The Murder Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  It was the same way with his sensitivities. They too were battened down, because even though he could be hard and sort of elliptically tough, any shadow—even one so unimportantly frail that another man would never notice it—that touched his integrity, his judgment, or his deeply imbedded idealism could hurt him down there inside his 182-pound body very much.

  This Phil and Stella situation.

  It was so disgustingly careless. It had the slob touch. The open jar of brushless cream and the razor, still uncleaned, on the basin shelf of the bathroom connected with Stella’s bedroom. The soiled sport shirt, size large—definitely not Carrington’s, who was a shrimp—crumpled on the bedroom-cupboard floor. Naturally the maid who came in daily had been aware of such things.

  His unheralded arrival toward eight in the morning had caught the maid oil balance. She was a cheerful, completely amoral woman with a blasé understanding of humanity warm in her chocolate eyes. Her name, she had told him, was Edith, and Miss Stella would be mighty unhappy she hadn’t known he was coming and waited home to greet him.

  It had been a simple matter to extract from Edith the superficial aspects of the past week, even to the name of the tavern where Mr. Philip worked, and it sure was mighty clever and patient of Miss Stella to get material about bartenders at first hand like that for her new book. For a painful moment Jerry had felt that Edith had been all but at the point of a giggle.

  The ease and fluidity of this gossip made Jerry appreciate not only the awareness of the servant grapevine but what its threat could build up to during a police investigation.

  Stella continued unique in his mind. Pie felt nothing, zero nothing, about Phil one way or the other. If there had been room for any emotion other than Stella, Jerry conceivably would have liked Phil and have pitied him. Because of the rotten littleness of her tricks. Such as the use of her professional name with a Miss, instead of her married one; and her shoddy habit of removing her wedding ring while she was sun-tanning so that no telltale band of white would show on her finger.

  Then the whole mental picture of her cheap interlude with a pickup—after he, Jerry, had been square with her from the date of their marriage—pulled a thick dark curtain around every thought whatever. Not a curtain exactly. A shroud.

  The ocean, he figured finally, would be best. And keep the story simple. She had a cramp. And though he dove and dove and dove he could not find her.

  * * * *

  Phil arranged with the night bartender to take over early and managed to catch a Pan Am flight out of Miami that landed him at Nassau that evening. After checking the Carrington yacht and several leading spots, he located Stella on the terrace of the Caribbean Club. She was seated with the Carringtons, and the three of them, Phil thought, looked cool and expensive and smooth, with Carrington resembling a small, dressed-up sea horse, while his wife looked like a land version in mares. Only Stella had the glow of a beautiful idol, with candles of faith soft around her.

  She seemed neither startled, glad, nor sorry when he joined them, and her face was as impersonal as her voice as she said, “Effie, this is Phil Barricini. Dick and Effie Carrington, Phil.”

  Carrington stood up and shook hands. He asked Phil to join them, while Effie Carrington took in Phil’s physique and underlined the suggestion. Stella said nothing at all.

  “Thank you, no,” Phil said. “I’ve got to catch the next flight back to be on the job in the morning.”

  “Mr. Barricini,” Stella said, “is a bartender in a tavern called the Friendly Rest.”

  “Darling,” Effie said to Stella, “I adore you.” While Carrington, thrown momentarily for a loss by chitchat, compromised with a “Well, well.”

  “Stella,” Phil said, “I’ve something to tell you. Take a walk with me, will you?”

  Stella smiled at Effie and stood up. She moved with Phil across the terrace and onto a pathway that wound in privacy through tropical gardens.

  Phil said without preliminaries, “It’s about your husband. I made sure it was your husband because I telephoned the house and Edith said he was.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. He’d located the tavern through Edith. She remembered mentioning it to him, but when he dropped in, so far as I knew he was just another stranger. Well, Dora dropped in too. You know her big mouth, and anyhow she spilled the works about last week.”

  “Was there anything to spill?”

  Phil said patiently, “Look, Stella, it’s your husband I’m talking about. He’s down here right now.”

  “I know he is. He telephoned me around dinnertime. He said he had met you.”

  “You mean—just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Did he mention last week?”

  “Casually. We were more interested in discussing our immediate plans.”

  “You’ve got no immediate plans but these, Stella.”

  He wrapped her close and gave her the sort of kiss labeled fathoms-down which never had failed to floor her, shooting his love, his passion for her into the job to their fullest extent. She waited in his arms, docile, until the performance was over and then disengaged herself, saying, “I’d wipe that clown make-up off your lips if I were you.”

  She repaired her own lips, standing cold and composed under the moonlight, and a sort of darkness rushed in on Phil and it was like a black flame, searching and licking him all over.

  “What are you doing to me, Stella? What are you trying to say?”

  “Trying?”

  “Whatever it is, don’t act like this to me, Stella.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake cut out the string section, Phil. You yourself said one night that the limit would be about a week.”

  “And you said on the way home it was me. Nobody in the universe—universe, you said, Stella—but me.” He reached out tentatively, as a child would reach after an escaping iridescent bubble, “And you meant it, Stella.”

