Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 90, May 1951

Murder with Music by Frederic A. Birmingham[3]

It is very difficult to sing while you are being choked to death. So thought Fogarty as he heard her upstairs, singing to herself in that hateful, trilly soprano. This evening would do as well as any other. It isn’t every suburban community that can boast a good old-fashioned strangling.

There were better ways, but Fogarty found himself liking the whole idea of watching her bright eyes grow dim as he stilled that lovely voice forever. He was not afraid. His alibis were set in advance. After it was done, he could merely slip out of the house and it would be morning before anyone found out what had happened. He had made it a habit to stay out all night every so often, and the neighbors — the only ones who could possibly see him — were too dulled by routine to remember anything even if it happened before their very eyes. They could never trace him even if they saw him. He knew every alley and vacant lot for miles around. He had made it his business to find out.

She would be taking her nap soon: this was the time. Her daily nap! Fogarty bristled at the thought. No concern for him, or what he might want to do, or need to have done for him. She was delicately formed, her voice was precious, and it had become obvious to him all too soon that her interest in him came afterwards.

It hadn’t always been that way. Fogarty could remember the time when they delighted in being together, when it was enough to sit there for hours just looking at each other, and wondering about the other’s thoughts. That had been a happy beginning, before everyone who knew them was captivated by her skittish little marks of friendship, her radiant pleasure in even the smallest attentions, and the soaring beauty of her voice. Even Fogarty had been taken in by her voice, at first. But now he knew that she lived only for that magic thing in her throat. Even his own friends shuffled him off quickly now for the sake of spending time with her, as if a set of vocal chords meant more than Fogarty’s almost perfect male perfection and the many romances thereof. Well, her indifference to him, her incredible vanity, and her insatiable love of attention, would cost her the life that she loved so well.

Fogarty waited until he was sure that she must be asleep, and then he started carefully up the stairs. If she awakened, what matter? He could be looking about for any commonplace reason, and put off her punishment. But he wanted to do it now.

The stairway was visible to the house next door, through a window on the landing, and as he passed it, Fogarty flattened himself against the wall, and crouched down below the line of visibility. No use being seen by some unthinking fool with a wandering eye. Worse if Smudge, the noisy cocker spaniel who belonged next door and never strayed very far from home, were to see him and start his infernal yapping. Fogarty could get along very well without Smudge, too.

He cleared the landing and approached the bedroom door, stealthily. It was slightly open. For all his size and strength, Fogarty could walk as silently as a kitten when he wanted to, thanks to the long training in his lithe, perfectly responsive body. He glided in.

She was asleep. He saw that as he came slowly across the room.

He stood over her for a moment, very near. When he struck, he wanted to strike hard, he wanted it over with as quickly and brutally as possible, without any fuss and feathers, without any outcry.

It is too bad that in that moment there was no pity in Fogarty’s hard eyes. It is too bad that one cannot say that some human warmth or feeling of remorse or some remembrance of love did not flick across his mind and stay him. But there was none. Fogarty was cold with hate as he measured her throat with his eyes. There was the place to strike, there, near the marvelous voice that had driven him to this, the voice that would never be still until now. There was the place where the voice and the breath came together.

“Now!” something inside shrieked to Fogarty, and he reached out and took her in a terrible grip that surprised even himself with its power for death.

Her eyes opened wide, just once, then flickered and flickered as Fogarty kept increasing the awful pressure on her throat. His eyes never left hers. Neither one of them made a sound until he dropped her, and the wind whistled out of his throat, for he had never breathed once while he choked her. He had only felt a wild, exultant joy that dimmed every other sense and thought.

But now, as he turned away, he heard a step downstairs. Then, coming up the stairs! Fogarty crouched close to the bedroom door as he heard Smudge barking next door, excitedly.

They were coming, now, heavy steps near the bedroom door, and Fogarty flung himself out — heard shouts, felt blows rain on his head and shoulders, lashed out in return with all his strength, screaming now in his sickness at being caught, and suddenly a terrible pain shot up through his whole body, as the bedroom door was slammed on his tail.

Fogarty, with the telltale blood on his claws, was caught, caught, caught, but at least the canary, the foolish singer of silly songs, was dead, dead, dead...