The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  “I came out here before I saw your sister,” she said. Her voice was as cool and bright as her dress. “I wanted you to be the first to know. Simon and I are going to be married next month.”

  Mr. Partridge never remembered what was said after that. He imagined that she made her usual comments about the shocking disarray of his shop and her usual polite inquiries as to his current researches. He imagined that he offered the conventional good wishes and extended his congratulations, too, to that damned young whippersnapper Simon Ash. But all his thoughts were that he wanted her and needed her and that the great, the irresistible Harrison Partridge must come into being before next month.

  Money. That was it. Money. With money he could build the tremendous machinery necessary to carry a load of power—and money was needed for that power, too—that would produce truly impressive results. To travel back even as much as a quarter of a century would be enough to dazzle the world. To appear at the Versailles peace conference, say, and expound to the delegates the inevitable results of their too lenient—or too strict?—terms. Or with unlimited money to course down the centuries, down the millennia, bringing back lost arts, forgotten secrets—

  “Hm-m-m!” said Agatha. “Still mooning after that girl? Don’t be an old fool.”

  He had not seen Agatha come in. He did not quite see her now. He saw a sort of vision of a cornucopia that would give him money that would give him the apparatus that would give him his time machine that would give him success that would give him Faith.

  “If you must moon instead of working—if indeed you call this work—you might at least turn off a few switches,” Agatha snapped. “Do you think we’re made of money?”

  Mechanically he obeyed.

  “It makes you sick,” Agatha droned on, “when you think how some people spend their money. Cousin Stanley! Hiring this Simon Ash as a secretary for nothing on earth but to look after his library and his collections. So much money he can’t do anything but waste it! And all Great-uncle Max’s money coming to him too, when we could use it so nicely. If only it weren’t for Cousin Stanley, I’d be an heiress. And then—”

  Mr. Partridge was about to observe that even as an heiress Agatha would doubtless have been the same intolerant old maid. But two thoughts checked his tongue. One was the sudden surprising revelation that even Agatha had her inner yearnings, too. And the other was an overwhelming feeling of gratitude to her.

  “Yes,” Mr. Partridge repeated slowly. “If it weren’t for Cousin Stanley—”

  By means as simple as this, murderers are made.

  The chain of logic was so strong that moral questions hardly entered into the situation.

  Great-uncle Max was infinitely old. That he should live another year was out of the question. And if his son Stanley were to pre-decease him, then Harrison and Agatha Partridge would be his only living relatives. And Maxwell Harrison was as infinitely rich as he was infinitely old.

  Therefore Stanley must die, and his death must be accomplished with a maximum of personal safety. The means for that safety were at hand. For the one completely practical purpose of a short-range time machine, Mr. Partridge had suddenly realized, was to provide an alibi for murder.

  The chief difficulty was in contriving a portable version of the machine which would operate over a considerable period of time. The first model had a traveling range of two minutes. But by the end of the week, Mr. Partridge had constructed a portable time machine which was good for forty-five minutes. He needed nothing more save a sharp knife. There was, Mr. Partridge thought, something crudely horrifying about guns.

  That Friday afternoon he entered Cousin Stanley’s library at five o’clock. This was an hour when the eccentric man of wealth always devoted himself to quiet and scholarly contemplation of his treasures. The butler, Bracket, had been reluctant to announce him, but “Tell my cousin,” Mr. Partridge said, “that I have discovered a new entry for his bibliography.”

  The most recent of Cousin Stanley’s collecting manias was fiction based upon factual murders. He had already built up the definitive library on the subject. Soon he intended to publish the definitive bibliography. And the promise of a new item was an assured open-sesame.

  The ponderous gruff joviality of Stanley Harrison’s greeting took no heed of the odd apparatus he carried. Everyone knew that Mr. Partridge was a crackpot inventor.

  “Bracket tells me you’ve got something for me,” Cousin Stanley boomed. “Glad to hear it. Have a drink? What is it?”

  “No thank you.” Something in Mr. Partridge rebelled at accepting the hospitality of his victim. “A Hungarian friend of mine was mentioning a novel about one Bela Kiss.”

