The Third Mystery

by James Holding

  Dr. Williamson thought that coffee would be more agreeable in the patio and told his manservant so.

  “What Jackson had in mind,” he expanded, “was a new identity, a new life, and money enough to live comfortably for the extent of it. An absolute divorce from everyone and everything he had ever known, and a swift escape from the intolerable situation into which he felt that fate had plunged him. It’s possible that in his youthful fashion he had a naive and romantic idea of a tropical islet where he would be born afresh to take up whatever work or hobby might appeal to him, when the boredom of doing nothing began to irritate. And perhaps he might have done just that—if Parker hadn’t thrown in his monkey wrench and thus elected himself to the role of an essential corpse…”

  * * * *

  For the couple of days that intervened between Parker’s ultimatum (one half of the loot as payment for his silence) and the television broadcast on capital punishment, Jackson blanked himself within a mental wall where every thought revolved cold-bloodedly and with intensive concentration on the safe accomplishment of murder.

  He had been able to convince Parker that the securities and cash had been carefully concealed by him “outside of Florida” during his recent vacation. He refused to disclose the location of the cache, but agreed to meet Parker’s demands as soon as he would have completed arrangements for his own disappearance.

  This had appeared satisfactory to Parker because, perhaps, it had to be. Nevertheless, Jackson was aware that Parker did his best to watch him like a molting hawk.

  Jackson evaded this jejune surveillance and spent some hours in a public library absorbing several standard works on criminology. He used the Miami library instead of Halcyon’s, where he would have been recognized and his unusual interest in the technicalities of crime noticed.

  And still no satisfactory answer came to him until the television telecast hit him with the effect of a long, cool drink of water. In the State of Rhode Island he could kill, and even if he were stupid enough to get caught the law could not kill him.

  There was the problem to be faced of not only getting himself but of getting Parker to Rhode Island.

  Haste seemed not only desirable but advisable now that Parker had brought the matter to a head. So the coming weekend became the target. With his detailed information gleaned from the garrulous tourist Herkimer Smith, Jackson figured he would catch a flight after banking hours on Friday for Boston.

  He would arrange at the terminal to have a rental car waiting for him and would drive at once to his destination. He plotted his route from an automobile association’s road maps. Massachusetts into Rhode Island, then down to Herkimer Smith’s village of Foster. Then the last lap—the twenty-odd miles northwestward to Killingsby Pond where, before the exposing light of dawn, he would polish off the job. He would be back in Halcyon by Saturday night, certainly by early Sunday morning. In time for church.

  The biggest hurdle lay in devising a method for putting Parker on the spot at Killingsby Pond.

  “I’ve already admitted,” Dr. Williamson said, “that the whole plot was a foolish complicated one, but Jackson was forced to make it so because nothing on earth could have tempted him to commit murder except the fact that the crime would take place in a state that had abolished capital punishment. Never lose sight of that point—it is crucial.”

  Dr. Williamson thanked his manservant for the tray of bourbon and branch water, and said there would be nothing further for the night.

  “The problem of getting Parker to Killingsby Pond actually was a simple one—just a case of good psychology on Jackson’s part. He was satisfied that Parker was breaking his neck trying to keep him under surveillance, and he was equally satisfied that Parker would do his best to tail him when he would leave town, supposedly to recover the hidden securities and the cash. To prevent a double cross. So he made things almost childishly easy for Parker…”

  Jackson drove at a conservative speed south on the Federal Highway toward Miami. He drove conservatively out of consideration for Parker who he knew was tailing him with the doubtful virtuosity of a late-show dick. At 36th he turned west and after a dowager-paced drive past drab reaches of shops, bars, and billboards Jackson parked at the airport.

  He slowed down his movements in order to give Parker time to park and then slither into the tourist-spattered terminal after him. Under the alias of Jasper Morton, Jackson bought space for Boston on a flight late the following afternoon. Taking care to be completely unaware of Parker, he moved to another counter to arrange for a rental car to be awaiting his arrival.

