The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

Till Death Do Not Us Part

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1975.

As constable of Grande Isle Parish, Louisiana (Jerem Jenks is the name), I’ll naturally stick to bald facts when I write the official report. I’ve pieced together details of the killing out at the Deveau place without much trouble. It was a simple, direct act of violence. Once it was started, it had to end in blood. In physical terms, we’ve never had a messier killing in the parish; but it was tidy in one respect, leaving none of those wearisome questions about motive and identity that cause a lawman sleepless nights and a case of heartburn.

I’ll write up the details with impersonal attention, the same way I’d give directions to a motorist passing through our back-bayou country, but I’m not sure the bare facts will tell the full truth or its complete meaning. Ten dollars plus ten dollars equals twenty dollars — but that doesn’t explain the latent power in the printed paper, what the twenty dollars will buy. The significance depends on the druthers and desires of whoever owns the twenty. The visible fact of the money is only the beginning of the truth concerning it.

In my own mind, Robert Deveau’s love for his wife had a lot to do with what happened. Yes, I know that Robert died thirty years ago. I know that my notion is fanciful, but I believe it. I don’t think his love died with his flesh. It was a part of her, always. It was there when she needed it most. His devotion, through her undying memory of it, steadied her, directed her; and an earthly portion of him protected her and kept her safe...

The background of it all goes back quite a way, almost forty years. Robert Deveau was a strapping, black-haired, sun-darkened young man descended from those French Acadians who fled British rule in Nova Scotia almost two hundred years ago and trekked all the way into the Louisiana wilderness seeking freedom.

Robert’s was a working plantation, and he was rarely seen lolling on the veranda of his comfortable old colonial house sipping mint juleps. His muscles were hard and his hands were calloused. He was outgoing and generous, honest and compassionate. The way the parish felt about him, he could have had any local political office for the asking.

He met Valerie during a business trip to New Orleans and spent every weekend down there until he married her a few months later.

They went to Europe for about a month, and Grande Isle awaited their return with the usual small-town expectancy and curiosity. They settled into married life on the modest Deveau plantation, and Grande Isle quickly had its answers about her. Robert Deveau couldn’t have made a better choice. Tall, lithe, chestnut-haired, strongly beautiful, Valerie made Grande Isle her home with such a natural ease and unpretended warmth that folks soon dis-remembered she hadn’t been born in the parish. I figure that Robert was the key to that. Robert was her home, just as she was his. The two of them could have been at home in Baltimore or Borneo, just so long as they were together.

About the eighth year of their marriage, they went up to the Great Smoky Mountains near Asheville for a short summer vacation. One night as they were returning to their rented cottage, the brakes faded on their car during the long drop down the steep mountain road. The car hurtled into a tight hairpin curve even as Robert reacted to the emergency. It plunged down the mountainside, rolling over and over with glass shattering, metal rending, and hot oil and water spewing from the engine’s guts.

Robert was knocked out the first time the car turned over. When he groaned back to pain-filled consciousness, he knew he was badly hurt. His stomach, chest, and head felt as if a team of Louisiana mules had walked across him. From the numbness in his left leg, he suspected what his groping fingers confirmed. He had broken the left femur, the big thigh bone, just above the knee. The sharp, jagged end had punctured the flesh, and blood was coursing down his calf.

The first shock of pain began to build in the fractured femur, but it wasn’t as important as the emptiness of the car.

“Valerie...”

He realized that he was lying awkwardly on his side against the top of the car. It had come to rest upside down. The door near his face had sprung open during the long and violent fall.

“Valerie...”

Had she been thrown clear, escaped relatively unharmed? With the prayer on his lips, he dragged himself out of the car.

He lay for a moment fighting off faintness, dwarfed by the hugeness of the moon-washed mountains and their desolate silence. He sucked at the clean air and found a little strength.

Raising his head, he saw her face, not a dozen feet from him; just her head and shoulders. The rest of her was pinned between soft, loamy ground and the curve of the topsy-turvy front fender.

