The Second Talmage Powell Crime Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  Crouching, Carlin snaked his way out of the thicket, ran across the side yard, and pressed his back against the side of the house. Breath was shallowing out now, eyes and ears straining.

  He heard the soft, rattling slam of the back screen door. Running to the rear corner, he saw her walking toward the grove of live oaks a hundred yards away. She was carrying a basket of flowers, and he guessed she had been in the kitchen cutting and arranging them.

  He turned and padded quickly along the side of the house, sprang upon the end of the veranda, and entered the house through the front door.

  After the heat and insects, the foyer was a pleasantly cool invitation. He didn’t pause, darting into the long, sunken living-room. One by one he looked behind pictures on the wall, tested bookcases. At last he stood with fists clenched, teeth grinding. Was it just a made-up thing, this wall safe of hers?

  He looked once more about the living-room, his gaze stopping at the archway opening into the dining room. He hurried in, looking at the long table and arranged chairs, the tall bay with its soft draperies at the farther end of the room, the buffet closer at hand. Over the buffet hung an oil painting of a bowl of fruit. He crossed to it, touched the picture. It was hinged at the top, and when he swung it open a soft laugh caught in his throat. An almost frenzied joy built in his eyes as he studied the dial of the compact and very secure-looking wall safe. He lowered the picture silently.

  Slipping into the hallway, he hurried to the kitchen. He gave it a quick survey: cabinets, counter-tops, stove, refrigerator, walk-in cooler, large worktable, the huge old copper sink with its sideboards cluttered with flower cuttings and a couple of gardening tools where she’d arranged the basket.

  He looked out the rear window and drew in a thin breath. She was returning, only a few yards from the house, no longer carrying the basket.

  He pressed himself against the wall beside the screen door and counted the approaching footsteps. He clenched and raised his fist, and when she stepped inside he slammed his knuckles against her cheek.

  A small note of pain jarred from her. She reeled, twisted, tripped over her feet, and fell in an awkward heap near the sink. She was numbed for a moment. Then she pulled herself up, holding to the edge of the sink and looking over her shoulder at him. Her eyes were slightly glazed, more from shock and sudden terror than from the force of his blow.

  “What do you want?” she managed in a hoarse whisper.

  “Just open the safe, lady, that’s all.” He’d moved out from the wall and stood now near the center of the room, hands cocked op hips, staring at her defiantly.

  She was perfectly still for a moment. Clearly, she was thinking, this could well be the last day of her life. She would live until she had opened the safe; but looking at his brutishness and the temporary loss of sanity in his eyes, she was certain that he wouldn’t leave a living witness to his crime.

  He mistook her silence. “Don’t get crazy ideas,” he warned. “You’ll open the safe, one way or another. Easy or hard.”

  “I believe you,” she said.

  “And don’t try to stall or con me. Won’t do you any good to claim there’s only some papers or something like that in the safe. I know what safes are for.”

  “No, I wouldn’t try to lie to you about the safe.”

  “That’s on the track, lady. Now let’s get moving.”

  He stepped back and slightly to one side to make way for her to go ahead of him. She moved her hands, both of them, more quickly than he could blink. She grabbed flower cuttings, shears, heavy knife all in a motion from the sideboard and flung the lot of it at his face.

  The wet stems, leaves, and petals showered against his cheeks; the knife sailed past his ear; the heavy shears crashed against the bridge of his nose.

  With a yelp of pain, he grabbed his face and stumbled backward a step. He heard the snap of the screen door. “Damn you! I’ll really fix you now!”

  He stumbled to the door, feeling the warm coursing of blood from his nose. He squinted his eyes back into focus and saw her running hard across the back yard toward the ivy-grown mausoleum and live oaks a hundred yards away.

  Snorting out a spray of blood, he ran out to catch her, taking long strides, his mouth a confident and determined gash…

  She was wearing workaday clothing, blouse, slacks, sandals, and she was much faster than he’d expected—a tough, hardy plantation woman.