  While attending to this he obliquely kept an eye on Parker who spoke to the reservations clerk and himself bought flight space which he shoved into his pocket in a commendably furtive fashion. Jackson paused at the exit doors to light a cigarette and to watch, under cover of the movement, Parker heading for and stopping at the car rental counter, too.

  “And so,” Dr. Williamson said, “the hook was baited. Jackson was as certain as sunrise that Parker, undoubtedly in some abortive attempt at disguise, would accompany him aboard the plane and then trail him like a bloodhound in his own rental car. What he failed to suspect, and the thing that proved his ultimate downfall, was the fact that Parker would have with him…”

  * * * *

  Jackson, carrying an outsize briefcase, walked with other passengers toward the boarding ramp, having first unobservedly spotted his intended victim behind a family group of voluble South Americans.

  Parker, who had once played the role of Polonius in a Halcyon Little Theater Group production, had spirit-gummed on his chin a lemon-gray crepe-hair Vandyke beard. It was a passable job and undetectable unless you looked twice, and nobody ever looked twice at Parker. Dark glasses and a shielding Homburg completed the masquerade.

  After they were airborne Jackson sat at ease gazing at banks of cumulus beyond the window and consciously exuding an impression of complete satisfaction that he had evaded being followed. Parker was seated, he knew, across the aisle and a good many rows behind him.

  A stewardess moved leisurely about gathering coats, carried against the coming northern chill after Miami’s sun, and hanging them in the rear of the plane. Jackson decided to catch several hours’ sleep. He hoped that Parker would also get some sleep. It was going to be a long, tough night.

  Tougher than he knew.

  The trouble didn’t start until shortly before dawn when they reached Killingsby Pond, which lay, as Herkimer Smith had stated, some twenty miles to the northwest of Foster. It had been a more rugged and endless-seeming drive for Jackson than it had for Parker, because Jackson had had to make sure that Parker was following him without letting on to Parker that he knew he was being tailed. It was a queer sort of situation that became a greater and greater strain on Jackson’s nerves, like the cautious playing of a delicately hooked fish.

  The village of Foster was little more than that—a meagerly lighted main street, then the dark of the night and the silent, empty road to the lake. Beyond what was focused in the headlights Jackson retained no impression of the countryside. His energies were beginning to fade. His arms felt heavy and tired, and his hands were weights of unleavened dough on the wheel. He swallowed a capsule that a friend had given him and was becoming exhilarated in a small measure by the time he caught sight of the water—a dark, quiet sheet silvered in patches by a waning moon.

  Slowly, aware that Parker now with his lights out had closed in on him, Jackson followed the shoreline of Killingsby Pond as though searching for identification guides that would lead him to the mythical cache.

  The stillness, except for the sound of the car motor, was a breathing thing and Jackson experienced a surge of impatience to get the job over with. He had no idea how far they had driven parallel with the lakeshore nor had he the slightest notion of what this particular location was like, but he pulled off the road, doused his lights, and parked.

  He got out and stood perfectly still, the briefcase in one hand, a sma
ll flashlight in readiness in the other. He had not long to wait.

  Hurrying, fluttering almost, toward him through the mock pallor of false dawn came Parker, and Jackson flashed the torch full on him. Parker stopped, a theatrical character in his silly false beard and tired-out old face, and it took a moment for Jackson to realize that the nickel-plated object in Parker’s delicate hand was a revolver.

  There was an undertone of laughter in his voice as Jackson said, “I see that you’re taking no chances, Mr. Parker.”

  Parker held the gun aimed dead-center on Jackson’s stomach. “Did you expect me to?”

  “No, not really.”

  “You knew I was following you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I wondered. I began to appreciate the care you took not to lose me.”

  “Thank you. Were the false whiskers for my benefit?”

  “Not entirely. Rather as a protection against any chance recognition at the airport by someone else. My friends believe I am spending the weekend at Key West.”

