She came upright with a smooth motion and stared at me blankly. Spencer let out a noise of some kind.
“Roger killed her,” I said, “and you also know that.”
“Did he tell you?” she asked quietly.
“He didn’t have to. He did give me a couple of hints. He would have told me or someone in time. It was tearing him to pieces not to.”
She shook her head slightly. “No, Mr. Marlowe. That was not why he was tearing himself to pieces. Roger didn’t know he had killed her. He had blacked out completely. He knew something was wrong and he tried to bring it to the surface, but he couldn’t. The shock had destroyed his memory of it. Perhaps it would have come back and perhaps in the last moments of his life it did come back. But not until then. Not until then.”
Spencer said in a sort of growl: “That sort of thing just doesn’t happen, Eileen.”
“Oh yes, it does,” I said. “I know of two well established instances. One was a blackout drunk who killed a woman he picked up in a bar. He strangled her with a scarf she was wearing fastened with a fancy clasp. She went home with him and what went on then is not known except that she got dead and when the law caught up with him he was wearing the fancy clasp on his own tie and he didn’t have the faintest idea where he got it.”
“Never?” Spencer asked. “Or just at the time?”
“He never admitted it. And he’s not around any more to be asked. They gassed him. The other case was a head wound. He was living with a rich pervert, the kind that collects first editions and does fancy cooking and has a very expensive secret library behind a panel in the wall. The two of them had a fight. They fought all over the house, from room to room, the place was a shambles and the rich guy eventually got the low score. The killer, when they caught him, had dozens of bruises on him and a broken finger. All he knew for sure was that he had a headache and he couldn’t find his way back to Pasadena. He kept circling around and stopping to ask directions at the same service Station. The guy at the service station decided he was nuts and called the cops. Next time around they were waiting for him.”
“I don’t believe that about Roger,” Spencer said. “He was no more psycho than I am.”
“He blacked out when he was drunk,” I said.
“I was there. I saw him do it,” Eileen said calmly.
I grinned at Spencer. It was some kind of grin, not the cheery kind probably, but I could feel my face doing its best.
“She’s going to tell us about it,” I told him. “Just listen. She’s going to tell us. She can’t help herself now.”
“Yes, that is true,” she said gravely. “There are things no one likes to tell about an enemy, much less about one’s own husband. And if I have to tell them publicly on a witness stand, you are not going to enjoy it, Howard. Your fine, talented, ever so popular and lucrative author is going to look pretty cheap. Sexy as all get out, wasn’t he? On paper, that is. And how the poor fool tried to live up to it! All that woman was to him was a trophy. I spied on them. I should be ashamed of that. One has to say these things. I am ashamed of nothing. I saw the whole nasty scene. The guesthouse she used for her amours happens to be a nice secluded affair with its own garage and entrance on a side street, a dead end, shaded by big trees. The time came, as it must to people like Roger, when he was no longer a satisfactory lover. Just a little too drunk. He tried to leave but she came out after him screaming and stark naked, waving some kind of small statuette. She used language of a depth of filth and depravity I couldn’t attempt to describe. Then she tried to hit him with the statuette. You are both men and you must know that nothing shocks a man quite so much as to hear a supposedly refined woman use the language of the gutter and the public urinal. He was drunk, he had had sudden spells of violence, and he had one then. He tore the statuette out of her hand. You can guess the rest.”
“There must have been a lot of blood,” I said.
“Blood?” She laughed bitterly. “You should have seen him when he got home. When I ran for my car to get away he was just standing there looking down at her. Then he bent and picked her up in his arms and carried her into the guesthouse. I knew then that the shock had partially sobered him. He got home in about an hour. He was very quiet. It shook him when he saw me waiting. But he wasn’t drunk then. He was dazed. There was blood on his face, on his hair, all over the front of his coat. I got him into the lavatory off the study and got him stripped and cleaned off enough to get him upstairs into the shower. I put him to bed. I got an old suitcase and went downstairs and gathered up the bloody clothes and put them in the suitcase. I cleaned the basin and the floor and then I took a wet towel out and made sure his car was clean. I put it away and got mine out. I drove to the Chatsworth Reservoir and you can guess what I did with the suitcase full of bloody clothes and towels.”
She stopped. Spencer was scratching at the palm of his left hand. She gave him a quick glance and went on.
“While I was away he got up and drank a lot of whiskey. And the next morning he didn’t remember a single thing. That is, he didn’t say a word about it or behave as if he had anything on his mind but a hangover. And I said nothing.”
“He must have missed the clothes,” I said.
She nodded. “I think he did eventually—but he didn’t say so. Everything seemed to happen at once about that time. The papers were full of it, then Paul was missing, and then he was dead in Mexico. How was I to know that would happen? Roger was my husband. He had done an awful thing, but she was an awful woman. And he hadn’t known what he was doing. Then almost as suddenly as it began the papers dropped it. Linda’s father must have had something to do with that. Roger read the papers, of course, and he made just the sort of comments one would expect from an innocent bystander who had just happened to know the people involved.”
“Weren’t you afraid?” Spencer asked her quietly.
“I was sick with fear, Howard. If he remembered, he would probably kill me. He was a good actor—most writers are—and perhaps he already knew and was just waiting for a chance. But I couldn’t be sure. He might—just might—have forgotten the whole thing permanently. And Paul was dead.”
“If he never mentioned the clothes that you had dumped in the reservoir, that proved he suspected something,” I said. “And remember, in that stuff he left in the typewriter the other time—the time he shot the gun off upstairs and I found you trying to get it away from him—he said a good man had died for him.”
“He said that?” Her eyes widened just the right amount.
“He wrote it—on the typewriter. I destroyed it, he asked me to. I supposed you had already seen it.”
