The Talmage Powell Crime Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  He was also very wealthy. But that was only a part of it. He had been born with money, and with his physical strength and the money to back him up, he could afford to be an arrogant, overbearing man.

  But I could be his without so much money, Lissa thought, although it’s nice to live in a world of luxury.

  He was generous, but he handed out his money only because there was so much of it. But his kind of generosity didn’t underline her reasons for committing murder.

  He despised just about all people. He saw their weaknesses, where he had none. He met a great number of people who groveled before his money, and he had never groveled to any man.

  He possessed no great humanitarian traits to inspire a woman to the supreme act for his sake.

  The question was a knife in her mind now. Why do I intend to kill Jocelin?

  Because he’s mine.

  There the crux of the thing lay. There’d been a steady parade of women, like toys, in Carl’s life. He could have his pick. He’d never married and probably never would. Women like Jocelin were always seeking him out. He looked upon them with a mingling of cynicism and contempt; and they were too stupid to realize it.

  No woman had ever interested him for long.

  Except me, Lissa thought.

  He’s mine.

  I simply intend to keep him.

  That’s all there was to it.

  She lifted her gaze to Jocelin, who lay on her stomach on the foredecking.

  You have about one hour of life left, dear.

  Jocelin was a strikingly beautiful woman even in the Gulf Coast resort city of Sarasota where beauty, spawned in luxury, is little more than commonplace.

  Jocelin was tall, slender, and dark. With the figure of a Venus, the face of a madonna, and the morals of an alley cat. She was the kind of woman who lived enwrapped in her sleek inner satisfaction. She petted herself with a self-delight and self-assurance that was unholy.

  Right now she was wearing a white bathing suit that was startling against her deep tan. She turned slowly and sat up, almost as if she had felt the weight of Lissa’s gaze.

  The eyes of the two women met and a thin smile came to life on Jocelin’s full red mouth. She looked at the golden blonde beauty with a sneer for something that was second rate. A little gleam of triumph was in her eyes.

  A small red explosion took place inside Lissa’s head as the silent communication of rivalry and hate continued.

  Lissa was trembling with hatred.

  Never had she hated anyone so much.

  And there was the second part of the reason. Killing Jocelin was going to be a pleasure.

  Under the bright sun and kind beauty of the deep blue sky the cruiser cut its way past Longboat key. There in the distance, solid and pleasant, stood the pastel houses and private docks with bobbing cruisers. The surf whispered lazily against the pure whiteness of the beach. The cruiser turned in a long arc away from the key, its prow showering glittering jewels of spray, its wake a path of silver. A swooping pelican gliding over the cruiser spread his webbed feet and came to a skiing contact with the water. He folded his wings, shook himself, and bobbed contentedly, as if the beauty of the whole scene were plucked out of heaven itself.

  Lissa felt the wave of redness leave her brain, and her vision cleared. Her head still pounded a little at the temples.

  She broke the interlocking of gazes and glanced at Carl. A pulse jumped in her throat. He was looking at her, then at Jocelin, as if the two-way silent conversation of hate had become a three-way communication. His eyes were narrow and cold.

  “Fix me a drink,” he said.

  “Yes, Carl,” Lissa said, getting out of the deck chair.

  Jocelin smiled faintly and patted a yawn with the back of her hand. “I’ll have scotch on the rocks, darling.”

  Lissa was trembling when she went into the small, gleaming stainless steel and chrome galley below deck. “I’ll have scotch, darling,” she mimicked as she raged inwardly. “Enjoy your scotch, you cheap pig. Enjoy every last moment you’ve got left.”

  Lissa fixed the drinks and carried them up on deck. As she came up, the breeze, light as feathers, ran its fingers through her hair and touched her fevered cheek lightly.

  The breeze helped. So did the drink.

  She wouldn’t have another. She must have a completely clear head and all her resources for the act ahead.

  It would be very simple.

  Lissa had the agility of a tawny amphibious animal in the water, and an ability to hold her breath that would have brought admiration from a pearl-diving South Seas native.

  Once they were in the water, Jocelin simply couldn’t match her.

