The Second Pulp Crime

by Mack Reynolds

  Delilah was not alarmed, she was simply spurred from a contemplative jog trot into a gallop. She was personally satisfied that the Chalice nuisance was little more than a resigned move on Damon’s part of accepting second-best. He was definitely the marrying male, and as pal Pythias had removed his one true passion (herself) from the market, a sensible ceremony with the Westchester drip was his best out. The wedding was scheduled for December, leaving Delilah a comfortable margin of three months for arranging her husband’s encore act to the Sputniks.

  How?

  Suffocation? Blunt force? Gunshot? Ice pick? Rat poison? Delilah considered them all, judicially chasing their drawbacks about in her clever young head while she seated and soothed and politely kidded the stuffed customers in Grandmother Katy’s Kitchen, or as she glowed magnetically while downing several cool ones at a neighborhood tavern, or especially while she and Pythias were involved in the (to her) shopworn gestures of love after the two-o’clock curfew had eased them away from the taps.

  It took about three weeks of speculative prospecting before she hit pay dirt, in what satisfied Delilah as a recipe for the perfect crime. Reasonably simple, enchantingly original—this it was—and leaving her grief-shocked self triumphantly in the clear.

  All she needed was a goat.

  Delilah pin-pointed this goat in the bulging, perspiration-moistened person of a Dr. Hillegas Dow. Dr. Dow was also a cracker—in fact, everyone concerned in this simple pastiche on homicide was a cracker except for the sheriffs deputy and the B.C.I. man who were shortly to be slapped with the case in the middle of a sopping wet and windy night. And, of course, the peripheral Ethel Chalice.

  Delilah knew Dr. Hillegas Dow both inside and out, being on liquid terms of gossiping intimacy with a Mabel Oestringer who held down the job of nurse-receptionist at Dr. Dow’s small clinic. Delilah knew him to be licensed in chiropody and as a naturopath, facts that apparently barred him from practicing in any of the hospitals, and that he had had to establish his private clinic in order to cash in. She was further happy in the conjecture that his professional ethics were as flaccid as a dying girdle and that his one-and-only god was the fast buck.

  Definitely, Dr. Dow appeared not to be what even his kindest colleague would call a dedicated man. He was reputed to be far more interested in the pattings and pinchings of the comely than in therapeutically patting the ill. He was undoubtedly one of the exceptions to the rule that can be found in any line of professional work.

  * * * *

  During a pre-dawn hour of the Wednesday-Thursday night of October 16th, while Pythias breathed deeply in guileless sleep, Delilah explored the pockets of his slacks and then arranged the first ingredient of her recipe for wishing him a bon voyage. Needless to say, it was not three cups of sifted flour.

  The weather forecast for Halcyon and vicinity (said the 6 o’clock A.M. newscaster) calls for fair skies and mild temperatures today and Friday…

  “Nuts,” said Delilah, snapping off the radio set and getting back into bed.

  “What did you say, sugar?” Pythias asked drowsily.

  “I said nuts.

  “Why?”

  “Because the man said clear weather.”

  “Good. Damon and I have that job to inspect over on Bricknel.”

  “You got about one hour more sleep coming. Turn over and take it.”

  * * * *

  Friday:

  The weather forecast for Halcyon and vicinity calls for party cloudy skies today with occasional showers late tonight and Saturday…

  “And just why only occasional?” Delilah said irritably, snapping off the set and getting back into bed.

  * * * *

  Sunday:

  The weather forecast for Halcyon and vicinity calls for cloudy skies and increasing showers over the weekend…

  “That’s better,” said Delilah.

  Sunday.

  …A low-pressure area in the Caribbean will cause an increase in the rainfall both today and Monday. Motorists are advised to exercise special caution while…

  Now that’s my boy, said Delilah, getting back into bed and landing a solid punch on the back of Pythias’ solid neck to wake him up.

  “How—when—what’s the idea, sugar?”

  “Do you know what day it is tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what?”

