by Неизвестный
“Oh, hush up,” the reporter suggested, sitting up. “I had a tip from one of my local informants that zither music had been heard hereabouts, so—”
“Would your informant be a guy who imports brandy in a somewhat unorthodox way?”
She nodded and, with his help, stood up. “The Zimmerman Emeralds were buried by Ogden in a gravesite behind this tomb. He etched, in cipher, the exact location of the jewels on the surface of the automaton and …Harry, look out!”
He spun around in time to see Perdita, black cloak billowing out, charging toward him and swinging the shovel.
Harry backed against the marble wall of the crypt and dropped to a sitting position.
Carried forward by the force of her swing, Perdita stumbled and she and the shovel slammed into the wall. She fell and the shovel bounced away to land at Jennie’s feet.
While Perdita was thus occupied, Harry yanked out his .38 revolver from his shoulder holster and shot the aggressive young woman in the thigh.
“How ungentlemanly,” she muttered, toppling over sideways and passing out.
“See here, Challenge, you blackguard, I won’t allow you to go around peppering my only daughter with bullets.” Molesworth had come trotting around from the back of the crypt.
He was clutching a derringer in his right hand. Halting, spreading his legs wide, he aimed the tiny weapon directly at the crouching Harry.
Jennie, who’d grabbed up the fallen shovel, tossed it now at the tenor-voiced master criminal.
The blade hit him in the vicinity of the kidneys. Yowling in pain, Molesworth stumbled.
Harry, upright again, lunged and caught Molesworth’s gun hand. He brought the arm down like the handle of a pump and the derringer’s single shot dug into the weedy ground.
He then socked the criminal mastermind on the chin three times, hard.
Molesworth tottered, slumped, fell to the ground and stretched out beside his daughter on the hallowed ground, out cold.
“Despite your uncalled-for criticism of me,” said Jennie, gathering up the strands of rope that had recently held her, “I do appreciate your saving me, Harry.”
“I, too, appreciate my saving you,” he told her, “since I’m quite fond of you.” Leaning, he kissed her.
After a moment, Jennie said, “Okay, now let’s wrap up these two and turn them over to the law.”
While winding rope around Molesworth’s ankles, Harry inquired, “Is Mme. Theresa inside the mansion?”
After binding up the leg wound with the polka dot handkerchief, Jennie was tying up the unconscious Perdita. “That she is,” she said. “But I can’t see why Colonel Bascom is so eager to display her. She really is a rather second rate musician.”
* * * *
Ron Goulart has been a professional writer ever since he left college at UC Berkeley several decades ago. He’s written a lot of stuff in the mystery, science fiction and nonfiction areas. Twice he’s been nominated for the MWA Edgar, once for the SFWA Nebula and once for the Will Eisner Award. His latest mystery novel is Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle (2005) and his latest nonfiction work is The Comic Book Encyclopedia (2004).
THE BET, by Marc Bilgrey
“Is this seat taken?” said a voice. I looked up from the novel I was reading and saw a man who I knew to be one of the club’s senior members staring down at me. “No,” I replied, “no one’s in the library but me.”
“Very good,” he said, and sat down on the wing back chair next to mine, holding a copy of the Wall Street Journal. Then he eyed me and said, “You’re young Chester, aren’t you?”
I admitted to it.
“Rollo Trundell,” he said, nodding. “Your father and I used to see each other at the exchange quite often. Sorry to hear about his passing.”
“Thank you. He was a good man.”
“That he was,” said Trundell, and opened up his newspaper. For a minute or two he didn’t say anything and then he turned to me and said, “What’re you wasting your time reading that trash for, young man?”
I shrugged and looked at my novel, then back at him. “Nothing like a good mystery to take your mind off the cares of the day.”
“Trash, chewing gum for the eyes. What’s the point of them? To find out who killed whom? Exercise in futility.”
I wasn’t used to having my choice of reading matter questioned, let alone impugned. “I happen to like to read a good crime story every now and then, sir. No harm in it.”
“A good crime story? In this city there’s enough of the real thing going on without having to read some half baked writer’s idea of murder and mayhem.”
Trundell was not a man I cared to have a row with so I decided to let him have his say and not allow myself to become agitated. “Mr. Trundell—”
“Rollo, please.”
“Rollo, I appreciate your opinion on my choice of reading matter, but I must respectfully disagree.”
“Your father was a stubborn man, too. I admire stubbornness. But, see here, this mystery business is really a crock. What useful purpose does reading all that rot do anyone? And don’t tell me that it gets your mind off things. That’s what women were invented for.” He chuckled to himself.
I had no wish to offend Trundell, whose reputation for crudeness was, I now saw, well deserved; however, I did not feel like being the butt of his jibes, either. I debated getting up and leaving, but this option would certainly do nothing if not offend. Trundell was a legend on Wall Street and one never knew when a legend could be helpful to one’s business. Better to make an ally than an enemy.
