Merchants of Menace

by Joan Aiken

  Hiding behind the daily paper, Francis was secure in the knowledge that nothing in his appearance or habits betrayed him. To everyone on the car he was the same, inoffensive, sandy-haired man who always boarded at Thirty-first, sat in the same seat and meekly got off in front of Grayson’s Lumber and Hardware. It was sufficient for him to know that this was only protective coloration. Inside, he was a David who had struck a deadly blow against Goliath.

  Unable to concentrate on his paper, Francis watched the streets click monotonously past, wondering who would notify him that Emma was gone. His boss, Mr. Grayson? Dr. Johnson? No, probably Joe Pollock. Joe was desk sergeant now down at the station, “Lucky” Joe who had married Mabel Richards. Francis remembered how jealous he had been of the policeman when they were both courting Emma. Yes, it would probably be Joe who would have to tell him that Emma was dead.

  Sad-faced, solemn, he would come into Grayson’s. “Francis,” he would say in a somber tone. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  “Bad news?” Francis would ask, portraying just a hint of apprehension.

  “You better sit down, Francis. Prepare yourself for a shock.”

  “What’s happened? Nothing’s happened to Emma!”

  The policeman would blow his red trumpet of a nose. “She’s dead, Francis. There’s been an accident.”

  “That’s not possible! She was asleep when I left.”

  “She died in her sleep, Francis, from gas fumes. The heater was on, the flame must have gone out.”

  Francis would bury his face in his hands then. “It’s my fault, all my fault! The regulator hasn’t been working right. I kept putting off having it fixed.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Francis. These things happen.”

  He could feel Joe Pollock’s hand press his shoulder, looked up startled from his daydream to find that it was not Joe at all, but the conductor. “Your stop, Mr. Whitcomb.”

  The trolley stopped directly in front of Grayson’s. “You don’t need a car,” Emma always said. “It’s a foolish waste of money.” Well, by next week he would be able to have a car, waste money as foolishly as he pleased.

  He walked into the store, nodded stiffly at Miss Adams, who was already working over the accounts, and went into the back room to put on his gray work jacket. Generally he thought of Miss Adams with mild disapproval. She emitted a constant mingled aroma of perfume and gin that was associated in Francis’ mind with dark, dimly lit bars and swarthy, hot-eyed men. But, unexpectedly, he noticed that Miss Adams had a vivid charm, hair that shone orange under the artificial light, a white, flashing smile.

  He thought, I wonder what it would be like to spend an evening with her—later, of course, he amended cautiously. After a suitable period of mourning for Emma.

  They would go to one of those bars and he would talk to her about his wife. “A wonderful person,” he would say. “You remember her, Miss Adams, a large woman, but beautiful in her own way.”

  “What about me, Mr. Whitcomb?” Miss Adams would pout. “They tell me I’m not so bad.”

  “You’re not bad at all, Miss Adams,” Francis would agree. “Not bad at all.”

  He stole a surreptitious glance in the bookkeeper’s direction, saw only the orange crest of her hair bent over the ledger and, musing pleasantly, picked up his backlog of hardware orders. He was hard at work when Mr. Grayson swept pompously through to his private domain.

  The tempo of the morning slowly accelerated. The telephone rang, customers came in. Every time he would hear the bell or see the door open, Francis would wonder whether this was it, whether this time it would be someone with the news about Emma.

  By nine-thirty, he was beginning to grow a little apprehen­sive. What if Emma were still lying there when he returned home? He had hoped never to see her again, not even to open the coffin.

  Shortly after ten o’clock, a call did come for him. With his heart thumping against the cage of his ribs, he finished waiting on a customer before picking up the receiver.

  “Whitcomb speaking.”

  And then the shock came. It was Emma’s voice at the other end of the line. “Francis, I’ve been trying to get you for hours. That phone’s been busy. What in the world do you people do down there?” She paused as if expecting an explanation, then continued angrily. “Did you light the gas before you left this morning?”

