Exeunt Murderers

by Anthony Boucher

  She sat in a chair half-facing the door, well lit by the reading lamp which must have been left burning from the night before. Her face grinned at him, in that sardonic welcome which only a strychnine-fed host can provide.

  There were smudges of chocolate on the grinning lips, and there was a box of chocolates on the table by the phone.

  MacDonald used the phone to call the necessary technicians. Before they arrived he had discovered in the wastebasket the familiar wrapper and the familiar typed label.

  “And now,” MacDonald demanded in the fourth booth on the left of the Chula Negra, “where the hell are we?”

  “Hell,” said Nick Noble succinctly and truthfully.

  “It made sense before. Steve had made up his mind. He didn’t have the heart or the guts to make a clean cut, so he simply removed the one he didn’t want. It would’ve made the same kind of sense if we’d found only Lynn. But both of them … that switches the motivation altogether. Now we have to look for somebody who wants both women out of Steve Harnett’s life. And who has such a motive?” He paused and tried to answer himself. “I’ve got to look into the secretary. Every so often there’s something in this office-wife business. She’s a dowdy, homely wench, but she probably doesn’t see herself that way.”

  “Labels,” said Nick Noble. “Let’s see.”

  MacDonald placed them before him:

  Mrs Stephen Harnett

  11749 Verdugo Drive

  Los Angeles 24, Calif

  Mrs Lynn Dvorak

  6708 Las Aves Road

  Hollywood 28, Calif

  Nick Noble leaned back in the booth and a film seemed to obscure his eyes. “Mrs…?” he said softly.

  “Lynn? Divorced. Three years ago. That doesn’t enter in. You’ll notice the postmark, too. Downtown Hollywood. Steve admitted he’d been in to see the advertising agency; but that doesn’t help now. The secretary lives near here—which might be a good reason for not mailing here. And that reminds me: I’m down in this part of town to see her. I’d better—”

  “Why?” said Nick Noble.

  MacDonald smilingly disregarded the query. “Oh—one odd thing I forgot to tell you about Steve. When that New York call came through he muttered something about life goes on, and added: Life’s crime’s fool. I told you he’s a sucker for quotations, but I couldn’t spot this one; it bothered me, so I stopped at the library to use a concordance. It’s Hotspur’s death speech in Henry IV, Part I, the same speech Huxley used for a title a while back, only it’s properly Life’s time’s fool. Interesting subconscious twist, don’t you think?

  Nick Noble’s lips moved softly, almost inaudibly:

  But thought’s the slave of life, and life’s time’s fool;

  And time, that takes survey of all the world,

  Must have a stop …

  He broke off, looking almost embarrassed by so long and articulate a speech. “Wife and I,” he explained. “Used to read Shakespeare. Time… crime … must have a stop.”

  “Lieutenant MacDonald?”

  This was a strange new voice, deep, with a slight Central European accent. Bitterly remembering what had begun when last a new voice accosted him in the Chula Negra, MacDonald looked up to see a dapper little man waving a sheet of notepaper at him.

  “They tell me at your Headquarters,” the little man was saying, “I may possibly find you in this Lokal; so I come. Our friend Stephen Harnett gives me this letter for you long since, but I am first now in Los Angeles with the opportunity to present it.”

  Puzzled, MacDonald began to read:

  Dear Don:

  This is to introduce Dr Ferdinand Wahrschein, who is (need I say?) a friend of the sponsor’s wife and who is conducting a technical investigation into American police methods. I’d deeply appreciate (and so would the sponsor) any help which you can give him.

  Sincerely, Steve

  The lieutenant rose, tossing the letter to Nick Noble. “Delighted to meet you, but you catch me just when I am leaving to interview a witness, and I’d sooner do it alone. But I tell you what: if you really want to know how the local department cracks its toughest nuts, you stay right here with The Master.”

  And he was gone. Dr. Ferdinand Wahrschein stared speculatively at the pinched white face in the booth, then gingerly seated himself and resignedly began, “Na also! Is it your finding that anthropometric method—”

  “Sherry?” suggested Nick Noble hospitably.

