The Lethal Sex

by Christianna Brand

  I’d had time by then to get my wits together.

  “Well, so what?” I asked. “They found him somewhere else, but he was just as dead.”

  “I’ll tell you so what. First, this time he wasn’t a suicide—no weapon. It was murder. Second, haven’t you forgotten something? Frank was scheduled to go to the shack about one o’clock and discover his old man. And he was to take a witness along with him—the same guy who’d been providing his alibi since nine that morning. He did it all according to schedule. Only, he was so flabbergasted when he found the shack empty that he picked up the gun off the floor where the old man must have dropped it, and now his prints are on it too.”

  “And?”

  “And the autopsy surgeon down where the body was found gave the time of death as not more than two hours before. It was 3:30 p.m. when the kids found him. Frank has no alibi after one o’clock. Get it now, counselor? The logical suspect in a murder is the nearest of kin—wife, husband, brother, son. The cops are looking for Frank Nary right now.”

  “Will he talk?”

  “Will a canary sing? A guy that would turn in his own father, put the finger on him and soft-soap him into going up there to the shack alone for a private confab, with Gleason due to arrive instead of Frank—do you think he’d keep his mouth shut about us when it was a question of saving his own dirty hide? Even if it didn’t do him any good himself, he’d spill his guts out of pure meanness.”

  I didn’t like that “us.” My mind flew to Bonnie, waiting trustfully for me to come back in the morning.

  “I told you long ago,” I burst out, “that they were poison—Tom and Frank Nary both. I warned you to get rid of them.”

  “I’ve needed Frank; he’s a skunk but he’s a good worker, and I couldn’t get along without him. The old man came with the deal. How was I to know that the old fool would get cold feet and warn Frank he was going to the Feds? There was only one thing to do then, and Frank knew it—rat though it made him—and I knew it, and you knew it. It was your own scheme—do I have to remind you of that?”

  He didn’t. It had seemed foolproof, with Gleason safely back in Chicago again.

  “Where is Frank now?” I asked.

  “I’ve got him hidden. But I can’t hide him forever. You’ve got to find a way to get us out of this.”

  I’d have given a million dollars that minute, if I’d had it, to turn the clock back just four years. Those first bits of legal advice to an old buddy, the game it had been to think up clever dodges for an admiring client dizzyingly free with his money—I’d never dreamed they would lead up to the day when Dale Harden would be accessory to a murder. A week ago, all I had thought about was that now Bonnie and I could be married.

  Yes, I had to get us out of this, all right. I swore to myself that once this mess was over, I’d break with Ed Porter for good—though I don’t know what I expected to live on if I did. Only let me find a way out, no matter what it involved—a way that would make sure that Bonnie would never know.

  For a second, I thought of telling Porter the truth, letting him know how Tom Nary came to be found in that clump of trees. He would be wild, but that didn’t matter. Only, what then? It would prove that Nary had been dying, and hence must have been shot before noon, when Frank Nary’s alibi still held—but who was going to believe that a man would shoot himself, change his mind, stagger out to the road, be picked up, and die in the car of some passing stranger? The story would sound like a fairy tale to the cops, and if Frank got off the hook, they wouldn’t stop till they had found out about everybody else Tom Nary had known. That meant Ed—and Ed meant me.

  Besides, it would mean my confessing that I’d dumped the body, and there we were back on the same merry-go-round again.

  “There’s only one thing we can do,” I said slowly. “That’s for Frank to kill himself too. They had a family quarrel, and he shot his father. He can’t take it any more, so he’s shooting himself and leaving a note to clear the thing up.”

  “Sure, that sounds just like Frank,” Porter sneered. “I just go out to where he’s hiding and say to him, ‘Look, Frankie boy, our little scheme went wrong and the heat’s on Harden and me now, so will you just do us a little favor and write a confession and bump yourself off like a good fellow?’”

  ‘‘Oh, be your age, Ed. You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not going to do it,” he said hastily. “I never killed a man in my life.”

