Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 4, August, 1961

Die, Die, Die! by Rosemary Johnston

It was dim and cool in Harry’s Bar, peaceful and conducive to day-dreams... wonderful dreams of his mother-in-law. “That miserable old harpy.” He smiled and ordered another drink.

“I hear this Khruschev has a taster,” I said. “A guy that eats a bite or two of everything Khrushchev gets served. Drinks a swig of his champagne, vodka, whatever. All the kings in olden days had tasters, you know.”

Harry, the bartender, clapped the lid with the spring around it over the shaker and dumped the whiskey sour into my glass. It came just to the top, like it always did. Not a drop went over, but you couldn’t have put another drop in, either. Harry was a very good bartender.

“They must have to draft a guy for a job like that,” Harry said. “That taster. Wow!” He shook his head slowly. “When you think of all the guys in this world out to get Mr. K...”

“They say it’s safe enough, when everybody knows the food is tasted, they don’t try anything, see?”

“They’d have to draft me.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Me too. Because I’ll tell you what I think. I think, if a person really wanted to do it, he could. Know what I’d do? I’d pick out something that came in lumps. Shrimp, maybe. And I’d just put it in one, see. Chances are the taster wouldn’t get that one. Then old Mr. K., he’s talking away, arguing and all, and all of a sudden he bites into this one. And bingo! He’s had it!”

Harry nodded approvingly. “That would do it, all right.” He drifted down the bar to serve a young fellow and a girl who had just come in. It was cool and dim in Harry’s, lit only by the lights that glowed through the tiers of liquor bottles that lined the wall behind the bar. You could forget the ulcer-making lunch at home. You could forget that the August sun had made the asphalt street outside feel like hot sponge when you walked on it. The newspaper guys had fried an egg on that street yesterday. The annual egg fry.

What that pavement could do to your feet, right through shoe leather! My soles smarted and burned, even now, even in the air-conditioned cool. What it would do to bare feet! I thought of my mother-in-law’s feet, her ugly, dead-white swollen feet, the big toes turned sideways at an angle, the nails dry and yellow, nobbed with the yellow horn of old corns, the blue veins like contorted worms. I’d like to see her being marched down that street, slowly, bare-foot, two guys in uniforms like storm troopers holding her by the arms, seeing that she walked slow. I could just hear her, giving them a bad time at first, flaying them with that tongue of hers, saying things they wouldn’t forget for a long time, about how they looked and their personalities and all.

One of them would snatch out his Luger. “I’m going to let this old dame have it,” he would snarl. “She don’t deserve to live.”

The other one would grin, his lips curling wolfishly away from his teeth, his eyes dark and furious from her insults. “Put that thing away, pal,” he would say. “It’ll be better this way, remember?”

And then the pain would start getting at her, those feet would start swelling, sizzling maybe after a while, and she would be screaming, screaming, begging them to let her go, apologizing, screaming...

“Ready for another one, Mr. Adams?” Harry asked.

I started. “What? Oh, yes. Give me another one.”

“A person couldn’t be too careful, if somebody really wanted to poison them,” I said. “It wouldn’t have to be anything obvious, like special chocolates. It could be maybe something else in your vitamin capsule.” I watched him slicing lemons in the quick efficient way he did things.

“Maybe a lemon!” I exclaimed.

“Huh?”

“You could put it in a lemon! Inject it with a hypodermic needle, say. Then this person would make some ice tea. Pour it over ice cubes. All safe. Then she’d cut this fresh lemon in two Squeeze a big dollop of juice into the tea, drink it down...” I sat thinking about all that. What would happen then.

“Your mother-in-law been bugging you again?” Harry asked.

“Just being her usual sweet self,” I said, taking care with my speech. I’d had three, no, four drinks, since I dropped in here for something to settle my nerves after lunch. “Why do you ask about my mother-in-law, Harry?”

“Listen, Mr. Adams. I’d like to tell you something for your own good. OK?”

“OK. Shoot.”

“Mr. Adams, I wouldn’t go around talking like that. About poisoning people and all. Yesterday it was about how kitchen knives could slip. Last week it was about some dame getting caught in a wash wringer. Look, Mr. Adams. If the old lady was sitting right where you’re sitting, all by herself, and got drunk and fell off the bar stool and broke her neck, there’s a dozen people in this neighborhood would be willing to swear you got in here somehow and pushed her.”

I cackled with laughter at the idea. Her lying there, draped over the brass rail, her head at a funny angle, her mouth shut for good. I shook my head regretfully. “It wouldn’t happen that way, Harry. She wouldn’t do any more than break a leg. Then she’d swear you pushed her, Harry, and she’d sue you for all you’ve got, and she’d take this bar away from you. It wouldn’t be Harry’s Bar any more. You know what she’d call it? Mother’s!”

“Build me another drink, Harry. Want to watch you do it. Won’t come in here any more, once she has it.” As I pushed my glass towards him, somehow it fell over. He claimed I had enough, wouldn’t sell me any more. Got nasty about it.

I started down the street to my office, but the heat got me. It was like walking in a big bright furnace. I began to feel funny, like the sidewalk was going to come up and hit me. All of a sudden I was draped over the mailbox in front of Jack Pearson’s clothing store. The metal was hot, terribly hot. It burned me right through my suit, my arms, my belly, down my thighs. I let out a yell and pulled away. Jack came out and tried to steady me.

“You sick, Joe?” he asked anxiously. Then he said, “Oh. Been drinking your lunch. Here, I’ll help you, Joe. You better get to your office and lie down for a while.”

I tore away from him. “Hell with the office,” I said, “I’m going home. Just remembered. Got a little something to attend to.”

