Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

“Mr. Turnbell?” I asked.

He shook his head. “His apartment-mate.” Over his shoulder he called, “It’s for you, Ad!” Returning to the easy chair from which my ring had roused him, he disappeared behind his newspaper.

A muscular, blond, good-looking man of about the same age came from another room and over to the door. He also was in shirt sleeves, had an apron around his waist, and carried a dish towel.

“My night to do the dishes,” he said in wry apology. “What can I do for you?”

I showed him the badge clipped inside my wallet. “Sergeant Sod Harris of Homicide,” I said. “Mind if I come in?”

His eyes widened and he stepped aside. I put away my wallet, moved past him and waited for him to close the door. The thin, jaded-looking man folded his newspaper, set it aside and stared at me from eyes as widespread as Turnbell’s.

When I was first assigned to Homicide. I used to try to dream up ways to break the news of murder gently to the next of kin. Quite often, I soon learned, it wasn’t news, and even when it was, gentleness didn’t seem to soften the blow. Now, whenever I have the least suspicion that I’m not bringing any news, I just make the bald announcement and watch for reaction.

I said, “Mr. Turnbell, your wife was murdered at five-thirty this afternoon.”

Both men’s eyes became even wider. Turnbell asked on a high note, “Where?”

“In her home.”

“How?”

“With a butcher knife. We think from that set hanging over the stove.”

He licked his lips. “It happened in the kitchen, then, huh?”

I nodded.

“Have you caught the prowler?”

I examined him curiously. “Now, why do you assume it was a prowler?”

His eyes shifted away from me and he licked his lips again. In an oddly defensive tone he said, “Didn’t you say it happened at five-thirty?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, she always arrives home exactly at five-thirty. I used to set my watch by her. You also said it happened in the kitchen. I guess I just assumed she surprised a prowler when she walked in the back door.”

He looked so guilty, I very nearly gave him the customary warning and arrested him on the spot. I held off only because I could hardly believe it was going to be that easy.

It wasn’t, I discovered, when I asked him to account for his time. He could account for every second of it from the time he left work at four-thirty until right now. There was a space during the actual time of the murder when I momentarily thought I might break his alibi, but eventually that checked out too.

It developed that he and his apartment-mate had left work together at four-thirty, had ridden home together on the South Grand bus, and had gotten there at ten after five. Neither had actually checked the time when they walked into the apartment, but both insisted it had to be within a minute or so of five-ten because they made the same bus trip every day and always arrived home at the same time.

Lionel Short said, “I usually look at my watch when we get home, just out of curiosity to see how close to five-ten it is. And we’ve never been more than two minutes off. I didn’t look today because the phone was ringing when we walked in, and I ran to answer it.” He emitted a cackling little laugh. “It was Ad’s girlfriend again.”

I looked at Turnbell. “The girl you planned to marry if you could get your wife to agree to a divorce?”

He looked startled. His apartment-mate emitted another cackling laugh, then explained it by saying, “I was being satiric, Sergeant. It was his mother-in-law. Ad spends half his life talking to her on the phone.”

“Oh,” I said.

Addison Turnbell said wryly, “Tonight we talked for forty minutes.” Then a thought occurred to him. “Hey, I must have been talking to her at the very moment Joan was killed.”

“You were,” Short affirmed. “I did note the time when I returned from the supermarket, and you were still on the phone. It was exactly a quarter to six”

I perked up my ears. That was when I got the momentary hope that I might be able to break Turnbell’s alibi. I said, “You weren’t here at five-thirty, Mr. Short?”

“No. I went out to buy something for dinner. There’s a supermarket just a block away at Grand and Bates. I was gone from about a quarter after five until a quarter of six.”

I contemplated him in silence for some moments before asking, “You sure Mr. Turnbell was still actually talking to his mother-in-law?”

“Of course.” Then he caught the significance of the question and let out another of his cackling little laughs. “You mean maybe Ad tried to con me by talking into a dead phone? You don’t know Mrs. Phelps. Her voice on the telephone carries clear across the room. I could hear her still talking plainly enough even to tell you what she said. She was telling Ad that Joan realized she had been wrong to downgrade him for not having a better job, and had promised to look up to him and make him feel like the man of the house if he would come back. Then, a little later, I heard her say something about having a casserole in the oven, so she had to hang up.”

My hope almost flickered out, but not quite. There was still the possibility that Mrs. Phelps had phoned twice—or that Turnbell had called her back after the first conversation—and that there had been sufficient time between the two calls for Turnbell to make the round trip to the house on Dewey and back. However, that would have to wait until I talked to Mrs. Phelps.

Taking out my notebook, I said to Addison Turnbell, “I’ll need the name of your girlfriend. The real one, I mean.”

He stared at me in frowning silence.

“The girl you plan to marry,” I prompted.

“I know who you mean. What’s she got to do with this?”

I shrugged. “Quite possibly nothing. On the other hand, maybe she got tired of waiting for you to talk your wife into a divorce, and decided to make you an eligible widower. I’ll get to her eventually, whether you give me her name or not. It will be simpler if you cooperate.”

After glumly thinking this over, his face suddenly brightened and he said with an air of triumph, “She couldn’t have killed Joan. She works from four until midnight. She’s working right now.”

“Oh? Where?”

“At Martin’s Steakhouse on Kings Highway. She’s the hostess.”

“I know the place,” I said. “Her name?”

“Sylvia Baumgartner.”

After writing down the name, I put away my notebook and said, “I guess that’s all for now. You’ll stay available, Mr. Turnbell?”

“I wasn’t planning any out-of-town trips,” he said sourly.

“If I want to contact you tomorrow, will you be at work?”

He shook his head. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ll be here.”

“Fine.” I pulled open the door, then paused and turned. “One last thing. You don’t seem overly grieved at becoming a widower.”

“I was trying to divorce the woman, Sergeant,” he said sardonically. “I wasn’t wishing her dead, but frankly I was fed up to the eyebrows with her. If you want me to pretend, I suppose I could squeeze out a few crocodile tears.”

“Don’t bother on my account,” I said. I went out and pulled the door closed behind me.

Sylvia Baumgartner turned out to be a sleek, brittle redhead in her mid-twenties. She also turned out to have been in full view of the restaurant manager, a dozen waitresses, and a varying number of customers from four p.m., when she started work, until I got there at eight.

Mrs. Stella Phelps lived in an apartment in the 4300 block of Maryland. I got there about eight-thirty.

The victim’s mother was a plump blonde in her mid-fifties with a pleasant but rather moonlike face. She came to the door red-eyed from crying, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. It developed that Addison Turnbell had phoned her to break the news of her daughter’s death while I was en route.