Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 2, July 1973

The Cut-Out Pasted Heads by Pauline C. Smith

A drab little handmaiden of death, she had been. Now it was her turn to die...

Of all possible murder victims, Mary Oliphant was the most unlikely, being submissive, subservient, silent and sluggish. So who would want to kill Mary?

The idea was unthinkable.

However, someone had thought of it.

I was closely questioned by the police because it was assumed I probably knew her best. Actually, it turned out that I didn’t know her at all — not then, anyway. Not until much later.

She lived two doors from me, and due to the fact that the neighbors between us, a retired couple, were anti-social to the point of hostility, Mary had only one place to go. And that was to my house, where she sat, as imperturbable as a Buddha, hands clasped across her fat in solemn expectation that I would fill up the vast wasteland of her daily life with coffee and conversation. The first she swished around her teeth and tonsils like a mouthwash before swallowing and the second simply lulled her with sound.

She was found in one of the high backed rockers in her phlegmatic little living room, all brown and beige, as impersonal and as passionless as was Mary herself. I knew the rocker, one of a pair, upholstered with tan-colored seat and back pads of an uninspired print. She had been hanged by a piece of cord cut from her own drapery pull, looped around her neck and tied to the high back of the chair.

“What was she like, Mrs. Morton?” the police asked.

What was Mary like? I honestly didn’t know.

“Did she have any visitors?”

I shook my head.

“Family? Relatives?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

The officer consulted his notes.

“Yet you knew her two years?” he asked incredulously.

Mary had moved in as quietly unobtrusive as she had lived in that little house these past two years. I’m a friendly, outgoing widow and with that withdrawn couple next door, the self-centered parents beyond and all the others along the block coupled up and off to work, I went over with a pot of coffee and a plate of sandwiches to welcome her.

When you welcome somebody, you question them.

Like: “I’m a widow. I’ve got one daughter and two grandchildren five hundred miles away that I don’t see often enough.” Then you pause and expect whoever it is you’re questioning to lean forward and say, “Oh, me too,” and tell all about their children and grandchildren.

Not so with Mary. She simply said she never lived in any one place for long, which seemed to mean she never lived in any one place long enough to acquire either children or grandchildren. So I talked of Susan and the kids while she listened.

She used to phone me every morning at eight o’clock sharp, always beginning her conversation with, “What’s doing?” the vague lead-in question that not only relinquishes the burden of conversation but requests a schedule of activity. One of these days, I promised myself, I wouldn’t answer that eight o’clock call.

But that first morning the call failed to come, instead of triumph, I felt a sense of guilt because it was not there not to answer.

The second morning of silence I began to feel rejected, so in the early afternoon, I phoned her and received no answer.

That was when I really began to worry. What in the world was wrong with Mary Oliphant? Where in the world could she be? By going to the far rear of my property, I could see over into hers and she certainly wasn’t in her back yard; and by going out to my hedge in front I could see into her front yard. She wasn’t there.

Mary had no car, and with all of California on wheels, bus service being terrible if at all, the only time Mary went anywhere, she went with me. I’d say, “I have to go to the supermarket,” and over she’d come to go along. I’d say, “There are a couple of good garage sales in the east part of town. Want to go along?” She always did and while I picked and pounced, my imagination creatively transforming other people’s junk into my very own treasures, Mary placidly followed without interest. “You know what?” I said. “You need a hobby.”

“I have a hobby,” she answered without expression. What hobby, for heaven’s sake, follow-the-leader? I thought she was joking, making fun of herself for being such a dud. But she had a hobby all right, as I learned after her death.

I have never seen such apathy. That’s why I was so surprised when I noticed the mailman stuffing all those news magazines in her mailbox each week. Mary Oliphant and the news? The idea was unbelievable. So I sprinkled my monologue with news events, not that I know so much about what’s going on except what I read in the local paper and see on Channel 2, but Mary didn’t know even that much and cared less.

On the third morning with no call from her, I began to act.

