One Hour to Kill Read online

  THE ODOR of familiar perfume greeted him when he turned the knob on the door of Fay’s bedroom, and in that first instant when he saw the limp, crumpled figure in the wicker chair he knew instinctively that his wife was dead. . . . Dave Wallace had come to Trinidad to forget the past and his scheming, predatory estranged wife, Fay. But Fay had reneged on their divorce agreement and had followed him to the island, had moved in on him bag and baggage and begun running around with three different men. Now she was dead—strangled with her own necklace—and Wallace, who had quarreled with her only an hour before, still bore the scratch marks from her fingernails on the back of his hand. He knew that Fay had been winding up her affairs and planning to leave, that she had been playing her favorite game of blackmail, and that someone was paying her off. Steve Rand, the charter-boat captain, Neil Benedict, the gambler and night-club owner, and Joe Anderson, the real estate operator, had good reason to hate her. Yet of the men in Fay’s life, he himself became at once the most logical suspect. For there had been another time when he had resorted to violence and attacked his wife with murder in his heart. If this became known while the police were investigating her death, who would believe he was innocent?

  In this—his fiftieth—mystery novel, George Harmon Coxe weaves an absorbing and suspenseful tale of murder on a Caribbean island, a puzzler that reveals a top craftsman of crime at his incomparable best.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  George Harmon Coxe was born in Olean, New York, and spent his youth there and in nearby Elmira. After a year at Purdue and one at Cornell, he worked for five years with newspapers in California, Florida, and New York, and did advertising for a New England printer for five more. Since that time he has devoted himself to writing—for two years with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, then as a free-lance, selling numerous short stories, novelettes, and serials to magazines as well as to motion-picture, radio, and television producers.

  He is past president of the Mystery Writers of America.

  June 1963

  ONE HOUR

  TO KILL

  George Harmon Coxe

  NEW YORK

  Alfred · A · Knopf

  1963

  L. C. catalog card number: 63-17971

  Copyright 1951, © 1963 by George Harmon Coxe. All rights reserved.

  Based in part on the novelette

  THE FATAL HOUR, which appeared in

  The American Magazine

  For Alfred

  I

  On the days when Dave Wallace knew he could not spend much time with Ann Joslyn they would sometimes meet at this bit of beach he had found on the eastern edge of Chaguaramas Bay. It was not a place for tourists because the Naval Base, which was strictly off-limits, occupied that area, and when the highway ended there was nothing but a wooded headland which overlooked the tide-swept channel of Boca de Monas, the first of four Bocas that formed the Dragons Mouth and separated the northwest tip of Trinidad from Venezuela.

  There was nothing special about the spot except that no one seemed to use it. The shore was mostly rocky and tree-studded, the gray cloudy waters of the Gulf of Paria uninviting and not conducive to bathing. But it was a secret place for them, no more than ten or twelve miles from Port-of-Spain, and now, in March, the pouri trees were in full bloom and the brilliant yellow flowers gave added color to the scene he had been trying to put on canvas since early afternoon.

  The light had been bad for some time but he had blocked out the scene before Ann came down the little path from the highway at three o'clock, and he knew that if his wife bothered to look at the picture she’d see that he had done some work since he left the bungalow right after lunch.

  At other times, when they had been able to spend the whole day together, he’d always done enough work to justify his absence. In the ten weeks he had known Ann, he had finished a dozen or more pictures but the strain of such clandestine meetings was getting worse and now, as he began to pack his case, he waited for Ann to voice her discontent and bring into focus again a subject they had both studiously avoided for the past two hours.

  “Did you get to talk to her over the weekend?”

  “No.”

  “You said you would.”

  “I said I’d try to.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “She had a date Saturday night. I didn’t hear her come in but it was late. She had the usual Sunday hang-over.” He shrugged and tried to give some conviction to what sounded in his own ears like a very lame excuse. “She didn’t get dressed until four in the afternoon and she was in one of her I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it moods. I tried to reason with her and then I got sore. She called a taxi and started walking down the lane.”

  “Damn her!” Ann had been sitting on a rock, her back to him, hunched forward with elbows on knees and her chin wedged between her palms. Now she jumped up and wheeled, her gaze stormy. “I’d like to wring her neck.”

  “Don’t put ideas in my head.”

  “I mean it.”

  He put the canvas on top of his case, collapsed the easel, and walked over to her, sharing her resentment but finding her display of temper another facet of the physical attraction that made her seem so desirable to him regardless of her mood. The well-spaced hazel eyes remained intent as they regarded him under the arching brows, their level not too far below his. For she was tall for a girl and her chestnut hair had a bright sheen in the western light. The evenly tanned skin was smooth and flawless, the figured cotton sleeveless dress looked smart and sufficiently snug in certain places to remind him again of the firmly rounded slenderness beneath it, and she had a cute nose that was easier to paint than to describe.

