The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mysteries!

Salesmanship

Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1958.

Howard Alden’s day started on a miserable note. At breakfast he had to tell Clara, his wife, that they couldn’t afford a new coat for her, much as he admitted she needed one.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if she had burst out with something mean. Instead, she just sat there and looked at him as if he were a nonentity, an absolute zero.

Clara was a brunette, slender and beautiful. Howard was very much in love with her. It gave him a hard inner pain to have her look at him like that. He writhed inwardly when the villagers looked at him that way, but for Clara to give him such an appraisal was an unendurable torment.

She pecked at her oatmeal and sipped at the chickory she had brewed for breakfast.

Howard tried to think of something to say. She hadn’t always looked at him like that. In fact, the way she had once admired him was the one thing in life he had to treasure.

He was a man in his mid-thirties, middle-weight in size, trim, sandy in coloring, and not bad-looking. He had met Clara ten months ago during a business trip to Atlanta and they had married after a brief courtship.

He had brought her back to Pine Needle, which nestled in the barren Georgia foothills, without the courage to tell her the whole truth about himself. She had come to the village knowing only that he was the one mortician in the county, as his father had been before him. His profession put him, in her mind, on a level with the mayor, the leading merchant, and the chief of police.

She’d had to learn the hard way that he was the most poverty-stricken man in town. The dirt farmers had their chickens and hounds, but Howard Alden had only a dreary undertaking parlor and ramshackle house, both heavily mortgaged, and a yellowed sheaf of bills his dead father had never been able to pay.

Clara had envisioned an old plantation-style home with servants, but she found herself cooking on an ancient gas stove and polishing silver plate that had worn to the base metal.

She had first wanted to redecorate the gloomy house. Howard had borrowed all the money he could, yet the best she could manage were some new draperies, a cheap living room suite, and a table-model television set...

“Clara,” he said, his taste for breakfast gone, “if you’ll just be patient I know I’ll collect some of the money due me.”

“Collect from whom? The poor share croppers stuck in this Godforsaken county? The people you bury at two hundred dollars a funeral — on credit? And darn few burials at that. Most of the folks around here are too poor to die.” He didn’t answer — he had no answer. Sometimes he felt he didn’t know much of anything about life, or about women. He knew only the occasional dead who came his way. He wished he could change for Clara’s sake, but he didn’t know how.

Clara avoided his off-to-work kiss. He left the house with something squeezed tight inside of him. She had not mentioned it, but he knew she was brooding on going back to Atlanta. And thinking about her life here in this bleak Southern county, he couldn’t really blame her.

His jalopy of a car rattled to a stop at the lower end of Main Street. There was little activity in town — a few dusty pickup trucks parked along Main, a couple of men swapping talk at the feed store, a few old-timers sitting on nail kegs under the unpainted wooden awning of the hardware store. They whittled irresolutely, argued dogs and women, and crusted the curbing stone with tobacco juice.

Howard sighed and went into his place of business. Once the gold leaf spelling out Alden Mortuary on the front window had no missing letters. Once the walnut benches in the chapel and the foot-pedal organ had been glossy and new. Once the front office had been something more than a gloomy clutter of shabby furnishings.

Today the place held only the old sweet sick smell of dying flowers — and death.

Howard opened the windows to air the office, then went out to the diner on the corner. The diner had been converted from an old street car an enterprising soul had brought in from Atlanta.

The usual crowd was in the diner. Bayliss, who owned the dry goods store. Sheriff Loudermilk. Bill Suggs, who trained horses and hunting clogs for the vanDeventer family.

Suggs was an overbearing man, but it was said that old vanDeventer liked him. This was enough to give Suggs considerable prestige in Pine Needle. The vanDeventers owned practically the whole county — most of the farms, the cannery, even the local telephone exchange.

Maddy vanDeventer, beautiful, young, and blonde, had been educated at a fashionable girls’ school in North Carolina and had traveled in Europe. If Pine Needle had a princess, it was Maddy. The old man prized her slightest whim above the welfare of the entire human race.

Howard ordered a cup of coffee from the hefty, sweaty girl behind the counter. He sat listening to Suggs, Loudermilk, and Bayliss plan a fishing trip. They had acknowledged Howard with the briefest of nods, not quite friendly enough for Howard to take the liberty of joining them. It was unspoken knowledge that he was too poor and too unimportant to be included in any fishing trip.

