The Murder Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  After Lewis left for his rooms Mabel prepared for bed. For a couple of years now they had stopped sharing the same apartment so that couldn’t be it—Lewis’s phrase had gone right on nagging her: “within the feel of you again.” And so had Harris’s “I just want to get away from you,” which certainly had had no reference to her private chamber.

  Mabel bathed with her customary excess of care, having always felt what amounted to a fetish in maintaining the nicety of her person because of its large surface areas and generous vales. Then, after opening a bedroom window, she got between the sheets.

  Lewis’s relief-filled laughter sifted through the room’s empty dark. Not for an instant did she consider herself licked. Granting him lost to her and totally out of the picture so far as an ambassadorship was concerned, what of it? Why not herself instead? Appointed as an ambassadress by a grateful and obligated administration and the appointment applauded by an admiring and richly stomach-stuffed (by her) Senate?

  The solution was electrifying to Mabel in its simplicity and overpowering appeal. Certainly the money and the influence were hers, and certainly there was precedent in both Perle Mesta and Clare Boothe Luce. Her brain shot into high. This divorce business, any breath of it, must be killed. Divorce was the unalterable taboo within the State Department and with the governments abroad.

  Yet this she knew: Lewis would insist on one.

  Lewis alive would insist on one—

  Unfalteringly from Machiavelli’s Principe—her personal bible—she dipped out his cardinal rule of never gagging over dealing with false friends or questionable allies through an arranged death. Lewis must die.

  Her thoughts swam lucidly along this common-sense river for snatching victory from defeat. The horrendous properties of murder did not faze her for one compassionate bit. With her decision made, Lewis already had ceased to be a human being, a man whom she had lived with through so many years of doggish companionship and stretches of animal desire. He was altered now into an impersonal obstacle that must be brushed aside.

  How?

  It is interesting that it should have leaped into her mind from the long ago: the principal favor for the debutantes who had attended her coming out cotillion. They were gold replicas of the medieval anello della morte, the poison ring of the Borgias which her mother’s social secretary (and now Mabel’s) had so aptly labeled as being nothing short of a deadly concealed weapon. Yet it wasn’t so curious, really, that she should have remembered, because she had been thinking about Machiavelli and his conscienceless Principe.

  As she still had the ring among her souvenirs, the weapon was decided upon. The next question was when?

  By his very precepts of honor and his kindly decision to string along until she could bow herself out of her Washington campaign without loss of face, Lewis had placed himself in the vulnerable position of a sitting duck.

  Why not—yes—the party planned for the coming weekend at the Adirondack chalet could still turn out to be the felicitous moment for reaping her great, her precious and deserved reward. Her guest list of VIPs was just as perfect for a camouflage of murder as for its original purpose of popping an embassy into Mabel’s bag at long last.

  The job must be expertly, openly done. During a square dance? A moment of frivolity extemporaneously arranged for Veronica Olcott, the Postmaster General’s wife? Veronica was the ultimate bore in her passion for the more acrobatic aspects of folk lore, being skinny as a rail and lacking the loose poundage so helpful in the mamba.

  The scene unfolded in vivid preview: Do-si-do—change your partners—then Lewis’s hand swinging toward her and her own hand clasping it. And then the Borgian pressure on the hidden spring to the poison well of the ring.

  The shock. The profound and valuable sympathy that would be given her. So many men nowadays were suddenly taken at Lewis’s age. Stroke? Heart attack? Embolism? The symptoms would have to be looked up and a proper poison selected to counterfeit them; a poison so swift and deadly in its course that beyond, perhaps, one unintelligible cry no words could come from Lewis.

  Mabel tentatively sketched out a businesslike program. Make an appointment with that Dr. Beltry whom Lewis recently had been seeing, and check as to the specific nature of Lewis’s stomach trouble. Express deep concern about it to the doctor. Locate the poison ring. Determine and get the poison for it. And then test it out. On, say, some little animal.

  Small dog?

  Small cat?

  White mouse?

