Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  I went to their law library and read myself into a headache looking for a way to take the case to the shrievalty, but couldn’t find one.

  I phoned the county D.A. and we had an interesting chat. He told me that the endowments of Witterberg College amounted to nine million tax-exempt dollars and that he, for one, was not the man to buck nine million tax-exempt dollars over a dubious lab accident. Now if it had been a rape case—

  One of the college cabs took me to the station in Reading. I learned that there wasn’t any eleven-fifteen train and hadn’t been for several years. The next through train would be along at nine in the morning

  “What’s a good hotel?” I asked.

  The information clerk snickered and told me that the annual convention of the Benevolent and Fraternal Order of Beagles had come to town and that if I could find a room tonight I was a magician.

  I wasn’t a magician so I slept in the waiting room. At seven in the morning an excited young assistant professor of English shook me awake and hustled me into his car. He said the president wanted to see me.

  Henry, the campus cop, was in his little house by the gate. He climbed on the running-board and rode us to the Administration Building, where a lot of lights were burning. Dr. Bunce, the coroner, was there and he almost embraced me.

  “We sent a man after you,” he said emptily. “We’re going to retire that old fool Cullet. Will you accept the position of chief of police?”

  That one finally woke me up. “Sure,” I said. “Why?”

  “Didn’t they tell you?” he marveled. “Professor Wakely’s been murdered!”

  I got my appointment from the mayor-president of the college town and went to Wakely’s house on Faculty Row to see the body. It was a mess.

  It was lying at the foot of a tall, old-fashioned wardrobe clad in slippers and underwear. One hand was clutching a dressing gown. He had been struck down from above and a little behind as he was taking the gown from the dresser. The weapon was gone, but I didn’t anticipate any trouble in finding it.

  His head had been bashed in with one terrible blow of a huge, roughly spherical mass. I guessed a twelve-inch boulder at the very least.

  How can you hide a twelve-inch boulder?

  I was so sure of it that I sent Henry to look for it. He came back empty-handed, not that he could have lifted it, and reported no dice. I looked myself and found nothing. I tried the rock-crusher they had in the geology department, but it hadn’t been used for weeks.

  I personally dusted with talc and an air-gun every vehicle on the campus, but didn’t develop any large, round depressions. I dug up three suspicious-looking patches of ground and they turned out to be squirrels’ hoards of nuts.

  After lunch I sat down with Wakely’s manservant, an honest old Uncle Tom type that you don’t see much of any more and sweated him for two hours. He was dignified and positive through it all and stuck to his story, each time with enough minor variations to convince me thoroughly that the truth was being told.

  Wakely had come home from the inquest at eight o’clock and gone upstairs to his room. At six the next morning Uncle Tom had tapped gently on his door. At six-fifteen he had not heard Wakely stirring so he’d opened the door and looked in. At six-twenty he’d recovered consciousness and reported the killing by phone to the college president.

  The room was hopeless, of course. Everybody had been trampling around and about it until the carpet was threadbare. But I tried powder anyway, and got nothing for my pains.

  I wound up the brilliantly successful day by attending the Inquest No. 2, on the late Professor Edward Wakely, Ph.D., S.T.T.F.F.

  Bunce was in pretty poor form. He got testimony from the man-servant, a medical opinion and an expert opinion from me. The jury found that death had resulted from a blow on the head from a blunt instrument—but blunt!—wielded by a person or persons unknown.

  The county sheriff dropped in to deputize me and cut up a few touches. He was a shrewd, practical politician first and an able cop second. He was very glad the killing was in my lap instead of his. He gave me a good cigar and left. I polished the deputy’s badge, pinned it to my vest and whistled a sad and lonesome tune.

  The president of the college wanted to know who done it, and was astonished to find that I didn’t have the slightest notion in the world. He had the flattering idea that because I was a New York divorce snooper by trade I could solve premeditated homicides between smokes.

  “You realize,” he threatened, “that your appointment is definitely pro tempore?”

