Framed in Blood by Brett Halliday Page A

seems to have taken an overdose of sleeping-tablets and can’t be aroused.”
    “Killed? Right next door to me and I didn’t hear it! Mercy me, you’d of thought I’d heard something.” Her toothless mouth worked nervously, and she shook her snow-white head from side to side in anger or sheer disappointment. She made a clucking sound and said, “So she did it so quiet I never even suspected. Oh, she’s a sly one, all right. Cut his throat—or was it a blunt instrument like they say in the radio plays?”
    “He was shot and his body found in a ditch several miles from here,” Shayne told her gravely. He watched keenly for her reaction, and decided that it was definitely one of disgust and disappointment.
    “How’d he get out of the house?” she asked, greatly agitated, the end of her sharp nose twitching. “I thought for sure he was dead drunk when I heard the telephone ringing and ringing and nobody answering it.”
    “When was that?” Shayne asked quietly.
    “About half after ten—and then again a minute or two past eleven.”
    “How can you place the time so close?”
    “Because I had my radio on, that’s why,” she retorted. “I keep it on all evening with the lights out while I’m sitting here—now that they’ve got so careful to be quiet that a body can’t hear anything even when it’s off.”
    “If you think he was too drunk to answer the phone, didn’t you think it was queer that she didn’t? Didn’t it make you wonder if maybe she had slipped out before he got home without your seeing her?”
    “I know she didn’t, so why should I think that? Besides, she’s always taking those sleeping-pills and going to bed early so she doesn’t hear the phone, and it rings lots of times at night when she’s by herself. Too many sleeping-pills, eh? I’m not surprised. No, sir, not one speck surprised. Are they pumping her out—or is it too late to save her?”
    “I imagine the doctor is pumping her out,” Shayne told her. “What time did Bert Jackson go out again after he came in?”
    “He didn’t,” she said flatly. “Not till after midnight anyway when I went to bed. Land sakes! If I’d just had any idea—”
    Grandma Peabody went on to assure him emphatically that if she’d known what to look forward to she certainly wouldn’t have closed her eyes during the night, but Shayne was convinced of that fact and he didn’t listen to her.
    His mind was busy with the puzzle of Bert Jackson returning at ten o’clock when Rourke had told him positively that at twelve o’clock Betty denied that she had seen him all evening. If Mrs. Peabody was right—if Betty had been home at ten—
    But perhaps she had already taken the sleeping-tablets by that time, he thought, trying not to listen to the old woman’s chatter which had turned into personal grievances.
    That didn’t check. Rourke admitted talking to her at twelve—and comforting her. And he distinctly recalled that Rourke had mentioned talking to her on the phone again at two o’clock and advising her to take the tablets.
    He got up suddenly and moved across the room to the window, looked out, and noted that the corner of the Jackson house cut off her line of vision of the front walk at a point about ten feet in front of the Jackson’s front porch.
    Pointing this out to her he said casually, “When the police get around to questioning you, I advise you not to be too positive in saying that Mr. Jackson entered his house soon after ten o’clock and didn’t leave it until midnight.”
    She came over and peered out the window with him, reluctant to give up her role as the all-seeing eye. “I’d like to know why not,” she snapped. “I saw him with my own eyes, didn’t I? Staggering up that path and land knows how he managed to walk all the way from the bus in that condition.”
    “You saw him walk up the path to within ten feet of the front porch,” Shayne corrected her. “You don’t know that he went in. He could have