His thoughts cut off that track as his stomach turned even at the idea.
“But what about the rest of it?” he asked himself. “Where are Betty and Magraw? What’s happened to the lights? How—”
And then he listened to the roaring sound of pouring water, much louder, here in the kitchen, and his eyes darted toward the door that led down to the cellar. The noise was coming from down there. Completely sobered now, he knew what that sound was, too.
Showing him over the house, when he’d first got there, Eshmont had taken him down into the cellar. The cellar had been full of half-dried puddles and there was a watermark around the walls, a couple of inches from the floor. Eshmont had pointed out the main water pipe that had burst a few days ago. That section had been replaced with new pipe, but Eshmont had told him the whole thing was rotten and he had to get it all replaced soon. The plumber had told him some other part might spring a leak or burst at any time.
Munson knew now that was what had happened. The water pipe had burst again and the basement was being flooded. The power wires had become inundated and blown all the lights.
Suddenly, through the noise of the pouring, rushing water down below him, there was another, faintly discernible sound. Munson stood frozen, listening, and caught the sound again. This time there was no mistaking it. It was a woman’s voice, crying out for help. He ran across the kitchen to the basement door, flung it open. Cautiously, holding the flickering flame of the lighter out before him, he started down the steps.
Halfway down his foot sank into water up over the ankle. He felt it filling his shoe, icy cold and uncomfortable. Quickly, he withdrew the foot, shaking it furiously, cursing. Down here close at hand, the sound of the escaping water was a great roar. Munson squatted, holding the tiny cigarette lighter flame far out before him. The reddish glow of it fell palely over slickly undulating dirty water, as far across the cellar as he could see. The place was flooded almost to the ceiling.
Then it came again, the cry he’d heard up in the kitchen, more audible this time. “Help! Get me out of here. I—don’t want to drown. I don’t want to die!”
Looking toward the sound of the voice, Munson saw a dimly shadowed object on the other side of the flooded cellar, near where the furnace should have been. It was clinging to some kind of pipe and thrashing the water wildly.
“Betty?” he yelled. “Hold on. Stay with it. I’ll run and get help!”
“No!” she screamed back. “There isn’t—time. I—I can’t hold on much longer. I—”
The voice faded into a sickening gurgling sound and the shadowed object over there in the water disappeared. The splashing ceased.
Swiftly, Munson yanked off his shoes.
Holding the lighter high over his head, he bent forward and let himself down into the icy grip of the water. He held the tiny flame above his head and worked with a one-arm sidestroke toward the spot where Betty Eshmont had gone down. He was a few feet away from the spot, shivering and gasping for breath, when her head broke through the surface again, close to him.
No longer was Betty the slinky, blond siren type. Her yellow hair was plastered tight to her head, strands of it clinging in snaky wet tendrils to her cheeks and forehead. The mascara of her eyes had smeared and run, mixed with her other makeup. Her lips were shriveled and blue with cold. Her eyes were walled back in her head.
Just then a draft whisked across the flood waters in the cellar and the cigarette lighter flame puffed out. The darkness seemed to smother Munson like a great shroud. Frantically, he fumbled to set the lighter aflame again and it escaped from his wet, slippery fingers, fell into the water. There would be no more light to guide him.
The next few moments were nightmarish, horrible. He reached out with one hand, swinging it beneath the surface of the water, and his fingers finally tangled into the loose floating strands of Betty’s hair. He got a tight grip and pulled her head above the surface. Next he got his arm around her, under the shoulders. He treaded water for an instant, reached as high as possible with his free hand. It found a steampipe and his fingers clamped onto it.
Inch by inch he worked along the length of the pipe pulling Betty, limp and unconscious, with him, toward a gray splotch on the far wall, which he figured to be one of the high cellar windows. Halfway there, the girl regained consciousness, stiffened in his embrace, began to thrash about in wild desperation, sobbing hysterically. Munson almost lost his grip on the pipe. But then he got one hand up on her throat and cut off her wind.
“Stop it!” he yelled. “Calm down or you’ll drown us both. We’ll be all right, if you’ll stop thrashing around.”
