by Isaac Asimov
When the painting was finished, I carried it to Mr. Thurston’s office and left it propped against a chair. Then, wrung dry by exhaustion and the passion of my work, I returned to my room and collapsed into unconsciousness.
I don’t know how much later it was or how it came about, but my next memory is of Mr. Thurston himself standing over me, shaking the portrait in my face and shouting at me.
“I am accustomed to being hounded by every inconsequential dauber in the city,” he said. “If you have been the most persistent, I reasoned that it must be because you were the least talented. When I found this — this atrocity — in my anteroom I saw that I was right.
“I do not make a practice of offering constructive criticism for every smear of paint I see. But since to do so in your case may save me the further annoyance of being exposed to your work, I shall make this exception. My critical opinion is: stop painting! If you must paint, study under the proper teachers and you may one day be capable of designing wallpaper. You will certainly never rise above that level.
“Use your eyes and whatever sense you may have and you will see the truth of what I say. Compare this — this portrait! — with its subject, for example. Do the frontal lobes of my brain really peep through a gap in my forehead? Do my eyes indeed dangle out of their sockets? Have I somehow missed seeing in my mirror what is apparently a third eye? Are the bones of my jaw as badly broken and dislocated as this... this execrable... this heinous... this shocking—”
Mr. Thurston went on. And on and on. But I was no longer capable of understanding what he said. The very core and fiber of my being had been torn apart and shredded, as by some mighty internal explosion. With excruciating pain and blinding light the truth of all that Mr. Thurston said burst upon me.
It was futile to try to express thoughts and emotions with abstract forms, as I had been doing. My pictures had to look like the objects they represented. It was really so simple...
It goes without saying that it was Mr. Thurston’s wise and generous criticism that made my paintings the success they are today. A reporter was with the policemen who broke open the door of my room and his newspaper printed photographs of Mr. Thurston lying beside his portrait. Other reporters, too, were kind in describing the likeness as “uncanny,” “startling,” “an incredible similarity.” Art dealers and collectors have been clamoring for more of my work ever since.
Unfortunately the light here is bad and I am kept too busy shuttling between the courtroom and the doctor’s examinations to continue my painting. So the portrait of Mr. Thurston will probably be my last painting. That’s the opinion of the lawyer assigned to me by the judge; he believes I have only another six weeks or two months left, and I’m too exhausted to complete a major work in that time.
But that’s all right. The portrait is my masterpiece.
Thank you, Mr. Thurston.
Funeral Music
by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
As he wrote the confession he could hear the laughter of children playing in a distant meadow.
Hydrangea bushes, deep blue and soft white, swayed in the light summer breeze outside the study windows. He bent over the steel typing table and tapped out the confession with slow precision, using only the middle finger of his right hand. From the stereo speakers mounted on wall brackets above the desk came the softly haunting strains of the Baudelin String Suite No. 2 as the words slowly filled the sheets of cream bond paper under the printed heading: H. JOSHUA HAWES.
“Before I take my life I must write this. Paul Baudelin’s second wife did not die by her own hand but by mine.
“I will not repeat at length what I established in my book, The Life and Music of Baudelin, and what has been confirmed for me each day of the seven years I have lived with the Master as his business manager, biographer, and shield against the blows of everyday existence. Before his first marriage he was simply one of many competent young composers in a milieu dominated by his betters — Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Poulenc, Milhaud.
“Then in 1947 he met Claudette and within hours he was savagely, passionately in love. And on their honeymoon in Spain that winter occurred that famous freak accident in contemporary music history — the sudden collapse of a decaying and condemned building as she happened to be walking along the street, so that within moments Mme. Claudette Baudelin was crushed beneath tons of rubble, and Baudelin, who had been so full of the joy of love, was desolate.
“It was the shadow of that lost love, snatched away by sudden blind chance, that filled, one might almost say obsessed, his music from that day, and lent to his compositions a fullness and poignancy, a sense of the merciless randomness of the universe. It is to the fate of Claudette that we owe the four great Symphonies, the second Suite for Strings, the cycle of Death Songs — all the major works of Baudelin’s second period which established him as the foremost French composer of the generation.
“And then last year he fell in love again. He was in New York City to conduct the Philharmonic in his Third Symphony. Elana Nassour was second violinist, and her musicianship was superb. It was her rendition of the sublimely difficult passage at the end of the lento movement that first stirred his heart, Baudelin told me. The night after the performances of the Symphony they slept in each other’s arms.
“Suddenly he was like a boy of eighteen again, this fifty-year-old titan of world music. The universe revolved around Elana and he was soaringly happy. The sense of unutterable loss that was the hallmark of his second period vanished. He almost ceased composing, and what little he wrote was no longer worth hearing. I couldn’t stand to see that happen. I loved his work too much.
“And so, four months after they were married — I allowed him that much time of happiness — I mixed an overdose of sleeping pills into the thick Turkish coffee she drank each night before bed.
