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GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE, by James Holding
Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1966.
The power failure lasted less than five minutes—but it came at an awkward time.
John Marcy, soup spoon in hand, was seated at the dining table ready to start his dinner. He was hungry.
Angela, his wife, who had just carried the filled soup plates in from the kitchen and taken her own seat across the table, was reaching out a hand toward the cracker dish when the house lights flickered once, then winked out.
“Oh, dear!” Angela said, startled. “Now what? Look out the front window in the living room, John, and see if the neighbors’ lights are out, too. Maybe it’s just ours.”
John put down his soup spoon obediently, groped his way into the living room, and looked out the front window. “Even the street lights are out,” he reported over his shoulder. “It’s a general power failure, I guess.”
He could hear Angela moving in the darkness of the dining room behind him. “I’ve got candles,” she said in a moment, “if you’ll get the matches from the coffee table in there.”
John cautiously located the coffee table in the blackness and explored its surface for the book of matches always kept near the ashtray. As his hand closed on it, a match flared in the dining room, and a second later two candles set in silver candlesticks on the table were dissipating the darkness.
“Never mind, John,” Angela called, “I found a match in the buffet drawer. Come on and eat your soup now. It’ll get cold.”
Before John got back to his chair at the table, the electric lights came on again.
“Ah,” said Angela with relief. “That’s better.” She didn’t blow out the candles.
John picked up his soup spoon and then, with a distraught air, put it down again. He looked across the table at Angela whose gentle blue eyes were regarding him anxiously. “Is the soup cold, dear?” she asked. She took a sip of her own. “Mine isn’t.”
He shook his head. How lovely she is, he thought, and what a heel I’ve been to go running after those other women. His conscience was suddenly tender. An unaccustomed pang of shame caused him to lower his eyes.
“No,” he said, “I don’t suppose it’s cold, darling, but I’m not very hungry tonight.”
“It’s yellow pea soup, John. You love it.”
“I know.” He raised his head. “And I love you, too, Angela. You know that, don’t you?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Let’s not go into that again,” she said, trembling.
John said, “I’m an All-American heel, Angela, I admit it. A woman-crazy, middle-aged wolf who ought to know better. And I’m genuinely sorry for it.”
Angela brushed aside her tears with the back of a flexed wrist, a somehow pathetic gesture. She stood up. “Now you’ve spoiled my appetite,” she said. She picked up the two soup plates and carried them out to the kitchen.
* * * *
“So I want to divorce her,” John Marcy told his lawyer quietly the next day.
Bartley, the lawyer, aimed a faintly disapproving glance at his client and friend. “Divorce her?” he echoed. “You want to divorce her?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t make me laugh, John. It’s common gossip in town that she ought to divorce you. And I know the score, John, so don’t try to kid me. I haven’t forgotten those breach-of-promise suits and the paternity action I had to settle for you, John.”
“I’m not forgetting them either. I just want to divorce Angela, that’s all. And I need your advice on how to go about it. That’s simple, isn’t it?”
“Not all that simple, no. Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to divorce her all of a sudden after letting things drift along like this for years?”
“Because she won’t divorce me, that’s why. And I want to be free of her.”
“Yes, but why won’t she divorce you? Some foolish idea that this way she can punish you for your past peccadilloes?”
“No. You’ll think I’m even more insufferable than you do now if I tell you the true reason.”
“Try me and see.”
John hesitated. Then he said, “Well, it’s my considered opinion, knowing Angela as I do, that she won’t divorce me because she still loves me.”
“That’s no reason,” Bartley said.
“It is if she doesn’t want another woman to get her hooks into me permanently,” John said. “She knows how vulnerable and—uh—undiscriminating I am.” He paused. “You realize it isn’t easy for me to talk like this, Bart.”
“Go on,” Bartley said, and with the privileged candor of long friendship he added, “Everybody knows you’re a heel, John. No need to be embarrassed in front of me.”
Marcy flushed and plowed on doggedly. “Angela has decided that if she can’t enjoy my full-time love and loyalty, no other woman will get a chance at it, either.”
“Is that what Angela says?”
“Not in so many words, no. But I’m positive it’s how she feels.”
“How can you be positive about a thing like that?”
“From her actions, Bart. From her attitude lately.”
“And you want t
o charge mental cruelty, is that it?”
“No, you don’t understand at all.” Marcy sighed.
“I’ll say I don’t. But I might remind you, John, that even in these enlightened times you need stronger grounds for divorce than a simple statement that your wife loves you and you’re sure of it.”
