He started. “Your baby?”
She nodded. “I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to hold it over you. But you forced me. You’re going to have to marry me, Johnny.”
He reached numbly and mashed out his cigarette, then hunched over, staring again at the floor. He heard her move, but he didn’t look up. She came beside him on the bed, pressing against him, her face close to his ear, her hands stroking his shoulders. “It’s all right, Johnny,” she whispered. “You can get your divorce in Reno and I’ll go out with you. I’ll make you happy, Johnny. You see if I don’t—”
She kept on talking, but he had stopped listening. He had hoped against hope he would be able to discourage her. He had thought perhaps this month together would make her want to break it off. He had hoped there would be some other way to get her out of his life, but the baby queered it all.
Now he knew he would have to kill her.
CHAPTER I
Thursday, February 26, 1959
Since it was vacation and he didn’t have to drop his two little girls off at school, Raymond Watly, thirty-five-year-old real estate agent, didn’t leave his home in Ashmun until eight-forty and didn’t arrive at the Restlin Real Estate office in Stockford, Connecticut, until ten minutes of nine. The office, on Farnsworth Street, occupied the left half of the first floor of an old frame house. There was a plate-glass window with the name in gold letters, balanced by a matching window to a law office. A recessed door between opened into a dingy through hall from which both offices could be reached.
Mr. Watly, as was his custom, turned into the dirt drive beside the house and parked near the tumbledown shed in back. He entered the hall through the rear door and strode over the creaky planking to the office entrance, taking out his keys and whistling a time. When he got there, he didn’t put the key in the lock, but stopped and looked. The frosted pane in the door was broken. There was a hole in the glass as if someone had put a fist through it close to the knob. Cracks ran from the hole across the rest of the glass and, inside the office, fragments lay on the floor. Mr. Watly tested the door, but it was locked. He reached a gloved hand through the hole and saw he could turn the inside knob, but he withdrew his hand without touching it. He now used the key to let himself in, closing the door gently, touching only the frame. A quick look around showed him that the safe was intact and nothing seemed out of place, but the broken window was enough for Mr. Watly. He picked up the desk phone and dialed his boss, catching Mr. Restlin about to leave his home. He said, “Frank. You’d better get down here right away. It looks like somebody’s broken in.”
Mr. Restlin was there in five minutes, pulling in at the curb and scrambling out of his car almost simultaneously. Mr. Restlin was a bustling little man, a gray-haired gnomelike creature who had found real estate a more likely prospect than women and had married his business. The operation was a mistress of many facets. Not only did the Restlin Company act as agent in sales and renting, but in many cases acted as landlord, performing the service for its clients of managing their property and collecting their rents. In addition, Mr. Restlin was a landlord himself several times over, so there were few phases of real estate that the Restlin Company didn’t handle. It was a company that had grown fat under his watchful eye and his concern over this threat to it was immense. He almost ran to Watly on the stoop saying, “What is it, Ray? They take anything?”
Watly tried to tell him he didn’t know, because he hadn’t touched anything, but Restlin was already past him and into the hall. There, he glared at the hole in the pane and the pieces of glass on the floor inside. He tested the knob on both sides of the door while Watly, hanging over him nervously, said, “I don’t think you ought to touch anything, Frank. If it’s robbery there might be fingerprints.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Restlin said shortly, “but Fm going to call the police.” He went to the phone without taking off his hat.
It was Sergeant T. C. Unger who took the call, but Sergeant Unger wasn’t important enough for Mr. Restlin and it was relayed to Chief Fred C. Fellows in his small office back of the main desk. Fellows listened quietly to Restlin’s expostulations and then said, “A broken window? What are we supposed to do about that, Mr. Restlin?”
“It’s not just a broken window,” Restlin snapped. “It’s breaking and entering, that’s what it is. It’s burglary.”
“What’s missing?”
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t looked. You’ll want to fingerprint, won’t you?”
Fellows allowed that he might and said he’d send someone over and hung up with a sigh. He went to his door and gestured. “All right, Sid,” he said to Detective Sergeant Sidney G. Wilks. “You’d better go over to Restlin Real Estate. He thinks he’s been robbed.” Restlin’s was only two blocks away in downtown Stockford and Detective Sergeant Wilks walked the distance in the biting, ten-degree cold. When he arrived on the scene, he found Frank Restlin on the stoop in a dither of excitement. “Look, look,” the man said, half dragging the sergeant to the office door. “They stole all my leases. All my leases are gone.”
Wilks stepped inside and looked around. The door of the small safe near the
