The Murder Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  Faintly, on the bare perimeter of thought, Mabel indulged in a curt brown study of the trivial, of the truly damnable whip hand it could exert. She skimmed a few of the more obvious examples such as the kingdom ironically lost by the third Richard for the frippery want of a horse, the hand-sized cloud that rose with such crack of doom consequences, and the unpleasant results of chain reaction in general—like the modest detonator that balloons into hydrogen holocaust.

  But these notions were simply pinpricks and she sensibly slapped their irritating faces, thus reducing Hyacinth and Harris to what they were—nothing but a couple of servants no longer in her employ. Her eyes settled on the ashy fireplace and she was damned if she was going to freeze to death. The paper problem was solved by a weekly Essex County newssheet and there were logs stacked in the saddle-leather woodbox that papa had had made in Italy.

  But kindling?

  Under the impulse of some slippery vindictiveness her eye was drawn to Cousin Etienne’s violin lying in its corpselike apathy on the rug. Although she was far too massive a woman to say that she pounced, Mabel certainly gave the effect of doing so by the swoop with which she snatched up the fiddle and swung it back in order more viciously to splinter it against the stone fireplace.

  A strangled howl that was almost feral in its intensity checked the swing and held Mabel, to say the least, transfixed. What she saw, when she finally turned around, was a button-eyed mahogany face, sprouted over with a growth of stubble and topped by an incoherent cascade of black hair. This what-have-you effect was attached to a chunky body clad in a blazing reefer, less torrid britches, and calf-high boots. Thanks to the storm the whole thing was, of course, sopping wet.

  What Etienne first had seen upon entering the lounge had been his violin, which was his heart, on a midair passage toward demolition in the clenched talons of a sable-wrapped monster. Hence his understandably poignant bellow.

  He was as simple a soul as could be. Invariably he looked on the sunny side of life and was trustfully ready to believe that everybody else was kindly, too. His opinion of Mabel had been indoctrinated in him by Hyacinth. As a result he was fortified to accept her as the finest among women, a demigod-like earthling whose goodness was of a parallel bigness to her great physique.

  The onslaught of the storm had stopped his search for the body and had driven him back to the chalet and the staggering view of Hyacinth’s beatified Mabel doing Indian-clubs with his darling violin. It was confusing. It was impossible. But no-

  Etienne’s gentle, sub-suspicious soul swiftly reconciled the anomaly when he noticed a film of tears that shone on Mabel’s eyes. That they were the wet salt of a seething rage never struck him for a minute and he accepted them at his own evaluation of deep sorrow. In regard to the fiddle’s interrupted voyage into kindling, could it not be thought that the instrument, in some complicated female fashion, must have symbolized Hyacinth (through cousinship with himself) and that the sight of this inappropriately gay memento had been more than this wonderful woman’s grief could endure?

  “Do not explain this thing to me, dear Madame Gervais. The dope presents itself fully revealed. It grieved you to portray in your mind a vision of the joys Hyacinth discovered when I fiddled. You loved him, too.”

  It took Mabel several seconds to get this, but she did, and she seized on this moist object’s fortuitous interpretation of her tantrum to bind him to her as an ally through any possible local backwash from Hyacinth’s suicide.

  “I shall never forget your dear cousin,” she said with truly remarkable restraint, “as long as I live.”

  * * * *

  The following day a man, hired from Placid, drove Mabel back to Washington. They reached Broadlands at six. She returned the murmured greeting of Jellman, the butler, and said, “See that that driver is taken care of and have Miss Nest pay him tomorrow—thirty dollars plus traveling expenses back to Lake Placid.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “Did—has Harris returned?”

  “He was here last night. To pack. Miss Nest gave him his severance check this morning.”

  “Has she replaced him?”

  “The agency sent over a man named Walters. His last position was with Mrs. Emerson Ogden Stokes. For about fifteen years, I understand, until her death last month.”

  “Mr. Gervais is home?”

  It was an idle question, purely automatic, because Lewis would have had her wire that she would be home for dinner and that the evening would be devoted to his detailed report on the Georgia duck shoot at Senator Downsberry’s.

