Big John Quinnel said suavely, “I guess we shouldn’t have held out on you, Lieutenant. It’s true Larry saw the shooting. But he couldn’t give any description of the killer except that she was a woman. He wouldn’t of been much help to you, and getting himself tied up as a murder witness would of loused up our whole vacation. I’ll admit we was wrong in rigging him an alibi, but it wasn’t because he had anything to do with the shooting. I just wanted him to keep his nose clean.”
Lieutenant Redfern’s face was like a thundercloud, but Ross held off the storm with an upraised palm. “You didn’t coach Horton well enough, Quinnel. He should never have admitted to me that he saw the woman.”
When the big man merely looked at him without expression, Ross said to the lieutenant, “Horton here is one of Quinnel’s personal bodyguards. If the woman he claims he saw kill Benny Stoneman was Helene Stoneman, he couldn’t have helped recognizing her the minute he saw her. She used to be his boss’s mistress. That’s why Stoneman moved here from Chicago. To break up the affair. Horton must have seen her dozens of times.”
Horton said uncertainly, “It was dark that night…” then clamped his jaw shut at a look from his employer.
“The motive for the killing was the one I first suggested to you, Lieutenant,” Ross went on cheerfully. “But Quinnel wanted a patsy to take the rap, because if the killing went unsolved, suspicion would point straight at him. He probably picked Helene Stoneman because he wanted to get her out of his hair anyway. Helene is the kind of gal who hangs on to a man long after he wants to shake her. Matter of fact she’s so persistent, she’s been to psychiatrists in an attempt to get herself cured of running after her lovers so hard. She was still chasing Quinnel the day after her husband died. I saw them come out of the bar downstairs together. Probably that’s when he planted the gun. He took her home that day, and it would have been simple to slip into the bedroom and plant it while Helene was in the kitchen mixing drinks, or repairing makeup in the bathroom.”
Quinnel snorted, “You’re talking through your hat,” and Redfern said dubiously, “The gun was registered to Stoneman.”
“With this guy’s influence in Chicago, he could get any record fixed,” Ross said. “All he had to do was pick up a phone. He practically runs the political machine up there.” While the lieutenant thought this over, Ross went on, “Every bit of evidence points to Quinnel ordering the killing and Horton pulling it. Five shots placed in a circle you could cover with your hand. No one but a professional gunnie is that good. Point two: Quinnel tried to have me bumped after I pounded an admission out of Horton that he’d seen a woman kill Benny. He wouldn’t bother to finger me just in revenge for bouncing around his bodyguard. He wanted me cut down because he’s smarter than Horton, and he knew the minute the story of Helene’s arrest came out, I’d recognize it as a frame because Horton should have been able to recognize her if she’d actually been the killer. Point three: Quinnel had a strong motive both for the kill and the frame-up. Point four: his gunnie was right on the scene and later rigged an alibi.”
When the gambler stopped, there was a long period of silence.
Then Quinnel said heavily, “Prove it, tinhorn. I gather from what you’ve been spouting that this woman here positively identified Helene Stoneman as the killer and that the gun’s registered in her dead husband’s name. So prove different.”
“Oh, I have proof,” Ross said in an offhand manner. “Hold things for a minute.”
Going to the door, he disappeared into the hallway and returned with Marion Vandeveldt.
“Meet Miss Marion Vandeveldt,” he announced generally. “A regular patron of Club Rotunda.” He designated Lieutenant Redfern. “Miss Vandeveldt, this man is a police officer. Tell him about the night before last.”
The woman said, “I was on the club’s second floor, and I went over to the front windows for a breath of air. I looked down at the street just as a man coming from the front door of the club was shot. I saw everything quite clearly, including the face of the person who did the shooting.”
“Who was it?” Redfern asked. Slowly she looked around the room, her gaze merely flicking over Renee Desiree, lingering only briefly on Big John Quinnel, and finally settling on Larry Horton.
She made sure of the sunburned complexion and the missing earlobe Ross had described over the phone before saying in a tone of certainty, “That’s the gunman right there.” The instant she spoke Larry Horton’s hand dived for his armpit. Lieutenant Redfern’s motion was just as fast, but he started later. Clancy Ross started later too, and his movement didn’t seem nearly as hurried as those of the other two men.
Its easy flow was deceptive, however. The lieutenant was just beginning to draw his gun, and Horton’s was just centering on Ross’s chest, when the gambler’s .38 automatic spoke.
Horton slammed backward, stumbling over an easy chair and smashing to the floor on his back with his legs up in the air. Ross’s gun arched sidewise just as Big John Quinnel’s cleared its holster. The gambler waited until the muzzle of Quinnel’s gun had nearly steadied on him, then very deliberately placed a shot precisely between the big man’s eyes.
Lieutenant Redfern stood with his pistol muzzle drooping downward, staring from one dead man to the other and back again. After moving his head back and forth several times, he glared at Clancy Ross.
“You could have put one through Quinnel’s shoulder,” he accused. “You had plenty of time.”
