She was a singularly attractive lady with a singularly unattractive dog, and I had no idea, naturally, that either of them was involved in murder. While the dog looked capable of any perfidious crime, the lady did not. She was fresh as a rose.
A rather full-blown rose it is true, slightly middle-aged, but charming; a delightful perfume drifted from her corner. I sat opposite her; we were both waiting for the vet to return to his office; it was about seven o’clock of a rainy spring night. I held my dog Happy firmly by the leash and eyed the lady. She held her dog absently and eyed the door to the street. Her bare wrists were round and white; her hand wore no wedding ring, which pleased me.
Now I do not wish to give a wrong impression; I am and intend to remain a bachelor; my name is James Wickwire. I am rather on the elderly side, being a senior vice-president of a bank. Since my duties include the care of various estates, those duties have also included the task of dissuading some of my clients from diving into capital in order to finance sundry get-rich-quick schemes— those particular clients being, all too frequently, widows. This is merely a professional hazard; I only say that, in consequence, the absence of a wedding ring on the lady’s hand rather pleased me. I had no thought of amorous dalliance.
It was different with Happy; amorous dalliance was pre-eminent in his mind; he had taken one look at the lady’s dog and fallen in love. He gave a frenzied lunge in her direction and I pulled him back hard. The lady said absently, “Down, Lola,” and watched the door.
Lola did not obey; she flopped an ungainly paw in a lumberingly coquettish gesture which appeared to drive Happy out of his few wits with delight. I restrained him and glanced at my watch; it was twelve minutes after seven. I said politely to the lady, “Dr. Sherman was called on an emergency just as I arrived. He said he’d be right back.”
She nodded. “It’s twelve minutes after seven,” she said and watched the door anxiously.
I supposed her anxiety concerned Lola, although I have never seen so revolting a creature; she was a brown, ungainly animal, a veritable Jukes of a mongrel, with the nose of a terrier and the ears of a German shepherd except that one of them slanted backward while the other slanted forward in an indescribably raffish way. However, there is no accounting for the vagaries of human affection. I said, “Dr. Sherman is an extremely fine vet. I’m sure he’ll see to your dog...”
She gave me a surprised glance. “Oh, I’m only going to board Lola here. She’s not got anything wrong with her.”
There was, of course, everything wrong with her. My own dog. Happy, is a gigantic, liver-colored creature, predominantly Great Dane, although I have suspected a touch of the husky, in his pedigree; but he is a prince of dogs compared to Lola. I winced as I watched Lola rolling a waggish eye at Happy. He made another lunge at her and the door opened and a man came in.
It was not the vet. He was a small, thin man in a raincoat with a Lady’s handbag, bright red, under his arm. I had a swift impression that he did not see me, for my chair was behind a large filing cabinet, and in the same instant it occurred to me that the lady herself carried no handbag at all. And then a number of things happened.
He said, “I want to talk to you,” and seized the lady’s arm.
She sprang up and cried, “No! No!” Happy conceived one of his whimsical dislikes and surged the length of his leash at the man, who jerked around with a look of surprise and alarm.
I do not think that Happy would in fact dismember anybody, but occasionally he gives the impression of so intending. Lola instantly joined in the fray and got her teeth in the man’s trouser leg. He dropped the red handbag, which fell open, and it was stuffed with money.
I had a flashing but unmistakable glimpse of a huge roll of bills. The lady made a quick dive at the handbag, the man gripped her and seemed to be trying to pull her toward the street; she resisted violently and, while I do not believe that I dropped Happy’s leash intentionally, still Happy did get away from me. The man saw him coming, kicked Lola to free himself, released the lady and scooped up the handbag full of money all in one motion, and made it to the door, closing it behind him just as Happy thudded against it.
The door quivered; the man disappeared into the rainy night I snatched up Happy’s leash. Lola licked her chops and the lady turned breathlessly to me.
“What is your name? Please...”
I replied automatically, “Wickwire. James—”
“Thank you,” she said and to my dismay thrust Lola’s leash into my hand and whipped out the door herself, leaving nothing of her presence save a fragrance of flowers. And Lola. The dogs lolloped wildly around my legs, and as I was endeavoring to disengage myself from the tangle of leashes, a sudden crash of sound from the street outside froze the dogs, and me, too, for it was undeniably a gunshot.
Immediately the door was flung open again. Dr. Sherman dashed in, shouted, “There’s a man shot!” and dashed wildly out again. He left the door open and, as Happy is devoted to the vet, Happy shot out after him. Happy being a very vigorous dog, willy-nilly Lola and I were forced to follow.
A little crowd had already collected in the street about thirty feet away. It parted as Happy thundered upon it. I had a swift glimpse of the little dark man in the raincoat, huddled now in the gutter.
