The Murder Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  “Read this wire, Miss Nest, and call the Chamber of Commerce in Kitchener, Ontario. Ask them what publishing houses are in town. I imagine there won’t be more than one. Then put through a call to its manager.”

  Twenty minutes later a rich, Irish-Canadian voice flowed into Mabel’s ear with Gaelic unstopability: “Mrs. Gervais? I am Larry Connor. You’re calling about Hyacinth, aren’t you now? Well, I’m expecting him in the morning and any message you want to leave for him I will see that he gets it immediately. I can relish right now how he will appreciate your congratulations and good wishes for his success.”

  “Mr. Connor.” Mabel spiked the name home. “I have phoned because I want to talk with you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Will you tell me, please, how you happened to know of Hyacinth’s poems? Did he send a copy to you?”

  “That he did not. I am a friend of Sellingsby who printed them, and it just so happened that he spoke about them and I thought I might take a flier at publishing. And I am.”

  “Seriously, Mr. Connor, just what induced you? After all, you must have read them.”

  “Oh come now, Mrs. Gervais, they’re not so foustie as your tone implies.”

  “Certainly they are. I utterly fail to see what makes you feel they have commercial possibilities.”

  “I’ll tell you why, and it’s not a gamble. It’s a sure thing. It’s your dear, dear American tourists, bless their clutching little hearts.”

  “You mean the souvenir idea? Like hooked rugs and those dusty balsam pillows?”

  “You are as smart as myself, Mrs. Gervais, and you have struck it instanter. The copies will be planted in every tourist trap from here to the Gaspe, and I’m giving it to you straight that particularly in the Province of Quebec they will sell like hot cakes. A gold mine.”

  “Just how big a gold mine, Mr. Connor?”

  “I—beg pardon?”

  “Flatly, how much do you expect in net profit?”

  “Well now really in all politeness, Mrs. Gervais, I fail to understand just what—”

  “It is my business, Mr. Connor, because I intend to make it worth your while not to publish Hyacinth’s poems.”

  For a moment this even dammed up the Irish.

  “Mrs. Gervais, why?”

  “Are my reasons essential? Or will the sum of ten thousand dollars deposited through my bank to your account in Canada be sufficient to make them unnecessary?”

  A longer, a deadlier stillness.

  “Ten thousand. I did hear correctly?”

  “You did.”

  “I—it will be a bit difficult to explain it to him. I’m assuming that you won’t want your name to enter into it?”

  “Naturally not.”

  “You see—after all, Mrs. Gervais, the poor chap is as high as a kite over it. He feels he’s hit Heaven.”

  “Mr. Connor, the one way to handle a Gordian knot is to cut it. Simply express your regrets and tell him that after reviewing the matter you have changed your mind. You have been advised that the times, the public, are not ready. Surely as a publisher you must have a dozen stock excuses.”

  “True, that we have. But with a man like him it would kick the Santy Claus right out of his heart.”

  “I shall see that he loses nothing by your decision. I would further appreciate your arranging airplane transportation for his immediate return to the chalet. Charter a private one. Please tell him I shall be there when he arrives.”

  After a businesslike discussion of the money-transfer angle Mabel hung up. She prepared to go into further instructions to Miss Nest when something about Miss Nest’s expression checked her. It was so bleak except for the eyes and they, although swimming, did suggest an impossible combination of pleading, shocked anguish and—surely this must be a mistake—disgust.

  “Oh Mabel no! Just a message saying you needed him would have been enough. This way it’s like a revenge.”

  “Nonsense. Revenge is always a waste of time and a stupidity. This is a matter of discipline. Later I’ll buy him that gun he wants.”

  “You’re hard, Mabel. Very hard, and I simply cannot let this drop. All his life Hyacinth has had his dream of someday being publicly recognized as a poet. Well, his dream has come true for him, Mabel, and I really don’t know what this dreadful disappointment will do to him. It’s what he’s been living for. It’s funny the things that keep people living on, people who are placed in unimportant positions in life, the kind that are difficult to rise from.”

