by Ellery Queen
She knocked at the closed door, studying, during the annoying ten seconds she was kept waiting, the little white-lettered black label: Ronald Fenelli, Personnel Manager. Ronald indeed. Rocco more likely. Next thing you knew it would be Ronald Fennell. Just two more seconds and she would turn and go.
“Come in,” Fenelli said, opening the door. “Sit down, Miss Rounce.”
She thought afterward that she must have heard at the time every word he said to her, from his swift opening: “I have a most unpleasant duty to perform. I must tell you that effective immediately you are to be separated from the company. . .”
But, always, only faraway bits and pieces remained, like half-caught phrases carried by the wind from some distant hill. “. . .cutting back. . .long and honorable service. . .our executives putting themselves on a budget. . .after your position, naturally you wouldn’t want to consider. . .pension on the basis of early retirement, not the larger sum, but. . .”
In the middle of the floating phrases the crystal vision striking. New office like “a magnificent cave,” new secretary’s office like a conservatory, new secretary, shining and young, to match. . .
“. . .as of two weeks from today. . .of course, you may come in if you please and use the office—not Caudrey’s, it’s about to be torn apart, but I’m sure we can find you a cozy cubbyhole where you can use the phone and so on. . .on the other hand. . .embarrassment. . .Minnie-May can pack up everything of yours, bring it to your place. . .”
A tremor started deep inside Miss Rounce; then, to her horror, she began to shake. Her head shook. Her cheeks shook. Her voice shook. Her hands shook.
“But, what have I done? Twenty-five years—” It was not her voice at all.
Fenelli sighed and then smiled harshly.
“Don’t make it hard for me, Miss Rounce. This is off the record, and don’t quote me, and if you do I’ll deny it. You’re a woman of the world. Youth’s the story today. We must make way. We must make way. You’ve had your turn, now haven’t you? You said it yourself. Twenty-five years.”
He stood up, warily eyeing her, waiting, she knew, for some awful, some shaming explosion. One thing that kept her from it, in addition to a quality of iron in her, was the cold knowledge that he was thoroughly enjoying himself.
She stood up, turned, walked out of the office, and closed the door behind her.
Around a corner, from the door of the typing pool, she heard a high young voice cresting on a giggle, “The Rounce has been bounced!”
Shortly before eleven o’clock Miss Rounce, pale, erect, a poisonous, dangerous bag of pain and hatred, went out for the last time through the revolving doors of Hope & Hayes Pharmaceuticals.
She lost the next three days more or less completely out of her life. She slept a lot, day and night, like someone recovering from, or contracting, some dreadful disease. She supposed later that she must have eaten and drunk now and then: the teacup in the sink, the soup can at the bottom of the brown paper bag in the little yellow garbage can.
Occasionally the telephone rang, unanswered.
There had been flashes of all-too-coherent thought. Of course, that was why Mr. Caudrey had suddenly decided to go to Jamaica. He didn’t want to be around when his faithful secretary was dumped, canned, got rid of, fired. That was why he’d hardly looked at her when he said his nasty strange goodbye. He couldn’t bear to regard poor doomed Miss Rounce. And it must—bite savagely at the aching tooth—must have been he who said she must go. New offices, new image, new man, to fight back at 29-year-old Alec Mortimer, the hairy terrier snapping at the heels of his glossy English shoes.
Was it dreaming, was it waking, that the darkness had rushed into her mind? She would somehow fix Mr. Caudrey, Mr. President Philip Caudrey. She would fix Fenelli too, his willing, enjoying instrument. How?
On the morning of the fourth day she got out of her tossed damp bed. She showered, combed her tangled hair, dressed, and remade the bed with taut immaculate white sheets and a fresh white blanket and a starched white eyelet bedspread. Maidenly, maidenly, she thought. Why did I work so hard all those years? Why did I never sin?
She made herself do an almost impossibly hard thing. It was something she had to know, before—
She called Hope & Hayes and asked for Mabel Ross in Accounting, an old and trusted friend. She cut across Mabel’s where-have-you-been and I’ve-been-trying-to-reach-you.
“I can’t talk now, Mabel, I’m on my way out—but tell me, what’s my replacement like?”