  “No, madam. Mr. Gervais left for New York shortly after breakfast.”

  This peculiar news flash initially brought Mabel a feeling of bewilderment. It was so utterly irrational. She never doubted the constancy of Lewis being under her thumb, but during this critical period she also wanted him under her eye.

  “Did Mr. Gervais say when he would return?”

  “Not that I know of, madam.”

  Mabel went to the lift and pushed a button for the second floor. She felt the need for an iceberg calmness, a clear, gelid control over every immediate calculation and deduction to be made. Precisely what was in the air she couldn’t conceive, but she didn’t like it and it surged around her with a dangerous breeze.

  Her suite occupied Broadlands’ west wing and to reach it meant passing the one assigned to Jenny. The door to Jenny’s living room stood open and Mabel glanced in as she came abreast. She saw in a chair beside Jenny a young man with the build of a star football player, with black hair in a blizzard cut and with blue eyes that looked with polite interest straight into hers.

  The young man murmured something and stood up, and Jenny stood up, and they were coming toward Mabel with Jenny’s young face in a condition known as glowing, and to clinch the matter they were coming toward her hand in hand.

  “This,” Jenny said, “is Aaron.”

  * * * *

  Secured within the bastion of her suite Mabel rang for Miss Nest and then went into her dressing room and took off her wraps. She felt satisfied that the skirmish just passed had been in perfect key, pitched at a gracious cordiality to one of dear Jenny’s dear old friends.

  Behind this velvet window dressing she had erected a steel front against any on-the-spot gush of confidences. She had tossed the youngsters a frothy announcement of the migraine the day’s long motor run had given her, the touch of sheer exhaustion, and a plea that surely Aaron would understand her asking him to release Jenny from any plans they might have made for the early part of the evening. She wanted Jenny to join her during a light supper in the seclusion of her rooms, when Jenny could tell her all, and after that Jenny could rejoin Aaron.

  In brief, Mabel hadn’t given either of them a chance to open for one second their respective mouths.

  That blister being pricked, Mabel returned her full attention to the infinitely more disturbing and curious matter of Lewis. She said, when Miss Nest came in, “Did Lewis leave a message for me?”

  “No, Mabel. I looked for him after your telegram came, but Vincent said he had just left.”

  Vincent was Lewis’s valet.

  “Did you ask Vincent whether he gave any explanation?”

  “Yes, I did, and Lewis didn’t. He just asked Vincent to telephone for a reservation on the next flight to New York.” Tears flooded Miss Nest’s eyes. “Oh Mabel, I knew, I simply knew that Hyacinth—”

  “That will be all, Miss Nest.”

  “Have they found him, his—?”

  “I said that would be all.”

  After Miss Nest had gone Mabel put through a New York call to the Plaza, where she and Lewis always stayed. He had not checked in. He was not checked in at his club. She called Jellman on the house phone, asking him to send up dinner for herself and Jenny.

  Then she stood for a while at a window in her living room as a lingering twilight brought its chiaroscuro to a garden that spread in costly formality to the bank of the dark Potomac, tasting an acid
bitterness in the twilight from a Wagnerian connotation that had jumped into her head, his Twilight of the Gods.

  Everything was in abeyance.

  This absenting of Lewis made it seem as though a fundamental cornerstone were missing, leaving herself and the edifice of her megalomaniac purposes afloat in midair. In comparison, the sudden appearance of Jenny’s Aaron was an irritant but of no true concern. But Lewis, how deeply desperate, how true could be that concern.

  After Jellman had served and gone, Mabel said, “Jenny, dear, now tell me what brought Aaron.”

  It was, Jenny said, a most remarkable thing, hinging on an uncle of Aaron’s from whom neither he nor his father had heard in over twenty years. Until a letter last week from his uncle’s lawyer with its death notice and the staggering news that Aaron had fallen heir to fifty thousand dollars.

  This was somewhat tougher than Mabel had expected. It almost certainly indicated a hauling out of her most brutal artillery and giving this girl, with her love-bright eyes, the full treatment. Mabel veiled the cruel traps that lurked in her own cold eyes.

