The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  Oh, she was lovely! She was all gold and old rose and loveliness. She felt for her lovely body a fierce pride and an agony of tenderness. She enclosed herself in her own arms, in love and apprehension. It was incredible that the passing years would destroy her. It was a monstrous and unholy crime that anyone should want to do now what the years would surely do soon enough.

  She must delay no longer in a narcissistic spell, entranced before her mirror by the vision of herself. She had made precipitately the decision to do what must be done, the last desperate measure she must take to save herself, and now was the time, now if ever, to do it.

  Wrenching herself away from the mirror with a feeling of dreadful urgency, she went on, hurrying now, into the bathroom.

  His name was Collins. He was an old man, tired. With a small treasure of petty graft which he had tucked away over the years, he had bought five acres in the country, and when he retired next year he was going to build a nice house on the acreage to die in. He had a coarse thatch of grizzled hair growing low on the forehead of a worn leather face. The approach of retirement had made him cautious, inclined to act slowly if he acted at all, but at least he was the chief. That, anyhow, was hopeful. It was a special concession to her, of course, because she was the wife of Clay Moran. The wife of the richest and most powerful man in town, majority stockholder of its only steel plant and chairman of the board of directors of its most prosperous bank was entitled, after all, to every courtesy and consideration. If she had been someone other than who she was, she would surely have been forced to talk with a sergeant or someone like that.

  The chief looked at her blankly, wondering if his hearing, like his sight, was becoming impaired.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Moran,” he said. “I don’t believe I heard you correctly. Would you mind repeating that?”

  “My husband,” she repeated deliberately, “intends to murder me.”

  Crazy, he thought. Crazy as all hell. Hadn’t her mother had trouble that way? He seemed to remember that she had. Anyhow, what do you do with a crazy woman when she walks into your office and throws a bomb into your lap? Well, in the first place, you understand that the bomb is a dud.

  Don’t get excited. In the second place, you humor her. You play along. In the third place, after you’ve got rid of her, you protect your pension by reporting to her husband. From there on, it’s his baby, and welcome to it he is!

  “That’s a startling accusation, Mrs. Moran,” he said.

  “It’s true.”

  “It seems incredible. Your husband is a very prominent man. One of the most respected citizens of this community.”

  “I know how he’s regarded. I’m telling you what he is.”

  “No breath of scandal has ever touched his name.”

  “He’s very clever.”

  “Well, let’s look at this thing objectively. Without emotion.”

  “It is somewhat difficult to be unemotional about your own murder.”

  “Yes. I understand that. Tell me exactly what makes you think your husband plans to murder you.”

  “The way he looks at me. The things he says to me when we’re alone.”

  “Oh, come, Mrs. Moran. That’s tenuous evidence at best.”

  “You don’t understand my husband. You don’t know him. He’s clever and cruel. It gives him pleasure to taunt me. He likes to terrify me and watch me suffer.”

  “Has he ever threatened directly to kill you?”

  “He is much too devious and subtle for that.”

  “Even if he had, it wouldn’t necessarily mean much. I’ve been married for forty years, Mrs. Moran. Hard to tell how many times I’ve threatened to brain my wife. Maybe, sometimes, I’ve even felt like doing it. But I never have, and I never will.”

  “That’s different. You are not my husband. If something isn’t done to save me, he will surely murder me.”

  “Has he ever made any attempt to murder you?”

  “There will be no attempts. There will only be, if he is not prevented, the accomplished murder.”

  “Until he makes an attempt on your life, or at least commits a chargeable offense against your person, I don’t see how the police can help you.”

  “It will be too late for help then. His first attempt will be successful.”

  “Surely you understand that we can take no action on so grave a charge as this when there is nothing to support it but questionable interpretations of words, gestures, looks. An assumption of intent without proof.”

  “I see. I see that you won’t help me.”

  The dull despair in her voice, hopeless submission to what he was convinced was an imaginary danger, pricked his leathery heart for a moment and incited a rare flicker of genuine pity. She was hot, this one. She had smoke and flame coming out her ears. She needed help, all right, but not the kind of help the police could give.

  “Look at it this way, Mrs. Moran,” he said. “What reason could your husband possibly have for murdering you? You are a beautiful woman. I’m sure you are a faithful wife. You and your husband have been married for how long? Two years? The honeymoon is hardly over yet. There is no reason at all to believe that he has the slightest interest in another woman, is there? I thought not. If he did have, seeing you, I’d have to say he was nuts. You see what I mean? There’s no motive for him to murder you.”

  “He wants to murder me because he hates me.”

  “Oh, please. Frankly, I find that impossible to believe,” he argued.

  “He hates all women. Especially the women he marries. I can’t explain it. It’s something inside him, something sick, insane. You’ll believe me when it’s too late. He will murder me, just as he murdered his first wife.”

  “What? What’s that?”

  “His first wife. He murdered her.”