  “Monday. Look, Del, this is the one morning in the week when I can sleep—”

  “What else day is it besides Monday?”

  “Damon and I got that Harrison job to look over.”

  “And is that all that Monday October the twenty-first means to you?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  “Wake up and listen to me, you bleak catfish. Monday is my birthday.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Sure, why. Last year it was in November. Come to think of it, the year before last it was June.”

  “So this year it’s tomorrow.”

  “Del, honey, if it’s that leopard-spotted velvet stole you’re thinking about at Japeson’s—”

  “I am thinking about no leopard-spotted velvet stole at Japeson’s or at any other cut-rate trap. I am thinking that tomorrow is my day off from Grandmother Katy’s kind home for old mice, and that I want you and Damon to give me my yearly birthday party irregardless of the date.”

  “Okay, sugar. How about knocking it off now so I can get some sleep?

  “I want both you and Damon to take me for a charcoal broil at Tropical Joe’s. Damon is marrying that pixy potroast-special in six or seven weeks, and this may be our last good party like old times. Just the three of us all alone together. Just Damon, just you, and just me.

  “Look, babe, don’t choke it to death. I said yes. I’ll give a buzz if I can for one more time get back to sleep again.”

  And so with the few medical facts Delilah had gleaned from Mabel Oestringer, along with the rather less than flattering portraiture of Dr. Hillegas Dow, and with one pertinent bit of information she had casually lifted from Damon, and with the time now set for the launching, the deadly casserole was ready for the oven. Hot. 375 degrees.

  * * * *

  “Wella, wella, well,” said Tropical Joe with his celebrated originality as he watched Damon and Pythias and Delilah steer a homing-pigeon course from the wet doorway to the wet bar, “if it isn’t the Three Muscatels.”

  Delilah smiled magnetically back at Joe’s greeting and automatically counted the house: ten parboiled tourists, three deadpan crackers with their lady friends, and one stupefied ex-jockey with an Amazon lush. Not at all bad for a storm-flooded Monday night.

  She herded her mutually devoted escorts through some sets of martinis (Pythias), manhattans (Damon), old-fashioneds (herself) and then over to a table for charcoal-broiled steaks and beer.

  The long established pattern of their threesome get-togethers held, with Pythias and Damon absorbed in construction business chitchat, and Delilah occupied in stoking away the groceries and in exchanging the eye with any mobile individual in pants.

  Several hours and a good many squat ones later, Delilah rang the departure bell. The pattern continued to hold. As usual, she drove. As usual, Pythias lapsed into a state of negligible consciousness on the seat between herself and the painlessly un-consolidated Damon.

  Windshield wipers battled against a tropical downpour that blurred road visibility through a sheeting of water, and Delilah held the speed down to twenty-five while glissading over slick blacktop until, vague in the distance, a chaste neon sign announced the clinic of Dr. Hillegas Dow.

  It was a lonesome span of road, made melancholy on one side by scrub palmettos and on the other by a hyacinth-choked canal. She had scouted the route several times before tonight, and knew exactly the location of a tall Gru-gru palm tree with its thorn-spike
d trunk and large top of feather leaves that stood close by the entrance drive of the clinic.

  Perfectly cool in her head, despite a warm lower down flush from the evening’s liquid potpourri, Delilah swept a mental eye across this moment in which the show was to start. Her devoted consorts were both ripe for a good night’s sleep with their eyelids already comfortably composed, a single-edged safety razor blade was ready in her bag, and the rain-lashed highway fore and aft was empty of traffic.

  She took a skipper’s look at the looming Gru-gru palm tree, depressed the accelerator, swung the wheel, braced herself, and muttered, “Gold Coast, here I come!”

  The effects were reasonably spectacular. Pythias and Damon lunged in unison against the windshield, to their somewhat detriment, splintering it.

  Delilah, having prepared herself against impact, suffered little beyond a momentary loss of breath. Swiftly, she took the single-edged razor blade from her bag. Swiftly, she used it. Then she jumped out onto the clinic driveway and started a crescendo of screams.

