The Naked Murderer

By Evelyn Piper

Haunted by a vengeful ghost, a woman is forced to find a killer
 
It’s been nine weeks since Myra was murdered, and Elizabeth Tregillis is still seeing her ghost. After six years working as that horrible woman’s secretary, it’s no wonder she can still hear her insults and feel every scar left by the emotional abuse. Elizabeth has long dreamed of Myra being out of her life, but why won’t Myra stay dead? Why won’t she go to hell where she belongs?
 
If Myra weren’t haunting her, Elizabeth could live happily ever after with Tom. But it was Tom’s nurse, Ruthie, who was arrested as the killer, and Elizabeth isn’t sure that she’s truly guilty. Anyone in town could have wanted Myra dead, but who bought those nine grains of morphine? Who used them to shove the old lady over to the other side? One thing is for certain, until the real killer is found, Elizabeth won’t get a moment’s rest.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Feb 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504021111

Evelyn Piper

Merriam Modell, pen name Evelyn Piper, was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1908. She is known for writing mystery thrillers of intricate, suspenseful plotting that depict the domestic conflicts of American families. Her short stories have appeared in the The New Yorker and two of her novels, Bunny Lake Is Missing and The Nanny, were adapted into major Hollywood films.

Book preview

When I left Tom’s apartment that morning I had closed all the windows and pulled the blinds down. Now, returning at six, I laid Tom’s key softly on the kitchen table and softly set down the marketing bag because I remembered Kansas. I remembered how my mother used to darken our house early, before the hot sun came out full, and how in the summer evening she would go from room to room and without clatter, because she was a quiet woman, raise the blinds and thrust the windows open. (She had white round arms.) I remembered how she would lean out of each of the windows in the big bedroom which was a corner room to see whether she could spot Poppa’s Chevy coming up White, or Orchard, or Whitney Street. And if she did, we would go downstairs and wait at the door and then I would see that special smile.

I sighed and then Myra materialized for me. She was in that darkened kitchen.

Enter hautboys. Enter ghost sneering.

Myra’s sneering ghost said, "Why are you sighing? Because I Remember Momma? That’s not why! Come on, Tregie. ‘There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this.’ You’re jealous of Momma, that’s why! You can pull up the blinds all right, you can wait at the door for Tom, but you can never meet him with that mysterious smile. You were Tom’s wife’s secretary and now you’re Tom’s secretary, his cook, his housekeeper, his sock mender, but not his …"

I clattered up the blind as noisily as possible to drown her out and thrust the casement window open and then it was the voice of the shouting woman in the tenement across the alley I heard. She had already begun her evening harangue. Five years! Five years!

Tom said that although this performance had been repeated since he left Myra and moved into this apartment on Manhattan Avenue, he had never once heard any answer and that the woman’s husband was either a saint or a deaf mute, but I wondered if there was a husband. I saw that poor shouting woman returning each evening as I used to, to an empty room.

She screamed, I will not live this life!

I saw that life. Between the time Poppa died and the day I became Myra’s secretary and stayed in her big house in Larchmont, I had lived that life. I would be living it again now if Tom’s nurse, Ruthie, hadn’t been accused of murdering Myra so that he had asked me here to help him out. I was staying in Tom’s apartment, sleeping in his bedroom while he used the couch in the living room because we were so sure that Ruthie would be released soon and the nightmare would be over.

I closed the window so that I wouldn’t hear the shouting woman. Tom would soon be back from his round of house calls and his dinner wouldn’t be ready. The cold soup was fixed and the chicken liver made my way with rice, but I still had the salad to get. I took the cheese cake I had walked all the way to Cake Masters’ on Broadway for, because it was Tom’s favorite, out of the marketing bag. As I put it into the refrigerator, I could see how Tom’s fork would cut through the cream cheese and the delicate crust. I could hear the slight smacking of his lips and how, sitting at the bridge table on which we ate, when he nodded at me to say the cake was good, his cheeks would push his glasses up. (Why was that endearing?)

And then I wondered what Ruthie would be eating for her dinner. When we had last visited her in the Sheriff’s Jail in Grasslands, she said the food was good, but then she didn’t complain about anything. Once, in Chicago, I saw a collie being transferred from one plane to another, and while he waited for his leash and his shipping papers to be handed to the next official, he hung his head the way Ruthie did now, and the dazed uncomprehending look on his face was like hers since the afternoon she was indicted, when she had been handed, along with the court papers, to an Under Sheriff. Nothing in the collie’s life had prepared him for this, and nothing had prepared Ruthie to be accused of murdering Myra.