  He narrowed the gap between them steadily. Nearing the mausoleum, she cast a look over her shoulder, her mouth a wide hole laboring for breath.

  He forced a little more speed. A few seconds now and he would trap her against the old family tomb. He could see the bright splash of color of the flower basket where she’d set it against the rusty sheet-iron door.

  With a quick shift she darted around the mausoleum. OK, he thought, but it wouldn’t do her any good. Beyond the crypt he’d glimpsed only open fields of palmetto, sage, stunted brush that offered her no ready place to hide.

  He burst around the rear of the mausoleum and stumbled to a halt. The fields yawned emptily. She’d disappeared, just like that.

  He stood briefly, catching breath through his mouth and blood-encrusted nose. Then a cold smile crimped his lips and he turned slowly. Simple, he decided. Since she didn’t head across the field, she had to duck around the tomb, hoping to beat it back to the house.

  He ran to the front of the mausoleum, looking toward the house and seeing no sign of her in that direction either. Again he halted, more indecisively.

  He scanned in all directions carefully, even among the lower branches of the spreading oaks. A tremor of anger and frustration ticked the corner of his mouth. He tilted his head, straining his ears for the cracking of a twig, the rustle of a sage clump, sounds that would tell him that she was now in back of the mausoleum. Round and round, he mused, while she keeps the vault between us…but it wouldn’t work, of course. He’d charge, overtake her, or reverse directions suddenly and have her come charging around a corner straight into his grip.

  Then a slow frown began to creep between his eyes. He had the feeling that he was seeing something he shouldn’t. A wrong detail. Something out of place.

  The basket of flowers! His breath caught. The basket was tilted over on its side now—and the door of the mausoleum was slightly ajar.

  “Well, I’ll be diddle-damned!” he breathed to himself. His gaze inched over the weather-blackened sheet-iron door. Her only hiding place… She’d slipped around, ducked inside, hoping that he’d search the fields and give her a chance to get back to the house, a telephone, a gun.

  He let out a laugh. Bending, he picked up a small pebble, threw it, and listened to it ring against the sheet-iron door.

  “You hear that, lady, that little old rock?” he called out. “It means you’re not so smart after all. You’ve blown the deal. It means I’m coming in and drag you out. This time I won’t fool around. I’ll whip so much hell out of you, you’ll be begging to open that safe.”

  He grasped the ragged edge of the door and swung it back hard, and lunged at the indistinct form of her there inside the dense gloom of the mausoleum.

  His fist was raised to start giving her the message without any more question marks. As his hand came smashing down, he glimpsed a countermovement that she made. His eyes were still focusing from the brilliant sunlight outside, but he saw that she was holding something. A weapon.

  As his weight crashed against her, the weapon in her hand was driven home, straight through the wall of his stomach, biting deep into his entrails.

  His scream shattered against the stone walls. He fell back, grabbing at the sudden fire in his guts. He collapsed outside the mausoleum and lay thrashing in the sunlight.

  Her half-incoherent phone call brought me to the Deveau place in record time. When I arrived, she was sitting on the front steps, her body bent far over, her arms wrapped around her shins, her cheek pressing against her knees.

  She heard the police car skid to a stop
on the driveway gravel and struggled to her feet as I got out of the car and ran over to her.

  A sob racked her body. She reached toward me for support. “Constable Jenks …”

  “It’s all right now, Mrs. Deveau.” I put my arm about her shoulders. “It’s all over. Everything’s under control, and Dr. Simmers is on his way.”

  Physically she was unhurt, but she needed Doc’s help to get through the aftermath of shock.

  As if on cue, Doc’s dusty car rolled up, and when he took over with Valerie Deveau, I hurried around the house, crossed the back yard, and came to a halt a few yards from the Deveau mausoleum.

  Although I expected it, the sight of Carlin Soulards corpse stopped the breath in my throat. His death anguish had twisted his body out of shape, jutted his eyes, peeled his lips far apart.

  My unwilling gaze was held by the pattern the blood had made on his shirt and pants as it had spurted from his abdomen. His dead hands still clutched the weapon protruding from his belly.

