The Second Pulp Crime

by Mack Reynolds

  “Any proof?”

  “Now? No. But I’m sure.”

  “How can you be?”

  Selah shrugged. He repeated the statement he had made on the terrace to Stefan. “It’s because I like things simple.”

  * * * *

  Upstairs in Florence’s bedroom Carlotta stood at a window gazing out across the upper gallery, across a wide expanse of lawn, and beyond a row of live oaks to where, unseen because of the trees, were the entrance gates.

  The parked cars and the cluster of people around them had driven home to her the importance of the crime when she had arrived ten minutes previously. She had been stopped by a road patrolman to permit an ambulance to pass, and had realized with a kind of cold detachment that the body inside was that of Helmut.

  Florence, although in bed, was in a twitching state of nervous agitation and Carlotta said to her, “I wish you’d calm down, Flo. Where are the pills Dr. Vanner left?”

  “On the dresser, Carla.”

  Carlotta picked up a small bottle and studied its label. One of the barbiturates, of course. Take one, no more than two. Do not repeat. There were, she judged, about a dozen pills in the bottle. She shook out two and poured a glass of water from a vacuum carafe on the dresser. She gave Florence the pills, then lowered blinds over the room’s two gallery windows, slanting their slats to mask out the sunlight, cooling the room into partial shade.

  “You’ll stay with me right through all this, won’t you, Carla? Until everything is settled?”

  “Yes, Flo. My bags are coming over with Stefan’s things. Jenks is going to bring them in Stefan’s Bugatti.”

  “Your old room, of course.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Edward is putting Stefan at the other end of the hall. I know you each prefer privacy.”

  “So Edward said, and stop mulling, Flo. Let the pills take effect and go to sleep.”

  After a while Carlotta glanced at her wrist watch. It was almost noon. Barely fifteen minutes had passed and already, to judge by Florence’s moderated breathing, the pills must have taken effect. It seemed a short space of time even for a very strong drug.

  She again examined the label on the bottle. The phrase do not repeat captured her attention for a long and speculative moment. If—delicately, nebulously, the thought impinged—if the other plan were to fail, or be fruitlessly delayed…

  * * * *

  Somewhat later, Carlotta’s rendezvous with the sheriff was on the informally cordial side. They talked for a moment about the bygone Live Oaks days, until Selah brought the conversation to bear on Carlotta’s impression of Dr. Seibermann during the time when she had been arranging the appointment for Damon.

  “Did he seem nervous to you, Carlotta? Seriously worried in any way?”

  “Why no, Selah. Helmut was quite his usual self. A somewhat fatuously imperturbable man, if you know what I mean.”

  She suddenly thought: Miss Foot. The receptionist must surely have been questioned about the tampered files, about other matters as well. She remembered that Helmut had been drenched with agitation when she had left him, white faced and sweated with it. Miss Foot would have noticed his condition and reported it.

  Carlotta accomplished a swift about-face, adding quickly, “Only, that is, until just before I left.”

  “I just don’t understand?”

  “It’s that Helmut changed during the last few minutes we were together. He grew worried, frightened almost. I think it was because we had begun to reminisce about Vienna. He went through a pretty grim ordeal toward the end there, Selah. Anti-Semitism had leaped into full swing, among other wretched things, and our looking back on the period must have opened up old terrors, old scars.”

  Selah thought this over. “Do you seriously think that such fears—scars as you call them—could affect a man after twenty years?”

  Carlotta’s eyes were convincingly noncommittal. “It’s purely a guess, Selah.”

  They remained silent for a moment, then Carlotta placed ringed fingers lightly on Selah’s arm. “Have you found out anything important? Is there any person you definitely suspect?”

  “No, Carlotta. To all purposes, we’re at a dead end.”

  Carlotta in the blindness of her self-assurance believed him.