  Jackson was growing tired again. He considered the chances were negligible that Parker would shoot until after the supposed cache would be disclosed, unless he, Jackson, were to attempt some inimical move. He wondered idly whether the old scorpion’s dream-cloud intention was to highjack the nonexistent cache and then kill him.

  “Let’s get on with it,” he said.

  He turned his back on Parker and walked at a fair pace to the shore of the lake, then he continued along it in the same direction that they had been driving. Parker did not lag, and it was like having a venomous wraith breathing on his neck and holding a gun aimed at his back.

  Jackson was glad of it. The fact of Parker being armed effaced the gap between his powerful strength and Parker’s physical weakness. It altered the job in Jackson’s mind from a one-sided murder into a duel where the antagonists were equalized. The victim now had a sporting chance.

  It was no longer his muscle that counted against Parker. It would have to be his wits and the deadly value of surprise.

  “Is it much farther?” Parker asked.

  “Not much.”

  “We’re over a mile at least from the cars.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why didn’t you drive nearer?”

  “Road turns inland from the lake.” Jackson had no idea whether the road did so or not.

  “What’s the name of this lake?”

  “Killingsby Pond.”

  Then Jackson found what he wanted—the low-hanging supple branch of a pine. He slowed his next few steps until he sensed Parker closing in on his back. Then he released the branch.

  The backlash whipsnap caught Parker across the chest, knocking him flat, and Jackson leaped for the revolver still gripped in Parkers hand.

  It was amazing how the old bromide sprung to life—how a man locked in a death struggle could be possessed with the strength of ten. An exaggeration, of course, for Jackson shortly wrenched and twisted the revolver from Parker’s grip and tossed it out of reach.

  After that it was quite easy.

  He lugged Parker to the water’s edge and held his old skull-feeling head under until he drowned. He got a razor blade from his briefcase and carefully incised several parallel cuts across the body’s dead wrist and neck.

  Some suicidal cases [of drowning] reveal characteristic parallel cuts on wrist and neck, strongly suggesting suicidal nature [of the drowning].

  Jackson then removed six negotiable securities from the briefcase and stuffed them in Parker’s inner-coat pocket. He felt fine. He felt clever as hell. He started back for the car, for the return journey to Halcyon, wondering about the odd sound that was reaching him faintly across the waters of the lake.

  The cry, the sob of a loon.

  * * * *

  “They say that the gods on Olympus used to laugh,” Dr. Williamson said, adding a splash of branch water to the bourbon, “whenever a mortal touched the peaks of success. They would have been convulsed over Jackson. You can understand the sense of confidence that filled him, because he was so blindly satisfied with his own smartness. In fact, he couldn’t resist improving upon it, with frills…”

  * * * *

  The first thing Jackson attended to on Monday morning after reaching the bank was a partial doctoring of the records that Parker had examined. He made several rather obvious erasures of numerals at certain points of falsification and then re-entered exactly the same numerals.

  He felt terribly clever about this, reasoning that Parker’s fingerprints would be on the suspect pages (as they were) and that Parker would be presumed to have made the false entries while he had taken over during Jackson’s vacation—Parker’s purpose being to make Jackson Suspect One when the bank examiners discovered the embezzlement.

  This would, Jackson reasoned to his own satisfaction, tie in perfectly with the disclosure of Parker’s suicide-from-remorse, while on flight, with several of the stolen securities on his body, with the planted alibi among his friends that he was “spending the weekend at Key West,” and—a perfect clincher—with the disguise of a crepe-hair beard still glued to his chin. What else would the guy be doing, except taking it on the lam?

  As for the bulk of the plunder, the authorities could figure that Parker either had hidden it before remorse suddenly drove him to kill himself, or that an initial chance discoverer of the body had made off with the remainder of the securities and cash, leaving the body for somebody else to discover.

