Tales for a Stormy Night (18 page)

“Does Kelley want my corroboration, too?” he asked.

“I don’t suppose it’s necessary,” Martha said. She took a meat loaf from the oven to baste, but suddenly looked up from it. “Or
did
you hear something, Allan?”

“How could I when I was asleep?” he said, avoiding her eyes.

“So was Anna Rossi—at least, that’s her story. She’s supposed to have taken a sleeping pill, turned on some music, and gone to sleep by it. She didn’t miss her husband until nine o’clock this morning.”

Allan, walking past the Rossi house, had heard the music, and he had speculated all day, until he had heard of Rossi’s murder, whether or not Tom Sommers might have been coming from there when they met at the crossroad. He had felt on their meeting that Sommers was not his usual dour self, that something had just given him one hell of a lift. And Allan had enjoyed this speculation. For one thing, he liked Anna Rossi. She was a big, affable woman who wore her sexual attractiveness like a cloak to warm a cold world. The vulgar talk around the village asked what Rossi expected: his own infidelities were common knowledge.

Strangely, Allan had met Anna Rossi at the Shanleys’. It was to Betty Shanley’s credit, he thought, having Mrs. Rossi in their house. She was less their type than Allan himself. But then, Betty was a jabberer, and Allan supposed Anna Rossi made a good listener—and, he had thought since last night—perhaps a good mistress to Tom Sommers. Allan had worked it all out, the relationship between the widower and the attractive woman. It would account for Sommer’s aloofness from village gossip; it might even explain his daughter Ellen’s getting along so well without a mother.

With the news of Rossi’s murder, however, he tried to suppress that whole line of speculation. After all, what would Sommers have been doing at the Rossi house at an hour when Fred Rossi ordinarily would have been coming home from work? Unless…Allan shook off the new surmise as unfair and unfounded, and a lot too dangerous to think about a man he didn’t know any better than he did Sommers.

Martha eased the meat loaf back into the oven. “I’d say she was the last person in the world to need a sleeping pill, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Allan said, trying to catch up with his wife’s thinking. “Some of the easiest talking people churn up inside.”

“Men find her attractive, don’t they?” Martha said.

Allan shrugged.

“Have you ever been in their house?” she persisted.

“What the hell would I be doing there?”

Martha laughed. “I don’t know. I was just remembering that time you walked her home from the Shanleys’. It was you, wasn’t it? Oh, Lord, Allan, I’m not accusing
you
of anything.” She was on the verge of genuine mirth.

“I know you’re not,” he said irritably. He could not help feeling that there was something belittling in her taking him for granted so completely. “But you don’t have to treat me like old dog Trey.”

Martha sighed, her mirth vanished, and took the ice cubes from the refrigerator. “Will you make us a drink, dear?”

He got the ice bucket, and was gone from the room a few moments, getting the gin and vermouth.

“Allan, I’ve decided not to go to the Shanley’s again for a while,” she said when he returned.

“Oh?”

“You don’t really enjoy it, do you?”

“Not much. That’s the truth. It’s pretty rough for a man to know he’s accepted in a place only because his wife’s so much brighter than he is. Jack makes no bones about his contempt. And sometimes, when we’re there, you don’t either.”

“Now, that isn’t true, Allan. That’s just something in your own imagination that pops out when you’ve had a bad day. I know exactly when it happens—it comes out when your jokes go flat. Those silly wisecracks of yours—when they’re bad, they’re horrible, Allan. And even when they’re good, they have a way of killing a conversation.”

“They must be pretty rotten most of the time considering that the conversation doesn’t usually begin to lag till two thirty in the morning.”

“I didn’t think it was that late,” she said.

And so they were diverted from a growing quarrel. He twisted the lemon peels on top of their martinis, then touched his glass to hers.

“To us,” Martha said. “I promise, no more late nights.” She sipped her drink. “They say Kelley’s volunteer police have messed things up again. Remember the drug store man last year?”

Allan nodded. It was closer to two years ago, but the Point True pharmacist had been murdered in his shop, a boxful of change had been taken by his attacker, and, it had been said, the murderer’s tracks covered by the local investigators, presumably while investigating. The crime was still unsolved.