  Queer, Mabel thought, that this incident of Hyacinth’s defection should have ripped the veil from Miss Nest’s lifetime role of being a handy robot. She asked with genuine curiosity, “What’s yours, Miss Nest? What keeps you going on?”

  “Why your mother, of course. She was kind to me and I love her. I’m still close to her, in a sense, when I’m with you and maybe that makes her happy. I like to think that she recognizes me when I visit her at the sanitarium during my vacations.”

  Mabel was annoyed, sharply so, almost to the point of affront.

  “So that’s where you spend them.”

  “Yes. There is quite a nice little boardinghouse very near it. I go and sit with her and then say good-by until the next time.”

  There was something treacherous about this. It was understood that mama was never talked about. Almost literally nowadays she just didn’t exist, and certainly no one in Washington knew about her endless durability. The genuineness, the warm, heartening strength of Miss Nest’s feelings about mama were beyond Mabel’s appreciation. It was impossible for her to understand how anyone could truly love someone who was old and useless, who had no value left—a body so unneeded and unwanted except for Miss Nest’s mawkish wanting, which surely must be little other than an established pose. A pose mired in the nostalgic, like liking Parma violets.

  Miss Nest was off again, only now on a diversionary tack, “Jenny asked me to say she would not be here for dinner, Mabel. She said something about having heard from an old home-town friend. Then she left for the airport—”

  “Stop distracting me, Miss Nest. Call Harris. Tell him I want to start for the chalet at once.”

  * * * *

  Mabel broke the journey at Scranton, which they reached at eight, staying overnight at the Jermyn. She managed a six-o’clock start in the morning, which was cloud-thick and murky with the depressing color of dirty pewter. Critically she wondered whether the storm area would extend far enough north to delay Hyacinth’s chartered flight from Ontario. They made a stop for breakfast in Binghamton and reached the chalet toward midday under a sky still vicious with threat.

  A State Trooper lounged on the porch.

  His face held the grave imperturbability that seems to be a hallmark of the service, suggestive of an isolationism in some frozen preserve very strictly, very courteously barred to the general public. He walked over to the car as Harris opened the door for Mabel to get out.

  For a strange, almost a premonitory moment the three simply stood there caught in a rapt stillness under the cold, lonesome splendor of the mountains, with a bank of storm clouds crowding the peak of Ampersand.

  “I am Sergeant Catt, Mrs. Gervais.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s about your caretaker, Hyacinth Dubois. An accident.”

  “To the plane? It crashed?”

  “No, the plane’s all right. He’s dead.”

  “Oh no.” It could have been accepted as a cry of shocked pity, of grief, any of the decent reactions, but it was not. Contrary almost to credence Mabel continued strictly true to form. It seemed to the calculating machine that housed her emotions as though death, with its obstinate finality, had personally gone out of its way to bilk her. She said, “Was it a stroke?”

  “No. There are some puzzling features, Mrs. Gervais.”

  Mabel’s stomach gave her a danger-signal, gripping twist.

  “What are they?”

  “The plane was a Canadian charter job with a passenger
cabin separated from the cockpit. Mr. Dubois occupied this compartment by himself. The pilot says that somewhere between Mount Morris and Coreys—that would be the stretch of timbered country just to the southwest of here, Mrs. Gervais—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, the pilot heard Mr. Dubois cry out. A despairing sort of cry, he called it. He went back to investigate and found the cabin door open. This could have been accidental, maybe a mistake on Mr. Dubois’ part, and the windslip might have sucked him out. Or it could have been on purpose and he just stepped.”

  “But that’s stupid. How could you even consider it?”

  Catt drifted his look across the ugly, the granite caking of Mabel’s imperiously arrogant face.

  “The pilot told us that a Mr. Connor, a Canadian publisher, had arranged for the plane’s charter. We called him up.”

  “Well?”

