Hoch's Ladies

by Edward D. Hoch

  “What other method is there?”

  “Well, John Dickson Carr once had a novel where the killer introduced carbon dioxide gas into a tower room. The victim jumped from the window to avoid suffocation as the gas displaced the oxygen in the room.”

  “That wouldn’t work in an open-air balloon basket,” Susan pointed out. “Then maybe something else made him jump. A writer named C. Daly

  King wrote a story about the crew of a motor-boat who jumped overboard and drowned for no reason. It turned out there were giant wolf-spiders hiding on board that came out when the boat’s motor heated up.”

  “No wolf-spiders,” Susan insisted with a firm shake of her head as she pulled into the Rowe driveway.

  “Maybe a giant bird of some sort, a vulture or an eagle—”

  “You read too many mysteries, Rita.”

  “Then you think he just jumped?”

  Susan didn’t answer till Rita let them into the house. Then she said, “I don’t know. The answer may lie in the first death, a year ago. When we were talking last night, Leavor mentioned that Diana Rowe had left a suicide note for Duncan, and that he still had it. Do you think I could see it?”

  She hesitated a moment, then said, “I suppose so. He had it framed with her picture and hung it in his den.”

  “He framed her suicide note?” Leavor had mentioned that too. “He always considered it more of a love letter.”

  Susan followed her into the den and stood before a large color photograph of a strikingly handsome woman, her lips curled into a slight enigmatic smile. Beneath it a rectangle had been cut in the mat to show a brief handwritten note: I’m leaving our vacant existence yet our unique grand love endures nobly.

  Susan reread the words with their seeming contradiction. She was still staring at them when Philip Rowe came in a few minutes later. ‘That was Diana’s suicide note,” he said quietly. “Now my uncle is with her.”

  “You think he killed himself too?”

  “There’s no other explanation. The state police agree.”

  “No other explanation,” Susan agreed reluctantly. “You’ll be returning to New York now?”

  “I still have a store promotion to plan. I’ll have to speak with Kevin now.” It was sometime after one when Kevin Nova arrived at the house with some of the others to offer their sympathies. She got Kevin aside and asked him about taking Pegasus to New York in the fall. “I can’t think about it today,” he told her. “After what happened to Duncan I don’t feel like ever going near a balloon again.”

  “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

  “He wouldn’t have been up there if I hadn’t accepted his challenge to the race.”

  “You weren’t racing Manchester last week, were you?”

  “No,” he admitted, but that didn’t seem to make him feel any better.

  Leavor had brought the downed balloon to the state police substation for examination, but they’d been unable to find anything out of the ordinary. Philip spoke to them on the phone and then came to announce that the death would probably be classified as an accident, as had Manchester’s the week before. There was no evidence of suicide, and murder seemed out of the question.

  “No one would have a motive for killing Duncan,” Kevin Nova agreed. No motive, no means. Susan thought about it. Was it only her past experi-

  ence with crime that made her see something here that didn’t really exist?

  She decided to stay one more night and speak with Nova again in the morning.

  Susan awoke in the morning knowing who killed Duncan Rowe and Bruce Manchester. She knew who’d killed them and how it had been done. Perhaps her subconscious mind had been working on it while she slept.

  After breakfast she drove over to Duncan Rowe’s home, hoping they’d all be there prior to visiting the funeral parlor. Philip and Rita were serving bacon and eggs to some of the usual crowd, and she saw Nova and Leavor at once. She walked into the living room as if she owned the place and went right to the den.

  “Susan,” Rita called, “do you want some breakfast?”

  “I’ve had it, thanks.” She lifted the picture of Diana Rowe—the one with the suicide note—off the wall and walked back through the living room with it.

  Philip interrupted her. “Where are you going with that?”

  “To the police. It’s evidence in a murder case.”

