Mr Splitfoot (Dr Basil Willing)

by Helen McCloy

  “Naturally after what I’d heard. She talked to all the men. She didn’t concentrate on any particular one.”

  “She wouldn’t, of course.” Vanya was sadly cynical. “They don’t. They hide these things from their husbands.”

  “Well, you’d hardly expect her to tell him, would you? Unless she wanted a divorce? Still it is kind of odd. I wouldn’t have thought she was that sort of woman.”

  “Why not? People who run off the rails look and talk just like everybody else.”

  “I suppose so, but—”

  “But what? She seems so good and noble?”

  “No, she’s not a bit like that. I don’t like her, really. She smarms all over me, but I know she doesn’t mean a word of it. She’s just making up to Folly and Daddy through me, because Daddy is one of her husband’s most profitable authors.”

  “Well, then, she sounds just like the sort of phony who would—”

  “No, Vanya, she isn’t.” Lucinda struggled for words to express an idea beyond her own experience. “Don’t you see that if a person got involved in a tragedy like murder through—well—passion—there would have to be a certain greatness about the passion? At least it would have to be overwhelming. But I don’t believe Serena Crowe is capable of feeling or inspiring anything great. She’s shallow, self-centered, trivial.”

  “And you’re a baby or you’ve read the wrong books,” said Vanya. “You probably get your ideas from Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. People don’t have grand passions like that any more. They just have sex, and sex can be just as trivial and self-centered as anything else in life.”

  “All right, but those people don’t commit crimes of passion. If your feeling for somebody is trivial and self-centered, you’re not going to risk your life for that somebody and he’s not going to risk his life for you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Vanya was a little beyond his depth, but still swimming valiantly. “It could be like getting drunk, you know. Running amok. Going berserk. Something people do for excitement, not love.”

  Lucinda laughed. “It’s easy to see the kind of books you’ve been reading. The kind reviewers call ‘frank,’ ‘fearless,’ ‘earthy’ and ‘adult.’ In real life people are moved by love and fear and interest, but not by sex. It’s just something they like to read about.”

  “Maybe she was after money rather than love,” suggested Vanya.

  “Bradford Alcott is the only man here you could call rich,” said Lucinda. “And he’s so old he’s practically dead. I can’t see any man being jealous of a corpse, can you?”

  “There’s your father—”

  “Leave him out of it!”

  “Well, then, there isn’t anybody. Dr. Willing wasn’t here when you overheard the Crowes talking.”

  “Oh, yes, he was. The Willings arrived just before the Crowes, but from the way they talked at dinner, I don’t think the Willings had met anyone here before last night.”

  “So that lets Dr. Willing out and we’re right back where we started. We have no idea who Mrs. Crowe’s lover was. Did they speak as if he were there in the house last night?”

  “Crowe did. Very plainly.”

  “And you’re sure it was the Crowes?”

  “I’ve known them for years. I’d know their voices anywhere. Hers is flat and nasal. His is rather high-pitched for a man, but wiry and vibrant, especially when he’s upset, and he was upset last night. He was really jealous.”

  “And he was the one who got killed. That gives us such a beautiful motive for the lover . . . if only we knew who the lover was.”

  “I still can’t imagine any man risking his life for a woman like Serena Crowe.”

  “That’s what people always say about these crimes of passion,” retorted Vanya. “Just look up the records, especially the photographs of the women, and you won’t be able to believe that such commonplace faces could drive some poor devil to crime.”

  “Commonplace is the word for Serena Crowe.”

  “Then she’s just the sort of woman a man would commit murder for, only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  “When a man kills for a woman it’s usually because he can’t get her any other way, because she’s too respectable or religious or something to divorce her husband. Is Serena like that?”

  “No. The kind of people she knows wouldn’t care whether she was divorced or not, and I know she’s not religious.”

  “Then why murder?”

  “Could it be that this lover was afraid Crowe would kill him? Self-defense?”

  “I don’t believe a planned murder would be called self-defense.”

  “We don’t know that the murderer did any planning,” objected Lucinda. “You and I planned the poltergeist bit.”

  “You think the murderer acted on the spur of the moment, taking advantage of plans made by other people?”

  “Why not? Crowe’s jealousy is the one thing we have that looks like a motive. If someone else had been killed, we’d know that Crowe was the murderer. Since Crowe himself was the victim, we have to turn the thing around and say that the man Crowe was jealous of, Serena Crowe’s lover, is the murderer. I think he must have acted on the spur of the moment, but there’s no way of finding out. We can’t investigate him unless we know who he is. Since we can’t find out—”

  “Who says we can’t?” Vanya was smiling with malice. Only malice wasn’t quite the right word. What was that French word malin? Didn’t that mean cunning seasoned with malice?

  “You know what an agent provocateur is?” went on Vanya.

  “A policeman who asks a man without a liquor license to sell him liquor. Are you going to chase Serena Crowe to see who gets jealous?”

  “Don’t be silly. We’ll make the police do the work for us.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll write a love letter to Serena Crowe and leave it where the police are sure to find it. They’ll have to question her about it now her husband’s dead in suspicious circumstances, so the whole story of her love affair will come out. And she’ll have to tell her lover she’s told the police that he had a motive for murdering David Crowe. If he’s guilty, he’ll be so scared he’ll be sure to give himself away.”

