THE “WHODUNIT”
When Tony Boucher passed away in 1968, at the age of fifty-seven, the world lost a true Renaissance Man. He was a constructive and incisive book reviewer, a fine writer, a creative editor and anthologist, an expert on the mystery and fantasy/science fiction genres, a dedicated opera lover and critic-and a great deal more, including a friend and an inspiration to the two of us personally and to dozens of other writers. Part of his legacy to us all is his fiction, of which most is quite well known; but there are a few short stories that over the years have surprisingly remained unanthologized. “You Can Get Used to Anything” is one of these—an atypical Boucher story in that it is tough and not a little gory, and yet a typical one, too, because it is the kind of “whodunit” he did so well and because it is so painstakingly plotted and written. We’re proud and pleased to present it here. - B.P.
It’s hard to tell where to start this story. I could start it back in Iowa with the Wythe murder, if a common death by shooting is interesting enough. I could start it with Hagar, and the way her stubby fingers twitched when she thought of a killer. Or I could start it much further on, with the Pasadena police when they discovered that you can cut the head off a corpse, but you can’t necessarily fit it back on.
But I think it’s best to start in with Alonzo. It all revolves around Alonzo. Hagar and Willis and me…the whole picture would never have come into focus if it hadn’t been for Alonzo and his profession.
They say you can get used to anything. Aunt Martha used to say, “You can get used to hanging if you hang long enough.” I wouldn’t know about that, though Willis might have. But I do know you can get used to a hangman.
At first there wasn’t any telling Alonzo from the other retired Iowans playing checkers and horseshoes in the Arroyo. He chewed cigars like the rest of them; he had the same paunch and the same baldness. He played a fair game of checkers and a better than average game of horseshoes. And like the others, on a hot day he took off his coat and sat around in a shirt with a collar and tie and suspenders, which was to indicate that even though he was a voluntary exile from Iowa, he still hadn’t given in to Southern California.
I used to wear a tie myself when I went down to the Arroyo. I fit in better that way. Maybe it seems a funny place for me to want to fit in—a bunch of men a generation ahead of me living out their retired lives with huffs and ringers.
But to retire you have to have money. That’s sort of in the nature of things. And that makes a city like Pasadena, where being retired is a major occupation, a logical place for a man like me. Because when you have money you always want it to be a little more, and a gilt-edged proposition for doubling it in six months looks mighty attractive.
That’s how I met Alonzo—on what you might call a scouting expedition down to the checker tables. I was soothing down a retired banker from Waterloo, explaining to him how a flock of new government regulations was hampering the quick return he’d expected, when I first heard Alonzo.
“It’s a shame,” he was saying, loud and sort of petulant, “it’s a shame and a disgrace to the nation.”
At first, I thought it was more of the straight damn-the-White House talk I was used to around there, like what my retired banker was giving me now. (He was willing to believe anything about government regulations.) Alonzo said something about “the American Way” and I almost stopped listening; I know that speech.
But then he said, “Only eleven states left, unless you count Utah, and you can’t hardly do that. Only eleven states still following the American Way.”
This sounded like a new approach. I listened while I kept telling my banker how right he was.
“California held out a long time,” Alonzo went on, “but what’ve you got now? Murder, that’s what you’ve got; plain cold-blooded legal murder. What does the Constitution say? I’ll tell you what the Constitution says. The Constitution says…” He paused and held his breath. He let it out slowly, and then said, with a pause between every pair of words: “Cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted. That’s what the Constitution says.”
Alonzo made pretty much of a speech of it. Even my banker began listening and pretty soon there was a little crowd around him. He had all the facts: Twenty-two states where they fry you in the chair, eight where they use the lethal gas chamber, six (and this seemed to hurt Alonzo the worst) where they don’t even kill you at all.
I kind of liked Utah. There they give you a choice. You can select whether you want to get shot or hanged. And all the time that law’s been in force, nobody’s picked hanging yet.
That really got Alonzo. “What kind of murderers is that?” he argued. “Afraid to die the good old American Way? And what kind of legislators pass laws like that?”
