Tales for a Stormy Night (9 page)

“He was at the Elks’ meeting. I was over at my sister’s and then I came home about 10:30. I looked at the clock. I always do. It takes me longer to walk home than it used to.”

“And that was when you heard the baby crying?”

“It was crying when I came up the back steps.”

Phil Canby had been baby-sitting with his grandson while his daughter, Betty, and his son-in-law, John Murray, were at the movies. It was his custom to stay with young Philip every Thursday night, and sometimes oftener, because he lived with them; but on Thursdays Betty and her husband usually went to the movies.

“And you’re sure it was the Murray baby?”

“Who else’s would it be over that way? I couldn’t hear the Brady child from here. They’re five houses down.”

The sheriff nodded. Phil Canby swore that he was in bed and asleep by that time, and he swore that the baby had not cried. He was a light sleeper, in the habit of waking up if little Philip so much as whimpered. The neighbors to the south of the Murray house had not heard the crying, nor for that matter the radio in the Murray house, which Canby said he had turned on at 10 o’clock for the news. But they had been watching television steadily until 11:30. By that time the Murrays had come home and found Phil and the baby Philip each asleep in his own bed.

But to the north of the Murrays, in the corner house where Sue Thompson claimed she was asleep upstairs, her father Matt had been bludgeoned to death some time between 10 o’clock and midnight.

“And you didn’t hear anything else?” the sheriff asked.

“No, but then I didn’t listen. I thought maybe the baby was sick and I was on the point of going down. Then I remembered it was Thursday night and Mr. Canby would be sitting with him. He wouldn’t take the time of day from me.”

Not now he wouldn’t, the sheriff thought. “Have you any idea how long the baby was crying, Mrs. Lyons?”

“I was getting into bed when he stopped. That was fifteen minutes later maybe. I never heard him like
that
before, rasping like for breath. I don’t know how long the poor thing was crying before I got home.”

If Phil Canby had murdered Matt Thompson and then reached home by a quarter to 11, he would have had time to quiet baby Philip and to make at least a pretense of sleep himself before his family came home. Betty Murray admitted that her father was in the habit of feigning sleep a good deal these days, his waking presence was so much of an embarrassment to all of them. Scarcely relevant except as practiced art.

Willets took his leave of Mrs. Lyons. What seemed too relevant to be true, he thought, striding over the hedge which separated her yard from the Thompsons’s, was that Phil Canby admitted quarreling with Thompson at 9 o’clock that night, and in the Thompson kitchen.

After the first exchange of violent words between the two households, when Phil Canby and Sue Thompson made known their intentions of marriage, an uneasy, watchful quiet had fallen between them. Sue Thompson had not been out of the house except with her father, and then to Sunday prayer meeting. Matt Thompson had started his vacation the morning his daughter told him. Vacation or retirement: he had put the hasty choice up to the town supervisor. Thompson then had gone across to Betty Murray. He had never been in Betty’s house before, not once during her mother’s long illness or at her funeral; and if he had spoken to Betty as a child, she could not remember it. But that morning he spoke to her as a woman, and in such a manner and with such words that she screamed at him: “My father is not a lecher!” To which he had said: “And my daughter is not a whore. Before she takes to the bed of an old man, I’ll shackle her!” When John Murray came home from the office that night and heard of it, he swore that he would kill Matt Thompson if ever again he loosed his foul tongue in Betty’s presence.

But Matt Thompson had gone into his house and pulled down all the shades on the Murray side, and Phil Canby had gone about the trade he had pursued in Pottersville since boyhood. He was a plumber, and busier that week for all the talk about him in the town. All this the sheriff got in bits and pieces, mostly from Betty Murray. When Thursday night had come around again, she told him, she felt that she wanted to get out of the house. Also, she had begun to feel that if they all ignored the matter, the substance of it might die away.

So she and John had gone to the movies, leaving her father to sit with the baby. About 8:30, Sue Thompson had come into the yard and called to Phil. He went out to her. She had asked him to come over and fix the drain to the kitchen sink. Her father was sleeping, she told him, but he had said it would be all right to ask him. Canby had gone back into the house for his tools and then had followed her into the Thompson house, carrying a large plumber’s wrench in his hand. When Phil Canby had told this to the sheriff that morning—as frankly, openly, as he spoke of the quarrel between himself and Thompson, a quarrel so violent that Sue hid in the pantry through it—Willets got the uncanny feeling that he had heard it all before and that he might expect at the end of the recitation as candid and calm a confession of murder.