I phoned first, letting it ring eight or ten times before I banged down the receiver and raced out my front door. I flew past the hostile house and tore up Mary’s walk and her steps and had my finger on the bell almost before I’d hit the porch. It rang all right. I could hear the double chimes.

Nothing happened.

I tried the door, which was locked tighter than a drum. The drapes were closed so I couldn’t see inside. Then I remembered the mailbox and leaped off the steps, raced down the walk, opened it up and pulled out what was in there. One news magazine, the light bill and about three pieces of occupant junk mail. Well! I got my light bill two days before, so either Mary was inside that house so sick she couldn’t raise her head or she was gone, and where would she go and how?

I shuddered at what I refused to think about, stuffed the mail back in the box and hurried home to call the police. They fed me all the bromides like she’s probably gone on a little trip... Mary Oliphant? She’s probably visiting someone... Mary? Anyone but me? Finally I got mad and they got disgusted and came out and got into the house and found her hanged from the back of her rocker.

Who would want to kill Mary Oliphant?

Then came the questions and the raised eyebrows when I admitted I didn’t know item one about her, even though I had talked to her or seen her every blessed day of those two years, excepting, of course, for the week last Christmas and the one before that I spent in San Diego with Susan and the kids and the two weeks last summer I was there.

I was very meticulous with the police, wanting to indicate that I was statistically sound, and no one could learn anything about Mary Oliphant because either (1) there was nothing to learn, or (2) she wasn’t letting anything out. I, naturally, leaned toward (1).

Well, the police did everything that police do at a time like that, I suppose, such as making out reports and taking fingerprints of which there were a lot, all Mary’s. They studied the broken lock on the kitchen door, then paced in the back and peered in the front and said it must have been some prowler.

“Anything taken?” they barked at me, asking me to look through all the poor woman’s possessions.

“How do I know?” I barked back, having only been in the house once before.

Then they found the safety deposit box down at the bank. Think of it! The many times I’d driven her down to the bank... “to cash a little check,” she apologized, and there was that safety deposit box with a couple of diamonds in it that would knock your eye out. There were some war bonds — not that she was rolling in wealth, but there was enough to keep her in reasonable comfort until she was eighty, which she would never get to be now, rest her soul. I couldn’t help but think what a shame it was she hadn’t gotten those rockers reupholstered in bright red and had fun buying stuff at garage sales.

Everything would go to the State, the police told me. After a decent interval of time, of course, during which they would bend every effort to find some heirs, which I’m sure they won’t do, especially now that I know more than the police.

With everything tied up, like the house furnishings and safety deposit box, it meant the State would have to take care of her funeral and I knew how that would be, so I took care of it.

The whole neighborhood showed up, now that she was a celebrity, kind of, having been murdered and all, including the hostile couple, the parents and all the working couples. And then they forgot Mary. I did not, nor did the police who remembered her in a rigid we-have-our-minds-made-up fashion. What they’d made up their minds to was that the same monster who’d killed those two girls whose bodies were found in the brush, obviously killed Mary in her own house.

They said she’d been sexually molested. Mary Oliphant?

“Those two girls,” I reminded the police, “were young and pretty and plucked off the freeway when one of their cars ran out of gas and the other had a flat.”

How, I asked the police, could they possibly figure the murderer of two girls flung in the brush as the same one who hanged Mary on a chair-back, execution style? But they said how about the Boston Strangler? He killed all different ages and some he left in absolutely awful positions.

I looked away. I had read the book.

Anyway, they rounded up all the sex offenders and came up with nothing and asked me, as Mary Oliphant’s only friend, to help them gather together her possessions. I suppose they had to get the house emptied and put the stuff somewhere as exhibits. Or to be sold by the State after a properly allotted time.

That’s when I riffled through some of those news magazines she had piled up on the floor by a mirrored dressing table in her bedroom.

