The Oxford Book of American Det (95 page)

How, she wondered, had Mary Philips taken her estrangement from a husband she probably once adored? Did he drink? Gamble? Was he unfaithful? Reason enough—

any one of them—for some women. Or was it a cruelty surprised in him that had started the falling away of love, piece by piece, like the petals from a wasting flower?

Had the making of the final decision consumed Mary Philips’s every thought for months and had the moment of telling it been too terrible to remember? And did it recur, fragmenting the peace it was supposed to have brought? Did the sudden aloneness leave her with the feeling that part of her was missing, that she might never again be a whole person?

Idle questions, surely, to ask now of Mrs. Philips. Mary Philips, age thirty-nine, occupation beauty operator, was dead—strangled at the rear of her shop with an electric cord at the hands of an unknown assailant. And Clement Philips was being sought by the police—in point of fact, by Captain Edward Allan Fox of the Rockland force, which was why Nancy Fox had read the story so interestedly in the first place.

Clement Philips was sought, found, and dismissed, having been two thousand miles from Rockland at the time of Mary Philips’s murder. Several others, picked up after each of the three murders, were also dismissed. It was only natural that these suspects were getting testy, talking about their rights.

The chief of police was getting testy also. His was a long history of political survival in Rockland. Only in recent years had his work appeared worthy of public confidence, and that was due to the addition, since the war, of Captain Fox to the force. Fox knew it. No one knew his own worth better than ‘The Fox’ did. And he knew how many years past retirement the old chief had stretched his tenure.

The chief paced back and forth before Captain Fox’s desk, grinding one hand into the other behind his back. “I never thought the day would come when we’d turn up such a maniac in this town! He doesn’t belong here, Fox!”

“Ah, but he does—by right of conquest,” Fox said with the quiet sort of provocation he knew grated on the old man.

The chief whirled on him. “You never had such a good time in your life, did you?” Fox sighed. He was accustomed to the bombast, the show of wrath that made his superior seem almost a caricature. He did not have to take it: the last of the chief’s whipping boys was the custodian now of the city morgue. “Once or twice before, sir,” Fox said, his eyes unwavering before the chief’s.

The old man gave ground. He knew who was running the force, and he was not discontented. He had correctly estimated Fox’s ambition: what Fox had of power, he had only with the old man’s sanction. “In this morning’s brief for me and the mayor, you made quite a thing of the fact that all three victims were separated from their husbands. Now I’m not very deep in this psychology business—and the missus and I haven’t ever been separated more than the weekend it took to bury her sister—so you’re going to have to explain what you meant. Does this separation from their husbands make ‘em more—ah—attractive? Is that what you’re getting at? More willing?”

Fox could feel a sudden pulse-throb at his temple. It was a lecher’s picture the old man had conjured with his words and gestures, and his reference to Fox’s own vulnerability—Nancy having left him—stirred him to a fury a weaker man would not have been able to control.

But he managed it, saying, “Only more available—and therefore more susceptible to the advances of their assailant.”

The old man pulled at the loose skin of his throat. “It’s interesting, Fox, how you got at it from the woman’s point of view. The mayor says it makes damn good reading.”

“Thank you, sir,” Fox said for something that obviously was not intended as a compliment. “Do you remember Thomas Coyne?”

“Thomas Coyne,” the chief repeated.

“The carpenter—the friend of Elsie Troy’s husband,” Fox prompted. Elsie Troy had been the first of the three victims. “We’ve picked him up again. No better alibi this time than last—this time, his landlady. I think he’s too damned smug to have the conscience most men live with, so I’ve set a little trap for him. I thought maybe you’d like to be there.”

“Think you can make a case against him?”

Fox rose arid took the reports from where the old man had put them. “Chief,” he said then, “there are perhaps a half dozen men in Rockland against whom a case could be made... including myself.”

The old man’s jaw sagged. A lot of other people were also unsure of Ed Fox—of the working mechanism they suspected ran him instead of a heart. “Let’s see this Coyne fellow,” the chief said. “I don’t have much taste for humour at a time like this.”

“I was only pointing up, sir, that our killer’s mania is not apparent to either friends or victims—until it is too late.”

