Rub-A-Dub-Dub

by Robert L. Fish

  “So what do they want from us?’' Briggs demanded.

  “Money,” Mr. Carruthers said simply. “I'm afraid we depleted their operating funds.” He finished his brandy, washed it down with a sip of champagne and came to his feet.

  “But surely you aren’t going to finance them with our money?” Simpson asked, peering up anxiously at the round face and innocent blue eyes of his friend.

  “Not without a struggle,” Mr. Carruthers assured him, and marched from the room.

  In his youth, admittedly many years before, Billy-boy Carruthers had earned a reputation of something of a ladies’ man, the reputation being relatively well deserved. The feminine form, therefore, was not a complete mystery to him. And, of course, on occasion one of the younger—or even older but livelier—members of the Mystery Authors Club would leave a dogeared copy of Playboy in the club reading room, and in this manner Billy-boy had been able to verify the basic lack of design changes over the years. Still, there were figures and shapes, and shapes and figures, and it did not take a Praxiteles to know that the one standing and beckoning from the half-open door of Stateroom B-67 was one of the better models.

  From her dress—or rather, lack of it—it was instantly apparent that Mrs. Carpenter might well contract pneumonia if left standing in the slight breeze from the drafty corridor, and for this reason Mr. Carruthers did not hesitate to enter and close the door behind him. Mazie Carpenter was wrapped in a diaphanous bit of transparent gauze that seemed to magnify her charms rather than disguise or hide them; her air of nervousness was not entirely put on, because it was some years since she and Max had been forced to use this particular approach, and she wasn’t quite sure how well she was up on her lines.

  “Mr. Carruthers,” she said in a hoarse whisper, glancing about as if to make sure they were not being observed by any stray people who might just be wandering through the cabin, “you must help me! I beg you! You are the only one who can!”

  “Oh, ah?”

  “Yes!” Her hand grasped his arm, drawing it close in a gesture of confidence, inadvertently jamming it against her ample bosom. “My husband is an animal—a beast! And he is furious! He blames me for our losses this morning! Look!”

  She drew back the sheer covering that protected her from the elements, exposing a bruised thigh. The large black-and-blue mark smelled suspiciously of lip rouge and mascara; the mascara had already begun to run. One split second was given for inspection and then the mark was instantly and modestly covered again. “And this!” A rosy tip-tilted breast appeared as if by magic, flaunting itself before his eyes, and was as quickly withdrawn from circulation, although not before a blotch of suntan powder had been exposed, simulating a trauma.

  “Oh, I say!” said Mr. Carruthers, intrigued by the terrain if not by the seriousness of the wounds. “He did that, Mrs. Carpenter?”

  “Call me Mazie.”

  “He did that, Mazie?”

  “I just got through saying so, didn’t I? I mean, he sure did! Max may be a little guy but he’s terrible when he’s in a temper. Hell hath no fury like—” She frowned; the words didn’t seem right. She gave it up. “I mean, like Max when he gets mad! He goes ape, I’m telling you. And I don’t know where to turn for protection! Only to you!”

  She wound her arms about her own body, grasping herself tightly as if to keep inviolate its purity from the bestial grasp of her horrible husband and inadvertently dragging Mr. Carruthers’ trapped hand into closer contact with her lusty charms.

  “Have you tried the Captain?” Mr. Carruthers asked politely, doing his best to keep his hand from exploring.

  “The Captain! That jerk!” Mrs. Carpenter snorted and then remembered her lines. “1 mean, poor Captain what’s-his-name is so wrapped up in his duties, protecting us from the terrors of the sea, that he has neither eyes nor ears for poor innocents such as I, whose pitiful pleas must perforce fall upon barren soil and waste to nothing. What would he know of a woman’s suffering at the hands of a sadistic monster? Only a man of the world such as yourself could possibly appreciate the tragedy of a mismatched marriage, the torture of being tied to a brute who enjoys—yes, enjoys—the . . . the . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I got it! Where was I? Oh, yes. Who enjoys the beating of a soft womanly body, the silent screams of her misery under the oppressive degradation of his inhuman brutality.” Mrs. Mazie Carpenter paused a moment to consider her words and then nodded, satisfied. “Yes, that’s it. Inhuman brutality.”