But on our last visit, just before we left, Ruthie had broken down. I was sitting on one of the benches which lined the walls of the visitors’ room while Tom, in a box like a telephone booth, talked to Ruth through a round hole in the metal wall between them. He told me this afterwards, as we were driving back to New York, that when he said he had to go, she had begun to cry and he had reached into his pocket for his handkerchief and then realized he couldn’t give it to her. Couldn’t even give her a handkerchief when she cried!

Now I felt the hot sting of tears. I said aloud to the empty kitchen that it was a nightmare! A nightmare!

Then I could almost see the pointed nail on Myra’s index finger swoop down on that word nightmare and impale it as it used to when she read over a manuscript I had typed for her.

She said, "Is it all nightmare, Tregie? Needed to remind yourself of Ruthie just then, didn’t you? Had to reconstruct that tear-jerker handkerchief bit, didn’t you? Had to jerk that tear! Actually, Myra said, Ruthie in jail or no Ruthie in jail, come on, don’t be a hypocrite, you were feeling no pain!"

She meant because I was here with Tom, living in his apartment, helping him out in his office downstairs only because Ruthie was in jail.

Stop beating your breast, Myra said. Of course you felt no pain. No one ever feels anyone else’s toothache, so why should you?

Was it true? Was I like that? Did I need to remind myself of Ruthie in jail? Didn’t I care what happened to Ruthie if only I could be with Tom?

"What do you feel, Tregie? What do you really feel?"

Myra had said that so often in her aseptic voice, standing in front of my typing chair, wearing something memorable, with her dark hair shiny and her eyes slitted and her head to one side ready to study my reactions. She had said that so often, generally after she had hurt me, expecting me to describe where it hurt and how it hurt and exactly what I felt toward her for having hurt me. (Elizabeth Tregillis, secretary and guinea pig!) Myra would never accept the reactions of forgiveness or charity. She did not believe in them. She had flayed me alive and then she would stand there with those shiny slitted eyes waiting for me to tell her what it felt like to have my simple belief in decency and goodness ripped off layer by layer. And she had always known what she was doing.

My dear Tregie, for writers unawareness is the one cardinal sin! She leaned closer to me. And it’s dangerous for anybody, Tregie. You mustn’t be unaware of how evil people are. You must know no one is good. No one can be trusted. Surely, she said now, "my murder gave the coup de grâce to that idiot faith in mankind you used to have, Tregie. You may not believe that little Ruthie killed me … my own son’s fiancée, a pretty touch, but I am dead. I was poisoned. Surely this should show you what people are!"

I said, Tom’s good. Tom’s good! Look how he came here to this terrible neighborhood to give the best possible medical care to the Puerto Ricans and Negroes and poor white people!

But that figures, Myra had said when she heard about it. Tom simply has a God complex. Why do you think he became a doctor in the first place? Of course it figures, nothing for nothing. Tom’s getting paid in the adulation and unquestioning obedience he couldn’t get from his patients on Park Avenue. Now she added, Which, incidentally, is all he wants from you, my dear.

But it was what I wanted to give him. It was what I wanted to give Tom.

I washed the tomatoes I had chosen with such care and dried them and picked one up to admire it. It was coral smooth and round, unblemished and beautiful. Love apples they used to call them because they were believed to be aphrodisiac.

Don’t you just wish they were! Myra’s sneering ghost said. "Don’t you just wish they were! Here you are, mirabile dictu, sleeping in Tom’s bed, but he hasn’t asked you to share it with him, has he? And that tomato red you’re turning doesn’t make you any more aphrodisiac, believe me, Tregie!"

This kept happening now. Myra had been dead for nine weeks, but this kept happening. It was as if Myra had willed me her eyes; as if for six years, all the time I had been her secretary and lived in her house, she had been preparing me for the grafting operation; as if, now that she was dead, I had to see through Myra’s completely cynical eyes. When I tried to slice the tomato my hands shook with shame.

When Tom arrived, he saw that I was depressed and put himself out to cheer me up. He was sure, of course, that it was because of Ruthie, and refused to talk about her. He tried to make me forget her and … forgive me, Ruthie … when the buzzer rang at eight, I had forgotten. Both Tom and I believed it was a patient. Many of them knew he lived in a small apartment on the sixth floor of the seedy building in which his office occupied the right front side on the ground floor, and since his home telephone was unlisted, they just came and rang his bell.

