Crime on My Hands by George Sanders

Author:George Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2015-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

I claim no flair for philosophy that probes the hidden springs of human behavior. I am inclined to observe surface manifestations and deal with those. I have found this to be practical.

So, even now, when Peggy, who was something of a friend, had been shot in the back, I did not run down my list of suspects in search of basic motivations. The motive was there on the surface, clear as a signpost. The murderer knew that she had seen something – an act, a gesture, any abnormal characteristic – and made a note of it. He had to kill her to prevent her tagging him.

My plan to identify him was also a surface measure. The killer knew that he had committed murder. The very word murder must lie close to the surface of his consciousness. My purpose, then, was to jolt him into revealing that fact, and my plan to do so was simple. I had “invented” – the term isn’t strictly accurate, but suffices – a word game which had brought me many free drinks, and cost me a few, too. It began one day in the Derby bar where I ran into a highly literate lady who plays moronic roles on the screen and stage. I bet her a dollar I could give her three letters of a word, and she could not fit those letters into a word – mine or any other – within fifteen seconds.

“C-x-q,” I said, and pushed the timer on my watch.

She turned on that mournful expression that has brought belly laughs to millions, and said “quincunx” in a voice that said I was pumping her heart’s blood into the street.

“There isn’t any such word,” I said.

Heartbrokenly, she offered a wager of five dollars more that such a word existed, and the bartender offered to back her judgment with two dollars of his own. We adjourned to a near-by book shop, where she proved that “quincunx” concerned an arrangement of objects by fives, and I was eight dollars out of pocket. I didn’t play the game with her any more. I managed to recoup my losses from less erudite persons, and played the game occasionally off and on for two or three years.

Now, on the heels of Peggy’s death, I wanted to get as many suspects as possible together and throw them letter combinations like d-m-u for murder, l-l-g for killing, m-h-c for homicide, and the like. It seemed to be a sound theory to me. Although it would prove nothing, it would concentrate my attention on the person who was self-conscious about coming up with any of those, or related, words, and we could investigate his alibi, motives, former associations with Severance Flynne, etc.

I hadn’t speculated on Melva Lonigan’s reaction to my being in jail.

She came rocketing in with Fred and a middle-aged stranger. She said, “They can’t do this to me. Where’s that half-witted sheriff?”

“Can’t do what to you?” I asked.

“Put you in jail. What else?”

“I tried to tell her,” Fred broke in, “that this is swell publicity for you.

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