Leave Her to Hell (15 page)

“She advertised. She called herself Faith Salem. She got along all right, and finally she started teaching at a private conservatory. The point is, she wasn’t acting or consciously hiding.
She really thought she was someone named Faith Salem.
I’m pretty ignorant about such things, but I did some reading and fished a little information out of a medico who had a debt in my game rooms, and I finally I got an understanding of it. She was in a kind of condition that’s called a fugue. Same name as a kind of musical composition. Unless something happened to shock her out of it, she might go on in this condition for years. Maybe the rest of her life. I figured it was safer for her to leave her as she was. As long as she was in the fugue state, she’d act perfectly normal in the identity she’d assumed and would never give herself away.

“There were obvious dangers, of course. The thing I worried most about was that she’d come out of the fugue. She wouldn’t remember anything since the murder, because the fugue period is entirely forgotten after recovery. But the murder was before the fugue, and she’d remember it as the last thing that happened to her, and if I wasn’t around to help her then, she’d be done for. God knows what she’d do. So I’ve been keeping watch over her the best I can, and everything’s been all right, except now you’ve come along and made like a God-damn detective, and I’ve got to kill you. And now’s the time for it.”

That was Darcy’s cue. He got out of the front seat and opened the door to the back seat on my side, and I was supposed to get out quietly into the road to save the cushions, but I didn
^’
t want to do it. What I wanted to do was live, and in the growing sense of revelation and gathering ends, I thought I could see a faint chance.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said, “and if you go ahead and finish making it, it won’t be your first, but it may very well be your last and worst.”

Darcy stood erect by the open door and waited patiently and politely. Silas Lawler made an abrupt gesture with his gun and then became utterly still and silent for the longest several seconds there have ever been. Finally he sighed, and the tension went out of him.

“All right,” he said. “Another minute or two. What mistake?”

“Assuming that Constance Markley killed Regis Lawler,” I laid.

“She was in the room with him. He was dead.”

“Conceded. But you said you checked her purse and saw seven hundred dollars. Did you see a gun?”

“No. No gun.”

“Was it in the room? Anywhere in the apartment?”

“I never found it.”

“You think maybe she shot him with her finger?”

“I’ve wondered about that. You explain it.”

“I already have. She didn’t shoot him.”

“You’re just guessing.”

“Maybe so. But I’ve got better reasons for my guess than you’ve got for yours. You think she went off the deep end and killed him because he was getting tired of her. Is that it?”

“She’d had troubles. Things had piled up. Regis was more than a lover. He was a kind of salvation.”

“I’ll tell you something I’ve learned. The night Regis died, Constance Markley’s maid helped her dress. According to this maid, she was eager. She wasn’t angry or depressed or particularly disturbed in any way. She was only eager to see her lover. Does that sound like a woman betrayed and ready to kill? It sounds to me more like a woman who was still ignorant of whatever defections her lover was committing.”

“Say she was ignorant. She learned after she got there.”

“Sure. And shot him with her finger.”

Again, for the time it took to draw and release a long breath. Silas Lawler was silent. At the open door, Darcy shifted his weight with a grating of gravel.

“You got anything else to say?” Lawler said.

“Only what you’re already thinking,” I said. “Constance Markley didn’t kill Regis. Neither did you.
But someone did.
Pretend for a minute that it
was
you. You murdered a man, and the night of the murder the man’s mistress vanishes. No one knows where she went. No one knows why. In your mind these two things, the murder and the disappearance, are inevitably associated. It’s too big a coincidence. There must be a connection. But what is it? Does she know something that may be placing you in jeopardy every second of your life? Or every second of hers? You must learn this at any cost, and you must learn it before anyone else. You may pretend indifference, but in your mind are the constant uncertainty, the constant fear. They’re there for two long years. Then a garden variety private detective stumbles onto something. Maybe. He makes a trip to a town named Amity where the vanished mistress once lived with the same woman who has hired the detective to find her. Several people, in one way or another, learn of this trip. Including you, the murderer. What do these people do? They stay at home and mind their own business. Except you, the murderer. You don’t stay at home and mind your own business because your business is in Amity. I keep thinking about the Caddy that crawled past the house while I was on the porch. I
wonder whose it was?”