  “Mr. Connor wasn’t easy to understand. From the way his voice sounded he must have been hitting the bottle. We figured this because he broke out sobbing when he learned about Mr. Dubois.”

  “Men drink. There are crying jags.”

  “I know that, Mrs. Gervais. But you see we finally pieced together some sense from what he said. He claimed he had felt a premonition that this might happen. Then he added something not quite understandable about the death being the result of your having bribed him not to publish Mr. Dubois’ poems.”

  “Bribed? What drunken rot.”

  “Yes, we figured it that way, too. Especially when he said that the airplane business was nothing but a dismal anticlimax—because Mr. Dubois was already dead when he had walked out of the office.”

  “Then why—why this, Sergeant?”

  “To clear the record, Mrs. Gervais. Can you think of any reason that could have made it suicide? Did you ever notice any signs of emotional instability while he was in your employ?”

  “I should not have kept him if there had been.”

  “No, naturally, but perhaps some showed up just recently?”

  “We have not been here since early summer. I suggest that his cousin, a man named Etienne, would be a better source.”

  “Yes, I’ve talked with Etienne. He’s badly broken up. Hysterical type, in a way. Incoherent. He said that Mr. Dubois left here yesterday in the ‘highest of happiness’ after a little celebration party they had thrown. Then Etienne broke his neck beating it from the lodge to join in the hunt.”

  “Hunt?”

  “For the body.”

  “Of course, the body.” Mabel’s case-hardened mind flew to the nearing weekend. “There must be an inquest, I suppose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here?”

  “In the lodge? No, at Saranac, Mrs. Gervais.”

  “Naturally I shan’t be expected to attend it. There is no personal connection whatever.”

  “Perhaps it won’t be necessary.”

  “Why perhaps, Sergeant?”

  “The Kitchener, the publishing angle, rather the not-publishing angle. Because of its possible effect on Mr. Dubois’ feelings. A good many French-Canadians are pretty emotional, you know. The coroner will want the record as straight as he can get it—accident or suicide.”

  “All that is entirely in Mr. Connor’s province. Frankly, I did persuade him, begged him, really, not to publish Hyacinth’s poems. They were childish, stupidly crude, and I did not want Hyacinth to be publicly, critically hurt. Mr. Connor was planning the edition as a stunt along the souvenir line for tourists. I am certain that Mr. Connor will make a lucid deposition after he sobers up.”

  “We will keep you informed, Mrs. Gervais.”

  Catt touched his brim and went to a motorcycle that stood parked against clumped cedar trees. Almost with a contrived sort of symbolism its explosive pops soughed low under an ear-splitting counterpoint of ugly thunder.

  There was nothing singular in the fact that so far as Mabel’s apperception of him was concerned Harris had been blanked out during her talk with Sergeant Catt. He continued, as he had been during all the years in her employ, just a part of the furniture. She was insensible to the hard unblinkingness of his look as she passed him on her way into the chalet, where she went directly to a telephone in the lounge and put through a call to Connor.

  She had no trouble with him when the connection was made. Although brutally hung-over, Connors business brain was once more as sober as a cake of ice. He had made up his mind to expect the utmost trickery on Mabel’s part and an attempt through some devious litigation to get back her money, the transfer of which had gone through shortly before noon.

  He imagined that this telephone call was intended to put on the opening bite, but it did not. The woman (Mabel) could not have presented a more gratifying example of decorously patrician common sense and he wondered however on earth he could so basely have misjudged her. It seemed little enough that she wanted, and definitely no part of the money refunded. Under this assuaging effect of golden relief he accepted in toto her prevent-the-souvenir version of the deal as she had given it to Sergeant Catt, and assured her that any deposition he might be called upon to make would religiously follow the version’s laudably noble lines.

  With this irksome bother settled, Mabel bestowed a lady-of-the-manor look on the room’s fusty points of disorder. These included several empty wine bottles on a hearthside table, two residue-caked tumblers, odd spills of cigarette ash, one violin very dead looking on the rug (Cousin Etienne’s, no doubt), also several homeless lumps of bread and cheese. In short, a pigpen.