The magazines went back to the early ’50’s and seemed to be selected copies... twenty five, thirty of them, I thought. In counting them later, I discovered there were thirty-two, the latest issue, the top copy, dated four months previously. I sat there, on Mary’s dressing table bench, in front of her dressing table mirror and leafed through that top copy, wondering why she should keep only certain issues of certain magazines over such a long period of time. And there, in the National News section, I found the first pasted photographed face.

It was shocking. I stared at it, ran my finger over it, strangely appalled by the sight of this cut-out photographed face pasted over the face already there in the magazine picture. I leafed slowly through the rest of the pages, but that one picture in the National News section was the only one altered by a photographic substitution.

I turned the magazine face down and picked up the second one from the pile. There, in the National News section again, same photographed face, carefully cut out — I mean, around the chin and the hair. I glanced at the manicure scissors on the dressing table — she’d used those. The face didn’t quite fit on the body of the woman in the magazine photo. It wasn’t turned correctly for the angle of the shoulders and that made it rather horrible, somehow.

The third magazine. Same thing. A head pasted over another. In each case it had been the same substituted head for the same originally photographed body, in a picture with the same man, so this was not a random game of paper dolls, but a selectively serious study.

Two policement were working in the house, looking through drawers again and packing stuff in boxes to be carted away. This was two months after Mary’s murder and a month after her burial. The house had to be cleared out so the owner could rent it again. I grabbed up the three magazines and took them to the policemen, feeling as if I were right on the edge of something. I laid the magazines open so they could see what I had to offer.

They looked down at the pictures for a second, then up at me blankly.

“They’re Mary’s magazines,” I explained. “She pasted the heads.”

One officer picked up a copy while the other looked over his shoulder.

“Why did she do it?” I cried, my voice rising shrilly. “Who is it? And who did she paste it over?”

One officer shrugged and presented his verdict.

“Psycho,” he said to the other, who nodded knowingly. He tossed back the magazine.

“But it might mean something,” I attempted to argue.

“What would it mean?”

“That Mary was more than she seemed to be—”

The officer smiled.

“—or knew more and was pointing out her killer either as the man or woman in the picture, or the one whose head is pasted on—”

The officer laughed.

“Well look, then, could I have them?”

“Have what?”

“The magazines,” I cried, and together, the officers thought it over briefly, saying why not? They were just magazines. Old issues, and one said to the other, “We catch the guy did those other two killings and we’ll have the one did this one.”

So I took all the clues home and the movers dragged all the stuff that didn’t count out of the house and took it to wherever the police take the stuff of lone murdered people. The police went back to wherever the police go to figure out who killed whom.

Then the owner sold the house Mary Oliphant had lived in to a middle-aged couple.

“I understand there was a murder in it,” the new woman told me cheerfully, “and that’s the reason we got it at such a bargain. Did you know the woman that was killed?”

I shook my head because, with all those magazines piled in my house, I discovered I hadn’t known Mary at all, but I was beginning to find her and once I knew her reason for pasting those pictures over pictures in certain magazines, I was sure I would find her killer.

I missed Mary’s morning phone calls now that they no longer came. I missed her personalityless visits. It was when I reached the bottom magazine, dated early in the Fifties that I found, between its pages, the original photo and supply of stamp pictures made from it, also a newsprint copy carefully cut around the edge so that no headline, no caption was revealed.

The face in the picture began to look familiar. Was that just because I’d looked at it so often pasted incongruously on other pictured shoulders, or had the features begun to poke and pry at a memory?

They say a whiff of fragrance, a trio of musical notes, a line in a book will jog the memory back to forgotten times, and that is true. This carefully cut news photo of a girl’s sweetly empty face topped by a Lily Tomlin telephone routine pompadour, a ’40’s extravaganza, reminded me of Joe when he leaned close in the smoke-filled room to whisper, “She’s jiggled all her brains loose and they’re flopping around in that rolled-up hair.”

I had giggled in appreciation, not at Joe’s limp joke but for the fact that he recognized the prettiness of the jitterbug dancer as being shallow, because I was newly married and scared of any pretty girl in this Navy town of pretty girls.

