This was true. The details of dying, when Jackson applied them to himself, were an unwashed and horrible form of morbidity. That his mouth, for example, into which he could put such interesting things to eat, should be clamped shut by an undertaker. Such melancholy and unappetizing trivia would seize him whenever he was alone, and they gripped him on that Sunday afternoon of this year when a television series began its fall and winter season.
The telecast dealt with the theme of capital punishment, tracing the fascinating art from the days when a condemned felon was strapped down flat and a succession of lead blocks were arranged on his body until, in a state of helpless exasperation, he was crushed to death.
A variety of other methods followed—hanging, the guillotine, the gas chamber, and the now fashionable use of electricity to parboil the brain.
One detail of the broadcast impacted itself with the power of a revelation on Jackson’s mind: seven of our United States did not have the death penalty. The more convenient of these to Florida were Rhode Island and Maine, both of which meted out to a convicted murderer the comparatively agreeable severity of imprisonment for the balance of his natural life.
This enticingly left open to the convicted wretch the hopeful vista of ultimate parole, or the more immediate possibility of escape contrived through heavy money properly placed in bribes.
Why, Jackson wondered, did not a man who intended to commit a murder seize upon this inestimable advantage of eliminating the electric chair (the shadow of which had so far proved a deterrent, and an insurmountable one, to his own wishful plans) and arrange the killing in one of those seven enlightened states?
Well, why didn’t he—?
It attracted Jackson as the perfect form of life insurance.
“That broadcast,” Dr. Williamson said, “was the spark that started the powder train of Jackson’s conscienceless and foolishly complicated murder plot. He knew nothing whatever about the topography of Rhode Island or Maine, so he went about getting this information in the most reasonable way, straight from the horse’s mouth…
* * * *
The Chamber of Commerce building in Halcyon (a domesticated township lying on the Gold Coast of Florida, between the theatrical splendors of Miami Beach and the more coupon-clipping solidity of Fort Lauderdale) is located in a meager park and affords among its other admirable services a registration book for tourists who plan to settle during a short vacation or for the season. Their home town and state are listed, as well as their Halcyon address.
Jackson strolled there from the bank which his grandfather Jason had founded, after the old gentleman had cured his head cold and pyramided his 700 bucks, during the sucker-laden boom, into a fortune. Among the arrivals of the past couple of weeks Jackson found no one who was registered from Maine, but there was a Mr. Herkimer Smith from a place called Foster in Rhode Island. Mr. Smith listed his Halcyon residence as the Silver Lining Motel.
After banking hours Jackson called on Mr. Smith who was of retirement age, a widower, still friendless as far as Florida was concerned, and in such a state of homesick loneliness that he would have fervently welcomed the handclasp of even a door-to-door salesman.
“I noticed your name on the tourist register,” Jackson said with his electrifying smile, “and dropped by to say hello.”
“Now don’t tell me you’re from Rhode Island, too,” Smith said, warmed all through with delight.
“No, but I’ve a distant cousin who used to live in that town you come from—Foster—and I thought you might have known Charley. Charley Whipple.”
“Whipple?” Smith would have given a lot to say yes, not to have to disturb this connecting link with a companionable stranger, but he could not. “No, seems as though I don’t recollect any Whipples, and Foster’s population is only around two thousand, so it’s likely I’d have heard the name. Of course, I only lived there for the past five years.”
“That accounts for it,” Jackson said. “Charley left Foster eight or nine years ago and where he is now I haven’t the faintest idea. I hoped you might be able to give me a clue.”
But Charley or no Charley, the ice was broken, and two hours and three obscure taverns later Jackson had a photographic picture of the village of Foster—of how to get there and (of primary importance) the nearby waters.
The only sizable body of water, Smith told him, was Killingsby Pond which lay roughly twenty miles to the northwest of the village. “It’s named a pond,” Smith said, “but it’s really a lake—sort of long and narrow, and pretty big at that.”
