Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1964

This Day’s Evil by Jonathan Craig

Doubtless, there are some persons for whom “truth is a poison”. Conversely, equally disastrous effects may result from the opposite view, given a literal interpretation.

It had been a near thing. It had been so near that even now, as he crouched there in the bushes behind the small frame house of the man he had come to kill, there was still a taut queasiness in his stomach, and the sweat that laved his ribs was chill.

Half an hour ago, he had been five minutes away from murder. He had stood at the back door of the house, one hand on the heavy automatic in his pocket, the other raised to knock. Then, through the barred but open window, he had heard the hollow pound of heavy boots across the front porch, the hammering of a big man’s fist on the door, and the lazy rise and fall of Sheriff Fred Stratton’s singsong voice calling out a greeting to the man inside.

“Charlie!” Stratton had said in that fond, bantering tone he always used with Charlie Tate. “Charlie, you no-good rascal, your time has come. Open the door before I break it down.”

He hadn’t heard Charlie’s reply. He had already been running toward the bushes in the backyard, his knees rubbery and his stomach knotting spasmodically with the realization that if the sheriff had come five minutes later he would have caught him in the house with a dead man.

Now, hidden from the house by the bushes, his fear-sharpened senses acutely aware of the incessant drone of insects and the sickening sweetness of lilacs, Earl Munger shifted his weight very slowly and carefully, trying to still the tremor in his legs.

To have been caught in the act by that lazy, fat slob of a sheriff would have been just his luck, he reflected. Sheriff Fred Stratton was the laziest, slowest man in the county, with a maddening, syrupy drawl that made you want to jam your hand down his throat and pull the words out for him.

They made a good pair, Fred Stratton and Charlie Tate. Stratton had lots of fat, and Tate had lots of money. Not that Tate would have the money long; just as soon as the sheriff left, Tate would have neither the money nor his life.

There were sure some strange ducks in this world, Earl thought sourly. Take Charlie, now. Here he was, seventy if he was a day, with nobody knew how much money hidden in his house, and living like a pauper. He didn’t trust anybody or anything, unless maybe it was the sheriff, and he especially didn’t trust banks. If all the cash money he’d collected in rent from the property he owned all over the county was in the house, as it almost had to be, there’d be something pretty close to fifty thousand dollars. Charlie never spent a dime. He was a crazy old miser, with bars and bolts on every door and window, just like in the story books, and for all the good his money did him, he might just as well be dead.

And he would be, Earl promised himself again. The money might not do any good for Charlie, but it would sure do a lot of good for him. At twenty-three, he owned the clothes he had on, and another outfit just like them, and nothing more. But after today things would be different. There’d be no more conversations like that one night before last with Lois Kimble, when he’d asked her to go for a drive with him.

“A drive?” Lois had said, the perfect doll’s face as innocent as a child’s. “A drive in what, Earl?”

“The truck,” he had said. “It’s more comfortable than it looks.”

“You mean that old thing you haul fertilizer around in all day?”

“It doesn’t smell,” he said. “If it did, I wouldn’t ask you.”

“I’ll bet.”

“It doesn’t. And it rides real good, Lois. You’d be surprised.”

She looked at him for a long moment, the wide gray eyes inscrutable. “I’d be ashamed,” she said. “I really would, Earl.”

“You figure you’re too good to ride in a truck? Is that it?”

She started to turn away. “I meant I’d be ashamed if I were you,” she said. “I’d be ashamed to ask a girl to... Oh, it doesn’t matter anyhow. I’ve got to be going, Earl.”

“Sure, it matters. Listen—”

“Not to me,” she said, walking away from him. “Good-by, Earl.”

And an hour later he had seen her pass the feed store where he worked, beautiful in her thin summer dress, wide gray eyes fixed attentively on the well-dressed young man beside her, the low-slung red sports car growling arrogantly through the town as if it were affronted by the big unwashed sedans at the curbs, impatient to be back with its own kind in the city where the bright lights and the life and the pleasure were, where there were places that charged more for a dinner than Earl made in a week.

But after today, all that would be changed. He’d have to wait a cautious time, of course, and then he could leave the stink of the feed store and the town far behind, and the young man in the sharp clothes and the red sports car with the beautiful girl on the seat beside him would be none other than Earl Munger.

This afternoon, he had rushed his deliveries so that he would have a full hour to kill and rob Charlie Tate before his boss at the feed store would begin to wonder where he was. He had hidden the small panel truck in the woods back of Charlie’s place and then approached the house by a zigzag course through brush and trees, certain that no one had seen him, and that he could return to the truck the same way.