  “I’m terrified,” I said. “Your threat reduces me to a quivering jelly. For your information, Mr. Mayor, I accepted this job because I’d like to find out who killed Joe Haines. I thought Wakely did it until he got killed himself. Since you don’t usually have two murderers in the same county at the same time, the chances are they were both done in by the same guy. I’ll tell you about him.

  “He was burly, able to lift a heavy boulder. He was light on his feet because Wakely didn’t turn while he was sneaking up on him. The killer had access to the departments of biology, chemistry, bacteriology and physics. He knew Joe Haines’ taste in nuts. And he’s a smarter man than I am, because I can’t find where he ditched the murder weapon.”

  The president shrugged. “You might as well keep working on it,” he said. “I’ll bring it up at the trustees’ meeting next week.”

  “Do that. Incidentally, if both the alternates chosen for Kober Hall are unavailable, who gets the appointment?”

  “That’s happened a couple of times,” said the president. “The answer is ‘nobody.’ Good day. I wish you luck.”

  He waddled out. I lit a cigarette and wished me luck, too. I needed some. I went to sleep and dreamed of a burly man who was light on his feet and could make a twelve-inch boulder invisible with a wave of the hand.

  The next morning I did some surly, random grilling of the faculty and got nowhere. I went to Faculty Row and let myself into Haines’ house. I didn’t have a search warrant, but I went through his private letters and papers with a reckless hand. Much of it was mathematics and meant nothing to me. I was still looking by noon I gave up and wandered into his study for a smoke. This was where I had left the little stringbean at three in the afternoon; in an hour he had been dead in the cyclotron room. He had been working on the Jevons logic machine—

  I went over and looked at it All the tiny windows were blank. There were twenty-five keys at the base, in one long row. The two outside keys had the colon sign (:) engraved on them. The thirteenth key, in the middle, mysteriously said “cop.” I’d asked Joe about it and been told that it stood for “copula,” which stood for “is” or the equals sign in arithmetic as well as a number of other things. The other keys to the left of “cop” carried the alphabet up to “k”; on the right they carried the same in reverse order.

  I punched a few at random and watched letters bob up in the windows and wondered what it was all about.

  I pressed the “cop” key.

  There was the faintest little sizzle. I’d heard it before, half a dozen times, in the bleak winter fighting through Belgium. It meant that you’d stepped on a schuh mine and had about a tenth of a second to throw yourself on your face and roll away before your leg was blown off at the knee.

  I threw myself on my face, beginning to marvel: “But why—”

  The blast pushed solidly against my back and a chunk of something smacked my knuckles, which were locked at the nape of my neck.

  I waited for plaster to stop raining down and got groggily to my feet. There were a few people in the room. Their lips were moving and they looked excited, but all I could hear was a tinkling buzz in my ears.

  I yelled at them and heard my voice, as though at a great distance: “I’m O.K. Clear out of here!”

  They cleared out and I broodingly inspected the remains of the Jevons machine. It was a tangle of rods and plates and cams, opened out like a flower. The blast had knocked the pictures from the w
alls. One of the pictures was lying face down, a slip of paper wedged behind one of the nails that held it to the frame. I picked out the paper, smoothed it and read, in an illiterate pencil scrawl:

  “Got yore cole stuff doc will deliver 3:15 today shore is hevy.”

  I sat down with that note staring me in the face and thought for one solid hour before it came together. As soon as I realized that “cole” had to mean “cold” I was on my way.

  Three hours later I summoned the sheriff, the college officials and the Keystone cop to the faculty room. They filed in and took their seats glancing suspiciously at one another. They all read detective stories and were pretty sure I was going to say: “Gentlemen, the murderer is in this room!” I had a surprise for them. “Gentlemen,” I said, “the murderer is guaranteed not to be in this or any other room.”

  “All right,” said the president testily. “Who killed Haines and Wakely?”

  “They killed each other,” I said. “You’re crazy,” said the president.