  “Here you are, darling,” she handed Carl his drink. She could feel the weight of his eyes on her. She gave him a smile. It brought no change to his face.

  With a forced lightness, she turned and rounded the flying bridge of the cruiser to pass a drink to Jocelin.

  “Is it poisoned, darling?” Jocelin asked softly, not loud enough for Carl, at the helm, to hear.

  “Of course it is,” Lissa said.

  Jocelin laughed, sipped the drink, and said, “Why don’t you give up? You haven’t a chance, you know.”

  “I don’t care to discuss it.”

  “Why not? You’ll have to sometime—unless you are capable of bowing out with grace.” Jocelin looked at her over the rim of her glass. “Don’t be such a greedy minx, Lissa. You’ve had him far longer than anyone else.”

  “Long enough for it to become an unbreakable habit,” Lissa said.

  Jocelin sighed. “It’s really going to be quite painful for you, poor dear.”

  Uninterested in any reply Lissa might make, Jocelin turned forward, lay on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her drink held in her two hands.

  Lissa looked at the dark tanned back and felt dizzy for a moment. It’s going to be sweet, she thought, so very damned sweet.

  She didn’t return to her deck chair. She stood on the foredeck a moment, little droplets of spray catching on her tight blue bathing suit like rhinestones.

  She held the thought of the future moment in her mind. It had been easy to arrange it. Jocelin had been more than willing to go when Lissa had suggested the jaunt last night.

  Lissa turned, went to the bridge and stood beside Carl. He was remote, giving no indication he knew she was there. He stood solidly on his rather short muscular legs, handling the boat with the touch of a master, like a man who feels stronger than the sea itself.

  She wished he would say something. Anything. He said nothing, and the old burn began to grow in her. It was a devil inside her. It lashed her senses and seethed within her flesh. It made her willing to do anything to have him admit she was there, flesh and blood. A desirable woman. A human being.

  She laid her hand lightly on his arm.

  He looked at her. “Having fun?”

  “I always do.”

  “That’s one thing I’ve always liked about you, Lissa.”

  “Boredom and me,” she said. “We don’t mix.”

  She went aft and sat down, feeling buoyed up, as if from a victory.

  Carl looked back long enough to take a sighting from two landmarks. He turned the boat a little, until he had the angle he wanted between the tall, white water tower, a tiny bulb in the distance on its spidery stilts, and the final channel marker. Then he headed the boat into the open Gulf and the land fell below the horizon.

  They were quite alone on the endless, swelling, falling sea. The other boats had gone further north today, to the waters off Mullet Key, where mackerel had been reported running.

  No friends around. No other eyes.

  Just the three of us.

  Carl throttled down the cruiser’s twin Continentals. The engines putted softly and the boat rose and fell with the gentle sighing of the Gulf.

  “I guess this is it,” he said.

  Lissa’s heart throbbed with fear and anticipation.

  Jocelin had come a
ft and put on a face mask. “Sure I can get a giant snapper?”

  “No guarantee,” Carl said. “But you’ve got a good chance. A lot of snapper and sheepshead around the old wreck down there. Really monstrous sheepshead.”

  “I’ll leave them for Lissa,” Jocelin said, the veneer of a smile on her face as she glanced at Lissa.

  Sheepshead, Lissa thought. I know what she means. Lissa can have the sheep.

  Side by side they stood on the aft decking, over the baitwells. The baitwells were always empty. They’d never been filled since Carl had bought the boat. Carl had only contempt for tackle fishing.

  Carl stayed at the helm, keeping the drift of the boat corrected.

  “One shot only,” he said. “Then I’ll show you how to haul the granddaddy of all snappers out.” Lissa stood inhaling through her mouth, deeply and rapidly, charging her blood with oxygen. Jocelin went into the water like a sleek blade. Lissa counted four seconds and followed her dive.

  As she shot down through the clean green world of water, Lissa saw Jocelin ahead of her.

  Ten, fifteen, twenty feet down. Lissa felt the pressure on her eardrums and the little needles that reached out into her brain. A small fish backed off and stared at her.