  These relics of Hyacinth’s and Cousin Etienne’s simple celebration over the sandbag effect of imminent literary fame shot Mabel’s managerial efficiency into high. The actual running of the chalet for the coming decisive weekend would be taken care of by a picked handful from Broadlands’ staff, headed by its twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year chef. Accompanied by hampers of Lucullan vittles, liquors, and wines, they were scheduled to arrive and to take over on Thursday.

  They were important in the sense of basic machinery that would insure the party’s operational smoothness, but they could not insure its flavor, and flavor was paramount. An immediate call to Lake Placid resulted in a mutually satisfactory arrangement with the club’s steward by which he guaranteed Mabel a Canuck quartet—complete with engaging patois—of expert guides to handle the venison potting capers.

  On hanging up the receiver she grew conscious that Harris had come into the lounge and was standing like a shadowy boulder over at the door. The room’s murky storm-light left his expression indecipherable—not that Mabel was remotely interested—and everything about him seemed cumbrously vague. She was on the point of telling him to clear up the room’s mess when she experienced a strange reaction from the manner in which he slowly began to move toward her. The softness and delicacy with which he advanced one big solid foot in front of the other, the on-egg-like pattern of his stepping, gripped her in an hypnotic species of mild fascination.

  He halted this process of singular locomotion at the desk and then, with the pregnant deliberation of a dubious second-act curtain, placed the keys and the car registration down on it. Mabel, still mute, sat observing this standard gesture of polished abandonment and it further curdled the hot stew of gripes that had been simmering inside her since yesterday.

  “Put those back in your pocket.”

  “I’ve quit, Mrs. Gervais.”

  Mabel damped the blistering blast that tipped her tongue and, instead, asked reasonably, “Why?”

  “There wouldn’t be no use in telling you. It’s—I just want to get away from you.”

  She stayed moveless, still remote in her secure and powerful citadel of wealth and prestige, and digested the pungent ingredients hidden in this very odd statement.

  They were rather unpleasant in the sense of their possible repercussions. There was a cohesion of gossip among the different plateaus of the Capital servants and Mabel did not underrate it. It offered a ripe source for the columnists’ more muddy item
s, flakes either of moral or monetary indiscretions or (worse) of ridicule that had kicked the props from under a good many careers. One damnable thing was that Harris knew all about mama. Mabel thought it important to learn the full scope of the wormwood that all of a sudden Harris was finding it impossible to stomach.

  “Is it Hyacinth?”

  “You could call that the clincher.”

  “There is more, then?”

  “Little stuff. Years of it. He’s just the worst, I guess.”

  Mabel remained baronially patient.

  “Do you mind being reasonable? You heard my explanation to the state trooper. My motives were kind, almost altruistically kind. If there were any burden of blame, and there is none, it would rest with Mr. Connor.”

  “Look, Mrs. Gervais, this gets us no place. I talked with Miss Nest when she ordered the car and she was crying and she asked me in try and influence you on the drive up here and a fat chance I would have or anybody would ever have of influencing you.” Harris gave Mabel a good looking-over. It was sort of an impersonal spectator effect, like looking at a big deadly specimen in a zoo’s snake house through a guarding glass.

  He said, “Well, you got what you wanted. You got Hyacinth back all right.”

  He started to walk away and Mabel stopped him with, “About your salary, Harris. I’ve been thinking for some time that with your years of faithful service a very substantial increase—”

  “No. No, Mrs. Gervais. I like money, but I’ve got it. I’ve never been a spender and you might say I’m all set. I’ll call a cab on the phone in the garage to take me into Placid.”

  The room, being fireless, was cold from seepage of the storm’s tumult and in spite of the fur coat so warmly enveloping her Mabel felt a chill spread through her body and bones. It grew acute while Harris had the porch door open on his way out and the wind’s great power went yelling around the room until he had closed the door behind him.