Somebody said something about Communists, and somebody else said the only trouble with them was hanging’d be too good for them, and the conversation began to get away from Alonzo.
It’s always a good time to hit a man, just when the conversation’s getting away from him; so I slipped up next to Alonzo and listened to him for as long as he wanted to talk.
Finally, I said, “Just what makes you so hot about this, Mr. Fuss?” (We’d exchanged names by then.) “Sounds like maybe you had some kind of personal angle on it.”
“Well,” Alonzo said, “I guess for me it is kind of talking shop, like. You see, son… Well, there’s no use being modest about it. I was the best darned hangman the state of Iowa ever had.”
You know how you get ideas. You think of a hangman as gaunt and grisly, like the Thing that comes for Mr. Punch. And you sit in the hot Pasadena sunlight and you look at this plump little man with the white collar on the blue shirt and the sweat stains under the armpits, and he grins at you and says he’s a retired hangman.
You think a hangman must be grisly in his mind too, like a war criminal or a mass murderer. And you sit and listen to him and the voice goes on flat and colorless and it’s just another retired businessman talking shop, and his big executions have about as much thrill to them as a retired dentist’s account of his trickiest impacted wisdom tooth.
It was a job and he worked at it. He took a certain pride in it; he was a craftsman. He wasn’t just a hangman; he was the best darned hangman in Iowa history. But the fact that he’d killed people…
“Everybody kills a murderer,” Alonzo said. “You elect the attorney that convicts him and the judge that sentences him. You pay for the detectives that track him down and the rope that hangs him. Why son, I haven’t killed a man any more than you have.”
I smiled at that one. It was certainly one way to put it. But it wasn’t the way Hagar looked at it.
I met Hagar at a dinner party. The dinner was intended as another scouting expedition; but I didn’t think about that much after I sat down next to Hagar.
Maybe you’ve read some of her stuff. Hagar Dix is the full name. Factual murder stories—not the true-detective kind of stuff, but pretty subtle probings into murderers and what makes them tick. I’d read some and liked them—I’ve got a certain interest in murder. And I guess I’d thought of her as one of these admirable research workers—the women that think in straight lines and wear their clothes the same way.
I was wrong. Hagar had straight lines strictly in the right places only. She had a face that should’ve been ugly, and black eyes looked out at you and you didn’t see the face. You didn’t see much else around you and you didn’t taste your food; and you tried to decide whether you hated this woman or… Well, or not. And you could underline that not.
I don’t talk much about the Wythe case. My connection with the Wythes wasn’t one of my more triumphant episodes. Herman got some ideas about that Trans-Con bond issue that were as unfair and unjustified as they were accurate: and I kind of preferred to forget the whole episode.
But this night I wanted to make a pitch with Hagar; and murder being her business, you might say, I sort of offhand said I’d known a convicted murderer.
It was then I first noticed her hands. Her legs were long, her neck was high and slim; but her hands were the shortest and stubbiest I’ve ever seen. The three segments of her fingers added up to the length of the first two on most hands. They were strong, those stubs; and now the brief forefingers made sharp staccato stabs at the tablecloth, while the little fingers arched and twitched.
“You’ve known…a murderer?” It was a deeper voice than she’d used before, and yet it had the tone of a bobbysoxer addressing Frankie’s valet.
But the fact that I’d exchanged maybe twenty sentences with Willis Wythe wasn’t quite enough to keep her keyed up for long. Her fingers knocked off and rested, and she said, “I’ve never known a murderer. With all my work. Oh, I’ve talked to them through jail bars, I’ve seen them in court. I’ve met men who were acquitted…but always justly, I’m sure. If only once…” She turned the eyes on me, and I almost said something I’d’ve been sorry for.
But the girl on my other side wanted the salt, and when I turned back, Hagar asked me if I’d been to the Community Theater lately.
It was a few hours and a lot of drinks later that I was standing with Hagar on the balcony overlooking the Arroyo.