  Miss Patricia McVeagh had a room (adjacent bath—no cooking priv.) in what had once been an old family mansion on Bunker Hill. Lieutenant MacDonald walked from the Chula Negra to Third and Hill and there rode up the funicular Angels’ Flight. He ws glad he was in plain clothes. The once fashionable Bunker Hill district is now tenanted largely by Mexicans and by Americans of Spanish-Indian descent, many of whom feel they have good reason not to care for uniformed members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

  Miss McVeagh opened the door and said, “Lieutenant MacDonald, isn’t it? What on earth …?” Her tone meant (a) she hadn’t seen today’s papers, or (b) such an actress was wasting her time as a secretary.

  She hadn’t grown any more glamorous since the martinis in March; but there was something possibly preferable to glamor in the smile of hospitality which managed to conquer her puzzlement.

  MacDonald began abruptly, “I don’t need to bother you with the complete fill-in,” which is one of the best known ways of causing witnesses to volunteer their own suggestions. “It’s just a routine matter of checking certain movements in the Harnett household. I gather you weren’t working there today?”

  Miss McVeagh smiled. “Is that what Mr. Harnett told you? I suppose I shouldn’t … Look, Lieutenant; I don’t have anything to drink, but how about some Nescafé? I could talk easier with a cup in my hand. Do you mind?”

  MacDonald did not mind. He liked people to talk easy. And while he waited for the Nescafé, he decided he liked people who lived in cheap rooms and spent the money they saved on a judicious balance of Bach (Johann Sebastian) and Tatum (Art).

  Miss McVeagh came back with two cups and a carbon copy of a letter. “If it’s just where do I stand with the Harnett household, this letter ought to clear things up. I mailed it this morning.” MacDonald read:

  Dear Mr. Harnett:

  I realize that your financial position since “Pursuit” did not pick up the option makes my regular employment out of the question. But I still feel, as I told you that time when I so mistakenly took a second of your martinis, that a good secretary is also a collaborator.

  For that reason, I’d like to offer to place my secretarial services on a speculative basis. The exact terms we can work out if you like the idea; but the general notion would be that I’d work on the usual schedule, but be paid anywhere from $0.00 to $?.?? according to your monthly income level.

  He stopped reading there and said, “You love him that much?”

  “Love?” Her mouth opened wide.

  “You’d work for nothing just to try to pull him back on his feet?”

  “I would. So where does love come in?”

  “It would seem,” MacDonald observed between swallows of Nescafé, “to indicate at least a certain … devotion.”

  “Sure,” she nodded. “Devotion to Pat McVeagh. Look, Lieutenant. Steve Harnett’s good. When he does write, he can write like a blue streak. And when he gets himself straightened out, he’s going to hit the big time. What’s radio? What’s five hundred a week … said she blithely on Bunker Hill. But it’s true: it’s the real big time Steve Harnett’s headed for, and when he hits it, I want in.”

  “This not being straightened out,” MacDonald ventured. “It’s been bad?”

  “It’s been hell,” she said flatly. “I’ll tell you: Last week I was typing some letters on the standard out in the patio. He was supposed to be roughing out a plot in the study on his portable. Comes time for me to go home, he has to sign the letters, he hasn’t emerged, I take a chance on his wrath
and knock on the study door. He doesn’t shout. He just whispers ‘Come in,’ and I come in and there he is. He’s been in there eight hours. He hasn’t done one blessed word. His hands are shaking and his eyes look like he’s going to cry. I give him the letters, he picks up a pen, and it falls out of his fingers. That’s how bad it’s been, Lieutenant; but I’m still sold on him and I’ll take my chances.”

  Dr. Ferdinand Wahrschein felt a buzzing in his head. He was not sure whether to attribute it to his first experience with California sherry by the water glass, or to the answers he was receiving to his methodically prepared questionnaire. Nine out of ten of those answers would baffle him completely; but the tenth would cast a lightning flash of clarification on a long obscure problem.

  Pleasantly bebuzzed, he sat back and listened to Lieutenant MacDonald’s résumé of his conversation with Miss McVeagh. “I’m sold on her, Nick,” MacDonald ended. “Here: read her letter. I’ll swear that’s an absolutely honest expression of just what her interest in Steve Harnett is. And if she’s out on motive, who’s left?”

  Nick Noble accepted the letter and handed back another paper in exchange. “Something for you to read too. Came by messenger.”

  My dear Mr. Noble:

  My son informs me that he has once met you, and that you have had extraordinary success in solving problems perplexing to the regular police.

