The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  She raged inwardly at the improbable coincidence of his coming to this particular place at this particular time, and she searched her mind frantically for an appropriate lie to save herself. But then she understood, as he came nearer, that there was no coincidence, and that no lie was necessary. His eyes were shining with a kind of unholy glee.

  His teeth were exposed in silent laughter.

  “Hello, my, dear,” he said. “How sweet of you to keep our little tryst.”

  Strangely, she was neither angry nor afraid. She could only wonder at the devilish perversion of a mind that had conceived and executed such a cruel deception. She could only recognize in utter despair the depth of her own shame. But she was, in feet, quite calm and controlled, having died in an instant and being dead.

  Gathering up her purse, she rose to her feet and looked down at him for a moment almost with detachment.

  “Wicked!” she whispered. “Oh, how wicked!”

  His amusement was rich and depraved. Walking away, she heard his mocking laughter behind her. His voice followed her, each word enunciated with stabbing precision.

  “I shall expect my dinner at seven tonight—as usual,” he said.

  She seemed to be walking naked through the streets, but she did not care—for her shame was absolute and could not be increased. At the municipal parking lot she claimed her car and drove home. In her room she changed her clothes and sat down on the bed with her hands folded in her lap.

  She must have sat there for a long, time, much longer than she had intended, for suddenly she was aware of the clock striking in the hall below, and carefully she counted five strokes. It would be necessary to go down at once and begin preparing dinner if it was to be ready at seven, and she got up and went down and put a roast of beef in the oven.

  Then she began to consider what should go with the roast, and she thought she would have, to start off with, a generous shrimp appetizer. Martin was quite fond of shrimp, and his appetite would surely have been whetted by the complete success of his cruel trick.

  Besides, the spicy sauce, with horseradish and all, would disguise the taste of the cyanide that she had discovered, some months ago, tucked away among the gardening supplies in the basement…

  * * * *

  The doctor had come, of course, and the doctor had called the police, and the police had been, on the whole, quite considerate. She had spent the night in her own bed, and no one had disturbed her all the next morning. But then, early in the afternoon, a man had called for her with an invitation to come to police headquarters for a little talk, and she had gone with him, for she understood perfectly well that the invitation was really an order.

  She now sat in a straight chair in a bare little room, and the only others in the room were a man in a corner with a notebook of some kind and another man whose name was Ryan.

  Ryan was sitting on the edge of a desk and he smiled at her; he was young and nice and very friendly.

  “Mrs. Sterling,” he said, “there is no good in pretending any longer. You killed your husband, and we know you killed him. Isn’t that so?” She looked up from her hands, which she was holding quietly in her lap.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, I killed him. I put poison in his shrimp cocktail. It’s really rather obvious, isn’t it?”

  “It is. Did you actually believe you could get away with it?”

  “I don’t think so. No, not really. I just thought it would be better to let you make up your own minds.”

  “I see. Would you care to tell us why you did it?”

  She looked down at her hands again, apparently considering her answer with great care; and when she looked up, Ryan was surprised to see that she was suddenly quite pretty. Color had risen in her cheeks, and her flesh seemed warmed by a kind of inner glow.

  “I had a lover,” she said. “I shall never tell you his name, but you will find some letters from him in my room at home.”

  MY FATHER DIED YOUNG

  Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1965.

  There is no way better calculated to recall old times and old places than opening the grave of a person you once knew long ago. It was not actually a grave, though. It was merely a niche in the wall of my family mausoleum, which stood aloof and slightly apart within an iron picket fence in the cemetery east of town.

  Nor did I do the opening myself. It was done by competent workmen, hired for the purpose with official sanction, while I waited at the open door of the old tomb and looked out across green grass and gray headstones, scoured by a morning rain and now drying in the afternoon sun. I could smell red clover in a nearby field.

  When had I come with my mother to bury my father in this old place? It was a long time ago, but a time easily remembered, for there were associations vivid enough and grim enough to have impressed even a ten-year-old boy. It was a time of soup kitchens and doles and idle men. A man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been nominated for the presidency of his country, and in the fall he would be elected.

  There was unrest everywhere at that time, and in the midwest there was an extraordinary number of bank robbers, although the banks, unfortunately, were failing fast enough, without help. It was, in brief, 1932, and my father died in August of that year.

  The best that can be said of him is that he was a young man. Otherwise, he was sadly deficient in the qualities that make a good husband and father, and my mother’s marriage to him was a mistake she eventually regretted. He had no capacity to earn money or to apply himself for any length of time to constructive work, but his faults were not all negative. He had more than his share on the positive side, and the quality I remember most vividly was his insatiable appetite for bootleg gin. Not that he was ever abusive or brutal; he was merely indifferent to his family responsibilities.

  However, my mother and I did not go hungry. In fact, we did not want for anything. Her family had accumulated some money and property in our town, and my memory of the depression was fixed mainly by things that hardly touched me personally. My maternal grandfather had been a prosperous undertaker, and my Uncle Ned had succeeded to his trade and condition. Folk must bury their dead in any time, good or bad, and there is usually a small insurance policy to guarantee payment for services.

