Mostly Murder

by Fredric Brown

  Cain

  IN THE CORRIDOR the new guard, the redheaded one, didn’t like the sound of muffled sobbing; he didn’t think he was going to like his new job. You had to be tough, like Joe who was on duty with him tonight. Joe jerked a thumb; he said, “That’s Kiessling. Killed his brother. You read about the trial?”

  “Yeah,” said the redhead. “What time is it?”

  “Three,” Joe said. “Two more hours.”

  In the cell Dana Kiessling lay rigid on the cot, face down to bury his mouth in the small pillow that would not quite stifle the sounds he made. He was ashamed of those sounds; he wanted to be brave. Why couldn’t he? He’d made such a horrible mess of his life; why couldn’t he find the courage to be calm for the last few hours?

  He was a coward and now, beyond all doubt, he knew it. But knowing it didn’t help to fight it. Would he completely break up, he wondered, at the last minute tomorrow morning? Would they have to drag him off, screaming like a madman, hold him down and strap him into the chair from which he’d never get up alive?

  That was a horrible picture, but not so horrible as the picture of himself, actually strapped down in that contrivance of horror, the black hood over his head, and then the jerking of his body as the current came.

  He wanted to scream at the very thought of it. And within hours now, it wouldn’t be a thought; it would be fact, searing fact. The current going through him, jerking him, convulsing him. He thought of the frog’s leg in chemistry lab, the instructor poking two wires, the sudden jerk of the leg. The frog had been dead; it had felt nothing, yet it had jerked. But he would be alive when the current came.

  Would he be alive after? That would be the horror of horrors. He knew, from having read the descriptions of other executions, that sometimes a second, even a third or fourth application of current was necessary. The first didn’t always kill.

  Electricity wasn’t predictable; you read of linemen on high-voltage transmissions lines who had taken frightful shocks, shocks that had charred parts of their bodies black, and yet had lived.

  He might live, too. But if he did, there would be a second paroxysm of pain, of charring, of fire through his guts, through every fiber of him. And if that failed a third. Ad infinitum, until they pronounced him dead, until the life that was in him, the life that was he, was gone from his body.

  And after pain, the eternal night of death. He was afraid of that, too; he didn’t want to die. He was afraid to die.

  The fear of that never-ending nothingness gripped him so hard that he bit the pillow between his teeth to keep from crying out. He’d always been afraid of dying. The fear had been with him as a child, as soon as he knew what death was. He’d dreamed about it. And the fear had diminished only slightly when he grew up. Now it was back with all the vividness it had had when he had been ten years old and the death of a friend with whom he had played every day after school had suddenly bludgeoned his mind with the fact of its own mortality. Grief for the loss of his friend had been a mere bagatelle compared with the awfulness of the thought: This can happen to me.

  He had sobbed all night that night, as he sobbed tonight; he had fought off panic as he tried to fight it off now, and with as little success. But then, that night, his parents had heard and come to console him and to help. True, they had thought that grief for his friend had been cause; they had mistaken fear for grief. Yet his mother had sat on the edge of his bed and held his hand, and it had helped him not to be alone. As he was utterly alone, utterly alone, on the most fearful of all nights. For one who has every night feared that death might come, is not the ultimate horror to know that it will come, at dawn?

  He bit the pillow and found it wet and soggy. He rolled over to his back, but kept the back of his hand to his mouth to keep from screaming.

  Execution was unbelievably cruel, he thought. Why couldn’t the law be as merciful to a murdered as the murderer had been to his victim. George hadn’t suffered; he hadn’t even known he was going to die. Much as he’d hated George, he’d done him that kindness; he’d struck suddenly and unexpectedly, mercifully. There had not been even a second, not a fraction of a second, of fear or anticipation.

  Only after George was dead, beyond fear or pain, had he run the car over him, fixed everything to look so perfectly like a hit-run accident. And he had planned so carefully, driving the stolen car, wearing gloves, being sure nothing could be traced back to him, nothing, once he had safely got rid of the car and gone home in his own.