  “Stop it, Mrs. Moran! His first wife drowned. It was an accident. As an accident, it had to be investigated, of course. Your husband and his first wife were out on the lake west of town. They were in a motorboat, fishing. Your husband is a dedicated fisherman, as you must know. The first Mrs. Moran was not, although she apparently made an effort to share your husband’s enthusiasm. It was late in the evening of this particular day, almost dark. According to testimony, they were about to come back to shore. Mrs. Moran was wearing her swimming suit, and she decided, before coming back, that she would take a dip in the lake. She went over the side of the boat. It was the end of a hot day, and the water there was deep and cold. She took a cramp and drowned. She was quite a distance from the boat. Your husband tried to save her, but he couldn’t reach her in time. She drowned, that’s all. She just accidentally drowned.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  “I’ve just told you what happened.”

  “Did anyone see the accident?”

  “No.”

  “You had to depend on my husband’s version.”

  “There was no reason to doubt it.”

  “On the other hand, there was no way to verify it.”

  “He was heartbroken. His grief was genuine. Anyone who saw him could tell.”

  “Clay is very clever.”

  “He had no reason to murder her, no more to murder her than to murder you. There was absolutely no evidence that he murdered her. All the evidence, circumstances and possible motivation and method, all considered together, pointed clearly to an accident.”

  “He killed her because he hated her, as he hates me.” She stood up abruptly, clutching her purse with both hands in front of her. Her face in defeat was composed, touched by sadness and despair. “You will remember what I have told you when I’m dead.”

  The door had hardly closed behind her before he was reaching for the telephone on his desk.

  Outside, she stood with her head bowed, crushed by the monstrous burden of
her hopelessness. She had neither the strength to run nor the cleverness to hide. In any event, even if she had the strength and cleverness, running and hiding were clearly impossible. Clay was too rich. His power reached too far. Wherever she went, he would find her. Whatever she did, he would kill her. No one would believe her. No one on earth would help her.

  Then, for the second time on the second day after not thinking of him at all for a long while, she thought of Roger.

  * * * *

  She listened to the ringing of the telephone at the other end of the line. In her ears, the ringing was converted by the wire into a series of angry, waspish sounds. She counted the sequence of sounds, one, two, three, four, five. After the fifth, she hung up the receiver and stepped out of the telephone booth in the drugstore where she had gone to call. She stood for a minute outside the booth with her head bowed, as if she was trying intensely to remember something that she had forgotten. She had now reached, in fact, the nadir of her despair. Roger was not at home. Even if he had been at home, she conceded dumbly, there was no good reason why he should want to talk with her or see her or lift a hand to help her. Even if he were willing to help her, which he probably would not be, there was surely nothing that he could do. There was nothing anyone could do, and there was nothing now to be done. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. Nothing and nowhere on earth.

  Yet it was necessary, absolutely necessary, to go somewhere and do something. One simply could not, after all, stand forever motionless outside a phone booth in a drugstore. At the rear of the store, across from the booth, there was a lunch counter with a row of unoccupied stools in front of it and a girl in a starched white dress behind it. As a beginning, the lunch counter would be a place to go, and drinking a cup of coffee would be a thing to do. Having made this decision, or having had it thrust upon her by circumstances, she walked across to the counter, sat down on one of the stools and ordered the cup of coffee from the girl in the starched white dress.

  What day was it? Was it Saturday or was it Friday? She thought about this question for a moment, frowning with concentrated effort into her cup of coffee, and finally she was certain, although previously she had somehow felt that it was Saturday, that the day was in fact Friday. She had, for some reason or other, the impression that this was enormously important, making a vast difference to something significant, and she began now to try to think of whatever it was that was significant and different because it was Friday instead of Saturday. Then it came to her suddenly, accompanied by such an agony of relief and resurgent hope that she was forced to clutch her throat to choke back a burst of frantic laughter.

  Friday was a school day, that was what was important, and Roger was a school teacher, and school teachers on school days are at school and not at home. If one wanted to call a school teacher, then, one could wait until school was out and the teacher was home, or one could, if the matter was urgent, call the office of the school and have the teacher summoned to the phone there, which was, she understood, a procedure generally frowned upon by the administration. Well, her need was urgent, desperately urgent, but she was reluctant, nevertheless, to resort to the emergency procedure of calling Roger at school. Having injured him cruelly already, she could not now impose upon him the slightest inconvenience. Besides, if she called him at school, it would be difficult for her to say what needed saying, and for him, in return, to say what she wanted to hear.

  What, precisely, did she want to hear him say? What, if anything, did she want him to do? Save her from Clay, somehow give her sanctuary from death, yes, but most of all, she realized with a searing flash of insight, whatever was said and if nothing was done at all, she wanted him to recognize the truth.

  He must believe, she thought. If only he believes!

