Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 111, No. 1. Whole No. 677, January 1998

Marital Maneuvers by Stephen Wasylyk

© 1997 by Stephen Wasylyk

A sad note must accompany this story; its author, Stephen Wasylyk, a contributor to EQMM for more than 20 years, died in the fall of 1996 at the age of 73. We have one more of his witty, down-to-earth stories in inventory, to be published later this year. It is our hope that a kook publisher will someday bring out a collection of Wasylyk stories, for his talent was unique.

When Gilbert Stinson Sterling III decided to get rid of his wife Gloria, he devoted no more than ten seconds to thoughts of divorce.

As the last surviving member of a long line of methodical people for whom monetary profit or loss was always the basis for a major decision, he was aware that divorce would deprive him of all her money, a horrifying specter that numbed his mind and made his brandy glass tremble, since her money was one reason he’d married her.

Indeed, the further thought that a divorce might well cost some of his own brought a moan of pain.

He had no choice. This was one marriage that had to end with “till death do us part.”

The thought wasn’t entirely pleasing. It had not, after all, been a bad marriage; off to a roaring start, with Gloria gracing his arm at social functions with the beauty and poise only to be expected of a Sterling. A truly handsome couple, everyone said, and so suited to each other. The sex hadn’t been bad, either. While the grand passion had dimmed, a lingering affection remained, which to his embarrassment, occasionally surfaced.

But floating to the top of the motive mix was the increasing difficulty of keeping one step ahead in the subtle daily strife inherent in matrimony; borne good-humoredly by half the population, but intolerable to those who pursued an idyllic marriage. Seldom finding one, of course, their quest enriching the portfolios of divorce attorneys, worthy people who recognized early in law school the lucrative opportunity presented by unfulfilled dreams.

Their daily spousal skirmishing had fostered a paranoia in Gilbert that everything that happened to him was the result of one of Gloria’s insidious and vindictive plots. That these plots would stretch credulity to its outermost limits bothered him not at all. Gloria was capable of anything.

He was exceedingly weary of his matrimonial equivalent of the Hundred Years War, particularly since he felt he was losing more battles than he was winning.

There could be no cease-fire, armistice, or détente.

Gloria had to be nuked.

The unimaginative police, however, were notorious for placing the surviving spouse first on the suspect list. The problem would have to be approached with all the ingenuity and planning skill he’d inherited from his forebears, among whom were two generals who had never lost a battle, along with a few tycoons so adept at skimming the assets of a corporation none had ever been indicted by a grand jury.

He swirled his brandy smugly. He’d settle once and for all exactly who was in charge here.

While swirling his brandy and plotting her demise, Gilbert had no idea that Gloria was engaged in the same process. For all the same reasons. After all, their personalities had been determined by virtually the same backgrounds — the only difference being that Gloria was descended from two admirals who had never lost a naval engagement, along with a slew of politicians so adept at manipulating the system not one had ever been censured by an ethics committee.

Gloria’s long and shapely fingers grasped the stem of her wine glass gently as she held her Chardonnay up to the light. As if into a crystal ball, she looked deep into the golden glow, seeking the safest method to end his insidious and vindictive plotting against her and still retain both his money and hers. She’d settle once and for all exactly who was in charge here.

Gilbert immediately discarded the idea of employing someone. Impossible to see himself negotiating under a dirty bridge in the middle of the night with a bearded, shifty-eyed lout wearing a T-shirt emblazoned HIRED KILLERS DO IT MANY WAYS. Further, those people didn’t accept credit cards or send bills. They demanded cash. No way to come up with an acceptable sum under the terms of his father’s trust fund, which gave him unlimited credit but only five hundred a week in pocket money, something difficult to explain to greedy people forever expecting large tips.

His narrow-minded trust administrator wouldn’t look too kindly on a request for ten thousand or so to pay someone to kill Gloria. Not that he’d ask. The thought of parting with large sums made his blood run cold. And run even colder at the prospect of creating a unique 401K plan providing early retirement to the hiree, one hundred percent of the contributions coming from him through perpetual blackmail.

This would have to be a do-it-yourself project for which step-by-step instructions were not available, even from Time-Life Books.

