Kiss and Kill

Chapter IX

Because of a bad run of luck at Monte Carlo, the money didn’t last a year. We were back in the States and at work again in six months.

We had learned a lot from the Houston job. The most important thing we had learned was to lower our sights and never again try for such a big score. The more money people leave when they die, the more speculation there is about their heirs. It was safer to pull small jobs regularly than to try to clean up with only an occasional big one. We concentrated on marks whose passing would leave only the faintest ripple of public comment.

The Houston job also taught us never again to try to operate on the mark’s home ground. In small towns, where we found safest to operate, the death of a newcomer excites not nearly as much interest as the death of a lifelong resident. So we avoided women with deep roots in their own communities. If they weren’t willing to move off with me to some new town after marriage, we by-passed them.

In the beginning we made some mistakes, of course. There was one harrowing experience where a curious brother traced a mark to a cemetery in Bismarck, Indiana, demanded a police investigation and stirred up a lot of newspaper speculation. We were living in another state under new names when the story appeared over the wire services, but reading about it gave us a jolt. We had left Bismarck only twenty-four hours before the brother appeared.

The experience taught us another lesson: to avoid women with close family ties.

As time passed, our procedure smoothed out until it was flawless. Eventually we were regularly pulling three jobs a year without exciting the slightest suspicion from anyone. Through experience and planning, we had entirely eliminated the element of luck from the racket.

In the summer of 1959, five years and three months after our meeting at the Beverly-Wilshire, Mavis and I were working a job in the little town of Tuscola.

The woman this time was a forty-year-old spinster who had been raised on an Iowa farm. Before I uprooted her and took her to Tuscola, she had never been out of the state of Iowa.

Mavis and I were using the same plan which had become our pattern. Ostensibly my wife Hazel and I were negotiating to buy the hardware business of an elderly merchant named Tom Benjamin, who wanted to retire. Mavis, as usual, was living with us as my sister. We had rented a house and were studying the community to see how we’d like to live in it permanently before closing the deal. We had been in town six weeks, and I was supposed to give Benjamin my decision in two more days.

The old hardware merchant had been devoting considerable time to trying to sell me on the town as a nice place to live. He had introduced me to practically every local group. The evening that Hazel had her fatal accident, he had arranged to take me to a school board meeting.

Luckily the sky had been overcast all that day, and it was quite dark by eight o’clock. Too dark for any neighbors to see me carry my burden across the back yard.

Old Tom Benjamin honked his horn out front promptly at eight-thirty. We had the scene all set, the lights off in the front room and only the light from the hall casting a dim glow to the front door. There was just enough light for Benjamin to be able to make out that a woman was waving good-by to me from the doorway without his being able to see who the woman was.

“I ought to be back about ten, Hazel,” I called back to Mavis in the doorway.

From his car old Tom Benjamin shouted, “How are you, Mrs. Henshaw?”

“Fine,” Mavis called back in an excellent imitation of Hazel’s voice. She waved to him, then called to me, “Mavis will be right out, Sam”

Instead of getting into the car, I leaned in the front window and said, “I told my sister we’d drop her at the railroad station on the way to the meeting. Is that all right?”

“Sure,” the old hardware merchant said. “Where’s Miss Henshaw going?”

“Up to Chicago to visit our folks for a few days.”

Then Mavis was coming down the steps wearing a light coat and carrying a small suitcase.

She had switched off the hall light, and now she called back to the completely dark doorway, “See you Friday, Hazel.”

At the railway station, she gave me a sisterly kiss on the cheek and made the same announcement again.

Tom Benjamin’s invitation for me to sit in and observe a school board meeting worked right in with my plans. I couldn’t have asked for a more reliable group of alibi witnesses.

The meeting was over by ten-fifteen, and Benjamin dropped me off in front of the house a quarter-hour later. At that time of night, the streets of Tuscola were deserted, but light still showed in most of the homes.

When I switched on the front room light, I called, “Hazel!” Just as though I expected her to answer.

Mavis would have thrown me a sardonic grin if she had been there to hear. My increasing carefulness over the years had become a source of amusement to her.