Howard sat down at the next table and tried to appear as if he weren’t listening. They were going all the way over to Santee in South Carolina. There were bass there half as big as a man’s leg. It was going to be a rather expensive trip, by the time food and liquor were included. It was the kind of trip men talked out — long and detailedly. They wouldn’t leave for ten days yet, but a trip like this took a lot of planning and discussion.

And Howard just sat at his table and tried not to let the warm comradeship of the three other men make itself known to his senses. But he couldn’t help the pictures that came irresistibly to his mind: the car piled high with equipment, screeching to a stop before his house in the early dawn. Bayliss yelling, “Get a move on, Howard! You waitin’ for them bass to have grandchildren?” And Clara kissing him and telling him to be careful as he hurried from the house, loaded with rod, reel, creel, boots, and spare clothing. And Suggs flapping him on the back as he got in the car, thrusting a bottle into his hand, and saying, “Smoothest bourbon you ever drunk, boy. Right out of the old man’s private stock. Take a shot of that to settle your breakfast.”

Over at the next table Bayliss laughed heartily at something Loudermilk said, and the minute of fantasy was gone. Howard sat alone.

The pay phone on the wall at the end of the counter broke in on Bayliss’s laugh like a sudden scream. The sloppy waitress shuffled back to the phone and unhooked it. “Yeah?”

Then she turned, holding the receiver. “For you, Sheriff.”

Loudermilk uncoiled his hawkish six feet and strode to the phone.

Bayliss and Suggs continued talking. But they broke off when Loudermilk gasped, “Maddy vanDeventer! Where?”

The Sheriff listened a moment. Then he snapped, “I’ll be right out!”

He turned from the phone, his face colorless. “Maddy vanDeventer’s dead!”

Nobody else in the diner said anything for a long moment. Then Suggs croaked, “Where? How? By the devil, there ain’t never been a sweeter, more considerate, nicer girl born than Maddy vanDeventer, even if she is rich. She just can’t be...”

“She was found a few minutes ago,” Sheriff Loudermilk said. “She slipped and fell off her cliff.” Howard knew that this simple explanation was sufficient to make the occurrence clear to every inhabitant of Pine Needle. Near Maddy’s home, the vanDeventer mansion, there was a wild cliff with jagged rocks at its base. Maddy enjoyed taking long walks on top of the cliff in the cool of the evening. Apparently she had taken one walk too many.

Loudermilk, Suggs, and Bayliss rushed out. Howard sat staring at the bright hot day outside.

The waitress said something to him. She was so excited she was scratching the rolls of flesh along her ribs. He looked at her and said. “Huh?”

“I said I’m closin’ up. I want to get out there.”

“Yeah,” Howard said. “I guess I better be getting back to business myself.”

He had his undertaking parlor aired, swept, and dusted when Sheriff Loudermilk brought the girl’s body in.

She was so young and beautiful. And then Howard, laying her out on the slab, touched the back of her head where the blood was clotted and the bone crushed, and she wasn’t beautiful at all.

Simply pathetic.

She had been wearing jodhpurs, flat-heeled oxfords, and an open-throated nylon blouse when she had gone down the cliff. The ripped and torn clothing was no problem. The bruises and scratches also presented no great difficulties. The head, however, was going to be a really tough job.

Face drawn, Sheriff Loudermilk wiped his forehead with a blue bandanna. “She wasn’t missed until this morning. Her daddy knew she was out and thought he heard her come in last night — but it was a servant walking around upstairs. She always sleeps until ten or eleven o’clock, so the poor old man thought she was safe in her own home until a couple boys came to tell him what they’d found at the bottom of the cliff. They were on a berry-picking trip.”

“Where is Mr. vanDeventer now?” Howard asked.

“He’s coming down here,” Loudermilk said. He gave the body a brief glance. “I reckon it’s a clear case of accidental death. She didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

The bell attached to the front door tinkled.

“I’ll bet that’s her daddy now,” Loudermilk finished. The Sheriff trailed Howard as the undertaker went from the rear of the building to the entrance. The caller was vanDeventer.

The old man usually presented a rather dashing appearance, for all his years. He was slender and in good health. His white hair fell in snowy, glistening waves across his head. His blue eyes were sharp and clear, his lean, tanned face firm.

But now Howard was shocked at vanDeventer’s appearance. He seemed to be a bag of dried sticks from a quaking aspen. His face was blotched with spots of color the hue of a sick liver.

“Please sit down, Mr. vanDeventer,” Howard said, pulling a chair from the wall.