  What ghastly luck it had been to get caught in a minor auto accident, a mere affair of crumpled fenders, only two miles from the scene of the murder and while he was still in the stolen car. It had not even been his own fault—or possibly slightly so, for he had, of course, been nervous. But it had been mostly the fault of the other driver, trying to pass him on a hill, then swerving as the truck came in sight at the top of the rise. Still, he might have avoided the accident had his judgment been better, had he stepped on the brake to let the passing car cut in ahead of him instead of stepping on the accelerator to pull ahead and let it fall in behind until the truck was past. The other driver had done as he did, stepped on the accelerator first and then, to avoid the head-on collision with the truck, had swerved into him, crumpling a right front fender against his left back one and then locking bumpers and dragging both cars to a stop.

  Not his fault at all, although better judgment might have avoided it. And then the state patrol car coming along so quickly, and the state patrolman asking to see his driver’s license after he’d given a phony name….

  He tried desperately to keep his mind on that night, awful as it had been, instead of on tomorrow morning. He tried to concentrate on the trial—parts of it vivid in his mind as though it were this afternoon, other parts blurred. He tried desperately to think of the past, anything, however unpleasant, in the recent or distant past, to keep his mind away from the horribly near future, the future within a few hours.

  Even the murder he had committed. Was he sorry that he had done murder? Yes, yes! And yet he did not know, if he was honest, whether it was genuine repentance or whether it was regret because of the consequences that had been and the consequence that was to come, the chair, the electric chair, the searing, sizzling…

  He wrenched his mind back to George. Why did they, people, make such a horrible thing of killing one’s own brother? Why did they think it worse than killing a stranger? When he, George, was so utterly different that he wasn’t a brother at all? A despicable, smug little tyrant, always lecturing, always finding fault, quibbling over little sums of money owed him, narrow, opinionated, spiteful, hateful.

  Above all, or below all, stingy. With a successful career, his own house, twenty or thirty thousand dollars in the bank, hadn’t George refused—point-blank, almost insultingly—to lend him, Dana, the paltry five hundred dollars he needed to square off the mess of debts he’d gotten into, through no real fault of his own, and get back on his feet to take a new lease on life? It had been such a ghastly mess, hounded on all sides, tormented, persecuted….

  It would have been a temptation to kill George just for that thoughtless cruelty, that selfishness, particularly for telling him that it was “for his own good”; it would do him more harm than benefit to lend him money until he “learned to order and organize his life.” His own brother, and his younger brother, talking like that. A little prig if there ever was one, a self-righteous little snob who never bet on a horse race in his life, who watched how much he drank, who steered clear of women just because he was afraid of them.

  And that, of course, made him just the type of guy who’d be caught by one sooner or later. He, Dana, knew women and knew how to handle them; that was why, in his early thirties, he was still a bachelor. Maybe he’d liked them too well, maybe that was partly why he’d never made very much of himself, but at least it had kept him from getting caught in the shackles of matrimony. When you like them all, no one of them catches you.

  But poor simple George! Ge
tting richer and more successful all the tune, and still only in his late twenties—it would have been only a matter of time till a woman grabbed him off.

  And then—well, he wouldn’t get even any petty loans from George, the ten bucks or the twenty bucks that would tide him over till pay day when he’d had a bad break some time during the week and had gone flat. And, God, how he’d hated to ask George for those little sums that had I meant nothing at all to a man who was earning fifteen or twenty thousand a year and was so goody-goody that he didn’t know how to spend it, except on, of all things, a house of his own—and what did a bachelor want with a house?—that had cost twenty thousand dollars, and a fine car, and a servant to keep up the house, and paintings. The little cluck actually liked paintings, and in a way a painting had killed him.

  He’d had the guts, the very night he’d turned down Dana’s request for a five-hundred-dollar loan, to show Dana a painting he’d paid nine hundred dollars for. A French modern that looked like vegetable soup to Dana. And he’d gone on talking about art and the finer things in life when he, Dana, was two months behind in the rent on his apartment.