He wondered now why he hadn’t robbed Charlie before, why he’d waited so long. And yet, with another part of his mind, he knew why. To rob Charlie, it would be necessary to kill him. The only way to get into his house was to have Charlie unlock the door, and Charlie couldn’t be left alive to tell what had happened.

Then he heard the muffled slam of Charlie’s front door, and a few moments later the sudden cough and roar of a car engine on the street out in front, and he knew that Sheriff Stratton had left.

Now! Earl thought as he left the bushes and moved swiftly to the back door. I can still do it and be back at the store before anybody starts getting his suspicions up. Once again he closed one hand over the automatic in his pocket and raised the other to knock.

Charlie Tate’s footsteps shuffled slowly across the floor, and a moment later his seamed, rheumy-eyed face peered out at Earl through the barred opening in the upper half of the door.

“Hello, Earl,” he said. “What is it?”

“The boss asked me to bring you something, Mr. Tate,” Earl said, glancing down as if at something beyond Charlie’s angle of vision.

“That so?” Charlie said. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Earl said. “It’s wrapped up.”

“I didn’t order anything,” Charlie said.

“It’s too big to stick through those bars, Mr. Tate,” Earl said. “If you’ll open the door, I’ll just shove it inside.”

Charlie’s eyes studied Earl unblinkingly for a full ten seconds; then there was a grating sound from inside, and the door opened slowly, and not very far.

But it was far enough. Earl put his hip against it, forced it back another foot, and slipped inside, the gun out of his pocket now and held up high enough for Charlie to see it at once.

There was surprise on Charlie’s face, but no fear. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“I’m taking your money,” Earl said. “Wherever it is, get it, and get it now.”

Charlie took a slow step backward. “Don’t be a fool, son,” he said.

“Don’t you,” Earl said. “It’s your money or your life, Charlie. Which’ll it be?”

“Son, I—”

Earl raised the gun a little higher. “Get it,” he said softly. “You understand me, Charlie? I’m not asking you again.”

Charlie hesitated for a moment, then turned and moved on uncertain feet to the dining room table. “It’s in there,” he said, his breathy, old-man’s voice almost inaudible. There was a bottle of whiskey on the table, but no glasses.

“In the table?” Earl said. “I’m telling you, Charlie. Don’t try to pull—”

“Under the extra leaves,” Charlie said. “But listen, son—”

“Shut up,”.Earl said, lifting one of the two extra leaves from the middle of the table. “I’ll be damned.”

There were two flat steel document cases wedged into the shallow opening formed by the framework beneath the leaves.

Earl pulled the other leaf away and nodded to Charlie. “Open them,” he said.

“You can still change your mind,” Charlie said. “You can walk out of here right now, and I’ll never say any—”

“Open them, I said!”

Charlie sighed heavily, fumbled two small keys from his pocket, and opened the document cases.

It was there, all right, all in neat, banded packages of 20’s and 50’s, each of the packages a little over two inches thick.

The size of his haul stunned him, and it was several seconds before he could take his eyes from it. Then he remembered what else had to be done and he looked questioningly at the wall just over Charlie Tate’s left shoulder.

“What’s that?” he asked. “What’ve you got there, Charlie?”

His face puzzled, Charlie turned to look. “What are you talking...?” he began, and then broke off with an explosive gasp as the butt of Earl’s automatic, with the full strength of Earl’s muscular arm and shoulder behind it, crashed against his skull just two inches behind his right ear.

He fell to the floor without a sound, all of a piece, the way a bag of old clothes held at arm’s length would fall, in a limp heap.

Earl knelt down beside him, raising the gun again. Then he lowered it and shoved it back into his pocket. Nobody would ever have to hit Charlie Tate again.

He started to rise, then sank back, the sudden nervous tightening of the muscles across his stomach so painful that he winced. It was all he could do to drag himself to the table. He uncapped the bottle of whiskey and raised it to his lips, shaking so badly that a little of the liquor sloshed out onto the table. It was a big drink, and it seemed to help almost at once. He took another one, just as big, and put the bottle back down on the table.

It was then that he heard the car door slam shut out front, and saw, above the sill of the front window, the dome light and roof-mounted antenna of Sheriff Fred Stratton’s cruiser.

A moment before, Earl Munger would have sworn he could not move at all, but he would have been wrong. He moved too quickly to think, too quickly to feel. It took him less than five seconds to close the document cases and shove them under his arm, and it took him even less time than that to reach the back door and close it soundlessly behind him. Returning to the truck by the roundabout route that would prevent his being seen took the better part of ten minutes, every second of it a desperate fight against an almost overpowering urge simply to cut and run.

