Exeunt Murderers

by Anthony Boucher

  Finally I said, “Just what makes you so hot about this, Mr. Fuss?” (We’d exchanged names by then.) “Sounds like maybe you had some kind of personal angle on it.”

  “Well,” Alonzo said, “I guess for me it is kind of talking shop, like. You see, son … Well, there’s no use being modest about it. I was the best darned hangman the state of Iowa ever had.”

  You know how you get ideas. You think of a hangman as gaunt and grisly, like the Thing that comes for Mr. Punch. And you sit in the hot Pasadena sunlight and you look at this plump little man with the white collar on the blue shirt and the sweat stains under the armpits and he grins at you and says he’s a retired hangman.

  You think a hangman must be grisly in his mind too, like a war criminal or a mass murderer. And you sit and listen to him and the voice goes on flat and colorless and it’s just another retired businessman talking shop and his big executions have about as much thrill to them as a retired dentist’s account of his trickiest impacted wisdom tooth.

  It was a job and he worked at it. He took a certain pride in it; he was a craftsman. He wasn’t just a hangman; he was the best darned hangman in Iowa history. But the fact that he’d killed people …

  “Everybody kills a murderer,” Alonzo said. “You elect the attorney that convicts him and the judge that sentences him. You pay for the detectives that track him down and the rope that hangs him. Why son, I haven’t killed a man any more than you have.”

  I smiled at that one. It was certainly one way to put it.

  But it wasn’t the way Hagar looked at it.

  I met Hagar at a dinner party. The dinner was intended as another scouting expedition; but I didn’t think about that much after I sat down next to Hagar.

  Maybe you’ve read some of her stuff. Hagar Dix is the full name. Factual murder stories—not the true-detective kind of stuff, but pretty subtle probings into murderers and what makes them tick. I’d read some and liked them—I’ve got a certain interest in murder. And I guess I’d thought of her as one of these admirable research workers—the women that think in straight lines and wear their clothes the same way.

  I was wrong. Hagar had straight lines strictly in the right places only. She had a face that should’ve been ugly, and black eyes looked out at you and you didn’t see the face. You didn’t see much else around you and you didn’t taste your food; and you tried to decide whether you hated this woman or … Well, or not. And you could underline that not.

  I don’t talk much about the Wythe case. My connection with the Wythes wasn’t one of my more triumphant episodes. Herman got some ideas about that Trans-Con bond issue that were as unfair and unjustified as they were accurate: and I kind of preferred to forget the whole episode.

  But this night I wanted to make a pitch with Hagar; and murder being her business, you might say, I sort of offhand said I’d known a convicted murderer.

  It was then I first noticed her hands. Her legs were long, her neck was high and slim; but her hands were the shortest and stubbiest I’ve ever seen. The three segments of her fingers added up to the length of the first two on most hands. They were strong, those stubs; and now the brief forefingers made sharp staccato stabs at the tablecloth, while the little fingers arched and twitched.

  “You’ve known … a murderer?” It was a deeper voice than she’d used before, and yet it had the tone of a bobbysoxer addressing Frankie’s valet.

  But the fact that I’d exchanged maybe twenty sentences with Willis Wythe wasn’t quite enough to keep her keyed up for long. Her fingers knocked off and rested, and she said, “I’ve never known a murderer. With all my work. Oh, I’ve talked to them through jail bars, I’ve seen them in court. I’ve met men who were acquitted… but always justly, I’m sure. If only once …” She turned the eyes on me and I almost said something I’d’ve been sorry for.

  But the girl on my other side wanted the salt and when I turned back Hagar asked me if I’d been to the Community Theater lately.

  It was a few hours and a lot of drinks later that I was standing with Hagar on the balcony overlooking the Arroyo.

  The white sand in the moonlight looked like bleached bones and I said so—which is not the sort of remark I usually make to girls on balconies but there is no accounting for what happens to a man with Hagar.

  One stubby finger twitched slightly. “Death …” Hagar said. “Death is the only power …” Then she faced me abruptly and announced, “I’m a fake.”

