Malice in Wonderland

by Rufus King

  Finally, with a touch of grimness, Miss Fernandez opened the front door, braved the smash of wind around the pool’s rim, and fought her way to the Dean corner unit. The expression on Mrs. Dean’s face when she greeted her was one of very frank annoyance.

  “Miss Fernandez? I know you will understand and will forgive me if I do not ask you in. My nerves are in no condition to entertain guests.”

  “I do not come here, Madame Dean, to be entertained. My mission is pressing. I have come to instruct you in a parable.”

  Nothing could have been less fortunate than this opening remark. People did not “instruct” Mrs. Dean. It was an operation she reserved for her exclusive use, and her temper invariably rose whenever, rarely, she was confronted with such an attitude on the part of another.

  But Miss Fernandez did not budge. She raised a hand with two fingers extended upright in a gesture she had once observed Cardinal Filipe Hernandos employ in the face of a recalcitrant penitent.

  “It is my unshakable purpose,” she said simply, “to save your life.”

  Against her better judgment, Mrs. Dean did feel her curiosity being aroused.

  “Let’s get in out of this typhoon,” she said, “and then you can tell me about it.”

  In the living room, in the comparative quiet induced by closed jalousies, Miss Fernandez detoured toward the point.

  “There was once,” she said, “a fish.”

  Mrs. Dean clenched her fingers. “Please, let’s keep it simple, will you? No fish.”

  “A fish,” Miss Fernandez went on inexorably, “who was in residence in a coral palace at the bottom of the deep, deep sea. It was, this fish, a monster and with a monster’s appetite that it had trouble in satisfying because it was totally blind.”

  “Look. This is perfectly fascinating but I simply have not got the strength—”

  “Patience, madame! One discloses another fish, equally monstrous but blessed with two baby eyes.”

  Mrs. Dean stood up. This fantastic rubbish was not only ridiculous but galling, and she intended to put an end to it. Apart from herself being clearly cast as the monstrous blind horror in the tale, the second fish was undoubtedly intended to represent her son. Unquestionably the woman was mad. There was that distinct look of introverted passion in her dark accusing eyes.

  “I must ask you to leave me,” she said. “Go, please—at once—I am not well—”

  Disconcertingly, entirely unexpectedly, Miss Fernandez burst into tears, which poured from deep, shaken sobbing. It was certainly the last thing that Mrs. Dean had expected, and she said rather stupidly, “I shall get you a glass of water.”

  She went into the service pantry and found that the pitcher of chilled water was empty. So she broke out ice cubes, with the usual time and bother that that job entails. It was several minutes before she returned to the living room with the water, only to find Miss Fernandez gone and, oddly, like a clever magical trick, Mrs. Spang standing there in her place.

  “That Puerto Rican woman let me in, dear. Then she positively swam past me in a flood of tears and went out. Is she quite sane? At times I’ve wondered. And the weirdest thing—she kept muttering between sobs, blind, blind. Then something about danger and the foolish one not listening.”

  “She has some silly idea that my life is in danger. Of course she is crazy. She ought to be committed.”

  Little muscles in Mrs. Spang’s face tensed, giving her expression the quality of a plaster mask.

  “Your—life, dear?”

  “Yes. Apparently I am a monstrous fish at the bottom of the sea, eating everything in sight even though I’m blind as a bat.”

  “Are you serious? She really said things like that?”

  “She did. She simply barged in, and I could do nothing to stop her gibbering.”

  “But how utterly weird. You don’t suppose—”

  “Suppose what?”

  “No, no, it’s too absurd. That she could have second sight, or extrasensory perception as they call it? Like those frightening tests and things going on at Duke University? Something about blindfolds and colored cards.”

  Mrs. Dean said with a venom so sharp that the words sank into Mrs. Spang like little knives, “If any colored cards or rabbits are going to be pulled out of a hat—I intend to pull them.”

  The plaster look set more rigidly until it seemed that when Mrs. Spang moved her lips her skin would crack.

  “My dear, you look so intense. I simply don’t follow you.”

