by Rufus King
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
LET HER KILL HERSELF
MALICE IN WONDERLAND
AGREE—OR DIE
ABOUT RUFUS KING
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2015 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved. Cover art copyright © Garret Bautista / Fotolia.
* * * *
“Let Her Kill Herself” originally appeared in The Saint Detective Magazine, May 1956; copyright renewed 1984 (renewal #RE0000200493). “Malice in Wonderland” originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1957; copyright renewed 1985 (renewal #RE0000244509). “Agree—or Die” originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1957; copyright renewed 1985 (renewal #RE0000244509).
LET HER KILL HERSELF
The motel, hugging the shore of the lazy sea, was called Black’s. Located on the Gold Coast between Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale, it offered in its single-storied fashion luxurious living at a good stiff price. There were the customary swimming pool, a private beach, a cocktail room that was totally atmospheric, and, if you were silly enough to patronize it, a small restaurant that served luncheon snacks.
On the beach proper, artistically conceived as a thatched job from Pago-Pago, was the combined living quarters and beach-wear shop of the lifeguard, Oscar Bjorgsen. He lived there, not with a wife as yet, but with Jimmy Hart, the night-shift bartender of the cocktail lounge. They also shared a sporty convertible, and their melting point toward dames could be reached with the glow from a match.
As Jimmy often remarked during the next six months, at which time a fresher conversation piece developed in the form of a poisoned divorcée from Akron, nothing could have been smoother than Thursday night. The regulars were all in their regular places and he noted, while stirring two manhattans for the Cardigan Bags, the last element in what he called the Dean-Spang situation coming into the lounge.
She was registered as Miss Theda Sangford, and the briefest glance stamped her as a woman of mystery, her looks being darkly exotic and her costumes as revealing as a crystal ball. Naturally she slinked, with her insurable legs and contest-winning torso lending to all her movements the liquid co-ordination of quicksilver. You were prepared for about any sort of contralto foreign accent and were consequently rocked when her voice turned out to be solid Bronx as chirped by a bird.
The bar closed at two, and just before the hour Miss Sangford said to Jimmy, “Drop off a bottle on your way by, will you, Jimmy?”
“The usual?”
“Yes. Maybe you’d better make it two.”
“Glad to, Miss Sangford. In about half an hour?”
“That will be fine.”
Jimmy put the bar to bed, and Eric Havermay, who had the bar concession, took the night’s receipts, and they drank a brew together.
“I’ve got a feeling,” Havermay said. “I’ve got a feeling that something’s coming up and I don’t like it. It’s a bad situation.”
“Young Dean?” Jimmy asked.
“Both him and his mother and Spang and Sangford.”
“Setups like that are a dime a dozen down here, and you know it.”
“I do, and I know what comes of them. Trouble. Who’s the bottles for?”
“Sangford. She wants me to drop them on the way by.”
“She’s swimming in it right now.”
“Well?”
“Well, just this. It’s what I’ve been talking about. It’s exactly when it happens. Let them put away enough of that stuff and they turn into Annie Oakleys. Not one time when it’s ever happened down here have they been sober.”
Jimmy said again, “Well?”
Havermay wrestled with a few sparse shreds of an early-New England conscience, one that had been a shining field, sumptuous with a crop of basic virtues and tailor-made niceties. But a man had to live. And he had to get it while the getting was good. For a buck you could stretch a little, because a buck was a buck.
He didn’t like to do this stretching and would often say so in the didactic tones of a moralist. But he did it, nevertheless. She was a good customer. Good for twenty bucks a night.
“All right,” he said. “Let her knock herself out. Let her kill herself if she wants to.”
Havermay left. The stock was padlocked and the lights extinguished, with the exception of one torchère on a driftwood stand near the door. Jimmy killed a palmetto bug (Florida for flying cockroach), stepping on its paper-thin armor plate and kicking it under the duckwalk.
