The Murder Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  The woodchuck cubs were about a month old and with their round, heavy little bodies had the beguiling clumsiness of very young pups. There was plenty of fat under their soft, warm pelts and neither the mother nor any of them raised a row when Mabel reached and selected a cub at random from the litter. They were far too stuffed with sleep and good green vegetables to care.

  Snow had again started falling at midnight and Mabel was glad to have its masking curtain added to the darkness, as a further masking of the pinpoint gleam of her pencil torch. Also it would bury her tracks. She wasted no time. She pressed the poison ring against the cub’s soft belly and released its death-dealing spring.

  Very quick.

  She returned the small body to its place among the litter and, once more in her bedroom, she refilled the reservoir of the ring.

  * * * *

  The fateful Saturday opened, for Mabel, with a gratifying telephone call from Miss Nest that mama, obligingly, had rallied a little during the night, although there remained no real hope.

  If she would only hold out until Monday. Mama must hold out until Monday. You could understandably, even laudably, shelter an unfortunate parent in a sanitarium from the eyes of the world, but you could not go ahead with a high-jinks party while simultaneously absenting yourself from the bier of a dead one.

  For Etienne the day started with a mystery of sorrow. It seemed unreasonable that the woodchuck cub, who had been just as healthy a little bugger as the other four, should have decided during the night to expire. But there it was. An act of the good, determined, best-knowing God. He hoped that at some moment during the exacting schedule for the busy day he could snatch time out for a decent burial. In the meanwhile he wrapped the body in one of the chalet’s best towels and, first dumping out a dozen cans of the chef’s supply of clear green turtle soup, laid the cub at temporary rest in the emptied cardboard carton.

  To Lewis the day offered itself as nothing special one way or the other. Simply an automatic continuance of the tiresome social grind to which Mabel had inured him and from which, thank heaven, divorce would within reasonable time limits offer a grateful release. He saw that Vincent had laid out his hunting clothes and boots. He put them on.

  In a sense there was no beginning of the day for Jenny because, except for fitful moments, she had not slept. Almost she wished herself dead. She was not an innocent in the tricky chessboard of politics and knew very well that the average senator’s income was generally inadequate for campaign expenses and for a proper maintenance of position, once elected.

  She found nothing disgraceful in the practice of outside help because (she was positive about this in her father’s case) it went toward the ultimate good of the nation by making it possible for men of such sterling character to serve. But a personal check for thirty thousand dollars was pretty stiff. It was beyond reason unless you accepted the corrupt reason Mabel had given her, and that Jenny still was unwilling to do without first having heard her father’s side of the story.

  Therein she was hog-tied. His deep, recent worries had not passed unnoticed and Mabel’s implication about the fatality of shock had scared Jenny stiff. She simply did not dare think the risk advisable of going to him openly and putting the cards on the table. It was a risk her love would not permit her to chance.

  Her hate of Mabel was now as deep as her affection previously had been. She saw the woman for exactly what she was, and there seemed no answer but to play the game along the lines Mabel had drawn.

  The hunt breakfast, after the VIPs had arrived and changed into clothes for the chase, was more in line with Long Island than with the normal rugged board set for such meals in the north country. The Scotch ran neck and neck with the coffee.

  Mabel was at her heartiest best. Not a sign of the intricate machinery that was causing the party to run showed in the chalet’s warm, atmospheric charm. And certainly there was no sign of her conscienceless, murderous intent. Etienne, too, was going across with a bang, serving the hot dishes at the buffet, attending to the highballs, in constant liaison with the kitchen for a replenishment of crusty gold popovers, and dispensing enough quaint Canuck patois now and then to stamp the affair as being authentically north woods.

  With a carnival shattering of precedent the hunt was a matter of couples, each with one of the four guides. It was automatic that Jenny would be paired with Habling, whereas Lewis was teamed up with Senator Downsberry’s wife Wilma, while the senator had the Postmaster General’s Veronica.

  Olcott, Mabel reserved for herself.