  They were agreeably effective. Dr. Hillegas Dow emerged from the clinic and ran towards the screamer. He was followed by his nurse-receptionist, Miss Mabel Oestringer. By the time they reached the wrecked car, Damon had sufficiently recovered from shock to struggle out and take some befuddled steps over to Delilah, who adjusted herself about him warmly.

  Delilah went into her act. It was important that she establish her concern for Pythias, and even though her gears remained enmeshed with Damon, she cried desperately to Dr. Dow, “Help Pythias! He’s still in the car! He may be bleeding to death!”

  It is interesting to note that Damon promptly dropped Delilah like a hot potato, even while her physical contact was shooting through him with bolts of fire. He lunged for the car. And even though both young men were of equal tonnage and size, Damon managed under the press of anxiety to extricate Pythias and to carry him on a trot towards the clinic, crying “Snap into it, Doc! He’s bleeding like a stuck pig.”

  Dr. Dow snapped. What had initially struck him as being nothing more than an interesting motor accident was now translated into a source of cash, in what had been an otherwise cashless evening. First aid, he decided, then at least a week of expensive recuperation in the clinic.

  “Shall I phone for an ambulance?” Mabel Oestringer suggested as she trotted beside him.

  “Certainly not!” And Dr. Dow added, as a conscience-quieting clincher, “The man would be dead before an ambulance could possibly get here.”

  This made little sense to Mabel, but then little ever did beyond the delicious properties of vodka and her weekly take home pay of $42.60.

  Throughout this group-trot along the driveway, Delilah did not lose her impresario touch. She aligned herself beside Damon and established her loyalty as a wife by hysterically saying into Damon’s closer ear, “If Pythias dies I’ll kill myself. It was all because I didn’t control the skid. And I’d rather end it all than go on living with the horrible thought.”

  It worked to an extent, for Damon called time out from his deep anxiety over Pythias, fleetingly, to admire Delilah’s noble self-recrimination and noble anguish.

  “Forget it, Del,” he snapped soothingly, while hustling on with his bleeding-to-death burden. “That road was pure Vaseline. Even a bulldozer could skid on a night like this.”

  Within the clinic’s antiseptic walls, the command post fell to Dr. Dow, and in all truth the doctor was neither a complete dud nor a quack.

  He directed Damon to place Pythias on a surgical table, and was disturbingly aware that the situation was critical. Obviously, Pythias had lost and was losing a dangerous amount of blood from a wrist slash that had severed an artery. Odd, Dr. Dow thought abstractedly as he went about compressing the flow.

  Odd, in the sense of the wound’s location. The minor head and face lacerations were understandable, but unless Pythias had struck out in some witless moment of thrashing, and a shard of windshield glass had sliced the artery…

  “He must have an immediate transfusion—and I mean immediate.”

  “I’ll give it,” Damon said, adding with earnest selflessness, “He can have my last drop.”

  “Have you ever donated, Mr. Lang? Do you know your type?”

  “Yes. Type AB.”

  “You absolutely sure?

  Damon took out his wallet and leafed through its plastic compartments.

  “Here. Doc. Take a look.”

  “Oh, stop quibbling and give it to him!” Delilah cried. “His poor, dear skin looks like a slice of boiled liver.” Her agitated voice rose higher still. “Give him blood!”

  “Miss Oestringer—”

  “Yes, Doctor?

  “Please take Mrs. Brown into the waiting room and keep her there. Perhaps one of the yellow capsules.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  The clinic’s waiting room was principally a matter of chairs, ash-tray stands, and Mabel Oestringer’s desk. Mabel shook out a barbiturate.

  “Want this, lion, or a slug?”

  “Both,” Delilah said.

  Mabel produced vodka.

  “Join you,” she said, doing so, and then dialing the telephone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Sheriff’s office.”

  “Why?” Delilah’s voice held an edge.