  Below were the shadowy outlines of the old wreck. She lay on her side, covered with moss, half buried in sand, one broken mast sticking out like a finger, yawning holes in her decks and planking. She’d been a proud one, sailing these waters when Florida was young.

  The driving flippers on her feet drove Lissa closer to Jocelin. Jocelin was intent on the wreck below, as if determined to get in the first shot and bring the first snapper to surface.

  A sheepshead, enormous for his breed, drifted up out of the old hull through a hole in the deck. He was big game, but Jocelin ignored him, and Lissa stayed close behind Jocelin.

  The big snapper came drifting over the prow of the wreck. He floated gently, in curiosity. He backed away with slow movements of his fins as Jocelin glided to a standstill in the water.

  Jocelin fired, missed, and the big fish wheeled with, great speed and was gone in the greenery of water and waving seaweed.

  Now, Lissa thought.

  She fired.

  Straight into the old timbers. The missile struck and embedded its barbed steel head deeply. Lissa snapped the line tight around her left wrist.

  Now that she was anchored to the bottom, she threw herself against Jocelin and clamped Jocelin’s slender neck tight in the crook of her right elbow.

  We shall see who is stronger…

  Jocelin froze, stunned by Lissa’s attack. Then she came to explosive life. She twisted her body. She clawed at Lissa’s arm. She was a thrashing fish. Much bigger game than a sheepshead.

  Lissa felt the struggling body grow limp. Jocelin made a last feeble attempt to pull Lissa’s arm free of her throat. Then Jocelin was draped over her arm, arms, head, and legs dangling, her hair a black cloud floating about her face.

  A ringing had begun in Lissa’s ears, but she couldn’t surface yet.

  With the line, she pulled herself and Jocelin down to the rotting hole. Where timbers had broken jaggedly, she wedged Jocelin’s ankle until it was secure. Jocelin bobbed against the wreckage like a figurehead that had come to life only to go down with the ship she had adorned.

  Lissa felt the blood boiling in her veins. Everything was growing dim and far away. Hard steel spikes were being driven through her chest.

  For a moment, she was lost.

  She almost opened her mouth to suck in a great gasp of air.

  Panic hit her, and cleared her head.

  She freed her wrist of the line and started up. She could see sunlight shafting down into the water. It seemed so very far away…

  Her face broke water, and air burned into her lungs. She closed her eyes, gulping greedily.

  If I’d been five feet further down, I never would have made it. I haven’t the strength left to swim a single stroke. Now Carl will help me into the boat and I shall tell him about the accident.

  She opened her eyes and looked around. Then she screamed. Her wild gaze followed the wake of the boat. She saw Carl look back and give her a tired, bored wave. Then Carl and the boat were gone.

  SALESMANSHIP

  Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1958.

  Howard Alden’s day started on a miserable note. At breakfast he had to tell Clara, his wife, that they couldn’t afford a new coat for her, much as he admitted she needed one.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if she had burst out with something mean. Instead, she just sat there and looked at him as if he were a nonentity, an absolute zero.

  Clara was a brunette, slender and beautiful. Howard was very much in love with her. It gave him a hard inner pain to have her look at him like that. He writhed inwardly when the villagers looked at him that way, but for Clara to give him such an appraisal was an unendurable torment.

  She pecked at her oatmeal and sipped at the chickory she had brewed for breakfast.

  Howard tried to think of something to say. She hadn’t always looked at him like that. In fact, the way she had once admired him was the one thing in life he had to treasure.

  He was a man in his mid-thirties, middle-weight in size, trim, sandy in coloring, and not bad-looking. He had met Clara ten months ago during a business trip to Atlanta and they had married after a brief courtship.

  He had brought her back to Pine Needle, which nestled in the barren Georgia foothills, without the courage to tell her the whole truth about himself. She had come to the village knowing only that he was the one mortician in the county, as his father had been before him. His profession put him, in her mind, on a level with the mayor, the leading merchant, and the chief of police.