  Uncle Ned used to complain about the depression and make a great show of pinching pennies, but he gave us a generous allowance every month, and delivered it promptly along with a stereotype lecture to my mother on the foolishness of young girls who married wastrels and drunkards before they were old enough to make sound judgments.

  My father died suddenly. He was, as I have said, a young man. To me, of course, he seemed old enough, but I learned later that he was three months younger than the century. I was shielded from most of the unpleasant experiences connected with his death, and he seemed not so much to die as simply to disappear. I was first told that he was sick, and then that he was dead, and the next thing I knew he had been taken to one of the rooms behind the little chapel in Uncle Ned’s establishment, where Uncle Ned, as a concession to my mother’s sensibilities, was giving him individual attention. Before the funeral, I saw the body only once, and that was when, with my mother’s permission and in her company, I was allowed to look at my father in his casket in the chapel.

  When he was alive, he had earned scant respect, and now that he was dead, he excited little regret. For that reason, it was decided to make his last rites as simple and unostentatious as possible. The funeral was private, and the casket was kept closed. However, for those who were motivated by more than morbid curiosity to look at my father for the last time, it was arranged to make the body available to the public for an hour on the evening before the day of the burial, and for another hour on the morning of the day.

  During these two brief periods his casket lay open in the chapel, and friends could pass by it to the rec
orded music of an organ. Not many took advantage of the opportunity. In the vestibule of the little chapel there was a registry for visitors to sign, and this was later taken by my mother, who gave it to me, and I have kept it all these years, for some strange reason, and have it still. In it are less than a dozen signatures.

  I was not, of course, required to compete with even this small group for a last look at my father. I was taken to the chapel early on the evening before the funeral, and there, with my mother’s hand holding mine and Uncle Ned’s arm around my shoulders, I stood briefly beside the casket.

  My father’s face looked quite natural, hardly more drawn and drained than I had often seen it on the morning after a night devoted to a bottle. I could not feel any great sadness or sense of loss, and I was sorry that I couldn’t, and wished that I could. After a while Uncle Ned took me home, told me I was a good boy, and left me with a neighbor woman who had come in to watch over me.

  I did not sleep well that night. I was troubled because I had been able to feel so little for my father who was, whatever else he may have been, young and dead and almost friendless. My troubled thoughts nagged me well into the next morning, and finally I decided that I should go, before it was too late, and see him again. The unnatural stiffness of the circumstances, I thought, had dulled my feelings and made it impossible for me to react properly. If I could see him once more, perhaps alone, sorrow might come to ease my guilty conscience. My mother had already left the house, and so it was an easy matter for me to slip away undetected and make my way to the chapel.

  But it was too early for the final hour of public visits, and the chapel was closed. I tried the door and found it locked. Leaving the vestibule, I went around the chapel, through Uncle Ned’s office, and into the area in the rear. But all the other doors were closed, and there didn’t seem to be a soul there, which was odd and unusual; and then I heard the murmur of a voice and of another voice in apparent reply. They came from one of the closed rooms, and I went to the door and listened. The words were faint, a little blurred, but distinguishable.

  “Did you get my ticket and reservation?” a voice said.

  “Here they are,” another voice responded. “The reservation is for the ten o’clock train to Chicago tonight.”

  “You’ll have to drive me to the city in time to catch it.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you there.”

  “Thanks, Ned. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.”

  So one of the speakers was Uncle Ned. I felt relieved, somehow exonerated of eavesdropping, and I promptly announced my presence by knocking on the door. There was, following this, a rather prolonged interval in which nothing happened, and then Uncle Ned opened the door and saw me standing there.

  “Why, Calvin!” he said. “What on earth are you doing here? Come in, boy, come in.”

  Entering the room. I was surprised and a little alarmed to find my mother present. I was afraid she would be angry with me for coming to Uncle Ned’s funeral parlor without permission, but apparently she was not. She smiled in a kind of abstracted way, as if she were thinking about something quite remote from my petty delinquency, and came over and put her hand on my head.

  “Hello, dear,” she said. “This is a nice surprise. Say hello to Dr. Crandall.”

  Dr. Crandall was the only other person in the room. He seemed to me at the time tremendously experienced and wise, but he was actually in his late thirties and had been in practice no longer than ten years at most. Besides being a personal friend to my mother and Uncle Ned, he was our family physician and had attended my father before his death, and so his presence was not unusual. I spoke to him politely, as he did to me.

  “Why have you come here, Calvin?” Uncle Ned said. “You were to wait at home until we called for you before the services.”

  “I came to see Father again,” I said, “but the chapel’s locked.”

  “Father’s not in the chapel now, dear,” my mother said. “Uncle Ned had to bring him back here until it was time for his friends to come to see him. It’s nearly time now, isn’t it, Ned?”

