I declined another cup of coffee, and Gregg took me back into the foyer. That was where the box for the burglar alarm he'd mentioned was, on the wall to one side of the front door. It was a common type that could be turned on or off by a simple lever switch on the box, or from the outside by a key. But as Gregg had said, this kind of system isn't really foolproof; guard dogs, on the other hand, are when properly handled.
I said good-bye to Gregg and Sam Boy, and drove back into downtown St. Albans.
At seven-forty that night I called Gregg from a telephone booth in the Golden Mandarin Chinese restaurant. "How are you getting along with Sam Boy, Mr. Gregg?" I asked him.
"Beautifully," he answered. "What a marvelous animal."
"Isn't he? I was wondering, sir, if I could drop out to see you again one of these evenings? I've just picked up an excellent new book on dog handling and I thought you might enjoy reading it."
"That's good of you, Ferguson," he said. "Come by any night but tonight. My wife and I have a late dinner engagement with friends."
After we said good-byes, I went back to my table and sipped a final cup of tea and broke open my fortune cookie. Early preparations make for early rewards, the fortune said.
I drove around St. Albans for a while, killing time; then, at ten-thirty, I went to Melrose Place. When I saw that Gregg's house was dark I pulled the van into his driveway and parked in the shadows of one of the hedges. I went over and rang the bell a couple of times. Not a sound inside but the padding of a dog's paws coming to the door.
"Hi, Sam Boy," I whispered, and then I blew two short blasts on my silent dog whistle. Inside, as he had been so patiently trained to do—and as he had done so many times before, in a score of towns like St. Albans in eight different states—Sam Boy stood up on his hind legs, with his forepaws on the wall near the door, and used his teeth to flip the lever switch on the burglar alarm box to Off.
When I heard him come back to the door and bark once, I knew that he'd done his job. I hurried around the side of the house to the nearest window, used my glass cutter, and then reached in and opened the window and slid up the sash. Sam Boy was sitting on the floor inside; I leaned in and patted his head.
Yes, sir, I thought, you really can't beat a good, well-trained guard dog. Satisfaction guaranteed. Then I climbed over the sill and began teaching a valuable lesson in home security to another of On Guard's burglar-conscious customers . . .
MEMENTO MORI
There are murder weapons and there are murder weapons, but the thing used to bludgeon Philip Asher to death was the grisliest I'd seen in more than two decades on the police force.
It was a skull—a human skull.
Ed Crane and I stood staring down at what was left of it, lying splintered and gore-streaked to one side of the dead man. It had apparently cracked like an eggshell on the first or second blow, but that had been enough to shatter Asher's skull as well. Judging from the concavity of the wound, he had been struck with considerable force.
I pulled my gaze away and let it move over the room, a large masculine study. Well-used, leather-bound books covered two walls, and a third was adorned with what appeared to be primitive Mexican or Central American art and craftwork: pottery, statuary, wood carvings, weaponry. There were two teakwood desks arranged so that they faced each other—one large and ostentatious, the other small and functional—and several pieces of teak-and-leather furniture. It should have been a comfortable room, but for me it wasn't; there seemed to be a kind of cold, impersonal quality to it, despite the books and art.
Crane said, "If I wasn't seeing it for myself, I don't think I'd believe it."
"Yeah."
He rubbed at the bald spot on the crown of his head. "Well, I've had enough in here if you have."
"More than enough," I agreed.
We crossed to the double entrance doors and went into the hallway beyond. At its far end was a large living room containing more teakwood furniture and primitive art. One of the two patrolmen who had preceded us on the scene stood stoically beside a long sofa; the other officer was waiting outside for the arrival of the lab crew and the coroner. Sitting stiff-backed in middle of the sofa was Douglas Falconer—hands flat on his knees, eyes blinking myopically behind thick-lensed glasses. He was about forty, with a thin, chinless face and sparse sand-colored hair, dressed in slacks and a navy-blue shirt. He looked timid and harmless, but when he'd called headquarters a half hour earlier, he had confessed to the murder of Philip Asher. The dried stains on his right shirt sleeve and on the back of his right hand confirmed his guilt well enough.