“Perhaps reading mysteries isn’t the world’s most productive way of passing a few hours,” I conceded.
“Don’t go turning into a panty waist now, Chester.” He didn’t ask my Christian name. “I liked you better when you were standing up for what you believe in. Even if what you believe in is a load of crap.”
“Mysteries are not crap, sir.”
He grabbed the book out of my hands and examined the back cover. “Jack Barnes committed the perfect crime but can he keep it that way?” he read. “The perfect crime!” he laughed. “Tell me what possible merit this junk could have in the real world?”
“Not everything has a practical application.”
“Oh, please. The perfect crime, indeed. What nonsense.”
He had my back up, but, as I say, what could I do? Insulting him had landed lesser men than myself in the kind of trouble that one does not need. Why have to worry about avoiding someone at a social occasion in the future? Or having a potential investor back away because one of the ‘important people’ has deemed you unworthy? So there I was, forced to defend my choice of leisure time diversion and in the process bring the wrath of Trundell down upon me, or back down and be thought a weakling.
“I actually think that the perfect crime goes on all the time,” I said, surprised by my own words. Then, I realized, what I was doing, was attempting to move the subject away from crime novels and bring it into the area of crime itself, and hopefully segue into something innocuous. Rather like a hurricane that is downgraded to a tropical storm and then a breeze and finally moves out to sea.
“What do you mean that the perfect crime goes on all the time?” said Trundell, clearly intrigued.
“I just meant that fiction merely mirrors what goes on in society, that’s all.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily, young man. When you say the perfect crime, are you referring to murder?”
“I’m referring to all crime, and yes, I suppose murder fits on that list as well.”
“You think that many murders go completely unsolved?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I see,” he said, stroking his chin. Then he said, “I would define the perfect crime as someone getting away with mu
rder and then profiting from it.”
“Interesting definition.”
“Well, certainly. What good is killing someone if you can’t make money on the thing?”
“This is an odd conversation,” I said, in order to say something, though I was happy to finally get the subject off my choice of reading material.
There was a pause. Then Trundell said, “I happen to know that your business is in need of capital.”
“Whose business is not?” I said, with a smile.
“Yes,” replied Trundell, “but not everyone’s business is being trounced by Japanese competition.”
“How did you—?”
“I have my sources. Of course, if you had an extra thirty million to pump into resource and development, you could find that elusive computer chip before they do.”
“It’s not possible that you could know about that. That information is privileged—“
“No information is privileged to someone who knows how to get it.”
I bowed my head and admitted that he had accurate intelligence. I wondered how he had gotten it. Then I realized that he hadn’t stayed at the top of the game because he had gaps in his knowledge.
“So, young Chester,” he said, “how much is thirty million dollars worth to you?”
“I’m not sure I follow your point, sir,” I said.
He looked around the deserted room. Then he looked back at me. “What would you be willing to do for thirty million dollars?”
“Do? Are you making me some kind of offer?”
“Yes, but not the kind you think. Are you a betting man?”
“One can’t be in business and not be, Mr. Trundell.”
“Rollo. Though, I wasn’t thinking of the indirect gambling that might be called business. I mean the real thing. Roulette, baccarat, blackjack.”
“I can’t say that those kind of games ever held much allure for me.”
Trundell looked at the arm of his chair, then said in a lower voice, “Suppose I said that I would give you thirty million dollars under certain conditions.”
“I’d ask what the conditions were, of course.”
“Suppose I said that I would bet you thirty million dollars.”
“To do what?”
“To do something that I propose.”
“You have me intrigued, I won’t deny it. Though, as you no doubt know, I could not at this time put up a matching sum.”
“Obviously not. No, this would be a wager that would follow these terms: I would put up thirty million and you would put up, say, oh, fifty thousand dollars. So, if you win the bet, you take home thirty million, if you lose, I pocket fifty thousand.”
“As seductive an offer as this seems, I would not want to think that I was taking advantage of you, Rollo.”
Trundell’s eyes slitted. “No one takes advantage of me. No one. This offer is made in the name of sport. To me the money is not the significant factor.”
I swallowed. The legends about Trundell were all apparently true, I thought. His brashness, his eccentricities. His liquidity. “The obvious question of course—”
“Aside from what kind of fool am I—”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
He held up his hand. “You didn’t. The question is, what would you and I have to do to win the money. Well, the answer comes from your book.”
And I thought that I’d done such a masterful job of changing the subject!
“What I am proposing,” said Trundell, “is that both of us try to commit the perfect crime.”
“The perfect crime?” I said, hardly believing what I was hearing. The usual conversations I’d had at the club since becoming a full member a little less than a year ago involved boating, golf and upon occasion, women.
“You heard me correctly,” said Trundell. “Whoever can commit the more perfect crime collects the thirty million, or in my case gets to keep it. If you lose, you’re out fifty thousand. Now, as I stated before, I define the perfect crime as murder with profit. It doesn’t even have to be a large profit, it just has to enrich you more than you were before you committed the crime. By enrich, I mean financially.”
