The Murder Megapack
Page 40
“I see,” Odin said. “Your friendship—yours and your husband’s friendship with Mr. Barricini has been one of long standing, Mrs. Wiggen?”
“Isn’t the time element in friendship purely relative, Chief Odin? Some people one seems immediately to have known forever, and with others years can pass without ever truly knowing them at all.”
“My psychology is somewhat rusty, Mrs. Wiggen, but I am sure that you are right. Now, as for the tragedy itself, just what can you remember of it?”
“Little,” Stella said, “and what little I do remember is completely confusing. The three of us were within sight of one another, and then Mr. Barricini and I surfaced. We—we waited quite a while for my husband to surface also. He didn’t.”
“I understand from Mr. Barricini that both of you looked?”
“Exhaustively—repeatedly! There are those bottom currents. Chief Odin, Mr. Barricini was explaining to me shortly before you came that your examination of my husband’s breathing device showed a defect?”
“Not a defect,” Odin said. “Rather a malfunction of the diaphragm control. The medical examiner is quite satisfied, Mrs. Wiggen, and has certified the case as an accidental death.”
“Then there will be no inquest? You can understand how the publicity—”
“I do understand thoroughly, Mrs. Wiggen. I shan’t be technical about this, but the alcoholic content of your husband’s blood was such that any stoppage of air—such as the malfunctioning of the diaphragm of the breathing device—could well have resulted in almost instant asphyxia.”
Odin stood up. In common sense there was nothing left him, but to take his leave. Murder, he was satisfied, had been done, and an indictment for murder, he was satisfied, could never be obtained in a hundred years. Not with a woman of this position and mentality, with sufficient money to command smart batteries of counsel. So he left.
After Odin had gone, Stella turned with the force of a deadly rage that had been building during the past hours. “Phil, you’re covered. You’re in the clear,” she said. “Now get out.”
Phil went to a cellaret and mixed himself a scotch.
“We’re both in the clear,” he said. “So long as I keep it that way.”
“You’d better explain that, Phil.”
“Easy. Remember those notes you made? About the dope I gave you about the breathing device?”
“Certainly I do. They’re in that file.”
“They were in it, Stella.”
She joined him at the cellaret. She mixed a stiffer scotch than he had, and while she drank, the picture expanded in its dangerous detail. She had felt no particular revulsion of horror at what Phil had done, but rather an overwhelming rage that she should have been (as she was) dragged so inescapably into the setup with him. He had simply to produce those notes in her own handwriting on the perfect murder plot. They were a sword of Damocles to be held over her head for as long as she lived.
“How much?” she said. “I’ll write you a check right now.”
“Money? Don’t be silly, Stella. You are going to be my wife.”
Six months later they were married. Oddly, among the numerous messages of congratulation and felicitation, was one from Chief of Police Odin. In it he formally expressed the wish that they would receive all of the happiness which they deserved.
They established their legal residence in Florida, with Stella sinking the bulk of her fortune in Gold Coast real estate. All of which, under the law, became communal property with her husband.
Stella’s career as a writer moved at its regular pace successfully ahead. As for her personal life with Phil, the physical blaze helplessly would recur, but afterward they would lie with the dawn’s thin fog drifting in from the sea, with the flesh of their bodies, in reaction, distasteful to the touch.
And all through the patient procession of day after day their thoughts, like birds of ill omen, revolved around the only problem left them in the world—how each could kill the other best.