Passion was most probably out. I had quarreled with no one, insulted no one; I had not been sufficiently vicious to drive anyone to murder.
Was a killing for gain to be any more seriously considered? Wealth of course is a relative matter, and it was possible that my earthly possessions, a good home, two cars, several decent investments that were putting money in the bank, were great enough for someone to value them higher than my life. But those things of course would all go to Vicky once this inert hulk at the foot of the stairway was buried.
There was only one possibility left, a mixture of the two motives. Passion and gain so interwoven that the motive became a single driving force. A desirable woman, plus the estate of the deceased.
Can hell hold any greater torture? The desirable woman. Vicky. The deceased. Doug Townsend.
In desperate agony I wanted to be done with this reasoning. But my mind, with a grim, macabre relentlessness clung to that one idea, for there was no other with any substance.
Perhaps he had been plotting this very act that night I’d been so close to him, when only the curtain of darkness on the Bath Club terrace hid him from me.
Fresh light came, a shimmering in a fog. Footsteps moved toward me, around me. Someone had heard the shot and hurried to the scene…
I couldn’t see him. Just one flick of my eye muscles would have put him in a line with my vision, but the muscles were dead, powerless and the vision was dim and distorted.
I experienced a great need for his presence. He was human—he was living. Don’t go away! Look at me and tell me that this is not death!
A door slammed and fresh footsteps whispered into my foggy world. They stopped then came forward with a rush. “Doug! Oh, Doug!”
It was Vicky. Thank heaven, in that moment the sound of her voice was too dear for me to think of murder and its motives. Whatever the man had done, Vicky had had no part of it. Vicky would never be a party to a thing like this.
Right then I could have forgiven her of anything. I had never needed her more. The presence of living human beings had driven a fresh awareness of my present state through me. A fresh terror.
Surely she would drop by my side. Her hands would touch me. Yet the moment lengthened and I heard a voice, Shoffner’s. “Easy, Mrs. Townsend. You look pretty green. I heard something that sounded like a shot and ventured to come in just a few seconds before you got here. Don’t you think we’d better call a doctor and the police?”
He must have helped her to a chair. She moaned softly and the moan mutated into weak, soft sobbing.
“Yes, the police. How could he have done it?” And then she whispered brokenly, “Oh, Doug—how could you?”
If I had hoped there was a limit to the depths of torture, I knew better now. For a moment her words brought only a stunned, blank nothingness to my mind; then the insinuation behind them began to sink in. I didn’t understand. Desperately I thought, Darling, if I could look at your face at this moment, would I see something there I’ve never beheld before?
The last prop beneath my world was shattered completely. I might possibly have accepted oblivion right then; but oblivion failed to come. If this were death, then death was far from oblivion.
Only minutes passed before they came. The doctor. The police. My co-workers. I don’t know how many of them there were. At times it seemed the room was filled with the babble of many voices; then again there was the silence of emptiness.
Lew Whitfield came, of course. I sensed it was he when I heard the elephantine pad of footsteps on the foyer carpet. He stood over me during one of those silences before going down the two short steps that led to the living room.
The vague outlines of his heavy-jowled face came through to me. I could fill in the details of his expression, the pain in his eyes as they seemed to sink in the fat rolls of their sockets, the bitter passing of color from his ruddy cheeks, the sorrowful drooping of his heavy lips.
“My God,” he said, like a prayer, “this is terrible.” His words might have been inane, considering the situation, but I knew the meanings behind them. The days we’d worked together, the trust between us, the feeling of being on the same team. Those were the wonderful things Lew was talking about.
“He looks pretty gory, doesn’t he, with his right temple all torn and bloody. His eyes, glassy and staring—as if looking at hell itself.”
“He doesn’t look like Doug Townsend,” Lew agreed with tears in his voice. “Where is Vicky?”
“Out in the kitchen. A matron is feeding her coffee.”
“She find him?”
“No, the yardman heard the shot and came in the house just before she got here.”
“I can’t believe it,” Lew said. “I just can’t believe it. How much more have you got to do here?”
“We’re about finished, photos all taken, statements down. It seems like a clear-cut case of suicide. His wife told us he kept the revolver upstairs in their bedroom when he was off duty. He must have gone up, got it, and came back down. Maybe he was planning to do it in the study, or the kitchen, or out in the yard someplace. Or maybe he was only thinking about it, toying with the idea, and the impulse became suddenly overwhelming. The gun is in his hand, and he does it right here in the foyer. We’ve found only one set of fingerprints on the gun—his.”
I knew the scene as well as if I’d