I sat quietly for a couple of moments. If this bet had been proposed by another man I would have laughed it off as some kind of sick practical joke. Only this bet was coming from Rollo Trundell. A man not known for jokes. A man who was known for shepherding two presidents into office. A man who lesser lights might have characterized as a captain of industry, though that trite phrase didn’t even begin to describe his true stature. In another time he would have mixed with giants, now he quietly wielded what could only be described as (if one went in for melodrama) an empire. Trundell was as serious as a man could be. He was someone whose name never appeared on the lists of the wealthy and powerful. He owned the places where those lists were published and made damn sure his name was never on them.
My entire business depended on getting that thirty million, and, at the moment, there were no other offers. And to make matters worse, the deadline was a scant four weeks away and then the whole matter would be moot. If I failed to raise the necessary funds, my place in the world would be seriously diminished, as well as my standing amongst those who counted. I gave it some more thought, though it was quite clear that the decision had already been made.
When I turned to Trundell, he placed his newspaper on the small table next to him. “The perfect crime,” I said, “murder with a profit.”
“Yes,” he replied. “A week from tonight we shall meet back here and exchange stories. And each of us must bring along documentation of the crime and evidence of the profit. In the event of a draw, the winner shall be determined by the one who has profited most from the endeavor. If I make a dollar on it and you, a dollar and a quarter, you are the winner. Now then, shall we seal the wager?”
I shook his hand. “Done,” I said.
He smiled. It was the coldest smile I had ever seen.
The next day, I packed my wife off and sent her to our cottage in Maine for a week. The pretense I used was that I needed to entertain alone for business reasons. She didn’t question it. When she was gone, I sent our driver home and took out the car.
As I drove up Park, I decided that I must have been a lunatic to accept such a preposterous bet. Me, who had demurred on cricket wagers at school and who never dropped more than a hundred dollars at Saratoga. But then my thoughts drifted back to the Japanese. Damn it all! I had made a deal with the devil, I decided, but having accepted it, I had to see it through. It did not matter that I had done it during a moment of weakness, that, had calmer heads prevailed, I would have gotten up and left. No, I had given my word and so had, for lack of a better description, my adversary, and now, what was done was done. I was bound to abide by the terms of our agreement.
I drove to the edge of the East River and got out. I stared into the polluted waters and wondered what I could do to uphold my side of the bet. I was no criminal. I abhorred violence. It was with great reluctance at school that I even taunted the lower classmen (much less pushed them) though it was expected of me. But now, to agree to murder, well, it went against the grain. Still, there was the matter of business. An infusion of such a sizeable amount of capital would not only save the company, it bore the very strong possibility of elevating it (and me along with it) to a strata never before known by my family. The company could quite possibly prosper beyond mere business, providing me an entree into the upper echelons of power.
I got back into my car and began driving again. Aimlessly, through the park, down Fifth, up Madison, down Lexington. I hoped that an idea would come to me. But none did.
Two days later, I was still without the slightest notion of who to murder and how to make a profit doing it. It occurred to me that I could pick up a bum off the street, a homele
ss man, and do away with him, but what would the profit be in that?
If I was going to do this thing, I had to do it right. I had to show up old Trundell, beat him at his own game. The thought entered my mind to kill someone and sell their body to some medical school. But then I realized that bodies are donated, as far as I knew, and not sold for profit. That sort of thing only went on in bad Victorian gothic novels.
Another day passed. I was nowhere closer to my goal. At nightfall I once again got into my car and began driving with no destination in mind. I hoped that the motion or the constant change of scene would somehow inspire me to come up with a solution to my problem. I had even brought along a gun that had come into my possession as part of the legacy of a relative. Since the gun was from the Second World War, I knew that it was untraceable. The weapon was in fine shape and in good working order. This had been proved by me, months earlier with a few test shots into a pillow, at my house in Connecticut.
But what good was a gun without a victim? The chances of finding the elusive victim I sought seemed to grow more distant with each passing hour. I thought about the murder mysteries I’d read. The kind of book that had gotten me into this conundrum to begin with. In those, people often took insurance out on their intended victim and then killed him or her. But there wasn’t time to do that in this instance. And even if there had been, weren’t there always very thorough investigations by the insurance companies in those sorts of cases? As much as I needed the cash infusion, I had no wish to be arrested and sent to prison.
Implied in Trundell’s pact had been the proviso not to get caught. He didn’t have to say it. How could one hope to use the ill gotten gains from a jail cell? It was an obvious footnote to the whole game. Kill someone, don’t get sent to prison, make a profit. It had seemed like such a good idea at the club a few days earlier. I found it incredible that a single brandy had made me take such leave of my senses! But of course, I knew it wasn’t the brandy that had done it. It was desperation. And fear. Two feelings that have toppled entire nations. And built them.