  For one frightening instant Billy-boy Carruthers had the icy-cold feeling that the garbage to which he had just been subjected might have come from his own pen in those early days when he had been under the influence of J. Hamilton Grumbach. Then, with relief, he finally recognized the lines as coming from J. Hamilton Grumbach himself. They were from Tillie, The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter; and where Mrs. Carpenter had ever managed to unearth a copy was something Mr. Carruthers would dearly have loved knowing. His hobby was collecting dime-novel originals, and Tillie and her sufferings with the big lamp—not to mention the sadistic assistant lighthouse keeper who took over when her father was ashore for supplies—had been out of print some sixty years.

  He fully intended to ask her, but at that moment the doorway from the bathroom sprang open with a jarring thud, and in the opening there appeared—as J. Hamilton Grumbach undoubtedly would have put it—none other than Mr. Max Carpenter in person!

  Mr. Carpenter seemed to be growling or muttering, and he had a frightful grimace upon his face. Whether he was unhappy at finding his wife in their bedroom in a state of near nudity with a stranger, or whether his unhappiness stemmed from more cogent springs, was, at the moment, relatively unimportant. What was quite evident was that the man was unhappy.

  “Eeeeeeeee!” Mrs. Carpenter screamed. It was a well-controlled scream, one that was calculated not to penetrate the walls of the stateroom. Apparently Mrs. Carpenter believed in keeping family problems within the family, other, of course, than from saviors such as Mr. Carruthers. She thrust herself behind the rotund, elderly man, pressing her softness against his, as if for protection. “Save me! Oh, save me! He intends me harm! He intends to kill me!”

  Mr. Carruthers frowned over his shoulder. “Are you sure?”

  “I just got through saying so, didn’t I?” Mrs. Carpenter asked peevishly. “Open your ears, stup—I mean, you don’t know him. He’s a beast, a devil!” Somehow, as if by magic, a pistol appeared in her hand, complete with silencer, undoubtedly taken from the dresser behind her. She thrust it into Mr. Carruthers’ hand and screamed in his ear, making him wince. “Save me! Don’t let him touch me!”

  It was true that Mr. Carpenter was advancing in small shuffling steps with a look on his face that boded ill for somebody. Despite his smallish stature there was something about the look on the man’s face at the moment that was truly terrifying. Mrs. Carpenter pushed Carruthers forward and screamed at him once again.

  “Use the gun! Don’t let him touch me! Use the gun!”

  “The gun?”

  “Yes, dammit! The gun! Oh, for Pete’s sake! Shoot him!”

  “Well, all right, if you think it absolutely necessary,” said Mr. Carruthers, and, raising the weapon, he pulled the trigger. . . .

  5

  Sir Isaac Newton one day, apparently having nothing better to do at the moment, delivered himself of the edict that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. The patent falseness of this ridiculous notion was never more clearly demonstrated than in the few moments following the discharge of the silenced pistol in Mr. Carruthers’ hand; for while the gun merely made a little “pop” and barely bucked at all, the reaction from Mr. Max Carpenter was certainly far from equal.

  At first his eyes widened in horror; he then grasped his stomach as if someone were trying to take it away from him. Following this he gasped, went backwards several staggering steps, pivoted to the right once and to the left twice, tripped over a footstool, tried to
break his fall by sliding down the side of the bed, did a series of knee jerks, rolled over a few times until his head was resting on the cool tile of the bathroom, and then began to bleed copiously from the corner of his mouth. A few sharp twists and a final spasm and he lay still at long last, the blood running in a slowly coagulating wavering line to a small floor drain placed in the middle of the bathroom by the ship’s constructors, possibly for this very purpose.

  There were several seconds of taut, dramatic silence. Then Mrs. Carpenter slowly unwound herself from Mr. Carruthers and went forward hesitantly, peering down at her husband’s remains. The sight was neither reassuring nor particularly appetizing. Her eyes came up, wide open, round with shock.

  “You—you killed him!” She took the pistol from his hand and hurriedly hid it beneath the cushion of an easy chair, after which she returned to the bathroom and closed the door, hiding the hideous sight. She grasped Mr. Carruthers by the arm. “You must flee!”

