Alfred Hitchcock’s A Hangman’s Dozen
- Автор: Артур Роберт, Брэдбери Рэй Дуглас
- Год: 1962
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Publishing
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s A Hangman’s Dozen». Краткое содержание книги:
Sam turned the car into the driveway and parked alongside the house. We all got out and walked around to the back. Leading us to the rear of the yard. Cooper dully nodded toward a freshly-spaded section of garden.
“Right there,” he said in a low voice.
Sam said, “It’s a neat job. Smoothed off nice and even. What’d you do with the extra dirt?”
“Dumped it out back in a ditch.”
“Haw’d you manage such a clean job, as drunk as you were?” Sam asked. “And how come the neighbors didn’t see you?”
“Helen helped me. And it was dark last night. We didn’t use a light except to check up on how it looked afterward.”
The back door opened and a slim, rather pretty woman of about forty came outside. She wore a concerned expression on her face and her eyes widened when she got close enough to see Cooper’s handcuffs.
“What is it?” she asked on a high note. “Are you men police officers?”
I said, “Yes, ma’am. I’m Sergeant Sod Harris of Homicide. This is Officer Sam Wiggens.”
“Homicide?” she said. “Why is my husband handcuffed? George, what is it?”
In a low voice Cooper said, “I told them about it.”
“About what?” She looked at me. “What’s he done?”
“We understood you knew, lady,” I said.
She looked frightenedly from me to Sam and then at her husband. “Knew what?”
“It’s no use, Helen,” Cooper said in a weary tone. “I told them everything.”
Her nervous gaze made another circuit of all three of us. She took a deep breath and said rapidly, “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
I said, “Afraid it’s not that easy. Your husband says you helped him conceal the body.”
Glancing at Cooper, she nervously worked her hands together.
Sam said, “Makes you an accessory, lady.”
“You can’t blame me for not reporting it,” she said. “He’s my husband. A wife doesn’t have to testify against her own husband. Right?”
“Sure,” Sam said dryly. “But she doesn’t have to help him bury bodies either.”
Art Ward from the lab came around the corner of the house carrying a lab kit and a camera. He had two uniformed cops with him carrying shovels. Mrs. Cooper stared at the shovels as if she’d never seen one before.
“Hi, Sod, Sam,” Ward said. “What’s the scoop?” He gave Cooper and Mrs. Cooper a curious glance.
I pointed to the spaded area. “Right there, Art. Should be a body.” I turned to the woman. “Maybe we’d better go inside while they’re digging, Mrs. Cooper.”
She nodded and then led the way toward the house, with her husband following and Sam and me bringing up the rear. One of the policemen sank his shovel into the ground as we walked away.
She only took us as far as the kitchen. Offering us seats at the kitchen table, she said in a flustered voice, “You’ll have to excuse the house. The servants have been gone several days. I... I always let them have off when George...” She let her voice trail off.
Cooper said glumly, “She means she gives them a vacation when I fall off the wagon. She doesn’t want them to know how I am.”
I glanced around. The place looked clean enough to me.
I said, “Now, Mrs. Cooper, you want to tell us about last night?”
She was standing by the window over the sink, her attention divided between us and what was going on outside. “What is there to tell?” she asked. “George said he told you all about it.”
“We’d like your version,” I said. “Incidentally, we came inside so you wouldn’t have to watch what was going on out there. Don’t you think it would be better if you came away from the window?”
Flushing, she came over to the table and sank into a chair. “What do you want me to tell you, Sergeant? George came home drunk and found Mr. Marks here. They had a fight and George hit him with the fire tongs. That’s all there is to it.”
“How did Marks happen to be here?” I asked.
“He came to the door about fifteen minutes before George got home. He’d been drinking too, but I didn’t realize that until after I’d let him in. He... he tried to get fresh with me. I ordered him out of the house, but he wouldn’t go. Then George staggered in and the argument started. It would never have happened if George had been home where he belonged instead of out getting drunk. Drink was the cause of the whole thing. How many times I’ve warned my husband. George, haven’t I done everything possible to make you stop?”
“I guess,” Cooper said in a low voice.
There was a knock at the back door. Mrs. Cooper started to get up, but I waved her back to her seat and answered it myself. Art Ward was standing on the back porch. Stepping out, I closed the door behind me.
“It was there all right, Sod,” he said. “Got a bashed-in skull. He was only buried about a foot down.”
I walked back to the grave with him to look at the body. It had been lifted out alongside of the hole. It was still all covered with dirt.
“How long do you figure?” I asked Ward.
He shrugged. “No bloating. I’d guess under twenty-four hours. You’ll have to wait for the coroner’s physician to make a post mortem if you want it pinpointed.”
I said, “Our information is he died last night.”
“I’d figure about that,” he agreed. “In this weather it doesn’t take long for them to begin to swell. And he hasn’t started yet.”
I sent one of the uniformed policemen over next door to break the news to the victim’s wife and bring her over to identify the body. She was a mousy little woman of middle age and she went all to pieces when she saw what was left of her husband. She managed to identify him, but she was too upset right then to question. I sent her back home accompanied by the same officer who had brought her over. I told him to phone her family doctor to come over and see if he could quiet her down. Then I went back inside.
I took Art Ward back inside with me, having him bring his lab kit. Mrs. Cooper took us into the front room and pointed out the fire tongs, which still lay next to the fireplace with dried blood on them. I told Ward to check them for prints, then take them back to the lab.
There wasn’t much more we could do at the scene. Sam called City Hospital for an ambulance to take the body to the morgue, while I went next door to see how Mrs. Marks was doing. Her family doctor had arrived and had put her under a sedative. I left word with a servant for Mrs. Marks to drop down to headquarters the next day if she felt better, or to phone me if she wasn’t up to it.
We took both Mr. and Mrs. Cooper back downtown. Cooper had already been booked, so we just turned him over to Central District and had him put in a cell. Pending further investigation, we booked Mrs. Cooper on suspicion of being an accessory to homicide and held her overnight.
The next morning, Wednesday, Mrs. Marks’s maid phoned that her mistress was feeling better and would be down to see us about ten a.m., if that was suitable. I said it was fine.
A few minutes later Art Ward phoned from the lab.
“Fingerprints all over those fire tongs,” he said. “Mr. Cooper’s, Mrs. Cooper’s, some other people who will probably turn out to be servants. Everybody who ever fixed the fire last winter, I guess.”
“Any superimposed over the others, to show who handled them last?”
He snorted. “That’s for the movies. We’re not that brilliant.”
Mousy little Mrs. Marks came into the squadroom just as I hung up. She hadn’t met Sam yesterday because he had been inside with the Coopers. After introducing him, I asked the woman to have a seat.