Horrible Imaginings

SCREAM WOLF

Although it was a muggy August night in Chicago, the Lieutenant’s smile was as grim and frosty as a December, sunrise over the Loop.

“Let me see if I’ve got it straight so far, Mr. Groener,” he said. “This apartment isn’t your home. You and your wife were visiting Mrs. Labelle, an old friend. You occupied the front bedroom, just back of this living room. The back bedroom was occupied by another guest of Mrs. Labelle’s—a Miss Graves, also an old friend—Mrs. Labelle had the bedroom between.”

The big man sitting opposite the Lieutenant nodded dully, his face turned away from the bridge lamp cascading light on his chair.

“You went to bed about midnight,” the Lieutenant continued. “Mrs. Groener had been drinking heavily. At about two you woke and wanted a cup of coffee. You went back to the kitchen, past the other two bedrooms and through the dining room. While you were heating water, you heard Mrs. Groener scream. You found the bedroom empty. There was a cigarette burning out on the end of the sill of the open window beside a glass half full of straight whiskey. Four stories straight below you made out something turquoise-colored glimmering in the back courtyard.

“Mrs. Groener had been wearing a turquoise-colored long-sleeved nightgown. You knocked on Mrs. Labelle’s bedroom door and told her to call us. Then you hurried down. You were kneeling beside your wife’s dead body when we arrived. Correct?”

The big man slowly turned his head into the light. His face was that of a gaunt old matinee idol under its thatch of silvered dark hair. Then he looked straight at the Lieutenant and held out a steady, spread-fingered left hand.

“Except for one point,” Groener said. “When my wife screamed I didn’t rush back to the bedroom. I finished making my cup of coffee and I drank it first.”

The Lieutenant cocked an eyebrow. The younger blond detective who had been lounging wearily against the wall of the hallway sharply turned his wide face toward the speaker.

“Now and then Mrs. Groener used to scream,” the big man explained, “when she’d been drinking heavily I’d leave the bedroom. It may have been a rebuke or summons to me, or a fighting challenge to the whiskey bottle, or simply an expression of her rather dark evaluation of life. But it had never meant anything more real than that—until tonight.”

“Mrs. Groener was seeing a psychiatrist?” the Lieutenant asked harshly.

“I never was able to get her to,” the big man said. “As I imagine you find in your business, Lieutenant, there’s no real middle course between persuading a person to seek therapy voluntarily and having them forcibly committed to an institution. Mrs. Groener always had the energy be quite sane when necessary.”

The Lieutenant grunted noncommittally. “Well, you certainly seem to have been very long-suffering about it,” he said and then added sharply, “Cool, at any rate.”

Groener smiled bleakly. “I’m an alcoholic myself,” he said. “I know how lonely it gets way out there in the dark. I didn’t used to scream, but I pounded holes in the walls, and woke up to bloody plaster-powdered knuckles… and cigarette burns between my fingers.” He gave his head a little shake as if he’d been dreaming. “Thing is, I managed to quit five years ago. My wife didn’t.”

The long couch creaked as the Lieutenant slightly, shifted his position on the edge of the center of it. He nodded curtly.

“So when Mrs. Groener screamed,” he said, “you finished making your cup of coffee and you drank it. You thought she had screamed simply because she had become unnerved by heavy drinking. You were not unduly alarmed.”

Groener nodded. “I’m glad you didn’t say DTs,” he said. “Shows you know what it’s all about. Mrs. Groener never had DTs. If she had, I’d have been able to do something about her. I took my time drinking the coffee, by the way. I was hoping she’d be passed out again by the time I got to the bedroom.”

“This scream she gave—how loud would you say it was?”

“Pretty loud,” Groener said thoughtfully, “Almost loud enough, I’d say, to wake the people in the flat across the court—except that people in a big city never seem to bother about a scream next door.”

“Some of them don’t! Then it would have sounded still louder to Mrs. Labelle, or even Miss Graves, than to you. One of them might have been waked by it, or been awake, and gone to your wife’s bedroom.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” the big man disagreed. “They were familiar with Mrs. Groener’s emotional tendencies. They’re both old friends.”

