Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 11, November 1960

The Lipstick Explosion by James Holding

What would we do without science? It both saves and destroys lives — and you could hardly ask more of it than that. Be that as it may, there are those backward folk who have been requesting that it go away.

It has been said that a drowning person, in the brief moments between his last desperate struggles to stay afloat and his death by liquid suffocation, sees passing before his eyes, like a speeded-up motion picture, the chief events and crises of his life.

To Gaston Beaujolais, sitting in his favorite armchair in the flag-stoned parlor of Henriette’s house, with Henriette herself on his knee, a similar phenomenon occurred one wet spring night in the mountain village of St. Paul de Vence.

There was, however, one important difference: Gaston was in no danger of drowning — unless it was in the deep hazel pools of Henriette’s eyes. He was, in fact, demonstrating his affection for Henriette when the first scene of his personal cinema flashed without warning onto the screen of his consciousness.

Curiously, this flash-back, the lightning-fast recapitulation of his past, did not begin with his childhood or early youth as such manifestations are commonly expected to do. Instead, Gaston’s mental movie began only after he had attained mature manhood, married Yvonne, and become preeminent in his profession...

Gaston Beaujolais was a chemist. Not the kind of chemist, he was fond of saying, that messes about with nauseous batches of umbelliferone, phthalic anhydride or paradichlorobenzene. Oh, no. He had put his undoubted chemical talents to far better use, placing them at the service of Art and Beauty (with capital letters). He devoted his working hours entirely to the compounding of perfumes, face powders, soothing salves, wrinkle removers, astringents, cleansing unguents and sensuous shades of lipstick and nail polish. Anything, in short, that could conceivably help the French female to look and smell more attractive was grist to Beaujolais’ chemical mill. He was, in his words, a cosmetic chemist. And a good one, too. Indeed, he occupied the post of Chief Chemist at Rousseau Frères, the well-known firm of cosmetic manufacturers whose laboratories were located on the Boulevard Gambetta in Nice, just off the Promenade des Anglais.

It was a mental picture of that laboratory of his that occurred to him first, in that run-through of his past.

He saw himself, quite clearly, standing in his laboratory, a man of middle height with sensitive hands and a purely Gallic ebullience. He was dressed in his white working smock and was watching intently a concoction of some sort that simmered in a test tube over a burner.

He knew, instantly, exactly what the concoction was. It was the new lipstick ingredient he had discovered how to synthesize only that day. It had given him a great deal of trouble, the development of this particular ingredient. For it was not a substance usually included in lipsticks. Yet it was an ingredient that Beaujolais felt sure would inevitably enable Rousseau Frères to corner the world lipstick market, if he should ever divulge its secret to his superiors.

He had not the slightest intention of doing so, however. It was his exclusive formula, privately arrived at and now destined for use in one lipstick only: the lipstick with which he intended to murder his wife.

And the truly Gallic touch that distinguished Gaston’s planning was this: he could contemplate with equanimity the murder of his wife, and incidentally, of his best friend as well, but he felt very strongly indeed that when Yvonne died, he couldn’t bear it if she didn’t die quickly and happily. She had not, for some years now, of course, been a wife in the true sense of the word. Beautiful, yes, and gracious, convenable, affectionate she still was — but in matters of love, what had started as an attractive timidity on her part during their honeymoon had since become what he could only term outright indifference to him. This, Gaston Beaujolais felt, was certainly unsuitable, nay unacceptable, in the wife of an eminent cosmetic chemist.

His first attempt to solve his problem had taken, the form of Henriette Deschamps, a lovely mannequin he had met at a fashion show in Cannes, where he had been present as a representative of Rousseau Frères’ Commercial Make-up Service. Henriette was lonely, being only recently transplanted from Paris to the Cote d’Azur; she was basically fond of men; she found Gaston appealing in a chemical way. And she had no objections when he found a charming cottage for her in St. Paul de Vence, a village in the hills with the geographical advantage of being readily accessible to him when he motored from Nice to Grasse and back on his regular visits to secure certain flower fragrances for his work.

Henriette was a joy — a gay, intelligent girl who very soon supplanted Gaston’s wife, Yvonne, in his affection. This was made all the easier by Yvonne’s obvious and growing distaste for any expression of Gaston’s feelings. Even a hurried kiss from him upon his return from the laboratory made her wince a little, uncontrollably. Gaston, who was blessed with a normally healthy ego, realized that Yvonne’s was not a revulsion reserved only for him, but encompassed all men alike. Even Alfred, his long time friend, who had also courted Yvonne and bowed gracefully to defeat when Gaston came off with the prize, could nowadays scarcely touch Yvonne’s hand to pass her into a taxi, without the same shrinking becoming painfully apparent in her.