He immediately discarded all of the usual close-contact methods like shooting, knifing, or strangulation. Invariably messy, and all would require an iron-clad alibi, almost impossible to arrange. They also projected somewhat of a macho image that would lead the police straight to the husband. What he needed was something androgynous, as it were — slow poisoning or an accident, perhaps.

Dispatching Gloria safely would require research and analysis, even pie and bar charts generated on his PC to depict graphically the percentages of success of other spouses.

It didn’t occur to him that only the techniques of the unsuccessful appeared in print. Those who had managed to regain the single state while avoiding the defendant’s table wisely kept their mouths shut as to how they’d arranged the coup.

Gloria also had discarded the idea of using a third party. Not only was her ready-cash situation identical to Gilbert’s, but well-bred ladies never negotiated on deserted piers in the middle of the night with bearded, shifty-eyed louts wearing T-shirts emblazoned HIRED KILLERS LEAVE YOU BREATHLESS. Good heavens, a man like that might well demand more than money from a classy, good-looking broad.

She would have to do it herself. She was creative enough. Her interior decorating was the envy of her friends.

Reviewing her options, it was clear a gun or a knife was out. Unquestioningly effective, but indicating a definite lack of breeding. And if she’d had the strength to strangle Gilbert — he had an eighty-pound weight advantage — she’d have done so long ago.

No, she needed something that would require no alibi, that would leave her widowhood the focal point of sympathy.

Her problem required research and analysis. She regretted she couldn’t operate Gilbert’s PC. Perhaps one of those lovely, colorful pie charts could narrow her choices down quickly.

Not one to dilly-dally, she spent the next morning in the public library, leafing through fact-crime books and studying microfilms of newspapers hoping to pick up a tip or two and finding none. There was nothing to be learned from the caliber of cases like the husband who had pushed his wife down an escalator in a mall in full view of fifty witnesses, then claimed she had tripped on her miniskirt. Her research did, however, reinforce her opinion that an accident was the way to go. Only the type of accident was open to question.

Bleary-eyed, on her way out, she wandered by a stack holding volumes analyzing the country’s wars. A few had generated more books than casualties, which bespoke of the diligence of military scholars. One, in which an admiral among her antecedents had been given an entire chapter, caught her eye.

Amused, she flipped the book open. There the old boy was: walrus moustache, hair parted in the center, high-collared, brass-buttoned white uniform, stern look and all.

Immediately below the chapter heading was an italic quote of the admiral’s military philosophy: No enemy is without a weakness. Find that weakness and exploit it.

Her spine prickled. She imagined a shaky, bony, ghostly finger raised in admonition, albeit with a kindly smile.

The form Gilbert’s accident would take was suddenly clear.

The police were always suspicious of a convenient spousal disaster but not if it was one that had been long in the making. Predicted, in fact, by many people saying, “Anyone who swims as badly as you do, Gilbert, should be sewn into a life vest, even in his bath.” Gilbert laughed. He could swim well enough to avoid disaster.

She, on the other hand, could well have been born with webbed hands and the tail of a fish, and spent her life on a rock enticing sailors to their doom.

His weakness. All she had to do was exploit it.

Her hand shook as she replaced the book, leaving it projecting from the row. She fled homeward, convinced that fortune had smiled on her. Along with the admiral.

Gilbert pursued his aims in life far more leisurely, so he didn’t get to the library until afternoon. His eyes watering after a search through fact-crime books and newspaper microfilms of famous trials, he could only marvel at the lack of finesse on the part of some people; like the woman who insisted her husband had committed suicide by striking himself fifty times on the head with a baseball bat.

Leaving, he strolled by a stack containing volumes analyzing the country’s wars. Projecting from a pristine row as if hastily replaced, a thick volume caught his eye. He recognized it as one in which a general among his antecedents had been given an entire chapter.

Amused, he flipped the book open. There the old boy was: walrus moustache, hair parted in the center, high-collared, brass-buttoned blue uniform, stem look and all, and with his quote below the chapter heading.

He seemed to hear a thin, quavering, old man’s voice speaking from the grave.

Always hurl your strength against your opponent’s most vulnerable point.

Voices in his head suddenly muttered, “If you keep driving like that, Gloria—” “Keep it up and you’ll kill yourself one day, dear,” “A hundred miles an hour? Oh, my.”

Gloria always laughed. A superb tennis player and excellent swimmer, she’d extended her gifted athleticism to include defying speed limits, road conditions, the weather, and overloaded semis.

