Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 10, October 1960

Some Suggested Homicide by Richard Hardwick

Never listen to a barber or a bartender — except for the former’s “next” and the latter’s “what’ll it be?”. As they expound on life and death, politics, certain migratory practices of the tree swallow, etcetera and etcetera, I suggest you doze off.

Greg MacNeel nursed his drink along, wanting to pick it up and swallow it and order another, but knowing that would accomplish nothing at all toward solving the problem. Actually, it would in all probability have an adverse effect because in addition to soothing his jangled nerves it would give him a false outlook and that was one thing he could not afford. Not now.

Simply stated, the problem was a matter of choosing between two alternatives. On the one hand he could chuck Clarissa, break off with her — completely and with finality. He was very good at that. Or, he could kill Harry Melton. Clarissa would then be free to marry him and she would have all Harry Melton’s money.

Eenie, meenie, minie, mo...

He took another sip of his drink and looked around the dim-lit bar. It had started right here less than three months ago. Clarissa had been watching him in the mirror behind the bar. He knew she was watching him, that wasn’t an unusual thing to happen to Greg MacNeel. A glance at him explained it, cleft chin, straight nose tipped up just a bit at the end, wide-set gray eyes, wavy black hair, white even teeth. The sum total of his features was an aristocratic handsomeness that fostered an intuitive dislike in most men and a hopeful distrust in women.

He waited, over-eagerness being the mark of the amateur. After awhile he lifted his glass to his lips and as he did so he crooked a finger and the bartender came and stopped before him. The contrast between the two men was complete, Adonis confronted by a gargoyle.

“Refill, Mr. MacNeel?”

“Not just yet. Who is she, Barney? The one there at the end, that’s been giving me the once-over.”

Barney flourished his rag over the spotless bartop and cut his eyes down the bar. “The blonde doll with the earrings and brooch? The one that spells dough with a capital D?”

MacNeel suppressed a smile. “That’s the one.” Barney had become a great deal more observant of the finer things these past months, as a result of watching MacNeel in action.

“Search me. Never laid eyes on her before. Not bad, though.”

“Not bad at all. What’s she drinking?”

“She’s had a pair of champagne cocktails. Acts a little like something’s bugging her.”

MacNeel finished his drink and pushed the glass across the bar. “I’ll have that refill now, Barney, and a champagne cocktail for the lady, with my compliments.”

The bartender grinned his admiration, screwing his homely face into a caricature of itself. “You’re a pleasure to observe, Mr. MacNeel! None of these young punks can hold a candle to you, not a candle! The old master himself!”

Greg MacNeel took the words in the sense they were offered, as a statement of fact rather than as flattery. A man does not succumb to blandishments concerning a business he has been successfully engaged in for more than twenty years. He did wish, however, that Barney had not put quite so much emphasis on the word “old”. MacNeel was barely thirty-nine, but he was a realist and therefore aware of the beginning sag beneath his chin, of the incipient paunch when not wearing his girdle, and of the alarming quantity of black hair that turned up in his brush each morning. Barney, by using that word, had reminded him that the time was drawing near when he should consider some permanent alliance, and the time to find just the right one was while the cards were still stacked in his favor.

So he had met Clarissa there in Barney’s place and after he had gotten a few more cocktails into her, he learned from her that she was married to a man named Harry Melton and that Harry Melton was twice her age and had a great deal of money.

“I’m the little bird in the gilded cage, Greg,” she said later as they danced at a road house in Jersey.

“How’d you manage to fly the coop tonight? It can’t be much of a cage.”

“Harry’s in Chicago on business. He doesn’t go away often and when he does I feel that if I don’t get out of that house and have a little fun I’ll go stark raving mad.” She shook her head as she looked up at him. “You wouldn’t know what that feels like, would you?”

He grinned. “I suspect you weren’t forced at gunpoint to marry the man.”

Clarissa laughed, bitterly. “Everybody can be bought. I was bought.” She touched a finger to MacNeel’s lips. “Let’s have a fling. I’m Cinderella and it’s not midnight yet.”

“I hope this will be more than a fling with us.”

She laughed again, but gaily this time. “That smacks of a line, Mr. MacNeel. But I like it.”

It was a line. And of course they both knew that it was. But Harry Melton’s trips away from the city grew more frequent and every time Harry was away Clarissa went directly to Greg. They met in out of the way places, and never twice in the same place. Clarissa insisted on this. “I don’t love him, but I do love his money,” she said to Greg.

And that was another thing that bothered MacNeel. Clarissa never picked up the tab, even though he told her frankly that he was broke. She explained that expenses incurred while her husband was out of town would be hard to explain.

About a month later, Greg stopped off at Barney’s place one afternoon.

“Well, hello there, Mr. MacNeel! Ain’t seen you in awhile!”