  I forced a movement of my eyes and ventured a look inside the crypt. The scene of violence took shape in my mind, the way it must have happened. She slipped inside the crypt, hoping Carlin Soulard would search for her out across the fields… But if he didn’t, if he cornered her, she was desperate for a way to defend herself… She lifted the lid of Robert Deveau’s coffin a few inches… Her fingers closed on the left femur bone with its lower end broken to jagged razor sharpness on a mountainside thirty years ago… And when Carlin hurled himself on her, she used the bone as a strong and desperate woman would have used a sharp dagger…

  I stood for a hushed moment, just thinking about it. Why’d she hide in the crypt? For the logical reason that it was the only hiding place? Or because the memory of Robert was strongest there, to strengthen and steady her? And the weapon—had she thought of it for the logical reason that it was the only available weapon? Or because the suggestion came from an unseen source?

  I shook the questions out of my head and started toward the house. My mind was made up on at least one thing: Doc Simmers—not the faithful constable of Grande Isle—was going to have the job of removing the weapon from Carlin Soulard s body.

  HOPE CHEST

  Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, August 1976.

  The little old lady was a faint flickering in empty spaces where all the stars had gone out, a pinprick of awareness in a timeless nothingness. She was a single spark struggling against the darkness, a wavering candle glow, reaching, searching, writhing higher, bursting at last in a shower of purple, green and gold sparks. The display winked out, spark by spark, leaving the old lady with the vague and troubled notion that she existed.

  She didn’t know, in those first moments, who she was, where she had come from, how she had got here. But it didn’t seem to matter. She wasn’t hot or cold. She was comfortable, and comfort was a state to cherish.

  She tried to swaddle herself in the darkness, but returning awareness hung on, gathering strength, spreading like the coming a dreary gray dawn. Her brittle old bones, marrowed with creaks and stiffness, took shape bit by bit. Wan light filtered weakly through her open, filmed eyes, a gray seepage, dirty fog.

  She realized that she had a body. She was a physical being, a person. She didn’t know yet who the person was. What is a person? She wasn’t quite sure of that, either. Person. Individual. A body. A mind.

  Her mind… Little needles of light dashed in and out of the darkness, stabbing at her with impressions that were disjointed and long buried. The glimpse of a lake off beyond green trees from the dizzying heights of her father’s strong shoulders. The hint of lavender in her grandmother’s bedroom. The rustle of silk in her first party dress. The quiet of a cemetery. A headstone with rain washing over the letters of a carven name. Familiar name. Yes. Her husband’s name. And the old lady’s comprehension of self-identity began to slip together like the fitting of bits and pieces of a smashed china vase.

  Like a pupa struggling out of its cocoon, the old lady’s senses sagged with exhaustion. She rested, disembodied, formless, cushioned by the blackness. Then the invisible cord began to draw the parts together once more, and a little of the fog washed away from the mirror of memory. A hazy image formed in the gray mists. It was the young girl, the stranger.

  She was turning to look at the old lady with startled eyes in her suddenly white face. A soundless conversation took place, very briefly, and the strange girl was fighting to brush the old lady aside, grabbing from the bedside table the ceramic lamp with the heavy bronze base, lifting the lamp and striking. And the old lady heard the echo of her own skull breaking, driving splinters into the brain…

  The little old lady was an awkwardly arranged collection of fine bones and sinewy flesh, clothed in cool white dress and sandals, on the thick carpeting of a large bedroom, her bedroom. In years past she’d been one of those petite, glowing women who could flash about a tennis court or manage a small sailboat through a sudden squall. Despite her years, there was still a ghost of the old loveliness in the firmly cut little face—but not about the head with its finely textured silver hair.

  Her face was turned slightly toward the nearby wall, and slanting light from the windows in the furthest part of the room touched the sunken spot above the little old woman’s left ear, the pulpy softness where the touch of fingertips would have detected the grating of broken bone. There was no blood. Had it not been for the scooped-out look of the head, the wide, unseeing eyes and the mouth frozen in a twist of agony, the little old lady might have been sleeping.

