Neither of us mentioned this. We both acted as though her part in the plan were as important as mine.
CHAPTER VIII
I WAS GONE from the motel over three hours. It was six P.M. when I returned. Hannah seemed neither suspicious nor impatient when I got back, though.
She merely laid aside the magazine she was reading, smiled and asked, “Get it fixed, dear?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was the fuel pump, all right. Let’s go find a place for dinner.”
As I had told Mavis, I had no trouble getting Hannah to go to bed early. She seemed to think it was a natural suggestion on a honeymoon. We were in bed by seven-thirty, though it was some time after that before she was willing to go to sleep. Nevertheless, by eight-fifteen she was snoring lustily.
I had no desire to sleep, even if I could have. I lay next to her without moving as the hours ticked by, my body so tense it ached. Every so often I checked the luminous dial of my wristwatch. The hands seemed to creep forward at a fraction of their usual pace.
An eternity passed before my watch told me it was midnight. It seemed as long again before the hands showed one A.M. I had meant to let Hannah sleep until two, but at 1:45 I couldn’t stand the wait any more. I switched on the bedlamp and shook her awake.
“What’s the matter?” she inquired sleepily.
“I’m all slept out,” I said. “It’s only two A.M., but we’ve been in bed six-and-a-half hours. Let’s get up and get on the road. We can make New Orleans for breakfast.”
Hannah stretched and yawned. “All right, honey,” she said agreeably.
Twenty minutes later we pulled away from the motel. I hoped Mavis would be in place in time, as we were a good quarter-hour ahead of the schedule I had set.
Apparently Mavis had allowed herself leeway. Our headlights picked up her car parked on the shoulder just where I had told her to be. The only other vehicle in sight at the moment was a semi-trailer coming toward us. I slowed until it zoomed past, then swung over on the shoulder to park a few yards behind the Ford.
“What’s the matter?” Hannah asked. “More car trouble?”
“Feels like a flat,” I said. “Take a look at the tires on your side while I check the others.”
Opening her door, she climbed out. I climbed out the other side, reached onto the floor in back and drew out the jack handle I had previously laid there. I walked around the rear of the car to Hannah’s side, holding the jack handle behind me.
It was a dark night, but I had left the dim lights on and Hannah was peering at the tires by their reflected glow.
“They look all right on this side,” she announced. Straightening up, she cast a curious glance at the Ford a few yards ahead of us, parked with its lights out. “Maybe that’s some more honeymooners,” she speculated.
I moved a step closer to her.
Then I paused. In the distance headlights appeared. They neared rapidly as the car zoomed toward us at high speed. I waited, my hand still behind my back.
Hannah turned to look at me just as the car drew abreast. In the sudden glare of light she saw the expression on my face.
“What’s the matter, Sam?” she asked in an alarmed voice.
The car passed, plunging us into relative darkness again. I brought my hand from behind my back and swung the jack handle with all my force.
I don’t think she even saw it coming. There was a dull, crunching sound and she dropped without a murmur.
Reaching through the front window, I switched off the dims. Still carrying the jack handle, I walked up to the car in front. Mavis’s pale face peered from behind the wheel. I dropped the bloody jack handle on the Ford’s rear floor.
“Get rid of that when you get back to Houston,” I said. “Drop it in the canal.”
She asked huskily, “Is it over?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Get out and help me get her back in the car. We have to work fast.”
Opening the door, she climbed out. Hannah’s body was dead weight, but together we managed to lift her back to a seated position in the front seat of the Plymouth. Slamming the door, I went around to the driver’s side and climbed under the wheel.
Two cars passed, one from either direction. I waited until their tail-lights were dim red spots in the distance. “Well, here goes,” I said. “Better go back to your car.”
As she headed back toward the Ford, I started the engine, switched on the headlights and pulled around her. There were no cars coming from either direction. Where the curve began just before the bridge, I slowed to five miles an hour and kept straight on instead of turning with the road. My front bumper mowed down a reflector rod as though it were a match stick. Unlatching the door on my side, I held onto the handle and steered with one hand. I increased the speed to fifteen, jolting across the rough terrain straight for the gully.
Within feet of its edge, I flung the door wide and hurled myself from the car in a flying dive. The car continued on, nosed over the bank and landed hood-first with a rending crash.
In the dark I misjudged my distance slightly. I landed on hands and knees on the very lip of the gully, one hand and one knee on solid ground, the other frantically scrabbling at air. After teetering for a moment, I lost my balance and rolled head-over-heels down the bank to stop with a jolt at the bottom.
Groggily, I climbed to my feet. I was scratched and bruised and covered with dirt, and both trouser legs were torn, but otherwise I seemed to be undamaged. Though unplanned, the roll down the side of the gully added a beautiful touch. It made me look much more like a man who had been thrown from a car during an accident.
The Plymouth rested at a sixty-degree angle, nose down. It was as completely wrecked as though it had run into a brick wall at high speed. The force of the fifteen-foot-fall had driven the engine clear back into the front seat. Every window was broken except the rear one, which had popped out in one piece and lay on the ground intact. A strong stench of gasoline filled the air.
