5 Detective Novels Magazine Cover — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MEAT OF THE MURDER Every light in the house was turned on. Ted started methodically to turn them off—stopped. It was better with them on. He went to the living room, took a bottle of bourbon out of the liquor cabi- net, and poured himself a drink. It burned, going down, burned like the truth. If his marriage with Eliza- beth had become a progressive tyranny, it had been partly his fault. Mostly his fault. He hadn’t been a very right guy. There had been other women—wait- resses, stenographers—hell, even the farmer’s daughter. He’d been a travel- ing salesman, hadn’t he? Hit and run stuff when he couldn’t face the empti- ness of a country hotel. room. Then Loreen, the girl at the office. A steady thing, a big thing—love and larceny. ‘He wondered if Elizabeth had ever had another guy. He hoped she had. It would make him look better. Why kid himself? The living room was like a squirrel cage to Ted as he paced back and forth, tormenting himself. What he should have done—what he should have been— He stopped walking, began a system- atic search of the house He supposed he was looking for a clue, although he prob- ably wouldn’t know one if it fastened it- self on his throat. Besides, the police had been all over this—trained men, ex- perts, scientists. What could they miss, that a little wholesale meat salesman would pick up? The whole business was a waste of time. Which made it important to Ted Owen. He had to waste time. Te wandered listlessly into his study, sat down behind the desk. He pulled out the top drawer and began pawing around in the jungle of stuff in it. Pen- cils with broken points, fountain pens with bent nibs, sprained paper clips, old envelopes, grocery lists. A nearly empty bottle of purple ink. Elizabeth had been partial to purple ink. The other drawers were pretty much the same. He found exactly what he had expected—nothing. In the bottom drawer, he kept a steel file box for his canceled checks. He hadn’t opened it since the first of the month, when he had balanced the bank 17 statement. He thumbed the catch and flipped the metal lid back. It was empty; the cardboard dividers lay flat on the bottom of the box. Ted stared at the empty file for sev- eral minutes. What was it all about? Who would be interested in his canceled checks and old bank statements? He closed the box finally, slid the drawer shut, and stood up. He had been using that file for years, and no one had ever touched it before. No one had ever strangled Elizabeth before, either. Ted went up to her room. If it had seemed strange to him to see this room choked with policemen and police tech- nicians, it was stranger now. The room and Elizabeth had been so completely identified it was almost as though Ted had walked into a room where he’d never been before. The ambulance at- tendants had stripped the bed when they came for Elizabeth, and Ted imagined he could still see the hollow her body had made in the mattress. Ted shook himself. He wasn’t there to wallow in nostalgia. He crossed the room to _ Elizabeth’s dresser, went through each of its drawers; moved on to the closet, the hat boxes on the shelf. In each place, he drew a blank. Beside the bed, there was a bulging, bandy-legged, French period night ta- ble. It had a cabinet space in it. The door to the cabinet was locked. He didn’t want to break into it. If Malotte hap- pened to come back and noticed that the cabinet had been tampered with, it would be just a little tough to explain. Ted knew for sure that Elizabeth hadn’t had the key with her when she was taken from the room. He tried the dresser again, the glove box. Elizabeth had had a theory that no one ever looked for anything valuable in the fingers of gloves. He had known her to hide con- siderable amounts of money in them, folded flat. He made a fine haul now—about a hundred dollars in twenties, in addition to the small, engraved key he was look- ing for. The cabinet paid off, too. At least as well as three oranges on a slot machine. His canceled checks and bank state- ments were there. Five years of them, AMICLOOO (Cc) S (CO mM