  Francis’ heart was clogging his throat. He managed, “Of course, my dear.”

  “Then that heater’s acting up again. How many times do I have to tell you about it? I woke up and found that flame out.”

  “Well, it was a good thing you did wake up,” Francis said weakly, beads of sweat bubbling up on his forehead.

  “On any other day I wouldn’t have. But the garbage men made so much racket I couldn’t sleep. I’ve got half a mind to complain to the mayor.” Momentarily distracted, she reverted to the main theme. ’’You call Mr. Slavin at the gas company right now. Have him send someone out. A situation like that is dangerous. Why, I might have been killed!”

  “Yes, my dear, you might have,” Francis mumbled.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I’d call Slavin.”

  He hung up, wiped the film of sweat from his face and, with robot response, dialed the gas company. Whatever temp­tation there might have been to delay was erased by the thought that Emma would be waiting when he got home. She was alive, very much alive—as dominant and terrifying and penurious as ever. The muscles of his stomach cramped in disappointment.

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Whitcomb?” he heard Miss Adams say. “You look sick.”

  “I am. The flame on the gas heater went out, and my wife almost suffocated.”

  “All’s well that ends well, I always say, Mr. Whitcomb,” Miss Adams contributed pertly. “Good thing she noticed it in time. Of course, I wouldn’t have gas in my house. Too dangerous.”

  It was because he had heard the same comment so often, because periodically the paper carried stories of houses exploding or people suffocating that Francis Whitcomb had decided to gas his way to freedom. From the very beginning, when he first started to think of murdering Emma, he had known that her death would have to be an accident.

  But in spite of the ease with which such matters are arranged in fiction, he had dis­covered that, in real life, murder is not so simple. They owned no car with which he could tamper, and send Emma speeding to her death. There were no stairs in the house down which she could be pushed to a broken neck. And, if there had been stairs, she would probably have picked herself up at the bottom and come after him with a meat cleaver. Emma was invincible, indestructible. Even his flawless scheme with the gas had failed.

  He returned to work, his mind and stomach churning in futile rebellion. The day that had started with such bright hopes settled in one of despair.

  At noon, he sat in the back room on a sawhorse, surrounded by bins of nails and bolts, and opened his lunch.

  “Deviled eggs again,” he thought morosely, peeking between the two slices of tasteless bread.

  It was always deviled egg sandwiches. Emma lacked imagination. That was another of the many things he disliked about her, that and her gluttony and her angry voice and her con­tinuous penny-pinching.

  Perhaps because he was so depressed, the sandwich tasted worse than usual. He managed to swallow only a few bites before his throat and stomach rebelled. Throw­ing the rest into the incinerator, he wandered out into the lumber yard.

  There the clean, crisp smell of freshly sawed wood momentarily revived him. The knot in his stomach loosened. Every­where around him was the potential for committing a perfect murder. For instance the brakes on one of the big trucks could fail...or an imperfectly stacked pile of lumber could come crashing down...or the safety guard on the giant saw could come loose. Perfect, no doubt, for killing one of the men who worked in the yard, useless as a method for killing Emma. And bloody, too. At the thought of blood, Francis’ stomach started to churn more vio
lently than ever.

  Probably it was the combination of frustration and the images of gore that made him feel so squeamish. After he returned to work, he kept thinking that the waves of nausea and the pains in his stomach would pass, but they grew steadily more acute. By mid-afternoon, he was so desperately ill that he was forced to lie down.

  In all the years he had been at Grayson’s he had never been so desperately ill, and everyone was concerned. Miss Adams clucked over him compassionately. Mr. Grayson insisted on sending him home in a taxi.

  “I’ve called Dr. Johnson for you, Francis,” he said. “He’ll be over as soon as he can get away.”

  On the way home Francis watched the taxi meter, fearfully anticipating the tirade that would greet him at this unusual expense. He must have looked worse than he felt, for Emma said nothing. She didn’t even complain about the cost when the doctor came. But there was a definite limit to her for­bearance.