The face was shallow, remindful too. I bent down, remembering San Diego old town in the ’40’s, tough, vital and bombastic. Navy uniforms. Off-limits nightclubs. My God! The jitterbug was a wild dance and this girl the wildest.

I brought the magnifying glass close so that the face fell apart in newsprint dots and remembered her impossible name, Pansy Field. Flying legs, tapping feet, the rhythmic clap of the audience, Pansy Field...

“The one The Congressman’s off his nut about,” Joe had told me. “He’s thinking of marrying her if she can prove she’s pure enough for him.” I remembered, after not remembering all these years, the commotion over Joe’s commanding officer, nick-named “The Congressman” because he was a politician’s son and therefore news, as was the fact that he was courting Pansy Field, an off-limits nightclub entertainer.

Now I knew this photograph, the stamp pictures and news photo were all of Pansy Field. What I had to find out was why she was pasted here with The Congressman on the shoulders of the woman he really married.

“She hasn’t got a brain in her head,” Joe told me and I had pressed my knee close to his under the quarter-sized table, glad I had the brains if not jitterbug prettiness to offer him, and shouted to be heard over the brass and the cymbals, “She doesn’t need any. She’s doing all right without them.” But she had needed brains if this picture of Pansy Field was also the picture of Mary Oliphant and I was sure that it was.

There had been no portraits of Mary in her home. None at all. No snapshots in albums. No albums. No memories, unless these news magazines were her memories doctored into wishful thinking. I closed my eyes tight and allowed myself to see the brief shallow beauty of Pansy Field buried beneath the years of Mary Oliphant’s purposeful neglect.

That newsprint photo had looked out of the front page of a San Diego paper, and I remembered Joe saying, “Well, this tears it with The Congressman. He can’t afford to get tied up with anything that might hurt the future he’s got all laid out for himself...”

But I don’t remember what it was all about or anything of the trial that was to follow because Joe’s ship moved out and I refused to read the newspapers filled with war, and was no longer a part of the frenzied crowd trying to forget it in smoky off-limits night clubs watching a crazy jitterbug routine.

After Hiroshima and once Joe was home, we put that time behind us, never talking of the town when we left it or the people we had known there. We never saw the town again until Susan elected to enter the university at San Diego and later married a San Diegan. Then we saw it often, but never any of the people until I saw Pansy Field when Mary Oliphant moved into the house two doors away from me.

So now I would have to go back and read the accounts I had not read then and find out what happened when Mary looked like Pansy.

I phoned Susan and told her I was on my way. I had the car tuned up and packed the thirty-two magazines, the photograph, newspaper copy and the stamp pictures in a suitcase and took off.

Then I spent two weeks in the back rooms of the two leading newspaper offices in San Diego and found out why Mary Oliphant pasted Pansy Field’s head on the wife of The Congressman, and the reason for her murder.

“How do you even know this Pansy-Whatever and the woman who was your neighbor are the same?” Susan asked me.

“It was in the paper,” I said.

“What was in the paper?”

“Well, she was a witness at the trial”

“What trial?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, “this trial I’ve been checking back on. Happened in ’44, and Pansy Field was a witness. The prosecuting attorney asked her name and she said it was Pansy Field. Then the attorney said, ‘Your legal name, not your stage name,’ and she said it was Mary Oliphant.”

“What was she a witness to?” asked Susan.

“Murder,” I said.

That was an overstatement actually, made for effect. What she was supposed to be was an alibi witness for the man accused of murder. I tried to describe for Susan what this town was like during the war years, and the little off-limits nightclub where an apartment building now stands.

“Mary Oliphant won a jitterbug contest,” I said.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Jitterbug was a dance,” I said and showed her a few steps.

“That’s weird,” she said.

“Well, anyway, she was good at it. And it came out in the trial that she’d won this contest and was hired by these two men to perform in their nightclub.”

“What two men?”