No one would question an accident so long in the making.

Gloria’s most vulnerable point.

He could swear the general nodded in approval.

Smiling as he drove homeward, he pondered the question of where. City streets were out. Not even Lead-Foot Gloria could generate enough speed in traffic to acquire more than a few dents in the car and herself.

The accident had to occur on the open road, where she was wont to tool along at her usual reckless pace, oblivious to the laws of man and a body in motion, but in any crash, a seat belt, automatic braking system, and an airbag could negate his best effort. The thought irritated him so much, for a moment he considered demanding his trust administrators divest the fund of all shares in those inconsiderate automobile manufacturers.

He needed an accident for which no safety feature had yet been devised.

And then his smile broadened.

There was one road where the accident rate was variable but the survival rate always zero, since no car as yet came equipped with an ejection seat and parachute.

The cliffside road to the cove — where their seaside cottage and sailing boat, really Gloria’s, were tucked away.

Now if she were to plunge from that road, carved into the face of a sheer cliff a hundred feet or more above a rock-studded shoreline, where the roiling waters were so deep, rough, and treacherous, no attempt was ever made to recover a vehicle—

Gilbert congratulated himself. Absolutely brilliant.

A flair for mathematics and the practical had shifted him from the traditional liberal arts to engineering, where he surprised everyone with a definite talent. Lurking beneath his engineering skills was a mind a creative terrorist would envy, so it required only the sudden blazing of the outdoor lights when he drove up to his home to give him the method he was seeking.

A motion sensor.

Hah. Instead of completing a lighting circuit, suppose a motion sensor at the side of the road told a chip to emit a signal to another chip — to trigger a small battery to set off a small quantity of plastic explosive molded to the steering mechanism of her car? Beautiful. While the motion device would respond to the passage of any vehicle, innocent lives wouldn’t be at risk. Only when it found its electronic soul mate would a union be consummated that would truly cause the earth to tremble and the moon to stand still.

One of his engineering-school acquaintances had found more pleasure in reducing huge buildings to rubble than in constructing them. He would never miss a bit of plastic explosive the size of a wad of bubble gum. The other components were available at electronics stores. If he was lucky, he might even pick up a few on sale. A penny saved was a penny earned.

He was home free.

He looked up to find Gloria standing at the window. He’d be very humble when suggesting a romantic weekend of sailing, candlelit dinners, and champagne.

Awaiting his arrival for dinner, Gloria had concluded the best locale for drowning an inept swimmer was the sea.

From the two admirals and a host of other forebears who had wrested lucrative livings from the briny deep, she had inherited a love and talent for sailing — so deep she’d often thought the ideal way to go was to sink beneath the waves with all flags flying.

Now, if she and Gilbert were sailing and the boat capsized and threw them overboard, not an uncommon occurrence among the sailing fraternity, she could — under the guise of assisting a floundering swimmer who never wore a life jacket — usher him into a watery grave, and no authority would blink an eye.

The cove where their cottage and her sailing boat were tucked away beckoned with sly fingers.

She smiled. She’d be very humble when suggesting a romantic weekend of sailing, candlelit dinners, and champagne.

Watching him step from the car, she wondered why he was grinning. He usually arrived home wearing the expression of a dental patient heading for root canal.

Her invitation beat his to the punch by only two minutes. He masked his surprise, pleased she’d fallen into his trap through no effort on his part, not wondering why at all. He requested only that they drive down separately.

Gloria agreed without hesitation. When he drove, she fidgeted because he was so slow. When she drove, his white-knuckled way of clinging to the dash irritated her.

She had no idea that Gilbert needed time to scout out the best spot on the road. And that unless she was alone in the car, Gilbert had wasted $30.95 at Radio Shack.

From a host of forebears who had wrested a lucrative living from the earth, Gilbert had inherited the opinion that the sea was nice to look at, particularly at sunset, but anyone who ventured out upon its bosom was short-changed a few brain cells, since you couldn’t walk home if your conveyance was disabled.

His no-frills mentality also ranked sailing right up there with golf as one of life’s most useless activities, based on the observation that sailboats seldom went from Point A to Point B in a straight line.