  As a final precaution against any eventuality, no matter how improbable, Jackson removed the pigskin suitcase from the stored-luggage room and concealed it in an unused stone smokehouse in the rear of the estate, a small structure almost smothered through the years with tropical vegetation.

  It was all very reassuring, and Jackson hadn’t a shred of doubt but that he could sail through the upcoming investigation with flying, if hypocritically shocked, colors. He would not now have to disappear. He could take his time in clearing up the meager remnants of the estate and then, with an honorable name, plus the pigskin suitcase stuffed with a fortune, take an orderly leave from Halcyon. Because of its no longer bearable tragic associations.

  Yes, he was truly on top of the world.

  * * * *

  “So that was Jackson’s frame of mind,” Dr. Williamson said, “when the news broke. It broke not only at the bank but in the Halcyon, Miami, and Fort Lauderdale papers and on the networks. Few people did not fail to hear or read about it. Among them, Mr. Herkimer Smith. Smith felt, after a few hours cogitation, that it was his duty as a now Florida citizen and a once-resident of Foster, Rhode Island, to put in his two cents’ worth of obliquely peculiar but possibly pertinent information…”

  * * * *

  The man, when Jackson answered the door chime, was a stranger. He was of Jacksons own age, well knit and quietly dressed, with an intellectual face unsmiling in the evening shadows.

  “My name is Fillmore,” he said in a mannerly voice. “With the FBI.”

  “Come in, Mr. Fillmore.”

  They went into an oppressively appointed study, heavy with mahogany and wine-colored brocade curtains, and Fillmore politely refused a drink.

  “It’s about the bank,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  The silence held. The disproportionately loud sound of a tree frog outside an open jalousie broke it “Is there,” Jackson asked, “any particular reason why you’ve come to see me?”

  “There are several. We first became interested in you because of certain information volunteered to us by a Mr. Herkimer Smith. You do know Mr. Smith?”

  “Smith?” Keep the smile lazy, Jackson. “Herkimer Smith?”

  “He moved down here from Foster, Rhode Island. Where,” Fillmore himself smiled faintly, “your distant cousin Charley Whipple once lived.”

  “Of course. That Smith. We downed a couple of brews together. What about him?”

  “Well, when he heard the ne
ws about Mr. Parker, about the body being found at Killingsby Pond, he was reminded of your somewhat excessive questions about that particular locality. He remembered your name, although he wasn’t aware that you were connected with the bank. We, of course, knew that you were. It interested us.”

  “Coincidence.”

  Fillmore raised polite eyebrows. “Isn’t that rather far-fetched?”

  “No, I remember now telling Mr. Parker about the place.”

  “Why should you?”

  “Because of Smith. A newcomer. The possibility of his becoming a new account. It must have stuck in Parker’s mind—possibly as a good place to vanish to, to take on a new identity.”

  “That’s reasonable.” Fillmore’s voice hardened. “But it doesn’t gibe.”

  “Gibe with what?”

  “With your having been there with him at Killingsby Pond,” Fillmore said.

  It was a longer silence this time and even the tree frog respected it.

  “Just what makes you think so, Mr. Fillmore?”

  “Any number of proofs.” Fillmore’s voice sounded tired with the ineptitude, the stupidities, the amateur complications of the plot that Jackson had woven, the wide-open trail he had blazed for the state police and the FBI to follow.

  “A set of fingerprints other than those of Mr. Parker,” he said, “were on the nickel-plated revolver found near the body. As soon as Mr. Smith told us of your excessive interest in the locality we compared them with your prints on file with the bank’s bonding company. Our conclusion was that the embezzlement had been a conspiracy between yourself and Mr. Parker. From the location of the prints on the gun we believe that you forced the gun out of his hand and tossed it to where the troopers found it. Then you killed him.”

  “It was suicide.” Keep pitching, Jackson. “He slashed his wrist, his throat, then he had some sort of a seizure and fell down by the water’s edge with his face in the water—”