  * * * *

  Within a smug limbo of comforting delusion the afternoon passed for Carlotta in a succession of unruffled hours. Florence slept, and Jo had elected to sit in her mother’s room and read. Otis had driven off in his car directly after lunch for the beach, and had taken Stefan along with him. Selah also had gone off, saying something vague to Carlotta about taking a look-in on the Fort Lauderdale end.

  Road patrolmen continued to keep Live Oaks free from reporters and the inquisitive, while several of the sheriff’s clever young ferrets—as Otis had labeled them—were still unobtrusively loose around the grounds.

  Shortly after two o’clock Jenks arrived in the Bugatti. He was followed by their gardener in a station wagon, loaded with Stefan’s and Carlotta’s luggage, and in which the two men would return to Halcyon. Leaving the Bugatti for Stefan.

  A little after six o’clock Edward served cocktails on the terrace.

  Florence was not present, being still under the influence of the barbiturate. Belle, Jo’s maid, was with her as a companion, while Damon had not as yet joined the group.

  Damon, for some time now, had been closeted in the library with Sheriff Conley.

  Carlotta reclined on a bamboo chaise longue somewhat apart from the others, lending great style and elegance to a cotton dinner frock cascaded with a wisteria print. Chuck Fallon had come back with Damon from the plant and was now sitting beside Jo on a settee. Carlotta noted with keen satisfaction that their fingers were intertwined and that there was a certain oneness about the youngsters—gratifyingly indicative that they must have swallowed Helmut’s whitewash of David’s mental condition in whole cloth, and that the engagement remained solid.

  Stefan and Otis occupied adjacent chairs, occupied with old-fashioneds and smoking cigarettes that were individually blended and shipped to Stefan by Benson & Hedges, at considerable cost to Carlotta. Evening was taking over, and above the western wall of live oak trees a cloudless sky began to flame.

  Conversation was sporadic and what there was of it was of no consequence. Each was attempting to visualize the session still going on in the library between Damon and Selah.

  When Damon did finally appear, Carlotta saw that he was in a smoldering mood of barely suppressed rage. He was alone, and he carried a partially filled highball glass in his hand. He gave Otis and Stefan an inimical glance, gave Carlotta an even more hostile one, then yanked a chair over beside Chuck and Jo and sat on it aggressively, as though to form a small defensive outpost against the rest of them.

  “Will Sheriff Conley be with us for dinner, papa?” Jo asked.

  “No, he’s through here for the night.” Damon downed the remaining bourbon and called for Edward to refill his glass.

  He’s already half-seas over, Carlotta thought. Then under a surface ripple of chatter that broke out—none of them cared to bring up the subject of the just-concluded session in the library—she seriously studied Damon’s face, as if seeking to dissect its weaknesses and its strength. Her absorption was akin to a marksman engrossed in a detailed examination of some novel still-to-be-tested weapon—its sights directed on murder.

  Damon was acutely aware of Carlotta’s scrutiny, the probing speculation in her eyes, but he translated it incorrectly. She thinks I’m crazy, he decided. Just as Selah does.

  He was a profoundly disturbed and angered man. The talk with Selah, in the latter’s official role as sheriff, had shaken him badly. They had found Damon’s case history. Not in the regular office case-history files (the ones that had been tampered with) but in Dr. Seibermann’s private safe. Mrs. Seib
ermann had known and given them the combination.

  As Damon’s blood pressure slowly had mounted, Selah had gone on with careful friendliness to touch sketchily on the case history that Dr. Seibermann had concealed, the gist of it being that the doctor had been far from satisfied with his own diagnosis.

  “You mean he thought I was nuts.”

  “No, not in plain words, Damon. He just seemed to figure there might be a latitude for error. All of these psychiatric fat brains hedge their bets.”

  “Then why did he lie to me? Why did he tell me I was all right?”

  Selah had deliberately side-stepped this question. Not that he didn’t know the answer to it. Quite the contrary. But until absolute certainty could be established, during tonight or tomorrow morning, an amount of reticence must be observed.