  Mrs. Dean laughed unmusically. “They say that patience is a virtue. Fools! It’s the most valuable weapon that exists.”

  “Weapon?”

  “Yes, weapon. And I intend to employ it to the hilt.”

  “Dear—is it possible—I mean, do you know something?”

  “About the drowning of that despicable harlot?” Mrs. Dean looked levelly at Mrs. Spang for a long moment, dissecting with a surgeon’s touch those particles of avarice and tigerish rapacity which lay beneath the woman’s creamed and tinted skin. She said, “What do you think?”

  * * * *

  Mrs. Dean was a shaken woman. The world, her world, where she had lived with every assurance of dependable continuance, had exploded in her face. She loved her son. Of that there could be no doubt. And all of her restrictions upon his freedom were not, as she saw them, restrictions at all but rather a constant imposition of wise guidance.

  The diseased nature of the intensity of ownership that she felt about Ernest did not occur to her ever, and she honestly believed that everything she did was for his good.

  And who better than herself could shelter him with this sturdy umbrella against the dangerous storms of life? Certainly not a child like Jenny, especially with her type of covetous, fortune-hunting mother like Mrs. Spang. No, Jenny couldn’t—no more than could the other ones have. What had been their names—Estelle? Marguerite? That rather dangerous one—Ethel?

  Squashed. All of them. Buglike, beneath a diamond-studded heel.

  Then this.

  The unbelievable treachery of a secret wife.

  A dead one, now.

  Murdered.

  Her features hardened. There was a debt connected with murder. The guilty paid it and sometimes, rarely, the innocent. Had it been a mistake to let the affair go so far? She caught herself up. It was her false knowledge that had betrayed her, because from all she had known about it, the Sangford menace had only existed during the past week.

  Mrs. Dean had never felt like this before, with her mental faculties fractured into violent shards that were nothing but meaningless strays of thoughts. Certainly she had never felt so miserable, so downright sick at heart and all straight through. Nor so sweaty chill with ice-cold anger.

  She noticed without much interest that the time was an hour after midnight. It would be several hours more before Ernest and Bert would return from Mario’s gambling club on the county line. She had insisted upon Ernest’s going, as she wanted him to follow the regular pattern of his evenings, to flaunt his unconcern in the face of a solidifying public opinion that was so outrageously unjust.

  Her sigh was an exclamation point, as sharp as a stiletto of Damascus steel. There would be justice, yes. But it was she who would deal it out.

  Mrs. Dean seldom drank alone but she felt the need of a sustaining jolt right now. A good stiff gin and tonic. In the service pantry it occurred to her as odd that only one bottle of tonic water should be in the refrigerator. She could distinctly recall that earlier in the day there had been three. Neither Ernest nor Bert ever drank tonic water, disliking its bitterish quinine flavor. Possibly the maid? A Bahama Negress with British tastes?

  She dropped ice cubes in a tall glass and poured a double shot of gin. The cap of the tonic water did not, for once, stick as though it had been soldered on. It came off quite easily under the first leverage of the bottle opener. She stirred the drink and carried it, untasted, back toward the living room, pausing in the short dark hallway to close the beach d
oor which the wind apparently had blown open.

  She decided that the living-room lounge would be the proper setting for her discovery by Ernest upon his return. She would be found lying there in a dead faint as a result of a severe attack of the heart, brought on by his unspeakable act of deceit. From there she would proceed to the matter of Jenny Spang.

  She placed the gin and tonic on a table before the lounge, sat down, and then reached for her handbag, which was lying against an end pillow, a place where she generally tossed it on returning to the apartment. She rummaged through its contents for the vial of strychnine tablets which, conspicuously placed upon the table, would bear mute testimony to the mortal shock she had suffered.

  She became aware that the vial was empty.

  She sat motionless while an arctic cold embraced every fraction of her body and while her eyes, with a dreadful speculation, traveled toward and rested on the glass that contained the gin and tonic water.

  The single bottle where there had been three, and the cap that had flipped off with a flick!