“All play and no work, you know, Barney.”

Barney winked knowingly. “The doll with the earrings and brooch?” he said, and his hands got busy mixing a martini.

MacNeel shrugged and the bartender’s face split in a wide grin. “Magnifico! Like putting the little leaguers against the Yanks I Yes sir, these young squirts just ain’t got the touch of the old master!”

There it was again, that unpleasant pang when the word “old” came up. “You make it sound too easy,” MacNeel said, “We’ve all got our problems.”

Barney frowned. “You got problems?” He put the martini on the bar, in front of MacNeel. “I should have a half a dozen of the problems you handsome guys got, two blondes, two redheads, and a pair of brunettes. If you ever get married and settle down, Mr. MacNeel, the world is goin’ to lose one of the great ones!”

Barney moved down the bar to wait on a customer and Greg MacNeel sat staring into his drink. He picked it up occasionally and sipped at it. He was thinking about marriage. He’d marry Clarissa if he could. In a way, he really liked her. Maybe if she got a divorce, it could be framed so that she would get a hefty settlement from the old man.

The bartender came back and picked up MacNeel’s empty glass. MacNeel nodded and Barney set about preparing a fresh martini. “Like I was saying, Mr. MacNeel, I should have the problems you good-lookin’ guys have. Now you take me, for instance, ninety-nine percent of the time a dame’ll laugh right in my face.”

MacNeel smiled. It was a switch, the customer listening to the troubles of the bartender. “You probably make out better than any guy in town.”

Barney sighed philosophically. “Well, there’s always that one percent that doesn’t laugh at me. You might not believe it, but some dames really dig us ugly guys! Sure! I figure it’s got something to do with the mother instinct. Anyhow, when you work for something, really work, you appreciate it* more. Keeps you right on your toes, too.” He tapped his forehead. “Keeps you using the old bean.”

A few nights later when he was with Clarissa, Greg thought of what the bartender had said. They had dinner, then went to one of the cheap roadhouses Clarissa insisted on frequenting and danced and had a few drinks. A man like Barney could probably solve this, MacNeel thought. Maybe I’m rusty. Maybe I’ve been operating in the same old rut too long.

“My, it must be serious,” Clarissa said with a little laugh.

He realized he had been frowning. “It is serious. I was thinking about us — you and me.”

She nodded and began turning her glass slowly, thoughtfully, on the table. Then she said, “Harry’s talking about moving south, Greg.”

His frown deepened.

“He’s starting to liquidate some of his active interests. He’s planning a sort of semi-retirement now that he’s made it. We’d go to Miami, or maybe the west coast, Sarasota.”

Inside, he began to panic. She was the one he’d waited for. “You — you can’t let him do that, Clarissa. We love each other, doesn’t that mean anything?”

She laughed, without humor. “Well, what can I do? Unless... unless you want me to leave him.”

“I—” Suddenly, he was trapped. “It wouldn’t be fair to you. I haven’t got any dough. You know that.”

“I do know that, my sweet.” She reached out and touched his hand. “Maybe we’ll think of something. Right now, I think I’d like to dance.”

There were others, he told himself at that point. But where was there one potentially worth four or five million? Clarissa would marry him, if he asked her to, of that he was certain. She’d walk out on Harry Melton and his millions and take pot luck with him. He could visualize it, a cold water flat someplace with a view of the air shaft, and after a few years a bunch of kids screaming around the place, while the great Greg MacNeel grew fat drinking beer while he watched ball games on television. It made his blood run cold.

As usual, the next afternoon he went into Barney’s place. Barney could always buck him up with a little enlightening conversation and a fine dry martini or two.

Barney prepared the drink then leaned on the bar with a newspaper before him. There was only one other customer at the bar. “Whatdya think of that creep down in Florida?”

“Who’s that, Barney?”

“I been keeping up with it in the papers. It sort of goes back in a way to what we was talking about the other day. Now, if it had been me, I’d have done it all different. And I’d have had a mighty good chance of getting away with it. Like it stands, the guy’ll get the chair.”

MacNeel turned the paper on the bar. There was a picture of a sulky young man and a police officer.

“Maybe you ain’t been watching it,” Barney said.

MacNeel shook his head.

“Well, this kid wanted to marry this rich guy’s daughter out there in Chicago, but the old man spotted him for a kind of fortune hunter, which he was, and the old man told the girl if she saw this guy any more he’d cut her off without a dime. So, this kid goes and knocks the old man off, figuring the girl’ll get the loot and the two of ’em can go and live happily ever after.”

“And?” MacNeel said.

“Ahhh, this kid pulls this off about as smooth as a idiot chimpanzee. All he’ll get is some free voltage from the state.”

“And you would have done it some other way?”