  It was an incongruous room, a spacious air-conditioned chamber in a modern condominium near Naples, Florida. Its designer had envisioned furnishings moderne, with perhaps a touch of cubist art to relieve the expanse of the east wall. But the old lady had filled it with furnishings precious to her. Big four poster she and her husband had shared in long-ago New England. Heavy walnut bedside tables, chest on chest and bureau to match the bed. Portraits of a pair of forebears in large oval frames on the wall.

  About eight feet from where the little old lady lay, the huge cedar hope chest sat, its lid ornately carved in a design of leaves and flowers. It had been her grandmother’s, her mother’s and, in due time, hers. A young girl of each generation had patiently and painstakingly filled the hope chest with laces, linens, fine needlework toward the proud day of her marriage.

  A shadow fell across the old lady, a fuzzy-edged silhouette of a girl. She was young, in her late twenties, a carelessly sensual figure in knit-top, raveled-edge denim shorts, and scuffed strap sandals. Dark blonde hair was tied with a ribbon away from her face, falling to a ragged ending almost in the small of her back. Her features were small, sharp, but pretty so long as the bloom of youth held.

  As she looked at the old woman, she lifted her hand and wiped fine beads of perspiration from under her eyes.

  “How can you stand there and look at her?” the man said. He was sitting, humped on the edge of the bed, hands hanging like leaden weights between his knees, a look of sick shock on his narrow, almost effeminate face. His voice was thick with helpless fright and remorse, as if he’d been kicked in the gut, hard, and choked on every word that came out.

  The girl walked backward away from the old lady and came around to face the man. He was dressed in a conservative blue suit, white shirt, black tie, the way the old lady had requested him to dress. His name was Hert Everly and he’d worked for the old woman for five years as chauffeur and general man-servant. It was an excellent job, paying well, with quarters here in the apartment and a lot of time off. The old lady had liked to do things for herself, even to most of the cooking when guests weren’t scheduled.

  He lifted his face and looked at the girl, the left corner of his mouth twitching, oozing a thin smear of spit. He put his fingers against the tic as if he would mash it out of the flesh. His features twisted a little out of shape, and for a moment he was on the verge of rocking sobs.

  “Get hold of yourself, Hertie
!” the girl said.

  “How could you do it, Carol?” He looked her up and down. His face filled with loathing for her and himself. What had he ever seen in her? She was sleazy, common, coarse. Even the animal magnetism wouldn’t last long. The signs were already there, the broad splayed toes in the crummy sandals, the faint thickness of bone in the ankles, the slight bow in the tapering young legs, the hint of bovine broadness in the hips. One day, before many years had passed, she’d have the allure of a bowling pin capped with brassy hair and a face hardened like cement.

  His face mirrored his depth of feeling, and her lips thinned. “You got something on your mind besides the thoughts of a dirty old man chasing a young girl?”

  He looked away, a faint murmur, moan-like on his trembling lips. He was fortyish. Old? Right now he felt too old to die. He heard her suck in a breath. He knew the signs. She had a temper like an undisciplined infant. “Carol, please…”

  “You thought I was real cool the night you picked me up in the bar,” she said, gathering words, venom. “Afterwards, how about afterwards…lovesick old creep. Always knocking at my door. Making with the flowers and candy. Smooth talker, you! Going to do great things for me. Now look at the mess you’ve got me into!”

  “I?” he said. A soft, mild laugh came from him. “I? You were supposed to stay in my quarters, out of sight, any time I brought you here. But today, when I come back to the apartment, what do I hear? What do I see? I hear you in here, in her bedroom. I hear words between you. And a blow. And the sound of her striking the floor. And I rush in—and she is lying there”—a shiver crossed his shoulders—“just as she is now. A hole knocked in her skull. You standing over her with the lamp in your hand.”

  He began to giggle. “What brought you in here, Carol? Brattish curiosity? Or were you looking for something to pilfer that she might not miss?”