Homicidal drownings, Jackson recalled from his research into an authoritative work, are rare, comprising about 0.4 percent of all homicides in New York City.
“Lonely sort of spot, Killingsby Pond,” Smith went on, “but beautiful. Lets a man be alone with nature.”
The circumstances of death are usually not ascertainable, for the chances are that the drowning occurred in the absence of eyewitnesses. Subsequent investigation may fail to elicit evidence which would justify classifying the drowning specifically as homicidal, suicidal, or accidental.
Unless, Jackson reasoned, specific indications were arranged to point strongly to one of the three. As in his proposed plan for the old blister’s suicide. “Not many people around?” he asked. “Campers, things like that?”
“No,” Smith said with the precise diction of six snorts and six beer chasers, “there are not. As I say, Killingsby Pond is a spot where a man can commune. When I think back on it, it makes me want to cry.”
Smith did cry, and Jackson returned him to the Silver Lining Motel where he felt reasonably assured Smith would wake up in the morning with a terrifying hangover, a wrecked stomach, and with any memories of the past moist evening a convenient blur.
“So we know,” Dr. Williamson said, signaling his manservant to bring in the next course, “that the first emotional block was removed—Jackson’s overpowering dread of death by the electric chair should he be caught and brought to justice. Naturally, he had no intention of being caught, but even if by the millionth chance he should be, the State of Rhode Island would not, could not take his life. And he had plenty of loot to try and bribe his escape out of prison. His defalcations, as you know, were considerable…”
* * * *
The Halcyon Bank and Trust is a handsome stone-faced building on the boulevard leading to the beach, and its lobby contains, among gracious pillars, potted palms and urns of deceitful plastic flowers, a portrait of the founder. This insult to the name of Art depicts Grandfather Jason as the lumberjack he had been, but stiltedly glacéd with the habiliments of wealth and position. It is a thorough deletion of basic character, even to what had been the rumpot color of the old gentleman’s powerful nose.
The assets of the bank are impressive, and Jackson in his sinecure as Assistant Manager in Charge of New Accounts had had little difficulty in absorbing into his own pockets (actually a pigskin suitcase stashed among stored luggage in his pseudo-Moorish homestead) some $230,000 in cash and negotiable securities.
“You must keep in mind,” Dr. Williamson said, “that Jackson is the last of the line. His mother died shortly following his birth, and about a year ago his father exited in a blaze of glory when his cruiser Saffron III blew up in Biscayne Bay. The popular fiction of great family wealth, incidentally, blew up with it because the estate after probate yielded mostly debts, and certainly not enough to keep young Jackson even in his Sulka ties. His father with consummate skill had squandered old Jason’s pile in a surreptitious carnival of gambling—in foreign casinos because of his position as president of the bank—as well as in a costly style of living and a succession of three jewel-happy mistresses, who subscribed wholeheartedly to the cliché that diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
Dr. Williamson paused to squeeze a shot of key lime onto the tender flesh of a stone crab’s claw. “If it seems to you that I am relating these odds and ends out of their chronological order,” he said, “you are quite right. Jackson
’s intention—his necessity, really—to murder old Parker was born several nights previously to the television broadcast I’ve just mentioned, and it happened like this…”
* * * *
The large staff of servants that had served the ancestral home were, after Saffron III ballooned in flame, a luxury of the past, and Jackson, who lived there in solitary bachelorhood, was sketchily taken care of by a minimum-wage Haitian couple who would drift in around eight in the morning and hustle out at five when Jackson either suppered at a tavern or in company of one of the few friends left him.
This night, when he got home after dining, he found Parker, known at the bank as “the old blister,” seated in a wicker chair on the porch and puffing away on his putrid pipe.
“Well, good evening, Mr. Parker.”
Parker made no effort toward lifting his delicate bones from the chair. In the moon-faded darkness his black, beady eyes gave out onyx glints under their canopy of lemon-gray hairs.
“Sit down, Jackson,” he said. “I’ve come to talk to you.”