  “Possibly. Then. But you’ve intelligence enough to see that the picture has changed. Jerry and I are shoving off for the Coast. He’s my agent as well as my husband. He’s just landed Harbinger with M-G-M. It’s why he came down.”

  A mockingbird from a tortured banyan tree trilled an impossible song.

  “Stella, you must give me time, give us both time to talk this thing through. Tomorrow, when you get back from here—”

  “I shall be back tomorrow but I shan’t see you. We’re leaving the day after and I’ll be constantly tied up with Jerry—probably skin diving up to the last minute. He’s as much of an enthusiast about it as I am. Just us, Phil. And by us I mean himself and me.”

  The thought came to Phil as a sort of impossible revelation, and he said, “You love that jerk.”

  “I love that jerk. He’s mine.”

  He soaked it up for a moment, the way a mop soaks up some noxious slop that’s been spilled. He said, “I just passed by?”

  Stella said before she turned and left him, “What else?”

  On the flight back, in the dim blue of the cabin, in his terrible aloneness, and with the ugly mess of hate that made up his shredded stomach and soul and brains, Phil thought, I am going to kill her. She will never go…

  So there were two lines converging toward a common point, the point being Stella or, more accurately, Stella’s death.

  The line representing Jerry held no hurdles of preparation. Simplicity was and remained its keynote.

  Jerry went deadpan through the gesture of meeting Stella’s flight from Nassau, and you could wrap it up in a word, the balance of the day, for all the emotional fireworks that showed. Only once did they touch the surface. That was the moment when he picked up their flight reservations for the following afternoon. The clerk got a shock then at the look in Jerry’s eyes when the thought struck Jerry that the ticket for Stella amounted to one for a woman who was slated, unprettily, to become a floater after the gases formed.

  The second converging line, held to by Phil, had its complications. This was in ke
eping not only with Phil’s Latin blood and temperament but with the fact that his daily life was spent in “figuring the angles.”

  He ruled out, as Jerry had ruled it out, the Carrington house. He came to the conclusion that accidental drowning was best, but there any similarity with Jerry’s line ceased.

  There was no simplicity about Phil’s evolving scheme. Bit by bit its pieces fell into shape as he went about the business of serving drinks, chatting, listening, smiling, looking sympathetically grave, whatever the customer of the moment demanded.

  Stella had said… I’ll be constantly tied up with Jerry—probably skin diving up to the last minute. He’s as much of an enthusiast about it as I am…

  The remark became the focal point around which Phil’s mind worked. It placed Stella in the ocean. It accoutered her in the equipment for skin diving.

  The professional diver who had briefed Phil on the danger of swift death from the sharks and barracudas had also warned him of the possibility that death could happen accidentally. He summarized a mental digest of what the diver had told him: the regulator case which holds the main diaphragm of the breathing device is not keyed to the base casting; it depends on tightening a threaded ring to hold it in the correct position. If this ring were to become loose, and then if the outer case were to be turned slightly, the diaphragm would move out of the correct position and shut off the air.

  Well, the threaded ring would become loose.

  And it would be his hand (swimming up behind her in his own underwater equipment) that would turn the outer case.

  The verdict, based on an official investigation, would be: accidental asphyxia due to an obvious malfunction of the regulator.

  So any results from an official investigation did not bother Phil in the slightest. What did bother him was that one day during the past week when they had been skin diving he had mentioned this very thing to Stella. In fact, it had interested her sufficiently so that she had jotted down detailed notes about it and put them in her file labeled Ideas. This was a file she kept for possible future use in her writings.

  Those notes would have to be removed from the file. Otherwise, when Jerry went through her papers after her death, he would come across them, and the method, even if not the proof, of her murder would be plain.

  The obtaining of these notes, Phil decided, was a must.

  With the coming of nightfall he drove over to the beach road and headed south toward Silver Shores, the incorporated community north of Baker’s Haulover where the Carringtons had built their home. He parked and waited patiently until he saw Stella and her husband drive off. Shortly afterward Edith, the maid, followed in her coupe, going home for the night.

  Phil drove into the grounds, which were heavily landscaped with tropical shrubbery and palm trees, and parked by the garage. Using a key which Stella had given him, he went into the house and into the living room where, with its wide jalousies facing the ocean, Stella worked.

  Her packing for tomorrow’s departure was still incomplete. He easily located the proper file and removed the notes on tampering with the breathing device. They were on a single sheet of paper which he folded and shoved into a pocket of his slacks. He left the house.

  A pathway skirting the garage led him to the beach and to the cabana where the Carringtons and their guests dressed for swimming. It contained separate rooms for the men and women. From a cupboard in the women’s room Phil removed Stella’s skin diving gear. A brief smile touched his lips as he regarded the frog fins that Stella used. They were not the usual putty-lead color but were painted in brilliant stripes of yellow and flamingo red—they had been put on the market recently, evidently with a sales appeal eye toward the number of women who were taking up the sport.

  Before going to work on the breathing device, Phil drew on a pair of cotton gloves.

  * * * *

  It was at Stella’s suggestion that she and Jerry ended the night’s tour at Wolfie’s, a popular spot with the last-ditch crowd.

