Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

Roetherl ground out his cigarette on the garage floor with the toe of his shoe. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I can’t hear Lambie from here.”

“You go on in,” said Auburn. “I’ll put the door back down and come around to the porch. Better lock the door to the basement until you get this door fixed.”

Before Auburn had time to ring at the front door, Roetherl opened it for him and led him once again into the venomous atmosphere of the living room. Mrs. Roetherl seemed to be dozing.

“Why didn’t you admit a while ago that you’d had transmission work done on your car?”

“Because I thought you were getting around to telling me this fellow had been rim down by my car. I knew that wasn’t true, but I wanted to avoid—” After stopping to light another cigarette he picked up his narrative on a different tack. “Sometimes I let my wife’s nurse, Mrs. DePaul, use my car. Last summer I had her take it in for some transmission work.”

“And that was when Brendel pulled a wire loose in the remote unit for your garage door opener and put in a label inviting you to call a number to get it fixed — his number.”

Roetherl, smoking in silence, shrugged and nodded.

“So what did you hit him with?”

“A crowbar he swung at me. It’s in the Raysters’ fishpond along with some other tools he had. Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights?”

“I wasn’t planning to arrest you for killing Brendel. At the very worst it was manslaughter. But I do have to read you your rights about another matter. I think I know why you went to the trouble of carrying Brendel’s body all the way down to the road in the dark last night instead of calling the police and telling them what had happened.”

As Auburn recited the Miranda formula, the bravado glare died out of Roetherl’s eyes, to be replaced by a dark gleam of fear.

“I read over some old newspaper accounts of your trouble in Canada back in the fifties,” said Auburn. “You were accused of shooting your cousin and making it look like a hunting accident.”

“And I was fully exonerated,” said Roetherl. “It was an accident.”

“Your cousin was a Marine on leave. You had just inherited your grandfather’s business — all of it. You and your cousin were both named Karl after your grandfather. You had the same name, the same build, almost the same face—”

“That’s ancient history.”

“But you, sir, were the Marine on leave, weren’t you? The man who died was the architect, the successor to your grandfather’s business and fortune. After shooting him in the head, a day and a half away from civilization, you exchanged clothes and personal effects with him.” Roetherl was shaking his head and indeed the whole upper half of his squat body in a frenzy of denial.

“You and your cousin were the only surviving representatives of your family. After your acquittal you traveled outside the country for years before you could safely return and step into the other Karl Roetherl’s shoes.”

“That’s the most fantastic, idiotic—”

“Six years ago you had a break-in here and failed to report it. One of your neighbors did. When the police came to investigate, you claimed you’d broken the window yourself and refused to let them in. Why? For the same reason you didn’t call the police last night and tell them you’d surprised an intruder and hit him a little too hard — because you couldn’t risk having them go over the place and find the fingerprints of a man who’s supposed to have died forty years ago.”

Roetherl collapsed into a chair. “I’ve dreaded this moment every waking hour of my life for all those forty years. All right, yes, I changed places with my cousin. What are you going to do about it now? There isn’t much left of the money. There isn’t much left of me.”

An overwhelming wave of pity threatened to wipe away Auburn’s objectivity. “There’s no statute of limitations on first-degree murder,” he forced himself to say.

“I tell you I was acquitted,” Roetherl snarled, with something like a return of his former pugnacity. “You can’t try a man twice for the same crime.”

“That won’t work, sir. You weren’t acquitted because you never came to trial. You were exonerated of a charge that you had murdered Karl Roetherl the Marine. If your prints match his in military records, you can be tried for the murder of the man you’ve been claiming to be. The case against Karl Roetherl the millionaire architect fell apart because there was no apparent motive. But Karl Roetherl the disinherited grandson, the instructor in hand-to-hand combat—”

Roetherl ran a jerky hand over his shaven scalp. “I’ll have to make some arrangements about Lambie,” he said. “And it’s time for her medicine.”

They went to the kitchen, where Roetherl emptied a bottle of clear liquid into a drinking glass and added grape juice. In the nick of time Auburn woke up to the fact that Roetherl was on the point of giving his wife a lethal overdose. Preferring not to scuffle with an ex-Marine who had carried the hundred eighty-eight pound Brendel a quarter of a mile over rough ground in the dark, he drew his weapon.