In a few moments she subsided and Munson took his hand from her throat. She gasped, “I’ll be okay, now. Who—who are you?”
He told her, then asked, “What happened, anyhow? How did you get caught down here like this?”
He felt her shudder. In a dull monotone, she said, “I—I guess I fell down the stairs. I was knocked out. When I came to, I was lying in several inches of water and the cellar was filling fast. I tried to make it back up the stairs, but there was something the matter with one of my legs and I was too weak and dizzy. I couldn’t make it, kept falling back.
“The water got deeper and deeper. I—I finally crawled to a table, then pulled myself up and lay across it. When the water rose, the table floated. It held me up and I got to the top of the furnace. I—”
She broke off, her body jerking convulsively against his arm. “It—it was horrible,” she said. “Get us out of here! Please!”
He was almost to the window now and in a few more moments he turned loose from the overhead pipe and splashed a few strokes to the gray patch of light. Somehow he reached up and undid the latch, got the window open. It was narrow, with barely room to squeeze through, but he made it finally. He got them both out of the cellar.
For several minutes they sprawled there, wet and shivering, on the soft earth in a clump of lilac bushes planted against the side of the house. He reached over and touched Betty Eshmont’s shoulder.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get over to the house next door and get warmed up and call the police. I—”
He stopped. Betty wasn’t listening. She’d passed out again. He lifted her limp figure in his arms, walked across a lawn and a driveway, through a privet hedge gap and into the next yard. The neighboring house was a little larger than the Eshmonts’. There were no lights on, but Munson clumped up onto the front porch and kicked at the door with his foot.
Munson almost had to boot in a lower panel of the door before a light flashed on in the hall and footsteps shuffled toward the door. It was an old man who opened up. He wore a bathrobe over a long-tailed nightshirt. He was pink and shining bald except for cottontail tufts of white hair over each ear. His round blue eyes practically hung on his cheeks when he saw Munson standing there, sopping wet and shivering, with a woman in the same condition in his arms.
“Don’t get alarmed,” Munson said quickly. The old fellow looked as if he were ready to keel any moment. “This is Mrs. Eshmont from next door. She got trapped in their flooded cellar and almost drowned. I think she’s all right, though. Just fainted from shock or exposure or something.” He didn’t say anything about the fact that Mr. Eshmont had been murdered. The old boy didn’t look as though he could have stood that.
“Come in then, come in,” the neighbor mumbled finally. He tugged nervously at his pinkish jowls. “My name’s Jeremy. My wife’ll be right down. Glad to do anything we can to help.”
Mrs. Jeremy, an apple-cheeked little old lady in horn-rimmed glasses, put in her appearance then and bustled around, wringing her hands and exclaiming what a terrible, terrible thing it was, that the Eshmonts seemed like such a nice young couple, too. She supervised the job of putting Betty Eshmont to bed in a guest room, shooing out her husband and Munson, ordering them to call a doctor immediately.
> Mr. Jeremy gave Munson the doctor’s number, showed him the phone in the dining room, and told him to make the call while he tried to dig up some dry clothes for Munson to put on. After he’d called the doc, Munson phoned the police about Eshmont’s death. They said they’d send somebody right out.
As he hung up, Munson heard the Jeremys’ doorbell ring. When the old man answered it, Munson heard an excited familiar voice. He was just starting out into the living room where Jeremy was talking to the new arrival when he heard his own name mentioned. He stopped in the doorway and listened, recognizing the voice. It was the man named Magraw, Eshmont’s cousin. He was saying:
“It must have been that guy, Munson, who did it. Lew brought him home from the office for dinner and he and Betty were playing up to each other all night. Lew was terribly jealous of his wife. They were having a big fight out in the kitchen when I got scared and left. I—”
Munson stepped out into the living room. He said, “What is all this, Magraw? Where did you disappear to?”
Magraw was a slightly built, dapperly dressed young man with thick, wavy yellow hair and a high-cheek-boned handsome face. His eyes popped and his long thin jaw fell when he saw Dan Munson.
