Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

“Since there simply was no such address, he went home.”

I paused to take a long drink of my tepid coffee.

“She was already dead?” Arthur asked astutely.

“Right, that’s the point. If Wallace killed her, he had to have done it before he left on this wild goose chase. If so, what I’m about to tell you was all acting.

“He gets home and tries to open his front door, he later says. His key won’t work. He thinks Julia has bolted the front door and for some reason can’t hear him knock. Whatever was the case, a couple who live next door leave their house and see Wallace at his back door, apparently in distress. He tells them about the front door being bolted. Either his distress is genuine, or he’s been hanging around in the back alley waiting for someone else to witness his entrance.”

Arthur’s blond head shook slowly from side to side as he contemplated the twists and turns of this classic. I imagined the Liverpool police force in 1931 sitting and shaking their heads in exactly the same way. Or perhaps not; they’d been convinced early on that they had their man.

“Was Wallace friendly with those neighbors?” he asked.

“Not particularly. Good, but impersonal, relationship.”

“So he could count on their being accepted as impartial witnesses,” Arthur observed.

“If he did it. Incidentally, the upshot of all this about the front door lock, which Wallace said resisted his key, turned out to be a major point in the trial, but the testimony was pretty murky. Also iffy was the evidence of a child who knocked on the door with the day’s milk, or a newspaper or something. Mrs. Wallace answered the door, alive and well; and if it could have been proved Wallace had already left, he would have been cleared. But it couldn’t be.” I took a deep breath. Here came the crucial scene. “Be that as it may. Wallace and the couple do enter the house, do see a few things out of place in the kitchen and another room, I think, but no major ransacking. The box where Wallace kept the insurance money had been rifled. Of course, this was a Tuesday, when there should’ve been a lot of money.

“The neighbors by this time are scared. Then Wallace calls them into the front room, a parlor, rarely used.

“Julia Wallace is there, lying in front of the gas fire, with a raincoat under her. The raincoat, partially burned, is not hers. She’s been beaten to death, with extreme brutality, unnecessary force. She has not been raped.” I stopped suddenly. “I assume Mamie wasn’t?” I said finally, frightened of the answer.

“Doesn’t look like it right now,” Arthur said absently, still taking notes.

I blew my breath out. “Well, Wallace theorizes that ‘Qualtrough,’ who of course must be the murderer if Wallace is innocent, called at the house after Wallace left. He was evidently someone Julia didn’t know well, or at all, because she showed him into the company parlor.” Just like I would an insurance salesman, I thought. “The raincoat, an old one of Wallace’s, she perhaps threw over her shoulders because the disused room was cold until the gas fire, which she apparently lit, had had a chance to heat it. The money that had been taken hadn’t actually been much, since Wallace had been ill that week and hadn’t been able to collect everything he was supposed to. But no one else would have known that, presumably.

“Julia certainly hadn’t been having an affair, and had never personally offended anyone that the police could discover.

“And that’s the Wallace case.”

Arthur sat lost in thought, his blue eyes fixed intently on some internal point. “Wobbly, either way,” he said finally.

“Right,” I agreed. “There’s no real case against Wallace, except that he was her husband, the only person who seemed to know her well enough to kill her. Everything he said could’ve been true… in which case, he was tried for killing the one person in the world he loved, while all the time the real killer went free.”

“So Wallace was arrested?”

“And convicted. But after he spent some time in prison, he was released by a unique ruling in British law. I think a higher court simply ruled that there hadn’t been enough evidence for a jury to convict Wallace, no matter what the jury said. But prison and the whole experience had broken Wallace, and he died two or three years later, still saying he was innocent. He said he suspected who Qualtrough was, but he had no proof.”

“I’d have gone for Wallace, too, on the basis of that evidence,” Arthur said unhesitatingly. “The probability is with Wallace, as you said, because it’s usually the husband who wants his wife out of the way… yet since there’s no clear-cut evidence either way, I’m almost surprised the state chose to prosecute.”

“Probably,” I said without thinking, “the police were under a lot of pressure to make an arrest.”

Arthur looked so tired and gloomy that I tried to change the subject. “Wh/d you join Real Murders?” I asked. “Isn’t that a little strange for a policeman?”

“Not this policeman,” he said a little sharply. I shrank in my chair.

“Listen, Roe, I wanted to go to law school, but there wasn’t enough money.” Arthur’s family was pretty humble, I recalled. I thought I’d gone to high school with one of his sisters. Arthur must be three or four years older than I. “I made it through two years of college before I realized I couldn’t make it financially, because I just couldn’t work and carry a full course load. School bored me then, too. So I decided to go into law from another angle. Policemen aren’t all alike, you know.”

I could tell he’d given this lecture before.

“Some cops are right out of Joseph Wambaugh’s books, because he was a cop and he writes pretty good books. Loud, drinkers, macho, mostly uneducated, sometimes brutal. There are a few nuts, like there are in any line of work, and there are a few Birchers. There aren’t many Liberals with a capital ‘L’, and not too many college graduates. But within those rough lines, we’ve got all kinds of people. Some of my friends-some cops-watch every cop show on television they can catch, so they’ll know how to act. Some of them- not many-read Dostoevsky.” He smiled, and it looked almost strange on him. “I just like to study old crimes, figure out how the police thought on the case, pick apart their procedure-ever read about the June Anne Devaney case, Blackburn, England, oh, about late 1930’s?”

“A child murder, right?”

“Right. You know the police persuaded every adult male in Blackburn to have his fingerprints taken?” Arthur’s face practically shone with enthusiasm. “That’s how they caught Peter Griffiths. By comparing thousands of fingerprints with the ones Griffiths left on the scene.” He was lost in admiration for a moment. “That’s why I joined Real Murders,” he said. “But what could a woman like Mamie Wright get out of studying the Wallace case?”

“Oh, a chaperoned husband!” I said with a grin, and then felt a sharp pang of dismay as Arthur re-opened his little notebook.

Almost gently, Arthur said, “Now, this murder is real. It’s a new murder.”

“I know,” I said, and I saw Mamie again.

“Did they quarrel much, Gerald and Mamie?”

“Never, that I saw or heard,” I said firmly and truthfully. I’d always believed Wallace was innocent. “She just seemed to be keeping an eye on him around other women.”

“Do you think her suspicions were correct?”

“It never occurred to me they could be. Gerald is just so stuffy and… Arthur? Could Gerald have done this?” I didn’t mean emotionally, I meant practically, and Arthur realized it.

“Do you know why Gerald says he was late to the meeting, why Mamie came on her own instead of riding with him? He got a call from a man he didn’t know, asking Gerald to talk with him about some insurance for his daughter.”