After Midnight (10 page)

“And,” Simon concluded, “the string
was
cut—the package
was
unwrapped. Therefore, if Mrs. Warren was driven by murderous impulse to drive the knife into her husband’s chest, it couldn’t have been until
after
he completed the task for which he requested the knife. Did you hear any further sounds from the house next door, Mr. Lodge?”

“No,” Lodge admitted. “I closed my window.”

“Why did you close the window, Mr. Lodge?”

Lodge was irritated. “Because the wind was banging that confounded door!”

“The front door of the Warren house?”

“Yes.”

“The front door,” Simon repeated, “which was still open in the morning when Elmer Cranston delivered the breakfast pastries, and which, obviously, was open all night long banging in the wind loudly enough to catch the attention of any prowler or burglar. Banging on the door of a house that was fully lighted with the drapes pulled back to display a luxurious home unguarded and unattended except by two people exhausted from a day’s outing—”

“Two drunks!” Lodge protested. “Two drunks snarling at each other!”

“But the house was open all night, wasn’t it?”

“Apparently—yes.”

“And
anyone
could have entered that house.
Anyone
could have found Roger Warren sleeping off his drunk in a chair facing the bar.
Anyone
could have accidentally awakened him—grabbed the knife from the bar where Roger Warren left it after cutting the string on the package—” Simon stepped back to the exhibit table and exchanged the trophy for the murder weapon. Still facing Lodge, he held it out before him “—and, before Roger Warren could cry out,
anyone
could have silenced him with this!”

Without warning, Simon pivoted. The knife now pointed directly at Wanda’s face. She cried out and shrank back in her chair.

“Anyone,”
Simon repeated sternly, “unless you still believe this Borgia, this cold-blooded, unfeeling woman stabbed her husband to death and then, feeling no sobering shock as a consequence, walked calmly into her bedroom and went to sleep cradling a bloodstained knife on the pillow beside her head! Look at her, Mr. Lodge. Isn’t she the portrait of a ruthless murderess?”

Wanda crouched in her chair like the terrified child she was. Simon left her to the mercies of the police matron and returned the knife to the table. Then, calmly, as if announcing a fact any child would know, he added:

“Anyone could have killed Roger Warren and left the knife on the pillow of a sleeping woman, isn’t that so, Mr. Lodge?”

Simon didn’t wait for an answer. Duane Thompson could object until he was hoarse, but nothing could erase the image Simon had created. There was nothing cold-blooded about the woman who sat terrified at Simon Drake’s table in the courtroom. He ended the cross-examination and scanned the faces of the spectators until he found Hannah’s. His severest critic reassured him with a motherly glow of pride even as she mouthed the only word he could understand:

“Mafia!”

The jury was out for two hours: one for lunch and the other to bring in a verdict of homicide at the hands of a person or persons unknown. Wanda was free.

Wanda accepted the verdict quietly. She was still awed and unbelieving when Simon led her out of the courtroom. Commander Warren’s influence on politically ambitious Duane Thompson had ruled television cameras away from the trial, but the corridor swarmed with reporters and photographers. Tight-lipped, Commander Warren stalked past them all with no word for Wanda or the press, but Simon could feel the vibrations of animosity. It was a personal victory, but he had no time to celebrate. As quickly as possible, he hurried Wanda through an adjoining chamber and into a back corridor that led to the rear parking area. Hannah waited at the Rolls. Simon hailed a cab and transferred her to the lesser conveyance with a terse explanation.

“I’m borrowing your car,” he said. “I don’t want to send Mrs. Warren home alone. The press will be waiting for her and possibly the commander, too. He’s mad enough to try anything.”

“I don’t think it’s the commander who’s mad,” Hannah protested, “I think it’s you. If Wanda Warren had warts and a bald spot, she’d be three-quarters of the way to the gas chamber right now.”

“You’re a lousy loser,” Simon said. “The girl is innocent.”

And then Hannah gave him one of her rare looks reserved for idiots and bigots and bequeathed a last word of motherly advice.

“All right, take your sweet innocent client home, Brown Eyes, and play the brave protector. But if you think of getting cosy, don’t turn your back on the knife drawer!”

It was too soon to return to the house on Seacliff Drive. Simon took the coast route and drove slowly while Wanda smoked chain fashion and let the sea air ease the tension and terror of the past ten days. After a while they stopped at a roadside restaurant for coffee. She declined food.

“My stomach’s tied in knots,” she said. “It’s worse now than before the trial.”

“Reaction,” Simon told her. “It’s perfectly natural.”

“What will happen now? Will the police go looking for Roger’s murderer?”

“Why don’t you worry about one problem at a time?” Simon said. “The most immediate problem is you. You need a rest.”

She smiled wryly.

“What do you suggest—a cruise on the Mediterranean? Maybe I could induce the commander to take me.”

“In other words, you’re broke?”

“The rent on the house is paid up until the first of the month, and there’s almost a hundred dollars in the joint checking account. And the Mercedes is in my name.”

“Why?”

She was startled by the question. “Why?” she echoed.

“I didn’t know your husband,” Simon explained, “but a sports car is like a cowboy’s horse—the last thing he wants to relinquish.”

“But that’s why,” she said. “Roger said if the car was in my name, it couldn’t be taken by creditors. Anyway, it’s what I plan to sell so I can pay you.”

“Later,” Simon admonished. “Worry about that later. Your Calvinist background is showing and it embarrasses me. I usually have to sue to get paid.”

When she had finished the third cup of coffee, he drove her home. It was long enough after the end of the trial for the curious to have come and departed, and the reporters who were probably scouring every hotel and motel in the vicinity would least expect to find Wanda Warren in the house on Seacliff Drive. He could sense her dread when they pulled into the driveway. She gave him the key and it was Simon who unlocked the front door and switched on the lights that illuminated the stairway up to the living room. The drapes were drawn and Lieutenant Franzen had thoughtfully stretched a strip of matching carpet over the bloodstains; but the memories were waiting and the tension seeped back into Wanda’s face. The question they had avoided for hours had to be voiced.