  She shut her eyes upon the chill and the quiet dark, feeling the well-earned peace of a child at the close of a busy day. This idyllic moment lasted no longer than a ten-minute stretch. Crowding her head and body into a fitful state of renewed wakefulness, bitter in view of its present drastic repercussions, came a clear panorama of the entire Moljinski episode…

  * * * *

  Ten years ago had it been? Fifteen? Anyhow, the number no longer mattered. Lewis, Mabel remembered, had insisted on driving and she was still turgidly enough in love with him so that she didn’t care. She knew he had had enough to drink at the Beatons’ party to give him that Viking attitude which she admired in him, even though it was liable to let the edge show of the deeply hidden disgust that he felt for her.

  They were using the Jaguar, and the road home from the Beatons’ led through the Oyster Bay section of Long Island. The hour was after one, the summer night moonless. Patches of fog were drifting in from the Sound and they should, Mabel thought, be crawling, instead of the pace which Lewis was holding.

  The bump was slight but perfectly noticeable, and Lewis said, “Animal?”

  “No, it was something bigger. I think it was on my side. I saw a sort of blur.”

  Lewis stopped the car, leaving the motor running.

  “I’ll go look.”

  Fog swallowed him. He was gone for what seemed a long while and, muffled through the shrouding darkness, Mabel could hear him retching. When he came back his big frame was shaking all over and he took a long drink of bourbon from a silver flask before he said, “She’s dead, Mabel. I’ve killed her.”

  Then he started to cry, the Viking stage being collapsed and the maudlin having set in. He folded up across the steering wheel in heavy, muscular lumps and passed out cold. Mabel did not stir for several moments. The road was a secondary one and traffic at that hour of the morning was improbable. Apart from her self-indulgent animal passion for Lewis, Mabel had a precision mind and she used it now unhurriedly.

  She took a flashlight and walked back until she reached what resembled a discarded bundle on the road’s grass shoulder. The woman was small but stockily built and with flattish, middle-European features. Her clothes were serviceable, ordinary, and cheap. She seemed around Mabel’s age, which was twenty-seven, and a moaning whisper of breathing denied Lewis’s drunken decision that she was dead.

  Mabel was a big, heavy, plain woman with no real fat but just solid flesh and strength. She easily gathered the woman up and carried her to the car, putting her in and then shoving Lewis over and herself getting behind the wheel. She drove at a sensible rate through varying densities of fog toward home. Any physical probabilities as to the woman’s condition, whether she were fatally injured or, with equal seriousness, under syncope from shock, did not concern Mabel in the least.

  It was Lewis she was thinking of, about his barely noticeable hungry grasps toward independence which with increasing frequency had been coming to the surface. Like tonight when she had told him to get ready to go home his: “Knock it off, Mabel! We’ll go when I’m ready to go.” Yes, another turn of the screw did seem to be indicated and this incident, perhaps, could be used to tighten it permanently.

  On reaching the house—mansion would be a more appropriate word for the place—Mabel left Lewis in the car. She carried the woman in sack-like fashion indoors, through the massive marble entrance hall with its statuary that papa had brought from Italy, and on back through the service regions to the kitchen where she turned on ligh
ts.

  She put the woman down in the French chef’s lounge chair and shortly revived her with whiffs from a bottle of household ammonia. The staff always left a platter of sandwiches in the refrigerator and Mabel joined the woman in eating them while they talked and drank sherry

  The woman’s name was Anna Moljinski. She was unmarried, a recent Polish immigrant, and Mabel’s argument was this: If Miss Moljinski were to demand an arrest and sue for damages what would be the result? She would fall into the clutches of some negligible lawyer and the case would be fought against Mabel’s wealth, against the smartest legal talent and, if need be, be carried through the appellate courts. And all this pother would result in Miss Moljinski ending up with but a pittance for herself or conceivably even being in debt to her cheap attorney.

  Mabel shrewdly never underpaid for anything. She could afford not to. From a wall safe she took ten thousand dollars, gave the money to Miss Moljinski, and had her sign a full release.