Magraw stabbed a finger toward Munson. “That’s him, Mr. Jeremy. That’s the man who killed my cousin and his wife Betty! What’s he doing here? Listen, Munson, you aren’t going to get away with this!”
“Killed Betty?” Munson said. “What are you talking about?”
“You know damned well what I’m talking about, Munson,” Magraw snarled. “Go phone the police, Mr. Jeremy. We’ll take care of this guy. I come home and find my cousin Lew dead in the kitchen and Betty floatin’ around in the flooded cellar. What happened, Munson, after you killed Lew? Did you get afraid that Betty would tell on you? You had to get rid of her, too, didn’t you?”
Dan Munson stood there, water still trickling from his wet hair down into his shirt collar. He stood there with his legs aspraddle, a tall, rangy-shouldered man, and slowly his fists closed against his thighs. This was beginning to get him. He’d had enough of this business tonight. It was too much now, with Magraw standing there accusing him of murder.
It was then that the puzzling things Magraw had said began to penetrate and Munson saw what was wrong with the other man’s excited statements.
“Wait a minute,” Munson said. “You say Betty is over there in that flooded cellar? What makes you think that? Was she there before you left the house tonight?”
“Of course not,” Magraw said. “But when I came back a few minutes ago, I found Lew Eshmont in the kitchen, dead. Then I heard water flooding the cellar and looked down there. I—I saw Betty down there and—”
“You did?” Dan Munson’s lean, haggard-looking face tightened and a tiny muscle began to jump along his jaw line. “That’s peculiar, Magraw, because Betty isn’t over there in the cellar any more. She’s right here, in the Jeremys’ bedroom. She’s alive and the police are coming here, too, Magraw. I imagine she’ll have a lot of things to tell them about what went on over there tonight.”
Color washed out of Magraw’s face. His hands worked nervously at his sides. “Betty—she’s here?” he gasped. “She’s alive? But—but that’s impossible. She couldn’t be. She—”
“You should have made sure she was dead, there in the cellar, before you left,” Munson cut in. “You’ve just given yourself away, Mister. You took too much for granted. You figured Betty wouldn’t have a chance, lying there unconscious after you busted the rotten water pipe open. If you hadn’t been so cocksure that your whole plan had succeeded, you might still have gotten away with it and pinned it on me. Even after what you did to her, Betty still tried to cover up for you. She told me she fell down the cellar steps.”
Magraw opened his mouth several times, but no words came out. A corner of his mouth twitched and his green eyes took on a glassy hardness so that the light reflected from them as it does from a cat’s.
“Betty covered for me?” he finally managed.
“Yeah. She had to, you damned fool, because she’s as guilty as you are. The way I see it, you and Betty had just been waiting for a chance like my visit tonight afforded. You’ve been seeing each other secretly and tonight gave you a chance to knock off two birds with one stone. You would get rid of Eshmont, leaving you free for each other, and Betty would grab off a big hunk of insurance. Lew was an insurance salesman and they always carry heavy policies on themselves.”
Slowly, Dan Munson started toward Magraw. He said, “I’m going to fix you right now before the cops come. I don’t like being made the patsy, the fall guy in any murder rap like you cooked up tonight. I resent it.”
Magraw fell back before him. Suddenly his hand darted into his pocket and he yanked out a small-calibered automatic, lined the black hole of its muzzle onto Munson’s stomach.
“Stay away from me,” he snarled and started edging toward the door. “You haven’t got a damned thing on me, really. You won’t be able to prove anything.”
“I don’t know about that,” Munson answered. “I have an idea Betty will cook your goose for you, soon as she comes to and finds the whole thing’s come out. She’ll be ready to sing plenty loud. I imagine she’s plenty sore about you deciding at the last minute to double-cross her, kill her, too. What happened, Magraw? Did you suddenly get it figured that as Eshmont’s next of kin, if Betty was dead, too, you’d get that big hunk of insurance money?”