But Canby had not confessed to the murder. He had taken alarm, he said, when Matt Thompson swore by his dead wife to have him apprehended by the state and examined as a mental case. He knew the man to do it, Thompson had said, and Canby knew the man of whom he spoke: Alvin Rhodes, the retired head of the state hospital for the insane. Thompson had landscaped Rhodes’s place on his own time when Rhodes retired, borrowing a few shrubs from the Pottersville nursery to do it. This the sheriff knew. And he could understand the extent of Canby’s alarm when Canby told about the confinement of a friend on the certification of his children, and on no more grounds apparent to Canby than that the man had become cantankerous, and jealous of the house which he had built himself and in which he was becoming, as he grew older, more and more of an unwelcome guest. Phil Canby had bought the house in which he now lived with his daughter. He had paid for it over 30 years, having had to add another mortgage during his wife’s invalidism. Unlike his friend, he did not feel a stranger in it. The baby had even been named after him, but he was well aware the tax his wooing of Sue Thompson put upon his daughter and her husband.

All this the sheriff could understand very well. The difficulty was to reconcile it with the facts of the crime. For example, when Canby left the Thompson house, he took with him all his tools save the large wrench with which Thompson was murdered. Why leave it then—or later—except that to have taken it from beside the murdered man and to have had it found in his possession (or without it when its ownership was known) was to leave no doubt at all as to the murderer? All Canby would say was that he had forgotten it.

Willets went to the back door of Canby’s house. He knocked, and Betty Murray called out to him to come in. Little Philip was in his high chair, resisting the apple sauce his mother was trying to spoon into him. The sheriff stood a moment watching the child, marveling at the normalcy which persists through any crisis when there is a baby about. Every blob of sauce spilled on the tray Philip tried to shove to the floor. What he couldn’t get off the tray with his hands he went after with his tongue.

The sheriff grinned. “That’s one way to get it into him.”

“He’s at that age now,” his mother said, cleaning up the floor. She looked at Willets. “But I’m very grateful for him, especially now.”

The sheriff nodded. “I know,” he said. “Where’s your father?”

“Up in his room.”

“And the Thompson girl?”

“In the living room. Sheriff, you’re not going to take them…”

“Not yet,” he said, saving her the pain of finishing the sentence. He started for the inside door and paused. “I think Mrs. Lyons would be willing to have her there for a bit.”

“I’ll bet she would,” Betty said. “I had to close the front windows, with people gaping in to see her. Some of them, and they weren’t strangers either, kept asking…where her boy friend was.”

“It won’t be for long,” Willets said; and then because he had not quite meant that, he added: “It won’t be this way for long.”

“Then let her stay. I think she feels better here, poor thing, just knowing Papa’s in the house.” She got up then and came to him. She was a pretty girl and, like her father’s, her eyes seemed darker when they were troubled. “Mr. Willets, I was talking to Papa a while ago. He was trying to tell me about…him and Sue. He told her when he asked her to marry him that he was going to be as much a father to her…as a husband.” Betty colored a bit. “As a lover,” she corrected. “That’s what he really said.”

“And did he tell you what she had to say to that?”

“She said that’s what she wanted because she’d never had either one.”

The sheriff nodded at the obvious truth in that.

“I thought I’d tell you,” Betty went on, “because I know what everybody says about Papa and her. They think he’s peculiar. Almost like what I told you Matt Thompson said. And he’s not. All the time mother was sick, until she died, he took care of her himself. He even sent me away to school. Most men would have said that was my job, and maybe it was, but I was terribly glad to go. Then when mother died, and I got married, it must have seemed as though…something ended for him. And fifty-nine isn’t really very old.”

“Not very,” Willets said, being so much closer to it than she was.

“I’m beginning to understand what happened to him,” Betty said. “I wish I’d thought about it sooner. There might have been something…somebody else.”