The bar was in order, the ash trays clean and rightly spaced along its length, the glasses shiny clean, and in the shadows of the night-filled room a white hand moved. Its pale arc hovered over near the table where young Dean always sat with his watchdog Bert Jackson, and Jenny Spang. Jimmy went over to the woman who was seated there.
“It’s closing time, Miss Fernandez,” he said.
She was an attractive woman in a heavy way, dark-eyed and dark-haired and dressed on the ornamental side, with a bank of expensive bracelets on her left forearm, and with large earrings of intricate gold.
“Yes,” she said, “I know. I am depressed. There is a mist, very black. Not for me, you understand, but for others. For that alive young man and the girl he should marry. I grope after their future, but my fingers touch nothing.”
Jimmy summed up his knowledge of Miss Fernandez. Rich, very possibly a Puerto Rican of unusually distinguished ancestry, a good but never excessive tipper, a conservative drinker, and neither a man-snatcher nor a table-hopper. Her odd way of expressing herself was a minor quirk. But this “black-mist” business verged on the screwball. His lifeguard roommate had told him of her strong hobby for collecting shells at odd hours along the tide edge.
What Jimmy had failed to appreciate was that Miss Fernandez, apart from quirks, was an observant woman in her own strange way and to an all but mathematical degree.
“I stay here,” she went on, “and I think. You do not mind?”
“Not a bit.”
“You are kind. Good night.”
“Good night.”
There was no moon, and the coral walk past the unit patios was silver against velvet grays, and the surface of the swimming pool was silver, and amber light diffused through the Sangford unit’s Venetian blinds.
Jimmy pressed the door button and heard the soft chime and her voice in its birdlike chirp call, “Come in.”
He entered an empty living room, and her voice called again from behind a closed door, “Jimmy? Just leave the bottles, will you?”
“On the desk, Miss Sangford.”
He placed the bottles on the desk and then, under a swift compulsion which he could not at the moment nor at any later time understand, called, “Miss Sangford—”
“What, Jimmy?”
“Have you been bothered by any—well, what you might call premonitions? Like, say, groping around in a mist?”
“Not me, Jimmy boy. Tonight the world is my oyster. Forget the creeps, pal, and go home and sleep it off.”
Jimmy went, a lithe shade through the stillness of the semi-tropical night, and the memory of her laughter did not reassure him, for the feeling that Havermay had felt was dominant, and the crack about mists by Miss Fernandez and the look of seeing in her eyes.
* * * *
The night rolled on with the homecoming of the late ones from the clubs and supper traps. Young Ernest Dean and Jenny Spang and Ernest’s watchhound Bert Jackson came back from dancing in the Coral Room of the Chalefont Towers, and a familiar look passed between Ernest and Bert. It was from habit entirely understandable by each, and a cartoonist would have symbolized it with pupils in the shape of dollar marks.
Bert Jackson’s exact position in
the Dean ménage was the subject of considerable conjecture among the cocktail brigade. In appearance Bert resembled a somewhat ripened Dead End Kid, with the build of a wrestler and a rarely produced infectious smile that would break through the dark glower. He wore expensive clothes and his manners were honed to an edge that would have brought a fan-flick of approval from Emily Post.
He made a fetish of cleanliness, going to indescribable lengths of care and detail about the scrubbed freshness of his person, and somewhere in the dimming past lay a background of both money and gentility.
The women’s section of the regulars considered Bert’s role of Little-Shepherd-to-sonny-boy as so much eyewash, even though Ernest’s pockets were loaded with his mother’s money, and an occasional break either at the track or in one of the sub-rosa gaming casinos further increased his freight of funds.
No, the gossipers decided that Bert’s real job lay in having an affair with Mama Dean. This struck them as being completely in line, Mrs. Dean being a loaded widow and still quite able to stack up with the best of them. With her slim, well-kept figure and shoulder-length hair brushed under and tinted a pale gold, it was a commonplace for her to be mistaken for Ernest’s sister, especially as his manner held a touch of grave maturity at odd variance with his actual age.