  Selah had lapsed into an irritating kindliness, affirming that in his opinion most psychiatric mumbo-jumbo was plain balderdash. But he also conceded that other people, many people, did not agree with him. What it boiled down to was a suggestion that Damon might find it agreeable to submit to a further examination by a different psychiatrist, preferably a man recommended by their mutual good friend, the medical examiner.

  Under an increasing pressure, with the blood beginning to pound under the roof of his head, Damon had been forced to listen to Selah explain that while he knew there was nothing to it, there were several other people to consider.

  Damon had hit the ceiling then, and it was only with difficulty that Selah had been able to calm him down. “At least do this much for me,” Selah had said. “Sleep on the idea tonight and we will talk about it again tomorrow.”

  Sleep on it!

  Damon noted that Carlotta, that elegant wastrel witch with her spasmodic and thank God fruitless efforts to gouge money out of Florence for her own and her wedded gigolo’s insatiable extravagances, had quit staring at him with her cold blue eyes. And what in the name of reason were the rest of them jabbering about?

  No matter. Whatever was coming out of their mouths had nothing to do with what was going on inside their heads.

  “Selah’s term of office,” he said suddenly, and with an explosive belligerence, “ends in a few months. I intend to see to it that he does not come up for re-election.”

  They were shocked into silence by the fury in his voice.

  “Really, sir?” Otis’s voice penetrated mockingly through the hush. “I thought it was my mother’s branch of the family that had the personal influence and the money to engineer elections?”

  Jo swiftly pressed Damon’s hand, as if begging him to restrain for his own sake any further outburst. It is doubtful whether Damon could have held himself in check, held back from knocking Otis senseless, if Belle hadn’t loomed up beside him and said, “Miss Florence is awake now, Mr. Damon. She would like to have you come upstairs and see her.”

  * * * *

  The moon rose at 8:26.

  By midnight it had sailed high in a cloudless sky. To all purposes it was still at the full, with only a delicate paring removed from its roundness of the night before when Dr. Seibermann had sat under its black magic in the gazebo.

  Knocks sounded on Carlotta’s door just as she was completing her preparations for the night. This was a ritual rather rugged in its nature. In addition to certain physical exercises and the use of a massage machine it involved a chin strap, a skin cream plastered thickly on her face and neck, and a turban-like device that for some esoteric reason swathed the top of her head. The completed effect resembled, frighteningly, one of Mr. Karloff’s better mummies.

  She called, “Come in.”

  Florence entered the room, shut the door, and sank weakly into a lounge chair. She looked haggard.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “Obviously.”

  “Carla, I’m frightened.”

  “Of whom?”

  “Of Damon.”

  Easy tears began their trickle down Florence’s cheeks. “He—he wants me to send Otis away.”

  “Well, it’s understandable. They irritate each other to the edge of mayhem at times. Does he mean abroad to study? Paris? Art? I imagine that Otis would be enchanted.”

  Florence’s voice held a flat quality that brought to her statement an impressive air of conviction. “No, Carla. That sort of a suggestion would have been reasonable. Damon wants Otis sent away from us for good. It was a demand, an ultimatum, really. Damon said that otherwise he would kill him.”

  Control vanished and Florence dissolved in a cascade of sobs. Carlotta got her over to the bed and made her lie down.

  “I refused to consider it,” Florence managed to say. “I told him that if Otis were lost to me I wouldn’t care to live.”

  “Did he in any manner—please answer this honestly, Flo—did Damon in any manner directly threaten you?”

  “No, he didn’t, Carla. But he looked at me. He looked at me horribly, just as if he—oh, I can’t—”

  The memory of Damon’s look with its abstract load of hatred loosed a fresh flood of weeping, and for a while Carlotta just stood at the bedside and let her sister cry. She disliked the situation very much. The preferred mechanics of her plot did not call for a hysterical Florence safely bedded and cared for by a guardian sister. They called for a Florence asleep in her own bedroom and helplessly vulnerable to a maniacal attack.

  Could she get Florence to go back without creating a disturbance that would rouse everyone in the house? Would she go back?