The street light shone down brightly through silver slivers of rain. There was no red handbag anywhere. The lady, like the handbag, was nowhere to be seen.
I am strongly opposed to murder; I exerted all my influence over Happy and got him—and Lola, like the end of a remarkably animated kite—back into the vet’s office.
And presently the vet returned. “Guy’s dead,” he said. “Patrolman on the job. Squad car on the way—now, then, what’s Happy eaten this time?”
I was listening to the shriek of the approaching squad car, thinking of a lady who refused to take a handbag stuffed with money, ran into the street scarcely a moment before the murder, and left her dog. I replied that a box of carpet tacks had disappeared in Happy’s immediate vicinity and the vet saw Lola and put a hand to his head. “What’s that?”
I replied that to the best of my belief it was a dog.
“Your dog?” The vet pointed an outraged finger at Lola, who grinned cozily at him. “Mr. Wickwire, have you gone out of your head?”
“Certainly not,” I snapped and described the lady, the incident, and then made the mistake of trying to put the leash in the vet’s hand.
“No!” he cried in a voice of anguish. “A thousand times no! I never saw that creature before. I don’t know who the lady was. And I’m not going to keep that dog here!”
I daresay a career of inducing dogs with gleaming white teeth to swallow pills they do not wish to swallow develops a certain iron in a man’s nature; an hour later when I went home, I took Lola with me. It was an hour not without incident, for we had scarcely got Happy under the fluoroscope—which revealed no carpet tacks in his capacious interior—when the police arrived to inquire if either of us had seen or knew anything of the murder.
It was a triumph of my civic nature that I conquered a sneaking reluctance to do so and told them all about the lady, the handbag, and the dog. Lola wore no tags, as a reasonable and law-abiding dog would do, and there was no possible way of identifying the lady. After taking various notes the police went away. And so did I—taking, as I’ve said, Lola with me; it was that or the pound for Lola, owing to the lack of tags and the vet’s intransigence. Besides, the lady had asked me for my name.
I pass over the greeting Wilkins, my only servant, gave Lola; she was unaffected by it save to give him a nip in the calf as he passed the soup, which then spilled over on Lola’s head. Lola screamed pettishly and made a fretful dash at Wilkins, who displayed a feat of remarkable agility in ascending to the tabletop, from whence he bitterly remarked that either he or Lola would depart from the house immediately.
In the end we shut Lola in a bathroom and Happy in my bedroom. After dinner I endeavored to ignore the sound of howls, moans, thuds, and at ten o’clock I turned on the radio and heard the news. The murdered man’s name was Sol Brunk. And Sol Brunk together with one or two confederates—the police were uncertain about this—had held up a payroll messenger at six o’clock that evening and got away with what I believed is called the swag, amounting in this instance to fifty thousand dollars. One of Brunk’s confederates had shot the messenger, who had, however, lived long enough to identify a photograph of Sol Brunk, which, not remarkably, the police had on file. It had been Sol Brunk who assailed the messenger directly, but the messenger had been shot from behind; so Sol Brunk was not his murderer.
The murderer of Sol Brunk was not known. The accomplice—or accomplices—had escaped. It was known that on occasion a woman, a gun moll so to speak, accompanied Sol Brunk on his nefarious excursions.
There was no description of the gun moll. There was no mention at all of a red handbag stuffed with money. There was no mention of the dog Lola.
After some thought only one conclusion emerged; the lady had made one half-hearted grab for the handbag and the money; she had also strongly opposed Sol Brunk’s company. But she had then hurried out into the street and disappeared altogether too coincidentally with murder. And thieves have been known to fall out.
It depressed me. Such white little hands and wrists to aim a revolver so very efficiently!
Wilkins set out my mild evening highball in a foreboding manner and went to bed. And it was about then that it struck me that there was something odd about the lady’s—or rather the gun moll’s—pretty white wrists, something inconsistent yet puzzling. I could not pin it down and analyze it.
In fact, as the clock ticked on I fell into a curious sort of reverie in which blossoms of some kind formed a very agreeable background, not orange blossoms exactly but blossoms and sunlit paths and most delightful company; the company was not precisely identifiable either, except that it was not that of a gun moll.
Indeed, the faint ting of a distant bell blended so suggestively with my dream that for some time I did not rouse to the fact that it was not, say, something resembling a wedding bell but the ting of the back door bell, touched lightly but repeatedly. I hurried back through the dining room and opened the kitchen door.
The lady flung herself into my arms. The scent of flowers surrounded me most delectably; a soft strand of her hair brushed my cheek. “Somebody’s trying to kill me!”
Since it seemed rather more than likely that she had killed somebody herself, I steeled myself against the kitten warmth and softness of her clinging figure. “Where have you been?” I demanded sternly.