Concerned, reluctant voice. “Oh, you know, the kind they stamp out by the thousands now. Long straight blonde hair. Ridiculous huge pink sunglasses. Legs like a—like a heron. I tell you, Maria, I’m in such a rage. I found out she’d been hired by him, Caudrey, last week and was just sort of waiting in the wings—”
“Call you soon,” Miss Rounce said, hanging up. Her face was expressionless; there could be no further hurt when you hit the bottom of pain.
She found herself responding to a schedule that someone else seemed to have thought out for her. She went out and bought groceries. She bundled up the laundry and left it outside her apartment door. She washed, dried, and put away the few cups and dishes in the kitchen. She made a pot of hot strong tea and took it to the typing table she kept set up in her bedroom.
Often, on weekends, she did typing chores for Mr. Caudrey. Articles for trade newspapers—for which she did all the research—personal letters he didn’t want to bother with, his address to the graduating class of Morningtown College. The machine on the table was new, bought only last month, an electric; it wouldn’t do to have a comma the least bit out of alignment in anything she typed for Mr. Caudrey. She hadn’t as yet, in fact, used the new machine. Good. Not that it could possibly come to that.
She closed her eyes in concentration, to collect the odds and ends. A half-heard telephone call to South Carolina, an order to the florist, an accidental glimpse of two figures ducking through the rain into his Mercedes. She hadn’t been jealous, when to her all-seeing eye, the odds and ends formed themselves into an unmistakable pattern; indeed, she felt a certain vicarious pleasure in the sheer brigandage of it, right under the nose of the Chairman of the Board, and his second wife at that, only married two years ago.
After pulling on a pair of thin white nylon gloves, she began typing. No formal salutation. Not in a letter like this.
“Dear Phillip (he always misspelled, on memos, Mr. Caudrey’s first name): I will make this brief and to the point. Dossiers, you know, are more or less my business and I have a complete one on you and Cecelia Hayes—or shall we call her Cissie? Do you, for instance, recall a weekend in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Bluebird Motel? Six dozen white roses delivered to her house the day after Holy Joe Hayes left for the conference in the Virgin Islands? And so on, friend, and so on.
“You’re feeling the hot breath of Mortimer and I’m feeling the same from Skillington, who questions some of my interviewing practices with young girls, quite unfairly, I may add. But as my tenure here may not be indefinite, I must make plans. I want from you, in exchange for my dossier, $50,000, which will be acceptable in five installments—cash, of course—the first to be placed in my mailbox at home no later than 6 o’clock on Monday. I’ll let you know the dates for the other payments. As you may or may not know, I start my vacation Monday and will not be at the office; but I do assure you that your offering will be picked up. As ever, Ronnie F.”
Miss Rounce did very well with the scrawled signature. She had had to learn to do Mr. Caudrey’s, too, so that no one could tell the difference, the time he’d suffered from a pinched nerve and a resulting wrist malfunction. She addressed the envelope to Mr. Phillip Caudrey, 108 Chancery Road, stamped it, put it in her handbag, and reached thirstily for her now half-warm tea.
She would drop the letter, after business hours on Friday, through the mail slot of the main post office. On examination it could be seen not to have been typed on Fenelli’s own machine in the offi
ce, but presumably on his typewriter at home. Not that it would come to that. Not if she knew Mr. Caudrey. The letter would be destroyed instantly. And then—
A man of powerful rages. And sudden, strong, unhesitating action.
In the meantime there was a little exploratory work to be done. It had been three years since she with most of the executive staff had gone to a large cocktail party at Fenelli’s. She got her compact from the parking lot at the rear of the apartment and drove through the pleasant Pennsylvania city-town to a near southern suburb, just now beginning to be developed.
At the bend of a lane lined on both sides with birches was Fenelli’s low white-brick ranch house, trim March-drab lawn in front, great shadowy groves of pine trees nodding in the wind on either side of the house and behind it. The lane angled at the house, turned left, and ambled past it to join a main road a quarter of a mile away.