“They still might have gone.”

Groener shook his head. “I’d have heard them.”

The Lieutenant frowned. “Has it occurred to you that one of the women may have gone to your wife before she screamed?”

Groener’s answering gaze was stony, “I’d have certainly heard them if they had,” he said.

The Lieutenant stood up and jerked his head at the blond detective, who came toward him.

“Through with me?” Groener asked.

“Yes,” the Lieutenant said. “When you get back to the dining room will you ask Cohan—that’s the other detective—to send in Miss Graves?”

Groener nodded and started off, his feet dragging. When he came opposite the bedroom he and his wife had occupied, he paused and his shoulders tightened wincingly. The Lieutenant looked away, but when the footsteps didn’t resume, he turned quickly back. The big man had disappeared.

The Lieutenant strode to the bedroom door. Groener was standing inside, just looking. The Lieutenant started to bark a question, but just then the big man’s steady left hand moved toward the bed in a slow curving gesture, as if he were caressing something invisible.

It was a bedroom with a lot of little tables and stacked cardboard boxes besides the usual furnishings—evidently used by Mrs. Labelle for storage purposes as well as guests—but a broad clear path led through the orderly clutter from the far side of the double bed to the large black square of the open window.

Standing two yards behind Groener’s back, the Lieutenant now became aware of the source of a high tinkling noise that had been fretting the edges of his mind for the past half hour. A small oscillating fan was going on a table beside the bed. Hanging from a yardstick stuck in a top dresser drawer a couple of feet from it was a collection of small oblongs and triangles of thin glass hanging on strings. When the stream of air swept them they jingled together monotonously.

The Lieutenant stepped up beside Groener, touched him on the shoulder, and indicated the arrangement beside the bed. Behind them the blond detective cleared his throat uneasily.

“My wife hated all little noises at night,” Groener explained. “Voice and tuned-down TVs and such. She used those Chinese windchimes to blur them out.”

“Was she quite a small woman?” the Lieutenant asked softly.

“How did you know that?” Groener asked as he started for the door. The Lieutenant pointed at the dresser mirror. It was turned down so that it cut off both their heads and the big man’s shoulders.

The Lieutenant and the blond detective listened to his footsteps clumping noisily down the long uncarpeted hall. They heard the frosted glass door to the dining room open and close.

The blond detective grinned. “I’ll bet he learned to walk loud to please his wife,” he said rapidly. “My mother-in-law does the same thing when she stays overnight with us. Claims it’s so as not to scare Ursie and me—we’ll know she’s coming. Say, this guy’s wife must have been nuttier than a fruit cake.”

“There are all kinds of alkies, Zocky,” the Lieutenant said heavily, “with different degrees of nuttiness and sanity. You notice anything about this room, Zocky?”

“Sure, it’s not messed up much for all the stuff in it,” the other answered instantly.

“That mean anything to you?”

Detective Zocky shrugged. “Takes all kinds to make a world,” he said. “My mother-in-law’s an ashtray-washing fanatic. Never dries ‘em either.”

They heard the dining room door open again. As they started back for the living room, Zocky whispered unabashed, “Hey, did you notice the near-empty fifth tucked behind the head of the bed?”

“No, I merely deduced the bottle would be there like Nero Wolfe,” the Lieutenant told him. “Thanks for the confirmation. Incidentally, quite a few people have a morbid fear of dirt, including cigar ashes. It’s called mysophobia. And now shut off that fan!”

Miss Graves was as tall for a woman as Groener for a man and even more gaunt, but it was a coldly beautiful gauntness. She dressed it well in a severe black Chinese dress of heavy silk that hugged her knees. Her hair was like a silver fleece.

She seemed determined to be hostile, for as she sat down she glared at the Lieutenant and said to him, “I’m a labor organizer!” as if that made them lifelong enemies.

“You are, huh?” the Lieutenant responded, thumbing a notebook and playing up to her hostility in a way that made Zocky grin behind her back. “Then what do you know about Mrs. Groener? An alcoholic, wasn’t she?”