  “Kiss?” Cousin Stanley’s face lit up with a broad beam. “Splendid! Never could see why no one used him before. Woman killer. Landru type. Always fascinating. Kept ’em in empty gasoline tins. Never could have been caught if there hadn’t been a gasoline shortage. Constable thought he was hoarding, checked the tins, found corpses. Beautiful! Now if you’ll give me the details—”

  Cousin Stanley, pencil poised over a P-slip, leaned over the desk. And Mr. Partridge struck.

  He had checked the anatomy of the blow, just as he had checked the name of an obscure but interesting murderer. The knife went truly home, and there was a gurgle and the terrible spastic twitch of dying flesh.

  Mr. Partridge was now an heir and a murderer, but he had time to be conscious of neither fact. He went through his carefully rehearsed motions, his mind numb and blank. He latched the windows of the library and locked each door. This was to be an impossible crime, one that could never conceivably be proved on him or on any innocent.

  Mr. Partridge stood beside the corpse in the midst of the perfectly locked room. It was four minutes past five. He screamed twice, very loudly, in an unrecognizably harsh voice. Then he plugged his portable instrument into a floor outlet and turned a switch.

  It was four nineteen. Mr. Partridge unplugged his machine. The room was empty and the door open.

  Mr. Partridge knew his way reasonably well about his cousin’s house. He got out without meeting anyone. He tucked the machine into the rumble seat of his car and drove off to Faith Preston’s. Toward the end of his long journey across town he carefully drove through a traffic light and received a citation noting the time as four-fifty. He reached Faith’s at four fifty-four, ten minutes before the murder he had just committed.

  Simon Ash had been up all Thursday night cataloging Stanley Harrison’s latest acquisitions. Still he had risen at his usual hour that Friday to get through the morning’s mail before his luncheon date with Faith. By four thirty that afternoon he was asleep on his feet.

  He knew that his employer would be coming into the library in half an hour. And Stanley Harrison liked solitude for his daily five-o’clock gloating and meditation. But the secretary’s work desk was hidden around a corner of the library’s stacks, and no other physical hunger can be quite so dominantly compelling as the need for sleep.

  Simon Ash’s shaggy blond head sank onto the desk. His sleep-heavy hand shoved a pile of cards to the floor, and his mind only faintly registered the thought that they would all have to be alphabetized again. He was too sleepy to think of anything but pleasant things, like the sailboat at Balboa which brightened his weekends, or the hiking trip in the Sierras planned for his next vacation, or above all Faith. Faith the fresh and lovely and perfect, who would be his next month—

  There was a smile on Simon’s rugged face as he slept. But he woke with a harsh scream ringing in his head. He sprang to his feet and looked out from the stacks into the library.

  The dead hulk that slumped over the desk with the hilt protruding from its back was unbelievable, but even more incredible was the other spectacle. There was a man. His back was toward Simon, but he seemed faintly familiar. He stood close to a complicated piece of gadgetry. There was the click of a switch.

  Then there was nothing.

  Nothing in the room at all but Simon As
h and an infinity of books. And their dead owner.

  Ash ran to the desk. He tried to lift Stanley Harrison, tried to draw out the knife, then realized how hopeless was any attempt to revive life in that body. He reached for the phone, then stopped as he heard the loud knocking on the door.

  Over the raps came the butler’s voice. “Mr. Harrison! Are you all right, sir?” A pause, more knocking, and then, “Mr. Harrison! Let me in, sir! Are you all right?”

  Simon raced to the door. It was locked, and he wasted almost a minute groping for the key at his feet, while the butler’s entreaties became more urgent. At last Simon opened the door.

  Bracket stared at him—stared at his sleep-red eyes, his blood-red hands, and beyond him at what sat at the desk. “Mr. Ash, sir,” the butler gasped. “What have you done?”

  Faith Preston was home, of course. No such essential element of Mr. Partridge’s plan could have been left to chance. She worked best in the late afternoons, she said, when she was getting hungry for dinner; and she was working hard this week on some entries for a national contest in soap carving.