“What happened?” Wanda asked. “I mean—that nurse, Nancy Armitage. Why didn’t she testify against me? Why did we win?”

“Because she was lying,” Simon said. “I caught her in the lie and told her she would be liable to a perjury charge if she told her story in court.”

“Then I’m not—then she didn’t see me kill Roger.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“There was no witness?”

“There was no witness.”

She breathed easier. “Then it’s finished,” she said.

It wasn’t, but this was no time to mention that. Brightly, Simon said:

“All I’m worrying about now is what the police did with the gin and vermouth that used to be in the bar. The night air gives me a thirst.”

He found the gin and vermouth where he had found it the first time, and then he found the switch for the hi-fi. In no time at all the house was warm and alive. He mixed the drinks while Wanda watched him from a stool across the bar. The trouble was still in her eyes when he slid her glass across the counter, and so he grabbed the handiest conversation peg and started talking.

“I still wonder what your husband wanted with that tennis trophy,” he said. “It can’t have any value—except the sentimental. Was Roger a sentimental man, Mrs. Warren?”

The martini Wanda so eagerly accepted had an almost instantaneous effect on a long neglected stomach. Her eyes brightened in remembrance.

“I did ask him why he wanted it,” she recalled. “He said: ‘Every great man should leave something behind him.’”

“Leave something behind? What did he mean?”

“I don’t know. Roger talked that way sometimes. Out. Way out. Usually he wouldn’t answer at all if I asked questions about what he did, but I couldn’t help being curious when he took the trophy out of the tackle box.”

Wanda’s glass was empty. Simon refilled it carefully while reflecting on what she had just told him.

“The tackle box,” he echoed. “I thought the trophy came wrapped in paper and string.”

Wanda shook her head gravely. “I know you did,” she said. “That’s what you said in the courtroom when Mr. Lodge was on the witness stand—but it wasn’t true. I wanted to correct you, but I didn’t have a chance.”

“I’m glad of that,” Simon said.

“Is it important?”

Wanda was beginning to resemble a growing child waiting for her sleepers. But she absorbed the martinis with amazing ease, and something was beginning to prickle at the back of Simon’s neck.

“That,” he answered, “depends on what was in the package wrapped with paper and string.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“But there w
as
a package. Roger did ask you for a knife—”

“I know that, Mr. Drake. But that was
before
he took the trophy out of the tackle box. I got the knife for him, and when I came back to the bar with it the trophy was standing—” She stared at the spot where Simon had first seen the odd bar adornment and pointed one finger “—there,” she said. “I asked what it was and what it was for, and he told me what I just told you that he told me, and then he got mad.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I was a disgrace to him and now he would never get any money from the commander—and then he told me to go to bed. I did.”

She became quiet then. Very quiet.

“You remember,” Simon said.

Modern science was wonderful. Psychiatrists could use hypnosis and drugs. The police could use lie detectors. But Simon Drake was beginning to penetrate the veil over Wanda’s mind with nothing more complicated than a pitcher of cool martinis.

“Let’s try again,” he said. “Are you sure that you never saw what was in that package?”

The pressure of the trial was over, and the martinis were relaxing. Simon waited for the breakthrough while frown lines deepened on Wanda’s forehead.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“The wrappings might remind you. I hope this room hasn’t been cleaned.”

“It hasn’t. It won’t be until I call the service. I subscribe—”

Wanda never completed the explanation of her housekeeping arrangement. Simon found the wrapping paper and the cut string that had been on the top of the bar stuffed in a waste basket. He spread them out for her to examine. It was an unusually textured paper, flecked with fibers. The cord was an ordinary twine.

He looked at Wanda questioningly.

“No—I don’t remember,” she said. “I’m sure I wasn’t in the room when Roger opened the package. I was too angry and too tired. I went straight to bed.”

“Was that particular Sunday the only time Roger brought home a package after his fishing trip?”

“Yes, I’m sure it was. But why are you asking me all these questions? Was the package so important?”

“The answer to that question depends on what was in it,” Simon said. “Did Roger take anything else from the yacht?”

“How could I know?” she protested. “I didn’t search him—and I jumped ship, remember? I just hailed a passing rowboat—” She waved one thumb in a hitchhiker’s gesture and laughed, but it was a hollow laugh that went nowhere. Her glass was empty, and the shadow of a dead man lay between her and a life she would never know again. They had gone driving and drunk coffee and talked for hours, but it had come back to that, finally. It had to come back to that.

The music from the hi-fi was gay and inanely inappropriate. Wanda pivoted slowly and let her eyes absorb everything in the quietly elegant apartment. A dream was ending.

“Mrs. Warren,” Simon said, “one thing still bothers me. Your husband worked in a haberdashery. He earned a hundred dollars a week. Didn’t you ever wonder how you were able to live so well on his income?”

She seemed completely sober.

“No,” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to wonder. Roger said making the living was his business—that I hadn’t married him to worry about money.”

“Why did you marry him?”

She completed the circle and turned back to Simon. “Because,” she said, “I thought he was Prince Charming and I was Sleeping Beauty.”

The truth was usually that simple. Simon reached across the bar and took the martini glass from her hand.

“You won’t need this crutch any longer,” he said. “Go to bed now.” Then he leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth.

She started toward the bedroom, stopped and looked back at Simon.

“Was that for professional services?” she asked.

“No—for fun,” Simon said, “and for Hannah Lee.”

“Hannah Lee?”

“A very wise old lady who can make a mistake.”