I left Mr. Winkley in my room and went looking for the Colonel. I figured that with both my doors closed and the chicken wire on the window, there was absolutely no way Mr. Winkley was going to leave my room. I didn’t want him getting in trouble.
I started down the stairs and I heard the Colonel and Elsie talking in her parlor. He must have just come in from his walk.
“We’ll put a stop to this right now,” he said.
I was going down the stairs and he was coming up. I started to whisper to him about Mr. Winkley, but he grabbed my arm and turned me around. I didn’t know he was that strong.
“We have to talk,” he said.
He held onto my arm as we walked up the stairs. When we turned onto the hallway he flung me up against the wall so fast I didn’t even see it coming. I thought that if he wasn’t quite a real colonel, he’d probably been something close to it. My side was hurting more and more from when I fell off the ladder, and him grabbing and twisting me wasn’t helping it any.
“You have been talking to Howie,” he said. “Elsie heard everything.”
“Mr. Winkley went through the door,” I said.
“Oh, did he?”
“I forgot to close Nancy’s window. He comes in the window and goes out through the door. I can show you how he does it.”
Francine came in from the street and was climbing the stairs. I wanted to see if she still was carrying the blanket, and if she had the statue I had to get it before Howie did.
The Colonel had me by the arm and he walked me to Nancy’s door. Every time I tried to turn my head back to see Francine, he’d push me. He put his other hand in his pocket and took out Nancy’s key, opened the door and pushed me in ahead of him and closed the door just as Francine made the top of the stairs. I heard her go into her room.
“Show me,” he said. I pushed the panel out and showed him.
“I see,” he said. “Do you think the killer went out by way of the panel?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s too small. But I think it was Roy.”
“Perhaps Roy trained Mr. Winkley to disengage the locks so that he could get in.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Then, after Roy left the room, Mr. Winkley engaged the locks and came out through the panel.”
“Well, maybe, but I don’t think Mr. Winkley is that smart.”
“I don’t think so either, Willy.”
Then something just popped into my head.
“I know!” I said. “After he killed Nancy, he pushed open the panel like this …”
I pushed open the panel—and it was the lower panel on the left side looking at it from inside the room, and the hinges were on that side too—with my left hand and kept my hand in there, turned the door knob with my right hand, stepped out into the hall and grabbed the edge of the panel in my right hand to hold it open, pulled out my left hand so that I was standing in the hall holding the panel open, and closed the door. Then I got down on my knees and pushed my right arm into the room and I was reaching for the locks when the Colonel, who was still inside the room, grabbed onto my hand. I didn’t like him grabbing my hand like that.
“That will be enough,” he said. He let go of my hand and I pulled my arm out of the door and rubbed my hand against my pant-leg and went back in the room.
“So you think that’s how Roy did it?” he said.
“I know that’s how he did it,” I said.
“You’re the killer.”
My stomach fell when he said that.
“What?” I said. “That’s crazy.”
“Suppose you’re the killer. We know how you got out, but how did you get in?”
I had to think about that. Then I had an idea.
“Suction cup!” I said. “He pulled the panel open with a suction cup, reached in and unlocked the door. I bet that’s just how Roy got in.”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think so. You’re sure it was Roy, are you?”
“Pretty sure; he’s a drug dealer. He sells drugs to little kids.”
“Something tells me it wasn’t Roy. You overlooked one thing: Roy has only one arm; his right. Put your left hand in your pocket and try again.”
Facing the door from the inside of the room, I had to reach my right arm across my body to push open the panel, and even when I turned around so that my back was to the door, there was no way to work my body around for any part of me—foot, teeth, or anything—to hold the panel open from outside the room so that I could step into the hallway and close the door, keeping the panel open. I tried every which way, and I couldn’t do it with one arm.
“It was Howie,” I said; “or maybe Francine.”
“I see that as highly unlikely,” he said. I got up to my feet and he walked around me and stood between me and the door.
“Geez Colonel, that would mean that the only two left are you and me, and it sure wasn’t either one of us.”
We heard Howie’s footsteps in the hallway. The Colonel put his finger to his lips and Howie stopped outside the door. Then he started up again and kept walking down the hall.
“Get a pair of rubber gloves,” the Colonel said. I got a pair from under the sink and tossed them to him and he pulled them on and didn’t take his eyes off me.
He closed and latched Nancy’s window, put her key back in her pocketbook, and wiped our prints off the door knob with his handkerchief. Then he opened the door and looked to make sure that nobody was out there, and nodded to me to go out in the hall. He followed me out, closed the door and locked it with another key that he must have had made from Nancy’s key.
“I now close and lock the door on the investigation,” he said. “We never entered this room subsequent to Nancy’s death. Come with me, Willy.”
He led me into his room and put a chair in the middle of the floor under the light bulb and had me sit in it. He reached up and turned on the light. I was sick and dizzy, and the light bulb was swinging. The Colonel was pacing around me, making like he was thinking, and then he’d stop and point his finger at me and say something, take a couple of steps, and say something else.