  “Even though he didn’t write the love letter?”

  “That’ll scare him all the more. He’ll know that somebody knows about the love affair and is working to unmask him.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler just to tell the police what we know about the love affair?”

  “Simpler, but not half as much fun. Mrs. Crowe and her lover will have no idea who wrote this letter. They’ll be afraid of everybody.”

  “I almost feel sorry for them.”

  “Don’t. If they’re murderers, they deserve it.”

  “But suppose they’re not murderers?”

  “Then they’ll just have to put up with it until the real murderer is caught.”

  “If they’re guilty, won’t they think that whoever wrote the letter is trying to blackmail them?”

  “No, because we’ll put the letter in a place where the police are sure to find it right away. Once the police know what’s in the letter, it has no blackmail value and that will protect us. We don’t want anyone to think we’re blackmailers. They get killed sometimes.”

  “Suppose the real murderer is never caught? Won’t there be danger of the police arresting Mrs. Crowe or this man?”

  “There still won’t be enough evidence to convict them, if they’re innocent.”

  “You hope.”

  “Well, what is there but our letter? And all it does is establish motive. That’s not enough.”

  “Vanya, I don’t believe you’ve thought this thing through. How can we sign this letter when we don’t know who the lover is?”

  “It’s going to be a two-page letter but the second page with the signature will be missing. It’ll be quite clear there is a second page, because we’ll break off the first page at the bottom in the middle of a sentence.”
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  “What about handwriting?”

  “This letter will have to be typed.”

  “A love letter? Oh, Vanya, how unromantic! People don’t type love letters!”

  “I bet some people do, but, whether they do or not, this love letter is going to be typed.”

  “Perhaps we could put something in the letter about his having hurt his hand so he can’t use a pen.”

  “Corn. And too complicated. It sounds fake. Much better let him just be a simple, unimaginative oaf who types his love letters.”

  “Or dictates them? Going to put initials in one corner to show which typist in the pool was lucky enough to draw this assignment?”

  “On the contrary, we’ll be careful to make a few mistakes in the typing to show that he’s not the sort who usually does his own typing. He’s only doing it this time because it’s a love letter and he doesn’t want to dictate it to a third person.”

  “What delicacy! Couldn’t he just call in a typist from the pool and say: ‘Miss Swivelhips, please write a love letter for me to Mrs. Crowe this afternoon while I play a round of golf’?”

  “All right. Laugh. But no matter what you think, Worm, this letter has got to be typed. Handwriting is hard enough to imitate when you know whose handwriting you’re imitating, and we don’t. Besides, that would be forgery. We can’t risk doing anything illegal with the police all over the place.”

  “How about block capitals?”

  “That’s only for anonymous letters and blackmail. You’ll be suggesting next that we cut printed words out of a newspaper and paste them on a sheet of—”

  “—cheap, mass-produced stationery that none of our experts can trace. What’s the matter with us, Vanya? This isn’t funny. It’s serious and here we are laughing.”

  “It’s only the old who take things seriously all the time.”

  “I hope we’ll never be that old.”

  “Of course we won’t. Nations may disappear . . .”

  “Heigh-ho! Never fear, we’ll be the same.”

  “Here’s a pencil and a scratch pad. Let’s get to work on the rough draft.”

  The paper was a kitchen memorandum pad. So there would be no mistake about this the word Marketing was printed at the top in red and green and surrounded with a border of fruits and vegetables.

  “Vanya, even if the police do question Mrs. Crowe about this letter, we’ll never know what she tells them.”

  “Oh, yes, we will. We’ll spend the day in the attic. Listening.”

  “But your sore throat?”

  “It feels all right now.”

  “But will your mother want you to go out after?—”

  “Probably not, but I won’t ask her and she won’t know where I am. How are we going to start this letter? Darling or Dearest?”

  “Oh, gosh, it’s going to be hard for us to write a letter that sounds as if it were written by a grown man to a woman he loves, a woman whom you’ve never seen and whom I don’t like!”

  “We won’t think about Serena Crowe while we’re writing it. You think about your Ideal Man and I’ll think about my Ideal Woman.”

  “What’s your Ideal Woman like?”

  “Not the way you describe this Crowe person. Come on now, let’s get busy! Dearest or Darling?”

  “Dearest. Darling is too mushy.”

  “The kind of love letters that get read aloud in court are always pretty mushy. That’s why newspapers print them in full when they can. Give the readers a good laugh.”

  “I still think Darling sounds kind of fake.”

  “All right then—Dearest. Will it be Dearest Serena or just plain Dearest?”

  “Just plain Dearest. Then the police will really have their hands full trying to identify the person it’s for as well as the person who wrote it. They’ll have to do a lot of digging about other people as well as Serena. Heaven only knows what they’ll turn up.”

  “Okay. Dearest. Then what?”

  Lucinda proffered the pencil. “You ought to write this, Vanya.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a man. You ought to know how men write when they’re writing love letters.”