  Though I do not know you, may I beg you to exert your abilities on the problem of the deaths of my son’s wife and of his friend? My son is no ordinary man; and his peace of mind, if you can secure it, will be deeply valued by

  Your sincere friend,

  Florence Harnett

  (Mrs. S. T. Harnett)

  “See it now?” said Nick Noble.

  MacDonald felt Dr. Wahrschein’s beady and eager eyes on him, and sensed vaguely that the honor of the department depended on him. “I can’t say …” he began.

  “Labels,” said Nick Noble. “Look at them.”

  MacDonald looked at the labels. He stared at them. He glared at them. He scrutinized their inscrutability. Then suddenly he seized the other three papers which lay on the table, spread them in a row before him, looked from one to the other, and slowly nodded.

  “You see?” said Nick Noble. “Clear pattern. Three main points. 1: Groucho Marx.”

  MacDonald nodded gravely; he’d remembered that one. Meanwhile Dr. Ferdinand Wahrschein stared at him.

  “2,” Noble went on: “the cliché.”

  “Cliché?”

  “The chocolates. Everybody knows gimmick. Botkin, Molineux, Anthony Berkeley. Why eat? Unless …”

  “Of course. And the third point …” MacDonald indicated the assorted papers before him and echoed Noble’s own statement. “Crime must have a stop.”

  Dr. Ferdinand Wahrschein giggled and beckoned to Rosario for more sherry. This essay on American police methods should be aber fabelhaft!

  Steve Harnett filled his glass of straight whiskey. “I’m alone,” he said thickly. “Alone. They’re gone. Harriet’s gone. Lynn’s gone too. How happy … But they’re gone.” His bare toes wiggled in anguish. “And Pursuif’s gone too, come Thursday week. And McVeagh’s gone on account of I can’t pay her any more. I’m alone …”

  “Are you?” Mrs. Harnett asked gently. She sat unobtrusively in a corner while her son paced the room.

  “I know,” Steve muttered. “You’re here. You’re always here, darling, and you know how much … Blast it, there is truth in cliches. A man’s best mother is his—”

  The phone rang.

  “I’ll take it, dear.” Mrs. Harnett seemed hardly to move, but the phone had not rung three times before she answered it. “Just a minute,” she said quietly into the mouthpiece. “I’ll see if he’s in.” She put her hand over the diaphragm as she whispered, “New York.”

  Steve let out a yell. “They fire me and still they own my soul while the contract runs! But I can’t. Not now I can’t. Look at my hands. They’re quivering like an aspen … an aspic … an aspen …”

  He was still judiciously weighing the two words when Mrs. Harnett had finished murmuring apologies and hung up. “I’ll stand between you and these things now, dear,” she murmured. “I’ll—”

  But the next ring was on the doorbell, and Lieutenant MacDonald was not having any standing between. He strode in, snatched the glass from Steve, and began talking.

  “This thing sticking out of my pocket,” he said, “is a warrant. Just so a mystery plot man like you gets all the gimmicks straight, we’ll brief it. You couldn’t make up your mind, could you? You kept quoting How happy could I be with either … Only there’s another quote that starts like that. It was Groucho Marx who said, How happy I could be with either of these women … if only both of them would go away! And that’s the decision you reached. You were going to pieces; and what a nice simple life you could have if only you weren’t bothered with either Harriet or Lynn. No more problems, no decisions, no impingements …just you alone, in your insufficient self-sufficiency …!”

  Steve said, “If I had that glass back I could think better.”

  “You don’t want things outside yourself, but you can’t live without them. You’ve found that out by now, haven’t you? OK, take the glass. And take the proof. There’s been too much written about poisoned chocolates. Nobody’d eat an anonymous gift nowadays—especially no one close to a gimmick-conscious man like you. Unless they were reassured. ‘Stupid of me, darling; I forgot to put in the card.’ And who’s the only person who, immediately or by phone, could reassure both Harriet and Lynn?