That was all I had. It wasn’t much, but it was all, and I had a strong conviction that it was true. Silas Lawler was still, and so was Darcy. In the stillness, like a living and measurable organism, was a growing sense of compelling urgency. I could hear it at last in Lawler’s voice when he spoke again.

“Darcy,” he said, “let’s go back.”

Darcy got under the wheel, and we turned and went. We went as fast as the Caddy’s horses could run on the road and highway and streets they had to follow. On Canterbury Street, in front of the small frame house in which Constance Markley lived, Silas Lawler and I got out on the parking and looked up across the lawn to the house, and the light was still on the blind behind the window, and everything was quiet. Then, after a terrible interval in which urgency was slowly becoming farce, there was a shadow on the blind that was not a woman’s, a scream in the house that was.

The scream was not loud, not long, and there was no shadow and no sound by the time Lawler and I reached the porch. I was faster than he, running on longer legs, and he was a step behind me when I threw open the door to see Constance Markley hanging by the neck from the hands of her husband.

Interrupted in murder, he turned his face toward us in the precise instant that Lawler fired, and in another instant he was dead.

Constance Markley began to scream again.

She screamed and screamed and screamed.

I had a notion that the screams were two years old.

It took a week to get things cleared up. I stayed in Amity that week, and then I went home, and the first thing I did after getting there was to go see Lieutenant Haskett.

“Hello, Percy,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“It’s all right. I hear you’ve been pretty busy. Sit down and explain the connection between that mess at Amity and the mess you called me into up at Colly Alder’s.”

“What makes you think there’s a connection?”

“Isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what makes me think so.”

I sat down and fished for a smoke, and he patiently rubbed his bald head with the knuckles of one hand while I found the smoke and a light and got them together.

“Graham Markley killed Colly and Rosie,” I said. “It was the result of a situation that developed from his killing of Regis Lawler two years before.”

“You can skip the Lawler killing. I’m briefed on it.”

“Okay. The point is, Colly knew Markley had killed Lawler, and he lived comfortably off the knowledge for a couple of years. He was discreet in his demands, and Markley apparently preferred to tolerate a nuisance rather than risk another murder at that time. Besides, Colly was incriminated himself, and probably Markley thought he might be useful in certain ways. Then I got on the trail of Constance Markley, and Graham Markley put Colly on mine, and Colly got his wind up. Like Markley himself, he was afraid that Constance knew all about the murder of Lawler, and Colly had made himself, besides a blackmailer, a kind of accessory. He could see the possibility of a long prison term ahead of him if Constance was found and the truth came out. So he decided to go for a big bundle and get out, and that was his mistake. Markley could be pushed only gently, and only so far. He went to his meeting with Colly, and he killed Colly and killed Rosie, and I think it happened just about the way I told you that night.”

“A very savory character. Lovable. How did Colly learn about the murder of Lawler?”

“He’d been gathering evidence for Markley concerning Constance and Lawler. Apparently Markley planned to use the evidence to beat an alimony rap if it became necessary. Alimony and blackmail seem to have been the big problems in Markley’s life. Besides murder, I mean. Anyhow, the night Markley went to Regis Lawler’s apartment and killed him, Colly was outside and saw him arrive and saw him leave later. Colly was supposed to be tailing Constance, I think, and I don’t know certainly how he happened to be waiting outside Lawler’s place. Maybe he’d lost Constance and intended to pick her up there if and when she came that night. Maybe he knew she’d show up eventually and just came on ahead to short-circuit the job of following her. However it happened, he was there and saw Markley, and you can imagine the jolt it gave him. Right away, being Colly, he began to sniff something. As soon as Markley left, Colly went up to Lawler’s apartment. He found Lawler dead, just as Constance was to find him later, and that was the beginning of Colly’s affluence. The beginning of his own death too.”