  After two deaths, the killer was beyond bluffing it out. He leaped from the sofa and tried to grab it from her. For an instant no one seemed to know what was going on. Finally they held him down while Philip demanded an explanation from her.

  “He was Diana’s lover,” she said simply. “She couldn’t break away from Duncan and she couldn’t give up the affair, so she went up in the balloon and found another way out. Even with her suicide note she found a way to communicate with each of them. You all looked at it for a year and no one ever saw it. Perhaps you just needed a fresh set of eyes.”

  “Saw what?” Rita asked, staring at the note below the photograph.

  “Read it: I’m leaving our vacant existence yet our unique grand love endures nobly. That was the message for Duncan. Now read the first letter of each word and get a quite different message: I love you Glen.”

  Glen Leavor glared at her and said nothing. The men holding him tightened their grip.

  “He felt that Duncan had driven her to suicide, and he spent a year devising the proper vengeance. He failed last week when Duncan and Manchester switched balloons at the last minute. The innocent Manchester died in place of Duncan. Yesterday Leavor was more successful.”

  “But how?’ Philip demanded. “How could he have forced my uncle to jump to his death from that balloon?”

  Susan was staring at Glen Leavor, whose expression of controlled anger hadn’t softened. “Duncan didn’t jump, he was pushed. You might say a blow from a giant boxing glove knocked him out of that basket. He was killed by an air-bag—an automobile airbag.”

  It wasn’t until Glen Leavor confessed to the police many hours later that Susan and the others learned the full story. It was Nova’s report of hearing a shot just before Manchester fell that had made her think of an airbag. “It’s like a shot when they go off,” she explained. “The igniter squib detonates with a bang, just like a gunshot, and the airbag is inflated with nitrogen gas in something like fifty milliseconds. I’d guess it was hidden in the box behind the control panel. What I took to be a fire extinguisher attached to a bracket on the bottom of that box was really the small tank for the compressed nitrogen gas.”

  “But you and Leavor reached the downed balloon together,” Philip said. “Why didn’t you notice the deflated airbag?”

  “Because Leavor painted it the same colors as the balloon’s envelope. I did notice him pushing some of the deflated fabric out of the basket, but I thought it was part of the envelope. Naturally he removed the entire gadget while he was bringing the basket back in his truck. Leavor’s in the auto repair business, remember. And he encouraged the race by immediately betting on Duncan to win. He probably stocks airbag kits as replacements after accidents. He no doubt inflated it with an air pump, spray-painted it to match the envelope, and then replaced it and reattached it to the pressurized tank of nitrogen gas. Getting it into that gauge box would have been easy.”

  Susan’s deductions had been correct so far as they went. Leavor revealed he’d added a device like a kitchen timer to the box so it would buzz after a certain number of minutes. When Manchester and Duncan Rowe lifted the lid to find the cause of the buzzing they activated the airbag. Angled slightly upward, it hit them with the force of—yes, a boxing glove. Without an automobile seat behind them they were thrown backward, over the edge of the basket to their deaths.

  “I suppose they were the first victims murdered with automobile airbags,” Susan told Rita as she prepared to leave the next day, but she wished somehow she could have changed that to “almost” murdered in the case of Duncan Rowe. She’d liked the man, and she wou
ld have liked having him at Mayfield’s fall promotion. As it was, Kevin Nova had agreed to take part, with his balloon.

  She knew every time she looked at it she’d remember Duncan’s body falling through space.

  A CRAVING FOR CHINESE

  From his office above the entrance to the main building of the state

  prison, Warden Chester Coyne could always hear the demonstrators on an execution night. They started early, before nightfall, with their

  chants and songs and speeches, and kept it up until confirmation came that the execution by lethal injection had been carried out, usually sometime after midnight. On this night in late November he’d been deluding himself that the turnout might be smaller than usual. The condemned man was white and middle-class, with a particularly brutal murder on his record. He wasn’t some disadvantaged youth from the inner city, lured into violence by the easy money of drugs. But by six o’clock they were out there, lighting little bonfires against the night chill, settling in for another countdown.