“She was a thoroughly detestable woman!” Miss Graves snapped back sharply. “The only decent thing she ever did was what she did tonight, and she did that much too late! I hated her!”

“Does that mean you were in love with her husband?”

“I—Don’t be stupid, officer!”

“Stupid, my eye! There has to be some reason, since you stayed close friends—at least outwardly.” He held his aggressive, forward-hunching pose a moment, then leaned back, put away his notebook, smiled like a gentle tomcat, and said culturedly, “Hasn’t there now, Miss Graves? Most of these complications have a psychological basis.”

She did a double-take, then the tension seemed to go out of her. “You’re right, of course,” she said. “I knew Mr. Groener in college, before he ever met her, and after that I saw a bit of them both from time to time, through Mrs. Labelle and others.”

Her voice deepened. “I watched him misuse his best years on too many high-pressure jobs, trying to be too successful too soon—because of her. I watched him become an alcoholic because of her. Finally I saw him drag himself out of that morass, but remain tied to her more closely than ever. She was his weakness, or rather, she brought out the weakness in him.”

Miss Graves shook her head thoughtfully. “Actually I no longer hated her when she killed herself—because during the last years she wasn’t at all sane. It wasn’t just the liquor, understand. Mrs. Groener scribbled paranoid comments in the few books she read. I found some in one I loaned her. She wrote wild complaining letters to people which sometimes cost Mr. Groener jobs.

“As for her social behavior—well, they were staying here because they’d been put out of their last apartment on account of her screaming and loud abusive talk. And she did all sorts of queer little things. For instance, when I came in yesterday she was drinking in the sunroom and she had her left wrist tied to the arm of her chair with a scarf. I asked her why, and she giggled something about supposing I thought she was fit to be tied. I imagine you’ve seen that horrible little wind-and-glass machine she used to blank out the sounds of reality?”

The Lieutenant nodded.

“It wasn’t the first time she tried to commit suicide, either,” Miss Graves went on thoughtfully.

“No? Mr. Groener didn’t tell us anything about that.”

“He wouldn’t! He was always trying to cover up for her, and he still is! It’s a wonder he didn’t try to hide from you that she was an alcoholic.”

“About this earlier suicide attempt,” the Lieutenant prompted.

“I don’t know much about it except that it happened and she used sleeping pills.”

“I take it you don’t live here regularly, Miss Graves.”

“Oh no! Mrs. Labelle invited me yesterday with the idea of old friends rallying around the Groeners. It wasn’t a good idea. Mrs. Groener was hostile toward me, as always, and he was simply miserable.”

“About Mrs. Groener,” the Lieutenant said. “Besides her hostility did she seem depressed?”

Miss Graves shook her head. “No—just a little crazier than last time. And thinner than ever, a bunch of match-sticks. Her drinking had got to that stage. We had some drinks after dinner—not Mr. Groener, of course—and she got very drunk and loud. We could hear her ranting at him for a half hour after we all went to bed—about how he shouldn’t have let them be put out of their apartment and about how he always had to be surrounded by his old girl friends and—”

“Meaning you and Mrs. Labelle?” the Lieutenant cut in.

Miss Graves made a little grimace as she nodded. “Oh yes. Mrs. Groener firmly believed that any other halfway good-looking women in the same room with her husband was his mistress or had been at some time in the past. A fixed delusion though she’d only come out with it at a certain stage of her drinking. I knew that, but it still upset me. I had trouble getting to sleep.”

“You stayed awake?”

“No, I dozed. Her scream awakened me. I started to get up, but then I remembered it was just part of the act. I lay there and after awhile I heard Mr. Groener coming back from the kitchen.”

“Had you heard him go?”

“No, that must have been while I dozed.”

“Did you hear the door to the dining room open or close? It’s just outside your bedroom.”

“I don’t believe so. No, I didn’t. It must have been standing open.”

“Do you sleep with your bedroom door open or closed?”

“Ope—” Miss Graves frowned. “That’s strange. I thought I left it open, but it was closed when the scream woke me up.”

