The Lieutenant cocked an eyebrow. The younger blond detective who had been lounging wearily against the wall of the hallway sharply turned his wide face toward the speaker.
“Now and then Mrs. Groener used to scream,” the big man explained, “when she’d been drinking heavily I’d leave the bedroom. It may have been a rebuke or summons to me, or a fighting challenge to the whiskey bottle, or simply an expression of her rather dark evaluation of life. But it had never meant anything more real than that—until tonight.”
“Mrs. Groener was seeing a psychiatrist?” the Lieutenant asked harshly.
“I never was able to get her to,” the big man said. “As I imagine you find in your business, Lieutenant, there’s no real middle course between persuading a person to seek therapy voluntarily and having them forcibly committed to an institution. Mrs. Groener always had the energy be quite sane when necessary.”
The Lieutenant grunted noncommittally. “Well, you certainly seem to have been very long-suffering about it,” he said and then added sharply, “Cool, at any rate.”
Groener smiled bleakly. “I’m an alcoholic myself,” he said. “I know how lonely it gets way out there in the dark. I didn’t used to scream, but I pounded holes in the walls, and woke up to bloody plaster-powdered knuckles… and cigarette burns between my fingers.” He gave his head a little shake as if he’d been dreaming. “Thing is, I managed to quit five years ago. My wife didn’t.”
The long couch creaked as the Lieutenant slightly, shifted his position on the edge of the center of it. He nodded curtly.
“So when Mrs. Groener screamed,” he said, “you finished making your cup of coffee and you drank it. You thought she had screamed simply because she had become unnerved by heavy drinking. You were not unduly alarmed.”
Groener nodded. “I’m glad you didn’t say DTs,” he said. “Shows you know what it’s all about. Mrs. Groener never had DTs. If she had, I’d have been able to do something about her. I took my time drinking the coffee, by the way. I was hoping she’d be passed out again by the time I got to the bedroom.”
“This scream she gave—how loud would you say it was?”
“Pretty loud,” Groener said thoughtfully, “Almost loud enough, I’d say, to wake the people in the flat across the court—except that people in a big city never seem to bother about a scream next door.”
“Some of them don’t! Then it would have sounded still louder to Mrs. Labelle, or even Miss Graves, than to you. One of them might have been waked by it, or been awake, and gone to your wife’s bedroom.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” the big man disagreed. “They were familiar with Mrs. Groener’s emotional tendencies. They’re both old friends.”
“They still might have gone.”
Groener shook his head. “I’d have heard them.”
The Lieutenant frowned. “Has it occurred to you that one of the women may have gone to your wife before she screamed?”
Groener’s answering gaze was stony, “I’d have certainly heard them if they had,” he said.
The Lieutenant stood up and jerked his head at the blond detective, who came toward him.
“Through with me?” Groener asked.
“Yes,” the Lieutenant said. “When you get back to the dining room will you ask Cohan—that’s the other detective—to send in Miss Graves?”
Groener nodded and started off, his feet dragging. When he came opposite the bedroom he and his wife had occupied, he paused and his shoulders tightened wincingly. The Lieutenant looked away, but when the footsteps didn’t resume, he turned quickly back. The big man had disappeared.
The Lieutenant strode to the bedroom door. Groener was standing inside, just looking. The Lieutenant started to bark a question, but just then the big man’s steady left hand moved toward the bed in a slow curving gesture, as if he were caressing something invisible.
It was a bedroom with a lot of little tables and stacked cardboard boxes besides the usual furnishings—evidently used by Mrs. Labelle for storage purposes as well as guests—but a broad clear path led through the orderly clutter from the far side of the double bed to the large black square of the open window.
Standing two yards behind Groener’s back, the Lieutenant now became aware of the source of a high tinkling noise that had been fretting the edges of his mind for the past half hour. A small oscillating fan was going on a table beside the bed. Hanging from a yardstick stuck in a top dresser drawer a couple of feet from it was a collection of small oblongs and triangles of thin glass hanging on strings. When the stream of air swept them they jingled together monotonously.
The Lieutenant stepped up beside Groener, touched him on the shoulder, and indicated the arrangement beside the bed. Behind them the blond detective cleared his throat uneasily.
“My wife hated all little noises at night,” Groener explained. “Voice and tuned-down TVs and such. She used those Chinese windchimes to blur them out.”
“Was she quite a small woman?” the Lieutenant asked softly.
“How did you know that?” Groener asked as he started for the door. The Lieutenant pointed at the dresser mirror. It was turned down so that it cut off both their heads and the big man’s shoulders.
The Lieutenant and the blond detective listened to his footsteps clumping noisily down the long uncarpeted hall. They heard the frosted glass door to the dining room open and close.
The blond detective grinned. “I’ll bet he learned to walk loud to please his wife,” he said rapidly. “My mother-in-law does the same thing when she stays overnight with us. Claims it’s so as not to scare Ursie and me—we’ll know she’s coming. Say, this guy’s wife must have been nuttier than a fruit cake.”
“There are all kinds of alkies, Zocky,” the Lieutenant said heavily, “with different degrees of nuttiness and sanity. You notice anything about this room, Zocky?”
“Sure, it’s not messed up much for all the stuff in it,” the other answered instantly.
“That mean anything to you?”
Detective Zocky shrugged. “Takes all kinds to make a world,” he said. “My mother-in-law’s an ashtray-washing fanatic. Never dries ‘em either.”
They heard the dining room door open again. As they started back for the living room, Zocky whispered unabashed, “Hey, did you notice the near-empty fifth tucked behind the head of the bed?”
“No, I merely deduced the bottle would be there like Nero Wolfe,” the Lieutenant told him. “Thanks for the confirmation. Incidentally, quite a few people have a morbid fear of dirt, including cigar ashes. It’s called mysophobia. And now shut off that fan!”
Miss Graves was as tall for a woman as Groener for a man and even more gaunt, but it was a coldly beautiful gauntness. She dressed it well in a severe black Chinese dress of heavy silk that hugged her knees. Her hair was like a silver fleece.
She seemed determined to be hostile, for as she sat down she glared at the Lieutenant and said to him, “I’m a labor organizer!” as if that made them lifelong enemies.
“You are, huh?” the Lieutenant responded, thumbing a notebook and playing up to her hostility in a way that made Zocky grin behind her back. “Then what do you know about Mrs. Groener? An alcoholic, wasn’t she?”
“She was a thoroughly detestable woman!” Miss Graves snapped back sharply. “The only decent thing she ever did was what she did tonight, and she did that much too late! I hated her!”
“Does that mean you were in love with her husband?”
“I—Don’t be stupid, officer!”
“Stupid, my eye! There has to be some reason, since you stayed close friends—at least outwardly.” He held his aggressive, forward-hunching pose a moment, then leaned back, put away his notebook, smiled like a gentle tomcat, and said culturedly, “Hasn’t there now, Miss Graves? Most of these complications have a psychological basis.”