Yes, I have to admit, Myra, that Tom and I were so far from nightmare that we merely sighed when the buzzer went. But it wasn’t a patient. When I opened the door, there was Andrew. I called over my shoulder, Tom, it’s Andrew! and Tom called out, Andy, hi! But was it Andrew? With such a white face, with eyes that looked past my shoulder? It is Andrew ashamed, I thought, and so little was I in the nightmare that I assumed that Andrew was ashamed because of me, because I was so ostensibly there, in his father’s apartment. (I am admitting this, Myra!)

Yes, Myra, I was on the point of reminding Andrew that the super had told us there was a one-room apartment about to be vacated on the fourth floor and I wanted to be on hand to grab it. I admit that I had already formed an explanatory sentence for those so oddly turned-away eyes.

Pa, Andrew said, now looking toward the window past Tom’s shoulder, this is Quentin.

I had met Quentin the week end he had stayed in the big house, the week end before Myra was killed. Like Andrew, he is a junior in Columbia College. We had heard a great deal about him. Andrew was so proud that Quentin had chosen him for his friend. Quentin is a dark handsome boy, no taller than Andrew, but heavier. His body seems more mature than Andrew’s, stronger looking, and he seems the elder, although he is twenty, too.

No one will see him from that description, Myra says.

Quentin has a dark piratical beard, but I hadn’t thought him piratical, dangerous, before; no, when Andrew brought him out to Larchmont, I only thought beatnik because of that beard and because of the brooding expression, the cotton sweatshirt worn next to his skin so that his throat rose out of it, because of the skin-tight blue jeans.

How exhibitionistic kids like that are, Myra had said.

Quentin had worn a corduroy jacket slung over one shoulder like a cape. (Too self-consciously picturesque to be accidental, according to Myra.) Now he transferred this same jacket to his left shoulder and shook hands with Tom. Hi, Doc, he said.

Myra had said, I detest this fashion of the lowest common manners being the denominator. It takes courage these days to be like Andrew and use the manners he was taught. She said it took courage to look like a gentleman when dirt and beards were fashionable. And Quentin did look deliberately theatrical with that draped jacket and his dark eyes and beard as he lounged against the green wall and waited for Andrew to explain why he had come.

But Andrew couldn’t explain. I saw how his hands made fists and how they pressed against his thighs. There was a vein jumping under the fair skin of his forehead and he hung his head. So it was Quentin who explained.

Doc, I got back from a nine-week trip a couple of hours ago. I’ve been telling Andy something he wants you to hear. I wanted to go straight to the cops, but Andy insisted on bringing me here first. We saw him take a deep breath as if he needed it; then he said, Look, I’m bushed! Look, I’ve got to have a drink!

I wondered why only this brought Andrew to, why, while Tom got a bottle and a glass, Andrew pulled out Tom’s big armchair and tried unsuccessfully to get his friend to seat himself. Quentin leaned his head back against the green wall, closed his eyes, and took a long pull at his drink. He has thick curling black lashes; with his eyes closed and those lashes, his face was no longer bold. He said, Doc, I killed her.

His lashes fluttered but only when he heard my gasp and Tom’s What? What? did he open his eyes again. He looked at me (with my mouth gaping), at Tom, whose eyes showed their whites, and then at Andrew, still staring down at the floor.

There was a thump as Tom’s feet came down hard. He went to his son. What is this, Andy? Is this some kind of lousy joke?

But the dark boy answered. It’s the truth, Doc. He managed a high shaky laugh. It’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Doc! I killed her.

Tom would not look at him. He would not take his eyes from Andrew. Is this some kind of lousy joke? Is this someone’s idea of a joke? But Andrew wouldn’t even raise his head so Tom turned back to the dark boy. Why should you kill Myra?

The ‘why’ is kind of complicated. Can I tell you how I killed her? That was easy. Pie.

We know how. She died of an overdose of morphine.

Yes, sir. Eight grains. I gave it to her. His fingers went to his beard. I noticed that they caught in it and that he grimaced with the slight pain. "You understand that I was positive it would be called suicide, Doc. Please give me credit—I never figured anyone would be accused of murder, much less poor little Ruthie! Which is why I’m confessing.

"I waited, you notice, until the Grand Jury indicted her. I just couldn’t believe they’d go that far. At least I told myself I couldn’t believe it. I’m no hero. I wasn’t going to stick my neck out for abstract justice!

"First I told myself that they were just going through the motions of arresting Ruthie because they had to make a showing—couldn’t possibly have a case. Then I told myself maybe the idea was to be able to blame the Grand Jury when they wouldn’t indict. Get the D.A. off the hook. I gave myself a new excuse to wait each step of the way, Doc, but when I heard she’d been indicted, that was it. As soon as I heard, I headed the heap for home; only it broke down and so did