The old man grunted and thrust his bent shoulders as far back as they would go—in subconscious imitation of The Fox’s military bearing. On the way to the ‘Sun Room’—so called because of the brilliance of its lighting—where Thomas Coyne was waiting, the chief paused and asked, “Is it safe to say for sure now that Elsie Troy was the first victim? That we don’t have a transient killer with Rockland just one stop on his itinerary?”

There had been several indications of such a possibility.

“I think we may assume that Elsie Troy was the beginning,” Fox said. “I think now that her murder was a random business, unpremeditated. She was killed at night—in her bedroom, with the lights on and the window shades up. She was fully dressed, unmolested. It wasn’t a setup for murder. It was pure luck that someone didn’t see it happening.

“But having walked out of Elsie Troy’s house a free man, her assailant got a new sense of power—a thrill he’d never had in his life. And then there began in him what amounted to a craving for murder. How he chooses victims, I don’t know. That’s why I called attention to the... the state of suspension in the marriages of the victims.” Fox shrugged. “At least, that’s my reconstruction of the pattern.”

“You make it sound like you were there,” the old man said.

“Yes,” Fox said, “I suppose I do.” He watched the old man bull his neck and plow down the hall ahead of him, contemplating the bit of sadism in himself—in, he suspected, all policemen. It was their devil, as was avarice the plague of merchants, conceit the foe of actors, complacency the doctor’s demon, pride the clergyman’s. He believed firmly that man’s worst enemy was within himself. His own, Fox thought grimly, had cost him a wife, and beyond that, God Almighty knew what else. There were times since Nancy’s going when he felt the very structure of his being tremble.

There was no joy without her, only the sometimes bitter pleasure of enduring pain.

Coyne sat in the bright light, as Fox had expected, with the serenity of a religious mendicant. His arms folded, he could wait out eternity by his manner. It was unnatural behaviour for any man under police inquisition. Fox was himself very casual. “Well, Tom, it’s about time for us to start all over again. You know the chief?” Coyne made a gesture of recognition. The chief merely glared down at him, his face a wrinkled mask of distaste.

“April twenty-ninth,” Fox led. “That was the night you decided finally that you had time to fix Mrs. Troy’s back steps.”

“Afternoon,” Coyne corrected. “I was home at night.”

“What do you call the dividing line between afternoon and night?”

“Dark—at night it gets dark... sir.”

“And you want it understood that you were home before dark?”

“I was home before dark,” Coyne said calmly.

There had never been reference in the newspaper to the hour of Elsie Troy’s death, partly because the medical examiner could put it no closer than between seven and nine. The month being April, darkness fell by seven.

“Suppose you tell the chief just what happened while you were there.”

“Nothing happened. I went there on my way home from work. I fixed the steps. Then I called in to her that the job was done. She came out and said, That’s fine, Tom. I’ll pay you next week.’ I never did get paid, but I guess that don’t matter now.” Told by melancholy rote, Fox thought, having heard even the philosophic ending before. But then, most people repeated themselves under normal circumstances, especially about grievances they never expected to be righted.

“What I can’t understand, Tom, is why you decided to fix the steps that day, and not, say, the week before?”

Coyne shrugged. “I just had the time then, I guess.”

“She hadn’t called you?”

“No, sir,” he said with emphasis.

“You say that as though she would not have called you under any circumstances.” Coyne merely shrugged again.

“As a matter of fact, it was the husband—when they were still together—who asked you to repair the steps, wasn’t it, Tom?”

“I guess it was.”

“And you happened to remember it on the day she was about to be murdered.”

“I didn’t plan it that way,” Coyne said, the words insolent, but his manner still serene.

He tilted his chair back.

“It’s a funny thing, Chief,” Fox said. “Here’s a man commissioned to do a job on a friend’s house. He doesn’t get around to it until the home has broken up. If it was me, I’d have forgotten all about the job under those circumstances—never done it at all.”

“So would I,” the chief said, “unless I was looking for an excuse to go there.”

“Exactly,” Fox said, still in a casual voice.

“It wouldn’t be on account of you they broke up, would it, Coyne?” the chief suggested.