Bert sheered off into the Dean apartment, and Ernest went with Jenny into the adjoining Spang patio. They sat on a metal white-enameled settee and in the darkness under the pin-point individuality of the stars they were very close and in each other’s arms. Their voices were quiet, very low. But they were not low enough to be muted in the hush which was complete but for the slumberous break of surf along the shore. Ernest held her more tightly while the warmth of her cheek became fire against his.
“I guess you know why I drink,” he said. “At the tough times, I mean. I get so drunk I don’t remember the next day what I’ve done or what I’ve said. Everything is an absolute blank.”
“Bert’s paid to stop you from that, isn’t he?”
“Yes, and to hand in the field reports to Mother. Well, he’s paid to forget about it too. By me. I tell her I’ve lost at the horses or dice and then I’ll hand the money over to Bert for covering up for me.” He added with the acid intensity of youth, in a swelter of self-disgust that gagged him like gall, “I’m no good. Really, Jenny, I mean it. I’m not honest with anybody. Even with you. Mother is the most wonderful woman in the world. She’s done everything for me, made every sacrifice.”
With a wisdom beyond her years Jenny kept her counsel. Actually she regarded Mrs. Dean as the blood kin of those cannibal fish who devour their own young.
But she did say, “She’ll never let you get married. She’ll never give you up.”
“I know, and there are times when I hate her. I’ve never said this to a living soul before, Jenny, but sometimes I’ve wished her dead.”
“You can’t help that. It’s the chained feeling. It’s that way with me too. I go crazy at times when Mama shoves me at some rich old goat. Then her heart—”
Ernest nodded. “I know. Mother’s, too.”
One thing that Mrs. Dean and Mrs. Spang had strongly in common was their hearts. Each had a convenient “condition” as one of the leash effects that could be brought into play at will—Mrs. Dean succumbing to dizziness followed by a faint, and Mrs. Spang being adroit at a frightening spell of last-minute gasps.
Both women kept on hand appropriate props to bolster the illusion. Mrs. Spang was never without her ampules of amyl nitrite, and Mrs. Dean had ever within her reach a vial of strychnine pills.
Ernest belted himself still further. “I’m not even a man. But I will be, Jenny—now that I’ve got you. I’ll clear up one mess I’m in that you don’t even know about, that I never want you to know about. I’m going to clear it up in the morning once and for all.”
A low whistle came from the Dean apartment, signaling that Mrs. Dean was awake.
“That’s Bert.”
They hurriedly but still moltenly kissed good night, and Ernest left.
The water was warm and infinitely soothing to Miss Sangford’s admirable body, in particular to her head, which was entertaining a convention of riveters. It was also entertaining a few doubts.
She felt uncertain that her course was the right one. It had been simple enough to trace him down to this motel called Black’s. An item in one of the cafe-society gossip columns had taken care of that. But this anger, this decision to smash, to rip things wide simply for the balm of revenge, a revenge that would surely prove costly—was that smart?
She closed her eyes and in the comforting water was in a world alone, and with this sense of aloneness a familiar fear stole over her. The sense of solitude was suddenly gone. But the fear remained.
She screamed as the hands closed about her ankles.
The familiar hands.
The water, as the grip tightened and gave an upward yank, choked short her scream.
* * * *
It was several hours later that dawn paled the east while bands of cerise roped low above the horizon of the sea, and Miss Fernandez, brilliant in a flamingo swim suit, walked down to the tide edge for a dip and to gather shells.
Actually it was an almost impossible hour for the search, as the air and sea and sand were bathed in a pale luminosity rather than true light. But it was a physical action, like fingering beads, one that kept her body occupied while her real concentration lay in her thoughts.
A movement off to her left in the Deans’ corner unit of the motel caught her attention. It registered itself as the somewhat careful closing of the apartment’s beach door. The door was being pulled gently to from the inside.
