The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

by Deming, Richard

  Her husky but flat voice said, “I’m frightened all alone over there. Am I welcome here?”

  I didn’t answer because I was afraid my voice would shake. I merely closed the door, which up till then I had been too stupefied to shut, locked it and unsteadily poured out two substantial shots of bourbon.

  The ice in the pitcher had all melted by now, but I needed mine straight anyway.

  CHAPTER 11

  The next three days were like a honeymoon. We didn’t have a thing to do but wait for the Buick to be repaired, so we simply relaxed and enjoyed ourselves. With Helena doing the housework, which consisted only of making the bed, emptying ash trays and washing our whisky glasses, we weren’t even disturbed by the proprietor’s wife coming in to clean. Daily we slept till noon, then showered, had a leisurely lunch and spent the rest of the day at the beach.

  Evenings we spent dancing and drinking at the White Swan.

  In looking back I can see that Helena’s attraction for me was almost entirely physical, because except for her beauty and an unexpected fiery passion, she wasn’t a very stimulating companion. We had almost no conversation aside from routine discussions of our plans for each day, and aside from such physical pleasures as sunbathing, dancing, drinking and love making, I don’t believe she had a single interest.

  Two things about her puzzled me. One was her disappearance for a short time every morning. I would awaken about eight a.m. to find myself alone, drift back to sleep and a short time later be awakened again by her climbing back in bed. Her explanation was that she had to have breakfast coffee but didn’t want to disturb me, so she dressed and drove down the road to a diner alone.

  The other thing that puzzled me was her ability to get ice from the motel proprietor. Both Wednesday and Thursday noon as soon as she was dressed, she left the cabin carrying the china water pitcher and returned with it full of cracked ice. But when on Friday I happened to get dressed first and took the pitcher to the office while Helena was still under the shower, the proprietor gave me an irritated look and told me he’d already informed me once he didn’t supply ice for guests.

  When I returned empty handed, Helena took the pitcher and came back with it full five minutes later.

  Friday afternoon I had Helena drive me to the Buick repair garage and discovered the convertible was all ready. The bill was a hundred and fifteen dollars.

  “I had to put on a new bumper bracket,” the chief repairman said. “Could have straightened the other, but it would have left it weak. I put the old one in your trunk.”

  “How’d you manage that?” I asked. “The lock was jammed last I tried it.”

  “Ain’t now.” He demonstrated by walking behind the car, inserting a key and turning it. The lid raised without difficulty. He locked it again and handed me the keys.

  I tried the trunk key myself and it worked perfectly.

  When I drove out of the service garage Helena was waiting for me in the Dodge a half block away. Again I led the way to a quiet side street, where we stopped long enough for me to switch plates back to the right cars. Then I took the Dodge and Helena followed in the Buick while I drove to the car rental lot.

  I had thirty-four dollars coming back from the seventy-five I’d deposited.

  As we drove back toward the tourist court I said, “We may as well start back tonight. We can have the car back in your garage by tomorrow morning.”

  Helena didn’t say anything at the moment. She waited until we were back in my cabin and I had mixed a couple of drinks.

  Then she said, “There’s one other little job we have to do before we go back to St. Louis, Barney.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Drink your drink first, then I’ll show you.”

  “Show me?” I asked, puzzled. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

  “Drink your drink,” she repeated.

  She sounded as though she meant I might need it. I looked at her dubiously for a minute, then drained my glass.

  “All right,” I said. “I drank my drink. Now show me.”

  Setting down her own drink unfinished, she took my hand and led me to the door. Still holding my hand, she led me to her own cabin door, unlocked it and drew me inside. Then she released her grip on me and locked the door behind us.

  “It’s in the bathroom,” she said.

  Now completely puzzled, I followed her. In the bathroom the shower curtains were drawn around the bathtub and a glittering new icepick lay on the edge of the washbowl. Without comment Helena drew the shower curtains wide.

  Three damp burlap bags were spread over something bulky in the bathtub.

  For a few moments I simply stared at the bags, the hair at the base of my neck prickling in anticipation of shock. Then I pushed Helena aside and lifted one of the pieces of burlap.

  Underneath, cozily packed in what must have been more than a hundred pounds of cracked ice, was the naked body of a man. He lay on his side, his knees drawn up to his chest and his back to me. The back of his head was oddly flattened and was matted with dried blood.

  Letting the burlap fall back into place, I staggered out of the room and collapsed in a chair in the bedroom. Helena followed as far as the bathroom door, then stood watching me with curiously bright eyes as I stared at her in stupefaction.

  Finally I managed to whisper, “Who is it?”

  “Lawrence,” she said without emotion. “My husband.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to make some sense out of the nightmarish discovery that Lawrence Powers, who was supposed to be at a banker’s convention in New York City, was actually lying dead in an improvised icebox not a dozen feet away. Surprisingly it did make sense. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place, various oddities in Helena’s behavior which had been vaguely puzzling me ever since we started the trip began to develop meaning.

