But he could not down a wave of uneasiness when he exchanged a nod with the elevator man, then received a sudden, startled glance of recognition, quickly veiled and averted. The attendants usually spoke after one of Brown’s trips—and his suitcase showed he was just returning from one. Now they ascended in silence to the fourth floor.
He saw why, when he stepped out. The door of his apartment was open. Beyond it, he saw men obviously in authority, men in uniforms, men in plain clothes, even one man in white. Something unscheduled had occurred, and that alone spelled danger. But this was more than unusual—it was grim. Fright followed his first consternation, then panic, then dread.
Rigidly controlling himself, he walked through the small foyer of the apartment and halted in the middle of the living room. A uniformed police lieutenant looked at his suitcase, then at him. The lieutenant’s stare was sympathetic, but, at the same time, it openly and carefully studied his face. “Mr. Brown?” he asked.
“Yes. What’s the matter?”
“Bad news, I’m afraid. It’s your wife.” The lieutenant paused, letting this register. Brown gave no reaction, except to put down his suitcase, then urgently and fearfully wait to hear more. “I’m Lieutenant Storber. Your wife is dead.”
Brown gave a stunned, disbelieving echo. “Bernice dead? She can’t be. What happened?”
The lieutenant made indirect reply with another question. “Did your wife have any reason to commit suicide, Mr. Brown?”
“Suicide?” Brown’s astonishment was a spontaneous, total denial of the idea. “That’s impossible. It’s silly. Why, she just bought another… No, it’s out of the question.”
“She just bought another what, Mr. Brown?” the lieutenant asked him gently.
Brown answered mechanically, but his features began to come apart. “Another cookbook. Would a person who did that ever think about…? It was a thick one, too.”
“We know. We found it in the kitchen.”
Brown’s knees seemed to become unfastened, and the lieutenant helped him as he sagged into the nearest chair.
“I tell you, there must be a mistake,” he insisted weakly. “You haven’t investigated thoroughly enough. You’ll have to look around some more. When did it happen? How?”
The lieutenant sighed, took out a notebook. An interne emerged from an adjoining room, one used as a lounge and library. Not seeing Brown, he spoke to two men in plain clothes who were giving the living room a cursory inspection.
“D.O.A.,” said the interne. “It looks to me like a stiff dose of cyanide in a cocktail, probably a sidecar. That’s up to the medical examiner’s office. But I’d say she drank it quick, and death was practically instantaneous. At a guess, it must have been six or seven hours ago. Around noon.”
The interne went out, and the lieutenant sighed, flipped open the notebook, found a pencil.
“That’s about it, Mr. Brown.” The perfunctory words were filled with commiseration. “We just got here, ourselves, following a telephone call from some woman, probably a friend or neighbor we haven’t yet located, and that’s what we found. Your wife in the next room, with one empty glass—hers! Out in the kitchen, where she must have mixed it, cyanide in the bottle of brandy. No sign of a visitor. Nothing disturbed, apparently. She left no note, which is a little unusual. But you’d be surprised how often they don’t.”
“I don’t believe it,” Brown protested hotly. “She didn’t kill herself. She couldn’t. Never!”
The lieutenant sighed again, and his voice was soothing. “I know how you feel. But that’s the way it hits everybody, when it’s close to them. Because, if you realize a person is depressed and despondent, then something is done about it, more likely than not, and it never gets as far as this. There are other times a person gets into a suicidal frame of mind and doesn’t tell anybody. When that happens, naturally nobody believes it, at first.”
“I’ll never believe it,” said Brown firmly. “You’ve got to look into this. This is something else. It’s got to be.”
“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll dig into it,” the lieutenant assured him heartily, but without much personal conviction. “We won’t drop this until we’re completely satisfied. Now, where have you been this afternoon, Mr. Brown?”
Brown’s surprise was genuine. “Who—me?”
“Yes, you. We’ll begin with you. Where were you around twelve or one o’clock, for instance?”