  After poking and thumping and questioning Francis, Dr. Johnson said, “If he’s not better tomorrow, we’ll have to put him in the hospital.”

  And that was when Emma exploded. “We can’t afford hospitals, doctor,” she snapped. ’’What do you think we are, mil­lionaires?”

  It’s just like her, Francis thought, to begrudge him medical care and he reconciled himself to dying right there on the couch. He was reckoning without Dr. Johnson, however.

  The doctor was diplomatically firm. “There are some things we have to afford, Mrs. Whitcomb. If Francis doesn’t feel better by morning, we’d better find out what’s wrong.”

  Emma sounded suddenly worried. “You mean it really could be serious, doctor? What do you think is the matter?’’

  Dr. Johnson shrugged. “It’s hard to say without testing. It may be nothing worse than nervous indigestion, or a mild form of food poisoning.”

  Emma and the doctor murmured together for a long time at the front door, but Francis made no effort to hear them. Something the doctor had said kept revolving on the turntable of his mind. Poison. The unpleasant taste of the deviled egg sandwich returned. He remembered stories he had read of bodies disinterred decades after a murder in which traces of arsenic were found. There was a sack of weed-killer in the shed, and poison would be so easy.

  He could mix the weed-killer in with the sugar or that chocolate syrup Emma poured over everything. Poisoning would be a form of poetic justice in which his wife’s gluttony and penny-pinching would kill her. If she were dying, Emma would never spend the money on a hospital.

  Francis’ hopes soared towards freedom. He would have that date with Miss Adams after all. At the rebirth of hope the knot in his stomach dissolved, the nausea receded.

  He smiled serenely, listening to Emma slam the door after Doctor Johnson and thump away to the kitchen. He heard her opening the refrigerator door, imagined her taking out the brown can of chocolate syrup. Now she was rinsing out the glass.

  But it was not a glass that Emma Whitcomb was rinsing. She was washing away the remnants of the deviled egg spread she had prepared for Francis’ lunch. There was some left that she had intended to use tomorrow. With that doctor snooping around, however, it was too dangerous. With hospitals and tests, using poison was no longer possible. She would have to find some other way to get rid of that worm she had married, something foolproof, like the gas that had seeped from the defective heater.

  “That’s it,” she mumbled optimistically. “I’ll arrange an accident!”

  And, humming cheerfully to herself, Emma Whitcomb put on the kettle for a soothing cup of tea.

  The Peppermint-Striped Goodbye

  Ron Goulart

  Parody is the sincerest form of flattery so, you Ross Macdonalds, Ray Chandlers, et al., feel praised. You’re being imitated, and by one who can express himself superbly.

  Chapter 1

  The drive-in, all harsh glass and stiff redwood and brittle aluminum and sharp No. 7 nails, stood on the oceanside of the bright road like some undecided suicide. My carhop had a look of frozen hopefulness and the flawed walk of a windup doll with a faulty gudgeon pin. Shifting in the seat of my late model car, I eased the barrel of my stiff black .38 Police Special so that it stopped cutting off the circulation in my left leg.

  “Where’s the town of San Mineo?” I asked the girl, my voice an echo of all the lost hopes of all of us.

  “Back that way about twenty miles,” she said.

  I’d thought so. Sometimes the intricate labyrinth that is Southern California gets one up on me. But there is, as my once-wife used to point out, an intense, harsh, sun-dried stubbornness about Ross Pewter. She often talked like that.

  It was stubborn of me to drive my late model car, gunning it too much on the sharp death-edged curves of the road that wound by the sea, twenty miles in the wrong direction. I was thirty-six now, and sometimes the harsh sun-dried motor trips through the fever-heat madness that is Southern California made me feel that time’s winged chariot was behind me. Other times it was a lettuce truck. Nobody passed Ross Pewter on the road.

  “Do you wish to see a menu?” the carhop asked. Her voice had the ring of too much laughter deferred in it.