Shaken from my fall, I instinctively reacted as though I had been in an unplanned accident. I reached in and switched off the ignition. Both headlights were smashed, of course, but the tail-lights still glowed and the dash-light was still on. By its light I could dimly make out Hannah’s body, oddly distorted and tightly imprisoned by mangled steel.
I didn’t examine her closely. I couldn’t. I had an urge to get away from there. Scrambling up the steep bank, I staggered over to the Ford, which Mavis had pulled forward to the broken reflector rod.
“Are you all right?” she asked fearfully.
“Just shaken up,” I said. “Get going. I’ll be phoning you in the morning to report the tragedy, and you’d better be at the house. Don’t forget to ditch that jack handle.”
“I won’t,” she said.
She put the car into drive and made a U-turn to head back toward Houston.
The first two cars I tried to flag down whizzed by without slowing. The third was a state trooper’s car. When I told the two officers in it that I’d had an accident and my wife was pinned in the car, they both hurried down into the gully.
After examining the wreck by flashlight, they decided it was both hopeless and useless to try to get Hannah out. It was going to take cutting torches. They reported the location of the wreck over their radio and sped me to the nearest town for medical attention.
There wasn’t the slightest suspicion about the accident on the part of the local police. They accepted at face value my story that I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I must have fallen asleep at the wheel. The tracks of the tires showing that I had plowed straight ahead instead of rounding the curve bore out my story. While it was apparent from the tracks that I hadn’t been traveling very fast, it was assumed that my foot had relaxed on the accelerator when I fell asleep, and the car had continued to roll along at reduced speed. My own minor injuries tended to make the whole thing more convincing. The general attitude seemed to be that it was a miracle I wasn’t killed too.
Later I didn’t
encounter any suspicion in Houston either, though I think there was some speculation about my motive in marrying Hannah. At the funeral I finally encountered the various employees of the gym, all of whom attended out of respect, and I could sense that they were sizing me up. Probably the consensus was that I had married Hannah for her money, but there was no indication that anyone suspected I had killed her in order to enjoy it by myself.
When after a decent interval I called on the young lawyer who had drawn up our wills, I sensed the same attitude in him. He seemed sincere enough in his expressions of sympathy, but I couldn’t help feeling that in the back of his mind he was trrinking that I had moved in on a good thing. I believe that if her death so soon after our marriage had come in any way except a car accident in which I also received minor injuries, he would have suspected foul play.
The very nature of the accident worked to my advantage. The tragedy of a bride dying on her honeymoon inclined people to sympathize with the surviving bridesgroom, even though they suspected it hadn’t been exactly a love match.
It was the insurance investigator who put my heart in my throat. The company sent its own man to Louisiana to talk to the police there, and later he came to Houston to interview me. He must have reported no suspicious circumstances, because nothing came of his investigation. But the very fact that an investigation was made was unnerving. If the company had decided to probe into my background, it could have been disastrous. As Samuel Plainfield was a fictitious name, they would have found no record of him in any of the places I claimed to have been. Which probably would have spurred a full-scale police investigation.
Probably only the fact that it was a paid-up policy forestalled a more thorough investigaton. Although I was a brand-new beneficiary, the policy itself had been in effect twenty years and had a cash-surrender value nearly as great as its face value. As paying it off represented no great loss to the insurance company, they probably felt more than a cursory investigation would be an unnecessary expense.
I hadn’t anticipated any insurance investigation at all, though, and it left a lasting impression. Ever afterward, I felt a healthy respect for insurance investigators and was extremely careful in my dealings with insurance companies.
Mavis and I lived quietly in the house for a month after the funeral. In due course the will was probated and everything was transferred into my name. I waited a week, then unobtrusively put both the house and the gym up for sale through a real estate agent, asking fifteen thousand for each. Two days later he phoned that he had a blanket offer of twenty-four thousand for both. I think his buyer was a front for the real estate man himself, and probably he later unloaded them at a sizeable profit, but I was eager to wind matters up and fade from town. I took the offer.
The insurance check arrived two days after we got the money for the house and gym. Meanwhile, the probate court had turned over the bonds and Hannah’s checking, account to me. I cashed the bonds and closed out the account.
On May first, just a few weeks short of a year since Mavis and I had met, we bought another car and left Houston with a stake of sixty-seven thousand dollars. Three thousand of it was the residue from previous scores. The rest was from Hannah.
Mavis sighed with relief as we crossed the city line out of Houston. “We really earned this one,” she said. “I think I’ve aged ten years in the past month.”
“You and me both,” I told her. “Our luck held all along the way. I get goose bumps when I think of how many things could have gone wrong.”
Mavis shivered. “I thought we were goners when that insurance man showed up.”
“We might have been goners if I hadn’t accidentally rolled into the gully,” I said. “It would have looked suspicious as the devil if I’d come through that wreck without even getting my hair mussed. We banked too much on luck. But at least we learned. Next time there won’t be any luck involved.”
