"Are you all right this morning?" he asked.
"Yes, pretty much. Come in."
He looked all around him, openly, when he passed through the living room, missing nothing. He paused at the big room where I really lived. "Nice," he said, sounding impressed. The sunny room with the big window overlooking the patio with its rose trees did look attractive. Exposed brick walls and all the books make an intelligent-looking room, anyway, I thought, and I waved him onto the tan suede love seat as I asked him if he wanted coffee. "Yes, black," he said fervently. "I was up most of the night." When I bent over to put his cup on the low table in front of him, I realized with some embarrassment that his eyes weren't on the coffee cup. I settled opposite him in my favorite chair, low enough that my feet can touch the floor, wide enough to curl up inside, with a little table beside it just big enough to hold a book and a coffee cup.
Arthur took a sip of his coffee, eyed me again as he told me it was good, and got down to business.
"You were right, the body was definitely moved after death to the position it was in when you found it," he said directly. "She was killed there in the kitchen. Jack Burns is having a hard time swallowing this theory, that she was deliberately killed to mimic the Wallace murder, but I'm going to try to convince him. He's in charge though; I'm assisting on this one since I know all the people involved, but I'm really a burglary detective." Some questions flew through my head, but I decided it wouldn't be polite to ask them. Sort of like asking a doctor about your own symptoms at a party. "Why is Jack Burns so scarey?" I asked abruptly. "Why does he make an effort to intimidate you? What's the point?"
At least Arthur didn't have to ask me what I meant. He knew exactly what Jack Burns was like.
"Jack doesn't care if people like him or not," Arthur said simply. "That's a big advantage, especially to a cop. He doesn't even care if other cops like him. He just wants cases solved as soon as possible, he wants witnesses to tell him everything they know, and he wants the guilty punished. He wants the world to go his way, and he doesn't care what he has to do to make it happen." That sounded pretty frightening to me. "At least you know where you are with him," I said weakly. Arthur nodded matter-of-factly. "Tell me everything you know about the Wallace case," he said. "Well, I'm up on it of course, since it was supposed to be the topic last night," I explained. "I wonder if—whoever killed Mamie—picked it for that reason?"
I was actually kind of glad I'd finally get to deliver part of my laboriously prepared lecture. And to a fellow aficionado, a professional at that. "The ultimate murder mystery, according to several eminent crime writers," I began. "William Herbert Wallace, Liverpool insurance salesman," I raised a finger to indicate one point of similarity, "and married with no children," I raised a second finger. Then I thought Arthur could probably do without me telling him his job. "Wallace and his wife Julia were middle aged and hadn't much money, but did have intellectual leanings. They played duets together in the evening. They didn't entertain much or have many friends. They weren't known to quarrel.
"Wallace had a regular schedule for collecting insurance payments from subscribers to his particular company, and he'd bring the money home with him for one night, Tuesday. Wallace played chess, too, and was entered in a tournament at a local club. There was a play off chart establishing when he'd be playing, posted on the wall at the club. Anyone who came in could see it." I raised my eyebrows at Arthur to make sure he marked that important point. He nodded.
"Okay. Wallace didn't have a phone at home. He got a call at the chess club right before he arrived there one day. Another member took the message. The caller identified himself as ‘Qualtrough.' The caller said that he wanted to take out a policy on his daughter and asked that Wallace be given a message to come around to Qualtrough's house the next evening, Tuesday. "Now, the bad thing about this call, from Wallace's point of view," I explained, warming to my subject, "is that it came to the club when Wallace wasn't there. And there was a telephone booth Wallace could have used, close to his home, if he himself placed the ‘Qualtrough' call."
Arthur scribbled in a little leather notepad he produced from somewhere. "Now—Wallace comes in very soon after Qualtrough has called the club. Wallace talks about this message to the other chess players. Maybe he means to impress it on their memory? Either he is a murderer and is setting up his alibi, or the real murderer is making sure Wallace will be out of the house Tuesday evening. And this dual possibility, that almost hanged Wallace, runs throughout the case." Could any writer have imagined anything as interesting as this? I wanted to ask.
But instead I plunged back in. "So on the appointed night Wallace goes looking for this man Qualtrough who wants to take out some insurance. Granted, he was a man who needed all the business he could get, and granted, we know what insurance salesmen are still like today, but even so Wallace went to extreme lengths to find this potential customer. The address Qualtrough left at the chess club was in Menlove Gardens East. There's a Menlove Gardens North, South and West, but no Menlove Gardens East; so it was a clever false address to give. Wallace asks many people he meets—even a policeman!—if they know where he can find this address. He may be stubborn, or he may be determined to fix himself in the memories of as many people as possible.
"Since there simply was no such address, he went home."
I paused to take a long drink of my tepid coffee.
"She was already dead?" Arthur asked astutely.
"Right, that's the point. If Wallace killed her, he had to have done it before he left on this wild goose chase. If so, what I'm about to tell you was all acting.
"He gets home and tries to open his front door, he later says. His key won't work. He thinks Julia has bolted the front door and for some reason can't hear him knock. Whatever was the case, a couple who live next door leave their house and see Wallace at his back door, apparently in distress. He tells them about the front door being bolted. Either his distress is genuine, or he's been hanging around in the back alley waiting for someone else to witness his entrance."
Arthur's blond head shook slowly from side to side as he contemplated the twists and turns of this classic. I imagined the Liverpool police force in 1931 sitting and shaking their heads in exactly the same way. Or perhaps not; they'd been convinced early on that they had their man.
"Was Wallace friendly with those neighbors?" he asked.
"Not particularly. Good, but impersonal, relationship." "So he could count on their being accepted as impartial witnesses," Arthur observed.
"If he did it. Incidentally, the upshot of all this about the front door lock, which Wallace said resisted his key, turned out to be a major point in the trial, but the testimony was pretty murky. Also iffy was the evidence of a child who knocked on the door with the day's milk, or a newspaper or something. Mrs. Wallace answered the door, alive and well; and if it could have been proved Wallace had already left, he would have been cleared. But it couldn't be." I took a deep breath. Here came the crucial scene. "Be that as it may. Wallace and the couple do enter the house, do see a few things out of place in the kitchen and another room, I think, but no major ransacking. The box where Wallace kept the insurance money had been rifled. Of course, this was a Tuesday, when there should've been a lot of money.