The sheriff shook his head. “That’s a man’s own problem till he’s dead.”

“You’re right,” she said after a moment. “That’s what really would have been indecent.”

The sheriff nodded.

“I wish it was possible to separate the two things,” Betty said as he was leaving, “him and Sue—and Mr. Thompson’s murder. I wish to God it was.”

“So do I,” the sheriff said, thinking again of the pressures that would be put upon him because it was not possible to separate them, not only by the townspeople but by the state’s attorney, who would find it so much more favorable to prosecute a murderer in a climate of moral indignation.

On the stairway, with its clear view of the living room, he paused to watch Sue Thompson for a moment, unobserved. She was sitting with a piece of crochet work in her lap at which she stitched with scarcely a glance. Whatever her feelings, the sheriff thought, she was not grieving. She had the attitude of waiting. All her life she had probably waited—but for what? Her father’s death? A dream lover? A rescuer? Surely her girlish dreams had not conjured up Phil Canby in that role. The strange part of it was that it seemed unlikely to the sheriff she had dreamed of rescue at all. However she felt about her father, she did not fear him. Had she been afraid of him, she could not have announced to him that she intended to marry Phil Canby. And because she was not afraid of him, Willets decided, it was difficult to imagine that she might have killed him. She was a soft, plump girl, docile-eyed, and no match for her father physically. Yet she was the one alternate to Phil Canby in the deed, and he was the only one who knew her well enough to say if she was capable of it.

The sheriff went on and knocked at Canby’s door. “I’ve got to talk to you some more, Phil.”

Canby was lying on the bed staring at the ceiling. “I’ve told you all I know,” he said, without moving.

The sheriff sat down in the rocker by the open window. The radio, which Canby claimed to have been listening to at 10 o’clock the night before, was on a table closer to the window; and across the way, no more than fifteen yards, the neighbors had not heard it.

“Mrs. Lyons says that little Philip was crying at 10:30 last night, Phil.”

“Mrs. Lyons is a liar,” Canby said, still without rising. His thin gray hair was plastered to his head with sweat and yet he lay on his back where no breeze could reach him. A pulse began to throb at his temple. The skin over it was tight and pale; it reminded Willets of a frog’s throat.

“Betty admits you didn’t change the baby. That wasn’t like you, Phil, neglecting him.”

“He was sleeping. I didn’t want him to wake up. I had to think of my plans.”

“What plans?”

“My marriage plans.”

“What were they?”

Finally Canby rose and swung his slippered feet over the side of the bed. He looked at Willets. “We’re going to be married in Beachwood.” It was a village a few miles away. “I’ve got a house picked out on the highway and I’ll open a shop in front of it.”

It was fantastic, Willets thought: both Canby and the girl behaved as though they were not in any way suspected of Matt Thompson’s death—as though nothing in the past should interfere with the future. This angered Willets as nothing save Mrs. Lyons’s judgments had. “You’re in trouble, Phil, and you’re going to hang higher than your fancy plans if you don’t get out of it. The whole damn town’s against you.”

“I know that,” Canby said. “That’s why I’m not afraid.”

The sheriff looked at him.

“If I didn’t know what everybody was saying,” Canby went on, “I wouldn’t have run off home last night when Matt Thompson said he was going to get me certified.”

“Phil,” the sheriff said with great deliberateness, “the state’s attorney will maintain that’s why you
didn’t
run home, why you
weren’t
in this house to hear the baby crying, you
weren’t
home in time to change him, why you
can’t
admit Mrs. Lyons heard Philip crying! Because, he’ll say, you were over in the Thompson kitchen, doing murder and cleaning up after murder.”

Canby was shaking his head. “That baby don’t cry. He don’t ever cry with me around.”

The sheriff got up and walked the length of the room and back, noting that Phil Canby was careful in his things, their arrangement, their repair. He was a tidy man. “You’re still planning to marry her, then?” he said when he reached Canby.

“Of course. Why shouldn’t I?”

The sheriff leaned down until he was face to face with the man. “Phil, who do
you
think killed her father?”

Canby drew back from him, his eyes darkening. “I don’t know,” he said, “and I guess I never rightly cared…till now.”