He crawled toward her, the sight of the stillness of her features killing his own pain for a moment. His trembling hand touched her lips, her throat, the place where the fender pressed down on her.

He looked up the long, moon-spangled slope, seeing the trail of broken brush and shattered saplings the car had plowed. Against the heights was the dark band, like a black scar on the mountain’s face, made by the road cut. Perhaps he had strength to crawl the distance up to the road. Maybe there’d be the luck of a passing car he could stop for help. He had a chance to save himself before he bled to death from the leg wound. A chance with strength and just the smallest bit of luck... but, he knew, he didn’t have the time. If she was still alive at all, Valerie wasn’t breathing under the weight and pressure of the fender. She couldn’t wait for help. She was suffocating now.

He dug his hands into the earth under her shoulders and started tearing it away. Inch by inch he gave her room, somehow hanging onto consciousness and sanity. Each handful of dirt he grubbed out loosened the clamp against her chest a little bit more.

He heard a faint popping sound, the recoil of cramped muscles within her rib cage, and with a shuddering gasp, the first thread of air streamed past her lips and into her lungs. It was followed by a stronger gasp, and then another, and in a few seconds she moved her head a little and moaned.

She was trying to speak his name, and he said weakly, “I’m here, Valerie.”

“Oh, God, Robert...”

“Can you manage? Wiggle out?”

“I’m hurt, Robert. My arm... my stomach...”

“Try, Valerie. Work your way out. A little at a time. That’s it. Keep trying. You’ll have to do it... I’m plain tuckered. Give me a minute... just a minute... to rest...”

His eyes closed slowly, and the last drops of life oozed through arteries and flesh sliced by the razor-sharp end of the broken femur bone.

When Valerie brought his body back, Grande Isle closed up for the day and joined her mourning. His service was held in the community church, and the long procession of cars wound its way the ten miles out to the Deveau place.

Robert was interred in the family mausoleum, which stood a hundred yards to the rear of the house in a grove of live oaks. The burial place was like a dozen others in the parish, a thousand others in our part of Louisiana where the nature of the swampy soil rules out below-ground burial. It was an almost-crude blockhouse built from stone. Weather had pitted and stained it and ivy smothered the walls. The sheet-iron door that was pulled open to admit Robert Deveau to his own niche in the dark crypt was blackened with rust. His father and mother were in there, his grandparents and their parents — and no doubt in that moment Valerie Deveau thought that in some distant day there’d be room for her. In keeping with custom, if it should be necessary, the bones of a long-dead Deveau would be pushed to the rear of a niche to make room for the new arrival.

Meantime, there were the pieces of her life to pick up, and she did so with the quiet brand of Deveau courage. She ran the business of the plantation on a reduced scale. She kept up old friendships. She drove into Grande Isle once a week for her volunteer day at the parish’s small hospital. If her thoughts or wishes strayed beyond the plantation, she never showed any sign of it.

She might have married again, a dozen times. A lot of the parish bachelors made the try. As far as she was concerned, however, the male gender began and ended with Robert Deveau, before whose tomb she placed a basket of fresh flowers once each week.

The years burnished her hair to smooth gray, added wrinkles to the corners of her green eyes and full-lipped mouth, and tugged faintly at the animal beauty of her body; but she was structured not to grow old with bent back and rheumy eyes, and she remained a striking woman, even after thirty years of widowhood.

My mind was far and away from anything connected with the Deveaus the day Carlin Soulard drifted into Grande Isle. As constable, I didn’t fancy his type. He was a hulking youth with hair like dirty frayed blond ropes hanging to his heavy shoulders. His stubbled face was brutish and habitually sullen. He wore dirty jeans tucked into run-over boots and a filthy green T-shirt with “Make War — To Hell With Love” stenciled across the chest. I figured he’d smoke pot and spit on the floor.

He came from beyond Chad Bayou, where the Soulards were a sizable interbred Cajun clan that existed on its knack for poaching, making moonshine, waylaying the infrequent stranger, and stealing from one another.