The white sand in the moonlight looked like bleached bones and I said so—which is not the sort of remark I usually make to girls on balconies, but there is no accounting for what happens to a man with Hagar.
One stubby finger twitched slightly. “Death…” Hagar said. “Death is the only power…” Then she faced me abruptly and announced, “I’m a fake.”
I said, “So?” which seemed as plausible an answer as any.
“I write books. I pretend to try to explain why people commit murders. But I know that. You know that. It’s only being human to know that. What I don’t know is the other thing. Why don’t people commit murders? Why are there so few? What is there about killers that makes them…I don’t know…free from whatever hampers all the rest of us?”
It was looking down at the Arroyo that gave me the idea “I know a killer,” I said slowly. “He’s killed forty-nine men. You can meet him tomorrow.”
The balcony rail throbbed under Hagar’s twitching tattoo.
You didn’t regularly see anything like Hagar around the checker tables. But her presence didn’t seem to bother Alonzo any. Things didn’t bother him much.
I’d got to know him pretty well the past few weeks. We kind of liked each other, I guess. And I knew most of his stories, and I couldn’t share Hagar’s excitement when he told about how the Mad Butcher of Clover Hill started singing a hymn just before the trap sprang, or how Mrs. Leroux (whose baby farm was a sort of after-the-fact method of birth control) went stark raving mad on the trap. It was hard to get excited about them anyway, the drab matter-of-fact way he told them. But Hagar sat there with her black eyes fixed on him, and the checkerboard next to us jumped with the thumps of her fingers.
“But I did have one…I guess you might call it a failure,” Alonzo confessed. “Young Willis Wythe… Danged trap went down one inch, and then stuck. Left him standing there with no more damage than you’d suffer from a tight collar. So they take him off. I go to work and oil the trap and test it. Works fine. They put him back on and what do you know? Danged trap sticks again. Three times it happens—never did find out what was wrong.”
“I remember,” Hagar said softly. “The Governor commuted his sentence...then later pardoned him because the women’s organizations made such a to-do.”
“He was guilty,” I said.
Hagar looked at me hastily as though she’d forgotten I was there. “That’s right…you knew the Wythes.” Then back to Alonzo, “And that was your one failure, Mr. Fuss?”
“Dang it,” said Alonzo. “It was fine for him—pardoned and everything. But somehow I never have felt quite right about that.”
He sounded a little guilty, like a doctor who’d lost a prize patient from causes he couldn’t explain.
It was just then that my retired banker tapped me on the shoulder and I withdrew.
I didn’t see either Alonzo or Hagar again for a year. My banker had been talking to his lawyer and to some stuffed shirt calling himself an Investment Counselor. I didn’t much care for the shortsighted ideas they’d been planting in his mind, and it looked like a good notion to stay away from Pasadena for a while.
So it was in a Nebraska paper that I read about the marriage. Hagar Dix, 35, it read, noted criminologist, and Alonzo Fuss, 63, retired professional man.
I spoke out loud in the hotel lobby. “This,” I said, “I gotta see.”
I wasn’t taking any chances on meeting my banker. I went to Alonzo’s home. It was on North Orange Grove, which isn’t South Orange Grove, but is still a pretty comfortable neighborhood. The house looked like it’d been done over recently, and I guessed Hagar was sinking her criminological income into this latest research.
They were glad to see me. There was a lot of talk about how I brought them together and wasn’t it fate and stuff. The talk was more on Alonzo’s level than on Hagar’s.
Alonzo had changed. I thought in my mind that he looked haggard and then I thought what a lousy pun that was and then I thought pun hell! it’s the exact truth. I never did understand just how the marriage was arranged. Hagar never talked about it, and I doubt if Alonzo understood himself. How much does a male spider understand?
Hagar? She looked a little…I don’t know…richer, maybe. Fuller. She could listen to Alonzo now and her fingers stayed still. I couldn’t figure if that was good or bad.
I learned after Alonzo went to bed. “I’m a man that needs his eight hours,” he said, “and I’ve got a championship horseshoe match on in the morning.”