The Lieutenant looked at her sharply. “Then are you quite sure it was Mr. Groener you heard coming back from the kitchen?”

“Certainly. I couldn’t be mistaken. He always made a lot of noise, even in slippers.”

The Lieutenant grunted. “And when did you finally get up?”

“When Mr. Groener came rushing into the hall and knocked on Mrs. Labelle’s door and told her to call the police.”

The Lieutenant stood up. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to ask you,” he said quietly. “Are you Mr. Groener’s mistress—or were you once?”

“No, never,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Groener was an attractive man, but she spoiled him for everyone.”

“But now that she’s no longer here…” The Lieutenant left that question hanging in the air and so did Mrs. Graves, though it seemed to start something working in her that almost had the look of hope. “That’s all then,” he told her. “Thank you. Ask Cohan to send in Mrs. Labelle.”

When they were alone, Detective Zocky said, “Hey, I’ll bet you got the same idea as me. There was no trigger for this suicide. But what if Groener had been having his coffee in Miss Grave’s bedroom, and his old lady knew it or slipped out and caught them. That’d make a wow of a trigger.”

“I take it Miss Graves is a dike no longer,” the Lieutenant said. “Ambidextrous at least.”

“Hell, that was just descriptive. I’d say Groener and this dame are practically the same type.”

“Yes, they’re both tall, good-looking people with gray hair,” the Lieutenant observed drily. “Bound to start making violent love to each other every chance they get.”

“Well, what the hell, it was a perfect set-up for them,” Zocky persisted. “The wife passed out and Mrs. Labelle the tolerant type, no doubt. I know this Groener puts on the pious reformed-alky act, but most ex-boozers his age do that. Why, my father-in-law—” He stopped talking as the dining room door opened and high heels clicked in the hall.

Mrs. Labelle was quite as sylph-bodied as Miss Graves but she dressed it in thinner silk—crimson. Under the coiled and gleaming blonde hair her face looked much younger. Its expression was teen-age, in fact, avid and pert. But there were more tiny wrinkles around the corners of her eyes and mouth than there had been around those of Miss Graves.

“Do I sit there?” she asked, pointing at the brightly lit chair under the bridge lamp before the Lieutenant could. She took it, tucking her feet under her and carefully drawing down her skirt after giving him a flash of high leg.

“This is quite an event for me,” Mrs. Labelle announced. “I’ve always been fascinated by police work. You must find out so many strange things about how people behave in funny situations.”

“Right now I’m just looking for a few everyday facts,” the Lieutenant said. “How did the Groeners happen to be staying here?”

“They’d lost their apartment without warning. I always feel very sympathetic toward them, because Mr. Labelle is an alcoholic too. We’re getting divorced. He lives at a hotel. Perhaps you can tell me what makes alcoholics tick, officer. They’re beyond me. I always told Mrs. Groener that if she’d just control her drinking—not stop altogether and get gloomy like her husband—but just take enough to feel bright and happy and relaxed—”

“Miss Graves now,” the Lieutenant interrupted. “How did she happen to be here?”

“I invited her. I thought the Groeners ought to have all their old friends around them.”

“And perhaps you were interested in seeing how people behave in funny situations,” the Lieutenant said. “For instance, Mrs. Groener thinking her husband’s mistress was sleeping in the same apartment.”

Mrs. Labelle giggled. “Oh that,” she said scornfully. “Mr. Groener chased every pretty woman in a lazy secret sort of way, but if he’d ever caught one he’d have scurried right back to his wife. I think she kept throwing it up to him just to keep him in line. I’m quite a psychologist—”

“Okay,” the Lieutenant said. “Now about tonight. Did you hear the Groeners quarreling after you went to bed?”

“I wouldn’t call it that. Mrs. Groener just let off steam for awhile as any woman will. I listened. It didn’t make much sense in her case. But it was interesting.”

“And when they quieted down you went to sleep?”

“Oh my no!” Mrs. Labelle gave a little wriggle and flirted her coiled blonde hair. “I had too many exciting things to think about.”