John said, “Don’t clown with me, I’m serious. I tell you I want to divorce Angela.”
“I’m not clowning. But you’ve got to have grounds. Angela’s got plenty—but you haven’t. Understand?” Bartley didn’t wait for an answer. He went on, “Exactly when did you decide you had to divorce Angela? Maybe that’ll help.”
Resignedly John said, “Last night. At the dinner table.”
“What happened?”
“We had a power failure in our neighborhood. The lights went out.”
“Well, well.” Bartley lit a cigarette and examined his client’s glum face with interest. “That certainly explains a lot.”
“It did to me,” John said, “even if you think it’s some sort of joke.”
Exasperated, the lawyer leaned back in his swivel chair. “Nothing about divorce is some sort of joke, as you call it,” he snapped. “So be serious about this, John! Tell me about the lights going out, if you think it’s important.”
“It’s important, all right. The lights were out for only a couple of minutes, but during that brief period of total darkness I suddenly found out Angela’s true feelings for me, Bart.” John was dragging out the words reluctantly. “I’m being honest with you.”
“Good,” Bartley said. “So in the dark you had this great revelation of Angela’s true feelings. What did she do—try to seduce you, or what?”
Marcy shook his head. “I’m sorry to make you pry it out of me like this, Bart,” he apologized. “But I was pretty surprised at the time, and I’m not over my confusion yet.”
“Obviously. But let’s have it. You’re stalling.”
“I suppose I am,” Marcy admitted. He took a deep breath. “Well, you’ve got to get the picture. Angela had just brought in our soup. We were ready to begin eating. And it was at that instant, with our soup plates on the table before us, that the lights went out.”
“All right. What then?”
“Then,” Marcy said, “then I saw that Angela was trying to kill me.”
“Kill you!” Bartley dropped his cigarette on the rug and swore as he stamped it out.
“That’s what I said. Kill me. Poison me. She had poisoned my soup.”
Bartley stared at him, shaking his head. “But in the dark—” he began.
“If the lights hadn’t gone out, I’d be dead. I’d have eaten that damned soup and gone where no waitress or chorus girl could ever give me the come-on again.” For the first time Marcy smiled. “My soup was loaded with yellow phosphorus.”
“How did you know?”
“High school chemistry. When the lights went out, my soup glowed in the dark like a plate of incandescent paint.”
After a dazed moment Bartley managed to whisper, “Attempted murder.”
“Is that grounds for divorce?”
“Should be enough for a starter,” Bartley said, swallowing.
“Angela, poor darling, tried to distract my attention from the soup,” John went on. “She got candles lit as soon as she could, to hide the soup’s phosphorescence.” He paused.
Then he said, “Understand, Bart, I’m telling this to nobody but you. If you go to Angela and tell her you know all about her attempt to murder me last night, I think that out of shame she’ll consent to divorce me for the old-fashioned reasons. But I don’t want the police to hear a word about this.”
“Why not?” asked the lawyer. “After all, attempted murder—”
“Because Angela still loves me, as I told you—enough to want to kill me, if that’s the only way she can keep me straight. And in my own stupid way I still love her—now more than ever, perhaps. I don’t want the police hounding her.”
Bartley hunched his shoulders in pure bafflement. He said, “If you and Angela still love each other so much, why not stay together? Why not go on through life hand in hand, as the poet says? Why a divorce?”
John Marcy stood up. He gave the lawyer a crooked grin. “Everybody knows I’m a heel,” he said. “But that’s a little different from being a fool. There might not be a power failure the next time.”
ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER, by Stuart Palmer
Originally published in Mercury Mystery Book, Sept. 1957.
Curtain rises on a lonely deserted dock on the Long Beach waterfront, where the schooner Carma has just been moored that afternoon. The date is December 6, 1932; the hour 9:30 of a dank and dripping evening.
That is the setting. Enter the chorus, consisting of eight very pretty girls and seven handsome men, most of them in their early twenties. They are all living aboard the schooner, supposedly engaged in preparing for an adventure cruise to Tahiti and Samoa. It is nice casting. One girl is a bewitching authoress and poet from Atlanta, one a bobbed-haired student from Boston and Wellesley…there’s a cute, plump secretary from Manhattan, another poet, a painter, a dishwasher, a sailor or two, and an actress who had played Juliet in summer stock. And there is even a handsome young man with a heavy Oxford accent who claimed to be the son of a British peer—and was!