“Having lunch in a restaurant in Philadelphia,” said Brown readily. He supplied the name of the place. “I was there for almost two hours. The waitress ought to remember me—she asked for a tip on the races, and I gave her Bold Magician. After that, I made several business calls at drugstores. My order-book is in the car downstairs. It shows where I stopped.”
The lieutenant was nodding, making only the briefest of notes. In spite of his shock and grief, Brown realized that the schedule to which he had adhered so rigidly was indeed paying off, in a serious emergency. He had never anticipated an emergency quite so drastic and dreadful. But now that it was upon him, the plan was there, a safeguard against the exposure of his illegal marriages, against even the possibility of suspicion in this present trouble.
Local newspapers, the next day, carried three-and four-paragraph stories on inside pages about the apparently impulsive, macabre suicide of Mrs. Robert D. Brown. There were pictures of the twenty-eight-year-old Bernice. One caption read: Beauty Drinks Death Cocktail. Stories mentioned Mr. Brown, who had not been at home, as a salesman traveling for Glamor-Glo Cosmetics.
Bernice had two older sisters, one of them married. These, with the brother-in-law, helped Brown with the few arrangements that had to be made. The brother-in-law confided in Brown, and Lieutenant Storber.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not surprised. Bernice was always moody and different. Most people wouldn’t notice, but there were little things gave her away, to anyone who had his eyes open.”
She was buried on the third day, at a quiet service. Brown came back to the apartment afterward, but there was nothing for him to do. He made arrangements to have the furniture stored and to terminate his lease. Then he packed his personal suitcase. It was the third day. He was due in Hartford that evening, at seven o’clock. Lucille would be expecting him—as Raymond A. Brown, salesman for a firm that manufactured smokers’ accessories.
Brown felt better after the change-over. Lucille might have her faults, but, tactfully handled and ignoring her sudden outbursts of temper, she could also be a wonderful tonic for the nerves. Bruised and shaken as his were, after the last three days, he needed an influence that would restore his normal poise and self-confidence.
Therefore it was strange, and more than frightening, when he arrived at his modest, two-story Hartford home that evening, to find a police prowl-car parked in front of it, along with others whose official look he knew too well. The newly familiar scene was only too familiar.
He felt that this was a motion picture he had seen before. He hadn’t liked it the first time, but now he was plunged, in a single moment, from uneasy disbelief to numb horror. This couldn’t be happening—not again—not to him. But it was happening. It didn’t help, for some reason it was only worse, much worse, that this time he knew all the lines by heart, including his own.
“Mr. Brown?”
“Yes. What’s the matter?”
“I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Mr. Brown. It’s your wife. I’m Lieutenant-Detective Todd. Your wife is dead.”
“Lucille? Dead? She can’t be. It’s impossible. It’s silly. This whole thing is silly. What happened?”
“Did your wife have any reason for taking her own life, Mr. Brown?”
“Lucille kill herself? No—absolutely not. That’s out of the question.” Brown’s repudiation, this time, came from more than spontaneous grief. There was black suspicion behind it. “There’s no chance she committed suicide, Lieutenant. None!”
The lieutenant’s sympathy was partly habit, but he showed a trace of real curiosity, as w
ell. “Why do you say that, Mr. Brown? How can you be so sure?”
Brown opened his mouth to tell him why. It could not be coincidence that two of his wives, unknown to each other, had died by their own hands within a matter of days. But he checked himself in time. The mere existence of his surplus marriages, if exposed, spelled ruin.
“It wouldn’t be like her,” he said lamely. Then he collected his shattered wits and marshaled the solid facts of his alibi.
They were good enough for Lieutenant-Detective Todd. The widower had been having lunch in a quiet restaurant, fifty miles away, at the hour Lucille drank a cocktail, an old-fashioned this time, loaded with cyanide. She had been alone in the house, in the downstairs bar. The bottle of liquor used in the drink also held cyanide.
An old, dusty tin of the substance had been found among the hand-wrought bracelets, brooches and costume novelties in which Lucille dabbled, as a hobby. Again, there was no note. But Lieutenant Todd told Brown that this happened more often than most people thought.