  The late-afternoon sun was bright in her room, which you might call her studio if you were politely disposed, her garret if you were not. It picked out the few perfect touches of color in the scanty furnishings and converted them into bright aureoles surrounding the perfect form of Faith.

  The radio was playing softly. She worked best to music, and that, too, was an integral portion of Mr. Partridge’s plan.

  Six minutes of unmemorable small talk—What are you working on? How lovely! And what have you been doing lately? Pottering around as usual. And the plans for the wedding?—and then Mr. Partridge held up a pleading hand for silence.

  “When you hear the tone,” the radio announced, “the time will be exactly five seconds before five o’clock.”

  “I forgot to wind my watch,” Mr. Partridge observed casually. “I’ve been wondering all day exactly what time it was.” He set his perfectly accurate watch.

  He took a long breath. And now at last he knew that he was a new man. He was at last the Great Harrison Partridge.

  “What’s the matter?” Faith asked. “You look funny. Could I make you some tea?”

  “No. Nothing. I’m all right.” He walked around behind her and looked over her shoulder at the graceful nude emerging from her imprisonment in a cake of soap. “Exquisite, my dear,” he observed. “Exquisite.”

  “I’m glad you like it. I’m never happy with female nudes; I don’t think women sculptors ever are. But I wanted to try it.”

  Mr. Partridge ran a dry hot finger along the front of the soapen nymph. “A delightful texture,” he remarked. “Almost as delightful as—” His tongue left the speech unfinished, but his hand rounded out the thought along Faith’s cool neck and cheek.

  “Why, Mr. Partridge!” She laughed.

  The laugh was too much. One does not laugh at the Great Harrison Partridge, time traveler and perfect murderer. There was nothing in his plan that called for what followed. But something outside of any plans brought him to his knees, forced his arms around Faith’s lithe body, pressed tumultuous words of incoherent ardor from his unwonted lips.

  He saw fear growing in her eyes. He saw her hand dart out in instinctive defense and he wrested the knife from it. Then his own eyes glinted as he looked at the knife. It was little, ridiculously little. You could never plunge it through a man’s back. But it was sharp—a throat, the artery of a wrist—

  His muscles had relaxed for an instant. In that moment of non-vigilance, Faith had wrested herself free. She did not look backward. He heard the clatter of her steps down the stairs, and for a fraction of time the Great Harrison Partridge vanished and Mr. Partridge knew only fear. If he had aroused her hatred, if she should not swear to his alibi—

  The fear was soon over. He knew that no motives of enmity could cause Faith to swear to anything but the truth. She was honest. And the enmity itself would vanish when she realized what manner of man had chosen her for his own.

  It was not the butler who opened the door to Faith. It was a uniformed policeman, who said, “Whaddaya want here?”

  “I’ve got to see Simon . . . Mr. Ash,” she blurted out.

  The officer’s expression changed. “C’mon,” and he beckoned her down the long hall.

  The tall young man in plain clothes said, “My name is Jackson. Won’t you sit down? Cigarette?” She waved the pack away nervously. “Hinkle says you wanted to speak to Mr. Ash?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Are you Miss Preston? His fiancee?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes widened. “How did you— Oh, has something happened to Simon?”

  The young officer looked unhappy. “I’m afraid something has. Though he’s perfectly safe at the moment. You see, he— Damn it all, I never have been able to break such news gracefully.”

  The uniformed officer broke in. “They took him down to headquarters, miss. You see, it looks like he bumped off his boss.”

  Faith did not quite faint, but the world was uncertain for a few minutes. She hardly heard Lieutenant Jackson’s explanations or the message of comfort that Simon had left for her. She simply held very tight to her chair until the ordinary outlines of things came back and she could swallow again.

  “Simon is innocent,” she said firmly.

  “I hope he is.” Jackson sounded sincere. “I’ve never enjoyed pinning a murder on as decent-seeming a fellow as your fiance. But the case, I’m afraid, is too clear. If he is innocent, he’ll have to tell us a more plausible story than his first one. Murderers that turn a switch and vanish into thin air are not highly regarded by most juries.”