  It was tough to get by on five thousand a year; hadn’t he done damned well to keep his debts and troubles down to the point where only five hundred would square him off and give him a new start? And then to be shown a painting, and what a painting, that his kid brother, his smug, dumb kid brother who wouldn’t lend him money to get out of a temporary jam, had paid nine hundred dollars for. Of all things, a painting. Not even an etching; he himself had etchings in his apartment; it was a nice gag to have etchings, but he hadn’t paid a fourth of nine hundred dollars for all his etchings put together—and a few hunting prints besides.

  Yes, it had been that very evening that he’d decided to kill George. He knew that George had never made a will; and, since their parents were dead and there were no other close relatives, he knew that he was George’s only heir. Say, thirty thousand in the bank, a house worth twenty thousand with ten thousand dollars’ worth of stuff crammed into it, a car—even with inheritance taxes and funeral expenses off, there was going to be a lot of hay left over. Maybe fifty thousand. Anyway, forty thousand. Eight years’ income in one grand chunk. What couldn’t he do with that?

  Yes, that night he’d decided to kill George. He’d taken a full month to work out every little detail, because there wasn’t going to be the slightest slip, not a thing to make the police even suspect that George’s death wasn’t an accident. Oh, he’d worked it out fine.

  And everything had gone perfectly until that damned fool had tried to pass him on the hill….

  And now, tomorrow—today! How long now? One hour, two hours, three hours? Surely at least one hour. There’d be breakfast, the breakfast at which he’d be given anything he wanted—as though he’d be able to eat! As though a single bite of anything wouldn’t nauseate him! And the chaplain to try to give him comfort—as though that could help. And the prison barber to shave the round patch on top of his head and to shave the hair off his leg where the other electrode would go. And the guards staring curiously at him through the bars.

  The electrodes through which the searing current…. He heard himself screaming, and got the back of his hand over his mouth again, and that didn’t stop the sound so again he buried his face in the pillow and found the screams turning into racking sobs.

  A coward, sure. But why shouldn’t he be a coward if he was a coward? The men you read about who walk calmly to the chair or to the hangman’s platform, weren’t they merely lacking in imagination? A cow feels no fear when it is led to the slaughtering pen, for it does not know what is coming. Those men who walk calmly are almost like that—they know what is coming, but only as an abstraction; they cannot imagine it.

  Wouldn’t any sensitive man, with imagination, feel as he did? Those guards outside—he could hear a faint murmur of their voices now and again—would they be any braver than he?

  How long? Three hours—two? Not long, at any rate.

  And then the corridor, the walk (would he walk of his own accord?), the room, the chair. The hot squat, the prisoners called it. One had said to him, “Pal, you’re going to fry.”

  To fry. Literally to fry, jerking spasmodically against the straps, the blood boiling in his very veins; the searing, charring, agonizing pain…. The jerking leg of the dead frog in the chemistry lab….

  The pillow was between his teeth again, but he was screaming despite it. Then, out of breath, he stopped, and the silence was even more terrifying than his screams had been.

  Death. Pal, you’re going to fry. And if the current doesn’t kill you the first time, they give you another jolt, lightning striking twice in the same place, and a third time, your body jerking horribly…

  He screamed again.

  In the corridor the redheaded guard, the new one, said, “Gee, Joe, that gives me the willies.” He thought, I’m not going to like this job. I’m not going to like it at all.

  Joe, the hard one, grinned. He said, “You’ll get used to it. He does that every night and all night. Six years ago he beat the rap—by going screaming mad because he was afraid of the chair. Before they even tried him. Only he thinks he’s tried and sentenced and every night’s the night before.”

  The redhead shuddered; he said, “Six years. That’s…”

  Joe had already figured it; he said, “About two thousand two hundred nights so far, and every one of them the night before he burns. Sure, he beat the rap.”

