had entered and killed her. No one would be more surprised and shocked than he when he returned with Jackson an hour from now and found her — dead.
He slipped his key in the front door. The inner bolt was shot and it refused to open. He considered ringing the bell and killing her in the hall. He decided to stay, as far as possible, with his original plan. There was no convenient weapon in the hall. A single scream would shatter the stillness of the sleeping street. What he had to do must be done in silence.
The back door leading into the kitchen was open but the screen door was locked. He slipped on a pair of gloves and fumbled in one corner of the porch where he had remembered seeing a rusty ice pick. His luck was holding. The pick was there. He probed it through the screen and lifted the hood from its eyes.
The door open, he waited, listening, hearing nothing. There was a half-emptied bottle of milk, a clouded glass, and the remains of a peanut butter sandwich on the kitchen table.
Frances, he decided, was playing the sober and repentant wife this time.
He had heard it so many times that he could play the record by heart. He noted that the kitchen shade was up. Anyone entering the kitchen would be visible from the darkened windows of the house next door. Sweat beading on his forehead, he slipped in a hand before him and snapped the switch, thankful that he had noticed the shade in time. It was the little things of murder that sent men to the chair.
The darkness magnified his strain. His mouth grew even drier. He heard, or thought he heard, the pounding of his heart. He had to force himself to cross the kitchen, feeling his way along the wall to the rear stairs.
Now he could hear sounds in the bedroom. She seemed to be opening and closing drawers, probably in search of one of the bottles she was always hiding from herself.
He crossed the dark hall toward the closed bedroom door and his weight caused a board to creak. The light in the bedroom went out and the door opened. They stood only feet apart in the black hallway, aware of each other but unable to see.
Then he realized he still was clutching the rusted ice pick in his hand. It was as good a weapon as any, better than most. Murder Incorporated had used them as the chief tool of their trade. An ice pick had been used in the case of the State versus Manny Capper. The sweat on his brow turned cold. Manny had gone to the chair.
Galvanized by his own terror, crying out hoarsely, Sorrel sprang forward. His groping hand felt teeth in time to clamp his palm over the welling scream. It died stillborn as he plunged the pick in his hand repeatedly into the yielding flesh. The body he held ceased squirming and sagged limply. He allowed it to fall to the floor, relieved to be rid of it.
The ice pick fell from his nerveless hand. He tried to fumble a match from his pocket and could not. His hands were shaking too badly. Afraid of the dark, afraid of the woman whom he had killed, he squatted beside the body and felt for a pulse with the back of his wrist, where flesh gaped between glove and coat cuff. There was no pulse. It was over, done with,
He crept back down the stairs and out through the kitchen to the porch. Then he remembered the pick. It would have no fingerprints on it. He considered returning for it and his stomach rebelled.
So there were no fingerprints on the death weapon. So what? Most house prowlers with the sense of gnats wore gloves. It was nothing for him to worry over.
He walked silently, unseen, back to his car and examined his gloves in the dash light. One was slightly splattered with blood but there seemed to be none on the cuffs of his suit. All that remained to be done was to rid himself of the gloves.
It was over, done. He was free. There was nothing to stop him now, nothing to stop the boys from running him for whatever office they pleased. Frances had made her last scene. He was young, under forty. His new life was just beginning.
As he drove, the horror of the thing that he had been forced to do left him. He wanted to sing, to yell, to shout to the stars that he was free. He contented himself with a grin.
It had been a relatively simple matter, after all. He wadded the gloves into a ball and tossed them out the car window. They could not be traced to him. There was nothing to tie him to the murder but the fact that he and Frances were married. Back at the Eldorado, he parked the coupe in the same space it had occupied before and glanced at his watch before switching off the lights. It was eleven minutes past one. He was four minutes ahead of schedule.
He expended them by walking to the corner and peering around it cautiously. The doorman and Jackson were deep in some discussion. Satisfied that he had not been missed, he entered the side door.
Telling Evelyn would take some doing. She would be horrified at first, but she was quick-witted enough to realize that no other course had been open to him. It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was that the thing was done.
His throat and mouth were normal again. In the bright light of the cage he could see no bloodstains on his suit. He had been fortunate. He was whistling softly, almost cheerfully, as he inserted his key in the door.
The radio was still playing softly. A bottle of his best scotch beside her, Frances was sitting in one of Evelyn’s easy chairs. “I knew you’d come here first,” she said. “What’s a matter? Was your plane late?”
He stared at her open-mouthed, screams he was unable to utter tearing at his throat.
“You poor damn fool,” his wife continued. “Why didn’t you let me meet her? Why didn’t you make me realize what a swell kid she really was? Why didn’t you tell me that the boys wanted to run you for senator? You should have known me better, John. You’re my man. You always will be. No tramp was goin’ to take you from me. But a sweet kid like that is another matter.” She fluffed at her frowsy hair. “I feel kind of honored like.”
Sorrel managed to gasp one word, “Evelyn …”
Frances nipped at the scotch. “Oh, you didn’t know. Well, she showed at the house this morning and gave me a song and dance about being a maid out of work, her with fingernails that long.” She laughed, shortly “So I hired her and I pumped her. She’s probably goin’ through all my things right now, spyin’ on me.” Frances picked an oblong scrap of yellow paper from the table. “She never even got a chance to see her telegram because I copped her key from her purse and come over here shortly after I got the telegram that you sent me. Mine was all right. But after I read this one I kinda wondered.” She read it aloud: “‘Sweetheart. Be in your apartment at twelve tonight. Don’t leave it for any reason. And don’t let anyone in but me. This is important, more important than you realize.’”
His voice sounding strange to himself, Sorrel asked, “You — knew?”
Frances Sorrel smiled thinly. “I know you,” she admitted. “But don’t worry. Think nothing of it. As long as your plane was late, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
1946
DOROTHY B. HUGHES
THE HOMECOMING
Dorothy B(elle) Hughes (1904-1993). Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Hughes received her journalism degree from the University of Missouri and did postgraduate work at the University of New Mexico and Columbia University. She worked as a journalist in Missouri, New York, and New Mexico before becoming a mystery writer.
This underappreciated author is historically important as being the first female to fall squarely in the hard- boiled school. She wrote eleven novels in the 1940s, beginning with
