Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Henry T. Parry Homage to John Keats

When Howard P. Ransom reached fifty-five, he retired from his job, sold his house, murdered his wife, and settled down in Rome, thereby fulfilling four long-cherished ambitions. He loathed his house, detested his job, hated his wife and loved the prospect of taking up life, late but renewed, in a foreign capital of endless attraction.

His job, he felt, was far beneath one of his talent but it paid so well that his love of money outweighed his distaste. His house was a constant burden, insatiable in its demands for repairs, rapacious in its tax requirements, an unstaunchable bleeding of the money and time that he would rather have spent on his boat. But it was his wife Hannah whom he regarded as the major obstacle to freedom and a new life.

As the years of their marriage passed, whatever of love and understanding there may have been had vanished, with Hannah exhibiting a half-hidden sufferance bordering on contempt, and he an impotent chafing and smoldering resentment. He found that the cute pussycat face of twenty-two became the snarling mask of a stalking tiger at fifty.

Hannah had adamantly refused to agree to a divorce, primarily because Howard wanted it. For Howard to have simply walked out was repellent to his nature, which required order and planning and abhorred loose ends and unfinished business. This plus the fatal flaw in the mind of every killer — the conviction that his action was justified — led him to the murder of his wife.

The act itself was simple, well planned, and swift. One of the few remaining things they did together was to take an occasional weekend cruise in the boat. Returning home just after dark one Sunday, they rounded the breakwater at the end of the Delaware-Chesapeake Canal and turned north against the ebbing tide where the river and bay met. Two miles upstream Howard put the engine on idle and came astern to where Hannah sat.

“I want you to put on this life jacket. The tide is ebbing quite strongly and there’s all this debris floating about. If I have to make a quick turn and if you should be standing, you might go over the side.”

“Oh, Howard, is that necessary? Such unusual precautions here on the river.”

“This is practically the top end of Delaware Bay. And there’s this heavy tanker traffic—”

“Oh, all right, all right. A lesson in geography. Always a lesson in something.”

“Just this one last lesson then.”

She stood and he helped her into the life jacket, steadying her as she staggered slightly, and swiftly tied the ribbons. He could smell the perfume she used, a smell that he had come to loathe as much as once it had attracted him.

“Howard,” her voice rose in bewilderment, “what have you done to this jacket? It weighs a ton.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “it’s packed with lead” — and he pushed her over the stem.

The greasy water was barely disturbed as she went under. He switched on the spotlight and played it back and forth over the water. Crates, fruit baskets, odd pieces of lumber, all swam placidly by on the outward tide, but the surface betrayed no sign of what had happened.

For two hours he waited, to be sure that his plan had worked, and then headed for the nearest marina and a telephone to report his well-rehearsed story to the Coast Guard, with special care in placing the scene of the incident farther up the river than it had actually occurred.

It took Howard three months to make what he thought of as his getaway. Calls placed at lengthening intervals to the Coast Guard brought no news and elicited finally the opinion that there was no likelihood of the body being recovered.

The house was sold, removing forever the burden of wet basements, rising taxes, and ever more plentiful crops of crabgrass. Kindly neighbors offered sympathy and expressed understanding of his wish for a complete change of scene, expressions which Howard gravely accepted, inwardly relishing the contrast between his decently submissive outward manner and his inner satisfaction with the fruition of his plans.

Thoughtfully he arranged for a tombstone to be erected — a fact that was noted in the local paper — and had it incised with Hannah’s name and the years of her birth and death, and, as indicative of his intentions, he had his own name added, followed by the year of his birth and a small uncarved rectangle in which at the proper time another year would be cut. With a touch of grim wholly uncharacteristic humor he thought that a suitable epitaph for Hannah might be “Lost at sea,” but sensibly he restrained himself.

Late in the fall, after a dutiful and symbolic visit to the cemetery, Howard arrived in Rome. Through the columns of a newspaper aimed at the American tourist he rented a small furnished apartment in a converted palazzo on a street near the top of the Spanish Steps, a house reputed to have been owned by a cadet branch of the Medici.

After the spare trimness and openness of his suburban house he was struck by the stony, secretive exteriors of the Roman houses and the contrast with their ornate, pretentious interiors. His living room was furnished with heavy oaken furniture, elaborately carved; one chair with a faded damask cover on its tall back was supposed to have once been the property of the infamous Principe di Canisio who, it was said, had died in it, a messy affair of a jealous husband and a silken cord.

