The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  It had been a bad day at school. He’d had discipline problems. He was not good at discipline, and he often had problems of that kind. The principal had talked with him seriously about the problems several times. It was unlikely that he would be rehired next year, but he didn’t care. It was just another failure in his life. His life was full of failures. All his days were bad.

  His headache was back. It always came back. In fact, it rarely left. There was a contracting steel band around his head, slowly crushing his skull.

  Ellen was coming. Coming here. She would be here soon. Ellen had been the most beautiful thing in his life, and he had loved her, but in the end she had deserted him. Another failure for him. After Ellen, his life had been sick, and all his days were bad. It had been wrong of Ellen to make him sick with hate instead of love. Now she might die. She had said so herself.

  He broke the revolver in his hand. Because of a kind of inherent petty meanness in his nature which would not permit him to provide for any effort in excess of what was needed to complete it, there was only one cartridge in the cylinder. One bullet for one death.

  Carrying the revolver over to a chest of drawers where other cartridges were, he loaded a second chamber.

  SOMETHING PRICELESS

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1968.

  Dinner was served at seven, the routine hour, just as if it were an ordinary evening of an ordinary day. The courses were served in order by the maid, whose name was Clara. Neva Durward sat at one end of the long dining table, and Dwight, her husband, at the other. By a scale of three inches to the year, the interval between them was a measure of the disparity of their ages. It was also a fair indication of the climate of their relationship. Neva was thirty-two. Dwight was double that.

  After the final course, Dwight asked to be excused and told Clara that he would have coffee and brandy in the library. This was predictable. Dwight was always proper. He was always dull. He always had coffee and brandy in the library. As for Neva, who was not always proper and rarely dull, she excused him gravely and escaped, when he had retired, to the living room.

  Dinner had not taken long. Consulting her jeweled watch, Neva saw that it was just past seven-thirty. Seven-thirty from nine left one-thirty; an hour and a half. Ninety minutes. This was a long time to wait under the circumstances, a very long time, but Neva was not, strangely enough, impatient or apprehensive. She was, indeed, almost serene. A little restless, perhaps, but nothing more. She considered television and rejected it. She thought of reading and was not tempted. Music, she decided, was what she needed now. Not, however, just any music. Music to excite the mind and heat the blood. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss? Yes, Strauss. Richard, not Johann. Moving to the stereo, she selected a recording and put it on the machine. Don Quixote. Standing there, her head bowed, her fingers spread and touching tips to the console top, she listened intently to the sounds of a madman’s dream.

  Clara came into the room. She walked a few steps toward Neva and stopped, not speaking, her eyes fixed on the back of her mistress. Neva could not see her and did not hear her, but she knew, after a while, that Clara was there. She could sense it in the electric prickling of her skin. She was certain from her sudden illusion of nakedness. She stood quite still for a few moments longer, listening in illusory nakedness to the fantasies of madness, and then she raised her head and turned it slowly to look at Clara over a shoulder, turned her body as slowly afterward to conform.

  “There you are, Clara,” she said.

  “Have you served Mr. Durward his coffee and brandy?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Durward.”

  “We’re alone here, Clara. Never mind the formality.”

  Clara’s lips had been set in the faintest of smiles, and now the smile, with no change whatever in the set of the lips, seemed to spread subtly and gather in her eyes with bright intensity.

  “Yes, Neva.”

  “That’s better. I have enough of propriety. Do you want something, Clara?”

  “I was wondering if you’d like some coffee and brandy yourself.”

  “Brandy. No coffee.”

  Clara turned and went out the way she had come. She was a lovely girl, Neva thought. A strange and lovely girl with strange and mute commitments. Being herself a beautiful woman, Neva could afford the generosity of such a concession. She had no cause to envy the endowments of her maid. Crossing the room to a sofa near the fireplace, in which there was no fire, she sat down at one end, resting in a corner against an arm and the back. She wondered what Dwight was doing this moment in the library. This, too, like so many other things Dwight did, was predictable. He was surely sitting in the deep leather chair under the reading lamp, surrounded by shadow outside a small perimeter of light, his glasses slipped down on the bridge of his nose, and in his lap, lying open, whatever book he had chosen to read in snatches between naps until it was ten o’clock and time for bed.

  The book, whatever its exact title, would be in some way related to the life and times of Savanarola. Since his heart attack and his subsequent retirement from active engagement in his business affairs, Dwight had sustained the fiction, somehow essential to his vision of himself, that he was hard at work on what would be the definitive biography of the Florentine friar. His work had never progressed beyond the preparatory stage, undisciplined reading and disorderly data, and Neva knew, as he did in his heart, that it never would. No loss to the world, Neva thought. It was evidence of the quality of Dwight’s character that he had chosen to admire, from a time of renaissance literally glutted with giants of the arts, a strident and bothersome reformer who had eventually succeeded, quite properly, in getting himself burned at the stake. Dwight’s nose, unfortunately, was as blue as litmus paper in an alkaline solution.