  “This inheritance, I suppose Aaron feels it removes any obstacle to an immediate marriage?”

  “We both do. I can make a home, a good home for him to go on with his studies in, to come back to from his work. A home with no distractions of money worries or care.”

  “Are your plans as yet definite, dear?”

  “Pretty much so, yes. Neither of us wants a big wedding. Just father and you and our own close friends at home.”

  What a curious light, Mabel reflected, love seemed to bathe across the face of the young. A haze, in a fashion. She found it faintly repellent.

  “Just how is your father, dear?”

  “He says he’s coming along fine, and that Dr. Morris tells him he may be able to leave the hospital by the end of next week.”

  “Then he does still require treatment?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Strange—they never can quite touch it. The nervous system, I mean. Strain, any breakdown of the heart. Always the hovering threat of some sudden relapse. The danger of a shock—the possible fatal result of a shock—”

  Mabel’s slanted eye caught the drench of anxiety that replaced the stuffed-peach look on Jenny’s face.

  “Please—is there something you know? Something Dr. Morris has been hiding from dad or me?”

  Mabel emptied her coffee cup. She touched a napkin against her thick, coarse lips. As a result of her tutor’s (Machiavelli) contempt over half-measures she never dallied in coming to a decision. She saw it was no use. Jenny’s mind was set, rendered mulish by that most unknown of all emotions to Mabel—love.

  “Yes, dear,” she said. “There is something that I know.”

  She shoved her chair back and stood up. With the fastidious lightness of the heavily built she moved toward the Renoir which concealed, behind its subtle sensuality and fine plastic sense, the safe set in the wall.

  And toward ten o’clock that night, which now was this night, Lewis had walked in with his knowledge concerning Anna Moljinski and his declared determination about a divorce.

  * * * *

  Toward dawning as the panorama of remembrance reached its close, Mabel slept. She awoke at nine on a morning that showed promise of good crisp fall weather and, relaxed against the bed pillows, she inspected the breakfast tray her maid brought her with pleasurable zest.

  She polished off a broiled kidney while testing the oddity of her present emotion toward Lewis. It was so very vacant, like a slate from which all scribbling has been rubbed. Almost it seemed that the very decision she had reached to poison him now filled her with an enormous indulgence, a wanting to be kind and to arrange that his final days should be agreeable, in the fashion of that last-meal for the irrevocably condemned. Not exactly, though, because in Lewis’s case he wouldn’t be entertaining the faintest notion that he was condemned.

  Through the balance of the day she marshaled her steps toward murder. A session in the public library with medico-legal texts resulted in her rejecting the mineral poisons because of the certainty with which they could be identified in a dead body, and her choosing among the vegetable poisons instead. In her list she found, to her quiet pleasure, that one of the most effective was also the simplest to concoct on a home basis, and that its ingredients were readily at hand.

  TOBACCO. AN ALKALOID OF NICOTINE.

  And about it:

  Its rapidity is only surpassed by the action of hydrocyanic acid. It can be reduced to a tincture, without any decomposition, as simply as you can boil down a strong broth, and then a final clearing through the evaporation of an alcohol bath… The fatal dose would approximate the minute quantity of 0.05040 mil.

  Well, the poison reservoir of the ring was more than ample to contain such an amount. Then, with an interest that was purely clinical, one that was divorced from any human relationship with Lewis, Mabel digested the poison’s effects in its passage toward death.

  Nicotine, after absorption, acts first as a stimulant and then as a paralysant to the central nervous system, causing muscular weakness, colonic convulsions, vertigo, tetanic spasms, twitchings, and mental confusion. If, however, the pure alkaloid is injected [as Mabel had every intention it was going to be, via the poison ring] death may occur in a few seconds with its swift course exhibiting the pupils dilated, the pulse feeble, the face pale and the extremities cold.

  In other words to all normal appearances—and certainly so to the inexperienced eyes of the country general practitioner who would be called in—a plain stroke.

  As for the concocting of this witch’s brew the kitchen of Broadlands would offer a special security, the majority of the household staff having already embarked on their journey to the chalet.