  Miss Moljinski was not only satisfied but stunned into speechlessness. To her, in her unenviable niche of static cash meagerness, in her hand-to-mouth present, past, and undeviating future, this money was more than just the chance of a lifetime. It was a miracle. And this woman (no longer an ugly grotesque) was a saint.

  Mabel drove Miss Moljinski to the farmhouse where she had a room and board. It was a mile outside of Oyster Bay where her job was doing pastries in a bakeshop, and from which she had been walking home when Lewis had struck her.

  “I shall expect never to see or hear from you again,” Mabel said. “That is understood, Miss Moljinski?”

  “Yes, madam. Never.”

  It was nearing three o’clock before Mabel again reached home, with Lewis continuing as a wetly snoring clump on the seat. As she made the turn to the porch she saw a lighted window over at the garage in an upper room that was occupied by her chauffeur, Harris. Being still absorbed in the full current of her plotting she attached no significance to it, and certainly no future importance.

  * * * *

  The panorama of memories did not stop there. It ran on through the clinching of Lewis’s bondage.

  Mabel, as a starter, had contrived the appearance and the atmosphere of flight, a whisking away of Lewis from the hit-run charge of manslaughter. She had gone inside and packed a bag for herself and one for Lewis. In her own she put a large flask of bourbon. She left a note for Mrs. Bisbeck, the housekeeper, that they would be at the chalet in the Adirondacks for an indefinite period. Then she placed the bags in the car and drove off with Lewis.

  She deliberately kept Lewis in a stuporish fog throughout the long, endless hours of the trip, feeding him bourbon while she drank quantities of black coffee. This resulted in his never being quite aware of her, or of himself, or of the swift, steady flight.

  But Mabel was constantly aware of him.

  When they had passed through Keene Valley (it was there that you took the cut-off for the sanitarium where mama was being forgotten) the memory of how she and Lewis had met on that January morning three years ago had come flooding back in hot, physical waves.

  Mama then had only recently been committed as an alcoholic (a state brought on through shocked despair over papa’s unfortunate death) and Mabel was making the dutiful, tiresome gesture of staying for a few days at the sanitarium until mama was adjusted emotionally to the unfamiliar surroundings.

  There were some personal things that mama wanted from the chalet: a baby clipping of papa’s hair trapped between the dual glasses of a locket—a small, ivory-bound copy of the American Book of Common Prayer that mama had carried to her first Anglican Communion—and a bottle of yellow chartreuse that papa had bought during their honeymoon in France to be kept until their golden wedding anniversary. Naturally, his death had canceled that but mama had gone on keeping the bottle unopened, sentimentally, for an occasion.

  As the roads were largely precarious except for sledding, Mabel had taken a train when she had gone to fetch these mementos of mama’s pre-alcoholic days. She had stayed overnight at the clubhouse at Lake Placid in order to have an early start during the short winter daylight for the ride by cutter to the chalet. It was roughly a distance of fifteen miles and about all that a horse could possibly manage during the zero weather.

  The club arranged for a cutter, and its driver was Lewis.

  Throughout the drive, with each breath being icily lung-biting, Lewis was nothing but an ear-flapped, mufllered segment of a face with a frosty nose and a pair of eyes that were a dark, winter-sky blue under thick brows. But when he uncrated himself in the chalet, which they reached toward dusk, it was a different thing.

  The chalet had unspellably been named by papa Oeschinensee after that lovely Swiss lake mirror for the snowy Bliimlisalp. It was a roomy, timbered square built of six-inch-thick planks and had a projecting upper story that was balconied and boiling over at fever heat with intricate bracket treatments.

  The chalet’s caretaker, Hyacinth Dubois, was another one of Mabel’s purchases.

  Hyacinth’s grand passion lay in writing habitant verse, and inasmuch as Mabel had wanted Hyacinth for an unuprootable fixture in the chalet she had paid a Mr. Sellingsby, the politely bemused owner of a small press near Plattsburg, to print a limited edition of the poems. The hysterical joy of seeing his words, his brain flowers, his cascading precious stones in print made Hyacinth her slave—and got Mabel a manacled guide and cook. The money she paid Mr. Sellingsby all but made that gentleman her slave, too.

