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

In the House of Rats

Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1970.

Paralyzed from the waist down, the rich old man lay in bed and contemplated the absurdities of life, death, and the game of golf.

The bandages were off now, and a silver stubble glinted where the skull had been shaven. Under craggy brows his gray eyes were coldly clear as he watched the play of sunlight through the tall windows of his spacious bedroom. He haled the antisepsis of the hospital room and had wanted the hell out. If he had to be flat on his back for a while, let it be in his own giant four-poster bed. But he hadn’t counted on returning to a conspiracy to kill him...

Miss Castleberry, the private nurse, was a plump pleasant shadow beside the bed as her light touch on his hickory-like wrist checked the strong, steady pulse.

He was a lean, rugged, rawboned old man, gnarled and toughened by early hardships and a lifetime of work. Unlike most old men he’d never thought much about dying. Until that outlandish accident, death had seemed as remote and impersonal as it had when he was, say, twenty-five.

He wasn’t afraid to die. But the way he would die was what stuck in his craw. The accident had failed to kill him. But the accident had set him up. Who could say that an old man, not long out of brain surgery, hadn’t simply stopped breathing during the night? Who could prove that he hadn’t taken an overdose of sleeping pills, an old man preferring the peace of final sleep to paralysis for the rest of his life.

He didn’t know how The Rats would tip him over the edge. He couldn’t actually prove that they would. His suspicions could be dismissed as the ramblings of a senile old man. But he knew. His death was being arranged, right here in his own house, and he felt a sense of degradation and personal violation. He’d felt much the same way many years ago when without warning a small rattlesnake had bitten him above the left ankle. He’d stomped the snake to a pulp and then walked three miles across the sun-blasted Texas earth to the drill site and medical aid. The snake’s attack had been a blasphemy, an outrage against his sense of decency and fair play...

Miss Castleberry dropped his wrist and made a pleasant face.

“A man of thirty-nine should have your heartbeat and pulse rate. What are we having for lunch?”

The thought of food had lost its usual savor. But he’d never cowered before any threat in his life, so he was damned if he’d start now. “A steak,” he said, “burned on the outside and bleeding in the middle.”

“Tiger meat,” Miss Castleberry laughed.

“Maybe Katherine will arrive in time to join me,” the old man said. “Her plane lands at one o’clock. An hour from the airport — hold the steak. Miss Castleberry, and then make it double.”

Dropping his head back, he half closed his eyes. He heard the starched rustle of Miss Castleberry departing, the click of the door as it closed, leaving him alone in the silence.

Katherine, his niece, was the only member of the family still absent. The thought was a reminder of how few people he really had. There was George, his son, who could pretend that he was having no part in his father’s murder. And Claudia, George’s wife, who could plan it with all the emotion of a Lady Macbeth. And Elwyn — he of the hippie hair and bell bottoms of psychedelic hues — who could execute it.

My son. My daughter-in-law. My grandson. The old man wept silently.

For them the emergency summons had been a happy announcement. The old geezer worth $6,000,000 was in brain surgery. Perhaps he would die under the scalpel. They had flown joyfully in from New York.

But the old geezer hadn’t died on the operating table. The heart, the constitution and iron will, had pulled the old geezer through. He would, the doctors were certain, regain at least partial use of his legs in time and live to see any great-grandchildren that Elwyn might spawn. The time for The Rats to strike was here, now — or wait another lifetime to inherit the six millions.

The news of the old man’s accident had taken much longer to reach Katherine. She was off in some remote village in the mountains of Bolivia, where she was serving as a Peace Corp volunteer. Probably the message had finally been handed to her by a barefooted courier and the ragged, brown-skinned people of the village had shared their meager rations to pack her out by burro.

Such a long arduous trip for Katherine to make, all because of an errant golf ball and an accident almost too freakish to be believed. The sliced tee shot on the eighteenth hole fading into the trees — the opening between two live oaks that offered enticing distance down the fairway — the one-up advantage the old man was dead set on holding — the ball sitting up well on a small clump.

The old man had chosen a three wood and the gamble on reaching the green. Grip, stance, balance — eye on the ball, body turn, pivot, downswing, with the club-head hissing, packed with power. Then the slight yielding of twigs and desiccated vegetation under the firm left side — just enough to result in a slightly pulled shot. The ball had hit a live oak trunk dead-center and returned straight to his temple with a speed a little less than that of a bullet. Two sounds, like the rapid-fire echo of a cracking pistol. A flare of white light through the old man’s brain. Then temporary oblivion...

The old man heard the sigh of his bedroom door. George, Claudia, and Elwyn came in and ranged along the foot of his bed. The old man’s eyes swept them, and their images underwent a subtle transformation. He could imagine them with twitching whiskers. Rats. Skittering toward the prize. Sniffing at the bait, cautious, but ready to dart and strike and flee back to their hole with a six-million-dollar morsel in their mouths.

George, his inner weaknesses visible at last, magnified by Claudia’s domination. George, the mangy gray Rat, squeaking a feeble protest but ticking his paws along with the rest of the pack.

Elwyn, with the glittering eyes of the young Rat totally consumed by greed and by contempt for an old man of the Establishment.