He’d left the truck on an incline, so that he would be able to get it under way again without using the starter. Now he pushed the shift lever into the slot for second gear, shoved in the clutch, released the hand brake, waited until the truck had rolled almost to the bottom of the incline, and then let the clutch out. The engine caught, stuttered, died, then caught again, and he drove away as slowly, and therefore as quietly, as he could without stalling the engine again.

Half a mile farther on, he turned off onto a rutted side road that led to a small but deep lake known locally as Hobbs Pond. There he shoved the gun and the packages of money into a half-empty feed sack, making sure they were well covered with feed, and then sent the metal document cases arcing as far toward the center of the lake as he could throw them.

Then, after burying the bag under half a dozen other bags of feed and fertilizer in the truck, he started back toward the store. The money would probably be safe in the truck for as long as he wanted to leave it there, but there was no sense in taking any chances. Tonight or tomorrow he would bury it somewhere, and then leave it there until the day when he could pick a fight with his boss, quit his job, and leave the area for good without raising any questions.

Back at the store, Burt Hornbeck came out on the front loading platform and eyed him narrowly.

“Didn’t I see you gassing up that truck at Gurney’s this morning?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Earl said.

“Well, how come? You ever know Gurney to buy anything from this store?”

“No.”

“You bet ‘no’. What Gurney buys, he buys at Ortman’s. Next time, gas it up at Cooper’s, like I told you. Coop buys here, and so I buy from Coop. Got it?”

“The tires needed air,” Earl said. “Coop hasn’t got any air hose.”

“Never mind the air hose. After this, gas that truck up at Coop’s. I’m beginning to wonder how many times I got to tell you.”

Not too many times, Earl thought as he walked back to the washroom to throw cold water on his face. Another couple or three weeks, a month at the most, and he’d be buying gas for a sassy red sports car, not a battered old delivery truck.

The whiskey had begun to churn in his stomach a little. But it would be all right, he knew. From now on, everything would be all right. For a man with thousands of dollars everything had to be. That was the way of the world.

When he came back out to the loading platform, Sheriff Stratton’s car was there, and the sheriff was talking with a fair-sized knot of men. The sheriff was sitting on the old kitchen chair Hornbeck kept out on the platform, his enormous bulk dwarfing it, making it seem like something from a child’s playroom.

Trust the fat slob not to stand up when he can sit down, Earl thought as he edged a bit closer. The laziest man in the county, if not in the state. If Stratton was on one side of the street and wanted to get to the other, he would climb in his car, drive to the corner, make a U-turn, and come back, all to save walking a lousy forty feet. And talk about fat. The county could save money by buying a tub of lard and nailing a star on it. They’d have just as good a sheriff, and it wouldn’t cost them a fraction of what they had to pay Stratton.

“What happened?” Earl asked George Dill, who had wandered over from his grocery store.

“It’s old Charlie Tate,” George said. “He’s done took poison.”

“He what?” Earl said.

“Poison,” George said. “He killed himself.”

The sheriff glanced up at Earl and nodded. “Howdy, Earl,” he said, making about six syllables out of it. “Yes, that’s what he did, all right. Lord only knows why, but he did.” Beneath his immaculate white Stetson, the sheriff’s round, pink-skinned face was troubled, and the small, almost effeminate hands drummed nervously on his knees.

“He — poisoned himself?” Earl said.

“I always said he was crazy, and now I know it,” Norm Hightower, who owned the creamery, said. “He’d have to be.”

There were a dozen questions Earl wanted to ask, but he could ask none of them. He wet his lips and waited.

The sheriff took a small ivory-colored envelope from the breast pocket of his shirt, looked at it, shook his head wonderingly, and slipped it back into his pocket.

“Charlie gave me that about half an hour before I found him dead,” he said. “He told me not to open it until after supper. But there was something about the way he said it that bothered me. He tried to make it sound like maybe he was playing a little joke on somebody, maybe me. But he didn’t bring it off. I had this feeling, and so as soon as I got around the corner I stopped the car and read it.”

“And it said he was going to kill himself?” Joe Kirk, who carried the Rural Route One, said.

“That’s what it said, all right,” the sheriff said.

“But he didn’t say why?” Frank Dorn, the barber, asked.

“No,” Stratton said. “All he said was, he was going to do it, and what with.” He reached into his righthand trouser pocket and drew out a small blue-and-yellow tin about the size of a package of cigarettes. “And that’s another thing I can’t understand, boys. It’s bad enough he would want to kill himself. But why would he do it with a thing like this?”

