“Shall I pick it up at your shop?”
“I think not. From now on it would be wiser, I think, if we took no chances of being seen together. I’ll go to the bank on my lunch hour tomorrow. Let’s see, now. Do you know where Huton’s Restaurant is? I’ll go there for lunch at one precisely. Before eating, I’ll go directly to the washroom to wash my hands. Be there at that time, and I’ll manage to slip you the packet unobserved.”
“Don’t forget the key.”
“Of course. Also the key.”
“Huton’s. One sharp. I’ll be waiting for you.”
And so, as good as his word, he was. He spent the few minutes before Rudolph’s arrival in examining his pocked and ravished face in one of Huton’s mirrors. Luckily, he was the only one in the washroom when Rudolph entered. Claiming the next lavatory, the dapper barber ran water into the bowl, squirted liquid soap into a palm, and began to wash his hands.
“The packet and the key are in my right jacket pocket,” he said. “Help yourself.”
Gaspar did, dropping them quickly into his own.
“Is it all here?” he asked.
“Certainly. When are you going to be convinced, Mr. Vane, that you are dealing with an honorable man? If the total is not correct, you are under no compulsion to render service.”
“You’d better believe it.”
“Listen carefully. Go in the back door and across the kitchen into the dining room. Turn right into a hall. Winifred’s bedroom is first on the right. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Rudolph pressed a button and held his hands in a rush of hot air, rubbing them briskly together. When they were dry, he adjusted his tie, settled his jacket more comfortably on his shoulders, and turned away. From entrance to exit, he had barely looked at Gaspar. “Good-by, Mr. Vane,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”
Gaspar did not linger for lunch. Back in his office, he counted the money and found that Rudolph had indeed proved himself, at least so far, an honorable man. Gaspar put the ten grand in a metal lockbox, and locked the box in the bottom drawer of his battered file cabinet. He had never worried about thieves before, having had nothing worth stealing, but now he found himself wondering anxiously if he were exercising proper security measures. Oh, well, there was nothing to be gained by dissipating his mental powers in anxiety.
At a quarter to six, taking certain precautions that seemed fundamental, he was parked on the cross street at the end of the block on which Rudolph lived. Soon afterward, right on his weekly schedule, Rudolph passed the intersection in his car. Falling in behind, Gaspar followed as far as the turnpike entrance. Sure enough, Rudolph picked up his ticket at the toll gate and took the ramp that would point him east. Satisfied, or as nearly so as he could be, Gaspar drove back to town.
Approximately twenty-four hours thereafter, about one o’clock of the following morning, he was getting out of his car on a mean street some six blocks from the house of La Roche. He had chosen this place to leave the car because it was a block of rooming houses in front of which a variety of other cars were invariably parked at night. His own, he reasoned, would be less conspicuous in company. Moreover, it was remote enough from the scene of projected action to minimize the chance of disastrous association, just in case someone did happen to take notice of the car as a stranger.
Afoot, Gaspar navigated the dark streets, trying to exercise proper care without giving the impression of skulking. However, the houses he passed were dark. He saw not a single pedestrian, late abroad, on his way.
His caution, while commendable, seemed to be superfluous. The backdoor key was readily at hand in the right pocket of his coat. In the inside pocket, a dead weight that was at once comforting and threatening, was a short length of lead pipe.
A fat shadow, he slipped from the cross-street at the end of the La Roche block into the alley that ran behind the La Roche house. Minutes later, having paused briefly to reconnoiter, he was moving silently past garbage can and trash burner up a concrete walk to the back door. He paused there again, leaning forward with a large ear near the door. Silence within. Beyond the hedge where the Fitches dwelled, silence. Silence within and without and all around. Silence and thick, black darkness.