Miss Rounce drove along it slowly, pleased with the anonymity of her sensible black car. That path, through the fir trees—glancing up it, she could see the wink of glass in a window, the edge of a low roof. A secret, silently pine-needled path.
Fenelli, she knew, kept no servants. A cleaning woman came in once a week—a woman he had got from Mabel Ross, and who enjoyed talking about one employer to another. There was no Mrs. Fenelli in the house among the pines; he was divorced. At the start of his vacation he would, if he followed past habit, spend Monday at home lazing, packing, and closing up the house, then leave on Tuesday morning for Vail. Fenelli was a dedicated skier.
His reservations were all in order for Tuesday, Miss Rounce learned, when she called to check with the airline.
Mr. Caudrey would be back on Sunday afternoon, late. He would have the house to himself; Mrs. Caudrey was not due back until Monday. He would change his clothes, pour a drink—call Cissie Hayes? Holy Joe Hayes had to go to Memphis for a weekend seminar he was addressing. Yes, call Cissie—then he would go leisurely through his mail.
I’d say between seven and eight, Miss Rounce thought. When it gets dark. . .
If Fenelli was out somewhere Sunday night, then Monday night.
Waiting for the three days to spend themselves, she felt odd, lightheaded. Torn from the routine of 25 years, she didn’t quite know what to do with her hands and feet and body. Looking in the mirror, she felt an uncertainty as to who she was. If she was not Maria Rounce, Mr. Caudrey’s invaluable executive secretary, the silently purring engine that ran his world, then who was she?
But now, on this thinly raining Sunday as darkness fell, this woman had plans, had things to do.
At six o’clock she made fresh coffee and put a vacuum container of it into her tote bag. She buttoned on a thick sweater under the lined all-weather black poplin coat with its enveloping hood. She pulled on zippered black rubber boots over comfortable shoes that would take a great deal of standing still in one place before her feet began to ache.
She wasn’t really in her car, driving cautiously through the rain; she was looking over Mr. Caudrey’s shoulder as he ripped open the white envelope—good thick paper, but nothing showy—and glanced at the opening: “Dear Phillip.” She saw the slow purple which always seemed to surge down, not up—down from the thick creamy swoop of hair over the square forehead; and the veins, beside his large brilliant blue eyes, beginning to raise themselves ropily.
She saw his hands, with the beautiful long, strong, square-tipped fingers, reaching into the drawer of the bedside table where he kept his Colt .38. A raincoat donned in savage haste, the hand slipping the gun into the pocket. The sound of the Mercedes starting up, so real and near that she looked with panic into the driving mirror.
Not yet—the envelope was still sealed, the gun in the drawer, the raincoat in the closet, the Mercedes in the garage. Nothing at all had happened yet.
And Fenelli—what would he be doing? Waxing his skis, perhaps, sitting by his fire with a drink at his elbow. (Well. . .you’ve had your turn, now haven’t you?) Thinking with relaxed anticipation about his two weeks in Colorado. She had been told that people felt freed, sprung, wonderful on vacation eve; she had always thought how difficult it was to get through the time away from her lovely job.
She approached Fenelli’s house from the opposite direction this time, turning off the main road to the west of it into the ambling lane. About an eighth of a mile from the house in the pines was a stark little cottage she had noted on Thursday, empty, a FOR rent OR sale sign standing crookedly on its disheveled treeless front lawn. She drove her car behind the cottage and walked the rest of the way down the lane, her eyes adjusting to the wet blue darkness.
Here was the path. She moved along it, branches brushing her softly, rain dripping off the edge of her hood. Lights on in the house. As well as she could remember, his living room was at this end, its side windows looking into the woods, its front ones facing down the lane. Yes, they had gone to the right at the party, to leave their coats in the bedroom. Too soon to move up close to the window.
After a time she began to feel numb all over, with the cold and wet, and the waiting, and the immobility of her position against the bole of a tree, hiding her under a fall of branches.
The woman inside her, the thinker, the planner, the doer, watched what happened at 7:18 while poor bereft Miss Rounce cowered in the rain, appalled.
The sound of the car coming up the lane, slowly, stopping, at a guess, halfway up. The barest rumor of footsteps. The front doorbell ringing. Fenelli’s windows were double-glassed and after he opened the door the two men faced each other, mouths moving, like a scene from a silent movie.