“Riding the subways. I had some change in my pocket. Then I looked up your name in a phone booth and had just enough money for a taxi here. If you’ll loan me taxi fare and give me Lola—”
“You can have Lola and welcome,” I said austerely. “But I’d like to know...”
Her blue eyes were amazingly candid. “Well, you see, I left my handbag in the bar Lola likes.”
Nothing in the way of dissolute behavior on Lola’s part could surprise me. I said, frostily, I fear, “Indeed.”
“But then, you see, the bartender didn’t give her peanuts and then they saw me, so I had to get away. And they’ll not take Lola in a hotel; at least, they’ll not keep her,” she said candidly. “I don’t suppose you’d see to her for a few days, Mr. Wickwire?”
This really horrendous request brought me to my senses like an electric shock, with the result that I shortly extracted the story—or a story, at least. According to the lady, at one time she had visited a bar not far from the vet’s—“with friends,” she said hastily, fluttering her eyelashes—and the bartender had had the shocking lack of foresight to give Lola peanuts. The lady had been walking Lola the evening of the murder and had tried to lead her past the bar; Lola, however, wanted more peanuts; quite logically they had entered the bar and settled themselves in a booth.
Her blue eyes widened; she said, “And you see there are high partitions, between the booths. Nobody can see you unless they pass right by.” And at six-thirty she saw two men enter and settle themselves in the next booth to hers and Lola’s.
They had talked in low but, to the lady, audible voices about their successful coup in robbing a payroll messenger; they were concerned not about shooting the messenger, but about establishing an alibi for themselves, which they believed they had done by coming into the bar. “And I was terrified!” she cried, opening her blue eyes still wider. “I didn’t know what to do. And then they saw me.”
It developed that Lola had grown impatient as no peanuts were forthcoming and made shrill and penetrating complaint. So the men had peered over the partition anxiously and the lady had seized Lola’s leash and run out of the bar, forgetting her red handbag.
“I’d seen the vet’s sign; it wasn’t far away. So I thought I’d leave Lola there and then go to a hotel and phone the police. I’m afraid to go home because my name—charge tags, club cards, everything —is in my handbag. They knew I had heard them. They couldn’t let me get away. And one of them followed me, you saw him, so I had to hurry, and you have such a kind face I knew you’d see to Lola and—”
“The man who followed you was shot.”
“Oh, yes, I know. I was hurrying for the subway. I heard the shot behind me. I turned and saw him on the sidewalk and all the people running and…”
“Who shot him?”
“Why, the other robber, of course,” she said simply. “In the booth they were quarreling about the—the loot. One of them insisted on—I think it was two thirds, but the other one kept saying, no, it was just fifty-fifty. Really it was dreadful.
“Just then they heard Lola and saw me. I think both of them followed me out of the bar, and one waited in the street while the other followed me into the vet’s. After the dogs scared him out, the other robber shot him, grabbed my handbag and then saw me. He had to get away fast, but he had to get rid of me, too! So he followed me. In the subways. Took every train I took. Brown coat and hat. Young. Nice looking, really—but dreadful! Of course there were always people around. He couldn’t do anything. But he’s outside now.”
I may have uttered a startled word. She nodded firmly. “Another taxi was behind the one I took. So then I ran around to the back door of your house.”
I told myself to count ten. When I got to three, I said, “How do you know that the men were in the bar at—you said they came into it at six-thirty. Was there a clock? How could they expect to establish an alibi?”
“Oh, that was easy. There’s a clock near the door, set rather low. One of them must have turned it back while the other talked to the bartender. And then you see they must have intended to set it up again, the same way when they left. I saw the clock as I ran out of the bar and it was half an hour slow.”
“Did you—see him turn the clock back?”
“Oh, no. It wasn’t necessary to see it. I knew. I have a perfect sense of time. It’s like perfect pitch. I always know exactly what time it is. Like—like dogs, you know, when it’s dinner time. I knew that it was six-thirty when they came into the bar.”
This, to speak bluntly, finished me; being a banker, approached in the course of duty for loans, I have listened to some preposterous stories, but none as preposterous as this. I said sternly, “What about all that money in your handbag? There was at least five thousand dollars—”
“Twenty,” she said. “It’s mine, and I want it!”
The story was preposterous—a perfect sense of time indeed! And why was she carrying about twenty thousand dollars? There was no accounting for her motive in telling me such nonsense unless, in a confused way, it was intended to enlist my sympathy. There was clearly only one thing for me to do and that was call the police. I started for the kitchen telephone and someone knocked at the back door.
“No, no!” she cried, but I opened the door.
A man came in swiftly; he wore a brown hat and coat; he was young, handsome, slick and polite.
