When he was certain that he had done everything to the best of his ability, Henry sat by the body of his dead wife and waited for the police. He waited for what seemed a long time, but, eventually they came. He heard the siren outside. He got up and opened the door for them.
Two policemen came up the walk, a short one and a tall one.
“My name is Rogers,” the short one said, “and this is O’Toole. You called the station house a few minutes ago?”
“That’s right,” Henry said. “My name is Henry Wilson and my wife has killed herself.”
“Killed herself, huh?” O’Toole said. “Well, let’s just check this out.”
“Before you go in,” Henry said, “would you do me a favor and wipe your shoes off on the rug outside? We have a new carpet and—”
O’Toole gave Henry a strange look.
“Your wife killed herself?” he said.
“Yes. If you’d just do me the favor—”
Rogers and O’Toole shrugged, looking at Henry carefully, and obediently scuffed their shoes in the hall, then followed Henry inside.
“That her?” Rogers said, pointing to the couch.
“That’s her. I came home and found her dead.”
The two policemen went to the couch, leaned over.
“She’s dead all right,” O’Toole said. “When did you discover this?”
“When I came home from work about half an hour ago. I work in a bank. I’m a teller.”
“Looks like suicide, all right,” Rogers said, picking up the empty bottle which Henry had centered on the coffee table. “She must of took forty of these things.”
“It was a terrible shock,” Henry said.
“Let’s check out the place,” said O’Toole. “Mind if we look around in here?”
“Not at all. You’ll find that our home — my home — is quite neat.”
The two officers disappeared into the bedroom and began to move things around; Henry shuddered as he heard the room being disarranged. Then one of them went into the bathroom and began to flush the toilet repeatedly. Henry twitched.
O’Toole came back in by himself. “You had any indications that your wife might commit suicide?”
“No,” said Henry, taking a chair, and putting it neatly against one of the walls, sitting down on it. “None at all.”
“Any trouble between you too?”
“None at all,” said Henry. “Oh, we had our disagreements. She wasn’t a very good housekeeper and I’ve always felt strongly about those things. But we’ve been married for two years and I thought we were very happy.”
“Then why did she kill herself?” Henry rubbed an infinitesmal scratch on his left shoetip. “I haven’t the faintest idea, officer.”
“Well,” Rogers said, coming back into the room and taking off his hat. “I guess we better call down the precinct and get them over here. It looks like suicide. I’m sorry, Mr. — uh.”
“Wilson,” Henry said.
“Just wait a minute,” said O’Toole, taking another chair from under the table and sitting down in it so heavily that it groaned and made Henry jump. “I just want to ask Mr. Wilson one or two questions. You said you came home to find her dead on the couch. Any suicide note?”
“Suicide note? Well, yes.”
“What did it say?”
“Well, it didn’t make much sense. Something about being unhappy, I think; about being sorry to leave me. She typed it and she made a lot of errors.”
“I see,” said O’Toole. “Where is it?”
“What?”
“The note. Where is it? It’s evidence, you know. Where did you put it?”
“Put it?” said Henry. “Well, I don’t know. I mean I’m not sure where it is now.”
O’Toole gave Rogers a long, meaningful look and Rogers swung his head, peered at Henry. “You don’t know?” Rogers said. “You don’t know where your wife’s suicide note is? Maybe you don’t know because there wasn’t a suicide note? Is that it?”
“Oh yes, there was. I read it. It was just that I... well, I incinerated it. I cleaned up the apartment a little and I put it in a bag and took everything downstairs to the incinerator.”
“Well, now, is that so?” said O’Toole.
“I had to get rid of it, you see. I can’t stand sloppiness. That was Flora’s problem. She didn’t know how to keep house and I had to do everything myself. I can’t stand things lying around.”
“So, you incinerated your wife’s suicide note,” said Rogers, “and then you cleaned up the place a little. So in other words, it’s just your word that she left a note. It’s just your word that she killed herself, right? You could have poisoned her and left her with that empty bottle on the couch and for all we know it would be suicide, right? It could be that way, huh, my friend?”
“But it didn’t happen that way,” Henry said, “and I wish you wouldn’t raise your voice. I told you, I can’t stand disorder. I cleaned up everything.”
“I’m going to call the precinct,” O’Toole said heavily. “You’re in custody Mr. — uh.”
“Wilson,” Rogers said.
“Wilson,” said O’Toole.
“But I told you,” Henry said, straining in his chair. “I told—”
But it was never revealed exactly what Henry had told them for at the first clinging, cold touch of the handcuffs on his wrist, the dirty brass touching his own skin, Henry gasped and sprawled over his rug in a perfect faint, knocking over his chair and disarranging his room. It was fortunate that he was hot conscious to see the disarray because it would have upset him even more.
The autopsy showed that it was barbiturates, of course. But that did Henry very little good at all. The shocking disorder of the cell in which he had been confined for two weeks completely undermined his sanity and although the judge was very sympathetic, there was nothing to do but to remand him to a mental institution for an indeterminate time. Henry is still there and although the outlook is uncertain he has brought a better appearance to the day rooms.
Flora might have been pleased.
The Crooked Picture
by John Lutz
Where do you go... what can you do, when you’re preyed on by a man who is dead?
The room was a mess. The three of them, Paul Eastmont, his wife Laura, and his brother Cuthbert, were sitting rigidly and morosely. They were waiting for Louis Bratten.
“But just who is this Bratten?” Laura Eastmont asked in a shaking voice. She was a very beautiful woman, on the edge of middle age.
“He’s a repulsive, insulting ne’er-do-well,” Cuthbert, recently of Harvard, said. “A drunken, insolent sot.”
“And he’s a genius,” Paul Eastmont added, “in his own peculiar way. More importantly, he’s my friend.” He placed a hand on his wife’s wrist. “Bratten is the most discreet man I know.”
Laura shivered. “I hope so, Paul.”
Cuthbert rolled his king size cigarette between thumb and forefinger, an annoyed look on his young, aqualine face. “I don’t see why you put such stock in the man, Paul. He’s run the gamut of alcoholic degeneration. From chief of homicide to — what? If I remember correctly, you told me some time ago that they’d taken away his private investigator’s license.”
He saw that he was upsetting his sister-in-law even more and shrugged his thin shoulders. “My point is that he’s hardly the sort of man to be confided in concerning this.” He looked thoughtful. “On, the other hand, half of what he says is known to be untrue anyway.”
The butler knocked lightly, pushed one of the den’s double doors open, and Louie Bratten entered. He was a blocky, paunchy little man of about forty, with a perpetual squint in one eye. His coarse dark hair was mussed, his suit was rumpled and his unclasped tie hung crookedly outside one lapel. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of a hurricane.