  Looking at her watch, she saw that it was almost noon. Did school let out at three-thirty or four? She tried to remember from her own years there as a student, and she thought that it was four, but she wasn’t positive, and schedules, besides, are sometimes changed. No matter. She would call Roger again at four-thirty, after he had had time to get home, and she would keep calling him at intervals, if necessary, until he answered. In this resolution she was supported at last by the blind, unreasoned faith that he was her last good hope.

  There at this instant was the remote, shrill sound of the noon whistle in the railroad yards. There were four hours and a half that must be spent somewhere, and it was impossible to return to the house of Clay Moran. She could never, after today, go there again. Neither could she sit indefinitely at a lunch counter in a drugstore.

  Wondering where to go and what to do, she remembered seeing her checkbook when digging in her purse for a dime for her coffee. She opened her purse again and looked in the checkbook and saw that her account showed a balance of slightly more than a thousand dollars. Well, there was one more place to go and one more thing to do, one place and one thing at a time and in turn.

  She went to the bank and cashed a check for an even thousand dollars. After leaving the bank, she went to a restaurant and ordered lunch. She wasn’t hungry and couldn’t eat, but over food and coffee, growing cold, she was able to spend almost an interminable hour. Then, walking down the street from the restaurant, she saw the unlighted neon sign of a cocktail lounge and turned in, although it was something she would not ordinarily have done, and spent a second hour over two martinis, only the first of which she drank. It was then almost two o’clock. Spent piecemeal, a fragment here and a fragment there, time crept. It was an unconscionable drag from one hour to the next. She must somehow find a way to hurry the hour she wanted it to be, or to make less laggard the hours between then and now. Outside the cocktail lounge she saw, across the street and down a block, the marquee of a movie theater. She walked to the theater, hurrying as she wished time to hurry, bought a ticket and went in.

  She never knew what the movie was. She did not read the posters outside, and inside she did not watch the screen. Sitting in cool and blessed darkness in the back row of seats, she closed her eyes and tried not to think, but this was impossible, she discovered, and so she began deliberately to think of the days and years before Clay, the tender time of sweet sadness when she had loved Roger and Roger had loved her. In the end she had rejected his enduring love with cruel contempt when Clay, much older and immensely richer, had seen her and wanted her. That was before the smell of death crept in. She had sold herself for wealth and security and enviable status. Good-bye, Roger. Forget me if you can. Here’s stone for bread and vinegar for wine.

  Time passed in darkness before the silver screen, and it was four-thirty. She read her watch and left the theater and walked down the street until she came to a sidewalk telephone booth. She deposited her dime and dialed Roger’s number, but again there was no answer. She dialed three times more, waiting outside the booth for ten minutes between each attempted call, and then, on the fourth attempt, he answered at last. His voice, speaking after two years with the sound of yesterday, brought into her throat a hard knot around which she forced her response with a sensation of physical pain.

  “Hello, Roger,” she said. “Do you know who this is?”

  There was a silence so long that she had a bad moment of incipient panic, thinking that he had simply put down the phone and walked away, but then his voice came back, interrogative and listless, as if he were asking a question with an answer he did not really wish to hear.

  “Ellen? Is it Ellen?”

  “I’ve been trying and trying to call you, Roger.”

  “I was at school. I just got home.”

  “I know. I remembered. Listen to me, Roger. I want to see you again. Will you meet me somewhere?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Please, Roger. Please do.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “All right, then. There’s no use. No one will help me, and there’s nothing I can do.”

/>   “Are you in trouble?”

  “If you don’t help me, I’m going to die.”

  “What? What did you just say?”

  “Nothing. It’s no use. Good-bye, Roger.”

  “Wait a minute. Did you say you were doing to die? Is that what you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I can’t tell you over the phone. What does it matter? No one else will help me, and neither will you.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “I don’t know. I only know there’s no one else.”

  “I see. When there’s no one else, ask Roger.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Never mind. Where are you?”

  “Downtown. In a phone booth.”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “Yes. It’s parked in a lot.”

  “Come out here. I’ll wait for you.”

  “To your apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure it would be wise. Maybe we had better meet somewhere else.”

  “Come or not. I’ll wait here.”

  “You don’t understand. It might be dangerous for you.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “All right. I’ll come. Oh, Roger, it will be good to see you and talk with you again.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it will be good.” She hung up. She had now, after a long time of terror, a blessed feeling of security and peace. Roger would believe. Roger would help. He would be her refuge and her strength, and it was time, past time, for her to go to him. First, before going, she leaned her head against the telephone in the little booth and began silently to cry.

  * * * *

  Roger had been sitting, when the phone rang, on the edge of his bed holding a revolver. It was an old revolver that he had acquired from his father at the time of his father’s death. He did not like guns, and had never fired this one, although he longed to fire it, just once, and it gave him comfort sometimes to sit and hold it. He was holding it again now, having returned after the telephone call to his place on the bed.