  Faith rose. The world was firm again, and one fact was clear. ‘Simon is innocent,” she repeated. “And I’m going to prove that. Will you please tell me where I can get a detective?”

  The uniformed officer laughed. Jackson started to, but hesitated. “Of course, Miss Preston, the city’s paying my salary under the impression that I’m one. But I see what you mean: You want a freer investigator, who won’t be hampered by such considerations as the official viewpoint, or even the facts of the case. Well, it’s your privilege.”

  “Thank you. And how do I go about finding out?”

  “Acting as an employment agency’s a little out of my line. But rather than see you tie up with some shyster shamus, I’ll make a recommendation, a man I’ve worked with, or against, on a half dozen cases. And I think this set-up is just impossible enough to appeal to him. He likes lost causes.”

  “Lost?” It is a dismal word.

  “And in fairness I should add they aren’t always lost after he tackles them. The name’s O’Breen—Fergus O’Breen.”

  Mr. Partridge dined out that night. He could not face the harshness of Agatha’s tongue. After dinner he made a round of the bars on the Strip and played the pleasant game of “If only they knew who was sitting beside them.” He felt like Harunal-Rashid, and liked the glow of the feeling.

  On his way home he bought the next morning’s Times at an intersection and pulled over to the curb to examine it. He had expected sensational headlines on the mysterious murder which had the police completely baffled. Instead he read:

  SECRETARY SLAYS EMPLOYER

  After a moment of shock the Great Harrison Partridge was himself again. He had not intended this. He would not willingly cause unnecessary pain to anyone. But lesser individuals who obstruct the plans of the great must take their medicine.

  Mr. Partridge drove home, contented. He could spend the night on the cot in his workshop and thus see that much the less of Agatha. He clicked on the workshop light and froze.

  There was a man standing by the time machine. The original large machine. Mr. Partridge’s feeling of superhuman self-confidence was enormous but easily undermined, like a vast balloon that needs only the smallest pin prick to shatter it. For a moment he envisioned a scientific master mind of the police who had deduced his method, tracked him here, and discover
ed his invention.

  Then the figure turned.

  Mr. Partridge’s terror was only slightly lessened. For the figure was that of Mr. Partridge. There was a nightmare instant when he thought of Doppelganger, Poe’s William Wilson, of dissociated personalities, of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Then this other Mr. Partridge cried aloud and hurried from the room, and the entering one collapsed.

  A trough must follow a crest. And now blackness was the inexorable aftermath of Mr. Partridge’s elation. His successful murder, his ardor with Faith, his evening as Harun-al-Rashid, all vanished. He heard horrible noises in the room, and realized only after minutes that they were his own sobs.

  Finally he pulled himself to his feet. He bathed his face in cold water from the sink, but still terror gnawed at him. Only one thing could reassure him. Only one thing could still convince him that he was the Great Harrison Partridge. And that was his noble machine. He touched it, caressed it as one might a fine and dearly loved horse.

  Mr. Partridge was nervous, and he had been drinking more than his frugal customs allowed. His hand brushed the switch. He looked up and saw himself entering the door. He cried aloud and hurried from the room.

  In the cool night air he slowly understood. He had accidentally sent himself back to the time he entered the room, so that upon entering he had seen himself. There was nothing more to it than that. But he made a careful mental note: Always take care, when using the machine, to avoid returning to a time-and-place where you already are. Never meet yourself. The dangers of psychological shock are too great.

  Mr. Partridge felt better now. He had frightened himself, had he? Well, he would not be the last to tremble in fear of the Great Harrison Partridge.

  Fergus O’Breen, the detective recommended—if you could call it that—by the police lieutenant, had his office in a ramshackle old building at Second and Spring. There were two, she imagined they were clients, in the waiting room ahead of Faith. One looked like the most sodden type of Skid Row loafer, and the elegant disarray of the other could mean nothing but the lower reaches of the upper layers of Hollywood.