  There was a knock on the warden’s door and Captain DeMarco, in command of death-row guards, entered without waiting for the standard invitation. DeMarco was like that, and sometimes it annoyed Chester Coyne. “What is it, Captain?”

  “I asked Feltzer what he wanted for his last meal. He says Chinese food.” Warden Coyne sighed. They couldn’t prepare that in the prison kitchen.

  “All right. Send out for it.”

  “Which place?”

  “Whatever is closest. Make sure there’s tight security when they deliver it.” Chinese food!

  When he was alone again Coyne stared at the telephone on his desk. The red phone was a direct line to the governor’s office, but he knew there’d be no pardon tonight. The death penalty had been one of several issues in the recent election campaign, and the governor’s support of it had been one of the factors in his reelection.

  Coyne glanced at the typewritten schedule on his desk. David Feltzer was scheduled for his last meal at eight-thirty p.m. He had requested a visit from his wife and his brother at ten o’clock, and at eleven he would be visited by the Catholic chaplain of the prison. Shortly after midnight, pursuant to the warrant for his execution, he would be taken from his cell to the death chamber, strapped to a gurney, and fitted with an intravenous tube that would introduce a sedative into his body. At some point in the proceedings, after the condemned man was asleep, the designated executioner would add a lethal dosage to the tube. Death would be quick and painless.

  The warden turned and stared out at the growing crowd beyond the prison gates. All those who opposed capital punishment should be able to die so peacefully!

  Shortly after eight o’clock Captain DeMarco returned, giving his usual perfunctory knock. “The Chinese food is here. Want to come with me?”

  “Sure,” Chester Coyne said. It would be the last time the warden would see Feltzer until he was led into the execution chamber. This was the part he hated, seeing and comforting a man who would soon be dead, but he viewed it as part of his duty. Capital punishment was easy to support in the abstract, a bit more difficult when you were speaking to the condemned man from just a few feet away.

  David Feltzer was forty-five years old now, though he’d been only thirty-three at the time of the murder. He’d been unemployed and desperate when he passed a note to a bank teller and took the packet of money she handed him. It was an exploding dye-pack, and it had gone off moments later as he reached the bank parking lot. Enraged and desperate, and covered with red ink, he’d seized a young high-school girl named Meagan Brady and dragged her into his car as a hostage. The only witnesses had been across the street, unable to help, but one of them did get his license number.

  The girl’s body had been found a few hours later in a country ditch. She’d been shot in the head. Feltzer was apprehended by state police that night, fleeing through the southern part of the state. He offered no resistance and, in fact, signed a confession, claiming the police had deprived him of sleep during twelve hours of questioning. It had taken the jury only half that long to find him guilty and recommend the death penalty.

  Feltzer’s wife and brother had stuck with him through a number of hearings and appeals. He’d admitted the robbery but insisted he’d dropped the girl off unharmed. No one really believed him, least of all Warden Coyne. As he entered the condemned cell now with Captain DeMarco he still harbored a distaste for the man.

  “We’ve brought your Chinese dinner as you requested, Feltzer,” he said, stepping out of the way as DeMarco placed the containers of food on the small table a guard had brought in. The guard would remain with him while he ate.

  David Feltzer had grown thin and pale during his twelve years of imprisonment. He looked especially bad this night, which was to be expected. They never looked good during these final hours. “Thanks, Warden,” he muttered without meeting their eyes. He stared at the plastic knife and fork the prison had provided, then at the wooden chopsticks that had come with the food.

  “Your wife and brother will be here at ten,” Coyne told him. “The chaplain will come at eleven. You’ll have an hour with him.”

  The prisoner nodded, apparently deciding to use the chopsticks. “It’ll be good to see them.” He emptied the containers onto paper plates.

  “Is there anything else you’d like with your meal?” DeMarco asked.