  “And the best proof. Crime must have a stop. A full stop. The typewriter was almost certainly the one in your study, but that proved nothing. Anybody could’ve used it—Miss McVeagh, your mother … But typing habits are something else. And typists are divided into those who do and do not put a period, a full stop, after abbreviations like Mr. and Mrs. I saw a letter of McVeagh’s; she wrote Mr. Harnett—M, R, period. I saw a note from your mother; she wrote Mr. Noble—M, R, period. I saw a note from you; you wrote Dr Ferdinand Wahrschein—D, R, no period. And the murder labels were both addressed Mrs—M, R, S, no period.

  “The D. A.’ll want to know where the strychnine came from. I’ll make a guess. Your mother’s a semi-invalid, I gather. Maybe heart-trouble? Maybe using strychnine? Maybe missing a few tablets lately?”

  Lieutenant MacDonald had never seen anyone wring her hands before, but there was no other description for what Mrs. Harnett was doing. “I have noticed,” she struggled to say, “twice recently, I’ve had to have a prescription refilled before I needed to.”

  Steve gulped and set his glass down. “Hitting it too hard, Don,” he choked out. “Minute in the bathroom. Then you can …” He gestured at the warrant.

  “You must understand, Lieutenant,” Mrs. Harnett began as Steve left. “It isn’t as if my Stephen were like other men. This isn’t an ordinary case. Of course I have to tell the truth when it comes to something like the strychnine, but—”

  A dim fear clutched at Lieutenant MacDonald as he callously shoved past the old lady toward the bathroom. He threw open the unlatched door. Stephen Harnett stood there by the basin. MacDonald remembered McVeigh’s description: His hands are shaking and his eyes look like he’s going to cry. His trembling fingers were unable to bring the razor blade functionally close to the veins of his wrist. The blade slipped from his hand and clattered into the bowl as he turned and surrendered to the law.

  “He’ll never have to make another decision of his own,” MacDonald said to Nick Noble when he dropped into the Chula Negra after his testimony on the first day of the trial. “From now on it’s all up to his lawyers and the State. I think he likes it.

  “Of course they’ve made that nonsensical double plea: Not guilty and Not guilty by reason of insanity. In other words, I didn’t do it but if I did you can’t hurt me. It may stick; I think he’ll like it better if it doesn’t.”

  “Is he?” Noble wondere
d into his glass.

  “I don’t know. What’s sane? Like the majority of people? Then no murderer’s sane: the majority aren’t murderers. But the big trouble is with the people who are almost like the majority, the people you can’t tell from anybody else till the push comes which they can’t take. The people who could be the guy in the next apartment, the gal in the same bed … or me. So who’s sane? Who’s the majority? Maybe the majority is the people who haven’t been pushed …”

  Nick Noble opened his pale blue eyes to their widest. “You’re growing up, Mac,” he said, and finished his sherry hopefully.

  (1951)

  The Girl Who Married a Monster

  There seemed from the start to be an atmosphere of pressured haste about the whole affair. The wedding date was set even before the formal announcement of the engagement; Doreen was so very insistent that Marie must come at once to Hollywood to serve as maid of honor; the engagement party was already getting under way when Marie arrived at the house; and she had barely had time for the fastest of showers and a change of clothes when she was standing beside Cousin Doreen and being introduced to the murderer.

  Not that she knew it for certain at that moment. Then—with one of Doreen’s friends adlibbing a be bop wedding march on the piano and another trying to fit limerick lyrics to it and all the others saying “Darling…!” and “But my agent says…” and “The liquor flows like glue around here” and “Live TV? But my dear, how quaintly historical!”—then it was only a matter of some forgotten little-girl memory trying to stir at the back of her mind and some very active big-girl instincts stirring in front. Later, with the aid of the man in gray and his strange friend with the invisible fly, it was to be terrifyingly positive. Now, it was vague and indefinable, and perhaps all the more terrifying for being so.

  Marie had been prepared to dislike him. Doreen was only a year older than she (which was 27) and looked a year younger; there was something obscene about the idea of her marrying a man in his fifties. Marie was prepared for something out of Peter Arno, and for a moment it was a relief to find him so ordinary-looking—just another man, like the corner grocer … or no, more like the druggist, the nice one that was a bishop in the Latter Day Saints. For a moment after that it was a pleasant surprise to find that he was easy, affable, even charming in a way you didn’t expect of ordinary elderly men. He was asking all about her family (which was of course Doreen’s, too) and about Utah and how was Salt Lake nowadays, and all the time he made you feel that he was asking about these subjects only because they were connected with you.