Then almost at once, within the perimeter visible to her shell-seeking eyes, appearing beyond its circumference as she moved slowly forward, was the body of a woman. Shock confused her while the knowledge slowly registered that it was Miss Sangford and that Miss Sangford was dead.
Miss Fernandez’s notion of corpse-discovery procedure in the United States was exclusively based on Spanish translations of paperbacks. From them she had gleaned the inflexible rule that never must anything be touched on the X-spot until the police arrive. Also, apart from being ignorant as to how to go about doing it, she did not consider using artificial respiration. Having passed through numerous Puerto Rican political revolutions, she considered herself expert at recognizing the permanently dead when she saw them.
Speed in informing the proper authorities was of high importance. She fished a coin purse from her bag of shells and, going to a telephone booth attached to the lifeguard’s shop, dialed the operator and asked to be connected with the police.
“An emergency?” The operator asked.
“Very. A woman. She has been drowned.”
“I will connect you directly with Chief Duggan’s home. The men at the station will be out on patrol.”
Bill Duggan, in his thirties, was steeped in the leisureliness of Florida living, but in spite of a retarded outlook on the illegal antics of his fellow men he was thoroughly up to date on most new phases of criminology. The drowned were no novelty for him. Before joining the force he had been a lifeguard, and his knowledge of crazy bathers, sane fish, and wholesome, sticky, tangy salt water was encyclopedic.
When he reached Black’s private beach, accompanied by the handsome hulk of Officer Alan Day, he found Miss Fernandez standing in guardian vigil beside the body.
She said, well composed, “One thought at first, for the briefest moment, that she slept. But no. As the gentlemen can observe, she is dead.”
Duggan observed. The body, clothed in the scantiest of swim suits, lay on one side close to the surf. There was no bathing cap, and strands of hair partially masked a profile which by its tautness suggested that rigidity had begun. Duggan knelt and confirmed that rigor mortis already was attacking the face and jaw.
“Will I get to work?” Day asked.
Duggan shook his head. “No use, Al. It’s too late. Call up and
cancel the pulmotor and tell Roth we’ll want pictures. Also, ask Tropical to send an ambulance.”
Duggan studied the sand patterns dried on the flesh. He brushed back the clinging hair the better to see the features. His fingers paused, then cautiously explored the scalp. There was a degree of dampness at the hair base which the high humidity of the atmosphere had kept from drying out, even though, to judge from the onset of rigor, death had occurred at least two hours previously.
He leaned quite closely to the hair and sniffed. He found some bruise marks around the ankles which interested him. He took a notebook from his pocket and turned back to Miss Fernandez.
“May I have your full name, please?”
“Loreta Janeta Fernandez.”
“You are a guest here, Miss Fernandez?”
“For one week and for one week more. Then I am home again in San Juan.”
“Do you know who this is?”
“She too is a guest. A Miss Theda Sangford, from the City of New York. Beyond that I am ignorant but for an incident of uncertain value. I hesitate to speak up. He is a good, a nice young man but badly controlled by his mother. You have the expression—a mama’s boy?”
“Yes.”
“It would be distasteful to me to believe he would permit this poor one to drown. You understand?”
“Perfectly.” Duggan smiled faintly. “Who is he, and why do you think he may have?”
“He is Ernest Dean. He is a youth very stalwart in the extreme but with blood that turns from red to milk beneath his mother’s touch.” Miss Fernandez pointed, emphasizing the gesture with a deepening intensity of expression. “I behold the movement of that door. It is being pulled shut from within. This will be but a minute ago, at the hour when nobody is abroad. You will weigh the event of this door judicially? With compassion? You will consider his youth and that in all virtue he may have tried to save her? In vain. And then in panic, upon observing my approach, he fled.”
It was curious, Duggan thought, how patly a layman could tie up a homicide and present its solution with an absurd assurance to a trained observer.