“They’re saying the same thing’s happened again—the temporary police threshing around the woods, looking for clues. As Jack said when he was trying to find him up there—and it seems to have caught on with everybody—‘Has anybody here seen Kelley?’”

“When did you see Jack?”

“I didn’t. I talked to Betty on the telephone. Allan, you don’t think that Jack and I—that there’s anything between us, do you?”

“No, I guess not,” he said, and such a thought had never stayed very long in his mind, not really. “If there was, you wouldn’t talk so much, the two of you.”

“That’s an interesting observation.”

“My God, though, Martha—his own wife never shuts up. How does the man take it?”

“Very easily. Sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn’t.” She went to the door and called out, “Jeff, five minutes. Wash up for dinner.”

Tom Sommers, getting off the bus at his own gate, felt that his house was empty, and the cold fear got to him that never again would it hold Ellen and himself as it had, happily, for as much of the child’s life as she could remember. Even if the Rossi business affected them no further…

They had had their breakfast in the usual manner, only a little of the strain between them showing, both seeming to pretend that nothing unusual had happened the evening before. It seemed best, by unspoken mutual consent, to carry this day on like all the others.

Only when he had been about to leave the house and paused to kiss her cheek, as was their custom, had the difference now between them been manifest: he sensed the little stiffening in her body as he came near her—and he had gone no nearer, saying his “Goodbye, my dear,” to the back of her head, and getting a far too gay to be genuine, “Goodbye, papa.” How ironic, he had thought then, if he were to become the principal object of her resentment.

But at breakfast time Ellen had not known that Rossi was dead. He was no longer as sure of it then himself as he had been the night before.

In the house he found a note from Ellen: she would soon be home, but in the meantime would he please set the oven at 350 degrees and put in the casserole which Sylvia had left? (Sylvia was the woman who worked for them by the day.) How like any other day’s note this one read, and how almighty unlike other days the day itself had been!

And must continue to be. Sommers knew his own moment of decision was almost on him. There were at least two people who would suggest his name to Chief of Police Kelley as a likely suspect for the murder of Rossi.

He lighted and set the stove…Allan Ford—who was he, really? What kind of man was he beneath the clown that he played as endlessly as a child at being a grownup? What did he see when he shaved himself? Someone, Sommers thought, he wasn’t very fond of. Yet out of all that heavy-drinking, loose-mouthed crowd who chummed together on the bus, Ford was the only man Sommers cared a second thought about. Ford might not like what he was, but he didn’t complain in public about it, or of his job, his clients, or the squandering of his talents in the market place.

But how curious to have met him at the crossroad after the murder! Ford had come down the road from the direction of the tavern, a tavern closed at least an hour by then, as Sommers himself knew. What kind of mission had sent Ford out on the desolate road at such an hour? Ford was not a walker as Sommers himself was by nature.

His wife was at the Shanleys’, he’d said—his pretty, bauble-minded wife whom he must have thought he had won by a miracle the day she consented to marry him. That whole crowd, Sommers thought, like most American males, married from the neck down.

The phone rang, jangling every nerve in his body. But it was Ellen. Would he mind terribly if she did not come home for dinner? Cathie Rapp had asked her…He minded; and also he did not mind because, he decided, it indicated an answer to a question foremost in his dilemma: he would say now that Ellen did not know he had gone out before last midnight and returned home well after one
A.M.

But whether she knew it or not, the fact remained. He had gone up to Rossi’s; he had had motive to kill Rossi; and Rossi was dead.

Even Kelley could add that up to an indictment, and he would want to quickly, being still under fire for the drug store fiasco. This was the dilemma: if he confided in the police, might he not be merely sacrificing himself to them?

Somewhere in the hour during which he chopped wood, washed, and ate a meager supper, the idea took hold of him that it was a problem needful of a lawyer’s advice.

Shanley?

It was hard not to think of him at such a moment, his reputation in criminal law being what it was. Sommers also knew Shanley’s reputation as the man who threw the biggest parties in Point True—a boon to the village tradesmen, in fact to the whole village, where he was considered a sort of household god, their man of distinction. An advantage, especially considering Sommer’s reputation as a recluse.

There was something else that entered into the rationalization of his calling on Shanley: his was the house where Ford had been last night, and where he might have mentioned meeting Tom Sommers at the crossroad at that most significant hour.