  No, he just hired it done by a professional.

  “And it’s not going to be done where he is now,” he added. “That place can be tied to me.”

  “Well, I’m not going to do your dirty work for you,” I said, enumerating every word. “Can’t you get Gleason back in a hurry?”

  “I can, but I won’t. I don’t trust him that much. And his life wouldn’t be worth a nickel if he made too many trips here with somebody found dead right after each one of them—he’s too smart to take jobs too often in the same place.”

  “Don’t you know anybody else?”

  “No, I don’t. Who do you think I am—Dillinger?” He should have said Al Capone: Dillinger did his own killing.

  “—I could get his handwriting copied all right, though,” Porter was saying meditatively. “Well enough so no expert would know the difference—I’ve got plenty of samples to work from. And he could have something put in his coffee at night to make him dopey, so he could be moved easy. But whatever we do, we’ve got to do it right away.”

  “Give me a couple of hours,” I said. “I’ll work something out.”

  I drove downtown to my office. There was nobody there; I’d given my part-time secretary two weeks off, to coincide with my honeymoon.

  As soon as I got the door shut I phoned Bonnie. I had nothing to say to her; I just wanted to hear her voice.

  “Are you all right, honey?” She sounded anxious.

  “Sure I’m all right, except that I’m not down there with you.”

  “Well, listen: if you’re not here by noon tomorrow I’m taking the afternoon train up, I want to be with you. Who ever heard of a bride spending the honeymoon by herself?”

  I couldn’t argue. I kept wondering if the next time I saw her it would be across a table with a guard listening in.

  “I love you so much, Bonnie.”

  “Me too, Dale.”

  She hung up. I sat there thinking. The whole nasty business had to be taken care of at once. If there was going to be trouble, I wanted Bonnie far, far away from it.

  I had known from the beginning that I was elected. I put on my hat and went back to Ed.

  Frank Nary was hiding out in a cottage at the end of town. Bill Holmgren, a big lunk with a lard brain who did errands for Porter involving no mental effort, was looking after him and keeping an eye on him. Neither of them knew me by sight, but I’d seen both of them.

  I got there after dark. In my pocket was the letter Porter had had made for me—Frank Nary’s suicide note. I planned to use his own gun on him, but I had one of my own as a preliminary persuader.

  Ed had let them know I was coming. The ostensible idea was that I was to take him to another, safer hiding place. But the little rat was suspicious and jumpy.

  “Come on, fellows, let’s have a cup of hot coffee to brace us before we get going,” I said, once he was satisfied I was who Ed said I was. Holmgren was supposed to have doped his coffee already, but apparently he hadn’t had the sense to do it before I got there.

  “I don’t want any coffee,” Nary said sullenly.

  “Okay, then let’s have a drink to start out on. I could use one myself. Got anything here, Holmgren?” I winked at Holmgren, to indicate the switch in orders, but he was too stupid to catch on. Well, if I couldn’t get Nary sleepy and submissive, then I’d have to do it by force.

  When we were finally on the road, he asked, “Where are you taking me? I was all right where I was.”

  “Porter didn’t think so, and he ought to know. We’re going out of town.
”

  “Not—not to Dad’s shack?” He sounded scared.

  “Certainly not—they’ll have that staked out.”

  They would, at that; otherwise it would have been an ideal place—the criminal returning to the scene of his crime. I’d have taken him instead to the clump of trees where I’d dumped his old man’s body, but the newspaper stories had made that a point of interest to the local yokels, so I couldn’t take a chance on it.

  “Why didn’t you bring Bill along?” he brought up now. “I can’t go out myself to buy stuff—Porter ought to know that.”

  “He knows it. There’ll be somebody else where we’re going.” I headed toward the coast Driving down that way with Bonnie, I hadn’t noticed much of the scenery, but I had seen a straggling fishing village that ought to do. I’d told Ed about it and he thought it would be just right.

  I stopped the car on the edge of the settlement and put out the lights. Anybody who wasn’t out fishing was asleep. It was after midnight.