  In his late fifties, Olcott was a large, well fed, balding man with deceptively ingenuous eyes and there wasn’t a single thing about Washington or national politics that he didn’t know. He was just as aware as Mabel of the goal she had been working toward and was prepared (now that the Brussels post was vacated) to let her reach it.

  He sincerely admired Mabel, even liked her, and heaven knew she certainly had come across with enough cash and backstage help by now to have paid for what she wanted. Lewis was all right, too, although Olcott knew perfectly well that Mabel would be the power behind the embassy throne. Which was good. He bagged, in the early afternoon, a six-point buck.

  In his elation Olcott lost his usual strict caution and administration protocol and blurted out to Mabel, “I don’t mind telling you Brussels is set. Lewis will be asked to come to the White House—shouldn’t be spoken of until then—and I’m happy as a kid, Mabel, and I want you to be happy, too.”

  * * * *

  At their stand on the run where their guide had stationed them, Alden Habling and Jenny had had no shot and neither cared. The hours of proximity in the snow-hushed cold beauty of the forest, in their little world of total isolation, had been hell for Jenny, and she played the role she had been bludgeoned into by Mabel under an understandable surface tension.

  It was not a good job and for a while Habling had been puzzled by the change in her, this tension quality that had come over the warmly exciting young woman whom he so deeply loved and who (Mabel only this morning had practically told him so) in return loved him. There was a miracle in the fact, that life once again was offering him a new and wonderful happiness.

  One that but for Mabel never would have come his way. Could he ever repay her enough for having been the deus ex machina who had brought about this blessed state?

  Yet this change that he felt in Jenny, it wasn’t any sudden shyness or reserve—and then of course the explanation struck him. Mabel (again Mabel) had remarked on the touch-and-go condition of Senator Heatherwing in the hospital. Naturally enough her father’s critical health would be a constant prey on Jenny’s mind and would account for the change.

  An overwhelming tenderness of wanting to shelter and bring her comfort, right now, this instant, in this cold austere copse of pines and cedars, knocked Habling from his State Department poise. He set his gun against a fallen log, did the same with Jenny’s and then, to her frozen surprise, took her in his arms.

  The visor of his red hunting cap ricocheted his tender kiss from its intended target to a patch of cold cheek below Jenny’s left ear but Habling corrected this by snatching off the cap and then managed to land squarely on her pressed, icy lips. The blindness that love brings did not miss hitting him. His own emotion was so solid, and so bolstered by Mabel’s reassurances, that it masked the reluctance of Jenny’s response, or rather lack of response, because a Stoughton bottle couldn’t have been more stodgily unlimbered in his arms.

  “Jenny—you will marry me? It’s yes?”

  Her voice was suffocated.

  “Yes, Alden. It’s yes.”

  * * * *

  Candlelight and the glow from lazy logs were kindly over the dinner table and the dinner itself, which was just reaching the dessert stage and had been superb. Mabel, at the other end from Lewis, felt drugged almost to the point of letdown with the success upon which her fortunes rode.

  It would be done tonight.

  With Habling and Jenny settl
ed (he had confided the engagement to her) the square dance could be suggested shortly after dinner. There were two reasons for speed, for Lewis’s silence to be swiftly arranged.

  Firstly, Olcott already was mellowly half-potted and had his official back hair down to a point where he was giving his pet rendition of the Vodka Boatman. Mabel appreciated that in this mellowness he was quite capable of letting Lewis know that the Brussels embassy was an accomplished fact, and Lewis’s reaction to the news—perhaps an outright refusal of the proposed ambassadorship—was too tricky to be risked.

  Secondly there was mama. The thing must be done before any final bulletin should come through about mama, because then there naturally could be no thought of square dancing with its splendid opportunities for clasping, in the most natural manner in the world, Lewis’s hand.

  She appraised the well fed, chattering group. There had been enough cocktails, enough wines with the different courses to bring on a jovial contentment without taking the edge off zest. An enormous sense of superiority breathed in Mabel, one that transcended these food-and-drink stuffed pawns and reached out further to encompass Fate itself.