He telephoned, then walked up the hill to see the lawyer.

“A social call—or business?” Shanley asked, giving Sommers a hand as strong as a farmer’s. He looked the outdoor man, robust, tanned, healthy.

“Let’s call it social, anyway,” Mrs. Shanley said, “and we can have a drink together before I go upstairs. I think I know your daughter, Mr. Sommers. A lovely child.”

“A child, ha!” Shanley said.

A sudden lump rose to Sommer’s throat, and with it a wariness of Shanley. His rationalizations for having come began to weaken.

The lawyer looked at him. “What do you drink?” It was scarcely more than a glance, but Sommers felt his soul to have been penetrated. He tried to tell himself that Shanley was more an actor than a seer.

“Scotch, please.”

“I suppose you’ve heard all about the murder,” Betty Shanley said. “That’s one thing about living in a small town—you can’t miss anything even if you try.”

“Not easily,” Sommers murmured.

“I suppose you want a stinger, Betty?” her husband said. “Damn fool woman’s drink.”

“That’d be just lovely, Jack.” Mrs. Shanley winked at the visitor. “He always says that, pretending it’s on my account he has to make it. But you just notice: he’ll make one for himself at the same time.”

Sommers managed a smile. Whatever he had expected in Shanley’s wife, this woman did not fulfill it. She had probably once been as trim as Allan Ford’s wife, but she had gone as soft as a warm chocolate cream, of which she reminded him. She spoke with a drawl, and endlessly, not seeming to require any answers.

Sommers felt himself recovering some inner composure in her dribbling sort of chatter. Shanley was at the other end of the big room, concocting the stinger, whatever that was, in an electric mixer. It was not so much what she was that restored him, Sommers thought, but that she was Shanley’s wife. She made a least common denominator to which he could reduce Shanley himself, and in those terms the famous lawyer was not quite so formidable.

Mrs. Shanley was soon talking to Sommers as if he were an intimate. “We’ve got a friend who’s awfully fond of Mrs. Rossi. I’ve often thought he might—well, kind of visit her on the sly sometimes. I wouldn’t say anything more that that, him being a friend and all, and a married gentleman. That’d be gossip.”

“Did she have visitors?” Sommers surprised himself, putting the question that way, or, indeed, at all.

“I’d say Anna accepted visitors sometimes, Jack wouldn’t you?” Mrs. Shanley asked innocently, but of course understanding perfectly.

“I wouldn’t say.” Shanley passed the drinks. “Not your married gentleman, anyway. He doesn’t have the guts to carry on an affair.”

“Does it take guts?” Mrs. Shanley seemed to be musing aloud.

“It would take guts to kill her husband, at any rate,” Shanley said, “and I don’t think our Allan has ’em.”

“Besides,” Mrs. Shanley said, “he
was
here till two thirty.”

Sommers kept his eyes on the glass while he thought about that. This, he told himself, was what he had really come to hear. He was inclined to agree that it would be hard to see Allan Ford as a murderer, although he disliked Shanley just a little more for the way he had said it. And nobody here seemed to have known Ford was out of the house at the crucial time! It must make a man feel strange—to make so inconspicuous an absence! No wonder Ford’s hand had come out of the darkness in search of a friend.

Shanley sat down opposite him. “Did you know Rossi?”

“No.” The word seemed to crack in Sommer’s throat.

The lawyer’s eyes were probing. “But you must have heard certain things about him?”

“There was gossip, you know,” Mrs. Shanley put in.

“I keep pretty much to myself,” Sommers said, retreating even further. “Because of Ellen, and by choice.”

“Ellen, of course,” Betty Shanley said. “I was trying to remember your daughter’s name.”

“Rossi was several kinds of scum,” Shanley said. “For my part I don’t believe he was clobbered to death over a satchel of money.”

“They found the satchel in one of the abandoned well-diggings,” his wife said, “and the money too—the change was scattered all over the woods.”

“A killer with a hole in his pocket and a police chief with a hole in his head,” said the lawyer.

“‘Has anybody here seen Kelley?’,” Mrs. Shanley drawled chidingly, and looked at her husband. “Oh, Jack, what a thing to say about a man!”