Dim acne-ed mirrors on the walls on each side of the door reflected windows with heavy velvet drapes looped back by tassled rope ties. It seemed that the same style of furniture that was suitable for the palazzo of a doge had been used in this small room, giving it a theatrical, shop-worn splendor. But Howard settled contentedly in these falsely elegant surroundings and gave himself over to the delights of leisurely explorations of the ancient city.

It was not until early summer that he saw Hannah. Or thought he saw Hannah.

He was returning from an afternoon of browsing among the many shops near the Piazza di Spagna and had begun to climb the magnificent stairway street of the Spanish Steps, the sweeping thoroughfare that leads majestically up to the Monte di Trinita. In the wall of the building to the right of the first landing was the shrine of millions of poetry-loving tourists, the window of the room where the poet Keats had died. He paused on the landing, looking up at the open window, and saw a woman looking down at him, a woman who resembled Hannah.

Shaken, he stared up at her, his mind rejecting the atavistic fear of the dead returned to life and telling himself to wait for a movement or gesture to dispel the likeness, for her aspect to shift from identity to mere similarity. The woman gazed down calmly, framed portraitlike in the window, an absent-minded half smile on her lips, and raised her hand; but whether or not the gesture was in greeting he could not determine. Then the woman slowly moved back from the frame of the window and was out of sight.

He stood and stared upward at the window not thirty feet away, his mind searching for the possibility of error in the execution of his plan, but at no point could he find a mistake. He was brought back to reality when he heard a passing American schoolteacher comment to her companion, “Look. Another poetry lover paying homage to John Keats.” As they passed him he smelled the faint fragrance of the same perfume Hannah had used and he wondered if he had smelled it unknowingly as he looked at the woman in the window and if it had not added a subliminal reinforcement to a chance likeness.

He concluded that the resemblance was accidental, but from that time forward, before he fell asleep at night, he saw again the face and form of Hannah framed in the window.

A week later he saw her again.

It was during the intermission before the last act of “Aida,” which was performed outdoors at the Baths of Caracalla. He strolled among the crowds under the lights along the wide paths that skirted the towering walls with their shadowed arches recessing into darkness. She was standing under an arch, well back from the walk and partially obscured by the shadow of a tree as well as by the shadows of the arch.

He stopped, the crowd moving slowly past him, and stared at the figure that stood dwarfed by the tall arch, hugging itself as if chilled and idly watching the passing crowd. Her eyes swept over him with no sign of recognition and then swung back to look at him uncertainly as if she were not sure she knew him, and then she turned away toward the interior darkness of the arch, on her lips the same half smile that he had seen from the Steps.

He pushed his way through the crowd toward her but the overhead lights flicked off and on several times to signal the end of the intermission. By the time he made his way through the returning surge of the crowd she had vanished. He made his way to the entrance where the patrons were returning to their seats and although he observed each one until the first aria was well under way he did not see her again.

Similarly after the performance he watched the main exit but saw no one who remotely resembled his dead wife. But he found this occurrence less troubling than the previous one and although he thought about it constantly for days it did not cause the questioning and examination the first encounter had. A resemblance, close enough to be sure, but it was not Hannah. If it had been, he was certain she could not have resisted showing the new power which she would now have over him.

Three days later in the late afternoon he returned to his apartment, slipped his key into the handsome walnut door, swung the door inward, and froze. Delusions of sight and errors in identification were always possible but there is no autosuggestion in the sense of the smell. The living room smelled faintly of Hannah’s perfume.

Terror spurted in him but he forced himself to stride into the room. Hannah sat in the Principe di Canisio’s chair, her face as worn as the scarlet damask that covered the tall back of the chair, and in her hand was an ugly and unladylike .45 caliber automatic. She pointed it upward, directly at his face, so that he looked into its cruel, uncompromising muzzle that seemed small for such a deadly object.

For several seconds they stared at each other wordlessly, the woman who should have been dead and the man who should have been free. She waved the gun toward a slender gilt chair beside the door and he sat down facing her, the light from the window behind her chair making him feel, irrationally, that if only he could be in shadow he would be able to explain everything.

“How?” he managed to whisper.