Hagar and I looked at each other while his footsteps echoed off. I said, “Well? Did it work?”
Hagar said, “What do you think?”
I said, “I think it did at first and now it doesn’t. Change your ideas about killing?”
Hagar said, “No. Just my ideas about Alonzo.”
I said, “Because he isn’t a killer after all, is he? He’s just a poor old guy whose job happened to involve death. And maybe if you met Jack the Ripper, his shop talk wouldn’t be so hot either.”
Hagar said nothing.
I stood up for the next speech. I said, “Maybe you’ve been wrong all down the line. Maybe you ought to give a try to—”
She didn’t let me finish. She said, “I met a man. Oh, not quite by chance. Let’s say by premeditated coincidence…” Her fingers twitched on their imaginary drum. “You’ll stay for the weekend, of course?”
“I could, I guess. Do you think I’d find it…rewarding?”
“I’m sure you would. This man is coming. I want you…but then you know him already, don’t you?”
“Who is he?”
“Alonzo’s one failure… Willis Wythe.”
I remembered Willis Wythe as a towheaded kid who was sore at his uncle—pretty much like any other kid you ever knew, except Uncle doesn’t usually wind up with three bullets from the kid’s target pistol. (The Governor decided it was all purely circumstantial evidence when the pressure was turned on him for the pardon.)
I wouldn’t have known this hard, dark man with the lined face and the edgy, bitter voice. But I liked him, and when he talked about the things he’d done in the past years (I guess he was what the Sunday supplements call an Adventurer) I even began to think of angles where maybe we might work together.
We got through Friday night somehow, but even then I was glad I wasn’t Willis. There wasn’t a moment in the evening when either Alonzo or Hagar wasn’t looking at him, and they were looks that there aren’t words for in any books I know.
What Hagar meant you can figure by now. Here is a man who has murdered and escaped. He knows. And he isn’t sixty-three with a potbelly.
Alonzo’s was harder to define. It was a kind of worry. It was like a writer staring at a paragraph that stinks and wondering how the hell to revise.
Willis didn’t understand that look. For once there wasn’t a word said about Alonzo’s former profession; and Willis probably hadn’t even seen him on the one occasion their paths had crossed before. For Willis this was just a weekend with an interesting woman and a dull husband, and he was an Adventurer.
I had a little trouble getting to sleep that night. That’s how I heard the slippered footsteps and the bedroom doors.
Even Alonzo must have noticed the difference in Hagar the next morning. This richness, fullness that I was talking about—it was like it was coming to its final intensity.
I had one chance to speak to Hagar alone. I said, “So now you think you know?” and my mouth twisted as I said it.
Hagar said, “Not yet. Not quite yet…” and Willis came in and we talked about old acquaintances back in Iowa.
That was Saturday, and Saturday night Willis and Hagar went dancing at the Hotel Green.
Alonzo said, “I’m not much of a hand at dancing. Good for her to go out with somebody nearer her own age.” And he meant it, the poor guy, and I sat there and played checkers with him and wondered why I was sticking around.
I was just figuring that it was, in a way, just a standard method of mine in my other line—if things look headed for a crack-up, stick around; there’s no telling what a smart man may pick up out of the wreck—when Alonzo looked up from the checkerboard and said, “It’s Willis that’s come between Hagar and me.”
I didn’t say anything about slippers and doors. Instead I laughed and said, “They’ve only just met. You must think he’s a pretty fast worker.”
“It isn’t that.” He let that denial ride flat for three moves. Then he added, “Failure. You see, Hagar…I’m no kind of a man to be married to her. You know that, son. But she thought I was…I don’t know…kind of powerful, I guess, on account of what I’d… But you see, I wasn’t, because…”
It was the first time I’d ever heard Alonzo talk about anything emotional, and he couldn’t make it. His phrases wouldn’t come straight. He just said “Willis” a couple more times, and once he said, “One hundred percent…”
After the game he sat there until his regular bedtime, just staring at the brand-new radio-phonograph. I couldn’t think why until after he’d gone to bed. Then I remembered. I’d been around when it was delivered the day before. It came in a hell of a big packing case, all bound round with good strong rope.