  Apart from its acknowledged creative ability, Stella’s mind was the supple one of the nymphomaniac, somewhat like a pale gray slate on which each experience of passion was marked in scarlet chalk and then as easily erased. As the episode of Phil was now erased. A forgotten number in a continuing list.

  Phil being nonexistent in her thoughts, it never occurred to Stella to look around and see whether or not he might be there. He was, but even had she looked she would have failed to see him. He had picked up their trail at the Fontainebleau and had followed them down. He was sitting at a table in the far corner with his face concealed behind a dawn edition of the Miami Press and his eyes, like bullets, were straight against the print.

  When they left, Phil left too, and the converging lines moved more swiftly toward their focal point in what promised to be a dead heat.

  The drive home was mostly in silence, Stella doing the driving, and both she and Jerry were well awash with the multiple drinks they had put to rest during their crawl of the night spots.

  Dawn was coloring the eastern sky as they reached the house, and Stella was heading directly for bed when Jerry stopped her.

  “Let’s go in for a while before we turn in,” he said. “I’ve never been under in the dawn like this. It will be wonderful.”

  “Darling, you’re loaded.”

  “Maybe. So are you. What do you say, Stella? There’s nothing like it to prevent a hangover.”

  He did not wait for an answer but was off in an all but drunken lope. He was ready by the time she had made up her mind to follow him and had reached the cabana. He stood in the doorway, weaving a little, and with a loose grin on his face. Stella took a look at him and cut short a laugh.

  “Jerry, you drunken idiot!”

  “I am not drunk. I am not an idiot. And snap into it, will you, Stella? This wind is cold.”

  He left her abruptly. She hurried, but he was already in when she reached tide’s edge. The sea was perfect, gentle, and the paint of dawn swept roses over the lightening sky while the waters were opalescent with strange shades.

  In an unearthly suspension, Stella idly studied the ocean floor through an opaline semi-transparency of the dawn light filtering down. She knew that Jerry was around somewhere near. It was like this always when she went below—a physical and mental calmness that approached nirvana. She was really pretty drunk.

  And like a dream was the sudden vision of Jerry—of two Jerrys—no—yes—one of them was holding the other down by his flippered feet—impossible—impossibly absorbing—the upper one was struggling, thrashing, then becoming abruptly limp and drifting with a current, moving in slow swirls away.

  It was no dream. Under the stark realization of what she had just witnessed, Stella’s alcoholic befuddlement left her. The figure that had been holding the other figure down shot surface ward, and Stella surfaced right alongside. She tore off her mask.

  Phil tore his mask off too.

  For a timeless moment each looked at the other. At first in mutual disbelief.

  “Why was Jerry wearing those painted flippers of yours?” Phil said.

  Stella’s first impulse was to dive below and find Jerry, to do what she could, but the impulse was swept away—as the floor currents would be sweeping Jerry’s body away—by the implications in Phil’s question.

  She said, “You thought he was I.”

  It shed a definite light on Phil’s character that, even under what must have been the extreme emotional stress of having just committed murder, he immediately jumped into figuring the angles.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Stella.”

  She got it at once, of course. Even if she hadn’t been agile at plotting, the basic gambit Phil had just tossed her was perfectly plain: his-word-against-hers stuff, and as old as the hills.

  With acid clarity Stella tied the scenario in a sentence: a man and his wife and her lover went swimming and the wife and her lover came back.

  Stella clearly, dispassionately saw th
at, with the triangle situation blazed in every tabloid in the country, her future market as a paragon, as a nice, virtuous author for the family reader would be as dead as Jerry was dead. Her career as a writer would be finished.

  “We must talk this over. Carefully, Phil,” she said. “I am beginning to believe it was an accident.”

  “I figured you would come around to that,” Phil said.

  They swam with their separate calculations toward the shore.

  It was past noon before Chief Odin of the Silver Shores Police Department intruded upon the widow’s grief. There was no longer any question as to the state of Stella’s widowhood. Jerry’s body had been found by a surf fisherman at around seven, washed in by the rising tide.

  At that moment Stella had been avowedly in a nervous, grief stricken collapse, so the identification had been made by Phil—listed in the first press releases as Mr. Philip Barricini, a close family friend. It was also Phil who originally had spread the alarm and had issued a statement covering a general account of the accident.

  Odin was a frankly puzzled man. Also, he felt, a helpless one. He admitted as much to himself. His intensive and swift examination of such background material as he and his men had been able to unearth during the past several hours apparently left his official hands tied.

  Odin listened with an air of sympathetic attention as Stella calmly, unhesitantly gave him an admirable thumbnail sketch. It had been arranged last night, when they had run into one another, that Mr. Barricini return with her husband and herself for the balance of the night—the hour then being practically dawn.

  The suggestion was the result of a kind offer on Mr. Barricini’s part to drive them to the airport later in the day, when she and Jerry were leaving for New York on their first leg to the Coast. They had, the three of them, been rather high—Chief Odin would understand. Chief Odin did.

  “Then I take it, Mrs. Wiggen, that this skin-diving decision was just one of those sudden impulses?”

  “Yes,” Stella said. “Jerry’s idea was that a swim would prevent a hangover, especially in view of the coming flight.”