Just as Magraw was reaching a hand out toward the knob of the front door, footsteps pounded up onto the porch outside and the doorbell clanged loudly. Magraw spun about in panic at the sound. Dan Munson dived at him. He hit him around the knees in a perfect flying tackle and they crashed against the wall and went down. It took two cops and old man Jeremy to pull him off Magraw’s still figure…
It was broad, staring daylight when Dan Munson was released from headquarters, on bail, as a material witness. The little men were back again, kicking his head around, only he couldn’t actually see them this time. He could only feel them. Reaction from all the excitement and the hangover, in full glow now, made him feel like a walking version of a Dali horror painting. It didn’t help any, either, to think of facing Laura the way he looked, the way he felt.
Before he headed home, he stopped in a drugstore and bought a five-pound box of candy. At a florist’s, he got a dozen roses. But even thus armed, Dan Munson knew a man wasn’t too safe, going home to his wife after being out all night. Even with the whopping story he had to tell. She probably wouldn’t believe it, even when she read about it in the papers. Wives were like that. He got into a cab and settled back into the seat and hoped for the best. And let no man invite him home for dinner for a long, long time to come.
DAMON AND PYTHIAS AND DELILAH BROWN, by Rufus King
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 1958.
Within this subtropical dreamland of alcoholic divorcees, in this bar-studded playground of the suspicious rich, in this Florida of sunshine, palm trees, nag and dog-tracks, bars, jai alai, bolita, bookies, bars, surf-swept beaches, a moon, and bars, lived a young married lady with the first name of Delilah, her surname being Brown.
It happened that Delilah Brown was one of those special young women who crop up every now and again like Cleopatra or Circe or Pompadour or Gypsy Rose Lee, and who drive otherwise sensible men straight out of their wits.
In a case like hers mere looks do not matter, although Delilah had plenty, such as titian hair, deep-sea eyes, good bones and good bumps to go with them. It is the inner woman that counts, that certain ferrous quality, always in a state of magnetic flux, that can draw a man with even the trace of a nail in his head right into a condition of animal, mineral, and vegetable collapse.
The hunting ground through which Delilah scalped when off duty from her job as hostess in Grandmother Katy’s Kitchen was the seaboard to
wn of Halcyon, a homelike little community somewhat to the north of Miami. Apart from its seasonal glut of shrimp pink tourists, the place is inhabited largely by retired yankees, disillusioned motel owners, heat-baked construction workers, somewhat larcenous bar operators and an assortment of deep down Southern crackers.1
Well, Delilah was a cracker and her husband Pythias Brown was a cracker and Pythias’ construction-boss-and-best-friend Damon Lang was one too.
Although the boys’ friendship was on a common plateau of unshatterable fondness, the economic stature of Pythias and Damon were far apart. The Langs had prospered abundantly through several generations of turpentine stands, citrus groves, and eventually valuable real estate, leaving the resultant boodle in Damon Lang’s husky, well-molded hands—a provocative situation which more than frequently caused Delilah Brown to think, think turgidly.
If (she would turgidly think) I were married to Damon instead of to Pythias, I would have that kidney-bean-shaped swimming pool, that Jaguar and that 65-foot dream yacht, and I would have unlimited charge accounts at Burdines and at Jordan Marsh, instead of an installment rating at Sears Roebuck and a credit card with Texaco.
Damon, per se, never clearly entered the picture because men to Delilah were simply men—handy rungs on a ladder to an ultimate Monaco or an Aga Khan.
Now Delilah was not the type of girl who sits idly by and lets her dreams remain dreams. When she positively decided she wanted something she would put her well adjusted thinking cap on her titian hairdo and sort out all practical approaches to her goal. The basic solution to her immediate dream-compulsion was, naturally, for Pythias to be evaporated into outer space and for her ensuing state of pathetic widowhood to be rectified posthaste by a marriage with good, dependable, protective, and filthy rich Damon Lang.
What had sparked this lethal thought process into activity was the irritating announcement by Damon of his engagement to a svelte snowbird, a Miss Ethel Chalice, whose Westchester family wintered in Fort Lauderdale. Miss Chalice was generally considered by Delilah’s coterie to fall loosely within the category of a female meat-head, due to her absurd interest in puppet shows, ceramics, ballet, Aldous Huxley, and kindred paranoiac subjects.
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