  On impulse he leaned forward and, not touching her anywhere else, gave her a soft but lingering kiss. Her lips were warm and still against his. A quick glance of approval touched her eyes as he drew back, and then it was gone. The frown came back and the determined look was intensified, a farsighted look, as though the things she saw were not in his face but a long way off.

  “I didn’t want to spoil the afternoon or interfere with your work,” she said. “But I think it’s time for a change.”

  “All right. If Fay is sober when I get home I’ll talk to her.”

  “Talking to Fay hasn’t done any good so far. No, wait.” She made an abrupt, impatient gesture with one hand. “If I’m going to be difficult—”

  “You’re never difficult.”

  “—I might as well go all the way. I fell in love with a man about two months ago. It turned out he was a fairly successful illustrator who was taking a sabbatical and trying to get over an unhappy marriage. It only took about three dates—I mean, to realize he was the one for me. He’ll be thirty on his next birthday. He’s about six feet tall, give or take a half inch; a bit lanky, with a sort of bony angular face and a sweet smile that makes him handsome when he uses it. A very nice guy, a very trusting guy. Sincere and honest and generous. He said he was divorced—”

  She let the sentence dangle and a twinge of guilt pressed on some hidden nerve center as he admitted the truth of the accusation. The far-off look was still in her eyes and there was something so appealing in her smooth young face that he leaned forward again. This time, aware of him, she pulled back before he could kiss her.

  “Not yet,” she said. “I made up my mind to give you page eight and I’ll not be sidetracked by any emotional pressure.”

  “You know I thought the divorce had gone through.”

  “Admitted. So then Fay appears with the news that she reneged. She moved in on you—”

  This time Wallace interrupted, not denying this statement but defending himself with some resentment.

  “She’s been getting room and board from me, and that’s all. You kn
ow that. I haven’t given her a dime since—”

  “I told you I believed you, but you missed my point.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “And I refuse to quarrel with you,” she said, not angrily but with spirit. “I’m simply saying that until now you’ve handled tilings your way and your way is no good. You said Fay needed a man—or men. That they were as necessary to her as breathing, even though she pursued them like a huntress with a professional contempt for her quarry. You said she had a weakling for a father, that the domineering mother treated him with contempt and that as a result Fay had the same feeling about all men, including you.”

  She paused to take a breath and Wallace could not refute her. He had said these things about his wife and they were true. He also began to see what Ann was driving at, and because his sense of failure was now uppermost in his mind he let her continue.

  “I guess you were right about that,” she said. “You say she has been going out with other men. Three of them you know. That big blond Canadian with the charter schooner—”

  “Nick Rand.”

  “And the one who follows the races and bets on horses.”

  “Neil Benedict.”

  “And the American—Joe Anderson. You followed them—”

  “I followed Nick Rand once,” Wallace said.

  “So what did you do about it? Ill tell you,” she added, not wanting a reply. “You said: ‘That’s great, baby. Let her go. Maybe she’ll fall for one of them. If she does, then shell want the divorce.’” She sighed heavily. “That’s been going on for weeks, and what happened? Nothing.”

  “Okay, I was wrong. I still think the idea was all right but I guess none of her prospects wanted what she had to offer oh a permanent basis.”

  “Then why cant we try it my way?”

  “You mean get a private detective?”

  “Yes. I think you’ve been the victim of your own wishful thinking and its time you at least tried to get the sort of evidence that will give you the divorce you’ve already paid for. You tried to do the decent thing and what did it get you?” She turned away abruptly as she finished, a telltale quiver of her lower lip revealing her emotional distress before she could still it. He watched her a moment, disturbed by what she had said and knowing the indictment was true. Wishful thinking had indeed prevented any positive or aggressive action on his part and he knew now that Ann had suffered most by his indecision.

  “All right, baby,” he said. “I’ve thought about it and I’ve kept ducking. Maybe because I was scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “Because I was afraid she might do the same thing to me. Suppose she found out about us. Suppose she knew.”

  Her head came quickly about, the hazel eyes wide open as she caught her breath. “But she doesn’t, does she?” Wallace said he did not think so but inside his head his brain was probing as he remembered an innuendo here and there that Fay had tossed at him from time to time. There was nothing definite, nothing that she ever followed up, but such remarks had disturbed him at the time and they disturbed him now.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he said and moved up beside her. “I could maybe scrape up another five thousand. Make a final offer. If that doesn’t work I’ll try threats.”

  “Threats are not enough. You have to make her know you’ll do it.”

  As he stopped and slid his arm about her waist he saw the black-hulled ship move out behind Point Gourde. Outward bound from Port-of-Spain and well down in the water, she was moving parallel to the shore until she could swing north through the channel into the Caribbean. The horizontal stripes on the single stack gave it identity and Ann recognized the company colors.

  “A Harrison liner?”

  “Right.”

  “Round for England?”

  “Eventually.”

  “I wish we were on it.”

  “Me too.”

  They watched in silence for another few seconds and she snuggled closer as his arm tightened. Her head came to rest against his shoulder and he could feel some of the tension go out of her body as she took a long breath and let it out slowly.

