The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  “But, Johnny, I’ve always wanted this room,” she broke in eagerly. “I love being amid Mother’s things because they’re all so very much like me and now they’re all mine.”

  “Darlene!”

  It struck me so deeply, Rhea, that my sense pinwheeled. Overstrained as my nerves were, I was hardly aware of leaving. Then I discovered that I was no longer in your room, Rhea, but in my own. I had a sleepless nightmare of a night.…

  When I came home early the next evening, Rhea—after an interminable day at the office—I brought the engraved silver urn containing your ashes.

  With the urn in my hands I turned from the garage toward the house, and paused, staring apprehensively at the kitchen door. Then I went to it slowly, watching at every step. Thank heavens that the incident of yesterday was not repeated. Entering that door, in fact, I found the kitchen deserted. But there were sounds overhead, indicating that Darlene was upstairs, and her voice carried down gayly,

  “Welcome home, Johnny!”

  Unable to answer, I carried the urn into the living room and placed it on the center of the mantel. Left there in plain sight, I hoped it would serve as a constant reminder to our daughter that Rhea would continue to be present in this house only as a handful of gray dust reposing inside that silver vessel.

  But only the next day I came home, numbly tired again, to find that in one more detail Darlene had caused herself to resemble you even more closely. She had had her hair bleached a shade or two, to the shade yours had been.

  It was adding up tension toward the cracking point, Rhea. Darlene had also developed your trick of sneaking a smoke now and then, in just the way you used to do it, believing I didn’t know. Darlene was fully aware that I disapprove of women smoking, especially mere girls of her age—so she tried to hide her indulgence from me just as you used to hide it. But I could always smell the tobacco when I came into the house and I would find the butts stained with lip rouge, just like yours, in the trash basket.

  This in itself was trivial, perhaps, except that Darlene had never before liked cigarettes. But now she was smoking in my absence, concealing it and undoubtedly becoming an addict.

  Like mother, like daughter! Your evilness was your bequest to Darlene. Your sins were flowing in her blood, tainting it, cropping out of her now, more and more in hellish increase.

  All these things were nerve-shattering. Darlene’s new way of waiting for me just inside the kitchen door, smiling at me, was almost the worst trial to endure.

  But then came the worst of all, Rhea—the dereliction proving once and for all that Darlene was going the evil way of her mother. It came so soon that it left me dazed and appalled—inherited evil completely claiming Darlene. Almost before I was aware of it, it came so slyly, she was plunging into your own secretly fatal sin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE NIGHT YOU DIED

  I never told you in life, Rhea, just how I discovered your unforgivable secret. At the time I judged it best to use your own tactics of silence and craft. You didn’t even suspect that I had learned—and perhaps you do not know even yet how I brought a righteous punishment down upon you.

  The first sign of it, Rhea, was a strange new tenseness in you. Your cheerful, content manner was gone. You had become on edge, anxious. When I asked you what was bothering you, your answer was evasive. “I just seem to be a little nervous, Johnny, that’s all—probably because the weather is so unsettled.”

  But after the weather changed, you stayed agitated. Coming home from work these afternoons, I found your customary greeting strained. The stench of tobacco was stronger in the house and more butts than usual were discarded in the trash basket. At night, too, you were restless—you tossed and squirmed in bed so endlessly that neither of us could sleep. That was when you suggested it might be better if you had a room of your own, so you moved into the second bedroom on the other side of the bath.

  It did seem to help some, for soon your nervous tensions relaxed somewhat. In fact, you took on a new loveliness—there was a brighter flash in your eyes, a happier shine on your lips, and as you worked around the house you sang softly to yourself.

  And I didn’t suspect the reason, Rhea. Trusting my wife as a husband should, I didn’t dream.…

  The first inkling of it came, with bitter irony, as the result of my husbandly concern for you, Rhea.

  That night in bed I was also restive. Usually I sleep the sound sleep of a man whose conscience is perfectly clear, but on this night something caused me to waken. My first thought was of you, Rhea. I rose, wanting to make sure you were all right, and without turning on any lights, stepped through the connecting bath into your room.

  A light had been left burning inside your closet. Thinking you had overlooked it, I reached in to turn it out—and then I saw the bottle.

  On the shelf, Rhea, just barely visible behind a hat-box—a liquor bottle. You were keeping it hidden there. Only a few ounces of whiskey remained in it.

  I stood there too stunned to move, Rhea—staring at that bottle as if at the suddenly dead face of a loved one. In a soundless thunderclap of revelation, it told me that all my years of loving patience and guidance had gone in vain. You had secretly deceived me, Rhea. The sweet, good wife I had known was gone, for she had yielded again to sinful weakness.

  Heartsick, I turned my unbelieving eyes to look at you, Rhea, and then an even more staggering blow rocked me.

  Your bed was empty.

  Just in the nick of time I choked off a cry of pain. Darlene was asleep just down the hall, and the Fraziers’ open bedroom windows were no farther away than the width of the driveway. I could not bear to let them learn of my discovery.

  The condition of your bed showed you had been lying there for a while, Rhea, but now you had left it. And the clock on your vanity said the time was 4:20 a.m.