“Next time? Why don’t we get out, Sam? We’ve got enough of a stake to start some legitimate business. Let’s not just pitch it away on high living.”
“We’ve got a new business,” I said. “A safe, reliable, steady one.”
“What?” she asked.
“Lonely-hearts,” I said. “There must be thousands of women like Hannah throughout the country. They advertise in dozens of magazines that accept lonely-heart ads. We’ll build up a sucker list from the ads. And next time we start running short of money, we’ll be all set to go. We’ll be able to pick and choose from a whole list of prospects.”
“You mean you plan to marry more women?” Mavis asked on a high note.
“Marry them and bury them. The way I’ve been working it out in my mind during the past month, it’ll be the safest racket in the world. Far safer than bunco dodges like the POW gag. Because the marks won’t be around to report to the police how they’ve been taken.”
Mavis said in a horrified voice, “You want us to go into the full-time business of murder, Sam? I thought it would be just this one time, because it was a special situation. We’ll get caught and be executed, Sam.”
I shook my head. “We won’t even be suspected, the way I plan to run it. Anyway, you don’t have to get excited. We won’t be going back to work for at least a year. Not with the stake we’ve got. How’d you like to make a European tour?”
CHAPTER IX
BECAUSE OF a bad run of luck at Monte Carlo, the money didn’t last a year. We were back in the States and at work again in six months.
We had learned a lot from the Houston job. The most important thing we had learned was to lower our sights and never again try for such a big score. The more money people leave when they die, the more speculation there is about their heirs. It was safer to pull small jobs regularly than to try to clean up with only an occasional big one. We concentrated on marks whose passing would leave only the faintest ripple of public comment.
The Houston job also taught us never again to try to operate on the mark’s home ground. In small towns, where we found safest to operate, the death of a newcomer excites not nearly as much interest as the death of a lifelong resident. So we avoided women with deep roots in their own communities. If they weren’t willing to move off with me to some new town after marriage, we by-passed them.
In the beginning we made some mistakes, of course. There was one harrowing experience where a curious brother traced a mark to a cemetery in Bismarck, Indiana, demanded a police investigation and stirred up a lot of newspaper speculation. We were living in another state under new names when the story appeared over the wire services, but reading about it gave us a jolt. We had left Bismarck only twenty-four hours before the brother appeared.
The experience taught us another lesson: to avoid women with close family ties.
As time passed, our procedure smoothed out until it was flawless. Eventually we were regularly pulling three jobs a year without exciting the slightest suspicion from anyone. Through experience and planning, we had entirely eliminated the element of luck from the racket.
In the summer of 1959, five years and three months after our meeting at the Beverly-Wilshire, Mavis and I were working a job in the little town of Tuscola.
The woman this time was a forty-year-old spinster who had been raised on an Iowa farm. Before I uprooted her and took her to Tuscola, she had never been out of the state of Iowa.
Mavis and I were using the same plan which had become our pattern. Ostensibly my wife Hazel and I were negotiating to buy the hardware business of an elderly merchant named Tom Benjamin, who wanted to retire. Mavis, as usual, was living with us as my sister. We had rented a house and were studying the community to see how we’d like to live in it permanently before closing the deal. We had been in town six weeks, and I was supposed to give Benjamin my decision in two more days.
The old hardware merchant had been devoting considerable time to trying to sell me on the town as a nice place to live. He had introduced me to practically every local group. The evening that Hazel had her fatal accident, he had a
rranged to take me to a school board meeting.
Luckily the sky had been overcast all that day, and it was quite dark by eight o’clock. Too dark for any neighbors to see me carry my burden across the back yard.
Old Tom Benjamin honked his horn out front promptly at eight-thirty. We had the scene all set, the lights off in the front room and only the light from the hall casting a dim glow to the front door. There was just enough light for Benjamin to be able to make out that a woman was waving good-by to me from the doorway without his being able to see who the woman was.
“I ought to be back about ten, Hazel,” I called back to Mavis in the doorway.
From his car old Tom Benjamin shouted, “How are you, Mrs. Henshaw?”
“Fine,” Mavis called back in an excellent imitation of Hazel’s voice. She waved to him, then called to me, “Mavis will be right out, Sam”
Instead of getting into the car, I leaned in the front window and said, “I told my sister we’d drop her at the railroad station on the way to the meeting. Is that all right?”
“Sure,” the old hardware merchant said. “Where’s Miss Henshaw going?”
“Up to Chicago to visit our folks for a few days.”
Then Mavis was coming down the steps wearing a light coat and carrying a small suitcase.
She had switched off the hall light, and now she called back to the completely dark doorway, “See you Friday, Hazel.”
At the railway station, she gave me a sisterly kiss on the cheek and made the same announcement again.
Tom Benjamin’s invitation for me to sit in and observe a school board meeting worked right in with my plans. I couldn’t have asked for a more reliable group of alibi witnesses.
The meeting was over by ten-fifteen, and Benjamin dropped me off in front of the house a quarter-hour later. At that time of night, the streets of Tuscola were deserted, but light still showed in most of the homes.
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