“Good! I want you to tell me exactly what you heard in the way of footsteps and other noises. It’s important you get them in the right order. Mrs. Groener quieted down. Suppose you start from there.”

Mrs. Labelle leaned forward, hugging her elbows, and briefly closed her eyes in happy concentration. “First a long time passed. It must have been an hour or more because I’d almost run out of things to think about and was wondering if I shouldn’t take a sleeping pill. Mrs. Groener’s windchimes were beginning to get on my nerves, though I’d hardly heard them at first. Then I heard Mr. Groener go clumping down the hall.

“I called to him, because I had some hints to give him about how to handle Mrs. Groener. But my door was closed and he didn’t hear me. Then I heard his footsteps stop for a moment and a door close. A moment later I heard him going on to the kitchen.”

“Are you sure about that?” the Lieutenant asked “Mightn’t he have been going into Miss Grave’s bedroom? Think hard, please, before you answer.”

Mrs. Labelle laughed. “Not a chance in the world. He’s scared of her. You know why? Because she’s actually been in love with him her whole life and too stuck-up to do anything about it. That’s why she never married. He wouldn’t have gone into her bedroom even if she’d begged him to. Anyhow, I know he must have gone on to the kitchen, because right away I heard him banging around out there making coffee. Men! After awhile it got quiet and then Mrs. Groener screamed.”

Mrs. Labelle shivered and momentarily closed her eyes. “It was a pretty dreadful scream, even for her, and just a little later there was a thud, as if she’d fallen out of bed. Only it wasn’t quite the same. If my window hadn’t been closed, I’d have probably heard the difference better and been the one to discover her. Just suppose I’d looked out and seen her perching on the sill ten feet away! That would have been a psychological challenge! As it was, I almost did get up though I knew her tricks. But when I waited, half-expecting to hear something else, there wasn’t a sound. Except the windchimes, of course.”

“Think carefully, Mrs. Labelle,” the Lieutenant said. “Wasn’t there some other sound then? Didn’t Miss Graves get up? Or didn’t Mr. Groener at least start back from the kitchen or make some kind of noise?”

“No, officer, it was all quiet as death—oh, I didn’t mean to say that, but it was. Mr. Groener stayed in the kitchen a long time—long enough for two or three cups of coffee, I’d say. I thought about a sleeping pill again and finally I took one and about then Mr. Groener came clumping back. I might have called to him, but I’d just taken the pill. Right after that he came charging out of the bedroom and pounded on my door and told me Mrs. Groener had jumped and to call the police. That’s all.” Mrs. Labelle buried her head in her arms and let out a large sigh.

“Thank you,” the Lieutenant said. “Just a couple more questions now. Miss Graves said Mrs. Groener had tried suicide before. Do you know anything about that?”

Mrs. Labelle laughed. “That was a false alarm. A few months ago he found her almost passed out with an empty bottle of sleeping pills beside her. He started to force warm water down her and he’d just got the waste basket for her to throw up in when he noticed the sleeping pills scattered at the bottom of it. She just wanted to make him think she’d swallowed them. People are funny, aren’t they? What’s the other question?”

“Miss Graves said that yesterday she saw Mrs. Groener drinking—in your sunroom, she said—with her left wrist tied to the arm of her chair with her scarf. Know anything about that?”

“No, it sounds pointless. The sunroom’s that alcove behind you, officer, with the big windows. Wait a minute—I do remember seeing Mrs. Groener do that years ago. It was Oklahoma. It was sold out. We were sitting in the second balcony, and she had her scarf wrapped around her wrist and the arm of her seat. I thought she’d done it without thinking.”

“Huh!” The Lieutenant stood up and started to pace. He noticed Mrs. Labelle. “That’ll be all,” he told her. “When you go back to the dining room would you ask Mr. Groener if I could see him again?”

“I certainly will,” Mrs. Labelle said, popping up with another flash of leg. She smiled and rippled her eyelids. “You gentlemen have given me some fascinating sidelights on life.”

“You’re certainly welcome,” Zocky assured her, gazing after her appreciatively as she click-clicked down the hall. Then he said to the Lieutenant, “Well, that kills my theory of a suicide trigger. I guess Groener really is the pious type who’d never get out of line.”