Once previously, Carlin had drifted into Grande Isle. His sojourn had stretched to sixty days in the local jail after a drinking bout with a home-grown tough had ended in a fist fight. This time, I hoped, he was just passing through, but on the third straight day that he chalked his cue in the Little Andy Poolroom & Beer I decided to mention that our jail food had improved none at all, inflation being what it was.

He was crouched over the second table, running a rack of balls. He didn’t see me right away, moving around the table, sighting his next shot.

He extended his left arm, bridging his cue stick, and I said, “Just make sure you won’t end up behind the black ball, Carlin, the eight ball.”

He jerked a dark look over his shoulder, then straightened and turned, fingering the heavy end of the stick. “Well, blast me! It’s the old-timer. Old friend Constable Jenks.”

“Have some bad blood trouble over your way, Carlin?”

“Now, whatever would give you an idea like that, Mister Lawman?”

“Just figured you’d had to make tracks to stay out of Chad Bayou for this long.”

Half a dozen loungers in the place had perked up. They drifted over to lounge against the wall and take in the scene with a stirring of interest and curiosity.

“Stayed out once for sixty-days,” Carlin said. “Ain’t forgot that, old-timer.”

“We aired the cell after you were gone, Carlin.”

His eyes went a shade darker in their heavy sockets. Then he winked at one of the bystanders. “Real comic you got for a local fuzz. Real funny, ain’t he?”

One of the loungers laughed, uncertainly. Carlin shot him a look and the laugh broke off in mid-note.

“Only I ain’t letting him set me up.” Carlin swung his gaze back to me. “Just shoot your mouth off all you like, old gray fuzz. You ain’t egging me into giving you an excuse to invite me back into your lousy pokey. I’m a free citizen and I know my rights. That’s a public street out there and this is a public place. Now get yourself a cue stick and stand the hell out of my way.”

“Where you staying, Carlin?”

“The Bide-A-Wee Tourist Cabins on the edge of town. I registered right and paid for my flop. Don’t get any ideas about vagrancy charges, high mucky-muck policeman. I got money. Here. Look.” He fished a small roll of bills from his jeans and jammed them under my nose. “You want to count it, oh mighty chief of the gestapo? You got my permission.”

I raised my hand and pushed his aside with my fingertips. “All right, Carlin. I don’t need to count it, seeing as how there’s nothing visible except a few singles. I wouldn’t be surprised if you lifted it off a cousin or uncle and had to run like hell. In any event, I don’t imagine you’ve got enough there to last you long — and I’d suggest looking for some honest work before you go broke in Grande Isle.”

“I’ll be right over and apply for the job of deputy constable, old-timer.”

He thought that was rich, and I left him standing there laughing and slapping his thigh.

Late the next afternoon, as I pieced it together later during the investigation, Jeff Moseby showed up in the Little Andy. A lanky swamp cypress logger, Jeff had recently lost the first two fingers on his right hand in a sawmilling accident. Today, he’d had outpatient treatment and re-bandaging of the finger stumps at the parish hospital. With a wave of his bandage, he offered to stand a round of beer for the half-dozen loafers in the Little Andy. The group included Carlin Soulard.

Jeff was fond of describing his accident in bloody detail, and today he had a spin-off bit of news.

“Mrs. Deveau was doing her day at the hospital. She wrapped the fingers when the doctor was through. Made me a real interesting proposition, too.”

Buster Toutain smacked the lips in his big, greasy-looking face. “She’s still quite a piece, I bet. Play your cards right, Jeff-boy, and she might open the wall safe in her house for you. I hear it’s loaded with a million dollars and a quart jar of diamonds. Just give her what she—”

Jeff’s good hand shot across the pine plank table and grabbed the wrinkled collar of Buster’s poplin shirt. “You hear a lot of crud, because that’s all you listen for, Buster. You could wash your mind in a sewer and it would come out twice as clean. You don’t talk like that about Mrs. Deveau when I’m around, understand?”