  Lewis, unswaddled and ruddy in the glow of birch log firelight, fresh with ozone and a good Spanish Castile soap scrubbing, struck Mabel with the assured impact of a bullet from an elephant gun as being the answer, the very key to unlock the gates of her lifelong obsession. This fixed idea lay in her decision that the solution to her bodily lack of attraction rested in the diplomatic corps.

  She had arrived at this conclusion during her Court presentation in London. The remarkably well-preserved Cynthia, Marchioness of Knoyle, had sponsored her, as previously she had sponsored mama. Mama had by then been too far gone to do the job herself. The ceremony’s smooth deceptiveness convinced Mabel that the polished rigidities of protocol were her answer to living, for within its regimented bounds a woman’s looks meant little, whereas her official position meant everything. She could be as ugly as sin and still live brilliantly. She could even, Mabel had decided grimly, be as ugly as herself.

  Under the crush and glitter and stateliness of the presentation, dimly, far off in the future she could vision her canonical security as the wife of an ambassador at a major embassy. At first subconsciously, then consciously this had become her life’s goal, rooting itself so deeply that it grew into a cancerous obsession, its pervasive virus gripping her with undiluted strength right through the future years to the tragical end.

  The mechanics of this dream had required a husband, of course, and here, magnificently perfect in the lambent firelight, stood Lewis. Mentally, Mabel added a score of years to his appearance. She replaced his boots, britches, and lumberman’s shirt with striped pants, a morning coat, a black Homburg. The resulting vision almost made her call him Your Excellency to his face.

  During the evening meal of Hyacinth’s black bean soup, a saddle of venison, and a sebago pudding she laid the foundation for having Lewis wrapped up.

  Mabel’s dear mother was in a sanitarium and Lewis’s dear mother was in one, too. Check.

  It was the reason for her being here now, to fetch poor mama’s little souvenirs of sentiment. These were lingered on by Mabel lovingly and harrowingly and bravely.

  It was the reason why Lewis was driving cutters at Lake Placid instead of completing his graduate degree at the University of Vermont: both to be near his mother in her sanitarium and to earn as much money as he could to keep her as comfortable as he could.

  What a remarkable coincidence, what a strange, odd bond it formed between them (this was Mabel); why, when you came to think of it, the mutual link was positively p
rophetic. And what, dear Lewis, was the trouble with Lewis’s dear mother?

  The need for Mrs. Gervais’s operation then had come out, and the extravagant hopelessness of ever having it done. Montreal’s Sir Harry Dolkins, the celebrated tumor specialist, offered the sole chance, and even apart from the impossibility of meeting his fee he would offer but a problematical success at best.

  Well, Mabel would attend to that.

  She certainly did.

  The wedding had been a quiet one, coming as it had on the heels of Mrs. Gervais’s death. It was mellifluously conducted by the Reverend William Tooch at the chalet, with Lewis being an automaton stunned into complacency by grief—an emotional condition that resulted in the ceremony being the only one on local record at which it was the groom who burst into tears.

  So kind, Lewis—so considerately kind—so willing had Lewis been—

  So grateful.

  * * * *

  At the chalet, at the termination of the “flight” from Long Island, Mabel kept Lewis drunk for a solid week. During it there were flashes of torture for Lewis whenever a lucid remembrance of the accident would come and of the woman who, in the version Mabel gave him of it, he had killed. Also, during this week, she went to see Mr. Sellingsby at his press near Plattsburg.

  He couldn’t have been more pleased. At once he envisioned an expensive second edition of Hyacinth’s primitive outgushings, but Mabel abruptly put him straight. What she wanted, she said, was for him to print an item that would look as though it had been clipped from a New York newspaper. Could it be done?

  “Of course, Mrs. Gervais. A little joke, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps. I will pay you one hundred dollars for the job.”

  “Oh but that’s ridiculous. It’s far too much.”

  “Not on the understanding that you do the typesetting personally. And privately, Mr. Sellingsby.”

  Mentally, Mr. Sellingsby rang up the cash, with a side-nod of gratitude toward all quirks of the crazy rich.