  In a stunned turmoil of conjectures—unwilling to believe this thing until I had made doubly sure—I quietly went down the stairs. It took me only a few moments to search the house. It was horribly true. You were gone. You had risen from your bed in the middle of the night, while your trusting husband slept, to sneak out of the house and away.

  Where had you gone? How many times before tonight had you slipped out like this without my slightest knowledge? Did Darlene suspect, or the neighbors? I hoped to heaven they were as ignorant of it as I had been. I prayed that I could remain alone in my wretched wonder.

  These questions would remain a torture in my mind even after they were answered. I resolved on the spot, in my heartsick dismay, that whatever the ugly truth about you might be, it must, at any cost, remain always concealed from our daughter and from our friends who thought so well of us.

  Of one other thing I was instantly sure, Rhea. Whatever you were doing, I must stop you. You must be punished for your sins already committed, and I must not permit you to hurt me so ungratefully and so grievously with more of them.

  First I must learn the dreadful truth. I went quietly back up the stairs. I left the bottle untouched on your closet shelf, the light burning just as you had left it. I closed the connecting door, leaving it as I had found it, and fell back into my own bed.

  I lay there in acute wakefulness, listening and waiting.

  Almost an hour later, just before dawn, I heard the sound of a car pausing in the street, then quietly rolling on. The faint sound of hurrying feet came down the dark, hedge-bordered alleyway behind the houses. You came into our home with such sly quietness that I could well understand why your secret prowlings had not disturbed me before.

  All the while I lay still in my own room, letting you believe you were deceiving me again. Even when I heard you finally return to your bed, I kept my wretched silence—and planned.

  The next night, Rhea, I was grimly ready to find the answers to the dark questions rankling in my mind.

  At breakfast, to my secret amazement, you looked so fresh and unaffected. It showed your fine natural talent for sin, Rhea. As for me, I must confess findi
ng it surprisingly easy to act as if nothing was wrong.

  A shameful thing, Rhea, this mutual deception—but on my part it was justified.

  Again when I came home that evening to receive your usual cheery greeting, the warmth of your kiss seemed an expression of your duplicity. I suspected liquor on your breath, too. But I pretended to notice nothing and was ready with a small deception of my own—one you had forced upon me.

  “I came home by bus, honey, because I had a little clutch trouble with the car. Left it at the garage. Pick it up tomorrow.”

  That wasn’t quite the fact, Rhea. Actually I had left the car parked down in the next block. I expected to have a special use for it during the night.

  It wrung my heart to observe you during the evening, Rhea. Now I understood your nervousness. You were suffering pangs of guilt and remorse. You were tense with fear that I might somehow learn too much. Yet in your weakness you could no longer resist temptation.

  Our double pretense went on through the evening until our usual time to retire to our separate rooms—and then the deceit became double-edged with a vengeance.

  This time it was I who sneaked out of the house. Of course you didn’t dream of such a move on my part, Rhea. While you lay awake or dozing in your room, giving me time to fall into my usual deep sleep, I slipped silently out of my room.

  I managed it with great care and justified cunning, Rhea, and you never knew. You had no notion I had eased soundlessly out of the house and down the dark street to my waiting car.

  Sitting behind the wheel, I pictured your covert actions. I could visualize you getting up very quietly. Perhaps before making a second move, you would fortify your evilness from the bottle hidden on the closet shelf. Then you might listen at my door, and, feeling sure I was sleeping as soundly as usual, you would sneak down the stairs and out the back door.

  Then?

  My intention tonight was to see for myself where my good and faithful wife went from there.

  Sure enough, Rhea, you soon appeared. Having placed my car in the shadows of the maples to permit me to watch the mouth of the alleyway, I saw you hurry out. You turned to another car that was waiting there in the side street, a long convertible, gleaming new. I saw its door opened for you from inside. I watched you disappearing into it—and for moments of miserable suffering, I pictured you in the arms of the man you had met.

  Finally the convertible lights gleamed on, its motor purred and it breezed into the boulevard.

  You must not have noticed my car following you, or if you did you thought nothing of it. Many cars cruised that way, to the end of the boulevard, then along Rendezvous Road. I trailed you all the way, Rhea, until the shiny convertible pulled into a special parking space outside the Clover Club.

  Yes, the Clover Club, that notorious road house. I saw you leave the car with the man who had met you—the man with whom you must have come to this noxious place night after night. I recognized his handsome face, Rhea—with a blinding flash of realization.

  Bruce Dallas. The same man you had loved so eagerly and so evilly years ago. Now you had gone eagerly and evilly back to him. Abandoning all the sweetest things of your life, you had gone back.

  How did it come about, Rhea? Where and when did your meeting with Bruce Dallas occur? Even now I don’t know the details, my sweet. But my own feeling is that he happened to see you again somewhere—to see how sweet and good you were, and how amazingly like the young girl you had been—and then he sought you out.

  From the darkness I watched you going into this garish resort which Bruce Dallas himself operated. I saw you both appear at a window upstairs, in one of those private dining rooms. I saw a drink in your hand and heard shrill laughter on your lips before the venetian blinds were closed, mercifully to shut the sight of you, up there with Dallas, from my stinging eyes.