“The one who was murdered and the other accused of his murder.”

Susan looked confused.

“They were partners,” I explained, “and when one of them was killed, in the nightclub after hours, it was naturally assumed that his partner had done it. So they arrested him and he said he couldn’t have done it because he was with Pansy Field in her room a block away and she said he wasn’t there at all.”

“What was he killed with? The man who was killed, I mean.”

“A gun.”

“Well. How about fingerprints on the gun?”

“It was never found. But the prosecution claimed it could only have been the partner.”

“Why?”

“Because of Pansy Field. She was supposed to have been — well, have been their you-know-what.”

“No. What?” said Susan wickedly. She is very well aware that I am of the old school and can’t say things right out like young people can.

“Well, their girlfriend,” I compromised and she laughed.

“But Pansy denied it. According to the papers she said she was just a jitterbug dancer and that was all. And that man was never in her room, the one accused of murder. Never, she said. No man ever had been. She claimed she was alone and sound asleep that night. That’s what she said from the beginning. But, by then, The Congressman had been shipped out...”

“The congressman?” Susan clapped her hand to her head. “What congressman? You mean the one you showed me in the pictures with those horrible pasted heads?”

“Actually, yes,” I said. “But then he was just called that. He was your daddy’s commanding officer and they all called him The Congressman because he was the son of a politician,” at which Susan laughed again, but I couldn’t see anything funny, “and he planned to go into politics too, which he apparently did, after the war. That was another thing I looked up. His name. At least, the name of your daddy’s commanding officer when they were shipped out and there it was, the same name as the one in the magazines. So what do you think of that?”

“I don’t know what to think of it,” said Susan. “I don’t even know what this congressman or whatever had to do with anything.”

“He was in love with Pansy Field, that’s all. I remember your daddy saying he’d probably marry her if she could prove she was pure enough for him.”

“Daddy?” cried Susan, shocked.

“For heaven’s sake no. The Congressman, his exec. Your daddy was the one who said it. And then he said, when it first came out in the paper, the murder, that is, before the trial with Pansy’s picture — I showed that to you, indicating she was involved, some way at least, then your daddy said something about that would tear it with the Congressman, that he couldn’t tie onto anything that might hurt the future he had all laid out for himself, and I guess it certainly did, but she was stuck with the lie so she repeated it all during the trial.”

“What lie?” asked Susan.

“Why, the lie that the accused murderer wasn’t with her that night. She told it just to keep The Congressman on the hook, then when he got away, she kept on telling it, too dumb to realize her lie would put a man in prison for life and too thoughtless to care.”

“How do you know it was a lie?”

“Because it killed her.”

“Mother! I don’t see any connection.”

“He threatened her. He stood up there in the courtoom and told her he’d get her for her lie. So that’s the reason she moved around a lot. She told me she never stayed in one place long. She just moved herself, her pictures and magazines around and lived in a paper dream world with The Congressman because he had been the high point of her life back when she was young and rather pretty and sought after, before the fat and the inertia that had always been there came out of hiding. Since she wasn’t too bright, she stayed right here in the state, and being unimaginative, she took back her legal name, so as soon as the man she’d put in prison was paroled, he just got out and started looking for her. And when he found her he assaulted her because she’d been Pansy Field and killed her because she was Mary Oliphant.”

“What are you going to do?” Susan asked me.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” I said. “I’ll tell the police who killed Mary. It’s all very simple.”

But was it so simple?

On the way home, I got to thinking. If a man has been punished for a crime he didn’t commit, then doesn’t he have a right later to commit a crime for which he will not be punished?

That is poetic justice.

And, anyways, if I went to the police with my research and findings, they would just call me a psycho for thinking that Pansy Field’s heads could have anything to do with Mary Oliphant’s murder.

So I put the magazines and the pictures back in my linen closet behind all the sheets and if the police come up with some far-out suspect in the Mary Oliphant case, I’ll show them how far-out that murder really was.

But not before.