Not Quite Dead Enough (The Rex Stout Library)

“See him? How could I? I wasn’t there. When I got home she was dead.” Her voice got shrill. “I am eighty-nine years old! I went home and found my granddaughter dead! Could I sit right down and think it out? After I was in bed I knew he had killed her! I want you to get him! I want to see him face to face!”

“You will,” Cramer assured her. “Take it easy, Mrs. Chack. Do you remember why he killed Cora Leeds?”

“Certainly I do. Because he didn’t want to give up his pigeon loft. She was going to have it torn down.”

“I thought she had built it for him,” I put in.

“She had. She spent thousands of dollars on it. But after she hurt her leg and couldn’t go to the Square any more, she hated him and she hated everybody. She sent word to me that I had to move out, had to leave that house where I had lived for over forty years. And she told Leon he had to get out and she wouldn’t pay him any more for killing hawks. She had paid him twenty dollars for every hawk he killed. And she told Roy Douglas she owned the pigeons, he didn’t, and she was going to tear the loft down and he had to go. And she told her own daughter she had to stop going to the Square, and when she found out her daughter was secretly giving money to Leon for killing hawks she wouldn’t let her have any money for anything. That’s the way she acted after she hurt her leg and couldn’t go to the Square. It was no wonder I thought it was the Hand of God, especially when it happened on December ninth. But God forgive me, it wasn’t. And I knew it wasn’t, I knew it was Roy Douglas, because Ann told me-God forgive me.”

Cramer cleared his throat and asked, “From what you said, Miss Leeds, I understand you don’t agree with Mrs. Chack?”

“I do not,” Miss Leeds declared emphatically. “She’s crazy. She did it herself.”

“Did what herself? Made that up?”

“No, she did it. She killed my mother and she killed her granddaughter. I doubt if she even knows she did it. Nobody in their right mind would have hurt Ann. She was a nice child and everybody liked her.”

“Excuse me,” I put in. “You told me Monday that nobody killed your mother. You said she died of old age. Now you say-”