I waited for Willis in his bedroom. He didn’t like it when he came in and found me there. We could both hear Hagar moving around in the next room. Her fingers drummed on the objects she passed.
Willis said, “Bedroom vigils yet? What gives?”
I said, “Do you know who your host is?”
‘‘I hear he tosses a mean horseshoe.”
So I told him. “And he’s worried,” I added. “You’re the…well, the blot on an otherwise stainless life, you might say. It’s kind of a reproach to Alonzo Fuss that you’re walking around here alive.”
His lean face was tauter than ever. “I’m getting out of here,” he said. We were both silent, and we listened to Hagar’s fingers. His lips softened and he added, “Tomorrow.”
“It isn’t worth it,” I said. “Staying, I mean. I only warned you because…hell, I feel I owe you something.”
He was hard again. “Owe me what?”
“I was out of the state at the time of your trial. I wasn’t even reading newspapers. But I maybe could’ve cleared you and I didn’t. You see, I know Alonzo Fuss’s record is clear. He didn’t need to hang you—you were innocent.”
He loomed over me. “You could have cleared me? And you didn’t?” His heavy fist was balled.
“We’re even,” I said. “I’m giving you your life now. Get out…before Alonzo’s ideas go too far.”
His voice was getting high and sharp. “How could you have cleared me? Why didn’t you?”
I started to tell him how and why. It was then he jumped me. His taut face twisted into curious shapes. His hard lips mouthed ugly words, rising higher and higher.
When I left the silent room, Hagar was waiting for me in the hall. She was in a nightgown that looked as if you’d save it for a bridal night. She put her black eyes on me and said, “I heard a little of it… What happened?”
I told her, just the way I’ve told it above.
I never saw a face do what hers did then. It went blank. Dead blank. Even the eyes…their blackness seemed to go away. There was nothing on the face, nothing at all.
And that emptiness was the most terrible thing I have ever seen.
Alonzo was the first one up the next morning. He was on his way off to the horseshoes by the time I got down to breakfast. I was on my third cup of coffee and the second section of the Times when Hagar came in.
She said, “Have you seen that rope around anywhere?”
“What rope?”
“From the packing case. I thought I’d use part of it to tie up a parcel of books.”
“No, I haven’t seen it.”
She took the first section of the Times with her coffee. She was wonderfully relaxed this morning—calm literally to her fingertips. It was a domestic sort of scene—coffee and newspapers and silence. I liked it.
It was an hour before I began wondering about Willis. Hagar seemed unperturbed when I mentioned him. I wasn’t really perturbed myself until I got no answer to my knock and walked on into his room.
First it was the smell. The day was building to a scorcher and the blood permeated the air. A window was open, and word of the blood had gotten about among the neighborhood’s flies.
I took some fast gulps out the open window before I went near the bed. I don’t know why I touched him. I didn’t have to know he felt cold on that hot day.
Most men do when their heads are missing.
Lieutenant Furman had laryngitis. His voice never rose above a whisper all the time he questioned us.
They were shrewd, economical questions. It wasn’t long before he had a pretty thorough diagram of the three of us and our relations to that headless corpse upstairs. It wasn’t long before he had the cleaver, too. It had been neatly washed, but he spotted the minute stains and knew what the laboratory analysis would do with them.
“You’re intelligent people,” Lieutenant Furman whispered. “I can talk to you.”
Alonzo looked at him with vacant old eyes. Hagar was still cool and poised, still in her casual how-tragic-but-after-all-we-barely-knew-the-man attitude.
“You’re something of a criminologist yourself, Mrs. Fuss,” he whispered. “And death’s no stranger to you, Mr. Fuss.” He turned to me as though wondering how to continue the parallel.
“I’ve been around,” I said helpfully.