  Clara returned with a bottle of brandy and a snifter on a silver tray. She set the tray on a low table at Neva’s elbow and poured from the bottle into the snifter. Stepping back, she stood watching her mistress with the faint, strange smile that gathered intensity in her eyes.

  “Will there be anything else?” she said.

  “No. Nothing. Thank you, Clara.”

  “May I offer a suggestion?”

  “Yes. Of course. What is it, Clara?”

  “I’d drink lightly of the brandy if I were you.”

  “So I shall. So I always do. Have you ever known me to drink to excess, Clara?”

  “Never. I thought, however, that you might be tempted tonight.”

  “You’re mistaken. I don’t need to look for courage in a bottle.”

  “Are you offended? I’m sorry.”

  “Offended, Clara? On the contrary, I’m touched by your concern.”

  “I should be very unhappy if you came to harm.”

  “Believe me, so should I. We must do our best to avoid it. Tell me, Clara, are you certain that you want to play a part in this?”

  “Yes. I’m certain.”

  “Why should you do so much for me?”

  “Because you ask it.”

  “I have no right. You might be wise to refuse.”

  “I don’t think so at all, Neva.”

  “Are you so devoted to me, then?”

  “I would do a great deal more if more were needed.”

  “How much more, Clara? Would you die for me?”

  “It takes courage to die. If I had the courage, I would die for you.”

  “Well, you are committed to enough as it is. I prefer you alive.”

  “Thank you, Neva.”

  “Has Mrs. Kelsey gone yet?”

  “She’s just finishing in the kitchen. She’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”

  “Good. Make sure the back door is locked behind her.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure. Shall I remind you when it is
a quarter to nine?”

  “It won’t be necessary. I’ll not fail to watch the time.”

  It was then eight. Turning away, Clara left the room. Neva watched her go. From the shining goblet which she had lifted from the tray beside her, the bouquet of the brandy drifted up to her and seeped into her head. She raised the glass and tilted a little of the brandy into her mouth. Don Quixote’s mad dream, diminishing on the sound of a mellow horn, was interrupted by the click of automatic mechanism and ensuing silence. Neva sat still, draining her goblet by sips in the silence, and then she set it aside, got up and started the latter half of the dream. Returning to the sofa, she poured more brandy and sat down. Time passed. Don Quixote floated down the Ebro in an enchanted boat. Mrs. Kelsey, her kitchen clean, was surely gone. Somewhere near was Clara, and in the library was Dwight, napping and waking and reading on an island of light in a sea of shadows. They were alone in the house, she and Clara and Dwight, and it was eight-thirty. His mad dream done, Don Quixote died slowly to the sad, sane sound of strings.

  When Neva looked at her watch again, it was seventeen minutes till nine. She sat without moving, holding her arm bent at a right angle across her breasts, staring steadily at the face of the watch. The hour and minute hands crept imperceptibly. The sweep hand, measuring the swift flight of seconds, rushed apace around the dial. Once. Twice. At a quarter to nine precisely, as if a second or a minute soon or late would somehow be disastrous, she stood up and walked across the room and into the hall. Clara was standing there, across the hall at the foot of the stairs, and may have been waiting there in silence, for all that Neva knew or could guess, for most of an hour.

  “If Martin Crandell arrives while I am in the library,” Neva said, “show him into the living room to wait. Meanwhile, I will do what must be done. Wish me luck, Clara.”

  “I wish you luck,” Clara said.

  Neva walked down the hall to the library door. She paused for a moment outside, a hand on the knob, her head slightly bowed in an attitude of listening, and then she turned the knob and opened the door and slipped into the room, closing the door quietly behind her. Silence. In the silence, nothing moved. There was the massive leather chair, and there in the chair was Dwight. His head had fallen forward until his chin touched his chest. His glasses had ridden down the bridge of his nose and clung precariously to the tip. In his lap, still held open by a hand that rested flat on the pages across the fold, was the thick volume he had been reading before he fell asleep. The pages, Neva noticed with a sharpened awareness of details, had very fine print and wide margins and the faded, brittle look of age. She watched and listened. She could detect the merest movement of his chest, the shallow pumping of his lungs, and after a moment she could hear, hardly more audible than a drift of smoke, the whisper of his breath between his lips, closer to death than to life.

  Hurry. Hurry now. But hurry, remember, with caution.

  She knew from experience that Dwight in his naps slept lightly in the dim twilight just below the surface of consciousness, and so, although the pile of the carpet was thick beneath her feet, she stooped over, standing first on one leg and then the other, and removed her shoes. Leaving the shoes by the door, she walked swiftly and directly, without discernible sound, to Dwight’s desk beside the draped windows a little beyond and behind the chair in which he slept. She opened the top drawer to the right of the kneehole, and there was the revolver, just as she expected, where Dwight had always kept it.