Buster sensed that most of the men at the table were in solid agreement with Jeff. Valerie Deveau was that little part of itself that Grande Isle didn’t care to have dirtied.

“I didn’t mean nothing,” Buster muttered, straightening his collar as Jeff slowly released him.

“The hell you didn’t — and one of these days cruddy talk is going to land you in trouble.” Jeff’s eyes swept the group about the table. “Fact is, Mrs. Deveau and me got talking about how hard it is to get help these days and how tough and dangerous swamp logging is. Nobody out there nowadays but her and the caretaker. Plenty of good land lying fallow, she says. Told me if I wanted to put in a cane crop I’d keep the long end of the shares, her not needing money in particular.”

Jeff paused to eye his bandaged hand. “I might just do it. Get me a small crew and quit making cypress stumps before I lose more than a pair of fingers.”

Carlin Soulard took it all in. During the evening, when Buster was oiled with beer, Carlin drew him out about Valerie Deveau’s life style and the wall safe in her house. Then Carlin returned to his grubby room in the ramshackle Bide-A-Wee Tourist Cabins and did some long thinking. About daybreak, he slipped unseen out of Grande Isle on his battered motorbike. He hid the cycle in the weeds behind an old billboard on the county road and hiked across Deveau land until he had a wide, clear view of the house from the concealment of a thicket.

Carlin lay sweating as the sun climbed higher in the cloudless summer sky. At first he brushed off the swarms of insects that came to feed on him, then simply endured them while a growing thirst began to burn his throat. In a state of mild torment, he fueled a personal hatred for Valerie Deveau. It would make the robbery easier, and if he had to kill her, he could do so.

He watched the caretaker ride a power mower over the vast side yard. A stalwart, work-hardened, middle-aged figure, he broke the chore twice to walk to an outside faucet located against the north wing of the house and take long slow swallows of cool water. Cursing the man under his breath, Carlin held his impatience in check. He buoyed himself with the thought of the right moment, when she would be alone, when the safe would be open. Allowing for the exaggerations of gossip, Carlin was convinced that the wall safe would at the least contain the plantation’s cash on hand, several thousand dollars. Even several hundred was more than he had any prospects of seeing in a lump during the rest of his life.

At last he saw her come out on the veranda with its tall, slender white columns. She called to the caretaker, who was finishing up the side yard. He got off the riding mower and walked across to stand in the shadow of the veranda. They talked for a moment, and the man returned to the mower and rode it out of sight around the rear corner of the house. She turned and went back inside.

With a ripple of tension passing through his muscles, Carlin crawled through the thicket, shaving the distance between himself and the grounds. He heard a car’s engine surge to life and a few moments later a big blue station wagon nosed along the driveway, the caretaker at the wheel, alone in the car.

Carlin watched the station wagon follow the long curve of the driveway past the sheltering rows of tall Australian pines. Swiveling his head, he watched a distant humpback in the county road that was visible from his hiding place. In three or four minutes, the station wagon moved over the low rise and then was out of sight. Clearly, Mrs. Deveau had sent the caretaker to Grande Isle on an errand.

Crouching, Carlin snaked his way out of the thicket, ran across the side yard, and pressed his back against the side of the house. Breath was shallowing out now, eyes and ears straining.

He heard the soft, rattling slam of the back screen door. Running to the rear corner, he saw her walking toward the grove of live oaks a hundred yards away. She was carrying a basket of flowers, and he guessed she had been in the kitchen cutting and arranging them.

He turned and padded quickly along the side of the house, sprang upon the end of the veranda, and entered the house through the front door.

After the heat and insects, the foyer was a pleasantly cool invitation. He didn’t pause, darting into the long, sunken living-room. One by one he looked behind pictures on the wall, tested bookcases. At last he stood with fists clenched, teeth grinding. Was it just a made-up thing, this wall safe of hers?