“I was both careful and lucky. There has been much speculation whether her death was accident or suicide, but no suggestion of murder. And in the year since her death, out of his grief at the loss of her, Baudelin has begun to compose great work again. If she had lived, the Fifth Symphony and the tone poem La Mort de Dieu would never have been. That is my justification.
“But it is not enough. I have come to see that no work of art is worth a human life, not even a masterpiece by Baudelin. I have committed a great wrong which can be expiated in only one way. And so I shall go upstairs and take the revolver from my night table drawer and place the barrel in my mouth and squeeze the trigger.
“Baudelin, old friend and benefactor, do not curse my memory, I beg you.”
The string suite on the stereo came to an end, and the record player shut itself off with a sharp click. He tugged the third sheet of paper out of the typewriter — it began with the words “can be expiated” — and reread the confession with infinite care.
When he was satisfied he swiveled to the oak desk and placed the final sheet of cream bond on the blotter, above the last page of a signed copy of the management contract between Paul Baudelin and H.Joshua Hawes.
And then Baudelin picked up one of the felt-tipped pens with which Hawes customarily wrote, and boldly traced the signature of H.Joshua Hawes at the end of the suicide note, deliberately permitting variations, remembering that no two signatures by the same person are ever exactly the same.
When he compared the result with Hawes’s genuine signature, he gave a little gasp of delight: the forged signature, he was sure, would deceive an expert. He put the contract away in a drawer, slipped the protective lid over the typewriter, and fastened the sheets of the confession together with a paper clip. He then crossed the rooms of the spacious Connecticut farmhouse they had rented for the season.
The perfect murder, he reflected, is not so difficult after all; in fact it requires far less skill than the composition of a symphony. He sprang up the staircase two steps at a time and slipped into Hawes’s room without knocking.
His manager-biographer-buffer was sprawled in a wing chair with his hu
ge belly bulging beneath his scarlet dressing gown and his slippered feet resting on the edge of the bed. On the little teakwood table beside the chair there was a water tumbler half full of thick apricot brandy. A bright-jacketed detective novel lay open on Hawes’s lap.
Baudelin sauntered casually across the room until he was within one step of the night table where he knew Hawes kept his revolver.
“What’s up?” Hawes glanced up half irritated and spoke in a foggy mutter.
Touching only the end of the paperclip, not the papers themselves, Baudelin set the three sheets of the suicide note on top of the book on the other’s ample lap. “You might find this document more interesting than the detective story.”
As Hawes began reading, Baudelin backed toward the night table and eased the drawer open noiselessly, but kept his eyes fixed on Hawes as his fingers hunted for the weapon. First the musicologist’s mouth puckered in a whistle of amusement; then as he read more and more of the confession his face seemed to turn paste-white and his thick lips trembled in sudden terror. At the moment Hawes saw the forgery of his own signature on the last page, Baudelin snatched the revolver out of the drawer and pointed it at the other. Hawes’s mouth fell open in fright and disbelief.
“Wider, please.” Baudelin smiled bleakly and curled his finger around the cool metal of the trigger.
And suddenly H. Joshua Hawes began to roar with laughter. Great uncontrollable waves of mirth shook his huge frame and he rocked back and forth in the wing chair as if the revolver barrel were the most outrageously funny joke in the world. He groped blindly for the tumbler of apricot brandy, lifted the glass toward Baudelin like a salute, and gulped the drink down in a single swallow.
“Oh,” he mumbled, his face dripping with sweat. “What a scheme, what an absolute love of a scheme! You were right, you know. Much better than this novel.”
Baudelin was laughing too, but more quietly. He returned the revolver to the night table and shut the drawer tight. “I imitated your writing style well, no? Just the right touch of the pompous and the artificially dramatic.” He was delighted at the way Hawes bit down on his lower lip at his touch of criticism. “And not only your style did I capture, but your typing touch as well! You are a trained ten-finger typist, so to match your even touch on the keyboard I typed the entire confession with my one finger.”
“Clever of you,” Hawes admitted. “I missed that. But you did make one very bad mistake.” He folded his arms in a gesture of patronizing superiority.
Baudelin lifted his graying brows in disbelief. “And what might that be?”
“The note’s too damn long. No one would believe it was really written by someone who was about to kill himself. It rakes up too much past history. You wrote that confession as if there were a huge audience of readers out there who’d never heard of you or Claudette or Elana, so you had to tell them everything they needed to know to follow the story. That isn’t the way anyone would write a suicide note.”
The composer shook his head right and left. “I disagree with you most profoundly. You are a former music critic for a newspaper, so your instinct is always to write so that the great audience can follow what you are saying. Besides, my friend, your style is long-winded, even when you write about me.”
Hawes lifted himself out of the wing chair, crossed to Baudelin, and kissed him lightly on each cheek like a French dignitary awarding a medal. “I won’t argue it any further. Round Number Thirteen — this is the thirteenth round, isn’t it? — goes to you. I can afford to give you one round, I think. The score is now nine to four in my favor, if I’m not mistaken?”
“Nine to four,” Baudelin conceded. “But you were always a good manipulator, you know, while I am simply a guileless old naif who scribbles funny marks on music paper. Should I not have what you call a handicap?”