  “No,” I told her. I backed out of the place, afraid of the already ghost-town look of it, and cannoned back toward San Mineo and my client.

  “Pewter,” I said aloud as my late model car flashed like a dazed locust down the mirage of the state highway, “Pewter, some of these encounters you get into in the pursuit of a case seem to be without meaning.”

  I would have answered myself that life itself is at times, most times, meaningless. But a highway patrol cycle, its motor like the throaty cough of an old man who has come to Los Angeles from Ohio and found that his Social Security checks are being sent still to his Ohio address, started up behind me. The pursuit began, and I had to ride the car hard to elude it.

  Chapter 2

  The pillars that held up the porch of the big house reminded me of the detail of the capital and entablature of the Ionic temple at Fortuna Virilis at Rome. The entablature, cornice, and architrave were encrusted with carved ornament, a motif of formalized acanthus leaf enriching the design. and the scrolls terminated in rosettes.

  I almost wished this were the house I was going to visit.

  Sighing, and dislodging the barrel of my pistol from a tender part of my thigh, I crossed the rich moneyed street and approached the home of old Tro Bultitude.

  Decay seemed to drift all around, carried like pollen on the hot red wind of this late Southern California afternoon. Even the pilasters, the balustrades, and the cornices of the sprawling Bultitude mansion seemed decayed. It sat like the waiting wedding cake in that book by Charles Dickens.

  The thought of it all filled me with sadness, and the actual pollen in the air started my hay fever going again. The butler was a heavy-set man, all thick hair and musty black clothes, and there was about him the faint smell of Saturday matinees in small Midwestern movie theaters now ren­ovated and made into supermarkets and coin laundries.

  “Blow off, Jack,” he said.

  “The name is Pewter,” I said. “Tell your boss I’m here to see him.”

  “Scram, Jacko. We got illness in the family. All the Colonel’s unmarried daughters are down with nymphomania.”

  I didn’t speak. I just showed him the barrel of my .38.

  “What’s that hanging on the end of it?” he asked.

  I looked. “Some elastic from my shorts, it seems. Want to make a quip about it?”

  “I’ll quip you,” said the butler, snarling. “You remind me of all the lonely self-abusing one-suited bill collectors that haunted the time-troubled corridors of my long-ago youth.”

  “I’ll do the metaphors around here,” I said and went for him. I got two nice chops at his jaw, and he tumbled back like a condemned building that has just been hit by a runaway truck.

  “Let’s not waste any more time,” called an old lifeworn voice from inside.

  I vaulted the fallen butler
and found myself not in a hallway, but at once in a giant white-walled room. As I looked on, steam began to come from jets low in the wall.

  “The name is Pewter,” I said to the crumbled old man who sat in a sun chair, wrapped in a towel as white as the flash of a .38 like mine. “You’ve got a problem?”

  “Vachel Geesewand said you’d cleared up that business in Santa Monica,” said Bultitude.

  “I cleared up the whole damn town before I quit.”

  “Good. My problem,” said the old man, “is simply this. About twenty-two years ago in Connecticut—the name of the town doesn’t matter—a young man named Earl K. M. Hoseblender was riding a bicycle down East Thirty-fourth Street, heading for a hardware store.”

  “Go on,” I said, interested now.

  “My mind wanders,” he admitted. “That isn’t the right prob­lem. That one the p0lice will handle. What I want you to do is find my daughter, Alicia.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Alicia is a strange girl,” said the old man. “For a long time she wore a false beard and hung out with the surfers at Zuma Beach. They drove around in an old ice-cream wagon they’d painted with peppermint stripes.”

  “Red and white stripes?”

  “You’ve guessed it,” said Tro Bultitude. “Then, about a year ago, there was an accident.”

  “What kind of an accident?”

  “Alicia never told me. I do know that the bell fell off the ice­-cream wagon, she’s talked about that often. And a boy named Kip may have broken his left ankle. It was all a year ago, a long time ago for a twenty-year-old like Alicia.