  “Flee?”

  “Beat it! Scram! Damn it, don’t you speak English?”

  Mr. Carruthers frowned at her.

  “But, I can’t leave you alone with a dead body! What will you ever do with him?”

  “Let me worry about that, huh? I’ll manage, somehow. You just get moving! I’ll be in touch with you later!”

  She had grasped his arm in a grip of steel and was propelling him toward the cabin door. Mr. Carruthers set his heels and leaned backwards; in this attitude Billy-boy’s fifteen stone made him a rather immovable object.

  “Madam! Or Mazie, rather. Do you consider me such a cad that I would leave an innocent woman in a predicament such as this?” How now, J. Hamilton Grumbach? he thought with satisfaction and brought his attention back to the problems of the moment. “Quite obviously, we must rid ourselves of the body.”

  “You get out of here and let me handle this my way,” said Mrs. Carpenter with evident irritation. She wished now she had enticed the tall, thin member of the bridge partnership into the cabin rather than this overweight ball of suet; not only did Mr. Simpson appear to be less dense, but he couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred forty pounds dripping wet, despite his immense height. At the very worst, she could have thrown him out of the stateroom by bodily force.

  Mr. Carruthers eyed her with the indulgence one retains for women in shock and walked to the bathroom door, twisting the knob. He thought he heard a bump inside; when he had the door open the body seemed to have moved itself. Rigor mortis, undoubtedly, Mr. Carruthers said to himself, and studied the limp form. He looked up.

  “I don’t suppose you happen to have a steamer trunk?”

  “A what?”

  “A steamer trunk. No, I suppose not. They’ve gone out of style. A pity.” He left the bathroom a moment for the stateroom, opening the closet and peering within. Outside of the fact that it was already filled with clothing, it might have done nicely, but obviously only for a short time. He frowned, considering longer-range possibilities. Mrs. Carpenter, feeling the affair was getting away from her, tried to bring it back to the original script.

  “You—you killed him!”

  Even under the trying circumstances that prevailed, Mr. Carruthers felt he could not permit this misuse of the English language; certainly not for the second time. Even J. Hamilton Grumbach, he was sure, would have objected.

  “No, madam,” he corrected. “I shot him. The bullet killed him.”

  He leaned over the body once again, studying the narrow shoulders, and then came erect, nodding.

  “Of course! The porthole!”

  He crossed the room to this most natural means of ridding staterooms of unwanted detritus, amazed at himself for not having thought of it before. He unscrewed the hinged bolts and pulled them away, tugging at the small window and swinging it wide. The bright sound and smell of the sea instantly filled the room.

  “We may, of course, have to break his shoulders to get him through,” he said in a slight aside and went back to the bathroom to gather up the body. A washcloth, properly dampened and applied, removed the excess of blood from the corpse’s lips; thus having protected his ecru suit from being stained, Mr. Carruthers bent down and, with a strength surprising in one his age and build, easily lifted the limp figure of Mr. Carpenter, carrying it to the porthole.

  During this entire scene Mrs. Carpenter had remained speechless, a rare situation for the lady, but at this point her paralyzed brain revived. She moved forward in a hurry, grabbing Mr. Carruthers by the arm just as he was raising Mr. Carpenter to the proper elevation for decanting.

  “Hey!” she said.

  “Yes?” Mr. Carruthers waited politely.

  “He—he—well, he might not be dead, yet.” It was weak and she knew it, but it was the best she could muster at the moment. J. Hamilton Grumbach, apparently, had left the matter of killing in a stateroom out of his works. In lighthouses he had no master, but shipboard cabins had never been his forte.

  “It’s really quite impossible to recover from a stomach wound of that nature, you know,” Mr. Carruthers said in a quiet matter-of-fact tone of voice. He shifted the body to a more comfortable position, ignoring the grunt he thought he might have heard, and carried on. “Saw dozens just like him back in ’16. Just suffered, poor chaps, but in the end . . .”

  He managed a shrug despite the weight in his arms and turned back to the porthole, prepared to complete his offering to Neptune.

  “But you can’t toss him in if he’s still alive,” cried Mrs. Carpenter, and added—rather inconsistently, Mr. Carruthers thought —“That would be murder!”

