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

aware that if he went along, the power, the money, the influence here, there, and everywhere, would work to Mitchel Brown’s commercial advantage.

So he said slowly, “I know that he is a liar. I believe that he is an accessory after the fact. Yes, that’s what I mean to say.”

Julius Maxwell’s face darkened, “Prove it,” he snapped. “Because if you just tell it, I will have legal recourse, and I will have your skin.

I don’t sit still to be called a liar.”

Mitch looked up and said with an air of pure detached curiosity,

“What ever made you think that I would?”

“Look, give me something,” said the lieutenant with sudden anger,

“give me something to go on.”

Maxwell said contemptuously, “He can’t. It’s all moonshine.”

Mitch was scrambling for something that would help him. “I never thought of a car,” he murmured. “But I should have guessed from the shoes she wears, that she hadn’t walked here. I don’t suppose she has walked much since she married so much money.”

Mitch knew that Maxwell was swelling up with rage, or simulated rage. But he thought that Natalie was listening. It came to him, with conviction, that in spite of everything she was a human being.

So he looked at her and said, “Why did you leave this Joe Carlisle, I wonder? What kind of man was he? Did you quarrel? Did you hate him? How did he still have the power to hurt you that much?”

She looked at him, lips parted, eyes bright, startled. Her husband was on the point of getting up and hitting someone, and Mitch knew whom.

Lieutenant Prince said, “Sit down, Maxwell.” He said to Mitch,

“And you, hold on to your tongue. Don’t analyze me any characters.

Or emote me any motives. She’s got an alibi unless you can break it, and evidence is what the law requires.”

“But what about my motive for lying?” Mitch demanded. “Money?

That’s ridiculous!” He stopped, staring. Natalie Maxwell had opened her bag, taken out a lipstick. Murder, prison…she paints her mouth. Slander, blackmail…she paints her mouth. How probable was that?

“Give me proof,” the lieutenant said angrily.

“In a minute,” Mitch said, as his heart bounced upward. He leaned back. “Let me pursue the theme of money. I imagine Natalie’s got whatever money can buy. Her living is paid for. She has charge accounts.”

Maxwell said, “Let’s go. He’s rambling now.”

The lieutenant began to push at Mitch’s thigh, nudging him out of the booth.

“Know what I can prove?” Mitch said.

“What?” said the lieutenant.

“That I was working in my apartment all that day and into the night on the sixteenth, seventeenth of March. Those walls are cardboard and I am a nuisance — well known in the building.”

“So you were working,” said the policeman. “What of it?”

“I wasn’t in Santa Barbara,” said Mitch cheerfully. He reached over and plucked up Natalie’s handbag, the green one that matched the shoes.

“Now just a minute,” Maxwell growled.

“See if her checkbook is in there,” said Mitch, pushing the bag at the Lieutenant. “It’s a fat one. Her name’s printed on it, and all that: I don’t think she has much occasion to write checks. It may be the same one.”

The lieutenant had his hands on the bag, but he looked unen-lightened.

“Look at it. It’s evidence,” Mitch said.

The lieutenant’s hands moved and Maxwell said, “I’m not sure you have the right…” But the policeman’s weary lids came up, only briefly, and Maxwell was silent.

The lieutenant took out a checkbook. “It’s fat,” he said. “Starts February twenty-first. What of it?”

Mitch Brown leaned his head on the red leatherette and kept his eyes high. “Nobody on earth…unless Natalie remembers, which I doubt…but nobody else on earth can know what the balance on her check stubs was on Saint Patrick’s Day in the morning.

Even her bank couldn’t know. But what if I know? How could I? Because I looked, while she was snoring on my sofa and I had to find out who she was and how I could help her and whether she needed any money.”

The lieutenant’s hand riffled the stubs. “Well?”

“Shall I name it for you? To the penny?” Mitch was sweating.

“Four thousand six hundred and fourteen dollars, and sixty-one cents,” he said slowly and carefully.

“Right,” snapped the lieutenant and his eyes came up, wide-open and baleful on Julius Maxwell.

But Mitch Brown was not heeding and felt no triumph. “Natalie,”

he said, “I’m sorry. I wanted to give you a break. I didn’t know what the trouble was. I wish you could have told me.”

Her newly reddened lips were trembling.

“Not so I could buy off the consequences,” Mitch said. “I’d have called the police. But I would have listened.”

Natalie put her blond head down on the red-checked tablecloth where it had once rested before. “I didn’t mean to do it,” she sobbed.

“But he kept at me, Joe did. Until I couldn’t take any more.”

Julius Maxwell, who had been thinking about evidence, said too late, “Shut up!”

The lieutenant went for the phone.

Mitch sat there, quiet now. The woman was weeping. Maxwell said in a cold, severe way, “Natalie, if you…” He drew away from contamination. He was going to pretend ignorance.

But she cried out, “You shut up! I’ve told you and told you and you never even tried to understand. You said, give Joe a thousand dollars. He’d go away. You said that’s all he wanted. You wouldn’t even listen to what I was going through, and Joe talking, talking, about our baby that was dead…starved, Joe said, because she had no mother. My baby,” she shrieked, “that you wouldn’t have, because she wasn’t yours.”

Now her pink-painted fingernails clawed at her scalp and the rings on her fingers were tangled in her hair. “I’m sorry,” she wept.

“I never meant to make the gun go off. I just wanted to stop him. I just couldn’t take any more. He was killing me…driving me crazy…and money wouldn’t stop him.”

Mitch’s heart was heavy for her. “Didn’t you know what matters?”

he barked at Maxwell. “Did you think it was mink, diamonds — that stuff?”

“The child died,” said Julius Maxwell, “of natural causes.”

“Yes, he thought it was mink,” screamed Natalie. “And oh, my God…it was! I know that now. So he said he would fix it — but he can’t fix what I know, and I hope to die.”

Then she lay silent, as if already dead, across the red-checked tablecloth.

Julius Maxwell’s face was losing color, as the policeman came back and murmured, “Have to wait.” But the lieutenant was uneasy.

“Say, Brown,” he said, “you can remember a row of six figures for six weeks? You a mathematical genius or something? You got what they call a photographic memory?”

Mitch felt his brain stir. He said lightly, “It stuck in my mind. First place, it repeats. You see that? Four six one, four six one. To me that’s an awful lot of money.”

“To me too,” the lieutenant said. “Everybody in here heard what she said, I guess.”

“Sure, heard her confess and implicate him as the accessory. Take a look at Toby, for instance. He’s had it. There’s going to be plenty of evidence.”

The lieutenant looked down upon the ruin of the Maxwells. “Guess so,” he said tightly.

Later that night Mitch Brown was sitting up to a strange bar. He said to the strange bartender, “Say, you ever