Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

She invited me in, had me sit in an easy chair, and sank onto the sofa across from me. After giving her eyes another dab with her handkerchief, she squared her plump shoulders and smiled bravely.

“I’m not cried out yet, Sergeant,” she said. “But I know you have a job to do, so I’ll postpone my grief until a more appropriate time. Joan was my only child, you know, and since my husband died ten years ago, she’s all I had left. Ad has always been as close to me as a son, but of course he’s no blood relation, and he and Joan were separated, so he may not think of me as his mother-in-law anymore. I’m sure they were going to get back together eventually, but now it’s too late.”

She touched the handkerchief to her eyes again. I took advantage of the momentary pause in the flow of words to insert, “Your son-in-law says he was talking to you on the phone at the time your daughter was killed.”

“Yes. When he phoned me he said you would probably ask about that.” She cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me. “Surely you don’t suspect him of killing Joan, do you?”

“The spouse is always a routine suspect in a homicide, Mrs. Phelps. I haven’t accused Mr. Turnbell of anything. I’ll be quite happy to clear him as a suspect if you can confirm his alibi. Do you recall just what time you phoned him and how long you talked?”

“I can tell you to the minute, Sergeant, because I had a casserole in the oven that had to come out at ten of six. I turned on the oven at five-ten, then immediately dialed Ad. That fellow he’s staying with answered—Lionel something. I never liked the man. I think he’s been a bad influence on Ad. There is always potential for trouble in a marriage when the husband continues his friendship with a chronic bachelor. The fellow has never been married, you know, which seems to me unnatural for a man past thirty. While Ad and Joan were still together, he was always coming around and luring Ad to go off and do bachelor things with him, such as bowling, shooting pool and playing poker. I think he’s the one who introduced Ad to that little tramp who caused the final breakup between Ad and my daughter.”

I began to understand how the telephone conversation had lasted so long. When she paused for breath, I quickly slipped in, “When did your phone conversation end?”

She looked surprised. “I thought I already told you. At ten of six. I kept checking my wristwatch because of the casserole, and when it was ten to six, I told Ad I had to hang up. It was just when I was beginning to make some progress, too. He had admitted he was still fond of Joan, and if things were different—if she stopped nagging him about going out with his friend Lionel, for instance—maybe the marriage could still work. I was really beginning to feel quite encouraged that they would patch things up. But maybe at that very moment the poor girl was being killed by the fiend who murdered her.”

That was interesting. Addison Turnbell had said to me, “I was trying to divorce the woman, Sergeant. I wasn’t wishing her dead, but frankly I was fed up to the eyebrows with her.” Yet a couple of hours earlier he had hinted to his mother-in-law that reconciliation was still possible. Of course, that possibly could have been simply to shut her up.

After a brief pause Mrs. Phelps opened her mouth to say something else, but I beat her to it by asking quickly, “What time does your wristwatch show right now?”

Looking at it, she said, “Eight-forty-two. It keeps very good time. I haven’t set it for weeks, yet it’s always right with the time they announce on television.”

She reminded me of the guy who, when you asked him the time, told you how to build a watch.

My watch, which also keeps very good time, showed eight-forty-two as well. I got to my feet. “I guess that pretty well clears your son-in-law, Mrs. Phelps. Can you think of any enemies your daughter may have had who would resort to this?”

“Joan?” she said, obviously shocked by the idea. “Why, everyone absolutely loved her. I’m sure it was just a prowler.”

“Perhaps,” I conceded, and made my escape before she could get started on another monologue.

I drove back to headquarters, set up a file folder on the case and typed the chronological record of events so far, beginning with the phone call from the Carondelet Precinct. When I read it over, the suspicion I’d had all along crystallized into certainty: Joan Turnbell had not been murdered by a prowler surprised in the midst of burglarizing the house, but had been deliberately murdered. That much was perfectly clear. Nothing else about the case was, though.

When I got home shortly after midnight, Maggie was asleep. When I awakened in the morning, her side of the bed was empty. The bedside clock told me it was eight a.m.

Ordinarily I sleep until at least nine when pulling the night trick, but today I felt the need for Maggie’s counsel. Getting up, I yelled for her to put the coffee on, and went into the bathroom to shower and shave.

When I entered the kitchen, dressed, twenty minutes later, she was pouring my coffee. She gave me my usual good-morning kiss, still with considerable gusto even after twenty-five years of marriage, and asked what I wanted for breakfast.

“Just toast and conversation,” I said.

She dropped bread into the toaster, put butter and jam in front of me, then sat across the table from me and cocked an inquiring eyebrow. “Problems?” she asked.

“Just one. I’ve got a murder that was supposed to look like a prowler job, but wasn’t. The guy with the only motive I can unearth has an ironclad alibi.”

“Tell me about it, and maybe we can break it,” she suggested.

She wasn’t being egotistical. Over the years her hard common sense has unraveled a number of snarls that had me baffled.

The toast popped up and I waited until she brought it to me before beginning. Then I described in detail everything that had happened the night before.

“It couldn’t have been a prowler surprised in the act,” I concluded. “And not just because those two dumped drawers were so obviously staged. There was no way he could have avoided hearing her arrive home in plenty of time to scoot out the front door before she came in the back. If that noisy garage door hadn’t alerted him, he still couldn’t have missed hearing her steel heel cleats clicking along that fifty-foot stretch of concrete walk from the garage to the back porch. If the next-door neighbor heard both sounds, why couldn’t the killer?”

“He could have been deaf,” Maggie suggested.

I made an impatient gesture. “Who ever heard of a deaf burglar? It would be too much of an occupational hazard.”

She grinned at me. “Okay, so he had to hear her coming. Which means he deliberately waited there in the kitchen, intending to kill her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what’s your problem?”

I paused in the act of spreading jam on toast to stare at her. “My problem is that the only guy with a motive to kill her was four blocks away when she died, talking to her mother on the phone.”

“While his apartment-mate was out shopping. Or says he was shopping.”

I continued to stare at her.

“His friend did it for him,” Maggie said. “While he deliberately kept his mother-in-law on the phone in order to give himself an alibi.”

Setting down my toast, I folded my hands in my lap and peered at her until she blushed.

“You don’t like it?” she asked.

“Oh, I think it’s a remarkable theory,” I said with irony. “I’m curious about one small point, though. How did Turnbell induce his friend to commit murder for him?”

“I can’t do all your work for you,” she informed me. “Maybe he paid him.”

“Out of his salary putting together carburetors on an assembly line?”