Jackson experienced a complex wave of reactions at this gently mouthed but peremptory command. Dominant among them was a sense of alarm—faint but as insistent as a warning bell.
“Delighted that you did,” he said. “I’m always glad to see you.”
“Well, you won’t be this time, Jackson.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve got you dead to rights.”
“That has always struck me as an ambiguous expression,” Jackson said with barely contrived pleasantness. “I don’t know what it means in a literal sense.”
“In my sense, Jackson, it means I’ve uncovered the fact that you’ve been robbing the bank blind.”
One odd and, in an oblique way, admirable trait about Jackson was his habit of never side-stepping what he felt to be a demonstrable truth. Instead, he would not only face it but he would attack it head on. Now that he knew the worst—he brushed aside as stupid any doubts that Parker had the necessary proof of his larceny—he congealed into an efficient, clearheaded fighting machine to probe and pierce the core of his opponent’s weakness. For there was a weakness, otherwise Parker would have taken his knowledge directly to the board of directors instead of coming to Jackson himself. “What put you on?” he asked with honest curiosity.
Parker evidently got a shock of surprise at this certainly unexpected admission of Jackson’s guilt. He wasn’t prepared for it, having looked forward to an enjoyable hour of devious denials. “Your vacation,” he said, “last month.”
“What of it?”
“They had me fill in for you while you were gone.”
“I know they did. So what? All you had to do was sit on your rump and interview some tourist with a bundle every other day or so.”
Parker sighed with the effect of a long-pent disgust. “You never did give a damn about the Bulletins that come in now and then, did you?”
“What about them?”
“I refer specifically to the most recent Loss Prevention Bulletin issued by the Bank-Share Owners Advisory League. I take it you didn’t even bother to read it?”
“Good Lord, no.”
“A pity. To paraphrase the section that pertains to your case, one of the first recommendations made by the FBI to circumvent defaulters is that each bank employee have a two-week vacation every year.”
“They always do have.”
“Usually, yes, and while this might appear to be a purely humanitarian suggestion on the part of the FBI it is actually directed at a very basic problem.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I know you don’t—and didn’t. As the FBI so kindly pointed out, it is relatively easy for anyone to juggle his books and records without detection—if he continues to be the only one to handle them. But if someone else must take them over for a couple of weeks, any falsifications run an excellent chance of being found out.”
Jackson was coldly outraged at this uncalled for and, to him, presumptuous nosiness. “You had no legitimate reason for going back through my records. You’re not an auditor or an examiner.”
“The fact remains,” Parker said smugly, “that I did.”
“But why?”
“You.”
“Me? Just because I’m me?”
“Not entirely, and this will seem strange to you, Jackson, but I’ve been interested in you ever since your father’s death. Because, you see, the two of us are birds of a feather.”
This stumped Jackson by its very absurdity, until the simple basis for the comparison struck him—each, given the urgency, had larceny in his soul. He knew why he himself had stolen. He had no curiosity as to what Parker’s motive would have been had not he, Jackson, already amassed the loot. It was easy to appreciate Parker’s intention—to suppress his knowledge of the damning evidence and, instead, to blackmail Jackson for as much as the pressure would bear.
Jackson’s smile was different from his usual one. “How much do you want?” he asked.
* * * *
“Naturally,” Dr. Williamson said, “the one thing that Jackson needed at that instant was time. He was quite ready to buy it. He was prepared to accede to any demand Parker might make, no matter how drastic. To promise anything. Not that he had the remotest intention of keeping his word, but he could not at the moment determine any safe method for crushing this willowy vampire who was prepared to suck him dry, and who certainly held the equipment to do so.
“All Jackson was certain of was that he wanted to kill Parker, and the only thing that stopped him from braining the old goat on the spot was the devastating dread that possessed him of his own death—which would be an accomplished fact were he to be found guilty of Murder One in Florida.”