At the mercy of the wind, you were always tacking or beating or jibing, easing or trimming or luffing sails, loosening or tightening ropes — which he refused to call halyards, lines, sheets, or anything else. As someone once said, a rope is a rope is a rope. Not to mention that a rope by any other name was still a rope that left him with abraded palms. Which, together with the salt-water spray and sun and wind scouring his face, created discomfort exceeded only by the conviction that entirely new strains of mildew and barnacles were breeding in his armpits and between his always-wet toes.

Gilbert’s engineer’s mind insisted that if one could not go from Point A to Point B by land, the practical alternative was to jump into a power cruiser at Point A, point the bow at Point B, and ram the throttles forward.

Still, good husband he’d once been, he’d always cheerfully crewed Gloria’s pink sloop with its pink sails in spite of the non-masculine image it created, and tried not to fall overboard. Always hated it, really, but since it would be the last time, he could afford to be generous.

The sloop was running before the wind through gently rolling seas in the center of the bay, their sheltered little cove far behind. A balmy, glorious day for sailing. Gloria gazed upon Gilbert with fondness, recalling days when they had sailed in happier times: the wind whispering, the sunlight sparkling, the salt air clearing the sinuses — none of which Gilbert had ever appreciated. As a sailor, he was a klutz. His antecedents, no doubt. He’d probably be a whizz on a tractor or combine, charging across a wheat field.

His klutziness made him vulnerable. He completely lacked the ability to sense, through the soles of his feet and the wind on his face, what was about to happen and what he should do. In a few moments, she intended to ease into a turn — jibe, in sailing parlance — without warning him. Unattended, the mainsail would suddenly catch the wind on the other side and drive the boom across the boat violently, sweeping away whatever was in its path. Like an unwarned Gilbert. And capsize the boat.

She eased the tiller a trifle. Gilbert smiled at her and nodded at a catboat crossing their bow. Not important, thought Gloria, until she saw that it was crewed by a teenaged couple who either shared Gilbert’s ignorance of basic seamanship or were so enamored of the other’s almost-naked body that they were paying as little attention as he was. And allowing their sail to go unattended.

The catboat’s sail sagged. The other side suddenly caught the wind, filled with a dull pop, and swept the boom across the small boat. It lurched, heeled, hesitated as if making up its mind, and went over. Gloria mentally applauded her good luck. Reinforcement for her plan. Two boats capsized within minutes? A freak gust of wind that had caught even an experienced sailor unprepared. No question at all that whatever happened to Gilbert thereafter was strictly an accident.

Yet her seafaring blood stayed her hand on the tiller. The code of the sea demanded they render assistance, if required. Chances were, none would be. The soaked teenagers would probably be laughing as they scrambled aboard the capsized boat. Learning the hard way can sometimes be an adventure.

But since she couldn’t be certain, she shouted commands at Gilbert, came about with practiced skill, and coasted up to the catboat, now riding the swells like a wounded white bird.

The erstwhile occupants weren’t laughing. Both wore life vests, but the white-faced young woman was clinging to the end of the boom, supporting the young man. His head lolled, blood staining the side of his face.

After a look she could only describe as gloating, and before she could stop him, Gilbert belly-flopped into the water and splashed toward the couple. Gloria snapped to her feet angrily. Just showing off. No life vest, of course, and with his second-rate swimming ability, how much help could he be? Damned fool should have waited. The water wasn’t cold enough to pose a threat, and the capsized boat wouldn’t sink like the Titanic and drag the couple down with it. In the gentle swells, she could have maneuvered close enough to toss them a line and take them aboard in only a few minutes.

Her practiced hands edged the sloop closer. With Gilbert strenuously thrashing away on one side and the girl on the other, they brought the unconscious boy to the sloop. The lithe girl leaped aboard and helped Gloria heave him into the cockpit. Gloria turned and extended a hand to Gilbert.

Vigorously treading water, he grinned up at her.

“Nice try.”

She rolled her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“Now I know why you wanted to go sailing. You paid them to capsize the boat. If I didn’t jump in to rescue them, you’d call me a coward. If I did, you hoped I’d drown.”

Regretting she hadn’t thought of that herself, she said, “You’ve swallowed too much salt water. Give me your hand.”

He threw his head back and laughed, the laugh cut short as his head jerked forward, eyes wide with astonishment, teeth bared in a grimace. Clutching his chest, he sank.

Gloria sighed. As if she’d be taken in by such an obvious husbandly ploy.