“Right! And you know why? Because nothing ever came easy to me!” He touched his forehead. “Always had to work for every thing. The kid went off half-cocked. I’d of been all cocked or not at all!”

“Yeah?”

“Wait around, that’s what he shoulda done. Make it look like he gave up and moved off. Meanwhile, case the old man, maybe find out if he goes somewhere regular, like on a business trip. He could follow him somewhere, maybe, disguise himself, knock off the old man so’s it looks like a robbery, you know, and after things cool off, he slips the girl a wedding ring and...” Barney shrugged, “Simple.”

It had been in his mind, just under the surface. MacNeel knew that. The idea that Harry Melton had to go was basic to the whole thing. But it had been so appalling that up until now he had kept it buried. The electric chair had an awful finality about it.

Still, there was a lot in MacNeel’s favor. The affair with Clarissa had certainly been kept under wraps; she had insisted on that.

The afternoon business began to build up and Greg had another martini and watched Barney move around expertly behind the bar. A great deal of untapped wisdom lies inside the skulls of bartenders, he thought. From the mouths of babes — and bartenders...

He had to think a great deal about this. Here was something he had never even considered before. Killing a man. You don’t explain your way out of that if you’re caught. But why would he get caught? People get away with murder all the time.

He remembered suddenly something that Clarissa had said, “Maybe we’ll think of something.” Had she been getting at this? Maybe she had been hinting at it, not wanting to say it in so many words, but trying to put it across to him nevertheless. It stood to reason that if a woman started talking to a man about killing her husband, and this same man was in line as her next husband, mightn’t he be a little nervous when she brought him his morning coffee, or met him in the afternoon with a martini? So she’d leave it up to him. Maybe hint at it, but that was all.

The next time MacNeel met Clarissa she said, “Harry’s coming back from Los Angeles tomorrow; then he’s going on to Atlanta for the rest of the week. He’s definitely going through with what he was talking about, Greg. He’s selling off some of his interests now. He wants to move to Florida as soon as possible.”

“How soon? A month? Six months?”

“Maybe even less than a month. He’s leased a place in Miami Beach and he says he can operate out of there until things are settled the way he wants them.”

MacNeel picked up his drink, looked at it. “But he’s going to Atlanta first, is that it?”

“I confirmed his plane and hotel reservations myself. He’ll be at the Imperial Plaza, and he’s leaving on the six-fifteen Eastern flight, straight through on Friday.”

There it was again. It could have been a perfectly innocent remark. Still, why would she give him the name of the hotel and the exact time of the flight, unless she was inviting him to do something about the dilemma in which they found themselves?

He picked up the menu and studied it intently. “The lobster should be good. And perhaps a bottle of Liebfraumilch?” He let his tongue touch his Ups. “Six fifteen? Delta?”

“Six-fifteen. Friday. Eastern Air Line. And the lobster and wine sound delicious.” Clarissa looked up and smiled and laid the menu aside.

MacNeel recognized Harry Melton immediately, from the pictures of him that he had seen in the newspapers from time to time. He was a big, bluff man who, strangely, did not look quite as old as MacNeel had imagined he would.

MacNeel, who had booked passage on the same flight under the name of Clarence Smith, sat four seats behind Melton on the big Super Constellation. Disembarking in Atlanta, MacNeel took a cab into the city and checked into a small, second-rate hotel close by the Imperial Plaza. He was very nervous when he took the revolver from the suitcase and put it under his belt. This was the dangerous part, this was the part he had to handle with the utmost of care.

He called the Imperial Plaza and got Melton’s room number and also learned that Melton was just then checking in. MacNeel went to the hotel and took a seat in the lobby and sat reading a newspaper until Clarissa’s husband appeared. He followed him out to the street, dodging through the moderately heavy pedestrian traffic, keeping his eyes fastened on the back of the man’s head. Perspiration beaded his body. It was now only a matter of waiting for the right moment to come along.

And then Melton turned down a side street, still walking fast, and in the determined manner of a man taking a constitutional.

The phone rang behind the bar and Barney answered it. “Oh, hello,” he said. He listened with deep interest for a number of seconds, then nodded his head. “It’s done then. Good, good... Stop your worrying. There’s nothing to worry about. So he wasn’t caught. So what? If he tries to make any trouble for you, he’d just be cookin’ his own goose and he’d find himself in the chair... No, honey, no, there’s no way he can be connected with you...”

Barney listened to the voice on the other end of the wire for quite awhile. He nodded slowly as he listened, as though the caller could see him, and when he spoke at last his voice was muted with tenderness. “I know you love me, Clarissa. And you know how I feel about you, but it just wouldn’t look right so soon after Harry’s death. It just wouldn’t... In a couple of months. Yes. Sure. No reason why we couldn’t go and get married then...”