  She knew, on the whole, very little about revolvers, and she had no notion of the caliber of this one, but she knew that Dwight kept it loaded, even though she had never known him to fire it, because it gave him, apparently, a sense of security. Taking it from the drawer, she made sure the bullets were in place, and then, quiet as a kitten in her stocking feet, she turned and walked to Dwight’s chair and around it from the rear and knelt on one knee on the floor at his right side. He did not move. She could hear clearly now the sibilant sound of his shallow breathing. Holding the revolver so that it just touched the fabric of his jacket, the snub barrel angled slightly up between a pair of ribs, she shot him in the heart.

  She stood up and stepped back and watched him die. Afterward, swiftly again, she dropped the revolver and grasped him by the legs between the ankles and the knees and hauled him out of his chair onto the floor and across the floor to a position approximately midway between the chair and the desk. She returned to the chair and picked up the revolver. Lacking a handkerchief, she held the revolver in a fold of her skirt and scrubbed it clean of fingerprints. Still holding the revolver in the fold of her skirt, her skirt raised to her waist, she went back to the body and released the revolver to let it fall onto the floor near the right hand. On her knees, carefully, she took the hand and wrapped the fingers around the butt of the revolver, drawing them off afterward across the butt so as to smudge the prints slightly. Then, standing, with the toe tips of one foot she nudged the revolver away from the body into a position where, being dropped, it might have naturally fallen.

  There. It was done. The worst was done. Standing there beside Dwight’s body, her eyes closed and lowered in anomalous effect of obscene prayer, she suffered, in the brief suspension of action between what had been accomplished and what remained to be done, a quite genuine feeling of regret. She had killed in exigency without compunction but not without pity, and she would have preferred it otherwise. She would have chosen, if she could, to have him live out his days in his own way, dull and oppressive to her as his way had been, and to see him die in his bed in his own good time, which would not have been, at the longest, very long. But never mind. She had no choice. Or she had been forced, rather, to a choice she would not willingly have made. Now there was more to do, and little enough time, surely, to do it.

  Methodically, in the immediate area surrounding the body, she began to create signs of a struggle. She overturned a table lamp. She pushed askew the table on which it had sat. She swept a brass ashtray onto the floor. She was careful not to overdo the scene. Dwight, attacked, could have managed no more than token resistance.

  The scene set, she went to the drapes and parted them and unlocked a sliding glass door that opened onto a terrace outside. She opened the door a couple of feet and left it open, permitting the drapes to close again across it. Her fingerprints were of no concern. Her own would be expected, and it would be assumed that anyone fleeing this way in guilt would take sufficient care to leave none. From the door to the terrace, she crossed directly to the door to the hall. She looked at her watch. It was three minutes until nine. It had taken her about ten minutes to murder her husband and to accomplish the other necessary things. She picked, up her shoes and put them on, standing, as before, first on one foot and then the other. Opening the door, she went put and: walked down the hall to the living room. Clara was waiting there, standing just inside the entrance, her eyes shining, her lips slightly parted, her breasts rising and falling, in a measured cadence of leashed excitement.

  “Is it done?” she said.

  “Yes, it’s done.”

  “Is it all right?”

  “Yes, it’s all right.”

  Neva poured brandy into her goblet and sat down. The doorbell rang, and Clara; went to answer it. Neva could hear Clara’s voice, and the voice of a man, in the hall. She finished her brandy and set aside her glass.

  Martin Crandell came into the room. He was a fairly tall man, just over six feet, with the carefully preserved and tended body of a perennial beach boy prepared to go regularly on display in next to nothing. Now he was wearing a conservative gray suit with a white shirt and maroon tie and burnished black shoes. His shoulders were broad, his waist and hips narrow. His hair was pale blond, brushed smoothly across a narrow skull, and his eyes were a faded blue, restless in their sockets, probing always for secrets. He crossed the room to Neva with a kind of subdued grace, his legs swinging easily, his arms and
torso hardly moving.

  “Darling,” he said, “how are you?”

  “Don’t call me that,” she said.

  “Oh. Sorry. I forgot for a moment that things have changed between us. Neva, then, if you prefer.”

  “I prefer Mrs. Durward.”

  “Well, let it go. I see that this visit is to be strictly business. Fair enough. That being so, are you prepared to settle our little affair?”

  “That depends. In what way?”

  “Is there more than one way? To put it crassly, do you have the money? Fifty thousand dollars, I believe, was the amount agreed upon.”

  She stood up and moved away from him, and then, as if suddenly changing her mind, turned back to face him squarely.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t have it.”

  “That’s too bad. And not quite honest, if you don’t mind my saying so. When you called and asked me to see you here, you assured me that you would have the money. Could I possibly have come on the wrong night?”

  “No. It’s the right night.”

  “At the wrong time? You did nine o’clock sharp, didn’t you?”

  “It’s the right time.”

  “I must say, then, that I can see no excuse for your negligence. Or is it deception? Perhaps, however, you’ve simply decided that this is not the right place. I admit that our own home hardly seems appropriate. Not that I have any objection, you understand, but it seems that you are taking unnecessary risks yourself. I was fully prepared to meet you in a neutral place. Skulking in an obscure bar, for instance, or lurking in the bushes of some remote park.”