I didn’t consider it over-carefulness. While Tom Benjamin had already driven off, and no one else was on the street to see me enter, how did I know but what some snoopy neighbor was peering into my front room from a darkened window at that moment? They couldn’t have heard me call Hazel’s name, of course, but anyone in the house could have. I didn’t want to overlook even the remote chance that some neighbor might have knocked at the back door just as I came up the front walk and, getting no answer, had stepped into the kitchen.

Through repeated practice, I had trained myself to act perfectly natural in these situations, even when I was sure there was no audience. Now I put a faintly puzzled look on my face when my call brought nothing but silence, and began to look through the house. I covered the three downstairs rooms, letting my expression grow more puzzled all the time.

Then I mounted the stairs, glanced into both bedrooms and the bath, and came downstairs again. For a few moments I stood in the front room with the vaguely irked expression of a man who is more disappointed than worried at not finding his wife home when he expected her.

Finally I went out the back way, crossed the lawn to the Erlings’ and knocked at their back door. Ed Erling came to the door.

“Evening, Mr. Henshaw,” he said with a note of surprise in his voice. “Come on in.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m just looking for my wife. She over here?”

He shook his head. “Haven’t seen her.”

“I guess she must be over at the Shermans’. She can’t be far, because she left the back door unlocked.”

“Oh, you been out?” he asked.

“Mr. Benjamin took me to the school board meeting and I just got home. Well, thanks, anyway. I’ll get over to the Shermans’.”

That was normal enough, I thought as I crossed my back yard again toward the house the other side of mine. When it came time for Ed Erling to remember how I had acted tonight, he’d certainly recall that there had been nothing in my manner to indicate I was making an attempt to cover up a guilty conscience. I hadn’t tried to look worried or implant in his mind that I was afraid something had happened to Hazel. I had made it a simple inquiry such as any husband might make when he unexpectedly found out his wife had gone out.

I stayed close to the rear of my own house as I crossed the yard, so as not to tread on any of the tulipbeds Hazel had set out all over the yard. In the dark I passed within feet of the old dry cistern with the pile of new lumber next to it, but didn’t even glance in that direction. It was so dark I couldn’t have seen it anyway, though from the corner of my eye I could make out the dim outline of the lumber pile next to it.

Of course Hazel wasn’t at the Shermans’ either. This time I let myself look thoroughly puzzled.

“She can’t have walked down to one of the stores, because even the drugstore closes at ten,” I said. “Wonder where she went?”

“Did you have the car?” Mrs. Sherman asked.

“No. Mr. Benjamin drove me to the school board meeting and back. I haven’t looked in the garage.”

“Why don’t you look?” George Sherman asked.

I peered out across the dark yard. “You have a flashlight you could loan me, Mr. Sherman? Hazel will skin me if I walk on one of her tulip beds.”

“Sure,” Sherman said.

While he was gone after the flashlight, Mrs. Sherman asked, “Isn’t your sister home either, Mr. Henshaw?”

“Mavis left for Chicago earlier this evening to visit our folks,” I said.

George Sherman came back with the flashlight and handed it to me. I wanted him to stroll over to the garage with me, but I couldn’t just bluntly ask him to. The whole thing would seem more natural if he trailed along on his own hook.

One of the first things I’d learned about George Sherman when I’d rented the bungalow next door to him six weeks before was that he was an avid Cleveland fan. Now I used the knowledge as bait.

As I moved across the back porch, I said, “Cleveland dropped one yesterday, I noticed.”

With Sherman this was enough to start an evening-long dissertation. On several occasions I had listened to him explain his favorite ball club’s 1954 Series performance so convincingly, he nearly had me believing its four straight losses were entirely due to bad breaks instead of the Giants’ superior playing. Now he followed me down the porch steps explaining the Cleveland misfortunes which had brought about yesterday’s loss. When I switched on the flashlight to start across the back lawn, he continued to follow, still talking.

The night was so dark, we could see nothing either side of the flashlight beam. When we neared the small pile of new lumber next to the cistern, I interrupted his apologia.