The key slipped smoothly into the lock. The lock responded smoothly to the key. Moving with swiftness and quietness that was surprising in one so bulky, Gaspar entered a kitchen and closed the door behind him. He stood by the door without moving until his eyes had adjusted to the deeper interior darkness, then moved across the floor toward the outline of a doorway. Suddenly, beside him, there was a terrifying whirr in the shadows, like an aroused rattlesnake, and his heart leaped and fluttered wildly before he realized that the refrigerator, with devilish malice, had chosen that moment to come alive. When he had his breath back, he moved on into a small dining room and turned right through another doorway into a hall. Following his directions, he stopped at a door on his right, behind which he detected a gentle snoring such as might be indulged in by a lady who had drunk mildly to excess. Without further delay, he opened the door and entered the room.
A tiny nightlight made a meager glow. The luminous face of a clock leered at him through the darkness from a bedside table. On the bed, a prone and ample mass stirred and muttered. Another gentle snore followed.
Now! thought Gaspar. Now!
The length of lead pipe at the ready, he moved toward the bed.
Behind him, the silence was split by the merest whisper of sound. Then his head exploded with a clap of thunder and a blinding bolt of pain, and he was swallowed by the absolute night at the end of his particular world.
* * * *
Rudolph came in the door from the attached garage and went directly to Winifred’s room. He crossed to the bathroom and turned on the light above the lavatory. As he washed his hands, he spoke to Winifred, who was sitting up in bed against the headboard. She was gently stroking a cat that lay purring in her lap.
“Well,” said Rudolph, “that’s done.”
“Did you have any difficulty, dear?” she asked.
“Oh, no. I was careful not to be seen, of course. It was simply a matter of leaving him at the mouth of a dark alley on a side street. It’s a very rough neighborhood, the haunt of thugs and criminals and undesirable people of all sorts. He was, I’m sorry to say, exactly the kind of man who would be likely to frequent such a place. I emptied his pockets, and I’m sure, considering the blow on the head and all, that it will pass as an accidental killing in a routine mugging.”
“My dear, you’re so clever.”
“Not at all. Very little cleverness was required to deal with Mr. Vane. He was quite a dull fellow.”
“Did you find his car?”
“No, but it scarcely matters. Wherever it’s found, there will be reasonable explanations for his leaving it there. It’s sufficient that he didn’t leave it nearby.”
“It’s a shame that the ten thousand dollars can’t be recovered.”
“No matter. A paltry sum, surely, to invest in our continued security and happiness.”
Rudolph emerged from the bathroom and began to pull on his coat, which he had removed.
“Must you return tonight?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I must. My weekend has been intolerably disrupted as it is. Besides, it is better to sustain the fiction that I didn’t come back here.”
“Yes. Of course, dear. Imagine that stupid man thinking that his dirty spying would make the slightest difference to us!”
“I’m tempted to remark that he simply underestimated my appeal to the distaff side, but it would be immodest. Let me just say that I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my marital life.”
“Thank you, my dear. It’s sweet of you to say it.”
“And now I must rush. I really must.” He went to the bed and leaned over to receive a chaste and tender kiss on his smooth cheek. “Good-night, Winifred. I’ll see you tomorrow evening, as usual.”
“Drive carefully, dear,” sh
e said. “Give my best wishes to Angela.”
THE AVERAGE MURDERER
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1967.
We came in after nine holes, Pete Decker and I, and sat across from each other at a table beside one of the windows overlooking the terrace and the golf course beyond. From where we sat, we could see a large part of the rolling course, seared in spots by the summer sun, with spaced and elevated greens like bright emerald islands in a fading sea. Fine old trees, allowed to survive where they didn’t intrude, cast ragged shadows on the clipped grass in a scattered, random pattern.
Inside the bar, it was cool and dark and quiet. Besides Pete and me, there was no one there except a bartender who brought us, without orders, the pair of gin and tonics that he knew we wanted. We sipped the drinks, which were astringently good with their strong taste of gin qualified by the delicate bitterness of quinine water, and looked out across the terrace from the dark coolness into the hot, white afternoon. We didn’t speak. In our silence, however, there was no unease, no conscious restraint. That’s the way it had been with Pete and me for many years. We always understood each other.
