She crossed the room to where her bag was lying on the sideboard.
I had just fixed the back of the TV set in place. As I tightened the last screw, she walked over to Delaney and opened her bag. She took out three one-dollar bills, and as she did so, the bag slipped out of her hand. It fell on the floor and its contents spilled out by Delaney’s chair.
Right where he couldn’t fail to see it was the blue and silver powder compact I had given her.
Delaney stared at the compact.
For a split second Gilda seemed paralysed, then she darted forward and snatched up the compact.
Delaney grabbed her wrist, twisted it brutally, and wrenched the compact out of her hand. She tried to get it from him.
All this happened in seconds.
His face vicious, Delaney swung his left hand and struck her very hard across her nose and mouth. The sound of his hand hitting her made a tiny explosion in the room.
The force of the blow sent her reeling. She lost her balance and fell on her hands and knees.
I remained where I was, fighting down a murderous impulse to get my fingers around his throat and choke the life out of him.
Muttering under his breath, Delaney stared at the compact.
Gilda got unsteadily to her feet. Her nose was bleeding slightly. She looked bad, with blood running down her chin, and her face white and tense.
Delaney opened the compact and stared at her name engraved on the inside flap. Then he looked up, his face contorted with rage.
“So you’ve found a lover,” he said and the viciousness in his voice sickened me.
Gilda didn’t say anything. She leaned against the wall, her hands pressing her breasts, blood dripping from her nose on to her dress.
“So you’re not content to have made me a cripple, you have to act the whore as well.”
He threw the compact across the room. It hit the opposite wall. The lid broke off and the mirror smashed.
Gilda ran out of the room.
Delaney suddenly seemed to become aware of me.
“Get out!” he shouted. “If you spread this over your lousy little town, I’ll fix you! I’ll sue you to hell! Get out!”
I picked up my tool kit and went out of the room, down the steps to the truck.
I drove to the gate, pulled up and got out to open the gate.
Gilda came out of the darkness and into the light of my headlights.
She looked bad. Her nose was bruised, and there was dried blood on her chin and her eyes were glittering.
I started towards her.
“Don’t touch me!”
The hysterical note in her voice brought me to a standstill.
“You can’t stay with him now, Gilda,” I said. “Not after this. Come with me! I’ll make you happy! He’ll have to give you a divorce!”
“No! Keep away from here!” she said, the words spilling out of her mouth. “It was because I was fool enough to fall in love with you that my life is now being threatened.”
“Don’t talk like that! You can’t stay with him now! You’ve got to come with me!”
I grabbed hold of her and tried to pull her to me but she wrenched herself free.
“Keep away from me! Do you want me to go down on my knees and beg you to keep away from me? I can persuade him that I bought that compact myself if you will only keep away from me! How many more times do I have to tell you I can never leave him?”
“Until he is dead,” I said quietly. “That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
She made a desperate, impatient gesture with her hands.
“He won’t die. He’ll last for years. Keep away from me or you’ll make me hate you as much as I love you now.”
She turned and ran away into the darkness.
I didn’t attempt to go after her.
This was the moment when I decided to kill him.
There was no other way out for us.
I was surprised I hadn’t thought of this solution before.
CHAPTER III
I
I GOT back to my cabin, put on my pyjamas and laid down on the bed.
Murder!
I had no compunction about killing Delaney. Now that I had arrived at the solution, it was as if pressure had been removed from my mind that before had been crushing it. I felt a different being.
So I lay there and I thought about the problem: how I could kill him and get away with it.
So many men had thought as I was thinking: how they could murder someone safely, and nearly all of them had made a fatal mistake and had been caught.
There must be no mistake, I told myself. Unless I was absolutely convinced I could kill him and get away with it, I mustn’t attempt it.
The advantages that went with his death were a spur to my thinking. Gilda would be free, and she would be mine. Also his money would be hers and mine too. We would be able to begin a new life together. With the money, I knew I could make a success of my life. I had the training, the craftsmanship and the knowledge, but, without any working capital, I was sunk.
If I could only think of a way to kill him safely, in a way that no one would suspect that I had done it, then a new and exciting life waited, not only for me, but for Gilda.
But it was difficult. He never went anywhere, so he would have to be killed in the cabin. It would have to be done when Gilda was down at Glyn Camp. Therefore the time was fixed and not flexible. It would have to be done on a Friday between nine-thirty, when Gilda left for her weekend shopping, and midday when she returned. It would have to be done in daylight. This alone made it difficult and dangerous. Although the road leading past Blue Jay cabin was seldom used, the odd person did use it, and I might be seen going there or leaving there. I had also to think of the maid, Maria, who would be in the cabin. I had to arrange that she wasn’t there when I did it.
Whatever the plan was, I had to be absolutely certain that Gilda couldn’t be implicated. I myself had to have a foolproof, cast-iron alibi in case the police found out that Gilda and I had been lovers.
