A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

seventeenth?”

Mitch sipped from his water glass, watchful and wary.

Julius Maxwell said, “This man was trying to blackmail me with a crazy story.”

“I was what!” Mitch exploded.

The police lieutenant, or whoever he was, had a long lean face, slightly crooked at the bottom, and he had very tired eyelids. He said, “Your story figured to destroy her alibi?”

“Her alibi for what?” Mitch leaned back.

“Oh, come off that, Brown,” said Julius Maxwell, “or whatever your name is. You knew my wife from having seen her picture in the newspaper.”

Mitch’s brain was racing. “I haven’t seen the papers for six weeks,”

he said aggressively.

Julius Maxwell’s black eyes were bright with that triumphant shine. “Now that,” he said flatly, “is impossible.”

“Oh, is it?” said Mitch rather gently. His role of apostle of compassion was fast fading out. Mitch was now a human clashing with another human and he knew he had to look out for himself. He could feel his wings retracting into his spine. “Alibi for what?” he insisted, looking at the policeman intently.

The policeman sighed. “You want it from me? Okay. On the sixteenth of last March, late in the evening,” he droned, “a man named Joseph Carlisle was shot to death in his own front hall.” (Mitch, ears pricked up, remembered the paragraph he had seen just tonight.)

“Lived in a canyon, Hollywood Hills,” the lieutenant continued.

“Winding road, lonely spot. Looked like somebody rang his bell, he answered, they talked in the hall. It was his own gun that he kept in a table there. Whoever shot him closed the front door, which locked it, and threw the gun in the shrubbery. Then beat it. Wasn’t seen — by anybody.”

“And what has this got to do with Mrs. Maxwell?” Mitch asked.

“Mrs. Maxwell used to be married to this Carlisle,” said the policeman. “We had to check her out. She has this alibi.”

“I see,” said Mitch.

“Mrs. Maxwell,” said Julius through his teeth, “was with me in our home in Santa Barbara that evening and all that night.”

Mitch saw. He saw that either Maxwell was trying to save his wife from the embarrassment of suspicion or… that compassion was a fine thing but it can get a well-meaning person into trouble. And a few drinks might hit a murderess very hard and very fast. Mitch knew, that whatever else Maxwell said, he was lying in his teeth about this alibi. Because the woman, still sitting across this restaurant, was the very same woman whom Mitch Brown had taken in, had given a break.

But nobody was giving Mitch Brown any break. And why all this nonsense about blackmail? Mitch, with his wings folded tight away, said to the lieutenant, “Suppose I tell you my story.” And he did so, coldly, briefly.

Afterward, Maxwell laughed. “You believe that? You believe that he would take a drunken woman home with him — and close the door?”

In his breast Mitch Brown felt the smolder of dislike burst into a flame of hatred.

“No, no,” said Maxwell. “What must have happened was this. He spotted my wife here. Oh, he’d read the papers — don’t you believe that he hadn’t. He knew she had been married to Joe Carlisle. So, spur of the moment, he tried out his little lie. Might be some profit in it — who knows? Listen to this: when I asked him how much he wanted to keep this story to himself, he asked me how much it was worth.”

Mitch chewed his lip. “You’ve got a bad ear for dialogue,” he said.

“That is not exactly what I said. Nor is it the sense of what I said.”

“Oh, oh,” said Maxwell, smiling.

The lieutenant was pursing noncommittal lips.

Mitch spoke to him. “Who else gives Mrs. Maxwell her alibi?”

“Servants,” said the lieutenant gloomily.

“Servants?” said Mitch brightly.

“It’s only natural,” the lieutenant said, even more gloomily.

“Right,” said Mitch Brown. “You mean it is probable that when a man and his wife are at home together only the servants will see them there. But it isn’t so probable that a stranger will take in a drunken woman, and leave her to heaven…simply because he feels like giving a human being a break. So this is a study in probability, is it?”

The lieutenant’s mouth moved and Mitch said quickly, “But you want the facts, eh? Okay. The only thing for us to do is go and talk to the bartender.”

“That seems to be it,” said the lieutenant promptly. “Right.”

Maxwell said, “Right. Wait for us.”

He rose and went to fetch his wife. Mitch stood beside the lieutenant. “Fingerprints?” he murmured. The Lieutenant shrugged. Under those weary eyelids, Mitch judged, the eyes were human. “She has a car? Was the car out?” The lieutenant shrugged again. “Who else would shoot this Carlisle? Any enemies?”

“Who hasn’t?” the lieutenant said. “We better check with this bartender.”

The four of them went in the lieutenant’s car. The Parakeet Bar and Grill was doing well this evening. It looked brighter and more prosperous. Toby the bartender was there. “Hi, Mr. Brown,” he said.

“Long time no see.”

“I’ve been back East. Tell this man, Toby, what happened around one thirty on the morning of March seventeenth.”

“Huh?” said Toby. The flesh of his cheeks seemed to go flatter.

His eye went duller. Suddenly Mitch knew what was going to happen.

“You see this man or this lady in here between one, two o’clock in the morning last March seventeenth?” said the lieutenant and added, “I’m Lieutenant Prince, LAPD.”

“No, sir,” said Toby. “I know Mr. Brown, of course. He comes in now and again, see? Lives around here. A writer, he is. But I don’t remember I ever seen this lady before.”

“What about Brown? Was he in here that night or that morning?”

“I don’t think so,” said Toby. “That’s the night, now that I think back — yeah, my kid was sick and I shut the place up earlier than usual. Ask my wife,” said Toby the bartender with the fixed righteous gaze of the liar.

Lieutenant Prince turned his long face, his sad eyelids, on Mitch Brown.

Mitch Brown was grinning. “Oh, no!” he said. “Not the old Paris Exposition gag!” He leaned on the bar and emitted silent laughter.

“What are you talking about?” Lieutenant Prince said sourly. “You give me corroboration for this story you’re telling. Who can tell me about it? Who saw you and this lady that night?”

“Nobody. Nobody,” said Mitch genially. “The streets were empty.

Nobody was around. Well! I wouldn’t have believed it! The old Paris Exposition gag!”

The lieutenant made an exasperated sound.

Mitch said gaily, “Don’t you remember that one? There’s this girl and her mother. They go to a Paris hotel. Separate rooms. Girl wakes up in the morning, no mother. Nobody ever saw any mother. No mother’s name on the register. No room’s got the mother’s number.

Wait. No — that wasn’t it. There was a room, but the wallpaper was different.”

Julius Maxwell said, “A writer”—as if that explained everything.

“Why don’t we all sit down,” said Mitch cheerfully, “and tell each other stories?”

His suggestion was accepted. Natalie Maxwell slipped into a booth first; she was blond, expensive, protected…and numb. (Is she doped up with tranquilizers or what? Mitch wondered.) Her husband sat on her right and the policeman sat on her left.

Mitch slid in the other side of the Law and faced his adversary.

Mitch Brown’s mood was by no means as jaunty as his words had implied. He didn’t like the idea of being the victim of the old Paris Exposition gag. But he was not rattled or panicky. On the contrary, his mind began to reconnoiter the enemy. Julius Maxwell, flamboyantly successful — Mitch savored the flavor of the man’s