The more Gaston found himself in love with his mannequin, Henriette, the more impatient he felt with his wife, Yvonne, and the more pity he felt for his good friend, Alfred.

But since Henriette skillfully soothed the troubled waters of his spirit, and satisfied his persistent need for sympathetic female understanding, he gave the matter of his wife very little thought for a time, living in a dream world of his own in which he found myriad excuses to visit Grasse on business for Rousseau Frères, and stop each time for a blissful interlude with Henriette in St. Paul de Vence.

Such a make-shift arrangement could not possibly last, of course. Henriette soon began to fancy herself a little. As a result, she began to put on a few charming airs. Next, she found herself wishing she were Madame Gaston Beaujolais, rather than merely Gaston’s little “mountain blossom” as he called her fondly, carefully concealed from society and shut off from city gaiety as surely as though she were one of the pretty but useless white doves that gathered to gossip on the roof of Les Colombes, the local inn nearby. This, she said vehemently to Gaston one afternoon, while hugging his handsome head to her bosom, was no way for a girl to live, do you know it, mon cher?

Gaston was forced to agree, upon thinking it over, that she had reason on her side. He could not blame a sensitive girl like Henriette for feeling as she did. For several months after she mentioned it to him, his manner both at his laboratory and at home, was rather distrait.

It was during this period of restless brooding that Gaston came to his decision: Yvonne must be got rid of to make room for Henriette. It was as simple as that. Once this decision was made, he was not unduly troubled by the prospect of having to make away with his wife. It was the method of murder that kept him awake at night, tossing fretfully.

He would kill her, he thought feverishly. Yes, it must be. There was no other practical solution. But how? She was not to blame for her shortcomings, poor Yvonne. She was probably as bitterly unhappy in their marriage as he was. He must kill her, he thought, yes, but he must kill her in some way that would give her pleasure. She must be happy at the last. This was a sentiment that did him credit, but it posed a problem, all the same: what method of murder would be pleasant for Yvonne as well as quick and sure for him?

The “quick and sure” requirements occasioned him no difficulty. After all, was he not a brilliant cosmetic chemist, thoroughly accustomed to the compounding of all kinds of beauty aids, including lipsticks? Yes, he decided, a lipstick would be a fitting weapon. To a man of his knowledge and experience, it was the work of but a few minutes to blend a lethal solution of potassium cyanide with the pulp of one of Rousseau Frères’ Petal Pink lipsticks that Yvonne always used.

After this simple preliminary step, there followed some weeks of serious research, the net result of which was the new lipstick ingredient that Gaston now stood watching as it bubbled merrily over the Bunsen burner on his laboratory table.

Unfortunately, his brilliant solution of his problem made it imperative that Alfred, his oldest friend and Yvonne’s still faithful though frustrated admirer, should die, too. But again, Gaston’s conscience proved comfortably elastic, and although he regretted the necessity of finishing off poor Alfred, he was able to console himself by reflecting that Alfred, when the moment of death came, would be happy, too — happier than he had been for years.

Gaston determined to act that very night. Hastily he cooled the bubbling solution in his test tube, combined it skillfully with the body of the lipstick already liberally spiked with hydrocyanic acid, poured four precise drops of a colorless fluid he took from his laboratory shelf into the mixture, added a trifle more scent to the lipstick than was usual (to conceal the odor of almonds), then carefully rolled the finished preparation into lipstick shape, rounded it at one end as though it had been slightly used, and inserted the whole into a black and gold lipstick holder that was the exact duplicate of the Rousseau Frères 80-franc holder that Yvonne regularly used. The holder he put into his pocket.

They heard a performance of Simon Boccanegra at the Casino Mediterranée that evening, the three of them, Alfred, Gaston and Yvonne. Their seats were together, Yvonne sitting between the two men. It was a La Scala company from Milan, very good, and they enjoyed the opera immensely. Halfway through the last act, Gaston had the opportunity to remove from Yvonne’s evening purse, without her knowledge, her black enameled lipstick holder and replace it with the one he had prepared at the laboratory. A few minutes later, as the curtain came down to thunderous applause, he struck himself on the forehead with his clenched fist and said to Yvonne: “What a fool I am, darling! I told you that I must drive up to Grasse tonight, to be there for the early flower market tomorrow.” She nodded as she slipped into her wrap. “But,” Gaston continued easily, “I have forgotten some important papers that I must have with me. They are at the laboratory. I’ll just run down and get them now, do you mind? It will save me time in the end.”

“Alors,” said Yvonne with a transparent lack of interest, “I’ll come with you. Then you can take me home and be on the road for Grasse by midnight.”

As though suddenly struck by the possibility, Gaston said, “Unless Alfred would take you home while I go to the laboratory?”