In the top starring role is Captain Walter Wanderwell, leader of the expedition. He is a tall, handsome, stiffly military chap who always wears boots and a self-designed uniform. He is a world-traveler, adventurer, and soldier of misfortune.
There is also, as heroine and leading woman, his wife Aloha Wanderwell. She is six feet and 140 pounds of blonde, curly-haired pulchritude.
We have also the Wanderwells’ two children—Valerie, aged seven, and Nile who is pushing six, both members of the strange “crew.” Little Val was the nominal owner of the vessel, since her father was not an American citizen and thus could not own a ship under United States registry.
And—to round out the cast—there is a slight, wavy-haired, good-looking young man in a gray cravanette raincoat. He later stood trial, for his life on the charge of having shot Captain Wanderwell through the back of the neck. Certain highlights of that memorable trial, presented here for the first time from my own records and with the amiable assistance of Judge Robert W. Kenny, who presided, are worth bringing up in this account.
Captain Wanderwell and his fifteen merry, madcap adventurers were all living aboard the Carma, although the rickety vessel had not been conditioned nor fully provisioned, and her sailing date for Tahiti and points south was, to say the least, highly indefinite. But they had no place else to live, since each had contributed all the loose cash he or she had toward the trip’s expenses. Wanderwell himself had somehow raised the considerable amount of $22,000 with which to buy the ship, although his last venture—in the wilds of South America—had been spectacularly unsuccessful. He had purchased the old rumrunner at a government auction of seized ships, and had managed to have her towed to her present berth.
So, with all their money invested in the common kitty, the would-be Argonauts lived on canned beans and waited for the great day. Captain Wanderwell was a natural-born leader, imbuing them with confidence, a brave and dashing figure.
Only recently, within the last year, he had led a similar group of explorers north from Buenos Aires through some of the most impassable jungles of South America, travelling by means of two specially built, high-slung Ford trucks and stopping now and then to shoot movie film footage starring crocodiles, headhunters, and of course the beautiful Aloha.
That particular expedition, as I have said, had wound up somewhat short of its announced goal of Beverly Hills, California, due to the fact that no motor cars had yet been built which could travel through those parts of South America where roads didn’t exist. The trip had been a considerable disappointment and disillusionment to the members of the crew—the girls who had been promised roles in the picture found themselves fighting mosquitoes,
doing chores, or carrying lights and cameras for the photography.
The group broke up completely at Colon, and there a number of lawsuits against the Wanderwells were immediately instituted by members of the party. But the Captain and his fair bride managed to sail for Los Angeles before the suits came to trial. So now—after a few months of much-needed rest—Wanderwell was ready to take off again. His new volunteer crew had been recruited through advertisements in newspapers and magazines and literary weeklies by offering any footloose adventurer the opportunity of having his or her investment (which might range from $400 to $2,000 apiece) repaid tenfold from the profits of the new voyage—profits from the sale of the adventure movies they expected to make, from picture postcards, from curios and strange shells to be collected—and also possibly from the discovery of millions in buried treasure in case they happened to put in at the fabled Cocos Island or any other historic pirate hangout.
It may seem to contemporary skeptics that the investors were making a rather poor gamble. But it must be remembered that in that sad year of 1932 the nation was gripped tight in depression.
The fifteen who had signed on as the volunteer, amateur crew of the Carma did not know that the ship had already been condemned as unseaworthy; and that the aged vessel had taken two days to make the run of a few nautical miles from San Pedro to Long Beach, during which both of her auxiliaries had broken down completely. She was finally ignominiously towed to her new berth.
Here the Argonauts awaited her, ready to take off for anywhere. The cranky old Carma was possessed of only three cabins furnished with six double bunks and a few sofas. On the night when the fantastic comedy-tragedy really got under way, not all were aboard. The majority of the crew were out enjoying the dubious pleasures afforded by the Long Beach waterfront at the time—movies and speakeasies—and the fair Aloha had gone up to Los Angeles to visit her sister. The Captain was alone in his cabin aft; the remaining members of the crew were crowded in a cabin, amusing themselves after their wont, presumably listening to an accordion on which one of the boys had some facility.
But it was testified later that at least two of the crew saw a face appear at one open porthole, and heard a husky “Germanic” voice ask for Wanderwell. The visitor was directed to the other cabin—some said he was even guided there by one of the boys, but there is considerable conflict in the testimony about this point. Some of the gay young people in the cabin claimed not to have heard or seen anybody. Yet a while later there was the sound of a shot.
The Murder Megapack Page 2