  “Well, somebody has got to, hon,” Mabel said reasonably. “Anytime now, a patrol car will maybe spot the mix-up heap and will then ask why it was not reported and we’ll be in a snit—oh, hello? Sheriff’s office? Chuck? Well listen, honey boy, this is Mabel and…”

  Some twenty minutes later honey boy blew in, with his big fullback body creating the effect of a minor atmospheric disturbance in the quiet room.

  “Chuck, I want you should meet Mrs. Delilah Brown,” Mabel said.

  Chuck did so and suffered the usual male reaction upon first facing Delilah, of having been blasted by a pleasing booby trap. This over, he said to Mabel, “Bill is down investigating the wreck. What gives in here?”

  “Bill?” Mabel looked puzzled. “Isn’t Bill B.C.I.?”

  “He is. Happens Bill was in the office and losing his shirt at stud. He just came along for the ride. And now, ma’am, Mrs. Brown? Could I have just what happened?

  But Dr. Dow appeared and broke in upon Delilah’s Sarah Bernhardt interpretation of the dramatic night. Dr. Dow was both a bewildered and a badly shaken man.

  He said, “He’s dead.”

  It is fantastic how swiftly during a moment of absorbing triumph, disaster can strike and the tired old cliché about the cup that slips on its journey to the lip can get in its deadly licks.

  Never had Delilah so richly enjoyed the sweet and pitless fruits of success. Beneath her Academy performance of just-widowed grief, she was one utterly satisfied and contented cat. She had even managed to radiate through her quiet sobbing a few hot shafts at Bill, the Bureau of Criminal Identification man, who had finished with his examination of the wreck and for the past twenty minutes had been closeted with Chuck and Dr. Dow in the room where Pythias was lying in the long sleep.

  Twenty minutes?

  Remotely, the length of time—for what after all should have been a simple look-see—was beginning to overlap Delilah’s mood of total security. The thought seeped through her complacency: there is danger in that man. Something he knows. But how could he? And what? She worked on the problem, while Damon’s worthy right arm encircled and comforted her port side and Mabel bolstered up the starboard.

  “I feel so lost—so alone,” she sobbed.

  “You’ve got me, Del,” Damon said. “You’ve always got me.”

  “And me,” Mabel said.

  “Thank you, both of you,” Delilah sobbed simply, while in her coldly calculating thoughts the questions continued: What does that man know? From the wreck? From what is taking place in tha
t room in there right now?

  The razor blade?

  Scarcely. She had tossed it into the shrubbery, and on a storm-lashed night such as this…

  “Pythias was my very best friend,” Damon was saying in a voice charged with restrained emotion. “And you were everything to him, Del. It is my aim and my duty to shelter you as Pythias would shelter you, if—if he were still—”

  Damon’s honest baritone voice broke, and Delilah was engaged in the twin thoughts of how perfectly Damon was reacting according to plan and how silly were her unreasonable doubts when that B.C.I. man came back into the room with a purposeful stride.

  Bill carried his six foot two inches of whipcord intelligence and superlative B.C.I. training over to the trio.

  “With your permission, Mrs. Brown?” he said.

  Without waiting for the permission but just taking it for granted, Bill lifted Delilah’s bag from her lap and dumped out its contents onto the receptionist desk. His manner was so quietly assured, so officially confident of being within his legal rights (which he wasn’t, and knew it) that the trio of competent young adults watching him were momentarily changed into hypnotically transfixed children.

  He was about to pick up the wallet from among the trivia in Delilah’s bag when his attention was caught by a small cardboard guard. He held it up carefully by its edges.

  “You find these shields on new single-edged safety razor blades,” he said.

  Bill set it to one side back on the desk.

  “The blade itself will be looked for, he said, “in the shrubbery near the wreck, after sunup.”

  “Damon, sugar,” Delilah sobbed (she was still at it), snuggling closer with Damon’s arm, “what is the man talking about? Make him stop.”

  “Something in the nature of a razor blade was used to cut an artery in your husband’s left wrist, Mrs. Brown,” Bill said. “The location and nature of the wound rules out the probability of its coming from windshield glass.”