Dell Shannon - Extra Kill

"A- No, why?"

"Neither did I. Oh, I don't know-round out the case," said Mendoza vaguely. "Traffic tickets, they've had quite a lot to do with this i case, one way and another. If Frank Walsh hadn't given me that ticket and subsequently found I'm a tolerably reasonable individual to talk to, he'd probably have done nothing about his doubts on Bartlett. Let Slaney convince him he was just being overconscientious. And if Madame Cara hadn't got a ticket that night at-as we now know-the corner of Avalon and DuPont at seven minutes past eleven, I might easily have decided to use that warrant and charge them with the murder. And in the first instance, if Walsh and Bartlett hadn't stopped to hand out a traffic ticket right there, she wouldn't have had such a good chance to spot the squad-car number she was looking for, and take those shots at the driver-the wrong man. Funny how things work out sometimes. If she hadn't done that extra kill, nobody might ever have known a thing about it. Twelvetrees-Trask quietly moldering away there with his suitcases. Woods would have gone on looking, and finally filed it under Pending, and that would have been that… It was the extra kill-and the traffic tickets-that tripped her up in the end."

And Hackett asked, "But why? What possible motive-"

" Eso tiene gracia,” said Mendoza, "that's the funny thing. I don't know. I've got a little idea, but I don't know. Maybe she'll tell us."

And it was a curious ending to a curious case, how readily she told them, eventually.

When they brought her in the next morning and confronted her with the green plastic laundry bag and its contents, which had been locked away in Angel's old trunk, she went on talking for a while about her poor misguided child, so frantic with unrequited love.

She sat in the chair beside Mendoza's desk, which she had unobtrusively moved to put her back to the light from the window, and smiled at him, and at Hackett, at the silent policewoman and the stolid police stenographer, in perfect confidence. She was in black today, as glossily turned out as ever-and the little loose fold of skin at her throat shaking a little as she turned her head from one to the other, the little strain lines about the eyes (because she should wear glasses) showing deep, and the raised blue veins on her hands; the thick, skillful cosmetic mask could not hide the lines and hollows and shadows.

"Miss Ferne," said Mendoza finally, "it's really no use, your going on like this. Sooner or later you'll have to listen to me and believe it. We know Miss Carstairs had nothing to do with the murders. We know who did, and we have evidence on it. The salesclerk where you bought that coat on Monday remembers the incident very clearly-do you know why? Because, as Mr. Horwitz told us, you never were much of an actress and you can't do character parts. You overplayed it quite a bit, with that black hairpiece fastened to a turban, and the fake accent that puzzled everybody because it was partly French and partly German and partly just your own idea of how any foreigners talk English. You didn't fool anyone-the cab driver that night, or the man in the shop where you bought the serape, or the clerk on Monday-they all knew you were putting on a very crude act-"

"That's a lie!" she exclaimed. "I can! I'm a great actress, everyone always said so-it's only jealousy, I'd be showing these snippy young things today if-"

"We have the whole story from Miss Janet Kent, too. You make a mistake there in believing she really was devoted to you. All she was interested in was the money you gave her. Just as Brooke Twelvetrees was-wasn't he? That's why she fawns on you and flatters you-that's why she was afraid not to oblige you, when you came to her last Sunday and asked her-told her-to be ready to back up an alibi for you for the night of Friday the thirtieth. You hadn't thought you'd need one up to then, but after we'd found the body you thought you'd better have one. Miss Kent didn't like it, though I'm afraid she thought it was an illicit love affair-"

She smiled and smoothed her hair. "Of course. And that's a lie too, she is devoted to me-simply devoted. Servants always like me. You probably forced her to tell."

"It's always a mistake to count on other people in a business like this. They just haven't the incentive, you know, to go on telling lies. And when she heard that it was a murder case, she told us all about it. You made quite a few mistakes that night, and not the least of them was in overlooking all those odds and ends on the bureau. His hat, and the medicine bottles, and his watch and pocket-knife, both monogrammed, and the half bottle of Scotch and so on. It was convenient that you'd also overlooked that laundry bag on the chair. Into that it all went. But you couldn't face going down that trap again, so you took it with you.

"You thought you'd covered your tracks so cleverly, with the act you put on for the cab driver, for the salesclerk-" Mendoza laughed and shrugged. "You have a most unfortunate love of wild Gothic melodrama, Miss Ferne-no appreciation of dramatic subtleties at all! As I daresay directors have told you-many years ago." He let some contempt show in his eyes.

"A lie," she said in automatic reaction, "it's all lies."

"But things went on going wrong, we found the body, and that brought you into it-when we'd identified him-if only on the outskirts of the case. And when you talked to your dear friend Cara Kingman on Monday, she told you that the police had connected with the murder a woman wearing a light-colored coat with dark bands of trimming on the cuffs and front panels. That really frightened you, because you still had the coat-"

“Angel had it. You found it."

"I mean the real coat," said Mendoza patiently, "the one you were wearing that night."

"You don't know," she said almost slyly. "I never owned a coat like that in my life. You don't know."

"But I do," and he smiled gently at her. "I had to do a little serious thinking on it, but it came to me. It was your fur coat you were wearing that night, wasn't it? That specially made brown mink with the white satin lining. It was the one halfway clever idea you had-to turn it inside out and wear it that way when you needed a quick disguise. People could see what you'd done in good light, of course, but in the dark like that, it was quite effective. Only the fur on the inside borders still showed, to look like trimming in the dark. And the rain ruined the lining, didn't it? You were afraid to send it to the cleaners, they'd be bound to ask questions and remember. When we searched your house last night, one of my men examined it, and we've gone back just since you've been here, to impound it as evidence."

"You can't do that-"

"I'm afraid it's quite legal. As I say, you were frightened when we got that close to home, and you went on making mistakes by most unnecessarily trying to cast suspicion on your daughter. And most ineptly! The rawest new rookie in uniform could have followed the trail you left. You had a long hunt for a coat made just like that, you spent most of the day at it, in your crude disguise, and we've found several clerks who remember you and your specific request. You finally found what you wanted at a small shop called Betty Jo's, on Beverly Boulevard, at about four-thirty. You paid thirty-seven-fifty for it. You hid that damning laundry bag in your daughter's trunk that evening, put the coat in her wardrobe. Had you kept the bag in case you needed a scapegoat? I think so. You didn't have a chance to plant them in Miss Carstairs' room until she decided to go out to a movie. You knew where she kept the key to her trunk-but you'd decided to be bold about the coat, which was a very stupid mistake too… Once you'd gone to all this trouble, you were really hoping we'd come with a search warrant: I saw how pleased you were, yesterday morning, when we walked in and saw that coat lying there. But your daughter's an intelligent grown-up woman, Miss Ferne, however much you hate to acknowledge it, and you couldn't have forced her to admit owning that coat and forgetting it, or to believe she'd been in love with Brooke Twelvetrees." Suddenly he got up and stood over her. "You were the one in love with Twelvetrees-weren't you?"