  Then I turned back, Rhea, laden with a great sickness of the heart, fired with a resolve that a just punishment must be meted out to you.

  Before you sneaked back home again that same night, I did something, Rhea, which you may never have realized.

  Thinking and planning in my silent, anguished resolve, I closely inspected the head of the stairway. Darlene was asleep in her room then, also unaware of what I was about. As you have excellent reason to know, Rhea, those stairs are very steep—I was always careful to caution you about going down them.

  The post on the one side of the landing, and the molding on the wall on the opposite side, were ornately carved. I saw how it would be possible to brace a rod of some sort firmly across the top of the steps, a few inches above the edge of the landing, so that anyone moving onto the stairs would surely trip over it.

  I tried it then and there, Rhea, using a tool of a completely innocuous sort. Bringing an umbrella up from the stand in the vestibule directly below, I found it was of exactly the right length to be placed in position. A slight bit of forcing kept it firmly in place. Black, it would be completey invisible in the dark.

  I replaced the umbrella in its vase, undressed, got into bed and actually dozed off without waiting to hear you sneak back in. Because now my plan was complete. I could be confident that guilt would be punished. Tomorrow night I would set the trap of a just vengeance.…

  I recall so clearly, Rhea, the night you died.

  That evening, the normal course of incidents went along as it had on many other evenings. You didn’t imagine I had learned of your deceit, and much less could you dream I had definitely arranged that you would pay for it within a few hours. Nor did you realize, Rhea, that you would never see Bruce Dallas again—that you had already held your last mortal rendezvous with him.

  At her usual time, Darlene went upstairs. I heard her close her door—that door which could be counted on to stick shut for a few minutes when she tried to open it again. Soon I heard her bed bounce and knew she would be sound asleep within minutes.

  These were your last living hours, Rhea.

  You were reading a women’s magazine, remember?—and waiting with secret impatience for me to go to bed.

  I finished reading the paper, quite deliberately prolonging it a little. Finally I rose and said, “I’m turning in now, honey. Pretty sleepy. Good night.”

  You may have thought it a little strange that I placed my good-night kiss on your forehead this time, not on your lips. I could not bear to think of kissing the once-sweet lips which Bruce Dallas had defiled.

  You said, “I’m tired, too, Johnny. Be up in a minute.”

  I climbed the stairs, entered my room, closed the hallway door, got ready for bed and lay down. All this was entirely routine, except that tonight I had no intention of sleeping. I waited until you came up to your room and went through the same process. Then, once you were settled down for a brief doze, I rose in silence.

  I went down to the vestibule to get the umbrella, brought it up and wedged it across the edge of the landing, in just the right position, as I had tested it last night. Then I went back to bed and waited.

  Waiting, scarcely breathing, I soon heard your furtive sounds. First a motion of your bed as you got up. Then a stealthy squeak from the cork of your hidden bottle. Then a few more moments while you got back into a dress. Next you were almost soundlessly leaving your room.

  Then your scream, Rhea!

  Next the thumping fall of your body to the very base of the stairs.

  I saw a light come on in a bedroom window of the house next door. Your scream had been loud enough to waken our nearest neighbors. Seeing Marie Frazier putting her head out the window beside her bed to stare across, I made the clever move of turning on my bedroom light also and going directly to my own window to speak to her.

  “What was that, Marie?” I asked quickly. “Something wrong over there?”

  “It was a frightful scream, John,” she said. “But it didn’t come from here. It came from your own house. I thought it must be Rhea’s voice.”

  “But it can’t be Rhea,” I answered. “She’s sound asleep.”
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  Through the windows Marie Frazier watched me hurrying first into your room, Rhea, then into the hall. Darlene had also been awakened by your shriek but she hadn’t yet appeared from her room. As I had expected it to do, her door was sticking shut.

  I hastened to the head of the stairs, dislodged the umbrella, ran down, then snapped on the lights.

  You were lying huddled on the floor on your back, your head oddly twisted over one shoulder. Your eyes were staring up into mine. You were not yet dead then, Rhea. Your neck was broken and you were paralyzed. The terrified light in your eyes seemed to show you knew what I had done—and why. I lifted you a little in my arms. At that moment Darlene succeeded in yanking open the door of her bedroom.

  “Your mother’s had an accident, Darlene!” I gasped out. “Call a doctor!”

  Then you died, Rhea. You died and I felt an exultation.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ANOTHER IS CLAIMED

  Thinking back now, I can recognize that the disturbing change in Darlene showed itself the very first moment she learned her mother was dead.

  I can bring back that moment very clearly, Rhea. Darlene had finished telephoning for the doctor. Hurrying back, she found me holding you in my arms.

  I recall vividly that as she stood there she gazed wide-eyed not at her dead mother, but at me.

  I made quite a convincing picture of a grief-stunned husband, I’m sure, Rhea, as I knelt there on the floor.

  That was the way the Fraziers found me when they hurried in a few minutes later. I would not permit them to move you until after Dr. Kerwin arrived and pronounced you dead. I watched the good doctor solemnly filling out the death certificate—writing under the words Cause of Death his conclusion, Accidental fall.