All we knew about Falconer and Asher was that the deceased owned this house, an expensive Spanish-style villa in one of the city's finer residential areas; that Falconer had been his secretary; that no one else had been present at the time of the slaying; and that the crime had been committed, in Falconer's words, "during a moment of blind fury." We had no idea as to motive, and we hadn't been prepared at all for the nature of the murder weapon.
Falconer kept on blinking as Crane and I approached and stopped on either side of him, but his eyes did not seem to be seeing anything in the room. I thought maybe he'd gone into delayed shock, but when I said his name, his head jerked up and the eyes focused on me.
I said, "You want to tell us about it, Falconer?" We'd already apprised him of his rights, and he had waived his privilege of presence of counsel during questioning.
"I murdered Asher," he said. "I already told you that. At first I thought of trying to cover it up, make it look as though a burglar had done it. But I'm not a very good liar, even though I've had a lot of practice. Besides, I I. . . I don't much care what happens to me from now on."
"Why did you kill him?" Crane asked.
Falconer shook his head—not so much a refusal to answer as a reluctance or inability to put voice to the reason. We would get it out of him sooner or later, so there was no point in trying to force it.
I said, "Why the skull, Mr. Falconer? Where did you get a thing like that?"
He closed his eyes, popped them open again. "Asher kept it on the shelf behind his desk. He was sitting at the desk when I . . . when I did it."
"He kept a human skull in full view in his study?" Crane's tone was incredulous. "What the hell for?"
"He had a macabre sense of humor. He claimed to enjoy the reactions of visitors when they saw it. It was his memento mori, he said."
"His what?"
"Reminder of death," Falconer said.
"That sounds pretty morbid to me."
"Philip Asher was a fearless, cold-blooded man. Death never bothered him in the least. In one sense, it was his life; he devoted his life to the dead."
Crane and I exchanged glances. "You'd better explain that," I said.
"He was an anthropologist, quite a renowned one," Falconer said. "He published several books on the Mayan and Aztec races, and was in great demand as a lecturer and as a consultant to various university anthropological departments specializing in pre-Columbian studies."
"You were his full-time secretary, is that right?"
"Yes. I helped him with research, accompanied him on his expeditions to the Yucatan and other parts of Mexico and Central America, correlated his notes, typed his book manuscripts and business correspondence."
"How long did you work for him?"
"Eight years."
"Do you live here?"
"Yes. I have a room in the south wing."
"Does anyone else live in this house?"
"No. Asher never remarried after his wife left him several years ago. He had no close relatives."
Crane said, "Did you premeditate his death?"
"I didn't plan to kill him today, if that's what you mean."
"The two of you had an argument, then?"
"No, there wasn't any argument."
"Then what triggered this murderous rage of yours?" I asked.
He started to shake his head again, and then slumped backward bonelessly. His eye
s seemed to be looking again at something not in the room.
At length he said, "It was a . . . revelation."
"Revelation?"
A heavy sigh. "I received a letter yesterday from another anthropologist I'd met through Asher," he said, "asking me to become his personal secretary at a substantial increase in salary. I considered the offer, and this morning decided that I couldn't afford to turn it down. But when I talked to Asher about it, he refused to accept my resignation. He said he couldn't be certain of my continued silence if I were no longer in his employ or in his house. He ordered me to remain. He said he would take steps against me if I didn't . . ."
"Wait a minute," I said. "Your continued silence about what?"
"Something that happened six years ago."
"What something?"
He didn't speak again for several seconds. Then he swallowed and said, "The death of his wife and her lover at Asher's summer lodge on Lake Pontrain."
We stared at him. Crane said, "You told us a couple of minutes ago that his wife had left him, not that she was dead."