And Claudia, sleek and dark, avaricious, a polished and lacquered scavenger. Vampire Rat, who’d years ago got her claws in a weak, foolish heir to a fortune.

George was unable to meet the old man’s eyes. “Good morning, father,” he squeaked, with perhaps a note of shame and despair in his voice. But not enough shame. And too little despair.

Elwyn said nothing; he stood with his head tilted, his nose twitching, as if measuring the distance from one dark hole to another.

“Nurse tells us you’re feeling well today,” Claudia said.

The old man said nothing.

“Anything we can do for you, father?” George murmured feebly.

“Not a thing,” the old man said. He closed his eyes and turned his head away. He couldn’t bear to look at the mockery of the son he might have had.

They stood a moment with rat-like uncertainty; then they turned and slithered out.

The old man heard the door close behind them. He didn’t open his eyes. Against the closed lids he saw the scene again of last night, dreamlike in its unreality.

He’d been lying there in the silence, hating the pressure of the bed, despising his inactivity. How long? he’d thought. How long before that first tingle of feeling would return to his toes?

He’d struggled up on his elbows and the need to be in motion, to move under his own power, to forsake the hateful bed if even for a few moments had flamed through him.

His eyes had gleamed when their roving was arrested by the sight of the large square hassock.

It was mounted on rollers, and Miss Castleberry had left it quite close to the bed. She’d rested her feet on it while sitting in the chair and reading the evening paper to him.

The old man had turned his body with his corded arms, struggling until his torso had twisted from the bed and draped across the hassock. He’d encouraged himself with a soft, delighted laugh, reached down to the carpet, and inched the hassock with the pressure and push of his palms. His legs and feet had trailed slowly, dropping at last from the bed with a faint thump.

His vigor had renewed itself as he rolled himself across the bedroom, his chest and belly down on the hassock. He’d exulted in the feeling of freedom, looking over his shoulder and giving the bed a friendly sneer.

Grunting and breathing a little quicker, the old man had reached up, grasped the knob, and struggled to open the bedroom door.

The hallway had yawned. The truancy of what he was doing struck him, and the old man had hesitated. Then he’d propelled himself forward, like a legless man on a rollered wooden platform. The trip was, he’d decided, worth all the riot act the doctor could dish out later.

With dim night lights burning here and there, the hallway had been spangled with shadows. Then he’d heard their voices, through a door that was ajar down the hall. Soft, brittle, like the scurrying of tiny claws in the walls:

George: “No, I won’t listen! After all, he is my father.”

And Claudia: “I don’t think you have any choice. George. Just what would you do after it’s done and over? Be a big brave man for once? Tell the world? I don’t think so. I think you’ll do just as you’ve always done in your gutless way. Nothing.”

The old man had frowned, supine on the hassock in the sudden chill of the hallway. Gradually, the meaning of the conversation began to eat through to him. He’d been numbed, hurt beyond endurance, listening to the snatches of talk until one of them had noticed the door was ajar and closed it.

The old man had managed to roll back to his bed and pull himself onto it. The enormity of the thing they were planning had overwhelmed him. He couldn’t digest it all at once. Tell someone? The doctor? Miss Castleberry? The police?

No, that wouldn’t help. Just his word against theirs. They would dismiss his unlikely tale as the rambling of an old man who’d suffered a bad head injury.

When he’d drifted at last into exhausted, troubled slumber he’d dreamed of rats. Perhaps that skittering quality of their voices had suggested it. Three rats, circling him on scratchy claws. Three rats with familiar faces...

The old man snapped out of his long reverie with the feeling that someone had opened the door. He turned his head.

Katherine had arrived at last. She smiled a warm “Hi!” and the old man didn’t trust himself to speak.

“You had one hell of a nerve, scaring me so badly,” she was saying, misty-eyed and throaty with the joy of seeing him. “I counted every endless mile back home.”

It was exactly the way the old man would have said it himself. She was so like him in so many ways — fiercely loyal, tenacious, durable — qualities his own son had somehow missed. She was his favorite person in the world, and he knew that he was hers. He felt the old rapport, the bond between them, stronger than ever, if that were possible.

“Katherine... Kit...” The old man could barely talk. She’d been more than a match for the hardships, the jungles of Bolivia. Lithe, lean, and burned to a dark and savage beauty, she’d come out of the jungle concerned only for the old man’s recovery and well-being.

The old man had struggled his shoulders up and was reaching for her.

“My — blessed — Kit!”

His dearest Kit, returning to a house of Rats...

Then, as she closed the distance to his bedside, the old man had the strangest impression. She moved with the effortless grace of a feline still in the jungle. He noticed the peculiar slant of her eyes. A nudge of the imagination and the pupils were elliptical and vertical. The sinewy flow of her as she sat lightly beside him suggested the pent-up power of a guarding leopardess crouched at her maharajah’s side. Her voice was a purr, as she told him he looked wonderful and everything was going to be fine.

The impression was all in his mind of course, but—

A soft chuckle formed in his throat. Look out, Rats, he thought, the odds have changed!

The old man closed his eyes. He could relax now. She was stroking his forehead with a velvety paw, the talons sheathed, and the old man murmured under his breath in quiet contentment.

“Kit — Kitty,” he was saying. “Pretty Kitty. Nice kitty.”