  How terribly, terribly clever, she thought. What could better conceal the bitter taste of strychnine than the bitter flavor of quinine? They were so much akin that it would be difficult to tell them apart. Gently her hand reached out. Gently, experimentally, she sipped, allowing the liquid globules of the drink to spread upon her tongue.

  Then, abruptly, she spat them out.

  Was it the confusion of horrific belief that made the bitterness seem unusually acute? A conviction that the contents of the glass contained liquid death? Curiosity once had caused her to ask her doctor what a death from strychnine poisoning would be like. She recalled that the symptoms began about ten or fifteen minutes after administering—a premonition of impending calamity, a shuddering, a sudden violent tetanic spasm, a stiff sardonic grin, and (this disturbed Mrs. Dean more than anything else) the mentality of the victim during those convulsions usually remained clear.

  How did it end? That moment when death blasted you smack out of life—yes, she remembered now. It crushed you into its skeleton oblivion either from exhaustion or, in the midst of a paroxysm, from asphyxia.

  Mrs. Dean replaced the glass upon the table beside the empty vial.

  Oddly, she felt fresh-born. Had others felt so too? Others who were given, as she was, a second chance to keep on living through the coming generous years? Really—so close had been her brush with it—to return from the dead to life.

  There was no question in her mind whatever but that the bottle of tonic water had been loaded with a lethal dose of strychnine and then recapped. That the other two remembered bottles had been disposed of so that there would be no choice. And no one but herself was accustomed to use the tonic, a matter of common knowledge to any of the regulars who patronized the bar, as were the ever-present tablets of strychnine for use in the event of a sudden heart attack.

  The empty vial? Why had it not been disposed of too? But of course. It had purposely been left to be found as a grim signpost that in her shock and heart-wrenching disillusion over the beastly Sangford marriage situation she had taken her own life.

  Mrs. Dean entered upon her second emotional phase, having now finished with the exaltation of still being alive. Like a dark tide within her rushed the full surge of the vengeance that would be hers. She wondered what the death penalty was in Florida and felt pretty certain that it was the electric chair.

  Her first thought was to preserve the drink as evidence. It was indicative of her shaken state of mind that she failed to realize that the trial would be held for the willful drowning of Theda Sangford and not for this unsuccessful attempted homicide upon herself.

  The lazy minutes of the clock had moved to one-fifteen.

  She returned to the service pantry and fished the empty tonic-water bottle and its cap from the garbage can. Among the utensils in a drawer she located a funnel. These things she carried back into the living room and set them on the empty coffee table.

  Empty—

  Her electrified look raked its surface. The drink and the strychnine vial were gone. The cold of her anger was replaced by a clammy sweat of fright. The beach door which so recently she had closed—it was not the wind that had blown it open. Not originally. Not until in an excess of stealth the intruder had failed to shut it securely after creeping inside from the outer night.

  Mrs. Dean’s dread reached its saturation point as she realized that her reactions to finding the strychnine vial empty had been observed by this intruder, and it must be obvious that the nipped poison attempt would boomerang into exposure and arrest. Frightened almost to the point of nausea, she wondered whether this glorious pulse of living, which but so briefly had seemed secured, was crashing back into jeopardy.

  A switch clicked, dousing the lights and numbing Mrs. Dean within a paralyzing darkness that froze the vocal muscles with which, in her extremity, she wished to scream. A timeless moment of graveyard hush was broken only by twin breathings, one of which was her own.

  The curved fingers of a strangler clamped about her throat.

  * * * *

  Miss Fernandez, from her observation post at a jalousie in her own living room, saw the living-room blinds of the Dean apartment go dark. She noted the time by her wrist watch: one twenty-three. A feeling of foreboding had held her at this vigil during the past half hour, and no one had either entered the Dean apartment or left. Not by the front door. There was, Miss Fernandez reflected, the door that opened on the beach.

  Her dour thoughts were confirmed when the Venetian blinds of Mrs. Dean’s bedroom failed to indicate that lamps had been turned on in order that Mrs. Dean might retire. She looked at her wrist watch again and saw that five minutes had passed. Mrs. Dean would not prepare to retire in the dark. This Miss Fernandez considered to be a purely academic deduction.