"Did I? Yes, I suppose I did. I've told the same lie, in exactly the same way, so many times that it's an automatic response. Mildred and her lover died at Lake Pontrain; that is the truth."
"All right—how did they die?"
"By asphyxiation," he said. "It happened on a Saturday in September, six years ago. Early that morning Asher decided on the spur of the moment to spend a few days at the lodge; the book he was writing at the time was going badly and he thought a change of scenery might help. He drove up alone at eight; I had an errand to do and then followed in my own car about an hour later. When I reached the lodge I found Asher inside with the bodies. They were in bed—Mildred, who was supposed to have been visiting a friend in Los Angeles, and the man. I'd never seen him before; I found out later he was an itinerant musician." Pause. "They were both naked," he said.
"What did Asher say when you walked in?"
"That he'd found them just as they were. The lodge had been full of gas when he arrived, he said, and he'd aired it out. A tragic accident caused by a faulty gas heater in the bedroom."
"Did you believe that?" I asked.
"Yes. I was stunned. I'd always thought Mildred above such a thing as infidelity. She was beautiful, yes—but always so quiet, so dignified . . ."
"Was Asher also stunned?"
"He seemed to be," Falconer said. "But he was quite calm. When I suggested we contact the authorities he wouldn't hear of it. Think of the scandal, he said—the possible damage to his reputation and his career. I asked what else we could do. I wasn't prepared for his answer."
"Which was?"
"He suggested in that cold, calculating way of his that we dispose of the bodies, bury them somewhere at the lake. Then we could concoct a story to explain Mildred's disappearance, say that she had moved out and gone back to Boston, where she was born. He insisted no one would question this explanation, because he and Mildred had few close friends and because of his reputation. As it happened, he was right."
"So you went along with this cover-up?"
"What choice did I have? I'm not a forceful man, and at the time I respected Asher and his judgment. And as I told you, I was stunned. Yes, I went along with it. I helped Asher transfer the bodies to a promontory a mile away, where we buried them beneath piles of rocks."
Crane said, "So for six years you kept this secret—until today, until something happened this morning."
"Yes."
"These 'steps' Asher told you he'd take if you tried to leave his employ—were they threats of bodily harm?"
Falconer nodded. "He said he would kill me."
"Pretty drastic just to insure your silence about two accidental deaths six years ago."
"Yes. I said the same thing to him."
"And?"
"He told me the truth," Falconer said.
"That his wife and her lover didn't die by accident? That he'd murdered them?"
"That's right. He found them in bed together, very much alive; his massive ego had been wounded, the sin was unforgivable and had to be punished—that was how Philip Asher was. He knocked them both out with his fists. I suppose I would have seen evidence of that if I'd looked closely at the bodies, but in my distraught state I noticed nothing. Then he suffocated them with a pillow. I arrived before he could remove the bodies by himself, and so he made up the story about the faulty gas heater. If I hadn't believed it, if I hadn't helped him, he would have killed me too, then and there."
"Did he tell you that too?"
"Yes."
"So when you found out you'd been working for a murderer the past six years, that you'd helped cover up a cold-blooded double homicide, you lost control and picked up the skull and bashed his head in with it."
"No," Falconer said. "No, not exactly. I was sickened by his confession and by my part in the whole ugly affair; I loathed him and I wanted to strike back at him. But I'm not a violent man. It was his second revelation that made me do what I did."
"What was it, this second revelation?"
"Something else he'd done, a year after the murders. I don't know why he told me about it, except that he was quite mad. A mad ghoul." Falconer laughed mirthlessly. "Mad ghoul. It sounds funny, doesn't it? Like an old Bela Lugosi film. But that's just what Asher was, always poking around among the dead."
"Mr. Falconer—"
He let out a shuddering breath. "Asher's memento mori didn't come from Mexico, as I always believed; it came from that promontory at Lake Pontrain. I killed him, using the one fitting weapon for his destruction, when he told me I'd been working in that study of his all these years, all these years, with the skull of the only woman I ever loved grinning at me over his shoulder . . ."