After a while, another man entered the bar from the terrace, set his golf bag against the wall inside the door, and walked over to the bar. His face was lean and brown and gave one, somehow, by a curious effect of antithesis, a feeling that it was either prematurely aged or preternaturally preserved. His body was also lean, the shoulders somewhat stooped, and the hair below his linen cap was hone white. He ordered a bourbon and water and drank it standing alone at the bar. There was about him an aura of withdrawal, a patina of astringent bitterness as apparent to the eyes as my tonic’s to the tongue. When he had finished his drink, as he turned to go, he saw Pete and me at our table and hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he nodded, a faint movement of the head that was barely discernible, and left the bar by the way he had come, reclaiming his golf bag by the door as he went.
“How long ago has it been?” Pete said.
“Ten years,” I answered. “Ten years last fall.”
“A lot has happened since then. It’s almost forgotten now.”
Pete was right. A lot had happened since Francis McRae stood trial for murder. Pete Decker, then the young county attorney who had prosecuted him, had achieved through politics a state-wide attention and acclaim that would have landed him in the governor’s chair, the youngest governor in our history, if he hadn’t had the bad luck to get the nomination in a year when opposition candidates all over the country rode in on the coattails of the big man upstairs. People we had known had gotten rich or gone broke or died or moved away, and wars that were not called wars had begun and ended. And I, Guy Powers, had moved away myself but had come home again to inherit my father’s business, and had gotten married. A lot had happened; a lot of good things, and a lot of bad.
You may remember the Healy-McRae case. That’s what it was called at the time, but Francis McRae actually stood trial alone. Rhoda Healy was charged as an accessory before the fact, and would have stood trial later if Francis McRae had been convicted. After he was acquitted, it was obvious that she could not have been his accessory, and so the charge against her was dropped. She could have been charged with the murder directly, of course, but the odds against convicting her, after Francis McRae’s acquittal, were far too great. A third possibility, a charge of collaboration as the partner of a second murderer unknown, was, in view of the evidence, or the lack of it, manifestly absurd.
To be exact, Francis McRae wasn’t acquitted. His first trial ended in a hung jury, and so did his second. After that, mainly because the county was reluctant to throw good money after bad in an effort that was beginning to look futile, the case was nol-prossed, and he went free.
The second jury, because it is somehow easy to follow a precedent, was split down the middle. The first was hung by one juror. The case for the people was soundly organized and expertly presented, as the eleven ‘guilty’ votes testified, but it was entirely circumstantial. It was based primarily on motive and opportunity, and the motive could be questioned, while opportunity, as any rational man knows, is not always exploited simply because it is present. In brief, there was room for reasonable doubt. That was my position, at any rate, and my position happened to be decisive, I was the twelfth juror.
Perhaps I should recapitulate the circumstances of the case. Rhoda Healy was a beautiful young woman with pale blonde hair, striking brown eyes, and flawless skin that looked always, the year around, as if it had been tanned by the summer sun. She was married to Neil Healy, the only son of extremely wealthy parents. Unfortunately, Neil was a kind of semi-invalid. The report was that he had suffered, as a child, a critical attack of rheumatic fever that had left his heart seriously impaired. However that may have been, he took precious good care of himself. He was, moreover, suspicious and demanding and abusive, a difficult person to get along with generally, and difficult to live with particularly. He did no apparent work, and was constantly under the observation and care of his doctor.
His doctor was Francis McRae.
