Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

“I take it you were on quite friendly terms with Mrs. Turnbell, then.”

“Oh yes, we were close friends.”

I said, “When you came in by that gate, the killer must have just left by the gate into the alley. Did you hear that gate click shut, or anyone running down the alley, or anything at all?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. I went up the porch steps, and was just raising my fist to knock on the back door when I saw through the glass pane in the top of the door that Joan was lying on her back on the kitchen floor. I didn’t notice the knife in her until after I opened the door and went in. Then I almost fainted.” After a moment, she added with a touch of pride, “I didn’t scream, though, like they always do in the movies.”

I didn’t deflate her ego by telling her that women in the movies scream at the sight of bodies because it’s written in the script, and in real life they’re more apt to go into silent shock. I just said, “What did you do?”

“As soon as I could bring myself to move, I ran into the hall to phone Dr. Lischer.” Her tone became apologetic. “I think I knew she was dead the minute I saw that knife in her, so in the back of my mind I knew a doctor wasn’t going to do her any good. But I was so upset, all I could think of was getting Dr. Lischer over here.”

“You did fine,” I assured her. “A doctor had to declare her dead anyway, so it saved bringing some intern all the way from City Hospital. You have any idea who killed her?”

She looked surprised. “How would I know who the burglar was?”

“You figure it was a burglar?”

“What else? I heard one of those policemen say some drawers were dumped out.”

“Yeah, he told me. I haven’t had a chance to check that out yet. I understand Mrs. Turnbell was separated from her husband.”

Mrs. Crowder nodded, then her eyes suddenly widened. “You don’t think…”

When she let it trail off, I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea. Who is he?”

“Addison Turnbell. He works for the Marks Carburetor Company.”

“As what?”

“He’s just a worker on the assembly line.” She sniffed. “He’s always been way below Joan intellectually. She was a trained legal secretary, while he just worked with his hands. I never could understand why she was so crazy about him that she didn’t want to let him go.” After a pause she added, “I never said that to her, of course.”

“Was it an amicable separation?” I asked.

Henry Crowder said laconically. “Hardly.”

Both of looked at him. When he said nothing more, I looked back at his wife.

Emma Crowder said argumentatively, “Joan wasn’t giving him a hard time, Henry. If there was any bad feeling, it was on his side.”

Henry said, “Maybe she wasn’t giving him a hard time, but she wasn’t turning him loose either.” To me he explained, “Ad has another girl he wants to marry, but Joan wouldn’t agree to a divorce. She wanted him back.”

Mrs. Crowder rendered her opinion of this desire by emitting another sniff.

After a short pause, her husband said, “Joan’s mother wanted to see it patched up, too. Last time I saw Ad, he told me she was bugging him with phone calls nearly every night.”

“He has Mrs. Phelps as snowed as he had Joan,” Emma Crowder said with disgust. “Even after the way he’s treated her daughter, she mothers him like he was her own son.”

“Well, Ad has always liked Stella too,” Henry said. “He told me he wished she would stop bugging him to go back to Joan, but otherwise he’s as fond of her as before the breakup.

“How did Mrs. Turnbell’s father feel about the separation?” I asked.

Mrs. Crowder said. “He’s been dead for years. Mrs. Phelps lives alone somewhere out in the west end.”

Taking out my notebook, I wrote the name Stella Phelps in it, then said, “I take it you don’t know her address?”

“No, but Joan kept an address-and-phone-number book on the telephone table in the hall. It should be in there.”

I wrote down the name Addison Turnbell and asked if either knew his address.

“That should be in her book too,” Emma Crowder said. “He’s only a few blocks from here, over on Bates. He moved in with a bachelor friend named Lionel Short, who works at Marks with him.”

I went to the phone table in the central hallway and found both addresses. After writing them in my notebook, I returned to the front room just as Harry Dodge came back in from outside.

“Nothing,” he reported. “No one saw or heard anything at all.”

A moment later Carl Budd came through the central hallway from the kitchen and made a similar report about the neighbors across the alley.

I thanked the Crowders for their help and told them they could go home. As they were leaving, Art Ward from the lab showed up. I took him to the kitchen, told him what I wanted, left him there, and made a tour of the rest of the house while he was doing it.

There were four rooms on the first floor, clustered around the central hall. At the back were a kitchen and a TV room, at the front the parlor and dining room. On one side of the hallway was a bathroom, on the other side were stairways to the basement and second floor.

In the dining room the bottom drawer of the sideboard, containing nothing but linens, had been pulled out and was upended on the floor. In the TV room there was a combination bookcase-desk with a small drawer underneath the desk for stationery and writing implements. This drawer had also been pulled out and upended on the floor.

Those two dumped drawers were the only evidence of disturbance on the first floor.

I climbed to the second floor. There were two bedrooms and a second bath up there. There was no sign of disturbance.

I went down to the basement and gave it a thorough looking-over. Nothing seemed to be out of place there.

Going back upstairs, I checked the other drawers of the dining-room sideboard. One contained a set of sterling silver. Another contained a piggy bank full of dimes.

Art was finished in the kitchen by the time I completed my tour. He reported that he had taken pictures of the body from three different angles and had dusted the butcher knife for prints. There had been none. He wanted to know if it was okay to remove the knife from the body.

When I told him yes, he pulled it out, sealed it in a large manila envelope, marked it as evidence, and we both initialed it.

I said. “There’s no sign of forced entry anywhere. Want to look at the locks on the front and back doors to see if either has been scratched by a picklock?”

He went over to examine the back-door lock, then gave me a wry grin. “I thought that by now everybody had replaced these old-fashioned open-keyhole locks with modern ones. If this was a prowler job, you don’t have to look any further. You can buy a skeleton key in any dime store that will open this.”

Nevertheless I had him examine the front-door lock also, then, in afterthought and just to be thorough, the lock to the basement’s outside door. Neither showed any sign of tampering.

When I had him take photographs of the two dumped drawers, Art began to get it. “Hey,” he said, “this was a setup, wasn’t it? Not a very good one either.”

“The killer didn’t take much time,” I agreed. “But then, maybe he didn’t have much.”

When Art Ward left, I phoned for a morgue wagon and told Harry Dodge and Carl Budd to stand by until it came for the body. Then I drove over to the apartment where Addison Turnbell lived with his friend, Lionel Short.

The apartment building was on Bates, about four short blocks from Joan Turnbell’s house on Dewey.

Turnbell’s apartment was on the ground floor. When I rang the bell, a thin, rather handsome but jaded-looking man of around thirty answered the door. He was in shirt sleeves and had a folded newspaper in his hand.