He looked once more about the living-room, his gaze stopping at the archway opening into the dining room. He hurried in, looking at the long table and arranged chairs, the tall bay with its soft draperies at the farther end of the room, the buffet closer at hand. Over the buffet hung an oil painting of a bowl of fruit. He crossed to it, touched the picture. It was hinged at the top, and when he swung it open a soft laugh caught in his throat. An almost frenzied joy built in his eyes as he studied the dial of the compact and very secure-looking wall safe. He lowered the picture silently.

Slipping into the hallway, he hurried to the kitchen. He gave it a quick survey: cabinets, counter-tops, stove, refrigerator, walk-in cooler, large worktable, the huge old copper sink with its sideboards cluttered with flower cuttings and a couple of gardening tools where she’d arranged the basket.

He looked out the rear window and drew in a thin breath. She was returning, only a few yards from the house, no longer carrying the basket.

He pressed himself against the wall beside the screen door and counted the approaching footsteps. He clenched and raised his fist, and when she stepped inside he slammed his knuckles against her cheek.

A small note of pain jarred from her. She reeled, twisted, tripped over her feet, and fell in an awkward heap near the sink. She was numbed for a moment. Then she pulled herself up, holding to the edge of the sink and looking over her shoulder at him. Her eyes were slightly glazed, more from shock and sudden terror than from the force of his blow.

“What do you want?” she managed in a hoarse whisper.

“Just open the safe, lady, that’s all.” He’d moved out from the wall and stood now near the center of the room, hands cocked op hips, staring at her defiantly.

She was perfectly still for a moment. Clearly, she was thinking, this could well be the last day of her life. She would live until she had opened the safe; but looking at his brutishness and the temporary loss of sanity in his eyes, she was certain that he wouldn’t leave a living witness to his crime.

He mistook her silence. “Don’t get crazy ideas,” he warned. “You’ll open the safe, one way or another. Easy or hard.”

“I believe you,” she said.

“And don’t try to stall or con me. Won’t do you any good to claim there’s only some papers or something like that in the safe. I know what safes are for.”

“No, I wouldn’t try to lie to you about the safe.”

“That’s on the track, lady. Now let’s get moving.”

He stepped back and slightly to one side to make way for her to go ahead of him. She moved her hands, both of them, more quickly than he could blink. She grabbed flower cuttings, shears, heavy knife all in a motion from the sideboard and flung the lot of it at his face.

The wet stems, leaves, and petals showered against his cheeks; the knife sailed past his ear; the heavy shears crashed against the bridge of his nose.

With a yelp of pain, he grabbed his face and stumbled backward a step. He heard the snap of the screen door. “Damn you! I’ll really fix you now!”

He stumbled to the door, feeling the warm coursing of blood from his nose. He squinted his eyes back into focus and saw her running hard across the back yard toward the ivy-grown mausoleum and live oaks a hundred yards away.

Snorting out a spray of blood, he ran out to catch her, taking long strides, his mouth a confident and determined gash...

She was wearing workaday clothing, blouse, slacks, sandals, and she was much faster than he’d expected — a tough, hardy plantation woman.

He narrowed the gap between them steadily. Nearing the mausoleum, she cast a look over her shoulder, her mouth a wide hole laboring for breath.

He forced a little more speed. A few seconds now and he would trap her against the old family tomb. He could see the bright splash of color of the flower basket where she’d set it against the rusty sheet-iron door.

With a quick shift she darted around the mausoleum. OK, he thought, but it wouldn’t do her any good. Beyond the crypt he’d glimpsed only open fields of palmetto, sage, stunted brush that offered her no ready place to hide.

He burst around the rear of the mausoleum and stumbled to a halt. The fields yawned emptily. She’d disappeared, just like that.

He stood briefly, catching breath through his mouth and blood-encrusted nose. Then a cold smile crimped his lips and he turned slowly. Simple, he decided. Since she didn’t head across the field, she had to duck around the tomb, hoping to beat it back to the house.

He ran to the front of the mausoleum, looking toward the house and seeing no sign of her in that direction either. Again he halted, more indecisively.