Three days later, the same iron-clad story satisfied Detective-Inspector Casey of the Boston police, who was inquiring into the bizarre suicide of Mrs. Reynold B. Brown, housewife, of that city. Though hard-boiled, Casey and his fellow-officers were deeply touched by the protests of the bereaved husband that Helen couldn’t, wouldn’t and didn’t knowingly drink that deadly old-fashioned. Again! Their investigation would be thorough, but did Brown have any cold facts to support his refusal to accept suicide as the obvious conclusion? Anything at all except his intuition?
Brown did, indeed, have one overwhelming fact, but he was not in any position to offer it. Some unknown party or parties had a profound grudge against him and his wives, and was methodically carrying it to the extreme limit. But who? Of more immediate importance, who would be next?
The answer to the last question was simplicity itself. When they buried Helen, and Brown tried to pull his tangled thoughts together, he was at least able to perform a problem in elementary arithmetic—subtraction, unfortunately. By ruthless annulment—he hated to call it murder, in an affair so personal—he had only one wife left, Marion, in Camden.
As to the method used in breaking up his happy homes, Brown had little doubt. Some inconspicuous person, a casual friend, even a complete stranger with some plausible tale, had in each case called upon the victim when she was alone. At some point, the hostess would suggest cocktails, and, when she had poured them, her attention must have been diverted long enough, or, perhaps, she had been decoyed from the room, while the fatal drink was prepared.
After that, it was easy. Thoroughly wash, then replace the second cocktail glass. Put some more cyanide in the already open bottle, then unobtrusively depart. To the police, each case was no mystery, because it stood alone. Only Brown knew there were three, that they were linked and what the link was. Only Brown and—a murderer.
But who had such a fanatical resentment against Brown, the happy home-builder, and his uncomplaining wives? It occurred to him that he might somehow have come to the notice of an avenging misogynist. Some crank who hated not only women but marriage, especially wholesale marriage. That, he thought, might well be it. Brown, personally, had few close friends. He had, as far as he knew, no enemies.
After Boston, his regular schedule called for a restful, relaxing two-day trip back to Camden and now, in spite of serious misgivings, he set out for the city on the Delaware. He was worried about Marion, among a lot of other problems. He had forgotten to phone her, immersed as he was in so many tragic details. He wondered if he should call her now, with a peremptory warning not to drink any cocktails with anybody, no matter who?
He decided against it. For one thing, Marion never drank cocktails. He had never known her to drink anything alcoholic, not even beer, and she ought to be invulnerable to the only technique the killer seemed to know.
For another thing, if he did phone, any strange injunctions of that sort would be awfully, awfully hard to explain.
4
At seven o’clock on the evening of the sixteenth, the day and the hour he was expected, Brown rolled to a stop at the curb before his house in Camden. It was with relief that he found room to do so. The street was curiously empty of police and other too-familiar official vehicles. Marion met and greeted him at the front door, just as he reached it.
“Richard, darling!” she said, with warmth.
Even as they kissed, he spoke without thinking, from habit. “Yes. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing—why should there be? Did you have a nice trip?”
Brown recollected himself almost with a start. He shook his head and, at the same time, nodded, achieving a circular motion that might mean a lot, but was intended to signify nothing. He went on into the living room and, for a moment, stood in the middle of it, looking around. It, too, seemed rather empty, unpopulated as it was by hard-eyed but sympathetic detectives.
Could it be that the nightmare was over? He wondered. Though the riddle might never be solved—and Brown realized all too well that an official solution would be most inconvenient—the devastation, at least, might have ended. A simple armistice, in fact, with no more casualties, might be the best, the most congenial finish possible, all around.
Brown’s eyes were caught by an array of pamphlets, magazines, circulars, brochures, he had never seen before, certainly not on the table of his own living room. But their titles told him with ghastly clarity what they were—Harmonious Hearts, Why Wait for a Mate?, Cupid’s Catalogue, The Widow’s Guide. Literature from a host of Lonely Hearts Clubs, that blight of amateurism upon a lofty profession. What were they doing here? Who put them there, in the first place?
