturbing to be tolerated. She would either have to put it out of her mind, which was impossible, or do something about it.

The first thing Nancy did was to run across the street to the Richmonds’ attached garage. The overhead door was closed, but there were three tiny windows that Nancy could just look through by standing on tiptoe. She stretched and looked, and there in the garage stood the Volkswagen. If Vera had gone somewhere, she had either walked or been driven there by Jack. But Vera hated walking, and Jack usually left for the hospital or his office long before Vera got out of bed...

Nancy went around to the back door. She hesitated only a moment. Then she turned the knob and, timidly, pushed. To her surprise the door swung inward. Unlocked, with Vera away?

Nancy stepped into Vera Richmond’s kitchen. The conditioned air was cool and delightfully dry, and it made her feel light and liberated. At the same time she was oppressed by a dragging dread that made every step an act of will.

She held her breath and, cocking her head, paused to listen. But there was nothing to hear. It sounded exactly like an empty house, soundless.

Nevertheless, Nancy called, “Ver-aaa?” and waited. “Vera! You home?”

There was no answer. Nancy forced herself to go into the entrance hall.

“ Vera ?”

No answer.

I wonder, Nancy thought, what I would say if the front door opened this minute and Vera walked in. How do you explain being caught in your neighbor’s house? She laughed with vexation. The hell with that. There was something wrong, and she knew it. Nancy went determinedly into the Richmonds’ sunken living room.

It was a beautiful room, which Nancy had secretly envied for a long time. But she felt no envy now. Her attention fixed on the massive bleached mahogany door at the other end. For some reason. For some reason.

Behind that door was Jack Richmond’s study.

Behind that door lay something dreadful. Nancy knew it. She did not know how she knew it, but she knew it.

Like a sleepwalker she moved across the living room and opened the heavy door and looked into Jack Richmond’s study and there was Vera Richmond as Nancy had known in her heart she would be. Vera Richmond was in a big high-backed leather chair facing the door, almost as if she were expecting someone to come in and was sitting there quietly, waiting. But she was dead.

She was dead, and Nancy was so sure she was dead that she did not advance one quarter-step into the study. She just stood there and looked at her friend with an odd sense of detachment, all urgency ended.

Vera had brushed her hair and touched up her lips and cheeks and got into a crisp bright summer frock in preparation for her death. She looked quite pretty, Nancy thought. And utterly serene. The drapes were drawn back from the picture window behind her, and the sunshine through the Venetian slats fashioned a stairway of light across the glowing parquet floor... a stairway from life to death. It was really a lovely room to die in.

Vera was dead.

Vera dead? It was unthinkable. Vera had always been there, quiet, smiling, efficient, self-effacing; “my third arm,” as Jack used to say. Vera was the kind of person who just went on forever.

But here she was, suddenly, impossibly, inexplicably dead in her husband’s chair. And the question, after all, was why. Surely she hadn’t brushed her hair and got into a freshly ironed dress and made her face up just to sit down and die on a beautiful summer morning. Surely she hadn’t! But she had. She had died for a reason of her own, in her own way and time.

Turning violently, Nancy saw the desk of rubbed mahogany, its matching chair pushed back as if someone had just risen from it and walked away. And someone had. Vera. For on the desk, under a blue glass weight, lay two sheets of white paper filled with Vera’s bold script. She had sat down there to write something before dying, perhaps while waiting to die; and there it was, under the weight...

With some surprise Nancy found herself at the desk. She was not aware of having crossed the study; suddenly she was there. And pushing the glass weight aside with the tips of her fingernails, and stooping over the desk without touching the papers, and reading what Vera had written.

Jack darling:

Ever since the other night on our terrace, I have known with the most terrible certainty that Lieutenant Masters would come back. This morning he came. He rang the front door bell, and then he went around to the back. But I did not answer and after a while he went away. So I know what I must do. Forgive me, darling, as I forgave you.

I know it is only a matter of time, and I am tired of waiting. What I should have realized from the beginning was that you would be blamed and that in the end, found out or not, I would have to save you. You knew all along, of course, what I had done. But you never accused me, you never condemned me, and I’m so grateful for that. You will not forget, I hope, that I tried indirectly to assure you that I would never let you suffer for my mistake.

It was a mistake. I realized that as soon as it was made, but by then it was too late. Masters is shrewd. He had everything almost right except the all-important fact that it was I, not you, who was guilty. Larry phoned that night from his office. He wanted you. He had taken the overdose, as I’ll be doing soon, but he had become frightened, changed his mind, and wanted help. You were out on that emergency, I knew every second counted, I’d been a nurse, so I went to him myself.

I’m sorry about Larry. I sincerely meant to help him if I could. But when I reached his office, getting in through the back door that somehow he’d managed to unlock for me, I found him deep in coma on the sofa. That was when, in one blinding flash of revelation, I saw how I could rid you and me of Lila once for all without — I thought — being involved. With Larry having swallowed poison, he would be blamed for killing her... Anyway, I stood there in that office and watched and waited as Larry died. I don’t know if I could have saved him in any event; he was very far gone when I got there. But maybe that’s just rationalizing. The point is, I let him die without trying to save his life. By doing nothing I murdered him as surely, I suppose — I suppose — as if I had forced him to swallow the drug in the first place.

Lila I killed with my own hand. When I got back home there was still a light in her bedroom, and I had to wait for her to go to sleep. It was very risky, because I didn’t know exactly when you might return from the hospital; and the truth is, I had no more than finished and got into bed when you got home. I’m not sorry about having killed Lila, I’m only sorry that everything has come out badly for you and me. Lila’s greatest mistake was not understanding what I was. She was beginning to threaten me in a dozen different ways, to taunt me. Did she honestly think that I would take it? After all she’d done to me through you?

There would be no point in repeating the details of how I killed her, the air-conditioning business, and all the rest of it. Masters has already worked it out, and he has been wrong in nothing except, as I said, the identity of the one responsible. And I’m pretty sure, after his visit this morning, that he is no longer wrong in even that.

Jack darling, you said that you were neither a coward nor a fool, but I have been both...

That was not the end of the letter, but Nancy stopped reading. She turned away with a whimper that froze in her throat.

Jack Richmond was standing in the doorway. He was not looking at Nancy; he seemed hardly aware that she was there. He was looking at his wife in the chair with the lusterless eyes of an old man. His face was gray, and his voice, when he finally spoke, was without inflection or, indeed, any human character.