“What is it?” Sam Collins, from the lumber yard, asked.

“Trioxide of arsenic,” the sheriff said, putting the tin back in his pocket. “I found it on the floor beneath the table.”

“How’s that again, Sheriff?” Sam Collins asked.

“Ratsbane, Sam,” Stratton said. “Arsenic. I reckon there isn’t a more horrible death in this world than that. It must be the worst agony there is.”

“Why’d he want to take such a thing, then?” Jim Ryerson, the mechanic from Meckle’s Garage, asked.

“It’s like I told you,” Norm Hightower said. “He was crazy. I always said go, and now I know it.”

The sheriff got to his feet, ponderously, looking at the now badly-sprung kitchen chair regretfully, as if he hated to leave it. “Well,” he drawled in that slow, slow singsong of his, “I reckon maybe I’d better call the coroner and the others. At least Charlie didn’t have any kin. It seems like kinfolks just can’t stand the idea of somebody killing himself. They always carry on something fierce. I’ve even had them try to get me to make out they died a natural death or got killed somehow. Anything but suicide. They can’t stand it at all.”

“I fed arsenic to some rats once,” Tom Martin, the druggist, said. “I’d never do it again. When I saw what it did to those rats, I... well, I’d never do it again. Even rats don’t deserve to die like that. It was the most awful thing I ever saw.”

“Like I said before,” the sheriff said. “I just can’t understand old Charlie killing himself that way.”

“Maybe he didn’t know exactly what it would do to him,” Tom Martin said.

“Maybe not,” the sheriff said. “I don’t see how he could know, and still take half a box of ratsbane and dump it in a bottle of whiskey and drain almost half of it. There must have been enough arsenic in that bottle to kill everybody here and half the other folks in town besides.” He moved off slowly in the direction of his car, picking his way carefully, as if to complete the short trip in the fewest steps possible. “I’d better be seeing about those phone calls.” he said. “There’s always a big to-do with a thing like this. Of course, Charlie’s not having any kin is a help, but there’ll still be a lot of work.”

On the loading platform, Earl Munger tried to fight back the mounting terror inside him. No wonder the sheriff had taken one look at Charlie Tate lying there on the floor and thought he had died of poison. Why should he have looked for wounds or anything else? And how long would it be, Earl wondered, before the ratsbane really did to him what the sheriff had thought it had done to Charlie Tate? It was already killing him, he knew; he would feel the first horrible clutch of agony at any moment.

He forced himself to walk with reasonable steadiness to the truck, and although the door felt as heavy as the door of a bank vault, he managed to open it somehow and get in and drive away slowly.

Once on the highway that led to Belleville, he mashed the gas pedal to the floorboard and kept it there. He had to get to a doctor, and in this forsaken area doctors were few and very far between. The nearest was Doc Whittaker, four miles this side of Belleville. Whittaker might be a drunk, but he knew his business, at least when he was sober.

But when he reached Whittaker’s place, Mrs. Whittaker told him her husband was out on a house call. He half ran back to the truck, already stabbing with the ignition key as he jumped inside, and took off with a scorch of rubber that left Mrs. Whittaker staring after him with amazement.

The next nearest doctor was Courtney Hampton, six miles east of Belleville on Coachman Road.

He was beginning to feel it now, the first stab of pain deep in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t like the other pains, the ones he had felt earlier when he was scared; it wasn’t as acute, but it was growing stronger, and it was deep, deep inside him. It was the arsenic, and it was going to kill him.

There was a red light ahead. The Belleville cut-off. He kept the gas pedal on the floor, and when he reached the intersection, he shut his eyes for a moment, waiting for the collision that was almost sure to come. Brakes-screamed and tires squealed on both sides of him, but no one crashed into him, and he started down the long straight stretch of highway that would bring him to Coachman Road.

Eighteen minutes later, Earl Munger sat on Doctor Hampton’s operating table, a rubber tube in his stomach, while the doctor filled a hypodermic needle, and then, without Earl’s feeling it at all, inserted it in the back of his upper arm.

“And so you spread your lunch out right there where the insect spray could get to it,” Hampton said, almost with amusement. “And sat there eating sandwiches garnished with arsenic, without even knowing it.” He glanced at Earl as if he expected him to say something, tube in his stomach or not. “Well,” he went on, “you wouldn’t be able to tell, of course. That’s the insidious thing about arsenic. There’s no smell or taste. That’s why it’s been a poisoner’s favorite all through the ages.”

“You want me to come back again, Doc?” Earl asked when Hampton had removed the tube.