“Oh, there you are, Aunt Maisie,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home. I’m sorry if she’s troubled you, sir. She’s quite all right, really, doesn’t need to be in a sanitarium. But she does let her fancy run away with her—”
“You’ve been listening at the door,” the lady—and almost certainly the gun moll—cried with unexpected spirit. “You’re the other robber! You shot the man with my handbag!”
And he had told a good story, too, I reflected skeptically; a story that was almost certain to get his accomplice out of my house. There must be wheels within wheels, a complex situation between the two of them to which I had no key, except my previous conclusion that thieves do fall out.
“Come now, Aunt Maisie,” the young man said and advanced upon us.
The lady clutched my arm practically to the bone and cried, “He’s got a gun!” I looked down, naturally, to see if she had broken my arm, saw her white bare wrist—and suddenly saw the truth.
And there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Undoubtedly he did have a gun. The telephone was at least five feet away. Wilkins was asleep on the third floor. And at that point the lady gave a piercing shriek. “Lola,” she shrieked. “Lola!”
I have read the words, “pandemonium broke loose”; I never comprehended their meaning until the house rocked with it. Howls, yells, thuds and the rending crash of doors broke out from above; somewhere there were many madly running feet. I thrust the lady under the kitchen table and, since I am not a brave man, ducked under it myself. Happy hurtled through the kitchen door, swinging it back against the murderer, who went skittering across the floor. Lola flashed into view and into the corner from whence savage growls, thumps and curses arose; and suddenly two revolver shots crashed through the melee.
Peering out from under the table I perceived a ghostly figure in white in the doorway, which proved to Wilkins in a night shirt, who shouted in a quivering voice, “I borrowed your gun, Mr. Wickwire. Shall I shoot to kill or merely attempt to maim him?”
A panting, hoarse voice from the corner replied. “Don’t shoot—don’t shoot! Get these damned dogs off me!”
Well, since we had the young man at a disadvantage, so to speak, Wilkins and I trussed him up with roller towels before we tied up the dogs, too, and called the police. He did have a gun, which he had had no opportunity to use, being otherwise occupied. He also had the lady’s handbag under his coat. He turned sullen and stubborn about confessing, but he still had the payroll, a sizeable wedge, in his pocket; and the police felt sure that his gun was that which had killed Sol Brunk.
It developed, too, in the course of conversation, that Sol Brunk’s girlfriend was serving a term in jail.
They departed, police, murderer and all, some time later. Lola rolled a complacent eye at Happy, who was still, however, a little upset and snuffling at the back door in a menacing manner. Wilkins, the hero of the incident, draped a blanket modestly around him, made coffee for us and went back to bed. The lady said softly, “It was so sweet of you to believe me, Mr. Wickwire. About my sense of time, I mean. Some people don’t.”
I glanced at her white wrists, neither of which wore a watch. “Oh, yes,” I said. “When we were at the vet’s you said it was twelve minutes after seven. I had looked at my watch. I knew that you were right. But there was no clock in the vet’s office, and you didn’t wear a watch.” I didn’t add that I had not believed her until I remembered that small fact, and that its oddity had nudged at me earlier in the evening without making itself clear. I said instead, “It’s a very unusual gift.”
“Ah, well, it’s only one of those things,” she said and sighed. “Somehow it rather annoyed my late husband—”
“Your late—” I swallowed hard. During the chat with the police I had of course learned her name, which was Maisie Blane. But that was all.
“I’m a widow,” she said. “That’s why it was so hard to know what to do. A man’s advice especially about investments—why, what’s the matter, Mr. Wickwire?”
“Nothing,” I said. “A slight touch of vertigo.”
“Oh—that money, Mr. Wickwire, that twenty thousand. You see, I’m going to buy an oil well—that is, there’s no oil discovered there yet, but I feel sure there will be. And my banker opposed it so strongly that I just drew out the cash. But I’d like your opinion—Mr. Wickwire, really you look quite ill.”
“Not at all. I’m sure you’re right about the well,” I lied, and controlled a shudder. But I was conscious of a kind of emptiness within me as a pleasant little dream of blossoms whisked itself away.
I took her—and Lola—home. And she is an utterly delightful woman. She is also now a very rich woman, as not one but two oil wells came in on the land she bought.
But the fragrant little dream of unidentifiable blossoms has never returned. Besides, there is Lola. I really cannot permit Happy to make so shocking a mésalliance.
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: I rather think that my point of departure for this story was observing my dogs who seem to have little, accurate, inner clocks, and thinking that humans have them too, when we care to listen to their ticking. Who has not said to himself on going to sleep, “I’ll wake and get to the typewriter at eight in the morning?” One does wake at eight; I’m not sure that one does get to the typewriter so promptly, at least I don’t.