  Opening my eyes, I said in a dazed voice, “He was in the trunk all the way from St. Louis, wasn’t he? That’s why the key wouldn’t work. You substituted some other key so I couldn’t open the trunk, then put the right one back on the ring after you got his body out of the trunk and into your cabin.”

  “It was the key to the trunk of Lawrence’s Packard you tried in the lock that first time,” she said calmly. “I had the Buick trunk key in my purse.”

  “And that’s why you insisted on this particular tourist court,” I went on. “You wanted one with car ports, so you could get him out of the trunk and into your cabin without being seen. You dragged him in through the car port door while I was taking a shower.”

  She shrugged. “He wasn’t very heavy. A hundred and forty. I weigh one twenty-five myself.”

  Leaning forward, I put my head in my hands and mumbled, “Tell me the rest of it.”

  Without a trace of emotion in her voice she said, “While you were arranging for the Buick to be fixed I located an ice house only two miles from here. I thought of ice because I knew he’d begin to smell after a few days if he wasn’t preserved. I had the man put four twenty-five pound pieces of ice in the trunk of the Dodge. He also sold me an icepick. Then I came back here and carried the pieces in one at a time.

  “I left the plug out of the bathtub so the melted ice would run away, and I’ve been adding fifty pounds a day. I got it while you were still in bed and thought I was out after coffee.” She paused, then added, “The burlap bags were in our garage at home. I put them on the floor of the trunk in case he bled any.”

  I thought of something. “Good God!” I said. “All you borrowed from the motel proprietor was an empty pitcher. The ice for our drinks has been coming out of that bathtub!”

  When her lip corners quirked upward in the suggestion of a smile, I got to my feet, reeled into the bathroom and threw up.

  When I returned to the bedroom Helena had seated hersel
f on the bed and was serenely smoking a cigarette.

  “Tell me how it happened,” I suggested dully.

  “He was going to call the police,” she said. “It was all because he insisted on getting everywhere early. His plane didn’t leave until six, and I planned to start driving him to the airport at five. But he was all packed and ready to go before four. I intended taking the station wagon, figuring I’d make some excuse if he asked why I wasn’t driving the Buick. But Lawrence tried to be helpful. Without my knowing what he intended doing, he went out to the garage at four o’clock and backed the convertible out for me.”

  She paused to crush out her cigarette and light another. “When I heard the car start up, I rushed out back to stop him. I did get him to drive it back in the garage, but it was too late. He’d already noticed the damage. And he guessed at once what had caused it. He used to read every inch of both papers, so he knew the police were looking for a green Buick. He didn’t even ask me. He just looked at me in a horrified way and said, ‘Helena, you killed that old man.’”

  She blew twin streams of smoke from her nostrils, creating a curious mental impression on me. With her immobile face and motionless body, the smoke issuing from her nostrils made her look like a carved oriental idol.

  Tonelessly she went on, “There wasn’t any reasoning with him, Barney. He was the most self-righteous man who ever lived. It didn’t mean a thing to him that I might go to jail for months or years if I was discovered. I actually pleaded with him, but he was determined to phone the police. We have five phone extensions and one of them is in the garage. He marched over to it like an avenging angel and was dialing O when I picked up a wrench and hit him over the back of the head.”

  I said huskily, “Why’d you wait until now to mention all this? Why not before we started for Chicago?”

  “Because I wanted to make sure you’d help me get rid of the body,” she said serenely. “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to dispose of it myself. And you might have backed out of the whole deal if you’d known about Lawrence.”

  “What makes you think I won’t anyway?” I asked. “I’m not an accessory to this yet. Suppose I just walk out?”

  Helena yawned slightly. “Then I suppose I’d be caught. But I doubt that the police would believe you knew nothing about it. I’d tell them it was you who killed Lawrence, of course. And even if they didn’t believe me, they’d certainly never accept your story that you had nothing at all to do with it. Particularly after the motel proprietor identified you as the man who’d been with me.”

  She was right, I knew. No cop would ever believe I’d transported a body three hundred miles without knowing it, or that the woman I was traveling with had kept it on ice in her bathtub for three days without my knowledge. I had to save Helena in order to save myself.

  If it was possible to save either of us.

  I didn’t waste any time upbraiding her. In the first place it wouldn’t have accomplished anything, and in the second place I didn’t think it would bother her in the least.

  “Let’s go over to my cabin where I can think,” I said wearily.

  I spent the next twenty minutes thinking, pacing up and down and chain smoking while Helena calmly watched me and sipped a highball. I had one straight shot myself. I would have preferred a highball, but I refused to use any more of Helena’s ice.

  Finally I stopped pacing and faced her. “Look,” I said. “I think I’ve figured out how to get rid of him, but before we even discuss that, we’ve got to plan a story to cover you. When your husband doesn’t show up Monday, you’re going to have to act as a normal wife would. First phone his bank to ask if they’ve heard from him. Then on Tuesday wire convention headquarters in New York. They’ll wire back that he never showed, of course. Soon as you get that wire, you’ll have to phone the police and put on a worried wife act. Think you can manage all that?”

  She nodded indifferently.