Alfred rose gallantly to the occasion, as Gaston knew he would. “I insist on it, dear fellow,” he said warmly. “I’ll drive her home with pleasure. If you agree, Yvonne?”

“Why not?” she said indifferently. She took out her compact, unsheathed the pink cylinder of her lipstick and applied it to her lips as they made ready to leave the auditorium.

Gaston’s own lips curled in a slight smile.

Outside, it had begun to rain very heavily. They ran to the parking lot, and Alfred hustled Yvonne into the front seat of his Renault, then went around and climbed under the wheel. Gaston waved them away, and went to his own car farther down the rank. He got in and sat listening to the raindrops beating on the canvas over his head, the while he peered through a window at Alfred’s Renault. When the car left the lot, he could clearly see the silhouettes of Alfred and Yvonne limned against the lights of the Casino. The silhouettes were surprisingly close together.

Gaston did not go to his laboratory. Instead, he drove carefully from the parking lot and, at a discreet distance, followed Alfred’s Renault. It turned north, up the Avenue de la Victoire toward the suburb where Gaston and Yvonne lived, but he was amused to note that at the next turning, Alfred continued straight on toward the rising hills behind the city. “Ah,” Gaston said to himself with quiet satisfaction, “already it marches.”

When, presently, the Renault turned off the main road into a dark tree-lined track, Gaston winked and watched the streamers of rain that his headlights disclosed lancing thickly downward. Shutting off his lights, he then pulled up calmly at the edge of the road, several hundred yards short of the dark lane into which Alfred and Yvonne had disappeared.

He lit a Gauloise and sat in his car for five minutes, savoring the strong, black, biting tobacco, then confidently descended into the rain and walked openly up the road to the track where he had last seen the Renault.

He turned into the track, making no effort to conceal his presence. He was sure no one would see him in this deserted locality on such a miserable night. The rain was a stroke of luck, he thought. Certainly Yvonne and Alfred would not see him! He began to breathe a trifle rapidly. That was the only sign of tension about him.

No car lights were visible in the gloomy tunnel before him. But he detected the looming bulk of the darkened Renault twenty yards away, parked under the dripping trees. He approached it deliberately, his feet making small sucking sounds in the wet earth he trod.

And although he knew what he would find when he opened the Renault’s door and the dome light came on, he felt a pleasant sense of accomplishment at what he saw there in the front seat.

Yvonne and Alfred were in each other’s arms. Each face wore a look of joy and long-deferred satisfaction. Their half-opened lips were pressed together in a magnificently earthy kiss that roused a faint glow of envy in Gaston’s romantic breast.

And both were quite dead.

For a long moment, Gaston stood there, his head inside the Renault. His expression was that of an artist who stands back to regard a finished painting, proud and a trifle awed by the masterpiece he has wrought. For Gaston’s lipstick was indeed a minor masterpiece. Before him was the proof.

He could hear his own voice, very faint and off-stage, explaining to the wondering assistant chemists at Rousseau Frères exactly what a triumph of cosmetic chemistry that lipstick of his was. “You will remember,” he fancied himself saying, “that Madame Beaujolais was a woman to whom any physical contact with a member of the opposite sex was unpleasant. Yet what happens when she is driven home from the opera by her husband’s oldest friend? She moves closer to him in the car almost immediately. She begs him not to drive her directly home, but to take her to some dark spot where, like the veriest teen-age lovers, they can park their car, turn out the lights, and engage undisturbed in what our American allies at one time called ‘necking’. Yes, my friends, and when they found them, both dead as doornails, what was their position? They were locked in close embrace; their lips were joined in a passionate kiss.

“How can this be explained — this seemingly inexplicable tableau of death? I shall tell you. It was my lipstick that brought it all about; not only the death of the lovers — that alone would have been easy. But my lipstick was so formulated that it brought death in its fairest guise — a kiss!

“The death-dealing agent? Hydrocyanic acid. But, in all modesty, I must point out to you that it was my original variations on this ancient theme that are of interest. Let us take them in order. First, I desired to make a usually dispassionate woman want to be kissed. The answer, obviously, was a completely new kind of chemical — one that would work by osmosis through the skin of the lips and enter the blood stream in the mouth area with authority enough to arouse in the woman an intense desire, nay, a need to be kissed. Such a chemical I at length compounded, using the rendered salts of a number of other stimulating chemicals as the basic building block of my formula.

“Very well. We now have a lipstick that is lethal and contains a chemical to stimulate the kissing urge. But our difficulties are by no means at an end. Oh, no! Now we must discover some subtle means of holding the instantaneous virulence of hydrocyanic acid at bay, of making it remain quiescent and harmless until the moment of kissing. We don’t want the woman to die the moment she applies her lipstick, else the kissing chemical were purposeless.