  The redhead didn’t say anything, but he felt sure he wasn’t going to like working in a nuthouse.

  The Death of Riley

  RILEY IS DEAD. THEY gave him the biggest funeral Carter City had ever seen. Nobody got excited about Riley while he was alive. You can’t blame them for that because Riley—alive—was just another flatfoot, and flatter than most. And the life of Riley, reports to the contrary, never amounted to much.

  But there’s Riley Park in Carter City now, and the Riley Theater with Bingo twice a week, and there’s a statue—believe it or not—in City Hall Square that’s a statue to Riley.

  The life of Riley was a washout. But ah, the death of Riley! You don’t believe it? Listen.

  Riley’s first name was Ben, and Ben Riley was a big, awkward guy with more hair on the back of his hands than on top of his head. Built on the general lines of a beer truck. Inside and out, if you know what I mean.

  There are good Irishmen and bad Irishmen. Ben Riley wasn’t either; he was just an Irishman. He lived to play rummy and drink, and he hated to walk and he hated to work. You can’t blame him for hating to walk because he had corns and bunions. And you can’t blame him for hating to work because working meant—for a detective-either walking or thinking. And he wasn’t well equipped for either.

  Maybe the fact that he was a third cousin of Mayor Crandall had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t been fired off the force long ago. I don’t mean to imply that Carter City politics were crooked; I mean merely that there were politics in Carter City.

  The life of Riley? He’d roll out of bed, groaning, at six forty-five in the morning when the alarm went off. That gave him an hour and a quarter to be at work, and his feet hurt him already by the time he got there.

  He’d sink down into a hard chair in the assembly room and begin to wish it was five o’clock and his shift was over.

  So with a jaundiced eye he’d look over the line-up, and he wouldn’t have to strain his memory to remember them because he knew most of them already. The clientele of the Carter City jail wasn’t large but it was consistent. The same petty crooks, over and over, going up for a few months and then taking up business at the same old stand.

  After the line-up, he’d wait around in the assembly room and maybe shoot a little craps—for not more than quarters—with some of the other boys who were waiting. And he’d hope like hell that nothing would happen and that they’d forget about him for just one morning, but he was always wrong.

  “Hey, Riley
.”

  “Yeah, Cap. What?”

  “Moskewicz Jewelry Store. A pennyweighter took him yesterday.”

  “Again? And he didn’t find it out till this morning?”

  “Nope, not till he got the trays out of the safe this morning. You get out there.”

  Riley would groan. Moskewicz’s was only four blocks off and no use asking Cap for a car for that distance. He’d walk, every step hurting him like the little folk were sticking needles in his toes and the arches of his feet. And he’d look at the dune store ring the pennyweighter had managed to substitute for a diamond one, and say, “Yeah,” wisely as though the ring told him something.

  And he’d thumb through his notebook to a blank page, the latest entry in which was “R 2.25” indicating he’d lost that much at rummy the night before (he always lost), and on that blank page he’d painstakingly write a detailed description of the missing ring, “Wh. Old. V4 Karrot Dmnd…” and an equally painstakingly description of the man who’d looked at that tray yesterday and who might be the pennyweighter, “Av. Ht., Av. Bld., Clshven, wore…”

  And then he’d push his hat to the back of his head and say, “Yeah, Mr. Moskewicz, we’ll watch the pawnshops and send out the description. Yeah, that’s all we can do, I guess.”

  Not that Mr. Moskewicz, who was insured, cared a damn.

  And Riley would walk back to the station house, stopping in for a short one on the way to give him a chance to rest a foot on the brass rail. Funny, his feet never hurt so much when one of them was on the floor and the other on a brass rail.

  And then back to the station house on aching feet to write up his report by poking one key after another on an antiquated typewriter in a corner of the assembly room. If the report was a long one, he could dictate it to a stenographer in the outer office—the one with gray hair and thick glasses—but if it was a short report, he had to type it himself…