  I said, “So?” which seemed as plausible an answer as any.

  “I write books. I pretend to try to explain why people commit murders. But I know that. You know that. It’s only being human to know that. What I don’t know is the other thing. Why don’t people commit murders? Why are there so few? What is there about killers that makes them … I don’t know … free from whatever hampers all the rest of us?”

  It was looking down at the Arroyo that gave me the idea. “I know a killer,” I said slowly. “He’s killed forty-nine men. You can meet him tomorrow.“

  The balcony rail throbbed under Hagar’s twitching tattoo.

  You didn’t regularly see anything like Hagar around the checker tables. But her presence didn’t seem to bother Alonzo any. Things didn’t bother him much.

  I’d got to know him pretty well the past few weeks. We kind of liked each other, I guess. And I knew most of his stories and I couldn’t share Hagar’s excitement when he told about how the Mad Butcher of Clover Hill started singing a hymn just before the trap sprang, or how Mrs. Leroux (whose baby farm was a sort of after-the-fact method of birth control) went stark raving mad on the trap.

  It was hard to get excited about them anyway, the drab matter-of-fact way he told them. But Hagar sat there with her black eyes fixed on him, and the checkerboard next to us jumped with the thumps of her fingers.

  “But I did have one … I guess you might call it a failure,” Alonzo confessed. “Young Willis Wythe … Danged trap went down one inch and then stuck. Left him standing there with no more damage than you’d suffer from a tight collar. So they take him off. I go to work and oil the trap and test it. Works fine. They put him back on and what do you know? Danged trap sticks again. Three times it happens—never did find out what was wrong.”

  “I remember,” Hagar said softly. “The Governor commuted his sentence … then later pardoned him because the women’s organizations made such a to-do.”

  “He was guilty,” I said.

  Hagar looked at me hastily as though she’d forgotten I was there. “That’s right … you knew the Wythes.” Then back to Alonzo, “And that was your one failure, Mr. Fuss?”

  “Dang it,” said Alonzo. “It was fine for him—pardoned and everything. But somehow I never felt quite right about that.”

  He sounded a little guilty, like a doctor who’d lost a prize patient from causes he couldn’t explain.

  It was just then that my retired banker tapped me on the shoulder and I withdrew.

  I didn’t see either Alonzo or Hagar again for a year. My banker had been talking to his lawyer and to some stuffed shirt calling himself an Investment Counsellor. I didn’t much care for the short-sighted ideas they’d been planting in his mind, and it looked like a good notion to stay away from Pasadena for a while.

  So it was in a Nebraska paper that I read about the marriage.

  “Hagar Dix, 35,” it said, “noted criminologist, and Alonzo Fuss, 63, retired professional man.”

  I spoke out loud in the hotel lobby. “This,” I said, “I gotta see.”

  I wasn’t taking any chances on meeting my banker. I went to Alonzo’s home. It was on North Orange Grove, which isn’t South Orange Grove but is still a pretty comfortable neighborhood. The house looked like it’d been done over recently, and I guessed Hagar was sinking her criminological income into this latest research.

  They were glad to see me. There was a lot of talk about how I brought them together and wasn’t it fate and stuff. The talk was more on Alonzo’s level than on Hag
ar’s.

  Alonzo had changed. I thought in my mind that he looked haggard and then I thought what a lousy pun that was and then I thought pun hell! it’s the exact truth. I never did understand just how the marriage was arranged. Hagar never talked about it, and I doubt if Alonzo understood himself. How much does a male spider understand?

  Hagar? She looked a little … I don’t know … richer maybe. Fuller. She could listen to Alonzo now and her fingers stayed still. I couldn’t figure out if that was good or bad.

  I learned after Alonzo went to bed. “I’m a man that needs his eight hours,” he said, “and I’ve got a championship horseshoe match on in the morning.”

  Hagar and I looked at each other while his footsteps echoed off.

  I said, “Well? Did it work?”

  Hagar said, “What do you think?”

  I said, “I think it did at first and now it doesn’t. Change your ideas about killing?”