“You sometimes forget things, don’t you Willy? You don’t always tell the truth. Now think, and think hard, because your life depends upon it. After you left Nancy’s room the night she died, what was on your mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“She was planning to leave. She had just withdrawn a large amount of money from the bank.”
“I didn’t know.”
“But you said she told you.”
“About leaving, not about the money! And she didn’t say she was leaving; she said she wasn’t leaving. She said she wasn’t going anywhere!”
“You knew she was leaving because she told you she wasn’t? You were in love with her, weren’t you?”
“No! Yes! I don’t know!” He had me all confused. I was coughing and I had the hiccups.
“You loved her but she didn’t love you. She was going away with Roy, and you hated Roy. The police will conclude that while you were working on her door you saw the panel was loose and that gave you an idea. You killed her, took the statue as a souvenir, and attempted to frame Roy.”
“No! I didn’t kill anybody! I swear I didn’t!”
“Now listen carefully, Willy: The dumpster in back of The Morpheum is always emptied at 8:15 a.m. on Thursday, which is tomorrow. If the killer is not caught by then, in all probability he never will be, provided he disposes of the statue. He might, uh, place it in a bag, break it into small pieces, and toss the bag into the river. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“You think I killed her! I didn’t! We have to catch the real killer before they empty the dumpster! There isn’t much time, Colonel!”
He shook his head.
“When you were searching in the dumpster,” he said, “I told you to look for paint thinner. Immediately, before you even had time to look, you said, ‘There’s no can of paint thinner in here.’ I went back to the dumpster with a stepladder and I saw the paint thinner in plain sight. The next day it was gone. There must be an explanation, I thought. I must be mistaken. And so, in the hope that my suspicions would prove to be unfounded, I led you to believe that I had located a critical piece of evidence, the paint thinner. Then you left my room and went directly to the supply closet, unlocked the door and looked inside, all the while glancing furtively up and down the hall. Then you relocked the supply closet and left. You didn’t see me watching you from around the corner. After you left, I looked in the supply closet. The paint thinner, the very same paint thinner that had been in the dumpster, was locked in the supply closet, to which you have the only key.”
“How did you get into the supply closet?”
“That is not important. Now Willy, you are not required at this point to tell me or anybody anything, but you must try to remember what happened. Tell me about the chloroform.”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean you don’t remember?”
“I remember the paint thinner, but not the chloroform.”
“It may be easier to remember if we start at the end and work toward the beginning. Do you remember putting a can of paint thinner in the supply closet?”
“No! Well, yeah; I guess maybe.”
“Why did you hide the paint thinner in the supply closet?”
“It’s kind of a long story,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him, because he might tell Elsie, and then Howie and I would both get in trouble with her for taking money to buy things we already had; but I decided that I’d better come clean and tell the Colonel everything.
“When I found the paint thinner in the dumpster, I had a receipt from Peavey’s …”
“Your having a receipt is irrelevant. This is not about petty shoplifting; this is about the murder of a young woman. Do you even realize how serious this is?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t murder anybody. Anyway, it wasn’t my receipt; it was Elsie’s. It was in her trash basket.”
“Do you expect me to believe that Elsie bought the paint thinner and made the chloroform?”
“No. We were just playing a trick on her.”
“We?”
“I know now that it was wrong. I’m sorry and we never should have done it, but it’s not that big a deal and the cops can’t prove anything.”
“We?”
“Yeah, me and Howie. It was all Howie’s idea. He showed me how to do it.”
The Colonel didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I knew you wouldn’t and couldn’t have done this by yourself,” he said. “It seems that Howie manipulated you into doing something that you never would have done otherwise. He probably presented it as some fantastical game, and you were merely acting out the role he assigned you without fully realizing the consequences.”
“You’re not going to tell Elsie, are you?”
He stood looking at the window for a while.
“You were once my friend,” he said, “and so I will help you if I can; but you must tell the truth. I will have some consolation in knowing that at least you didn’t do it for the money.”
“Howie said we’d split fifty-fifty, right down the middle.”
The Colonel staggered like he was drunk, and I helped him into a chair. He was looking off into space and I don’t know if he even saw me.
“You did it for the money,” he said, and then his eyes got glassy and he was going into a trance.
“The last time it was only three dollars,” I said.
By then he was off in space and he wasn’t listening.
“You murdered that innocent girl …” he said.
“What? Where’d you get that crazy idea? You don’t understand! Elsie would give me and Howie money to buy supplies, and then we’d go out and bring in stuff we already had and show her the receipt, and we’d keep the money! It was wrong, but we didn’t kill anybody!”
I waved my hand in front of his face and snapped my fingers. I even grabbed his shoulders and shook him, but he didn’t pay any attention.
“Why don’t you ever listen to me?” I said. “You don’t listen!”