Neil and Rhoda lived in a white-painted brick house that was absurdly large for a young couple with no children and, if gossip could be credited, no prospects of any. Francis habitually stopped at the house twice a week professionally, although he later admitted that most of these visits were no more than doubtful psychological placebos, and frequently he was at the house in the evenings socially, without his stethoscope, so to speak. He admitted, in fact, with what seemed a perverse determination to see himself hanged, that Neil’s heart was in much better condition than Neil liked to admit, and that his patient, with only reasonable care, might have anticipated many years of life. It was the meat of the prosecution’s case, you see, that Neil Healy, dying too slowly to give satisfaction, if dying at all, had been nudged along by Dr. Francis McRae with the blessing and perhaps the help of Rhoda Healy. Pete Decker argued brilliantly that Francis and Rhoda were having an affair, and he was able to present testimony and evidence that supported, but did not prove, his argument. In this matter, again his most effective witness was Francis McRae himself. Francis denied that he and Rhoda were having an affair, but he said flatly, with go-to-hell belligerence, that he damn well wished they were. That wish, in the minds of eleven jurors, was unequivocally father to the deed.
Anyhow, to drop back a bit, Neil Healy suddenly died. Considering his medical history and the persistent impression of his precarious condition, this was no great surprise. Francis McRae signed the death certificate, and it appeared briefly that events would proceed normally to the end that is our common denominator. But no such luck. The elder Healys got their wind up and demanded an autopsy. Rhoda Healy, as the widow, refused to authorize one, and Francis McRae, once more with that strange obduracy that threatened to damn him, supported her refusal. The elder Healys, however, were rich and locally powerful, and had connections. They were instrumental in securing a court order, and Neil was opened for inspection. It was discovered that he had been given, by one means of ingestion or another, a lethal dose of white arsenic. It was murder. No doubt about it.
Well, who has better opportunity to poison a man than the doctor who is caring for him? And if the doctor and the man’s wife are having an affair, who has a better motive? And if it’s all circumstantial, and damn thin at that, what of it? It’s neat, it’s logical, and in the hands of an expert like Pete Decker, it’s deadly. I was astonished when I was summoned for jury duty, but I was glad of the chance to sit in on the case. In fact, I was so eager to serve that I told a necessary lie. I said, in response to a stock question, that I had no objection to the death penalty. That was all right, however, because if I had been convinced of Francis McRae’s guilt, I’d have voted guilty, death penalty or no.
I’ve already indicated the ingredients of the people’s case, and there’s no good in detailing it. I’ll only repeat that the execution, thanks to Pete Decker, was brilliant. As
a minority of one, I thought the defense was stronger, but it was often poorly handled, and it had the critical weakness of sometimes seeming fanciful. It was contended that a doctor, if he wasn’t a fool, could easily devise a better way to kill a patient than by feeding him arsenic. It was argued, the defendant’s wishes to the contrary notwithstanding, that there was not a shred of real evidence to show that his relationship with the victim’s wife had ever been more than platonic. It could hardly be denied, however, that the victim had been fatally dosed with white arsenic, and it was in an attempt to offer an alternative to the defendant’s guilt that the defense constructed its most fanciful hypothesis. Neil Healy, it was contended, had been a vindictive man; on occasion, a vicious man. He had frequently betrayed overt hostility toward his wife. Character witnesses were introduced to support the contention and testify to the evidence of hostility. So far, so good. Tenable, at least. From there on, however, the defensive position was pure conjecture. It was argued that Neil Healy, aware that he was dying, or at least believing that he was dying, had devised in a tortured and distorted mind the devilish scheme of poisoning himself in such a way as to excite suspicion and implicate the wife he had wrongly distrusted and hated. She was the one he wanted tried for murder. Dr. Francis McRae, because of his position, was merely the unfortunate victim of circumstances.
We, the jury, listened. Later we voted and split. Eleven went one way, and one the other. I, the splinter, was subjected to every kind of pressure short of violence by the block. They reasoned, they cajoled, they bullied, they sweat and cursed and tried again. But I didn’t waver. I took the English position of not proved, and there I stood. At last we gave up and went home, and it was shortly thereafter that I went away at the age of thirty. When I was brought back at the age of thirty-two by my father’s death, the case had been nol-prossed, finished. That was, as I had just said in response to Pete Decker’s question, ten years ago.
The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack Page 31