Flicking the beam over the pile, I said, “I’ve got to get to work on that cistern cover tomorrow before some kid falls through those rotten boards.”

Then I let the light play over the square wooden cover of the cistern.

“It was that triple of Los Angeles’ in the fifth,” Sherman resumed. “With a batting average of only a hundred seventeen, who’d ever expect — Hey, looks like somebody already fell through there.”

I had moved the light away from the cistern after holding it only long enough to give him a good look. Now I swung it back again.

“Yeah,” I said, walking toward the cover, whose rotten boards we could now see had given way in the center, leaving a gaping hole.

When I knelt at the edge of the hole and directed the light downward, George Sherman leaned over and peered into the deep pit also.

“My God!” he said. “There’s somebody down there!”

No one in Tuscola was even faintly suspicious of Hazel’s death. The primary reaction of everyone in town seemed to be sympathy for me at losing my bride after less than two months of marriage. If this was tempered by the thought that a skinny bride of nearly forty whose main attraction had been a rather vapid good nature shouldn’t be an irreparable loss to a tall and fairly good-looking man of thirty-five, it wasn’t apparent.

Nevertheless, the police had to make a routine investigation because of the nature of the presumed accident. Chief Howard Stoyle handled it personally, having me stop by his office the next morning. I found Tom Benjamin there too.

After the usual sympathetic cliches everybody uses in such circumstances, the fat chief said, “This is routine, you understand, Mr. Henshaw, but I have to ask some questions about last night. Just to try to fix the time of death and so on. Now I understand you were away from home at a school board meeting when it happened.”

“Yes,” I said. “Mr. Benjamin took me. I’ve been trying to get acquainted with as many facets of the town as I could, and he thought I might like to see the board in action.”

“Your wife was all right when you left?”

“She waved to me from the door. That was about eight-thirty. The meeting was scheduled for a quarter of nine.”

I looked at Benjamin for confirmation, and the old hardware merchant said, “That’s right. She was alive at eight-thirty. I yelled hello to her from the car and she called hello back.”

“What time was the meeting over?” Chief Stoyle asked.

“About ten-fifteen,” I said. “It must have been about ten-thirty when Mr. Benjamin dropped me in front of my house.”

“That places it between eight-thirty and ten-thirty,” the chief said thoughtfully. “Which conforms to the coroner’s guess. It was eleven when he examined the body, and he placed the time of death as two to four hours earlier. Far as you know, was your wife alone all evening?”

“My sister took the evening train to Chicago last night,” I explained. “Mr. Benjamin and I drove her to the station.”

When Benjamin nodded agreement to this, Chief Stoyle said, “Then she won’t be able to tell us anything. No point in talking to her.”

“She’ll be available if you want her,” I said. “I wired her this morning asking her to come home at once. It’s only about a four-hour train trip, so she should be in by evening.”

“Fine. But I don’t think I’ll be wanting her.”

I said, “I can’t understand what Hazel was doing out there in the dark.”

“She had her hat on,” the chief said. “We figure she decided to run downtown for something at one of the stores and was heading for the garage. Instead of sticking to the walk, she took a catty-corner shortcut, just as you and George Sherman were doing when you found her.”

“She should have taken a light,” I said. Then I made a hopeless gesture. “The worst of it is, I intended to build a new cover for that thing today. I already had the lumber for it.”

“Well, it was a terrible tragedy, Mr. Henshaw. Particularly since you were still practically newlyweds. But don’t go blaming yourself. It was just an unforeseeable accident.”

Unforeseeable. I wondered what the fat chief would say if I told him that the main feature which had attracted me to the house when I rented it was the abandoned cistern with its dangerous-looking wooden cover.

There wasn’t any more to the investigation. Chief Stoyle didn’t even question Ed Erling in order to verify that I had been to his house looking for Hazel. He did ask George Sherman a question or two as co-discoverer of the body, but he didn’t even bother with Mrs. Sherman.

Later Mavis was, as usual, amused at how many of my precautions had turned out to be unnecessary.