“I guess I got rattled,” Ross said. “It scares me to have people point guns at me.”
The lieutenant, belatedly realizing that the gambler had deliberately created a situation which would end in gunplay, when he could just as easily have turned over the information he had to Redfern and have let an orderly arrest be made, also realized that there wasn’t much he could do about it aside from swearing a little.
He decided to do that.
A LITTLE SORORICIDE
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1957.
Samantha Withers wasn’t reticent about showing her feelings. “Can’t you remember anything, you idiot?”
Homer Withers was a small, round, mild-appearing man, and he seemed to shrink even smaller under the blast from his spinster sister. Though she routinely treated him as though he were a mental incompetent, it never occurred to him to fight back. For too many years he’d been conditioned to her domineering manner.
Samantha Withers was a head taller than Homer, thirty pounds heavier, and as muscular as a man. Though she’d never actually offered him physical violence, she often seemed on the verge of striking him, and the thought made Homer cringe. He was quite certain he’d be defenseless against her in a physical battle.
“The policy won’t lapse,” he said in a placating tone. “The agent sends in the premium money when it’s due, you see, and I simply repay him. I’ll mail the check right after dinner.”
“You’ll mail it right now, if you expect any dinner,” Samantha snapped. “And don’t forget it’s the mailbox you’re heading for.”
“I’m entirely capable of mailing a letter without detailed instructions,” Homer said with unaccustomed asperity. Then he wilted under the glitter of his older sister’s eyes.
He rarely rebelled enough to give her a tart reply, and invariably wished he hadn’t on the infrequent occasions he drummed up enough courage to do it. For usually she made his life miserable for days afterward.
He scooted out before she could open up her heavy artillery, but she managed to get in a parting shot. As he went down the porch steps, she shouted through the screen door, “Look both ways when you cross the street, stupid. Coming back I don’t care. Once the premium’s mailed, you can…”
Homer had heard it before—you can drop dead, for all I care. Those were the words, he knew, which he didn’t wait to hear.
&
nbsp; Homer sighed. She probably would be glad if he were dead. Why did he put up with her constant carping? Discouragedly he answered the mental question as soon as he asked it. He put up with it because of unbreakable habit.
As long as he could remember his sister had dominated him, even while their parents still lived. Since their death fifteen years earlier, the domination had gradually increased until at middle age her grip on his whole life was an enveloping, suffocating thing which had squeezed from him the last ounce of resistance and the last drops of individuality.
“It’s not right for a person who’s so carefully avoided marriage to be the most henpecked man in town,” he thought, automatically following Samantha’s instructions to look both ways before crossing the street.
He reached the other side and walked vaguely past the mailbox in the direction of the drug store; he wondered what it would be like to die and be free of Samantha. He almost hoped that her repeated suggestion would come true when suddenly a new thought occurred to him. Wouldn’t it be nice if Samantha died?
This thought was so pleasant, he lost himself in it and nearly passed the drug store. He halted to consider what Samantha had sent him for, found his mind a blank and finally grew conscious of the envelope in his hand. Shamefacedly he retraced his way to the mailbox, dropped the letter and re-crossed the street. The dream persisted, however. As he strolled back up the street, he envisioned how pleasant it would be to return from work each evening to an empty and silent house, one where he could smoke in the front room, sit around without a necktie, or even in his undershirt if he chose. He could even have beer in the refrigerator.
He completely lost himself in the reverie. He had mentally gone through the ordeal of Samantha’s funeral, had completed the necessary period of mourning, and was busily converting her bedroom into a masculine den when he opened the front door. The daydream was so real, he let out a gasp when he saw Samantha standing there.
Samantha snapped at him, “What’s the matter with you? You look like you’re going to throw up.”
“I…I don’t feel too well,” he said.
He went upstairs to wash, jolted from his dream world into full awareness of reality. As he examined his pale face in the bathroom mirror, he realized how intolerable that reality was as long as Samantha was alive.
The idea of killing his sister came to him effortlessly and with no sense of shock. His sole emotional reaction was surprise that he’d never thought of it before.
* * * *
Unfortunately Homer Withers discovered there was a vast gap between reaching a decision to kill and carrying out the decision. He didn’t discover this at once, however. That evening, as he prepared the hot chocolate he made for his sister each night, his plans took shape with remarkable ease.
Any plan as violent as strangulation was out of the question for the simple reason that Samantha was larger and stronger than he. Shooting or stabbing were ruled out because he had no desire to hang for Samantha’s murder. He toyed with the idea of staging a fatal accident but discarded it for the same reason he had discarded strangulation. He wasn’t at all sure that if he attempted to push Samantha out of a window or down a flight of stairs, he wouldn’t end up being the victim.
By the process of elimination he arrived at poison as the most practical means. A few minutes after he had carried Samantha’s hot chocolate into the front room, he knew how to administer the poison. He watched as she took a sip to test the temperature, then set the saucer on the floor and poured some of the chocolate into it from the cup.
Roger, Samantha’s cat, dropped from the window ledge, stalked majestically over to the saucer and sniffed at it. Roger licked tentatively, then sat down to wait for it to cool.