  Her thoughts phrased themselves in the stilted elegance of early Latin-American drama. Something was amiss. Her rebuff earlier in the evening at the hands of Mrs. Dean had been a severe one, and it was with the greatest strength of character that she forced herself to face a further ordeal. She threw a velvet stole about her shoulders as a shield against the chill night wind and made her way around the swimming pool’s rim.

  There was no answer to the chime. Miss Fernandez opened the front door and stepped into the pitch-darkness of the room. As she had expected, the light switch was similarly placed to her own. She pressed it, flooding the scene with amber.

  Mrs. Dean’s body lay tossed on the carpeting near the lounge. A tongue tip protruded. The eyes gave an unpleasant impression of dropping from their sockets. The face was a dusky blue.

  Miss Fernandez touched a wrist. The flesh was warm. She felt for and found no pulse. A mirror of her compact held against the nostrils remained unclouded. They were simple tests and definitely inconclusive, but they were the only ones which Miss Fernandez knew.

  She was completely calm. Her nerves, from having so many times faced it, were immune to a violent death. She wished to get in touch with Chief Duggan and to have things remain exactly as they were until he got there. To accomplish this meant avoiding the furor that would follow putting a call through the front-office switchboard.

  From a strong draft in the hallway she imagined the beach door would be open. It was, and she left it so and went to the telephone booth attached to Oscar Bjorgsen’s beach-wear shop. With the glow from a cigarette lighter she looked up the number and dialed.

  “Chief Duggan?”

  “Yes?”

  “It is Loreta Fernandez who speaks.”

  “Yes, Miss Fernandez?”

  “It concerns Mrs. Dean. She is choked dead.”

  Duggan took the news in one admirable stride. “Where are you?”

  “The telephone cubicle of the lifeguard. You would wish things to be untouched. I am not unversed in the police aspects of crime. The motel switchboard, you understand?”

  “Is she in her apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  �
�You did the right tiling. Tell me, can you stand going back? Maybe wait in the patio until I get there?”

  “I shall permit no one to enter until you come.”

  “Ten minutes, then.”

  Oddly, Miss Fernandez then said, “There is no rush. I think we both know that.”

  She hung up, and Duggan had the strong impression that in her peculiarly melodramatic and witchcraft fashion she had determined the identity of the killer and the motive for the crimes. And this knowledge, he thought with a good touch of grimness, was about as safe to cart around as a Molotov cocktail, especially in view of Miss Fernandez’s publicized habit of groping for things in mists.

  Before leaving his quarters he put through a call to Dr. Sibley. “Frank? This is Duggan.”

  “Oh yes, Bill?”

  “Another one. Mrs. Dean. Strangled.”

  “At Black’s?”

  “Yes, in her apartment. When you’ve done what you have to there, there’s something I need, and I need it bad. The Gettler test on Sangford. Can you jump the gun on that?”

  Sibley counted hours.

  “Well, the solutions have been standing thirteen, fourteen hours. I guess possibly.”

  “Thanks, Frank.”

  “I’ll do my best, Bill.”

  Duggan hung up, only to dial again several times, making the regular arrangements—Roth to take pictures, a technician for fingerprints, and Officer Day, whom he picked up and drove with him toward Black’s.

  Day, of course, had the job wrapped up. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face, Chief.”

  “Let’s not get personal, Pinkerton.”

  “It’s so plain it falls into slots. Like pinballs. Secret wife—I am speaking now of Sangford.”

  “That I gathered.”

  “Both her plus unwanted child stashed for good on ice, and the field all clear to gather in the Spang number in a legal marriage with the exception of one thing.”

  “Mama.”

  “Exactly right. We were pin-pointed heads not to case her as the next on the list.”

  Duggan said with a deadly seriousness, “We weren’t. I was.”

  “I kept saying we should have nabbed him, Gettler test or no Gettler test. Didn’t I?”