“Exactly,” he breathed. “So you all understand that the key to an understanding of this crime lies in the removal of the head. The commonest reason—preventing identification—can hardly apply here; the man’s fingerprints are on file in Iowa. There’d be no hope of, let us say, ringing in a substitute body if he himself wished to disappear.”
Hagar observed coolly, “Clearly, Lieutenant, you are trying to erect logic on an illogical basis. What can you ‘deduce’ from the act of a wandering madman?”
The Lieutenant shrugged. “I do not doubt,” he murmured, “that we will be hearing about that ‘wandering madman’ from the defense. But in the meantime—with all deference to your knowledge of crime, Mrs. Fuss—let us be honest with each other. In all likelihood, we must assume—”
It was just then that the Sergeant came in with something wrapped in bloody newspapers. “Found it just west of here, Lieutenant. Halfway down the slope of the Arroyo. Also found this.” His other hand held a length of rope, such as comes around packing cases.
“You will excuse me,” said the Lieutenant’s confidential voice. He rose, took the package from the Sergeant, and hastened upstairs. The Sergeant stood there in the doorway, looking from the rope in his hands to Alonzo and back again. Conversation did not flourish under the circumstances.
When the Lieutenant returned, his voice came as near as possible to breaking the whispered monotony of his speech. It all but rose to excitement as he announced, “I have made a most interesting discovery. This will fascinate you as a student of murder, Mrs. Fuss.” He paused. I’ve never seen a man in authority yet that didn’t have a touch of ham in him. He held the pause, and finally said, “I have discovered that the head and the body do not fit.”
I jumped. Hagar rose slowly to her feet. Alonzo stared at the rope in the Sergeant’s hands.
“Does this mean, Lieutenant,” said Hagar, “that there is some fraud after all, some confusion?”
“No fraud, Mrs. Fuss.” The whisper was eager. “A little confusion, yes. But I’m sure you can think it through.” He went on slowly, “They don’t fit. Because there is only a body, and a head. How could they fit?”
I hated the man. He was enjoying this scene. But Hagar went calmly on, “Don’t they usually? Heads and bodies? Isn’t it the accepted thing?”
“Not quite. You see, Mrs. Fuss, most use a neck to connect them.”
He let that one sink in. I tried to think fast. The neck was missing. The cleaver had been used twice. The Sergeant began drawing the rope through his fingers.
“Why?” came the whispered question. “The neck has been removed. Perhaps chopped in smaller pieces and…disposed of. But why? Surely there is one reason—because the neck would betray the murderer. Because something about that neck would prove the method of killing and point the directly accusing finger. Because…” Lieutenant Furman held his pause again. Then he whirled, carried away by his own words, and pointed the directly accusing finger. “Because the neck would prove that the corpse was hanged!”
On the last words his voice, for one instant, reached normal volume.
The effect was deafening.
Alonzo rose slowly to his feet. He still looked past the directly accusing finger at the rope. His voice was hardly louder than the Lieutenant’s as he said, “One hundred percent…”
He said nothing else as they took him away.
We were alone in the house now, Hagar and I. The stretcher had gone, and so had the wagon. The lawyer had been telephoned, the plans had been laid for the insanity defense. Suddenly there was nothing but an empty, hot day ahead.
It was the first time that we had ever been completely alone. I looked at Hagar as though I had never seen her before. As indeed I hadn’t. Not this Hagar. Not this ripe, complete, fulfilled woman, with serene black eyes and passive fingers.
I said, “You did it all, you know.”
Hagar bowed her head gracefully. She said, “I know. It was cruel to bring them together. To make Alonzo face what he called his ‘failure.’ I might have foreseen… But I had to know.”
“And now you know?”
“More than you can dream.”
“Not more than I can guess.”
“Guessing is nothing. Nothing.”
“I said you did it. That’s more than guessing.”
She looked at me without expression. “Am I to blame? Any more than you are to blame for introducing me to Alonzo? Every meeting starts ripples—some place those ripples intersect at murder. This was only more…direct than usual.”
“I said you did it. Not caused it.”
She said nothing, but her eyes became interested. Nothing more than that, but interested.