Ten seconds later, she realized what Fate had extended on a silver platter. She hastily leaped in after him, but even though born to the water, she couldn’t find him.

Neither, it developed, could anyone else.

There was a great deal of good, solid saltwater talk about tides, currents and crosscurrents, and undertows, all of which meant only that the sea had many ways to conceal what it elected to devour.

There was also some dispassionate discussion of how much more advantageous it was to have a heart attack on dry land, where CPR, medics, and a hospital were often readily available, but this was generally led by those who preferred to ponder the mysteries of the sea while seated on a veranda clutching a non-watery drink.

Gilbert, of course, was considered a hero. A stupid one, in Gloria’s estimation, but a hero, nonetheless. Now that he was gone, she felt his loss deeply. She’d spent so much of her time planning his demise, her days now stretched empty before her. Along with her sense of loss, she felt a touch of irritation at the thought that it wouldn’t be beyond him to kill himself to deprive her of the pleasure.

He still hadn’t been found when she left the following afternoon. Nothing she could do there, and a great many matters had to be taken care of in the city. Like happily arranging for the inevitable funeral or memorial service, whichever the case might be, and digging out his will.

The road had little traffic, as usual, until, about a mile from where it ran along the very edge of the cliff, she found cars lined up as though it were rush hour in the city.

She sighed. An accident up ahead closing one lane, no doubt, with the police alternating traffic through the one remaining. Her car inched forward.

Lacking the talent of political pundits, newspaper columnists, and others who can see into the future, Gilbert had never dreamed of a traffic slowdown when he’d carefully positioned his little electronic device.

Since his speed-loving wife was familiar with the road and would ignore the thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit as usual, he’d calculated that when she passed it, she’d be moving along at fifty miles an hour, which was 4400 feet per minute or 73.3333 per second. (Engineers always go out to at least four decimal places and never work with “approximately” or “about” when calculating, although an occasional inexplicable structure collapse might indicate that some do.)

He allowed three seconds for the shock to wear off after the device exploded, another three before she realized she could no longer steer, and another to apply the brake. She would then have traveled 513.3333 feet or 171.1111 yards. He placed his device, therefore, by the side of the road 100 yards before the sharp turn.

When Gloria finally tramped on the useless brake pedal, she should be 71.1111 yards beyond the guardrail and in midair, journeying back in time as she gracefully plunged past the layered deposits of successive geological ages exposed by the cliff face, on her airborne return to the ancient sea from whence the scientists say we all came.

As it was, her car was barely moving when the explosive went off. Carefully shaped by Gilbert to destroy only the steering — the car had to keep speeding along — the peripheral force only threw the hood back across the windshield and deposited the grille and radiator on the trunk of the car ahead.

Gilbert had also miscalculated her athlete’s reaction time.

Out of the car in one second flat, shock or no shock, she contemplated, from a safe distance and with utter disbelief, the resultant fire.

A former Navy SEAL coming the other way, having caused similar havoc here and there throughout the civilized world during his career, recognized the signs, looked for and found Gilbert’s little device by the side of the road, and realized what had happened. And what would have happened if she’d been flying along as usual.

He gently broke the news of how lucky she’d been.

The traffic tie-up had been caused by the morbidly curious slowing to gawk at boats attempting to recover a body tumbling about in the breaking surf at the foot of the cliff.

A body tumbling about in the breaking surf?

Had to be Gilbert. That creep.

First he had to die before she could kill him.

Then he’d made a deal with Poseidon or some other god of the sea to make his appearance at this time and place.

Why? Oh, she knew why.

So she’d spend the rest of her days wondering if she should hate him for trying to take her life, or forgive him for giving it back to her.

She screamed and ran to the edge of the cliff, pursued by the SEAL. He thought she intended to throw herself over, but arms raised, fists clenched, she stood there and shrieked a banshee barrage of imprecations and very unladylike words — some truly creative for a civilian — at the battered body being pulled from the white-foamed waters crashing among the rocks.

Certain phrases, like “keep your goddamn money,” left him thoroughly puzzled. The expression on the face of the corpse, clear even at that distance, puzzled him even more.

He was familiar with the toothy rictus sometimes exhibited by the dead, but this one struck him as having the fat, smarmy, smug smile of someone thoroughly enjoying a secret, inner joke.