Homer decided that his sister took her chocolate so heavily sweetened it ought to disguise the taste of nearly any poison. It also occurred to him that her habit of sharing it with the cat presented a complication, but not a serious complication. Samantha liked her chocolate hot, while Roger preferred his cool; her cup always was empty before the cat lapped from the saucer.
He could simply wait until his sister had drunk the poison and died, then take the saucer away from Roger.
The next day Homer used his lunch hour for a visit to the public library, where he did some research on poisons. He decided on potassium cyanide for two reasons: it was quick and sure, and the death symptoms resembled those of a heart attack.
Up to this point his planning had proceeded without a hitch. He didn’t run into a snag until he attempted to obtain the poison.
In a vague way Homer supposed that the law established certain restrictions against the indiscriminate sale of poisons. He was quite prepared to be questioned about its intended use when he bought his cyanide, and he expected to be asked to sign a poison register of some kind. For this reason he went to a downtown drug store where he was unknown, intending to give a fictitious name.
However, he wasn’t prepared to encounter a blank wall.
The druggist, an affable middle-aged man, chuckled indulgently when Homer told him in a diffident voice that he would like some potassium cyanide to use as a rat poison.
“You can’t buy cyanide without a doctor’s prescription, mister,” he said. “You can’t buy any poison without a prescription. It’s a federal law. Here’s what you want for rats.”
He produced a small, round tin labeled: Rat Poison. Homer looked at it doubtfully. “Do I need a prescription for this too?”
The druggist shook his head with a smile. “You only need a prescription for poisonous drugs which might be taken internally by a human.”
“Mightn’t this be taken by a human?”
The druggist shrugged. “Sure. Might even kill him. But chances are he’d throw it up. Rat poison contains white phosphorus, which is a deadly poison, but difficult to keep down. It works on rats because they don’t know how to vomit. Anyway, the main reason for the federal law is to prevent murders. I guess they figure a suicide would find some way to kill himself even if he couldn’t get poison. You might commit suicide with this, if you managed to keep it down, but you’d have a hard time poisoning anybody on the sly. The first sip would burn so bad, they’d spit it out without swallowing.”
“I see,” Homer said. “How much?”
As he left the store with the small tin in his pocket, he felt thankful that the druggist had been so informative. The thought of Samantha tasting her hot chocolate, spitting it out and realizing he had meant to kill her, sent him into a cold sweat. She would be quite capable of forcing him to drink it.
A block from the drug store he took the tin from his pocket, looked at it ruefully and rolled it into a sewer opening.
Not being a very resourceful person, this incident brought Homer’s murder plan to a dead stop. Aside from purchasing it in a drug store, he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to obtain poison. Murder remained in his mind, but it ceased to be an active plan. He relapsed into his dream world, and except that he had a new fantasy to entertain him, his life went on much as it had before he ever thought of murder.
For twenty-five years Homer had held the title of “chief clerk” at the law firm of Marrow and Fanner, a designation which implied more prestige than the job actually involved. He was chief clerk because he was the only clerk; his real status was that of an exalted office boy.
Five days a week he did routine office work for the law partners, each Friday faithfully brought home his pay and handed over half of it to Samantha. What was left barely covered his expenses, including carfare and personal needs and the monthly insurance premium.
On the surface this routine continued, but secretly Homer began to live an entirely different life. By a sort of schizophrenic process he succeeded in imagining, whenever he was away from home, that the murder was an accomplished fact and that he now lived in carefree isolation. Riding the
streetcar to and from work, he would plan how he meant to convert Samantha’s old room into a den, would mentally frame newspaper ads for a cleaning woman to “come in” once a week, and would wrestle with the problem of what he ought to prepare for dinner that night.
However, he carefully avoided losing himself in the fantasy as completely as he had the evening Samantha’s murder first occurred to him, for he had no desire to repeat the experience of being frightened into a near faint by seeing his sister’s ghost. Each evening, just as he reached the porch steps, he automatically returned to reality in time to greet his sister without surprise. The fantasy would then take a slight twist; instead of the murder being fait accompli it would become a deed planned for the next day.
But, of course, the next day never arrived.
It was within Homer’s capacity to live in reasonable contentment with this fluctuating dream for years without taking any positive action and he probably would have if Samantha herself hadn’t unsuspectingly furnished the impetus necessary to jar him into action.
Samantha developed a cold accompanied by a hacking cough which required the services of the family doctor. By the time Samantha let him go, it was past ten p.m. The local drug store was closed when Homer arrived with the prescriptions. The other two drug stores also were closed.
Homer didn’t work on Saturday and he went out again with the prescriptions immediately after breakfast. Idly he looked them over.
The doctor had written both before tearing them from the prescription pad, then had ripped them off together so that they were still attached to each other by the glued top edge. Apparently he had flipped one sheet too many after writing the first, for there was a blank prescription sheet between them.
The top one was a prescription for some kind of nose drops. The bottom read:
The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK® Page 25