Coyne seemed to suppress a laugh. It was the first time his effort at control showed.

“No, sir.”

“Don’t you like women?” the chief snapped.

“I’m living with one now,” Coyne said.

“Mrs. Turtle?” said Fox, naming Coyne’s landlady.

“What’s wrong with that? She’s a widow.”

Fox did not say what was wrong with it. But Mr. Thomas Coyne was not going to have it both ways: he had alibied himself with Mrs. Tuttle for the hours of all three murders. A paramour was not the most believable of witnesses. But then, from what Fox had seen of Mrs. Tuttle, he would not have called her the most believable of paramours, either.

With deliberate ease Fox then led Coyne through an account of his activities on the nights of the two subsequent murders. By the suspect’s telling they brought Coyne nowhere near the scenes.

Finally Fox exchanged glances with the old man. He had had more than enough of Coyne by now and very little confidence that the carpenter had been worth bringing in again. “You can go now, Tom,” Fox said, “but don’t leave town.” He nodded at the uniformed policeman by the door. And then, after a pause, “By the way, Tom, when was the last time you went swimming?”

“Oh, two or three weeks ago.”

“Where?”

“Baker’s Beach,” Coyne said, naming the public park.

Fox nodded, held the door for the chief, and then closed it behind them.

“That guy should go on the radio,” the old man said. “He knows all the answers.”

“Seems like it,” Fox said.

The second victim, Jane Mullins, had been strangled on the beach. But if Tom Coyne, as he said, had gone swimming two or three weeks ago, that would account for the sand found in Coyne’s room.

Sand and a stack of newspapers—the only clues to Thomas Coyne’s interests... and a clue also to the personality of his landlady; Mrs. Tuttle was a very careless housekeeper to leave sand and old newspapers lying around for weeks. She might be as careless with time—even with the truth.

Three strangulations—all of women who lived alone—within a month. It was enough to set the whole of a city the size of Rockland—population 110,000—on edge. As the Gazette editorialised: “When murder can match statistics with traffic deaths, it is time to investigate the investigators.”

Knowing Ed Fox so well, Nancy wondered if he had not planted that line with the Gazette; it had The Fox’s bite. It would be like him, if he was not getting all the cooperation he wanted from his superiors.

She looked at the clock and poured herself another cup of coffee. She was due at the radio station at eleven. Her broadcast time was noon: ‘The Woman’s Way.’

How cynical she had become about him, and through him about so many things. As much as anything, that cynicism had enabled her to make the break: the realisation that she was turning into a bitter woman with a slant on the world that made her see first the propensity for evil in a man, and only incidentally his struggle against it. This philosophy might make Ed a good policeman, but it made her a poor educator. And she considered herself an educator despite his belittlement of her work. A radio commentator was responsible to her audience to teach them a little truth. Why just a little? Ed had always said to that.

She wondered if Ed thought about her at all these days, when she could scarcely think of anything except him. It was as though she bore his heelmark on her soul. A cruel image—oh, she had them. For a month she had lived apart from him, yet the morbid trauma of their life together still hung about her. If she could not banish the memories, she must find psychiatric help. That would greatly amuse Ed—one more useless occupation by his reckoning. Worse than useless, the enemy of justice: his hardest catch could escape the punishment that fit his crime by a psychiatrist’s testimony.

Nancy folded the morning paper and rinsed her coffee cup.

Strange, the occupations of the three victims: Mary Philips had operated a beauty parlour, Elsie Troy had run a nursery school. She could hear Ed lecture on that: why have children if you pushed them out of the house in rompers? And poor Jane Mullins had written advertising copy—to Ed, perhaps the most useless nonsense of all. Well, that would give Ed something in common with the murderer—contempt for his victims. Ed always liked to have a little sympathy for the murderer: it made him easier to find. And no man ever suffered such anguish of soul as did Ed Fox at the hour of his man’s execution.

There, surely, was the worst moment in all her five years of marriage to him: the night Mort Simmons was executed. Simmons had shot a man and Ed had made the arrest and got the confession. Nancy had known her husband was suffering, and she had ventured to console him with some not very original remarks about his having only done his duty, and that doubts were perfectly natural at such an hour.