  To admit inexperience would have been too humiliating. Vanya frowned, clenched his tongue between his teeth for a moment, then took the pencil from her and began to write slowly, speaking the words aloud for Lucinda’s benefit as he wrote.

  “Dearest, When we are separated, I die a little . . .”

  “Separated is too long and too prosaic. Put parted instead.”

  “Okay. Parted. You cannot know what these little deaths are like or you would not inflict them upon me.”

  “I don’t like inflict. Makes Serena sound sadistic.”

  “Maybe she is.”

  “But we don’t know that. Impose would be better.”

  “. . . impose them upon me, you who are never cruel.”

  “I rather like that, but, of course, it’s derivative.”

  “How do you mean derivative?”

  “Didn’t somebody French say to part is to die a little?”

  “So what? All culture is derivative. The Persians influenced the Greeks and the Greeks influenced the Romans. Let’s get on with this. When I think of that insufferable husband of yours . . .”

  “Oh, no! Insufferable is too strong. We’ve got to be subtle.”

  “When I think of that insensitive husband of yours, I realize that this can’t go on forever. We must find some way to get rid of him and be together always, just you and me. That’s not bad, is it?” There was a note of surprise in Vanya’s voice as if he were pleasantly startled by his own eloquence. “How would you respond if you got a letter like that?”

  “Nobody would ever write me a letter like that. I’m too plain,” she said with dreadful, self-immolating honesty.

  “Just suppose you weren’t plain and somebody did write you a letter like that. Would you answer it?”

  “Of course.”

  “What would you say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Thank you for your nice letter.”

  “Of the fifteenth inst.? Really, Worm! I pity any man who ever does write you a letter like that. And now we’d better get going.”

  “Vanya! Is that all?”

  “It’s enough if we type triple-spaced on a small sheet of notepaper.”

  “You forgot to break off in the middle of a sentence.”

  “Oh, yes.” He seized the pencil again. We must talk the whole thing over. Will you meet me in the—blank. Break it off right there.” He glanced at the kitchen clock. “We’d better go. My mother is usually awake by eight.”

  “Oughtn’t you to leave a note for her? If you don’t, she’ll be scared stiff when she hears about the murder. She might even tell the police you were missing and they might start hunting for you and that might keep them so busy that they wouldn’t pay attention to this letter. Gosh, they might even find us in the attic and ruin all our plans.”

  “You’re right. If I leave a note, she’ll just be mad and she won’t go to the police the way she would if she were scared.”

  Vanya scrawled on another slip of paper. “Feeling fine this morning. Have gone out to ski and may not be back for lunch. Love, Vanya.”

  Having tasted the sadistic joys of literary criticism, Lucinda could not give them up at once.

  “Well, not fine. Luncheon, not lunch.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! How picayune can you get? You stay here and type this while I get my skis.”

  “Where’s the typewriter?”

  “Right here.” He went into the hall and came back with an Olivetti and some notepaper. “We’ll cut off the address at the top. Be as quiet as you can so you don’t wake my mother.”

  Lucinda put the typewriter on the kitchen table and stood up as she typed. Even with only two fingers it didn’t take too long to do the few sentences. She didn’t have to make any mistakes deliberately. They came naturally.

  With a sigh of relief, she sat down on
a high stool to wait for Vanya. Would the police trace the typewriter and wonder how Serena Crowe’s lover had access to the Radanine house? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they would find out Serena Crowe had a lover who had an obvious motive for murdering Crowe.

  Lucinda wanted to wash the mugs she and Vanya had used but she was afraid to make any more noise. The warmth of the kitchen after the intense cold outdoors was making her nose runny. She slid a hand into the pocket of her parka, hoping to find a piece of tissue. Instead her fingertips touched something hard. She took it out. The little strip of metal she had found in the ashes of the cold hearth at home.

  “What have you got there?”

  Vanya’s voice startled her. The bit of metal fell to the floor. Vanya picked it up. “Where did you get this?”

  “I found it this morning in the living-room fireplace.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It could be almost anything or part of anything. It’s awfully hard to identify part of something mechanical, like part of a watch or a typewriter or a car’s engine, when you see it out of context. That’s why I kept it. I thought we might be able to identify it and . . . Well, couldn’t it be a clue?”

  “A clue to what?”

  “I mean couldn’t it have something to do with the murder? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there yesterday afternoon when I watched Martha sweeping ashes out of the fireplace and laying firewood.”

  “Why didn’t you show it to me before?”

  “I forgot all about it. Honestly I did.”

  “You mustn’t forget things like that. We must pool all information, or we’ll never solve this case.” He put the bit of metal in his pocket.

  “Can’t I have it back?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It may be dangerous to its possessor. Like the Maltese Falcon or the Fifth Napoleon.”

  “You mean somebody might murder one of us to get it back?”

  “Who knows? Better for me to take the chance rather than you. Now let’s go.”

  Vanya opened the back door. “Oh, Lord!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Look.”

  They could see only six or seven feet ahead of them. The nearest trees were blurred, misty ghosts of their real selves. Beyond, there was no sky, no treetops, no mountains. Only a gray density without light or shadow, form or distance.