Kiss and Kill

Chapter VII

We were scheduled to leave on our honeymoon at noon the next day. I rose first and was showered, shaved and dressed before Hannah got up. Mavis was up too, and already downstairs. I had a chance to talk to her while Hannah was showering and dressing.

Mavis was seated in the kitchen over a cup of coffee and a cigarette when I came in. Dark circles under her eyes suggested she hadn’t slept well, and she looked cool and remote. Silently she poured me a cup of coffee and pushed sugar and cream toward me.

I said, “You look as though you were awake all night.”

“I kept listening for the creak of bedsprings from your room,” she said sardonically. “Enjoy your wedding night?”

“Let’s not squabble,” I told her. “We haven’t much time to talk before Hannah gets down.”

“What’s there to talk about?” she said listlessly.

“I’ve got a plan. It’s pretty risky. Riskier than anything we’ve done yet. But it’s the only way I can see to salvage anything from this mess.”

“Oh, you agree it’s a mess, do you?” Mavis said.

“Stop heckling and listen,” I said impatiently. I told her how Hannah had tied everything up so I couldn’t touch it without her signature.

Mavis thought for a moment when I finished. “Couldn’t you steal her safe-deposit box key?” she asked. “Get the bonds and forge her signature to them?”

I gave her a disgusted look. “Your signature card has to be on file before you can get through the vault gate. If I left planning to you, we’d have been bankrupt or in jail long ago. I’m not asking you for advice. I just want you to listen.”

Mavis looked wounded. “All right. Go ahead.”

I said, “If Hannah dies, I inherit everything. We’d not only get the insurance money and the bonds, we could sell the house and gym. Even a quick sale ought to bring fifteen thousand apiece from them.”

Mavis’s eyes started to widen, and grew wider and wider.

“Figure it up,” I said. “Twenty thousand in insurance, eighteen thousand in bonds, two thousand in her checking account. If we got fifteen apiece for the house and gym, the total comes to seventy grand.”

“But murder!” Mavis whispered.

“Yeah,” I said. “Is it worth the risk? It’s seventy grand or nothing. If you don’t want to go along, we may as well take off right now. There’s no point in wasting my time going on a honeymoon.”

Mavis licked her lips. “Seventy thousand,” she said in an unsteady voice.

“Or nothing. Make up your mind fast. Hannah will be down in a minute.”

“How would we do it?” she asked.

“I haven’t tried to work out any details yet. That’s not important at this point, and anyway, we haven’t time to discuss it now. What’s important is will you go along?”

“You’ve never asked me if I’d do anything before,” Mavis said. “You just told me.”

“This is different,” I said. “This is the big step. Maybe I haven’t the guts to take it on my own. Maybe I need your moral support. I don’t know. But I do know that if you don’t want to go along, we’re kicking the whole deal right now. We’ll go up and pack, tell Hannah it’s all off and leave.”

Mavis looked at me from wide, frightened eyes. “I’d rather have you just tell me, Sam. I’m not used to making even little decisions. Don’t throw one like this at me. I’ll do what you say.”

The bathroom door slammed upstairs.

“I’m not going to order you,” I said urgently. “You’re going to have to say one way or the other. I want this to be equal responsibility.”

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“If I wasn’t willing to go through with it, I wouldn’t have brought the matter up,” I said impatiently. “Make up your mind.”

Mavis took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “If it was just murder for money, I don’t think I could. If it was somebody like Mrs. Hollingsworth or Mrs. Brewster, for instance. Even for that much money.”

When she paused, I growled, “Well?”

Her nostrils flared and she said in a suddenly vicious voice, “I hate her. I’ve been wishing she was dead since the moment you told me you’d made love to her. I’ll go along, Sam.”

Hannah’s footsteps sounded on the stairs.

“We’ll have to get together to plan it out,” I said hurriedly. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll arrange to have some car trouble when we hit Beaumont, so we’ll have to spend the night there. As soon as Hannah and I leave, you run downtown and rent a car. Drive to Beaumont and register at the Hotel Beaumont under the name of Arlene Drake. Ill meet you there as soon as I can. Got it?”

Mavis nodded.

A moment later, when Hannah entered the kitchen with a cheery hello, we both had coffee cups raised to our lips.

Hannah and I got started at noon, as scheduled. Fifty miles out of town I stopped for gasoline and, as I expected, Hannah took advantage of the stop to visit the gas-station rest room. When she was gone, and while the attendant was at the back of the car filling the tank, I opened the hood, ostensibly to check the oil, and loosened a spark plug wire.

The car started to miss as soon as we pulled away from the gas station. Hannah looked at me inquiringly.

“Sounds like the fuel pump is going out,” I said with a frown. “I should have had a checkup before we left.”

By the time we reached the outskirts of Beaumont, the engine was missing badly.

I said, “Afraid we’re going to have to stop for a new fuel pump. It’ll probably take awhile to install. We may as well spend the night in Beaumont. We aren’t in any hurry, are we?”

“Not me,” Hannah said cheerfully. “I don’t care where I am, so long as I’m with you.”

I told her there was no point in her coming along and having to stand around in a repair garage while the car was being fixed. I suggested we find a motel, check in, and she could wait there in comfort while I saw to the car.

“All right,” she said agreeably. “I brought along a couple of True Stories I can read.”

