Murder by the Clock

by Rufus King

  “Tell me,” he said, “how you ever managed to breathe inside of that chest.”

  “The back of it is broken.” The casualness of the question had startled her into an answer.

  “Your own back must be pretty well broken, too.” Was Hansen, the idiot, going to smash the glass after all with the butt of his gun? Hansen was staring very intently at him, seeking advice. He all but imperceptibly shook his head in negation. “And what did you have in the paper bag you carried when you came here and from which you tore that scrap of paper upon which you wrote the misleading note?”

  “This gun.”

  “You carried the gun in a paper bag?”

  “I was smart, was I not? Who would think that in a cheap paper bag there was a gun?”

  “Not even a disciple of the fourth dimension.” Hansen was aiming now at her wrist. It was absurd—he faintly shook his head again. No—no! “How did it happen that Mr. Endicott had his overcoat on but you had his hat?”

  “I wear it for a better disguise. I have the dust on my face—there is the hat—it fits well over my cloche. The effect is astonishing.”

  “I see, and so when Endicott came back into the room to get it he couldn’t find it and thought he must have left it in the cupboard?”

  “Yes—yes—you are a smart man, too.”

  “And you entered the house with a duplicate key which you had had made from one of Endicott’s?”

  “Dear heaven, yes—how else?”

  It did not please her that her climax should come at a commonplace moment, when inconsequential questions were being asked and equally inconsequential answers being given. It was not bravura: the man was genuinely unafraid. And she wanted him to be afraid. One shouldn’t just dribble from the world: there should be a blaze, a scene.

  Then Hansen rapped, quite gently, upon the panes.

  Inspiration? Genius? Perhaps. Lieutenant Valcour’s Gallic blood swept back to the nation of its source and he could have kissed that dear, that brilliant Hansen upon both of his ruddy, his intelligent, his Nordic cheeks.

  She whirled as if something had flicked her. Blue serge—brass buttons—a glinting shield. She pulled the trigger.

  But the muzzle of the gun was in her mouth.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  8:37 P.M.—Five Years Later

  Mrs. Hollander thought for a moment of simply dialing the operator and saying, “I want a policeman.”

  It was what the printed notices in the telephone directory urged one to do in case of an emergency. But it wasn’t an emergency exactly, nor—still exactly—was it a policeman she wanted. She wanted a detective, or an inspector, or something; a man to whom she could explain her worry about Thomas, and who could do something about it if he agreed with her that Thomas was in danger.

  Mrs. Hollander wanted most of all a man like Lieutenant Valcour, who had so ably handled that wretched affair five years ago when she had been married to Herbert and Herbert had been shot. She wondered whether Lieutenant Valcour was still on the force, and decided to find out. She dialed Spring 3100. She grew nervous while waiting.

  “This is Mrs. Thomas Hollander speaking,” she said, when the same type of impersonal, efficient voice answered her as had been the one five years before. “I am ’phoning to inquire whether a Lieutenant Valcour is still connected with the police force…I beg your pardon? Oh.” She gave the address of her apartment house on Park Avenue.

  “This is Mrs. Thomas Hollander speaking,” she began again upon a second voice saying, “Hello!” “and I am trying to get in touch with a Lieutenant Valcour who—I beg your pardon?…You are Lieutenant Valcour—Inspector, is it? But how perfectly efficient! I am worried, Inspector, about Mr. Hollander, and I wonder whether it would be possible for you to come up and talk it over with me… No, he hasn’t disappeared. I know exactly where he has gone, but I have reason to believe that something might happen to him… Yes, I am the Mrs. Hollander who was formerly Mrs. Herbert Endicott… Yes, that dreadful affair…Oh, you will? Thank you so much.”

  Inspector Valcour smiled a curiously satisfied little smile all to himself as he sat in a department limousine, chauffeured by a department driver, and sped smoothly north along Lafayette Street on the way to Mrs. Hollander’s address on Park Avenue.

  And he thought of many things.

  He thought of Marge Myles and of Herbert Endicott, who were dead; and of Madame Velasquez who, too, had died.

  He thought of Mrs. Siddons, returned to her native New England hills, sinking her body and her being into their granite harshnesses and drawing amazing sustenance from them, as a flower will that grows in the imperceptible fissure of some solid rock.

  He thought of Roberts whom he had never seen again and of whom he had never again heard, after the violation of the Sullivan Law had been charged against her, and her sentence suspended. She had gone back to England, probably, to lapse into a proper background for her neurotic broodings.

  And that partner of Hollander’s—the Southernistic Mr. Smith. He had faded entirely, never to return; nor was the fact of any consequence at all. He had been at best a side issue too unimportant for further bother.

  But most of all he thought of Mrs. Endicott, who was now Mrs. Hollander.

  The annals of history and the annals of crime were fringed with women just like her: beautiful, astonishing women, who revolved with their uncertainties like satellites about the world of normal beings, trailing their baleful, striking brilliance like an impalpable poisonous gas across the surface of every person whom they plucked and tortured within the intricate enigma of their hearts. The law never could touch her—nor could a person, either. She would escape. She would always escape, with the subtlety of mercury slipping between impotent fingers.

  For she had escaped.

  There wasn’t any doubt in his mind about that. She had been the focal point five years ago in that Endicott case, no matter what the law or men might say. Her forgery of that postscript had had a deeper, a more deliberate intention than the mere breaking up of any affair between her husband and Marge Myles: it was to have been a breaking up of all of his affairs. Of him.

  She was the true murderer of her husband, and not Marge Myles. She had simply spread the powder train to a suitably lethal explosive and had then applied the match. The movements of the others had been nothing more than gyrations performed by stringed puppets. And she had held the strings. Some of her puppets had died, committed suicide, and been killed. And it didn’t matter in the least. The world was ageless, she herself was ageless, and plenty of puppets grew perennially every spring.

  Inspector Valcour wondered, as he descended to the curb and prepared to enter the lift to her apartment, whether Thomas had become a puppet, too.