The old man sank into the chair and leaned his head on one elbow. Loudermilk hovered in the background as Howard came around and sat down beside the old man.

The girl’s father pulled himself together. “I came to discuss...”

“I understand,” Howard said.

The old man looked around the office, sat in thought, then said at last, “Perhaps a bigger establishment would be better. Perhaps an Atlanta mortician...”

Howard looked directly at vanDeventer and suddenly there was steel in Howard’s eyes.

He spoke quietly but firmly. “Mr. vanDeventer, I am the only man alive to whom you can entrust this precious duty. I admit that Atlanta offers bigger establishments, but I offer you — and Maddy — much more. They would lay her away with the precision of a machine. I shall do so with the skill of an artist.”

He rose and stood over the old man, his face kind but unyielding. “Two generations of Aldens have buried all the departed of this county, Mr. vanDeventer. The Aldens as well as the vanDeventers are of this land, this soil.”

“You almost convince me, young man.”

“I need only to point out the facts, sir. Consider me first as a craftsman. I grew up in this business, sir. I know all the old ways, the fine ways. I take no short cuts to streamline my effects. I am the most capable mortician in this whole state of Georgia.

“Next, consider me as a man. I knew Maddy — her generosity, her beauty, her graciousness. I can impart to her a full measure of her divine naturalness. I shall approach my task, sir, with the deepest sense of duty.

“Add to all this the deep knowledge I have of what you, sir, would want. When this land has become ancient, her memory will still remain a landmark. Is that not your true desire, Mr. vanDeventer?”

“You read my heart, young man.”

“I would suggest, sir, a crypt of the purest marble from our own Georgia earth. If I may be permitted, I would deem it an honor to go to the quarries myself and personally choose every stone, supervise every inch of its cutting.”

“You would do that, young man?”

“Humbly,” Howard said.

“Then spare no expense,” the old man said, rising.

“As high as twenty thousand, sir?”

“As high as fifty thousand. The years left me are few, and of what use is my money now?”

The chauffeur was waiting outside to help the old man into one of the vanDeventer cars. Howard stood at the window and watched them drive away.

Behind Howard, Sheriff Loudermilk said, “We’ll get the inquest over quick, so’s you can get on with it, Howard. Just a formality, that’s all. Ain’t no doubt she died accidental, purely accidental.” Loudermilk went out. Howard spent the rest of the day seeing to preliminaries, such as pricing caskets in Atlanta and comparing them with prices quoted over the phone from Montgomery.

When he drove down Main Street at dusk he sensed a change that had come over Pine Needle. Sidewalk loungers waved to him, and he knew they were talking about him as he drove on.

When he got home, Clara met him with a kiss. Her smile was bright and warm.

She had cooked his favorite dinner, porterhouse steak with mushrooms. He hadn’t eaten a dinner like that in a long while now. It did more than warm his stomach. It told him their credit at the butcher and at the grocery was once more A+.

“Howard,” she ventured, “do you think we might have a weekend in Atlanta sometime? After the vanDeventer funeral, I mean?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said expansively.

Right after dinner the phone rang. The caller was Bayliss, who owned the dry goods store and was Pine Needle’s leading merchant.

“Say, Howie old man, think you’ll be free for a few days after the vanDeventer funeral?”

“I might be.”

“Sure hope so. Me and the boys got to have you on that fishing trip. Wouldn’t be a real trip without you, son.”

“I’d like to go,” Howard said simply, really meaning it. He wasn’t going to permit himself any resentment. Yesterday he had been nothing; today he was a leading citizen. The profit on fifty thousand in a pauperized village like Pine Needle made a lot of difference. That was all right with Howard. He was glad it did.

“Me and Loudermilk was talking a few minutes ago,” Bayliss said. “You know, this town needs enterprising young blood on our town council. We can chin about it on the trip. And I reckon I’ll see you in the diner tomorrow?”

“Sure, a man’s got to have a spot of coffee to keep him going.”

“That’s right,” Bayliss laughed heartily. “Specially a real live wire. Loudermilk told me — and the whole town’s talking — what a real spunky job of selling you did on the poor old man. Real salesmanship, boy!” Salesmanship, Howard thought after he had hung up. He stood by the phone and a faint shudder passed over him. But he controlled it quickly.

Selling the old man hadn’t been so tough. He hadn’t figured for a moment it would be.

The really tough part of the job had been that moment last night when Maddy realized it was he who was shoving her over the cliff.