We registered at a motel just inside of town. I left Hannah there and drove on into town, ostensibly in search of a repair garage.

As soon as I was out of sight of the motel, I pulled over to the curb and re-connected the spark plug wire. Then I drove downtown and parked on a parking lot near the Hotel Beaumont.

It was now only mid-afternoon, and I knew Mavis couldn’t have arrived yet. By the time she got to downtown Houston, rented a car and fought city traffic coming back, she would be at least an hour and half behind us. I left word at the hotel desk that when a Miss Arlene Drake checked in, to please tell her to come to the bar. Then I sat in the bar and waited.

Mavis came into the cocktail lounge at 4:30 P.M. Her face looked strained, as though she had done a lot of worrying during the drive from Houston. She looked as though she needed a drink. I ordered her one and lit a cigarette for her.

She drained half of her drink in one gulp. It seemed to pull her together a little. “Where did you leave her?” she asked.

“In a motel,” I said. “She thinks I’m having a fuel pump replaced. Did you register?”

She nodded. “I had a bellhop take my bag up, and came straight in here when they gave me your message. I haven’t seen my room yet. But it’s 325.”

“Finish your drink and we’ll go up to your room to talk,” I told her.

Ten minutes later we were alone in her room. Ordinarily, even after so short a separation, Mavis would have moved into my arms for a kiss of hello the instant the door closed. Today she walked straight to the bed and seated herself on its edge as though her legs wouldn’t support her any longer. Her gaze fixed on my face.

“You look ready to jump out of your skin,” I said. “Don’t you want to go through with this?”

A little unsteadily she said, “Yes, I want to go through with it.”

“You sure you can? I don’t want you coming apart at the seams on me.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I won’t come apart at the seams. What’s the plan?”

I examined her dubiously, wondering how well she would stand up under police examination, if it ever came to that. I said, “It has to look like an accident. The simplest thing would be to rig an automobile accident. Nobody’s likely to question a highway accident. They happen all the time.”

“Rig it how?”

“Have the car go over a steep bank somewhere. We can make it look as though I was thrown clear and Hannah was killed.”

Mavis looked at me with such an odd expression on her face, I asked, “What’s the matter?”

She said, “You haven’t planned this out very carefully yet, Sam. It isn’t like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where do you find a steep bank alongside the highway around here? It’s all flat country.”

I felt myself grow a little red. What she said was true. Apparently the idea of murder had such a paralyzing effect on me, my mental processes weren’t working properly. My planning was panicky instead of cool and dispassionate as it usually was when I was setting up a bunco dodge.

Running a distraught hand through my hair, I said, “We’d both better get our feet on the ground, or well botch this. Maybe we’re not up to murder.”

“We’re up to it,” Mavis said quietly. Realizing that I was as nervous as she was seemed to have a steadying effect on her. “Just start thinking, Sam. Approach it just as though it was only a bunco dodge. You’re smart enough to think up something foolproof.”

Her words calmed me down a little. I was smart enough, I told myself. The scores we had made in the ten months since we met proved it. It was merely a matter of carefully figuring every angle.

“Let’s go for a reconnaissance ride,” I suggested. “Well look for the right spot and plan what kind of accident to have according to the spot.”

We took the car Mavis had rented, a new Ford sedan. I had her drive in the direction of the Louisiana state line.

As Mavis had suggested, there weren’t any steep banks lining the highway in this section. But cutting the road there was an occasional gully that had to be spanned by a bridge. We stopped to examine two which were mere depressions a few feet deep, and where the road was as straight as a string. Neither seemed likely places for a fatal accident.

The state line is only a few miles from Beaumont. We found what we wanted just beyond it.

The gully was perhaps fifteen feet deep and a dozen wide, with nearly-horizontal banks. The road curved to the left just before the bridge — a gentle curve, but nevertheless a curve. The guard-rail, a wide metal strip attached to concrete posts, looked impossible to break through except at terrific speed, which is hardly feasible in a rigged accident unless the rigger is prepared to die too. But the approach to the bridge was guarded only by a series of slim steel reflector rods that could easily be pushed over by a car bumper. The ground alongside the road was flat and hard, though it looked a little bumpy. It would be possible to push down one of the reflector rods and drive right to the edge of the gully, then jump clear just as the car went over.

“It hardly looks like a dangerous spot,” Mavis said critically,

“Any spot’s dangerous when the driver goes to sleep at the wheel,” I said. “That will be my story. We’ll do it here.”

“When?” she asked.

“Tonight, between two and three A.M. I’ll get Hannah to bed by eight. There won’t be any problem there. She’s always willing to go to bed. About two in the morning I’ll wake her up, tell her I can’t sleep any more and suggest we might as well hit the road again and reach New Orleans for breakfast.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Just wait about a hundred yards this side of the bridge until we get here. I’ll park behind you.”

Mavis’s face looked a little pinched. “She’ll still be alive then?”

“Of course,” I said. “It can’t be done until the last minute, just before the wreck. They can tell by an autopsy when somebody dies.”

“I see,” Mavis said.

She didn’t inquire as to why her presence would be necessary at the scene. She must have known that it really wasn’t, as I could easily have worked the plan without her assistance. She could have stayed in Houston. She seemed to know she was there primarily as moral support, because I couldn’t bring myself to murder alone.

Neither of us mentioned this. We both acted as though her part in the plan were as important as mine.