  Hagar said, “No. Just my ideas about Alonzo.”

  I said, “Because he isn’t a killer after all, is he? He’s just a poor old guy whose job happened to involve death. And maybe if you met Jack the Ripper his shop talk wouldn’t be so hot either.”

  Hagar said nothing.

  I stood up for the next speech. I said, “Maybe you’ve been wrong all down the line. Maybe you ought to give a try to—”

  She didn’t let me finish. She said, “I met a man. Oh, not quite by chance. Let’s say by premeditated coincidence …” Her fingers twitched on their imaginary drum. “You’ll stay for the week-end, of course?”

  “I could, I guess. Do you think I’d find it … rewarding?”

  “I’m sure you would. This man is coming. I want you … but then you know him already, don’t you?”

  “Who is he?”

  “Alonzo’s one failure … Willis Wythe.”

  I remembered Willis Wythe as a tow-headed kid who was sore at his uncle—pretty much like any other kid you ever knew, except Uncle doesn’t usually wind up with three bullets from the kid’s target pistol. (The Governor decided it was all purely circumstantial evidence when the pressure was turned on him for the pardon.)

  I wouldn’t have known this hard dark man with the lined face and the edgy bitter voice. But I liked him, and when he talked about the things he’d done in the past years (I guess he was what the Sunday supplements call an Adventurer) I even began to think of angles where maybe we might work together.

  We got through Friday night somehow, but even then I was glad I wasn’t Willis. There wasn’t a moment in the evening when either Alonzo or Hagar wasn’t looking at him, and they were looks that there aren’t words for in any books I know.

  What Hagar’s meant you can figure by now. Here is a man who has murdered and escaped. He knows. And he isn’t sixty-three with a pot-belly.

  Alonzo’s was harder to define. It was a kind of worry. It was like a writer staring at a paragraph that stinks and wondering how the hell to revise.

  Willis didn’t understand that look. For once there wasn’t a word said about Alonzo’s former profession; and Willis probably hadn’t even seen him on the one occasion their paths had crossed before. For Willis this was just a week-end with an interesting woman and a dull husband, and he was an Adventurer.

  I had a little trouble getting to sleep that night. That’s how I heard the slippered footsteps and the bedroom doors.

  Even Alonzo must have noticed the difference in Hagar the next morning. This richness, fullness that I was talking about—it was like it was coming to its final intensity.

  I had one chance to speak to Hagar alone. I said, “So now you think you know?” and my mouth twisted as I said it.

  Hagar said, “Not yet. Not quite yet …” and Willis came in and we talked about old acquaintances back in Iowa.

  That was Saturday, and Saturday night Willis and Hagar went dancing at the Hotel Green.

  Alonzo said, “I’m not much of a hand at dancing. Good for her to go out with somebody nearer her own age.” And he meant it, the poor guy, and I sat there and played checkers with him and wondered why I was sticking around.

  I was just figuring that it was, in a way, just a standard method of mine in my other line—if things look headed for a crack-up, stick around; there’s no telling what a smart man may pick up out of the wreck—when Alonzo looked up from the checkerboard and said, “It’s Willis that’s come between Hagar and me.”

  I didn’t say anything about slippers and doors. Instead I laughed and said, “They’ve only just met. You must think he’s a pretty fast worker.”

  “It isn’t that.” He let that denial ride flat for three moves. Then he added, “Failure. You see, Hagar … I’m no kind of a man to be married to her. You know that, son. But she thought I was… I don’t know … kind of powerful, I guess, on account of what I’d … But you see, I wasn’t, because …”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard Alonzo talk about anything emotional, and he couldn’t make it. His phrases wouldn’t come straight. He just said “Willis” a couple more times, and once he said, “One hundred percent …”

  After the game he sat there until his regular bedtime, just staring at the brand-new radio-phonograph. I couldn’t think why until after he’d gone to bed. Then I remembered. I’d been around when it was delivered the day before. It came in a hell of a packing case, all bound round with good strong rope.