“Yeah,” the Lieutenant agreed abstractedly, still pacing. “Yeah, Zocky, I’m afraid he is, though ‘pious’ may not be just the right word. Scared of stepping over the line comes closer.”

“But this Labelle’s a real odd cookie—reminds me of that holdup girl last month. She thinks everything’s funny.”’

“You got a point there, Zocky.”

“A real bright-eyes too, despite her barbiturates and booze.”

“Some it takes that way, Zocky.”

“Of course she’s real attractive for her age, but that’s not here or there.”

“Maybe not, Zocky.”

“You know what? When you talked to her about Groener’s supposed mistress I think she thought you meant her.”

“Okay, okay, Zocky!”

When Groener arrived, looking more tired than ever, the Lieutenant stopped pacing and said, “Tell me, did your wife have many phobias? Especially agoraphobia, claustrophobia, acrophobia? Those are—”

“I know,” Groener said, settling himself. “Fear of open spaces, dread of being shut in, fear of heights. She had quite a few irrational fears, but not those particularly. Oh, perhaps a touch of claustrophobia—”

“All right,” the Lieutenant said, cutting him short. “Mr. Groener, from what I’ve heard tonight your wife didn’t commit suicide.”

Groener nodded. “I’m glad you understand alcoholics aren’t responsible for the things they do in black-out.”

Horrible Imaginings

“She was murdered,” the Lieutenant finished.

Groener frowned at him incredulously.

“I’ll give you a quick run-down on what really happened tonight, as I see it, and you can tell me what you think,” the Lieutenant said.

He started to pace again as if he were too wound-up not to. “You went for your coffee. Mrs. Labelle called to you through her door as you passed. You didn’t want any of her child psychology—or anything else from her either. But it told you she was wide awake and listening to everything. Then you came to Miss Graves’s bedroom and the door was open and you saw her sleeping quietly, her silver fleece of hair falling across the pillow.”

Groener shook his head and moved his spread-fingered left hand sideways. But the Lieutenant continued, “It struck you how you’d wasted decades of your life caring for and being faithful to a woman who was never going to get well or any more attractive. You thought of what a wonderful life you could have had if you’d taken another direction. But that direction was closed to you now—you’d been spoiled for it. You’d built up inhibitions within yourself that wouldn’t let you overturn the applecart. If you’d tried to, you’d have suffered agonies of guilt and remorse. It would have killed all enjoyment. So you closed Miss Graves’s door, because you couldn’t bear to watch her.”

“Wait a minute—” Groener protested.

“Shut up,” the Lieutenant told him dispassionately. “As you closed the door you felt a terrific spasm of rage at the injustice of it. All of that rage was directed against your wife. You’d had feelings like that before, but never had a situation brought them so tormentingly home to you. For one thing you’d just been treated like a worm by the woman you were tied to in front of the woman you desired with a consuming physical passion. It was tearing you apart. You’d come to the end of your rope of hope. Five years had fully demonstrated that your wife would never stop drinking or mentally intimidating you.

“You thought of all the opportunities of happiness and pleasure you’d passed up without benefit to her, or yourself—or anybody. You suddenly saw how you could do it now without much risk to yourself, and how afterwards perhaps everything would be different for you. You could still take the other direction. What you had in mind was bad, but your wife had been asking for it. You knew you could no longer ever get free without it. It was a partly irrational but compulsive psychological barrier that nothing but your wife’s death could topple. The thought of what you were going to do filled you like black fire, so there was no room in your mind for anything else.”

“Really, Lieutenant, this—”

“Shut up. Your plan hung on knowing Mrs. Labelle was awake—that and knowing that she and Miss Graves were both on to your wife’s screaming trick, if that should come up. You started making coffee—and even more noise than you usually do—and then you took off your slippers and you walked back to the bedroom without making a sound. Or if you did make a few slight, creaking-floorboard sounds, you figured the wind-chimes would cover them up.