  “Much better to drown than go through the agony of a belly wound,” Mr. Carruthers assured her and started to feed the small body through the round opening. “Drowning isn’t all that bad, they say. Of course, if there happen to be sharks . . .”

  “Hey!” It was Mr. Max Carpenter, suddenly realizing the discussion was getting out of hand and feeling the cold blast of air on his face. He began to struggle.

  “There, there,” said Mr. Carruthers soothingly. “Just relax.” He smiled reassuringly at the pallid face staring at him incredulously from outside the porthole. He raised his voice to make sure his words would not be snatched by the breeze. “You’ve been shot in the stomach, and it’s an excruciatingly painful way to die. You’d do much better to let me get on with putting you in the sea.”

  “You have to be crazy,” Mr. Carpenter said in a whisper that carried the first edges of panic. “You have to be mad! Mazie! Don’t stand there! Make this maniac pull me in!”

  Mr. Carruthers shrugged and withdrew the body a bit, although he maintained a hold that would permit him to renew his mission at any moment. Max Carpenter squirmed fiercely.

  “Damn it! I haven’t been shot in the stomach! Damn it! I haven’t been shot at all!”

  “My, my! You mean I missed?”

  “Max!” cried Mrs. Carpenter warningly.

  “Oh, shut up,” Max said crossly and squirmed more. “You! Fat boy! Set me down!”

  “Of course!” Mr. Carruthers instantly placed the dapper little man back on his feet and bent over to examine any potential damage. True enough, the checkered vest covering the small torso remained inviolate, other than a tiny smudge navel high. Mr. Carruthers shook his head in dismay. “I really did miss, didn’t I? And at that range, too! Dear me! I shall have to have my eyes examined as soon as I get back home.” A sudden thought struck him and he paused, frowning at Mr. Carpenter with wonder. “But I’m sure I saw blood—unless I’m beginning to imagine things, as well. . . .”

  “I fainted and bit my lip,” Max Carpenter said with deep sarcasm. “Guns do that to me.” He checked his appearance and brushed away a few spots that had occurred in his deathbed scene. His eyes came up to Mr. Carruthers’ face. “Look, Buster—you’ve had your fun. Why don’t you clear out, huh? Go back to your pals at the bar and get stewed, huh? On our dough, yet!”

  Mrs. Carpenter was staring at the two men in profound puzz
lement. Things were happening which were not in the script and she could not fathom why. She would have sworn that Bernhardt (had she ever heard of her) could not have turned in a better performance. Her eyes fastened on her husband.

  “What do you mean, he’s had his fun?”

  “Just what I said. Old twinkle toes here was wise all the time,” Max said in deep disgust. He picked a flake of dried chicken blood from the corner of his mouth, studied it distastefully for a moment and flicked it away. He twisted to see if he had sprained anything during his gymnastics, decided he hadn’t and looked up broodingly. “He was having a big yak at our expense.” He straightened his trouser creases. “We should have known better. This character is probably the guy who invented the dodge in the first place!”

  “Not exactly,” said Mr. Carruthers and settled himself in the easy chair, smiling at his hosts. The pistol with the silencer under the pillow disturbed him and he fished it free, tossing it aside. “Still, if you don’t mind I should like to offer a bit of advice. The chicken bladder swindle may be fine on land—or, on the other hand, may not be, depending on many things—but aboard a ship it is fraught with danger. I mention this in purely friendly fashion. One of the major points in the scheme depends upon the so-called corpse not being seen around and about after the event. On board ship it’s rather hard to disappear, you know. And how would he get off the ship without going through Immigration? Or Customs?” He shook his head slowly and favored Max Carpenter with a pleasant smile. “You, my friend, are quite adept at handling a deck of cards. To be truthful, I envy you your skill. May I suggest you stay with cards? And leave these other dubious means of gaining a livelihood to those with the temperament for them?”

  “Thanks a heap,” Carpenter said in disgust. “Except you took us for our stake.”

  “Well,” Carruthers said, coming to his feet and preparing to terminate a pleasant and enjoyable afternoon, “it’s the rub of the green, you might say.” He considered the phrase a moment and chuckled. “Yes. I must remember that. The rub of the green. . . .”