I took a breath, and Haskett knuckled his skull and squinted at me dourly.

“You got any evidence to support this?”

“No. But it fits. It’s neat.”

“It is. Convenient too. It’s always a help if you can hang several murders on one guy. Sort of tidies things up in a hurry. Well, it won’t hurt Markley to take the rap. You can only execute a man once at the most, and you can’t even do that if he happens to be dead.”

There wasn’t a lot to say after that was said, and after a while, being very tired, I went home and went to bed, although it was still daylight, and I slept with only a few bad dreams until the next day, when I went up to the apartment of Faith Salem. I made a point of going when the sun was on the terrace. Maria let me in, and I crossed the acres of pile and tile and went out where Faith was. She was lying on her back on the bright soft pad with one forearm across her eyes to shade them from the light. She didn’t move the arm when I came out.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Hand,” she said.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Excuse me for not getting up. Will you please sit down?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Thanks.”

I sat down in a wicker chair. It was very warm on the terrace in the sun, but the warmth was pleasant, and after a few minutes I began to feel it in my bones. Faith Salem’s lean brown body remained motionless, except for the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breasts in breathing, and I suspected that her eyes were closed under her arm.

“So it was Graham after all,” she said.

“That’s what you suspected, wasn’t it?”

“In a way. I had a feeling, but it was a feeling that he had done something to Constance. I can’t understand why he killed this man.”

“Not because of the affair. He didn’t care about that.”

“Why, then?”

“As I told someone yesterday, there seemed to be two big problems in Graham Markley’s life. Alimony and blackmail. They both happened to him more than once. As for the blackmail, Regis Lawler was the first to try it. It went back to something that happened about three years ago. Graham Markley and Constance were driving back from the country. They’d been on a party, and Graham was drunk. He hit a woman on the highway and killed her and kept right on driving. It was a nasty business. Constance isn’t a strong person, nor even a very pleasant person, and she agreed with Graham that it was better to keep quiet about the incident. It’s easy for some people to rationalize that kind of position. Then, in due time, after the death of her child, she met Regis Lawler, and she wanted to do with Regis just what everyone actually assumed she had done. She wanted to run away from everything — her marriage, her guilt, everything associated with her child’s death, all the unhappiness that people like her seem doomed to accumulate.

“Apparently Regis let her believe that he might be willing to go along with this, but he had no money. Silas Lawler told me that Regis stole seventy-five grand from a wall safe at the restaurant, but it wasn’t so. It was only a rather clumsy lie Silas used to make their running away plausible. What really happened was that Constance told Regis about the woman’s death on the highway, and Regis tried the blackmail, although he actually had no intention, it seems, of going anywhere at all with Constance. The blackmail didn’t work. Whatever passes for pride in an egoist like Markley would never let him hand over a small fortune to his wife’s lover, although he could and did submit to blackmail for a while under other circumstances. He went to Lawler’s apartment and killed him.

“When Constance went there later the same night and found his body, she knew immediately what had surely happened. Her own burden of guilt was too heavy to bear in addition to everything else, and so she escaped it by becoming another person to whom none of this had ever happened. It was something that could only have happened under certain conditions to a certain kind of person. She became you, the one person she had ever known that she completely admired and envied, and she went back to the place where she had, for a time, been happier than she had ever been before or since. She became you, and she went back to Amity.

“With a break or two and a couple of hunches, I got the idea that she might be there, and I went there to see if I could find her, and Graham Markley learned from you where I was going. He was terribly afraid of what Constance might know and tell if she was found, and it was imperative, as he saw it, to get rid of her for good and all. And so he followed me and found her and tried to kill her, but it didn’t turn out that way.”