“The Lieutenant’s a glib ham. His reasoning doesn’t hold water for a second. Remove the neck to destroy the evidence of hanging? Nonsense. All removing the neck does is call attention to the neck. Bring to mind the idea of murder by the neck. Suggest hanging, in fact.
“And the mere fact of hanging would be no direct personal proof. Sure, it would point to Alonzo. But only as a lead, not as proof. There’d be no sense to the neck gimmick unless it removed proof, unless the neck positively had to be destroyed because the neck itself was irrefutable proof of the killer’s identity.”
“How?” asked Hagar calmly. “It’s next to impossible to get fingerprints from flesh.”
“You’re on the track,” I said. “He was strangled, wasn’t he? That’s why the neck had to be destroyed. Because you can’t get prints, but you can get the size and shape of the fingers. And yours are unique.”
Hagar glanced down at her incredibly blunt and stubby hands, still restful and twitchless. “You’re a clever man,” she said. “But there’s no point in making a Thing of it, is there? Poor Alonzo is obviously mad. I hadn’t counted on the shock’s doing that. But since he is… He has to be put in a place anyway; is there any reason why he shouldn’t carry…this along with him?”
‘‘None,” I said. Hagar smiled and rose. I stopped her. ‘‘Wait a minute, Hagar.”
“Yes?”
I don’t usually grope for words. I did a little now. “Hagar. Ever since I met you. That dinner. I’ve wondered.’’
“Wondered?”
“Whether I hate you or love you.”
“And now you know?” There was a smile on her lips. I’d never noticed her lips much before. I’ll swear they were never full like that, never so warm-looking.
“Now I know.”
“You hate me, of course.”
“No.”
I moved toward her. She stood still.
I said, “You found what you were looking for. In its damnable way, it’s made you a woman. The twitches are gone. You’re real and warm.”
She didn’t avoid my touch. She didn’t respond either. She said, “And why should I care what you think?”
I said, “Because I’m what you want. I’ve almost said it before. And then I’d think, ‘No boy. You don’t want her enough—not for that.’ But now I know. I know a lot of things. I know why you killed Willis Wythe. Because you thought you’d found it with him, and then you learned he was innocent. Not a murderer. And you hated him because you had been fooled.
“But you’re not fooled now, Hagar. Because I’m what you want. I’m the Wythe murderer.”
The words were coming easier now. They came almost too fast as I rushed on, “Uncle Herman was onto a racket of mine. It was too dangerous. I used the kid’s gun—it was lying around the house—and cleared out fast. I worried some when he was convicted. But hell, a man’s got to look out for himself. That’s what I told Willis last night. That’s why he jumped me, why I had to knock him out and leave him there where you found him.
“I’m it, Baby. I’m your thing, I’ve carried it in me all these years and now—”
Almost imperceptibly, Hagar moved away from me. She stood very straight and her body touched my arm, but it was cold and unyielding.
She said, “You’re what I wanted. Past tense. I was a fool. I thought I could know through a man. I never thought, I never knew…”
The black eyes rested on me with something like pity.
“Goodbye,” she said.
When I answered the doorbell, I found Lieutenant Furman. He said, “The alienists are working the old man over.” His voice was normal now, and I guessed the whisper was a part of the whole ham set-up. “I’ve come back,” he added, “for the murderer.”
I deadpanned. “I thought you proved from the neck, Lieutenant—”
“Snap judgment,” he said. “Sometimes it gets results. But once I thought it over...Look: All that removing the neck does is to call attention to the neck. It’d be worth doing only if some vital positive clue…”
I let him go on. It was my speech almost word for word, and I had to admit I’d underrated the guy.
When he was through, I said, “You’ll find her in there. And no complications this time. I’m admitting that the prints on her neck are mine.”
They argued over me for a while, the sovereign states of California and Iowa. Finally, they decided that California had the stronger case if I should go and retract my confessions, and who trusts a murderer?
That was too bad in a way. It meant the cyanide chamber. Alonzo wouldn’t have approved at all.