  * * * *

  The first snowfall of the season had brought its cake-icing beauty to the somber evergreen and woodland carpeting of russet leaves when Mabel, Jenny, and Lewis reached the chalet by late Friday afternoon. Even nature (Mabel thought) is with me. For the snow added the final charming atmospheric touch.

  While Lewis and Jenny went up to their rooms to change, Mabel paused in the lounge and gave it a general’s eye. She said to Etienne, who was hovering with his jet-bead eyes just level with her heavy shoulder, “Has he—has your dear cousin’s body been found?”

  “Alas!”

  Mabel gave him a tempered look.

  “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “The search moves on and I have ceased to join it only that I may be here to serve you. As Hyacinth would wish.”

  Etienne’s face, Mabel decided, needed correction. Its present cast could put a damper on a state fair.

  “This is a hard thing to ask of you, Etienne, but I want you to be brave about our tragedy before our guests. Even gay.” She clutched at Pagliacci and managed to get out: “The laughter that hides the tears.”

  “Ah so!”

  “I may even ask you to play your violin for square dancing. Can you call the sets?”

  That he was able to do so, he assured Mabel, was of a certainty. He could call them with impressement both in English and in French and among his own immense social circle his mastery of the art was a matter of disputeless fame and now that he came to think about it there was a message for Madame Gervais.

  This snapper on the tail of Etienne’s self-appreciation pastoral flicked Mabel with a scorpion touch. There was no message that she expected, nor was there cause for any unless the cause were a bad one. The State Police or the coroner about Hyacinth? A defaulting guest?

  She said with the force of a backfire. “From Washington?”

  “That it did not disclose. It is from your Miss Nest and you are to talk back to her by calling the Essex exchange and putting yourself in communion with Operator Number Three.”

  The quick and the dead and in the midst of life we are in—mama—the Essex exchange could mean nothing but the sanitarium. The little hot pebbles of anger and confusion bounced about i
n Mabel’s stomach. Just why in the dear name of Heaven should it be now? Her hand was curiously shaken as she lifted the receiver from the telephone.

  Miss Nest’s voice was a reed so thin as to be virtually inaudible. “You will have to talk louder,” Mabel said.

  “—couldn’t catch you while you were en route so I flew up here myself, Mabel—Mabel?”

  “Yes, you did perfectly rightly, and you must speak louder. I’m only catching half you say.”

  “—sinking, sinking fast, Mabel—lucid moments—come to her bedside—”

  “Miss Nest, pull yourself together! There have been false alarms such as this before. Now tell me, did she, has mama asked for me, and I mean specifically?”

  “No, not really, Mabel. It was me she asked for but she’s your mother, Mabel.”

  “Miss Nest, you must control yourself and listen to what I have to say. It is out of the question that I leave here before Monday, and you have proved the very point I’m trying to make. You are the important one—it is you she needs, not me—yes—yes—and should you telephone again will you please make certain that you talk with nobody but me.”

  Etienne, already semi-dissolved with sympathy, asked after Mabel had hung up, “A matter of tragedy, Madame Gervais?”

  “No. There are moments when Miss Nest lacks balance. It is a matter of no importance.”

  * * * *

  That night, after dinner was over, after the people in the chalet and even the world itself seemed bedded down, Mabel tried out the poison ring.

  Among the many of Hyacinth’s simple pleasures had been the maintenance of a small zoo that occupied a series of comfortable cages beneath a stand of pine trees to the rear of the chalet. Having had to form an admiration-society-of-one over each fresh addition Mabel was thoroughly familiar with it, and Etienne, since Hyacinth’s suicide, had fondly taken over its care.

  Its current occupants embraced one irritable muskrat with an appetite for fish and frogs, an interminably breeding family of meadow mice whose stomachs were ever eager for green stuff, a waddling mother woodchuck with her brood of five cubs (father was dead), and a de-glanded skunk possessed of a fine taste for grasshoppers. All were well fed. All were tame. And all enjoyed the secure feeling of being in a safe, protected home.