  “Then the hard part will start. First the police will discover he never caught that plane, so they’ll know he disappeared in St. Louis…”

  “I thought of that two minutes after I killed him,” Helena interrupted. “He’ll be listed on the flight.”

  I stared at her. “How?”

  “It was only four when all this happened,” she said. “By four twenty I had Lawrence stripped, his clothes hidden in the garage and his body in the car trunk. Then I went back inside, told Alice I wouldn’t be home for dinner after I took Mr. Powers to the airport, and she could go home. I also told her I intended driving up to my sister’s in Columbia the next morning, so she could take the week off. I had her out of the house by four thirty.”

  “How’d that get your husband listed on the plane flight he was supposed to take?” I asked.

  “I haven’t finished. As soon as Alice left I phoned Harry Cushman. He took a taxi to the house, picked up Lawrence’s ticket and plane reservation and went straight to the airport. He flew to New York under Lawrence’s name and took another plane back under a different name as soon as he arrived. When the police start looking for Lawrence, they’ll start looking in New York.”

  CHAPTER 12

  For a long time I looked at her in wonderment. Finally I asked, “How’d you ever talk Cushman into doing a silly thing like that?”

  “Silly?”

  “Naturally the police will question the airline personnel,” I said patiently. “The minute they get Cushman’s description from the stewardess, they’ll know somebody substituted on the flight for your husband.”

  She shook her head. “In the first place, neither Lawrence nor Harry is known on the New York run. Lawrence often flies to Washington, but almost never to New York. I know he hasn’t made the trip in three years. And Harry never flies anywhere. In the second place, though Harry is ten years younger than Lawrence was and twenty pounds heavier, a rough description of either would fit the other. Both have light hair, neither is grey, both have lean builds and both wear small mustaches. In the third place the police won’t question the stewardess too closely. Just enough to satisfy themselves Lawrence was on the plane.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because they won’t suspect murder. The first thing the police do when a banker disappears is request an audit of bank funds.”

  She was right again, I realized. The probability was the first premise the police would work on was that Lawrence Powers had disappeared voluntarily. And by the time a bank audit disclosed he hadn’t absconded with any funds, the trail would be too cold to pick up.

  I said, “I still don’t understand how you talked Cushman into sticking his neck out.”

  “He’s in love with me,” she said complacently.

  I studied her broodingly, not satisfied with the answer. “Look, Helena, if I’m going to help cover up your murders, I want the whole story. Maybe Cushman’s in love with you, but he was in a blue funk over being accessory to mere manslaughter. I don’t think he’d stick his neck out for first degree homicide even for you.”

  She shrugged. “Of course Harry doesn’t know Lawrence is dead.” Again I studied her broodingly Finally I asked in an exasperated tone, “What in the devil story did you tell him?”

  “You don’t have to shout,” she said. “I told him Lawrence had discovered the damage to the car and guessed what caused it. I said he had threatened to call the police, but I explained to him I’d already hired a private detective to try to arrange a quiet settlement of damages, and I talked him into holding off calling the police at least until he’d discussed it with you. I said Lawrence and I went to see you at your flat, and you and Lawrence had a fight. You knocked him out and tied him up. I told Harry this was the opportunity to accomplish everything we’d planned together. For me to obtain grounds for divorce against Lawrence and marry him.”

  “How did that follow?” I asked, f
ascinated.

  “I told Harry you had agreed to hold Lawrence captive until we could get the car fixed. Then, after it was back in the garage, you’d transport Lawrence to New York in a private plane owned by a friend of yours and turn him loose in the city unshaven and in dirty clothes. When Lawrence took his story to the police, they’d think he was crazy. The flight list would show he’d flown to New York as scheduled, and when he walked into a New York police station, he’d look like he’d been on a several-day drunk. When the police came to check my car, they’d find it undamaged. Then I’d announce my husband had been suffering delusions about me for some time, I thought he was insane, and I’d file for a divorce on the ground that he constantly made me suffer indignity.”

  I was conscious that my mouth had drooped open as she was speaking. “And Cushman believed that fantastic yarn?” I asked in amazement.

  “Why not? He knew I’ve wanted a divorce for some time and would jump at any grounds for one. It was the divorce idea that sold him. He wants me to marry him. I don’t think he’d have agreed to take Lawrence’s place on the plane if I hadn’t included that, because he was scared silly.” She added reflectively. “Then too, Harry isn’t very bright. He’s got so much money, he’s never had to do any thinking.”

  He must not be bright, I thought. But it was just as well for our chances that he wasn’t. Having taken that plane to New York under Lawrence Powers’s name, he was an accessory to murder clear up to his neck, because he’d never be able to convince the police he didn’t know Powers was dead at the time. It occurred to me that pointing that fact out to him when we got back to St. Louis ought to silence any urge he might ever develop to tell his story.

  Then it also occurred to me that Helena Powers had a remarkable talent for placing her aides in positions where they had to protect her in order to protect themselves. For she had me in the identical position she had Harry Cushman. We all three had to hang together, or hang separately.