“Not particularly, but—”
“Do you wear a watch?”
“I have a pocket watch.”
“Is there a wall or desk clock in your office?”
“No sir.”
“Without consulting your watch, what time would you say it is now?”
“I suppose it’s about a quarter to eleven.”
“It’s exactly seven minutes after ten.”
Frank glanced at Greer. Greer merely shrugged his shoulders and looked up at the ceiling.
“You admit,” Angell said, “that you could have been mistaken about the time of that phone call?”
“I could have been, but I don’t think I—”
“That will be all, thank you, Mr. Clyde.”
Frank stepped down from the box without argument. He knew — and Greer knew — that the verdict would be what Angell wanted it to be.
At three in the afternoon the jury made its decision. The deceased, Rose Elizabeth French, had, after overexertion, died of natural causes, a heart attack.
On hearing the verdict, Mrs. Cushman, who had conducted herself with dignity and decorum for the whole day, burst into tears, and had to be escorted out into the corridor by Frank.
“With the evidence they had, no other verdict was possible,” Frank said.
“It isn’t the verdict that bothers me.” Mrs. Cushman wiped her eyes on her flowered chiffon sleeve. “It’s her poor heart, and her with never a word of complaint, and me badgering her the way I did sometimes.”
“Don’t let it get you down.”
“And the way I spoke sharply to her about not keeping her room neat like Miss Henderson’s, and her all the time ready to drop dead from a heart attack. I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Cheer up. Rose considered you her best friend.”
“She did? Honest?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“I’m not so sure. You know what she called me? An old bat, that’s what. When I think of all I done for that woman and her turning around and calling me an old bat, it makes my blood boil.”
“You were very kind to Rose.”
“You bet I was.”
“No one could have been a better friend.”
“No one else would of been such a fool.”
“Let me drive you home.”
“All right.” Mrs. Cushman glanced vaguely around the corridor as if she was trying to locate the guilty conscience she had temporarily mislaid. Frank knew what she was looking for but made no attempt to help her find it.
“I got a feeling,” Mrs. Cushman said, frowning, “I got a feeling I forgot something. I better go back in and take a look around.”
She went back in and examined the bench she had been sitting on, and the floor around it, but she didn’t find anything except a discarded copy of the Los Angeles Times. She took that instead.
7
Over a cup of hot, strong tea in Mrs. Cushman’s front parlor, Frank heard considerably more about Mrs. Cushman’s trials and tribulations with life in general and Rose in particular.
It appeared that, for the entire week before her death, Rose had been acting secrety.
“Now if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s secrety people,” Mrs. Cushman explained, “people that go around all the time without telling other people what they’re thinking or doing. To give credit where credit is due, Rose wasn’t always secrety.”
“Just for that one week,” Frank prompted.
“Well, no. It began quite a while ago but the past week especially, I knew something was on her mind besides men and liquor. Men and liquor I could understand, knowing Rose, but this going out all the time and not telling a soul where she’d been, that worried me. And always dressed up, too, fit to kill.”
“She might have had a date with a man.”
“I thought of that, first thing. Only can you imagine a woman like Rose having a date and not bragging about it all over the place? Bragging was Rose’s worst fault, God rest her soul, except for vanity. Rose was vain as they come. Why, many’s the time she’s taken up the whole supper hour telling about how this man ogled her on the street and that man tried to pick her up at a bus stop. It was disgusting, at her age. And speaking of age, did you hear what that Dr. Severn said at the inquest? He said Rose was between 60 and 65. She claimed she was only 52. That goes to show, don’t it?”
Frank wasn’t sure what it went to show, but he nodded.
Mrs. Cushman took the nod as a sign of approval and encouragement. The fact was that, while Rose was alive, Mrs. Cushman had always been a little afraid of her. She had thought many nasty thoughts about Rose which she couldn’t put into words because Rose was armed against attack not only by past prestige but by a present tongue as sharp as a razor. Now that Rose had no chance for a rebuttal or a return match, Mrs. Cushman for the first time felt free to speak her mind. Frank was the perfect audience, quiet, interested, and of the opposite sex.
“I’m not bitter, never’ve been bitter but when she started going out all the time and wouldn’t play canasta anymore — not that she could play canasta any better than a six-year-old child, she had no head for figures. I often had to let her win just so’s she’d keep her temper and wouldn’t walk out on the game.”
Frank covered his amusement with a little cough. He had heard a good deal about these canasta games from Rose. In Rose’s version Mrs. Cushman was an unmitigated cheat who would stop at nothing to win a paltry game of cards.
“I could beat her with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back,” Mrs. Cushman said briskly. “More tea?”
“No thanks.”
“I’ll take a drop more myself. Rose couldn’t stand tea. One of her husbands was an Englishman and after that she couldn’t stand tea.”
“About these excursions of hers—”
“Well, like I said, she went out every morning after breakfast all dressed up. A couple of times I asked her, I said, Rose, are you going shopping? She said yes, she was, but when she came home she didn’t have any parcels so I knew she hadn’t been shopping. Besides, there was nothing new in her room when I went to clean it up.” Mrs. Cushman flushed, but only slightly and momentarily. “Maybe you think I oughtn’t to of gone through her things, but if I didn’t clean up once in a while, who would? And anyway she was behind in her rent and I thought, well, if she’s got enough money to go shopping she’s got enough money to pay her rent. So I just checked to make sure. She had no new clothes, no new anything except a lipstick from the dime store and a whole bunch of maps.”
“Maps?”
“Yes, maps, and I don’t wonder you’re flabbergasted. So was I. It was the first notion I had that she was planning a trip somewhere. There must of been twenty maps altogether, of different parts of the country and of different cities.”
“Were they new?”
“Brand new, like she’d just suddenly decided to go away someplace and got a whole bunch of maps from a travel agency.”
“Did you ask her about them?”
“In a sort of way, I did. I said, Rose, are you thinking of going on a trip? And she gave me one of those sly secrety looks and said, my dear Blanche, one never knows what the future holds in store for one.”
“Did she seem pleased?”
“Pleased as punch, but trying not to show it. The thing is, where would she get the money for a trip?”
That was the thing all right, but as yet it had no shape, size or identity. Frank said, “Rose was an impulsive creature. If she did decide to take a trip, I can’t picture her planning it carefully with a lot of maps.”
“Impulsive, that’s the word all right. Whatever Rose wanted to do she did, and it always seemed right to her at the time she was doing it. Later when it was all over she could look back and see her mistakes and admit them. But at the time she always thought she was right.”