“You thought of everything, Howard, everything but one small detail. I surfaced under an upturned fruit basket and stayed there while you were making certain with the spotlight that you had murdered me. My clothes made me buoyant for a time and the tide was carrying me downstream away from your light. When I was in sufficient darkness I grabbed a floating timber and paddled to shore just below a refinery. Murder and a polluted river, Howard! Some form of repayment is indicated, don’t you agree?

“I floundered through the marshes until I came to a highway and walked along it until I found a filling station. It was closed but it was also a bus stop. After an hour’s wait, during which most of the water dripped out of my clothes — but oh, the smell — a bus marked Ocean City came in and I got on. In the two-hour ride down the coast to Ocean City I planned what I would do.

“First of all, I couldn’t let you, or anyone else, know I had survived. You would surely try again. I decided that this was no matter for the law and, besides, what could I prove? I had $48 in my purse. The next day I got a job as a summer waitress at a restaurant and worked there all summer under an assumed name. I even got a new Social Security number. I worked hard and they liked hard-working steady help who showed up seven days a week and didn’t irritate the customers. I also subscribed to our hometown paper so that I would have some way of finding out about you. That tombstone now, that was touching.

“After the summer was over they offered me a job in their Florida place and I worked there until two weeks ago when I had enough money saved for this trip. The paper had reported your departure to live in Rome ‘for an indefinite period,’ it said, and how wrong that is now. My one fear was that my money would run out before I located you. I didn’t realize how easy it is to find an American in Rome. Just watch the tourist attractions long enough and you’ll find them.

“I saw you first at the Colosseum one day and followed you to this address. I thought at the time what a fitting place the Colosseum would be to do what I had come to do if it weren’t so public. Too bad we didn’t meet there by moonlight.”

“May I get up and stand by the window?” he asked. “I can’t breathe.”

“Do,” she answered, “but don’t get too close. It’s too late for accidents.”

He walked to the window in the wall behind her chair and stood looking down into the street. Shielded from her direct view by the tall back of her chair she was sitting in, he slowly slid one hand under the window drapery and unhooked the ropelike tie that looped the drape back.

“How did you get out of the life jacket?” he asked, not turning toward her chair.

“Oh, it almost worked. But you made one mistake — one small detail. When you tied the ribbons of the life jacket your reflexes took over. You tied the same knot that you, and nearly everybody else, ties every day of their lives — a simple bow knot. Under water I gave one pull at the ends of the ribbons and the knots came apart and I slipped out of the jacket. It was simple compared to untying and taking off my sneakers under water as we used to do when I was a girl in camp. If you had tied a good hard square knot, Howard, things would have been different for me. And for you.

“If you’re wondering about the gun, I borrowed it — stole it really — from the Florida restaurant. They always kept one near the cash register.”

He whirled from the window and leaped toward the back of her chair, the drapery tie outstretched between his hands. Her first shot, fired in frightened reflex at his reflection, shattered the mirror on the wall opposite her chair. Hanging over the chair back, he fumbled desperately to twist the rope tie around her neck. She slid from the chair to the floor and fired backward and upward in the blind instinct of self-preservation.

Howard staggered backward from the impact of the shot, one hand jerking upward and holding the moth-eaten drapery tie as though in some baroque scalp dance, the other clutching the window drape which he pulled to the floor with him as he fell, his body becoming partly hidden in its pretentious folds. She pulled herself to her feet and stood over the body, sickened at the reality of what her plans had brought to pass, and dreading the possibility of having to fire again. But the thing that lay there was still and dead, the rope tie grasped in one hand.

She replaced the gun in her bag, inspected the room carefully to be sure she left no trail, and left the apartment without looking back. She made her way through the streets to the top of the Spanish Steps, rejecting the waiting taxis in case the drivers would be questioned later. Going down the long cascade of the Spanish Steps, she stopped at the landing one flight from the street below and looked up at the figures that drifted aimlessly past the open window of the room where Keats had died.

She wondered what historic shrine this house might be but knew that now she would never find out, any more than she would learn whether operas were performed in ruined bathhouses, as advertised. She had already placed a foot on the next descending step when her body contracted with rigid terror. Looking down at her from the open window of Keats’s room was Howard, or a man who at this distance resembled Howard in startling detail.

He stood in full view immediately in front of the window, looking patient and expectant. She stared up at him in a paralysis of fear; he gazed down at her with serene assurance.

Then the figure slowly disappeared backward into the room, smiling as if in anticipation and passing confidently, almost negligently, a faded rope tie through one hand and then the other.