  She stood up, with a full champagne glass in her hand.

  “Darlings, I have an announcement to make, and then a toast. In the role of foster mother to Jenny, and with her dear father unable to have been with us, I feel I’ve the right to let you know the wonderful, the happy news that she and Alden…”

  * * * *

  Etienne was exerting his loyal utmost to put his heart into his fiddling and his calling of the sets. It was a tough thing to have to do and he was appalled at the amount of unhappiness that lay beneath his forced surface gaiety like lumps.

  Also, he was bewildered and had been so from the arrival of Mabel’s guests of importance. He was aware of their esteemed position in government, and he had been looking forward to something special, a genteel reserve in whatever unbending would be done, and certainly not this ungainly cavorting to which he was a witness.

  Only Habling fitted the picture he had been looking for. Habling had happened upon him shortly before dinner when he had been burying the woodchuck cub. Habling’s courteous interest and appropriate cool dignity during an operation that commanded respect had left nothing to be desired, nor had his quiet attentive air of interest while Etienne had been relating his unspeakable astonishment at the cub’s untimely end.

  So patient had Habling been that Etienne had trespassed even further upon this exalted man’s ear and had given him a complete account of Hyacinth’s tragic departure and of his, Etienne’s, inconsolable despair that Hyacinth’s body still lay lonesome and unfound.

  The square dance had reached that point where Etienne’s call demanded a chain effect of changing partners, with considerable whirling on the part of the ladies, and a wide swinging and clasping of hands. He was observing them engage in the movement cumbrously and with a steamy amount of laughing confusion, a veritable kaleidoscope of unseemly, flushed buffoonery, when Mr. Gervais fell.

  Inasmuch as Mr. Gervais exhibited no palpable intention of regaining his feet, Etienne bowed some conclusive actes and lowered the fiddle from his chin.

  It was the skinny, meatless woman (he later decided) who had screamed.

  Mabel now stepped confidently into the crowning dramatic performance of her career. A triumphant exultation blazed its warmth beneath her surface role of staggered, thunderstricken shock. Lewis and the ring had both come across very well. He was dead in a matter of ten seconds, with no more than a garble of vocal sounds that had lacked the understandability of speech.

  With the timing of a Sarah Bernhardt she permitted Senator Downsberry to guide her solicitously to a chair and then to force on her a slug of straight Scotch, while Habling and Olcott with Etienne’s assistance lifted Lewis from the floor and stretched him on a couch, while Jenny telephoned Saranac for a Dr. Busby, and while Wilma and Veronica accomplished a lot of utterly headless darting.

  Mabel then allowed herself to regain her magnificent control. Her personal shock and grief retired before her position as a great hostess, a woman of unshakable poise, one who could rise above any emergency no matter how grave. To wit: to the impeccable stature of an ambassadress.

  The scene moved on according to plan with its banalities of sympathy, its hushed conjecturings, its recalling of similar fatal strokes. (“You remember that colonel—Wilson? Williams?—something like that, who simply sat down at his desk in the Pentagon and leaned forward and was dead?”) Other examples were dusted off, some old, some more recent, but all of a unified trend.

  Even Dr. Busby when he arrived filled the bill of Mabel’s expectations. A man in his early sixties, he was the prototype of all hard-worked country practitioners. His blood pressure was criminally out of bounds but there was little he could do about it; he just didn’t have the time. His manner was gravely bluff and decisive, the more so to cover a slight inferiority complex that helplessly beset him whenever, rarely, he was called in to treat any of the region’s visiting big shots.

  His capable, humanitarian hands and brain went at once to work on Lewis. Dead, certainly, and swiftly so according to the answers to his brief questioning. Poleaxed, you might say, by a clot or by one of those unpredictable revolts of the heart—after a strenuous day in the woods, a heavy meal and a tub of liquor, topped with the idiotic folly of the gymnastics of square dancing. During his long years of practice there had been cases such as this, and there was no thought in Dr. Busby’s brotherly mind but that death had struck from some such natural cause.