  Wait—a couple of Dr. Vanner’s barbiturate pills would calm Florence’s nerves sufficiently to keep her outwardly passive, and then it would be a simple matter to lead Florence back to her own bedroom. To her own bed. To lie there in a drugged, complaisant stupor for Damon to…

  “Flo, I’m going to your room and get Dr. Vanner’s pills. You’ll end up with a complete breakdown if you let yourself go like this.”

  “All right, Carla. I think that would be wise. Jo put the bottle in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.”

  Softly Carlotta closed the door. Softly she walked toward the hallway’s farther end. Her hearing was acute, and no sound came to her as she passed the second-floor bedrooms and crossed the passageway to the upper gallery.

  She entered Florence’s living room and did not bother to switch on lights, so bright and clear was the moonlight from the gallery windows. She walked through the bedroom and into the bathroom, where she did snap on a ceiling fixture.

  The bottle was on a cabinet shelf and for a moment, in hypnotic fascination, Carlotta just held it in her hand and looked at it. She thought, such power.

  Such terrible, deadly power did the little pills contain that an all but compulsive desire swept over her to try them out. Not on herself, but on Florence. Then there would be no leaving the thing—yes, the murder—to chance. And there would be no wait at all.

  Cold reason gave her pause. An overdose of sleeping pills would be hard to accept as the act of a homicidal maniac. It would not be in character. Damon might strangle Florence, might club her, shoot her, but never would he use the womanly weapon of poison. Never would he plan.

  Suicide would also seem improbable. There were too many imponderables associated with the act, so that in the general run a verdict of suicide was almost invariably rimmed with doubts and suspicions. Certainly the suicide of a woman of Florence’s prominence would be subject to the most exhaustive investigation.

  Well, so much for that little notion.

  Carlotta snapped off the ceiling fixture, after having taken a parting glimpse of her chin-strapped mummy-like head in the cabinet mirror. What grotesque tortures, she thought, a woman of fashion will go through!

  She stepped into the moonlit shadows of the bedroom.

  She had gone no farther than a foot or two when the world in all its orderly processes went insane.

  Hurtling
over her head, and enveloping her body in a shroud of fleece-smothering darkness was a heavy blanket, held in a merciless grip. She thought, he has mistaken me for Florence. It was Carlotta’s last lucid exercise of intellect before panic plunged her into an icy sea of terror.

  She attempted to cry out, to scream I’m not Florence, I’m Carlotta, but the effort sponged meaninglessly and muffled against the blanket’s stifling folds, even as fingers groped and then, with the power and precision of a vise, clamped tight around her neck.

  * * * *

  When the light had flashed on in Miss Florence’s bathroom window Belle had been standing for over twenty minutes on guard, immobile on the moon-washed lawn, her body shadowed by a great sago palm tree with wide, tapering fronds.

  Belle was a big woman, muscular rather than lush, with the ecru tones of a high mulatto. Her age chronically was in the late forties, but her age in wisdom and in her obscure magical beliefs was rooted centuries back in the alluvial plains of Haiti.

  She could have given no reasonable explanation for remaining thus on watch. She simply knew that bad trouble brooded over Live Oaks and that evil winds, both black and terrible, were soon to blow.

  A hand touched the bare skin of her arm, bringing an icy chill. Belle choked back a cry as she recognized the dark slender figure who had materialized out of the shadows as the vanished yard boy, Philomel.

  She kept her voice low. “Where have you been, boy?”

  “Out of the way, Cousin Belle.”

  “Because he beat you?”

  “No.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Mr. Otis.”

  “Stop that shivering, Philomel. Talk sense.”

  “The whip.”

  “You mean the snake whip?”

  “Yes. Mr. Otis made that whip. He made it so it would look to folks like Mr. Damon sure was crazy.”

  “You know this for a fact, Philomel?”

  “I saw him catch the snake.”

  “Why didn’t you say so, then, when Mr. Damon whipped you?”

  “Because Mr. Otis knew I saw him catch the snake.”

  “Even still, why didn’t you say so?”