A LITTLE LARCENY
Truax smiled at Margo London and me across his desk. He was short and round, with a receding hairline and soft smooth jowls; he reminded me of a large, pink, mostly hairless panda bear. "You brought the money, I trust?"
I lifted the briefcase from beside my chair and set it in front of him. "Seventy-five thousand dollars."
"Very good, Bob," he said. "Shall we sign the contracts?" I nodded, but Margo said, "I still don't see why we have to pay cash. Why couldn't we just give you a bank draft?"
"I explained that, Mrs. London," Truax said patiently. "But let me go over it again, in simpler terms. Dealings in land speculation these days are, by necessity, complicated and difficult. Sometimes the strict letter of the law must be, ah, shall we say slightly revised, in order to assure a satisfactory outcome for all concerned."
"In other words," Margo said, "you have to pay people off under the table."
Truax chose to ignore that. "Now in this case," he said, "the undeveloped property that Consolidated Development Corporation will soon purchase is valuable only as second-growth timberland. It is owned by a small independent logging company that is willing to part with it for five thousand dollars an acre."
"Because they don't know the state is planning to build a freeway through the area," I. said.
"Correct. It so happens that a close friend of mine is an official with the State Highway Commission. He came to me recently with a proposition: He would divulge certain classified information—in fact, the secret freeway project—in exchange for a one-fifth share in the Consolidated Development Corporation, which I would set up. This share was to be purchased for him in cash by the other four stockholders, each contributing twenty thousand dollars of their total purchase price of seventy-five thousand, so as to prevent any link between himself and the corporation. To put it another way, corporation documents show a total of four stockholders, when in reality there are five; the official's stock will be held in trust. Do you see now?"
"Not really," Margo said. "Oh, I understand why twenty thousand has to be paid in cash, but why the other fifty-five thousand?"
"I'll try to simplify that, too. The logging company wants to avoid a large capital-gains tax, so they've a
greed to sell Consolidated the land at a much lower official price than its actual market value. We in turn will give them the difference in cash." He smiled disarmingly. "As you say, Mrs. London, 'under the table.' Therefore, the logging company pays less tax and Consolidated outlays less for the property."
Margo was silent for a time. Then she said, "I see." Finally.
"Fine. Any more questions, then?"
"I don't have any," I said. "Margo?"
"No, I suppose not."
Truax beamed at us again. "Then shall we sign the papers and complete the transaction?"
We signed them. Truax countersigned, gave us our copy of the agreement, put the others away in a portfolio. He made no move toward the briefcase.
Margo asked him, "Aren't you going to count the money?"
"No, that's not necessary. I trust you and Bob implicitly, Mrs. London."
"You don't know us very well," she said. "We don't know you very well, for that matter. Robert only met you a month ago.
"Indeed. But trust is vital in this sort of business dealing, when the eventual rewards are so great. Don't you agree?"
"Mm. You're sure we won't have to wait more than two years?"
"Not absolutely positive, no. It might take as many as three before you begin to reap the profits. No longer than three, though; I think I can guarantee that."
The light of greed glittered in Margo's eyes again. "Several million dollars for each of the stockholders, you said?"
"Exactly. Five million, minimum. Perhaps as much as ten."
We shook hands all around, and Margo and I left Truax's offices and rode the elevator down to the lobby. As we left the building, Margo said, "I'm still not convinced we've done the right thing, Robert."
"Why not?"
"Seventy-five thousand dollars is all the money I . . . we have in the world. After all, Aunt Lucinda intended it for our golden years—a retirement home like the one she had in Sun-crest Acres."
"There isn't any reason we can't still buy a retirement home in Suncrest Acres," I said. "In fact, we can probably afford to buy Suncrest Acres itself with ten million dollars. Think about that."
Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories Page 15