“Not unless you feel ill again,” Hampton said. “That will be ten dollars, please.”

On his way home, Earl Munger, for the first time in his life, knew the meaning of pure elation. It was a strange feeling, one he couldn’t quite trust at first; but with every mile the feeling grew, and the happiness that flooded through him was the kind of happiness he had known as a child when things and people were the way they seemed to be, and not, as he had learned all too soon, the way they really were.

He took the long curve above the old Haverman place almost flat out, feeding more gas the farther he went into it, the way he had read that sports car drivers did. Even the old delivery truck seemed to handle like a sports car, and it amused him to think that, with the way he and the truck felt just now, he could show those fancy Ferrari and Lotus and Porsche drivers a thing or two.

He felt like singing, and he did. He felt like a fool; he felt as if he were drunk, but he sang at the top of his voice, and he was still singing when he braked the truck to a stop in front of the feed store and got out.

He would take the long way home, he decided. It was the better part of two miles that way, but he felt like walking, something he hadn’t felt like doing in more years than he could remember.

He began to sing again, walking slowly, enjoying himself to an extent he would once have believed impossible. He sang all the way to his rooming house, and then, just as happily but a bit more quietly, continued to sing as he climbed the stairs to his room on the second floor and opened the door.

Sheriff Fred Stratton sat there in Earl’s only chair, the pink moon face as expressionless as so much suet, the small hands lying quietly on the brim of the spotless white Stetson in his lap.

Earl stared at him for a moment, then closed the door and sat down on the side of the bed. “What are you doing here, Sheriff?” he asked.

“We were waiting for you at the store,” Stratton said. “My deputy and me.”

“I didn’t see anybody,” Earl said. “Why would you be wait—?”

“We didn’t mean for you to see us,” Stratton said. “It didn’t take us long to find that money, Earl. And the gun too, of course.”

“Money?” Earl said. “What money? I don’t know anything about any money. Or any gun, either.”

Stratton reached up and took the small, ivory-colored envelope from the breast pocket of his shirt. “Letter from my youngest daughter,” he said. “Looks like she’s bound and determined to make me a proud granddaddy again.”

“That’s the same letter you told everybody Charlie Tate gave you just before he—” Earl began, then broke off abruptly.

“That’s right,” Stratton said, putting the envelope back in his pocket and taking out the small blue-and-yellow tin. “Just like I told them this little box of throat lozenges was ratsbane.”

Earl felt his mouth go dry. “Not poison?” he heard himself say. “Not arsenic?”

“No,” Stratton said. “And even if Charlie had been meaning to poison himself, he wouldn’t have put the poison in a bottle of whiskey. He never took a drink in his life. That bottle on the table was mine, son. Charlie always kept a bottle on hand for me, because he knew I was a man that liked a little nip now and then.”

Stratton glanced down at the tin. “I dropped this at Charlie’s house when I was there the first time, and so I went back to get it. When I saw what had happened, and that Charlie had opened his back door to somebody, I knew the killer had to be a man he knew pretty well. Otherwise, Charlie would never have let him in the house.”

“But why?” Earl said. “Why did you...?”

“Why’d I make up all that about the letter and the lozenges?” Stratton said. “Well, I got the idea when I noticed the killer had helped himself to the whiskey. I’d had a drink myself, the first time I was there, and I could see that somebody had taken it down another couple of inches, not to mention spilling some on the table. I figured the killing must have rawed somebody’s nerves so much he’d had to take a couple of strong jolts to straighten himself out.”

Stratton paused, studying Earl with tired, sleepy eyes that told him nothing at all. Earl waited until he could wait no longer. “And then?” he asked.

“Well,” Stratton said, “there’s one sure thing in this world, son. A man that thinks he’s been poisoned is going to get himself to a doctor, and get there fast. And since there’re only four doctors within thirty miles of here, all I had to do was call them and ask them to let me know who showed up.”

“But I had the symptoms,” Earl said. “I was in pain, and I—”

“Sometimes if a man thinks a thing is so, then it is so,” Stratton said. “You were dead certain you’d been poisoned, and so naturally you had the symptoms.” He got to his feet, put the big white hat on his head very carefully, and gestured toward the door. “Well, Earl, I reckon we’d better head over toward the jail.”

“A trap,” Earl said bitterly. “A dirty, lousy trap. I guess you figure you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

Stratton looked surprised. “No such thing,” he said. “Just pretty lazy. I saw a chance to make your guilty conscience do my work for me, and I took it. That’s how it is with us lazy folks, son. If there’s a way to save ourselves some work, we’ll find it.”