Dr. Williamson turned his attention to the wet and intricate process of paring and eating a mango. “You might care to know,” he said, wishing he had a bath towel, “what started Jackson off on his desperate looting. It was a girl, of course…”
* * * *
People occasionally and rather snobbishly point out that Florida’s Gold Coast Society can best be described by saying it isn’t. Not in the Palm Beach, Newport, or Bar Harbor sense of the meaning. Money apparently forms its basis—large industrial and trade fortunes which permit membership in all three of the ultra clubs.
Until his father was uncomfortably devoured by flames, Jackson had all his life had enough of a financial standing to be “accepted.” It was the life he had been brought up in and the only one he knew. He had missed the leavening process of war, knew little of the country outside of Florida, and his standards were from habit those of the set in which he moved.
Some time before the Saffron III disaster Jackson had become engaged to Miss Manessa Lou Stotes whose family were in rubber. He had thought it love and so, at the time, had Miss Stotes. But after the probate of his father’s will had made the ridiculousness of her fiancé’s inheritance a matter of public knowledge, Miss Stotes changed her sharp little mind.
Later, Jackson attempted to explain the original love inception to Dr. Williamson—the blinding effect Miss Stotes had first had on him. It was, he said, like all the five senses rolled together—not canceling, but augmenting each other into one intolerable blast of fierce pleasure. Actually, pain and pleasure. He had fumbled between the two words with an earnest intensity, as if they held the explanation. As if any juggling of words could hold a convincing explanation of love.
This triple shock—the breaking off of the engagement by Miss Stotes, the wiping out of easy affluence, and the burden of his fathers concealed debts—these blows were, to put it mildly, rough. Nothing but the inherited lumberjack stamina of Grandfather Jason helped Jackson from becoming a punch-drunk bum.
Two things alone seemed clear to him: he still had his job at the bank and he was off all women for life.
This blanket decision about the perfidy of womankind was, Dr. Williamson feels, the crucial factor in shoving Jackson into his fling at crime. Jackson considered quit
e naturally that Miss Stotes had acted callously, brutally, and unforgivably in chucking him the minute his financial rating dropped to that of an ordinary bank employee.
She had explained her stand in the tenderest and most sensible manner—“Honestly, darling, it simply never works out. Just look at the cases around you—Wally Hazelton practically has to crawl to Estelle for cigarette money. I certainly don’t intend to give up my little necessities like Biarritz and the yacht and a new Jag every year and what would you feel like, darling?”
Miss Stotes had herself supplied the answer: simply a sort of half-baked gigolo. Jackson’s courtly reaction to her kindly meant effort was a hot impulse to squeeze the pulp out of her once-beloved swanlike neck.
He did go silly for a time, giving up his membership in the three expensive clubs and eliminating all social contacts beyond unavoidable business encounters at the bank.
He did so because, as he explained to Dr. Williamson, if he continued with the usual social rounds of night-club and general lushings without carrying his own weight with the tabs, he would have felt akin to any of the numerous muscular young men who studded the beach set’s lavender fringe—the ones whose cachet-of-arrival was usually conventionalized by the fond gift of a star sapphire ring, a cute foreign convertible, and charge accounts on Lincoln Road.
Following this give-it-all-up interlude, Jackson cooled off to the extent of becoming steel cold. He clothed himself in the camouflage of being a fine, upstanding young banker who in spite of adversity could keep his tough chin up and could take it. He resumed contact with a few friends, accepting their casual hospitality, but never becoming overly indebted.
Then he really went to work on looting the bank.
“Jackson’s purpose,” Dr. Williamson conceded, “was quite understandable when you take into consideration the fact that his whole comfortable and happy concept of existence had suddenly been ripped from beneath him like a rug, and through absolutely no fault of his own. That’s the important point—he’d had no finger in it, had had no faintest indication in advance that a cataclysmic pratfall was coming. Of course it warped him and turned him bitter. It brought to the surface all the dormant bad traits that admittedly must have lain subconsciously in his character. As they lie in most of us, I’m afraid.”
The Third Mystery Page 10