  “We walk from here,” I told Nary.

  He didn’t make any protest and we started down a rough track to the beach.

  “This is better than going through the town,” I said. “We’ll climb up again when we’re opposite the place.”

  There was no moon, but we could see our way by starlight. The tide was low, the ocean far out. We walked where the incoming tide would wash away our footsteps later.

  I’d hoped that by this time Nary would have been dopey enough for me to suggest a rest, but that was out. The strain was beginning to get me, with all the tough work yet to do; I was relieved when he himself suggested stopping a minute to take a breather.

  We plowed through thick sand and tangled beach grass where our footprints wouldn’t show, and sat down with our backs against a shallow depression in the low sandstone hills that lined the shore.

  “We got much farther to go?” he asked.

  “Nearly there,” I said.

  It was very dark. It would be a good place.

  I reached in my pocket. My hand came out halfway.

  Suddenly there was a gun in my ribs.

  “What’s the big idea?” I sputtered.

  “Hold still,” Frank Nary said grimly. “Ed told me the whole thing. Give me that letter you’ve got in your breast pocket.”

  I took it out with stiff fingers. He clicked his cigarette lighter with his left hand and we watched it crumble to ash.

  “Now,” he said confidently, “I’ll take out my letter. You’re the guy that bumped off my old man, and now you can’t face it—just married and all—so you’re doing the Dutch and leaving a confession.”

  That double-crossing louse Ed Porter! He’d decided Frank Nary was more useful to him in the long run than I was. Probably he’d guessed I wanted out—wanted to get away from him and build up a new decent life with my wife.

  No wonder Nary’s coffee hadn’t been doped. I wondered if my drink had been. I wasn’t even frightened —just awfully tired. But I wasn’t going to let Porter get away with it.

  “And just why was I supposed to kill your father?” I asked, trying desperately to keep my voice calm. The longer I could hold him there talking, the longer I’d have to figure a way out.

  Oh, we’ve got that all fixed. Dad had some letters your wife—your girl, she was then—wrote to another guy while you were overseas. You destroyed them when you shot Dad, but he’d given me photostatic copies I can produce. Ed’s got the photostats all ready.”

  Something white-hot exploded inside me. It wasn’t a bullet.

  “You oughtn’t to have mixed Bonnie up in this,” I said softly. “That was a mistake.”

  I suddenly reached back with my left arm and caught his gun hand before he could squeeze the trigger. My knee smashed sideways into his belly and took his breath.

  With his own gun I shot him three times. I made sure, better than Gleason had done; I took half his head off.

  I hadn’t time to go back to town and finish off my pal Ed Porter. This account’s going to be found—I’ll see to that—and he’ll get his. It will hurt him a lot worse than just being killed.

  Oh, yes, I know my time is up—I’m done for. I can trust Ed Porter to see to it that I’m turned in to the police for Frank Nary’s murder—and for his father’s too. Those phony letters will be the clincher as a motive, and Bonnie would be dragged into the mess.

  Ed’ll report that Frank Nary was his employee—in the legitimate end of his business, of course—that Nary had come to him with the story, and that he’d sent for me, his legal advisor, his old army buddy, his personal friend, to give me a chance to explain before he took Frank’s information to the authorities.

  I’d rushed out of his office when I heard the news— that’s what Ed would say—and he couldn’t catch up with me before it was too late, before I’d killed both Narys. I know exactly how Porter works—I ought to. Holmgren would be the properly coached witness, and I wouldn’t have a hope—not a glimmer of a hope...

  I’ve holed up in my car at a lonely spot farther down the coast till I get this written, and till daylight comes. I’ll reach the resort around nine, before any word can arrive there.

  Because now, of course, I’ll have to kill Bonnie too. There’s no way to keep her from finding out the kind of man she married any more. And I’d rather see her dead than have her find out that.