  “This is fine.” He took a bit of food and seemed to grimace slightly. He took another portion between the chopsticks and brought it to his mouth. Coyne decided he was probably out of practice with the chopsticks. The third portion got away from him, falling to the floor.

  “Never mind,” the warden told him. “We’ll get it.”

  David Feltzer raised his eyes to Coyne for the first time. “I think I’m going to—”

  Then he slumped over the table, knocking the paper plate to the floor.

  Captain DeMarco was at his side, trying to lift him. After a moment he gave up and looked at Chester Coyne. “He’s dead, Warden. I think he’s taken poison.”

  It was Susan Holt’s bad luck to arrive in West Caroline two days after the death of David Feltzer. She’d flown there because her employer, Mayfield’s of Manhattan, had just completed an agreement to purchase Brookline, a chain of department stores headquartered in West Caroline. She and Mike Brentnor had come down from New York to help plan the special store promotions to be held when Brookline changed its name to Mayfield’s in six months.

  “We’d like to have the new name in place for the Easter selling season,” Brentnor had explained to Brookline’s top executive, a gray-haired man named Ziegler. “But that would only give us four months.”

  “Not enough time,” Ziegler decreed. Susan had already decided he was not the sort one argued with. “We need at least six months. Call it the end of May.”

  “That would be satisfactory,” Susan said quickly, before Mike could disagree. “We’ll want to meet with your promotions manager for some preliminary planning.”

  “That would be Simon Feltzer, but you’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Simon buried his brother this morning.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Was it sudden?”

  “Well, yes and no. He was awaiting execution for murder and he killed himself a few hours earlier.”

  “My God!” Mike Brentnor said. “How—?”

  Ziegler cut further questions short with a wave of his hand. “You can read about it in the morning paper. We have business to discuss here.”

  As they drove back to their hotel, Susan grumbled, “What a cold fish!

  Simon Feltzer must have a great time working for him.”

  “We’ll have to pick up a paper and read about it.” Susan shrugged. “We’ve got nothing better to do till tomorrow morning.” She was dreading the evening with Mike Brentnor, remembering a previous occasion when she’d been forced to fight off his unwanted advances. He’d behaved himself around the office since then, but here they were on a trip together and the memory of last time was
all too clear. She decided to check the newspaper for a nearby movie.

  The newspaper account of David Feltzer’s death was hardly satisfactory. It hinted that police were still investigating the circumstances, trying to determine how the condemned man had gotten the poison. There had been no ruling of suicide as yet.

  “Why would he commit suicide when the state was going to kill him in a few hours anyway?” Brentnor asked as they relaxed over a cocktail in the hotel bar.

  “Some people have,” Susan pointed out. “Goering did.”

  “Who?”

  “Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man during World War Two, commander in chief of the German air force. He swallowed a poison pill a few hours before he was to be hanged as a war criminal. Don’t you know your history?”

  “I have a tough enough time with modern stuff.” He chewed on a lemon slice that had come with his drink. “What’s on the schedule for tonight?”

  “I think I’ll look for a nearby movie I haven’t seen.”

  “Hey, this isn’t Manhattan! In these burgs the movies are all out at the malls.”

  He was right, of course, as she discovered when she glanced through the entertainment pages. They ended up having dinner together and then she made a hasty escape to her room.

  In the morning they showed up at Simon Feltzer’s office at the Brookline store. The appointment had been set for ten o’clock, but when they got there they discovered Feltzer was in a meeting with a detective investigating his brother’s death.

  Simon Feltzer himself was a rumpled man of about forty, with thinning hair and thick glasses. He didn’t look like any sort of department-store executive, but then Susan was probably judging him in New York terms. He met them at the door with a beefy man who was introduced as Detective Sergeant Green. The sergeant nodded to Susan and said, “Sorry to delay your meeting like this. I have to check in with headquarters and then I’ll be back for just a minute.”