  “I’m sorry I was such a brat,” she said. He said she wasn’t, but she ignored him. “It’s just that I get so damn tired of sneaking around meeting you on the sly and not being able to do anything about it.”

  “I know.”

  “Sometimes I get so discouraged. I mean, some days it just seems so hopeless—”

  “Don’t think that way,” he said.

  “If you weren’t so nice to her—”

  “I’m not nice to her at all.”

  “Will you talk to Uncle Sidney the next time you come out about getting a detective? You meant what you said, didn’t you?”

  “We’ll work out something. It’s going to be all right,” he added, but even to him his reassurance had an empty sound.

  As though this was what she had been waiting to hear, she straightened, took a quick breath, glanced at her watch, and dismissed the subject.

  “Oh-oh. I’ve got to run. I can just see Sidney now pacing up and down the-lobby of the Queen’s Park Hotel.” She gestured toward his gear. “Can I take anything to your car?” Wallace said he would handle it, and then she turned, kissed him soundly, and stepped away before he could grab her. He tried to give an affectionate slap where the dress was tightest, but he missed and stood watching her scramble up the little path toward the highway above.

  2

  The bungalow that Dave Wallace had rented in December was to the west of the city proper and some distance beyond the yacht club. A narrow tree-lined lane led from the highway to the clearing overlooking the Gulf, and sea grapes, which had been planted out front as far as the high-water line, were kept cut at a height of two or three feet so that the effect was an over-all hedge instead of a lawn, a path in the middle giving access to the shore.

  The bungalow itself was a wooden, metal-roofed structure that stood perhaps three feet off the ground and was supported by concrete blocks. Its unpainted look had neither style nor distinction, but because of this the rent was reasonable and when Wallace moved in he had not expected to share it with anyone. Another smaller and more rickety looking cubicle stood behind the bungalow to provide housing for the couple who lived there—Ernestina, the cook-maid, and her husband, Oliver, who divided his time as gardener, yard boy, and handyman between Wallace and a neighbor.

  A light was visible beyond the half-closed shutters of the little shack as Wallace drove his six-year-old rented sedan into the lean-to that served as a garage, and Oliver appeared in the gathering dusk to give him a hand with the easel and paint case in the rear deck. The partly finished canvas was on the back seat, and as Wallace reached for it he noticed that while some light showed from the living room there was none in the kitchen. This surprised him because Ernestina was usually busy there at this hour and he spoke about it.

  “No dinner tonight, Oliver?”

  “Oh, yes sir,” Oliver said, a tall, flat-muscled Negro in khaki shorts and a patched and faded shirt. His teeth gleamed whitely in his small and dignified smile. “The mistress says you will go out for dinner.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Has she been here long?”

  “Not long, sir.”

  Oliver led the way round the corner of the bungalow, climbed the steps to the porch, which ran the full width of the living room. As he went inside to put the painting paraphernalia in its accustomed comer, Wallace saw that his wife was watching him from a canvas planters chair, knees crossed and one foot swinging idly, her face shadowed by the light that spilled from the tall double door behind her. She had a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other. An ice bucket, a bottle of Scotch, an extra glass, and some soda splits filled the tray on the low taboret which stood near by.

  “Hi, Rembrandt,” she said. “Pour yourself a drink.”

  Even from where he stood, Wallace got a whiff of the perfume which she had always used an
d, in his opinion, to excess. But she was still an attractive woman if you liked them small and blonde and, lately, a little plump. She wore a smart navy-blue linen dress with a rounded neckline topped by a heavy silver necklace fashioned by some native craftsman and given her by one of the local admirers she had cultivated since she came; at least that was the impression she gave when she first wore it and he had made a point not to question her.

  But at the moment he was more concerned with her manner than with her appearance He could tell by the way she slurred her words that this was definitely not her first drink and he eyed her warily because of past experiences. The nasty mood that so often came to the surface when she had too many was absent, and her apparent good humor surprised him. Because he wanted to keep things on that level as long as he could, he accepted the invitation.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get some rum. Ill be right with you.” Oliver, having put the things away, stood waiting as Wallace entered the room. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  “That’s all, Oliver. We’ll lock up.”

  Wallace watched him go, then glanced about the sparsely furnished room. The washed-board floors were bare and smooth from long usage. There were two wicker chairs, a matching settee, another canvas chair, and a round, occasional table at this end of the room. Opposite was a heavy, oblong mahogany dining table, native-built like the six chairs that surrounded it. An opening to the rear of this led to a pantry of sorts, with a kitchen behind it; a second opening gave on a center hall with two bedrooms on the right side and a bath at the end.

  Coming back from the kitchen with a bottle of Barbados rum, Wallace stopped to glance again at the painting he had been working on, his inspection objective but finding the work satisfactory so far as he had gone. Aware suddenly that Fay had said something, he saw that she had turned in her chair to watch him.