“You old fraud,” Hawes chuckled, “you’re as devious as I am any day and you know it, and just as adept at the game of plotting against me as I am at plotting against you. So no handicap. The first to take eleven rounds is the winner. I’ll make my move within our usual week’s time, and I warn you now that I plan to do something especially fiendish to repay you for this clever one.”
“As you please.” Baudelin shrugged. “Then I leave you to hatch your scheme in peace.” With two fingertips he retrieved the confession he had drafted and silently left the room.
He could not restrain his excitement as he descended the stairs. It had worked! The look on Hawes’s face as he read the confession had betrayed him. He had never seen such a look of terrified guilt in his life. It had been the sudden numbed panic of a person with a monstrous secret who without warning and beyond human expectation has been exposed. There was no other way of interpreting Hawes’s reaction.
True, he had recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. H.Joshua Hawes had murdered Elana in the manner and for the reason Baudelin had written in the confession. His face had given him away, as Baudelin had been praying it would when he set this trap. What was it Hamlet had said? “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king?”
He was not sure when he had begun to suspect — four months ago, perhaps five. He had never believed his adorable Elana could have killed herself, without explanation, without leaving a note or even a hint. And he could not accept that she had died by accident, for in that case he himself must be some kind of accursed creature, whom no woman could love without paying with her life. And so her death had to be murder, and the only person who lived with them, the only one who could have put the sleeping pills into her Turkish coffee, was Hawes.
Like an evil god Hawes had been manipulating Baudelin’s life for seven years, managing his business affairs, publishing interpretations of his music, taping their conversations for use in his books — in the maze of the musical milieu Hawes was the researcher, and Baudelin the experimental rat. He had wanted Baudelin to continue the doom-haunted works of the second period, and so Elana had to die. The only difference between the typed confession and reality was that, in fact, Hawes felt no remorse at all.
Baudelin knew he could prove none of this in a court of law, that there was no way he could make that stare of blubbering terror reappear on Hawes’s face for the benefit of a judge and jury. But he didn’t need a judge and jury for what he intended to do.
In the study, as sunset turned the distant hills violet and orange, he reread the confession. When he had reassured himself, he swiveled to the steel typewriter table and fed a fresh sheet of cream bond into the carriage and rewrote the third page.
“... can be expiated in only one way. And so I shall go to the liquor cabinet and pour myself a final snifter of apricot brandy, mixed with an overdose of sleeping pills. It is at least a fitting way to die.
“Baudelin, old friend and benefactor, do not curse my memory, I beg you.”
He forged Hawes’s signature again at the end of the confession which now was conveniently marked with Hawes’s fingerprints, and put the three sheets away in a desk drawer beneath a sheaf of sketches for a concerto. Then he took the original third sheet into the downstairs bathroom, tore the sheet into tiny bits, flushed them down the toilet, took the bottle of sleeping pills out of the medicine cabinet, brought it into the kitchen where he crushed the tablets to powder, and poured the powder into the decanter of apricot brandy. When he was finished he replaced each thing where he had found it, cleaned his work space carefully, and went back to the study to wait for the sounds of Hawes stumbling downstairs to refill his glass.
Somewhere in a distant meadow he could still hear the laughter of children playing.
Murder Will Out
by Edward Wellen
VICTIM: Here he comes, oozing crocodile tears. Could I but throw off this illness and grow pert once more, they would be real tears. Still, he will weep sincerely when he finds the vaults bare. I have spent all to buy future life. But now my heart is faint, my belly writhes, my hands clutch at the sheet as if it were the thread of life, and
all my members fall to trembling. My throat is choke-full of dust. This is the taste of death.
MURDERER: Now he dies. The sun will not sink below the horizon, I think, before he is gone and all falls to me. But I must show grief even as I rejoice in my heart. Wealth and mastery are now mine, and I will ram through great works and far outbuild him. Set your mind at rest, I keep telling myself: for the tomb will mask it. What I have done will remain forever hidden.
DETECTIVE: Ha! Then I’m right. The state of the mucous lining and a rough chemical analysis of the skin confirm my hunch. Later I’ll hike over to the lab for more conclusive tests. But I can tell you now how you met your end. Someone fed you arsenic. Unfortunately, it’s a bit late for an official autopsy report in your case, you poor old bundle of rags, you poor old mummy.
An Insignificant Crime
by Maxine O’Callaghan
When the shop bell rang, I looked up from the account books and groaned. I had enough trouble managing the old man lately without that woman coming around to ruin things completely.
He watched her grimly, his mouth thinned to a tight, self-righteous line — judge, jury, and executioner. I closed the books and hurried to the end of the counter.
“Father, please,” I said.
“Please, nothing. I meant what I said. If that woman steals something today, I’ll turn her over to the authorities.”
I kept my voice low, but his was rising in agitation. “Let’s go back into the office and talk,” I urged quietly. A glassed-in area lay directly behind the counter where it was possible to work and watch the aisles at the same time. He hung back stubbornly, but I coaxed him in and closed the door.