  “Very nearly,” said Uncle Ned, looking at his wrist watch. “I’ll take him back to the chapel in a few minutes. If you want to see him again, Calvin, I’ll let you into the chapel now. You may wait for us there.”

  My mother’s comment, followed by Uncle Ned’s, called my attention to a casket resting on a mobile table against the wall. My father was obviously in it, awaiting his return to the chapel, but now that I was here, I was strangely reluctant to see his face again. It was better, I rationalized, to remember him as he had been when alive rather than try to force an unnatural emotional response. Suddenly I wished I had not come, and wanted to go home again. Compulsively, I said so.

  “There’s a sensible boy,” said Uncle Ned. “We’ll fetch you later for the services.”

  “You must walk straight home, dear,” my mother said. “It would be bad to cause any alarm in case you are missed.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dr. Crandall. “I have to be leaving, and I’ll be happy to drop him off. Wait for me in the vestibule, young fellow.”

  My mother kissed me and patted my head again, and after I had waited a while in the vestibule, Dr. Crandall and I left together. My mother came home later, and we were fetched on schedule for the services that afternoon. There were only a few people there, the services were brief, and Father’s casket was sealed afterward in its niche in the mausoleum.

  Father had not been a good man or a reliable provider, and his short life had left a residue of bitterness; but I was astonished to discover that he had recently taken out a life insurance policy in favor of my mother for $50,000. This was a small fortune in those hard times, and I was inclined to modify my harsh judgment of Father until I learned that Uncle Ned had negotiated the policy and paid the premiums in order to protect my mother in the event of my father’s death.

  My mother did not regret my father’s passing. If she felt a little sadness, the feeling was tempered with relief. Always a pretty woman, she became prettier and more animated. Dr. Crandall, who was a bachelor, began after a decent interval to pay serious attention to her, and in two years they were married.

  I approved of the marriage and was fond of my stepfather. He was a kindly, generous man, and by treating me without condescension he made me feel significant and mature. He had, moreover, an active curiosity about a variety of subjects, and was especially a devoted student of hypnosis. He argued strongly for its beneficial use in the practice of medicine, and I have even heard him make out a good case for its prospects as an anesthetic in certain kinds of surgery.

  Following his example, I eventually entered State University as a pre-med student, and after three years was admitted to medical college. It was during my third year as a medical student, slightly more than a year before my internship, that the pieces of the pattern began to fall into place in my mind. Most of the pieces were old—fragments of memory that had lain dormant for more than a decade; but the final piece in the pattern, the one that wakened all the others, was something that happened that year, my third year in medical college, when I was home briefly for the Christmas holiday.

  I had been out with a local girl who had proved both shy and dull, perhaps the latter because of the former, consequently I was home rather early. My mother and stepfather were entertaining a couple in the living room, and I was passing down the hall on the way to the stairs when I heard my stepfather say something that made me stop.

  I could see the four of them, my parents and their two guests, from my position in the hall, and they could have seen me if they had looked in my direction. But they were interested in what they were discussing, and my stepfather, in fact, seemed quite intense about it.

  “I can make you stiff as a post in sixty seconds,” he said.

  “Nonsense,
” said his male guest, a lawyer named Phillips.

  “Would you care to have me demonstrate?” my stepfather said.

  “Perhaps you’d better be a bit more specific before demonstrating.”

  “Agreed. I’ll tell you exactly what will take place. As I said, I’ll hypnotize you within sixty seconds. You will fall over, but don’t worry—I’ll catch you and let you down easy. Your body will be rigid. While you are in this state, I’ll suspend your body on its back between two straight chairs. Your head will barely be in contact with one chair, your heels with the other. You will admit, I think, that such a suspension would be absolutely impossible under normal circumstances. However, to make the feat even more incredible, I’ll sit on your abdomen while your body is suspended and you still will not bend at the neck or hips.”

  “Oh, come now! That’s absurd. You’re going too far.”

  “It sounds dangerous to me,” said Phillips’ wife. “I forbid any such foolishness.”

  “There’s no danger,” my stepfather said to Mrs. Phillips. “His breathing will be indiscernible, but I assure you that all the life processes will be going on as usual. He will awaken at my command in perfectly normal, healthy condition, and he will call us all liars when we report what happened.”

  “You’re on!” said Phillips. “I challenge you here and now to give such a demonstration.”

  That’s the gist of it. I cannot, of course, after all these years, reproduce their conversation verbatim, but I can still see that demonstration as my stepfather performed it in our living room. Every claim he made was substantiated. The lawyer lay suspended between two chairs as rigid as a steel rod, and he did not bend a fraction under the weight of my stepfather on his stomach. I have seen the thing done since on the stage, but at that time it was the most incredible performance I had ever witnessed.

  Phillips was brought out of his trance, and I immediately went on upstairs, still undetected. Lying in bed in the marginal state between waking and sleeping, I kept reviewing in my mind the remarkable show I had just seen. As I have said, I had known for years that my stepfather was a student of hypnosis, but I had not dreamed he was capable of anything so extraordinary.