I thought it was unlikely that they would find this out, but there was always a chance that someone had seen us when we had gone to the Italian restaurant at Hermosa Beach and would report to the police once the murder made headlines. This murder had to be fool-proof. There was no point in my killing him if I was to end up in the gas chamber. If I killed him, I meant to have Gilda and the money.
It seemed a hopeless problem, and, although I racked my brains half the night, no safe plan came to me.
It was Delaney himself who showed me how it could be done.
The following morning, as I was about to leave my cabin, the telephone bell rang.
I picked up the receiver.
It was Delaney.
“That you, Regan?”
I can’t describe the sensation that ran through me at the sound of his voice.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you come over?” he said. “I have something to say to you. I would take it as a favour if you’d come.”
Into my mind came a picture of him hitting Gilda and of her sprawling on her hands and knees, blood running down her face onto the carpet.
Today was Friday. She wouldn’t be there. I had an urge to look again at this man I planned to murder.
“Okay, Mr Delaney. I’ll be over.”
I reached Blue Jay cabin after half-past nine.
Delaney was sitting on the verandah, a glass of whisky in his hand. His face was flushed and his eyes were over-bright.
“Sit down, Regan,” he said, waving to a chair near his. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. “Have a smoke.”
I took the cigarette and sat down. Just to look at him: the man I was planning to murder, gave me a creepy feeling.
He leaned back in his chair.
“I want to apologize. I’m sorry about that sordid scene last night. I was drunk.” He drank some of the whisky, grimacing a little. “It isn’t exactly fun to find out that your wife is
being unfaithful, and I guess I went off the deep end.”
“You don’t have to excuse yourself to me. It’s none of my business.”
“I wanted to say I am sorry you happened to be a witness of such a sordid scene and ask you not to talk about it.”
“I don’t talk about other people’s affairs, Mr Delaney,” I said. “Is that all you want to see me about? If it is, I’ll get moving. I have a lot of work to do.”
I got to my feet.
“How’s that set you’re making me getting on? When can I have it?”
“I’ll deliver it on Monday.”
“Fine.” He lit a cigarette and then, squinting through the smoke, he said, “What do you think of my wife, Regan?”
Did he suspect that I was her lover?
“What do you expect me to say to a question like that?” I asked, keeping my face expressionless.
“I just wanted your opinion.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’m going to tell you something about her, then maybe you won’t think I’m such a heel to have hit her.”
“I have work to do, Mr Delaney. I’ve got to get going.”
Delaney said, staring at me, “I saw her for the first time in the swimming pool at the studios. She worked there at the kind of job they give girls with nice bodies and no brains. I’ve seen plenty of stars in that pool, but when I saw her, the sight of her took my breath away.” He emptied his glass, then refilled it, splashing whisky into it with an unsteady hand. “I fell for her, Regan. I thought of her night and day. I propositioned her, but she wouldn’t play. It was marriage or nothing. Imagine! I could have fallen for all the glamour stars in the business but I was mug enough to fall for her. I fell for her because of the way she looked when she climbed out of the swimming pool with water dripping off her and her swim suit plastered to her like a second skin.”
I stood there, listening to him, wanting to get away, but his words hypnotized me the way a snake hypnotizes a rabbit.
“Do you know what the matter is with my wife?” he asked, leaning forward to stare at me. “I’ll tell you: she’s mad about money. That’s all she thinks about. If I hadn’t any money she wouldn’t stay ten minutes with me. Do you know what the first thing she wanted me to do as soon as we were married? She wanted me to take out an accident insurance policy. She got a man from an insurance company to talk to me. He tried to persuade me to take out a hundred thousand coverage. To stop her nagging me — and God! how she nagged! — I told her I had taken out the policy. She wouldn’t believe me until I showed her the signed policy, but she didn’t know I tore it up once she had seen it.” He showed his teeth in a bitter, snarling grin. “Do you know what happened then? We went to a party. I got a little high and she insisted on driving. Like a fool I let her. I went to sleep. Somewhere up the mountain road she stopped, got out of the car to talk to a pal of hers who had stalled his car right across the road. She set the parking brake or at least she said she did when the police questioned her. Anyway, the car rolled down the mountain side with me in it. It’s taken me a long time to figure that one out. Do you know what I think now? I think she wanted the hundred thousand dollar insurance pay-off more than she wanted me.”
“I don’t want to listen to any of this,” I said. “You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You could be right, Regan, but it’s a thought that’s now going round and round in my head. Now she’s found another lover I’ve got to watch out for myself. The man who stalled the car was a pal of hers. He could have been her lover. They could have cooked up the accident between them. There was a time the police thought so, only I was in love enough with her to tell them I had touched the parking brake. I believed in her then, but not now.”
I didn’t believe a word he had said, but I was glad he had sounded off. It made it that much easier for me to kill him.
“I’ll get along, Mr Delaney,” I said and started to move towards the verandah steps.
“Wait a moment,” he said: “about this set you’re making for me. Can you fix me up with a remote control gadget? I want to be able to turn the set on and off without wheeling this chair up to it every time I want to use it. Isn’t there some gadget I can have to operate the set from my chair?”