  Mabel then moved on to the closing facet of her role. She had established her ambassadorial poise, and now decided it would be wisely necessary to exhibit for this country doctor the reactions he would expect to be present in a grief-stricken widow. While the others grouped in a low-voiced, manikin tableau before the fireplace and fortified their nerves with highballs, Mabel sadly and with tears held barely under control withdrew with Dr. Busby to a corner of the room.

  There were, he said, some details he would have to have—her husband’s full name, his father’s, date of birth—things like that. While she answered he was aware of her shaken condition (Mabel was doing it well, neither overplaying nor underplaying the part) and decided that bed was the immediate prescription for her, and an injection that would blast her into sound sleep. He had seen these big, strong women—Lord, how ugly she was!—collapse like babies on his hands.

  “About now, Dr. Busby? I mean, what do we do?”

  “There will have to be a few formalities, Mrs. Gervais. You will understand—any unattended sudden death. Don’t think about them. They mean nothing but a gesture to satisfy the legal requirements. Leave everything to me. I want you to get right into bed and sleep.”

  “Sleep? I couldn’t.”

  “I’ll arrange that you will.”

  Before going upstairs with Mabel, accompanied by that nice-looking young girl and the two women, Dr. Busby put through a call to the State Police.

  Habling, Olcott, and Downsberry were left a quorum by the fire. (Lewis’s body had been removed to the game room.) They were skirting the fringes of conjecture from the viewpoint of their ever important political skins. There would of course be national publicity as soon as the news broke. Well, there could be nothing unfavorable about it. Certainly nothing scandalous. But it was too bad about this autopsy-and-trooper business. That stuff was never, never good.

  “How about this?” Olcott said. “How about taking the edge off by giving it a little schmaltz? Spike any chance of its hitting the columns as being the result of a liquored-up razzmatazz?”

  Both Habling and Downsberry looked attentively bleak.

  “How?” Habling asked.

  “I’ll call up the White House around breakfast and get an official okay on releasing the Brussels dope. Then hand out a press release that we were up here to sound out Lewis—and—by God, yes! Drop a strong hint that Mabel will be offered the post in his place. Turn the spotli
ght full on her. Boys, it’s got everything. I’m pooped. I’m going to bed. Coming?”

  Downsberry said he was coming, but Habling said he’d wait by the fire for Jenny, that she’d told him she’d be back down.

  Olcott gave a jaw-busting yawn.

  “In that case we will leave the troopers and the doctor to you.”

  * * * *

  “An embolism is my guess,” Dr. Busby said when he came downstairs and joined Habling.

  “Too bad about the post-mortem. It’s always upsetting to the ones who are left.”

  “I know. There ought to be more leeway. There’s no more necessity for this one than a cow.”

  The porch door opened and both men looked up, expecting to see the State Police, but it was a woman who came inside. A small woman, wispish looking in spite of being bundled and mufflered against the cold. She walked directly over to them. Her face was desperately tired and strained.

  “I am Miss Nest, Mrs. Gervais’s secretary, gentlemen.”

  “Habling, Arthur Habling,” Habling said, “and this is Dr. Busby.”

  “Mr. Habling, oh of course. Dr. Busby, has Mrs. Gervais retired? If you both will excuse me I must go right up to her.”

  “I’ve given her an injection,” Dr. Busby said. “Nothing could wake her, Miss Nest, before morning.”

  Habling took another look at Miss Nest’s frailty.

  “Let me have your things, Miss Nest, and then I suggest you sit down. You look tired, and you have run into a tragedy. Mr. Gervais is dead. Suddenly. A stroke.”

  Miss Nest was already too cluttered with sorrow, too bone weary to be affected much further by any shock.

  “I am sorry,” she said, “truly sorry. Lewis was a kindly man. It is odd it should have occurred so closely.”

  “Drink this sherry,” Dr. Busby said.