Mr. Caudrey, from a distance of about five feet, shot Fenelli. The other man stood for a moment, rocking a little back and forth as though he were considering some matter of grave importance. But his mouth was wide-open. Then he stumbled ungracefully backward and fell across a gold brocade armchair. He wore a dark suit and Miss Rounce saw no blood. The sound of the shot, muffled by the double-hung windows, seemed to linger in the pines.
Mr. Caudrey stood perfectly still, watching Fenelli. His face was a dangerous purpled red. Oh, do be careful, Mr. Caudrey. Go into the bathroom and take one of your pills.
He finally moved from his frozen stance. Brisk now, he felt Fenelli’s pulse, looked for a moment into the open eyes. He scooped up a small portable television set, removed the watch from the dead man’s wrist, then began ripping Fenelli’s handsome room apart. Desk drawers out, contents in a wild flurry to the floor. A pair of curtains at a front window wrenched down, to lie in a golden heap. He kicked up a corner of the Bokhara rug, took an ornate pansy-painted porcelain clock off the mantelpiece and smashed it on the hearth. Then he went to the front door and let himself out.
The sound of the car starting up again. Not his Mercedes, but the softer sound of Mrs. Caudrey’s Chrysler Imperial. Tiremarks—
An odd pride stirred in Miss Rounce. He had done it very well. Mrs. Caudrey wasn’t back yet and he could say, if they ever got that close to the matter, that someone had stolen her car while he and she were away. In any case, the police would probably conclude, from the swift staging of it, armed robbery, a scuffle, and yet another sad meaningless death. Money for drugs, maybe.
The newspapers, radio, and television concurred the next morning. Hope & Hayes executive struck down in his home by an unknown assailant. . .armed robbery in quiet Morningtown suburb, the third in four months. . .police questioning known addicts.
Miss Rounce went again to her typewriter. She had slept badly, tossing and crying out warnings in her sleep, but she awoke feeling cleansed and empty.
She addressed the letter to the Morningtown Chief of Police. In it she detailed the name, the time, and the circumstances. The Chrysler Imperial, the Colt .38—“As I understand it, you will be able to match the bullet with the marks in the barrel. Don’t look for fingerprints because he wore gloves—rough pigskin, but you might find a pigskin imprint here and there, it is a deeply marked leather. It was a wet night and I assume you ch
eck for footprints. He wore a pair of Blucher-style shoes, brown, with crepe rubber soles.” At the end of the letter she wrote, “I was walking in the woods when I passed close to the house and saw all this happen. Don’t trouble to contact me as I am leaving the state as soon as I mail this letter.” She typed, for a signature, the name of the only dog she had ever owned, years and years ago when she was young, an Irish terrier, Shandy.
She got into her car and mailed the letter at the main post office a little after noon. They would have it by tomorrow morning. She wanted the confrontation to be, not in the privacy of his house, but in the full glare of day, with people around, people to see and hear.
At ten o’clock on Monday morning her telephone rang. Mabel? To tell her what had happened? I can’t, I can’t. I must. With shrinking fingers she picked up the cold black plastic.
“Rouncey!” His voice was warm and strong and rich. He only called her that on special, superspecial occasions. “I couldn’t get you out of my head down there. My own invaluable, irreplaceable Rouncey.”
Liar, she thought. You’re frightened. You want the old, old security of Miss Rounce to guard you from all harm, as she always had.
But the chilled blood in her veins stirred and rioted.
“To hell with executive budgeting!” he said. “But in any case, the way things have worked out—you’ve heard about poor Fenelli?”
“Yes.”
“There’s the job for you. You’ll make an absolutely magnificent personnel head. I talked to Holy Joe first thing and he thinks it’s a great idea. Your tax bracket is going to take an almighty jump, but you can cope with that, Rouncey, right? And you’ll be here on the scene, so I can always turn to you for help when my blonde knucklehead—”
There was the sound over the telephone of a door opening, of voices, commotion.
“Oh, God, the police—” His voice became a sort of gasping wail. “Rouncey, Rouncey—”