“Yes, Mr. Groener, you’re a man who normally makes a lot of noise walking, so your wife wouldn’t accuse you of sneaking around. So much noise, in fact, that it’s become a joke among your friends. But when you want to, or even just when your mind’s on something else, you walk very quietly. You did it earlier this evening right in front of me when you went in the bedroom. You disappeared that time without a sound.

“You found your wife asleep, still passed out from the drinks. You carefully moved back what light furniture and stuff there was between the bed and the wide-open window. You wanted a clear pathway and it didn’t occur to you that a drunk going from the bed to the window under her own power would have bumped and probably knocked over a half dozen things.”

The Lieutenant’s voice hardened. “You grabbed your wife—she got out one scream—and you picked her up—she weighed next to nothing—and you pitched her out the window. Then you stood there listening a minute. This was the hump, you thought. But nobody called or got up or did anything. So for a final artistic touch you put your wife’s bedtime drink and one of her burnt-out lipstick-stained cigarettes on the windowsill. You’ve got to watch out for artistic touches, Groener, because they’re generally wrong. Then you glided back to the kitchen, finished the coffee act, and came back noisy.”

The Lieutenant quit pacing and paused, but Groener just stared at him—incredulously, almost stupifiedly, but still steady as a rock. Zocky shot an apprehensive look at his superior.

“The important thing you overlooked,” the Lieutenant went on relentlessly, “was that I’d find out your wife was an acrophobe, and that her dread of heights was so great, sober or drunk, that she’d tie her arm to her chair when she was merely sitting near a big window or up on a theater balcony. To suggest that such a person would commit suicide by jumping is utterly implausible. To imply that she’d preface it by sitting or leaning on the window ledge having a last drink and smoke is absolutely unbelievable.”

The Lieutenant paused and narrowed his eyes before adding, “Moreover, Mr. Groener, quietly as you walked back to the bedroom, did you really suppose you accomplished that so silently that Mrs. Labelle’s sharp ears wouldn’t catch the sound of your footsteps?”

Groener roused himself with an obvious effort. “I… I… This is all quite absurd, Lieutenant. Mrs. Labelle…” He made the usual gesture with his left hand. “You can’t really believe that.”

He looked at his left hand. So did the detectives. It was shaking and as he continued to stare it began to shake more violently. The tendons stood out whitely as he stiffened it, but the shaking didn’t stop.

Groener’s tight-pressed lips lengthened in a grin but the corners of his mouth wouldn’t turn up. “This is embarrassing,” he said. “Must be embarrassing to you too. First time I’ve had the shakes in five years.”

But the shaking only became convulsive.

“All right,” he said, closing his eyes, “I did it.”

The shaking stopped.

After awhile he went on gently, “Just about as you’ve described it. I was insane to think I could ever get away with it. I suppose your doctor noticed that her neck had been broken before she fell. He probably deduced it from the tear in her scalp where I’d jerked her head back by the hair.”

“No,” the Lieutenant said, “but he will now. Zocky, would you get Cohan? Tell the ladies Mr. Groener’s coming with us to make a statement at the station. Tell them he doesn’t want to speak to either of them now. I imagine that’s the way you want it, Groener?” The other nodded.

After Zocky went off, Groener said, “Would you tell me one thing?”

“I’ll try to.”

“How did you know her hair looked like a silver fleece?”

The Lieutenant flushed. “Oh that—please excuse it. I was just blasting away at you. The words came.”

Zocky returned with the third detective. They opened the front door and started down the stairs. The Lieutenant told Cohan to go first with Groener.

Zocky said to the Lieutenant in a gruff whisper, “Hey, I gave you a right steer on that walking loud on purpose business, didn’t I?”

“Yes, Zocky, you did.”

“I don’t like this case, though,” the blond detective went on. “This Groener’s not a bad guy. Think of listening to those chimes night after night!”

“If they were all bad guys, our job would be easy.”

“Yeah. Say, I just realized we don’t know any of their first names—not Groener’s or either of the dames.”

“Cohan will have them,” the Lieutenant said. “But that’s a very important point about detective work you’ve just made, Zocky. Never know their first names.”