  Sleeping Dogs or Now You Know

  GLADYS CLUFF

  Walter held his sugary cup out by the handle and she poured him a second cup of coffee, pleased with the pristine whiteness of the new French coffeepot she had resisted buying for a full week. “Someone said once,” she offered in unasked extenuation, “that the comparative absence of crime in France was due to the whiteness of her dairy restaurants.”

  He didn’t answer but, pocketing the business section of the morning paper, he handed across to her the now disorganized news half. “Crime sheet’s yours, kid.” He lit a cigar—a large cigar, he was a large man—and inhaled his first long puff until it choked him into the coughing spell she had known it would, it always did; his morning spells were becoming almost too distressing to watch. Yet Walter even dressed like a cigar; that tight-wrapped, richly brown suit—just sitting across the table from it was too physically filling; plum pudding for breakfast.

  She frowned. For Walter hadn’t just lost, he had deliberately traded in pretty much everything she’d married him for; all in ten tobogganing years. Turned in those clear hazel eyes that she had loved, for opaque martini olives; that impulsively delighted laugh for this horrible cough. Walter hadn’t been able to laugh, he simply hadn’t the breath—it must be over a year now.

  “It’s nothing—serious,” he gasped defensively. “You heard that doctor say so yesterday. Just—”

  He coughed again, and she finished it for him. “Just throat irritation from a slight nasal infection, aggravated by smoking.” Mr. Harris, the doctor had explained, appeared to be one of those unfortunate people whom tobacco saturated.

  “Getting to be a lot of me to saturate,” Walter had grinned, and she’d smiled back, of course. But it wasn’t funny. Walter’s once lean flanks were high-banked now; the old swiftness, of step, of all response, was hard to credit—

  He was choking; she turned quickly to the kitchen, returned running. “Here’s a glass of water, dear!”

  As always, though, he couldn’t even hold the glass, could only point, wordless, to the table, for her to set it down. Once last week in the violence of his paroxysm, with his eyes tight shut, he had flailed the glass right out of her hand. There was nothing to do but wait till this spell too wore itself out. She skimmed the headlines, not to embarrass him.

  Lynne Harris had an amusing, even self-amusing, vanity, but no arrogance. On the contrary, she felt a real compulsion to understand anyone who was different from herself, who did things that she could not conceivably have done; even to the wildly lurid exploits of those newspaper criminals who came to breakfast with the most au
stere law-upholders and their sheltered wives.

  WOMAN ARSONIST FIRES CIRCUS TENT.

  TWIN ADMITS STRANGLING MOTHER.

  She had begun this odd new game of putting herself in the place of whichever bank robber or assassin first caught her eye in the paper, on one particularly low morning, rather idly, as a possible shock treatment to enable her to swallow her breakfast and get Walter off and generally launch the day knowing that the worst had happened, somewhere, and here she still was, drinking coffee. For if you can honestly think yourself into even a murderer’s shoes until they fit, even there you discover reasons; reason. Any slum-raised boy would be vulnerable to threats unknown on your own tidy block, he might really have to “take care of” the enemy, or be taken care of himself. That fatal leap of his reactions would be the perfectly natural, almost the inevitable result of living in constant fear— Not that Lynne Harris, no matter how hard she tried, could make herself like these unhappy, unself-disciplined people, nor any deliberately undisciplined person.

  —Not even Walter, any more? Oh, not for anything he did, simply for what he had let himself become. Unbecome.

  But she had trained herself by now to rationalize, and so to excuse at least temporarily the most depraved killer with rather fascinating success; breakfast would be her favorite meal yet.

  They ate at this time of year before an open east window, with a window-box of pansies on the outer sill; she liked small fragrant flowers.

  Walter grated back his chair and pried himself up. “Getting so damn fat I squeak like a hotel bedspring.” (Once he wouldn’t have said that.) And with his collar so tight his neck bulged over it, no wonder he couldn’t breathe. She’d offered a dozen times to set back those collar buttons, but Walter resented solicitude. “Just skip it!” he had practically shouted yesterday, and slammed out, leaving her staring, wondering. Maybe he wasn’t so—