  “Here’s what happened: Wakely made three attempts to kill Haines and they all failed. He determined on a fourth, booby-trapping the Jevons machine first chance he got. That turned out to be when Haines left his house at three-thirty the other day Wakely sneaked in and connected his explosive charge.

  “What he didn’t know was that Haines had left his house at three-thirty to booby-trap Wakely’s tall, old-fashioned wardrobe with a huge chunk of dry ice.

  “Wakely, his little errand finished, ran into Haines on the way back and probably decoyed him into the cyclotron room with an argument of some kind. While there he lined him up, turned on the machine and killed him. His next job was to disarm the Jevons machine, but he was tied up by the inquest. That evening, while changing clothes, he yanked open the wardrobe door and a couple of hundred pounds of dry ice fell six feet or so and bashed in his head. He died without a whimper and wasn’t discovered for ten hours, by which time, of course, the ice had evaporated.”

  “Got any evidence for that?” asked the sheriff skeptically.

  I passed him the note from the picture. “With that lead,” I said, “I rounded up everything I needed. The dry ice was supplied by the busboy at the Campus Coke Shoppe. He was told to keep his mouth shut as a practical joke was being planned. I’ve got the basket Haines carried the dry ice in. I’ve got witnesses that saw him carrying it. You just have to know what to look for in this racket.”

  “Not bad,” said the sheriff.

  “Here.” I unpinned the deputy’s badge and tossed it to him. “The legal details are all yours; I hereby resign. I’m going back to New York and divorce cases, where a cop’s a cop and not an equal sign.”

  I did, too. The next morning a Ph.D. from Columbia came into my office wanting me to guard a thesis he was writing against a rival from Fordham who had tried to steal it. I threw him out on his tail.

  1949

  Homicidal Hypo-Man

  An invite to a million-dollar babe’s mansion introduced Private-Eye Burroughs to a beautiful corpse, a curvaceous blackmailer—and two trigger-tempered slay boys.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Drink to Death

  IT WAS the first letter I’d ever got with a wax seal on the back. They’re used by arty people and very old-fashioned ones. When I opened the note I decided it was the latter.

  The handwriting was the kind that nobody does any more—big flourishes with a flexible pen based on a delicate, legible script.

  The letter said that Miss Emily Rose Speyendecker would be happy to see me at her home Wednesday afternoon. The address was just off Gramercy Park and it was now Wednesday morning.

  Since my hobby is eating three square meals a day, I went.

  The Speyendecker house had a lot of pretty ornamental iron work, and the lace-curtained windows were shimmeringly clean. I guessed that I was the first private detective who’d ever climbed the three scrubbed steps of the brownstone stoop.

  I presented the letter to a white-capped parlormaid who answered the knocker. She showed me into the parlor. There was a coal fire in a grate and a handsome set of wrought iron fire tools. The furniture was not self-consciously antique, just a bunch of nice old stuff that had been there a long time ago and stayed there ever since.

  “Miss Speyendecker,” said the parlormaid gently. I rose as an old, old lady came into the room like a little queen into her throne room.

  “Sit down, please, Mr. Burroughs,” she said in a sweet dry little voice. “Will you have tea?”

  “Thank you.” I studied her without staring as the maid brought a tea service of egg-shell china. She mixed teas from three lacquered Chinese boxes into the teapot and tipped a copper kettle that swung in a frame over an alcohol lamp. She inhaled delicately at the steam that rose from the pot.

  She made a fragile little joke, half apology, about not being able to add the bit of India tea that would give cachet to the mixture. It couldn’t be had in New York since the war.

  I made some kind of solemn reply and kept on sizing her up, from her waved, white hair to her small, pastel-slippered feet. She wore a soft, gray gown and was just a bit plump over fine bones. Her face was clear-skinned and fair; the wrinkles she had were laughter wrinkles.

  The tea was poured and sipped as we talked about the weather.

  The maid carried off the service after our second cups had been drunk and we had covered the weather for the past six and the next three months.