He took a deep breath to bellow an enraged question, but changed his mind. He looked at Marion, who smiled brightly in return, as composed as ever. Tonight, however, she seemed even more composed. Suddenly, Richard did not want to hear the answer to his unspoken question. At least, he did not want to hear the right answer, and he was almost certain this was the answer she would give.
Let the little woman have her secret foibles, Brown decided. Silence was truly golden.
“Are you tired, Richard?” she asked. “Shall I mix us some cocktails?”
Us? Brown sagged into the nearest chair, missing the firm, encouraging support of Lieutenant Something-or-other, in Newark. But he managed a nod, even ventured a cautious query.
“Thanks, honey. Only I thought you don’t drink?”
Marion’s reply was forthright and cheery. “Oh, I do now. It came over me, maybe I’ve been missing something. So I forced myself to experiment with a cocktail here and there, just now and then, these last few days. And I found I enjoyed them. A little drink never hurt anyone, at least, not me. What would you like, an old-fashioned? A side-car?”
Brown was not aware that he had any preference, but Marion had already moved to perform the mixing. While the sound of ice-cubes, glasses and a serving tray clattered pleasantly from the kitchen, he thought hard about some of the phrases she had used. They were poorly chosen, no doubt about it.
Unless, of course, they were well-chosen, and intended to be. Had she meant, actually meant, a certain nerve-wracking interpretation that could be placed upon her words? An old-fashioned—or a side-car. These suggestions all too closely resembled bull’s-eyes.
He looked at the table, again read a couple of obscene titles. The Widow’s Guide. What widow? Why Wait for a Mate? This had a horribly impatient ring.
Brown remembered something suddenly and stood up. Marion emerged from the kitchen, bearing the tray with glasses and shaker as he entered it, like a sleep-walker, and crossed to the basement door. He went down the wooden steps, and looked.
Sure enough, the hole for the fuel tank was still there, unfilled. So was the bag of cement. But the new tank was gone. There was the door to Marion’s small but well-stocked darkroom. Didn’t photographers often use certain potent chemicals?
From upstairs, through the floor of the living room, h
e heard the muffled, steady rattle of ice in a shaker. After a full minute of thought, he turned around and went back up.
The drinks were poured and waiting, and the scene, to the eye alone, was a study in domestic peace. Marion sat in the center of the lounge, before a low stand holding their drinks. Opposite her was the large chair he favored, when at home in Camden.
“I made old-fashioneds,” said Marion, superfluously. “Try yours, Richard. Tell me if it’s just right.”
Just right for what? Still standing, Richard glanced once at the glass placed next to his chair, then at his packed suitcase, resting where he had left it beside the door.
“Tell me all about your trip,” Marion coaxed. “Don’t look so upset. After all, nothing terrible happened, did it? To you, I mean?”
The question sounded both leading, and commanding. He answered it. “No.”
“Then do sit down and stop worrying. You look positively haunted, like some fugitive from justice. As if the police might link you with a lot of old crimes, any minute, and then they’d be looking for you everywhere, year after year, no matter where you went, or how you were disguised. Relax, Richard. Sit down.”
He sat down, but he didn’t relax. The horrible picture she had painted was—or could be—far too logical.
“It’s that job of yours,” Marion declared, maternally. “Traveling, I mean. The Speedie Sandwich Company asks too much, expecting you to cover such a wide territory. I think you ought to tell them that, hereafter, you’ll confine yourself to just this area—our area. Don’t you think you should—Richard?”
Richard guessed, from the tone of her voice, that a nod was expected. He delivered it. But what he was actually thinking about was the tap of a cop’s hand on his shoulder, in Florida maybe, or even Alaska, arresting Raymond-Reynold-Robert Brown for the murder of three wives.
“And I’ll keep all your books and accounts for you,” Marion informed him, with relentless kindliness. “Those petty details can be a burden. Hereafter, you can let me do all the worrying about them.”
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