It was when he said that I suddenly saw in a flash how I could kill him.
A remote control unit was the answer.
All I had to do was to make the unit alive, and in his metal chair, the jolt of electricity stepped up by coming through the TV set would kill him as surely as if he were sitting in the electric chair!
I kept moving because I was scared if he saw the expression on my face he would know I was planning to kill him.
I said over my shoulder, “Yes, I can fix that for you, Mr Delaney.”
I went straight back to my cabin to examine this idea he had given me. I was pretty sure this was the solution to the problem I had been wrestling with last night: how to kill him and get away with it.
I realized now the only safe way to kill him was to make his death look like an accident.
Death by accidental electrocution was the answer. It had to look like an accident, so Sheriff Jefferson would be the one to handle the investigation. If it looked like murder, Jefferson would have to call in the Los Angeles police, and I wasn’t going to risk having those experts making an investigation.
It wouldn’t be difficult to fool an old man like Jefferson, but I didn’t kid myself I could fool Lieutenant John Boos of the LA Homicide Squad. I had met him once when I had worked in Los Angeles, and I knew him to be a hard, smart cop with a long string of murder arrests to his name. I had no intention of tangling with him.
The accidental electrocution idea was right, but there were some obvious snags I had to solve before I could put the plan into operation.
The first move was to complete the set I was building. So I went over to the shed I used as my workshop and started to build the set.
As I worked I thought of Gilda.
With every wire I soldered into place, with every valve I put into position, I told myself I was getting nearer to giving Gilda her freedom and beginning a new life with her.
I must have been out of my head, but that’s the way a man can act when he is in love with a woman just out of his reach as I was with Gilda.
II
First thing on Monday morning, I loaded the set onto the truck and drove over to Blue Jay cabin.
I hadn’t seen Gilda since Delaney had hit her, and I wasn’t anxious to see her. I had thought of her ceaselessly, but I didn’t want to meet her face to face until I had completed my plan. I was scared she might say something that would turn me away from the plan, and I was determined to go through with it if it was the last thing I did.
As I drove up towards the cabin, I saw her washing down the Buick.
I didn’t slow down.
She glanced around, and for a brief moment our eyes met, then I was past her.
Delaney was reading the newspaper. He looked up as he heard the truck and, dropping the paper, he wheeled himself to the rail of the verandah.
“Here it is, Mr Delaney,” I said, “as promised.”
“Nice work, Regan. What’s it like?”
“You can judge that for yourself,” I said and carried the loudspeaker up the steps and into the lounge.
It took me about half an hour to install the set, then I explained to Delaney how it operated.
As soon as I put an LP record on the turntable and turned up the volume, I could see the impact the reproduction made on him was what I had been sure it would be.
“Why, it’s like having a live orchestra in the room!”
What pleased him most was the remote control unit which I clipped to the arm of his chair. It was a small thing with three knobs: one to turn the set on and off, the other two to take care of the contrast and the volume.
When I had bought the control unit each knob had been heavily insulated with rubber caps. These I had removed together with t
he rubber backing so that its steel base now rested on the steel arm of Delaney’s chair.
Finally, after he had examined everything, tested everything and watched a short film on the TV, Delaney turned the set off, using the control unit, and he looked at me, his face animated.
“Some set! It’s a sale!”
“You have the best, Mr Delaney,” I said, my eyes on his hand, resting on the control unit.
Then he said something that showed me that luck was working on my side, “You don’t happen to know of a woman who would come out here and run the cabin, do you? This damned Mexican servant of ours isn’t coming any more. She says it’s too far for her to walk from the bus stop. She’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
The Mexican maid had been one of the major snags in my plan. I couldn’t have gone through with the plan that was now taking shape in my mind if there had been anyone else in the cabin at the time he died. Now the snag had suddenly ironed itself out.
“I’ll ask around, Mr Delaney, and if I hear of anyone, I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you and thanks again for the set. I’ll send you a cheque.”
He put his fingers on the knob of the control unit and turned on the TV.
It gave me a crazy sensation to see his fingers on that knob. If luck kept coming my way, on Friday when he did that, he would be a dead man.
I left him staring at the lighted screen and drove fast past the garage.
Gilda stood by the Buick, looking towards me. I half raised my hand, but I kept on. I didn’t look at her as I passed her. In the driving mirror I could see her, staring at me, obviously startled.
I returned to my cabin.
With the maid out of the way, I had got over one of the major snags in my plan. Now if I could only be sure that Gilda went down to Glyn Camp on Friday, Delaney would be on his own.
But would he turn the set on?
I checked the week’s TV programme magazine and it gave me quite a jolt to see that on Friday morning one of the channels was going to show a film of Jack Dempsey’s famous fights, and it was being shown at nine forty-five a.m. I knew Delaney wouldn’t miss seeing such a film. Again it looked as if luck was running my way.
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