  She’d had to learn the hard way that he was the most poverty-stricken man in town. The dirt farmers had their chickens and hounds, but Howard Alden had only a dreary undertaking parlor and ramshackle house, both heavily mortgaged, and a yellowed sheaf of bills his dead father had never been able to pay.

  Clara had envisioned an old plantation-style home with servants, but she found herself cooking on an ancient gas stove and polishing silver plate that had worn to the base metal.

  She had first wanted to redecorate the gloomy house. Howard had borrowed all the money he could, yet the best she could manage were some new draperies, a cheap living room suite, and a table-model television set…

  “Clara,” he said, his taste for breakfast gone, “if you’ll just be patient I know I’ll collect some of the money due me.”

  “Collect from whom? The poor share croppers stuck in this Godforsaken county? The people you bury at two hundred dollars a funeral—on credit? And darn few burials at that. Most of the folks around here are too poor to die.” He didn’t answer—he had no answer. Sometimes he felt he didn’t know much of anything about life, or about women. He knew only the occasional dead who came his way. He wished he could change for Clara’s sake, but he didn’t know how.

  Clara avoided his off-to-work kiss. He left the house with something squeezed tight inside of him. She had not mentioned it, but he knew she was brooding on going back to Atlanta. And thinking about her life here in this bleak Southern county, he couldn’t really blame her.

  His jalopy of a car rattled to a stop at the lower end of Main Street. There was little activity in town—a few dusty pickup trucks parked along Main, a couple of men swapping talk at the feed store, a few old-timers sitting on nail kegs under the unpainted wooden awning of the hardware store. They whittled irresolutely, argued dogs and women, and crusted the curbing stone with tobacco juice.

  Howard sighed and went into his place of business. Once the gold leaf spelling out Alden Mortuary on the front window had no missing letters. Once the walnut benches in the chapel and the foot-pedal organ had been glossy and new. Once the front office had been something more than a gloomy clutter of shabby furnishings.

  Today the place held only the
old sweet sick smell of dying flowers—and death.

  Howard opened the windows to air the office, then went out to the diner on the corner. The diner had been converted from an old street car an enterprising soul had brought in from Atlanta.

  The usual crowd was in the diner. Bayliss, who owned the dry goods store. Sheriff Loudermilk. Bill Suggs, who trained horses and hunting clogs for the vanDeventer family.

  Suggs was an overbearing man, but it was said that old vanDeventer liked him. This was enough to give Suggs considerable prestige in Pine Needle. The vanDeventers owned practically the whole county—most of the farms, the cannery, even the local telephone exchange.

  Maddy vanDeventer, beautiful, young, and blonde, had been educated at a fashionable girls’ school in North Carolina and had traveled in Europe. If Pine Needle had a princess, it was Maddy. The old man prized her slightest whim above the welfare of the entire human race.

  Howard ordered a cup of coffee from the hefty, sweaty girl behind the counter. He sat listening to Suggs, Loudermilk, and Bayliss plan a fishing trip. They had acknowledged Howard with the briefest of nods, not quite friendly enough for Howard to take the liberty of joining them. It was unspoken knowledge that he was too poor and too unimportant to be included in any fishing trip.

  Howard sat down at the next table and tried to appear as if he weren’t listening. They were going all the way over to Santee in South Carolina. There were bass there half as big as a man’s leg. It was going to be a rather expensive trip, by the time food and liquor were included. It was the kind of trip men talked out—long and detailedly. They wouldn’t leave for ten days yet, but a trip like this took a lot of planning and discussion.

  And Howard just sat at his table and tried not to let the warm comradeship of the three other men make itself known to his senses. But he couldn’t help the pictures that came irresistibly to his mind: the car piled high with equipment, screeching to a stop before his house in the early dawn. Bayliss yelling, “Get a move on, Howard! You waitin’ for them bass to have grandchildren?” And Clara kissing him and telling him to be careful as he hurried from the house, loaded with rod, reel, creel, boots, and spare clothing. And Suggs flapping him on the back as he got in the car, thrusting a bottle into his hand, and saying, “Smoothest bourbon you ever drunk, boy. Right out of the old man’s private stock. Take a shot of that to settle your breakfast.”