He scanned in all directions carefully, even among the lower branches of the spreading oaks. A tremor of anger and frustration ticked the corner of his mouth. He tilted his head, straining his ears for the cracking of a twig, the rustle of a sage clump, sounds that would tell him that she was now in back of the mausoleum. Round and round, he mused, while she keeps the vault between us... but it wouldn’t work, of course. He’d charge, overtake her, or reverse directions suddenly and have her come charging around a corner straight into his grip.

Then a slow frown began to creep between his eyes. He had the feeling that he was seeing something he shouldn’t. A wrong detail. Something out of place.

The basket of flowers! His breath caught. The basket was tilted over on its side now — and the door of the mausoleum was slightly ajar.

“Well, I’ll be diddle-damned!” he breathed to himself. His gaze inched over the weather-blackened sheet-iron door. Her only hiding place... She’d slipped around, ducked inside, hoping that he’d search the fields and give her a chance to get back to the house, a telephone, a gun.

He let out a laugh. Bending, he picked up a small pebble, threw it, and listened to it ring against the sheet-iron door.

“You hear that, lady, that little old rock?” he called out. “It means you’re not so smart after all. You’ve blown the deal. It means I’m coming in and drag you out. This time I won’t fool around. I’ll whip so much hell out of you, you’ll be begging to open that safe.”

He grasped the ragged edge of the door and swung it back hard, and lunged at the indistinct form of her there inside the dense gloom of the mausoleum.

His fist was raised to start giving her the message without any more question marks. As his hand came smashing down, he glimpsed a countermovement that she made. His eyes were still focusing from the brilliant sunlight outside, but he saw that she was holding something. A weapon.

As his weight crashed against her, the weapon in her hand was driven home, straight through the wall of his stomach, biting deep into his entrails.

His scream shattered against the stone walls. He fell back, grabbing at the sudden fire in his guts. He collapsed outside the mausoleum and lay thrashing in the sunlight.

Her half-incoherent phone call brought me to the Deveau place in record time. When I arrived, she was sitting on the front steps, her body bent far over, her arms wrapped around her shins, her cheek pressing against her knees.

She heard the police car skid to a stop on the driveway gravel and struggled to her feet as I got out of the car and ran over to her.

A sob racked her body. She reached toward me for support. “Constable Jenks...”

“It’s all right now, Mrs. Deveau.” I put my arm about her shoulders. “It’s all over. Everything’s under control, and Dr. Simmers is on his way.”

Physically she was unhurt, but she needed Doc’s help to get through the aftermath of shock.

As if on cue, Doc’s dusty car rolled up, and when he took over with Valerie Deveau, I hurried around the house, crossed the back yard, and came to a halt a few yards from the Deveau mausoleum.

Although I expected it, the sight of Carlin Soulards corpse stopped the breath in my throat. His death anguish had twisted his body out of shape, jutted his eyes, peeled his lips far apart.

My unwilling gaze was held by the pattern the blood had made on his shirt and pants as it had spurted from his abdomen. His dead hands still clutched the weapon protruding from his belly.

I forced a movement of my eyes and ventured a look inside the crypt. The scene of violence took shape in my mind, the way it must have happened. She slipped inside the crypt, hoping Carlin Soulard would search for her out across the fields... But if he didn’t, if he cornered her, she was desperate for a way to defend herself... She lifted the lid of Robert Deveau’s coffin a few inches... Her fingers closed on the left femur bone with its lower end broken to jagged razor sharpness on a mountainside thirty years ago... And when Carlin hurled himself on her, she used the bone as a strong and desperate woman would have used a sharp dagger...

I stood for a hushed moment, just thinking about it. Why’d she hide in the crypt? For the logical reason that it was the only hiding place? Or because the memory of Robert was strongest there, to strengthen and steady her? And the weapon — had she thought of it for the logical reason that it was the only available weapon? Or because the suggestion came from an unseen source?

I shook the questions out of my head and started toward the house. My mind was made up on at least one thing: Doc Simmers — not the faithful constable of Grande Isle — was going to have the job of removing the weapon from Carlin Soulard s body.