  I waited for Willis in his bedroom. He didn’t like it when he came in and found me there. We could both hear Hagar moving around in the next room. Her fingers drummed on the objects she passed.

  Willis said, “Bedroom vigils yet? What gives?”

  I said, “Do you know who your host is?”

  “I hear he tosses a mean horseshoe.”

  So I told him. “And he’s worried,” I added. “You’re the … well, the blot on an otherwise stainless life, you might say. It’s kind of a reproach to Alonzo Fuss that you’re walking around here alive.”

  His lean face was tauter than ever. “I’m getting out of here,” he said. We were both silent, and we listened to Hagar’s fingers. His lips softened and he added, “Tomorrow.”

  “It isn’t worth it,” I said. “Staying, I mean. I only warned you because … hell, I feel I owe you something.”

  He was hard again. “Owe me what?”

  “I was out of the State at the time of your trial. I wasn’t even reading newspapers. But I maybe could’ve cleared you and I didn’t. You see, I know Alonzo Fuss’s record is clear. He didn’t need to hang you—you were innocent.”

  He loomed over me. “You could have cleared me? And you didn’t?” His heavy fist was balled.

  “We’re even,” I said. “I’m giving you your life now. Get out … before Alonzo’s ideas go too far.”

  His voice was getting high and sharp. “How could you have cleared me? Why didn’t you?”

  I started to tell him how and why. It was then he jumped me. His taut face twisted into curious shapes. His hard lips mouthed ugly words, rising higher and higher.

  When I left the silent room, Hagar was waiting for me in the hall. She was in a nightgown that looked as if you’d save it for a bridal night. She put her black eyes on me and said, “I heard a little of it… What happened?”

  I told her, just the way I’ve told it above.

  I never saw a face do what hers did then. It went blank. Dead blank. Even the eyes … their blackness seemed to go away. There was nothing on the face, nothing at all.

  And that emptiness was the most terrible thing I have ever seen. Alonzo was the first one up the next morning. He was on his way off to the horseshoes by the time I got down to breakfast. I was on my third cup of coffee and the second section of the Times when Hagar came in.

  She said, “Have you seen that rope around anywhere?”

  “What rope?”

  “From the packing case. I thought I’d use part of it to tie up a parcel of books.”

  “No, I haven’t seen it.”

&
nbsp; She took the first section of the Times with her coffee. She was wonderfully relaxed this morning—calm literally to her fingertips. It was a domestic sort of scene—coffee and newspapers and silence. I liked it.

  It was an hour before I began wondering about Willis. Hagar seemed unperturbed when I mentioned him. I wasn’t really perturbed myself until I got no answer to my knock and walked on into his room.

  First it was the smell. The day was building to a scorcher and the blood permeated the air. A window was open, and word of the blood had gotten about among the neighborhood’s flies.

  I took some fast gulps out the open window before I went near the bed. I don’t know why I touched him. I didn’t have to know he felt cold on that hot day. Most do when their heads are missing.

  Lieutenant Furman had laryngitis. His voice never rose above a whisper all the time he questioned us.

  They were shrewd, economical questions. It wasn’t long before he had a pretty thorough diagram of the three of us and our relations to that headless corpse upstairs. It wasn’t long before he had the cleaver, too. It had been neatly washed, but he spotted the minute stains and knew what the laboratory analysis would do with them.

  “You’re intelligent people,” Lieutenant Furman whispered. “I can talk to you.”

  Alonzo looked at him with vacant old eyes. Hagar was still cool and poised, still in her casual how-tragic-but-after-all-we-barely-knew-the-man attitude.

  “You’re something of a criminologist yourself, Mrs. Fuss,” he whispered on. “And death’s no stranger to you, Mr. Fuss.” He turned to me as though wondering how to continue the parallel.

  “I’ve been around,” I said helpfully.

  “Exactly,” he breathed. “So you all understand that the key to an understanding of this crime lies in the removal of the head. The commonest reason—preventing identification—can hardly apply here; the man’s fingerprints are on file in Iowa. There’d be no hope of, let us say, bringing in a substitute body if he himself wished to disappear.”