“Such a substance, too, I was successful in finding. It is a colorless liquid whose source I shall not reveal to you as you might not believe me. Only a few drops serve our purpose. But this antidote to the poison, major discovery though it is, must be a temporary inhibitor only, as you can readily appreciate. Now we must have a catalyst, a trigger, if you will, to remove the restraints set upon the poison by the inhibitor, to reactivate, at the moment of kissing, the deadly acid that lurks in the lipstick on the lady’s lips.

“I see you have guessed the catalyst, my friends. And of course, you are right. The natural moisture of the mouth — here was the logical trigger to set off a lipstick explosion. But wait! Do you see the difficulty involved there? The almost insurmountable chemical problem posed by that simple requirement? The trigger cannot be the lady’s own saliva. Decidedly not. Merely licking her lips will then inevitably precipitate death. No, my problem, the most difficult one I faced, was to evolve a temporary antidote for hydrocyanic acid that would volatize and release the killing poison only on contact with the moisture of male lips.

“Over this problem D worked with what I must call genuine dedication for some weeks, only, in the end, to be but partially successful. For my solution necessarily embodied death for the man who was kissing her as well as for the woman herself. However, I have never pretended to perfection. Sometimes we must be satisfied with workable compromises. And after all, by the simple formulation of this lipstick, I did succeed in my major aim: removing Madame Beaujolais to make way for Henriette, and doing it in such a way that she was very happy in the end!”

Gaston realized, of course, that to address such a monologue as this to his laboratory colleagues would be insane. But by delivering it silently to himself, with his head inside a car on a dark track above Nice, he found that he was able to enjoy, vicariously, some of the approbation for his chemical brilliance that would undoubtedly have been his had he been able to reveal the secret of his lipstick to the world.

That thought brought him up sharply. There was still much to be done. From the pocket of his wet jacket he brought out Yvonne’s own harmless lipstick. He put it into her purse, removing at the same time the poisoned lipstick and placing it in his pocket. He left her purse open on the seat beside her body, and carefully placed near her right hand a tiny vial, empty, that had the letters HCN stamped on it in tiny type.

Then he closed the door of the car. The roof light snapped off. And the tragic burden of the Renault withdrew once more into decent darkness. He walked boldly back to his own car, confident that the rain would wash out the marks of his footsteps on the soft ground of the track.

Driving through the hills half an hour later on his way to St. Paul de Vence, he tried to imagine the surprise and shock with which all his acquaintances — and Yvonne’s — would react to the news tomorrow when the bodies were found. The only possible explanation would be a suicide pact, carried out by star-crossed lovers who preferred to swallow poison together as they kissed for the last time, rather than continue to dishonor a loving husband and dear friend by a shabby, clandestine love affair. Everybody in Nice knew that Alfred had always been in love with Yvonne. And now they would know that Yvonne must secretly have been in love with Alfred, too. Gaston Beaujolais smiled to himself, anticipating the efforts of the authorities in Nice to reach him at Grasse tomorrow with the ill tidings of his beloved wife’s death.

Henriette received him in her small house just after midnight, delighted that he was stopping even for a couple of hours with her. She exclaimed in distress when she saw his rain-dampened clothing, and scolded him gently about going out in the rain without wearing a waterproof. She took his wet jacket and shoes into her bedroom to dry them out before the tiny coal fire that was burning there this damp night; she brought him the dressing gown and slippers that he kept at her house for just such occasions as this.

Then, settling him comfortably in his favorite armchair, she smiled bewitchingly at him and dropped into his lap with eager affection. “Darling Gaston,” she said to him, in a warm voice, “I feel very much like a wife to you, tu sais. I believe no wife could hold you in higher esteem than I do, or love you half so much.” She leaned forward to kiss him, but he held her away from him by the shoulders while he said softly:

“Perhaps you shall be my wife before long, chérie.”

Her eyes lighted up like those of a child who catches her first glimpse of the Carnaval parade. “Vraiment?” she asked joyfully. “You are not joking, Gaston?”

He shook his head, smiling at her tenderly.

She kissed him with even more passionate gusto than usual. Gaston returned her caress.

That was the exact moment when the curious cinema-like scenes of his life mentioned earlier in this chronicle began to flash with incredible speed before his inward eye.

Suddenly, violently, he wrenched his lips from hers and with agonized intensity whispered, “Where did you get the lipstick you are now wearing, Henriette?”

She attempted to resume their kiss. “In your pocket,” she said, “when I hung up your jacket just now. The sample of Petal Pink you brought me. Why? Does it taste funny?” She giggled.

His arms tightened around her as the first dreadful strictures began. “It tastes like death,” he said.

But she was no longer listening.