  “And now to business, Mr. Burroughs,” she smiled, smoothing her skirt, and trying to look practical. “You were mentioned to me by Mr. Bisch, who retained you for a week last April, I believe?”

  I nodded. That had been a blackmail case. There was a short, puckered scar over one of my ribs—a souvenir from the blackmailer. He was in Matteawan now; his lawyer had pleaded insanity and made it stick.

  “Good. He was most satisfied with your disposition of his problem. I accept his recommendation and would like you to consider a matter which seems to require professional attention of the kind in which you specialize.”

  Burroughs can be as courtly as the next. “I shall be flattered to share your confidence,” I said. “I can assure you it will not be misplaced.”

  She smiled as if she had seen a familiar move being made in the opening of a chess game. “My niece, Mr. Burroughs,” she said, “is a willful girl. Her father is widowed, and dotes on her. He will hear no word against her. He has actually assaulted friends who had mentioned her waywardness for her own good.”

  “Excuse me;” I interrupted. “Do you want me to follow the girl, spying in her to collect evidence of her behavior for you to present to her father?”

  “That is correct,” she said. “The Speyendeckers have never had a foolish pride of family; we come from good, Dutch peasant stock. But there is something about a name—” She mused, trying to put something into words. She gave up with a pretty shrug. “I can’t stand by and do nothing, Mr. Burroughs,” she said finally. “It’s my duty to Charles, my brother, to Eveline, my niece, and to—”

  HER eyes lifted and passed across three dusky portraits above the mantel. One was of a beaver-hatted old New Yorker who looked like her, another was of a bearded, fierce old fellow in the uniform of a brevet-brigadier general in the Union army. The third must have been her father; he wore the frock coat of the last century and the reversed collar of a minister.

  “I understand,” I said slowly. “I’m sorry I can’t be of any assistance, Miss Speyendecker. You are justified, of course—it’s your family and your name. But I don’t feel that I should take any part in the affair.”

  I could hardly believe it was me talking. The old lady cast a spell. I was turning down a fat and certain fee because I liked to think of her pouring tea and because I didn’t want to see her involved in a furious family quarrel, or to witness first hand the decay of her family. There was work enough for me to do without mixing myself up in her secret heartbreak.

  “Very well,” she said, her smile gone
. “Will there be any fee for your call?”

  “No fee,” I said, and waited to be dismissed for half a minute. Then I realized that she was waiting for me to say politely that it was delightful to have seen her and I was so sorry I couldn’t stay longer. I did, and her smile came again. We were back in the familiar ritual that she knew and loved, perhaps because it dulled her to a world that had grown terrible since she was young.

  She wished me good afternoon and floated from the room after giving me her delicate hand. I waited for the maid to come with my hat.

  It wasn’t the maid. It was a glossy Fifth Avenue brunette; tall, stagey and polished to a flawless micro-finish.

  “Burroughs the detective?” she asked boredly.

  I was still under the spell of the old lady, and made the mistake of answering politely. She laughed in my face and yawned: “That’s for French poodles, Burroughs. You’re a Saint Bernard.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “How about my hat?”

  “Sit down,” she said. “I’m Eveline Speyendecker. I want to talk to you about Aunt Emily. What the hell did she want with you?”

  I stayed on my feet. “Whatever she said to me,” I told her, “was a privileged communication. It can’t be forced from me by a subpoena. I’m certainly not going to pass on my client’s affairs to any dame for the asking.”

  “Come off that,” she snapped, two quarter-sized red spots appearing in her cheeks. She reached into a pocket of the trim, gray slacks she wore and came up with a twenty, neatly folded. She’d been ready for this.

  “Now do you talk?” she asked, holding out the bill.

  “Sure,” I said, not reaching. “For twenty dollars I’ll yelp and roll on the floor for joy. Did it ever occur to you that I’ve got a five-thousand dollar bond posted, and that I forfeit it and probably go to jail if I get caught divulging private information?”

  She poked the bill back into her slacks. “I can’t match five thousand dollars,” she said coolly.