“You want I should call you a cab, Joe?” Jack asked, peering at me in a worried way. “You don’t look to be in very good shape.”

“Cab!” I joked. “You’re an old maid, Jack. That’s what you are. An old maid! I only live three blocks from here!”

I stepped out strong, knowing he was watching me. But after a while that heat got me again. I began to feel woozey. The block seemed to go on forever ahead of me, shimmering with heat, full of people who kept getting in my way. I kept wishing I was home already, flopped down on the sofa, Verna bringing me a nice long drink that tinkled with ice. Verna, looking at me with those beautiful dark eyes, talking to me in her nice low voice. Like heaven, like cool, quiet heaven, being with my lovely young wife, just the two of us.

While the old harpy was off getting the twenty dollar permanent wave in her dyed red hair. I could see her now, sitting there in the Bon Ton Beauty Shoppe, her hair all screwed up in those metal things, watching in the mirror with that sour, suspicious expression while the girls in white uniforms buzzed around, working on her. Then they’d start taking the metal stuff off, and they would all be squealing and hollering, and Mr. Cecil would come mincing in and maybe faint. And here as they take off the curlers, all her hair comes too! She’s bald as a billiard ball!

I was walking along snickering about that, when suddenly all hell broke loose. People screamed, some guy roared in my ear, grabbed me by the arm and shoulder, yanked me backward, right off my feet. I swung on the guy, started fighting him.

He held me at arm’s length, in some way so that I couldn’t connect with my fists. “Now, Mr. Adams. Take it easy now, Mr. Adams,” he kept saying. Ail of a sudden my eyes sort of focused. I could see it was only Dick Burgess, the traffic cop on Main Street.

I pulled away from him, panting, sweating, all mussed up. “What’s idea?” I snarled at him. “Grabbing a man that way. Want to get hurt?”

“You sure went off like a firecracker,” he said. “Mr. Adams, you all but got run over. You walked right out into the intersection against the traffic. If I hadn’t grabbed you, that lady would have run you down.”

I looked over my shoulder, vaguely remembering the squeal of brakes. A red Jaguar was stalled right in the middle of Main Street. The girl driving it had her head down over the wheel, like she was sick or something. Traffic was piling up, honking, and people were jamming in around Burgess and me, staring.

It made me mad. “What’s the matter,” I yelled at them. “You never saw anybody arrested before?”

Doc Palmer from the corner drug store came elbowing through the crowd.

“Hey, Doc,” Burgess called, relieved. “Take care of our friend here, would you? No, he ain’t hurt, and I ain’t arresting him. He just shouldn’t be walking the street by himself.”

I put my arm over Doc Palmer’s shoulder and let him help me into the drug store. “Nerves,” I explained to him. “Nerves very bad. Home situation, you know.”

“I know, Joe,” he assured me, taking me into the back where he makes up his prescriptions. He did know, too. Doc and I are old buddies. He has problems, too. His wife has a disposition like my mother-in-law’s. She’s the one who owns the store, too. Inherited it from her father. She’s older than Doc, and crazy jealous. Yes, he has his problems.

“How about some nice, hot, black coffee, Joe?” he asked me, after he sat me down on the leather sofa in his private office.

“Hot coffee? On a day like this? You must be nuts. Just let me rest a minute. Then I’ll be getting home. My little wife’s all alone. Her mother’s away for the afternoon. I don’t want Verna to get lonesome.” I gave him a big wink.

He knew what I meant, all right. That was one of the things that bugged me most, the way my mother-in-law was always around the house. A fellow who’s married to a pretty young wife like Verna, a fellow who’s his own boss, can come home for lunch and all, well, he could have an enjoyable time for himself, afternoons. Only not with that old harpy sniffing around.

But Verna would get absolutely hysterical, if I so much as hinted that her mother should move out. “You want her around to make sure I behave myself, that I don’t bother you all the time, like a husband has a right to,” I accused her once. But I knew that wasn’t so.

The old bag was Verna’s mother, so naturally Verna looked at her differently from the way other people did. My own mother was a sort of strong-willed woman, too. She made it hot for me, sometimes, like when I’d think about getting married to some girl she didn’t like. But if she were still living, she’d be making her home with us, too. It would never occur to my mother not to, and I certainly would never have told her to get out. I knew how Verna felt. My insides twisted, thinking about it. These old women... The power they have, the naked, terrible power. Just because at some moment long ago, some moment they have long since put out of mind, motherhood was imposed on them...

Doc had left me. Now he came bustling back with a glass, ice, and some soda. “If you won’t have the coffee, how about a drink?” he asked. He got a bottle of bourbon out of his desk, mixed me a stiff drink. I drank it down thirstily. He poured me another before I could say no.

“Why don’t you lie down and rest for a while?” he suggested.

I let him talk me into that. “Feels good to lie down,” I muttered, stretching out on the couch.

“You bet. I’ll just pull the blinds and leave you, old boy. You’ll feel swell, once you have a little rest.”

I closed my eyes and I lay there for a while, but I didn’t go to sleep. Everything seemed to be whirling, revolving in a sickening sort of way. The leather sofa felt slippery, insecure. I tried to hang on to keep from falling, but there was nothing to hang on to. I was clammy, sweaty, from lying on that leather.

I sat up at last, groaning. Drank the rest of the soda water. Thought about Verna, so cool, so beautiful. Marriage had done a lot for Verna. She wasn’t the shy little stenographer she’d been when I first noticed her. One of the pretty young clerks I’d hired for the office, after my mother died.

Verna was engaged to a beatnik kind of fellow, then. A young jerk who wore a beard, who wrote silly poetry, who ran a tacky expresso joint, the one and only coffee house we ever had in this town. A fellow who didn’t make enough to support a wife.

I used to make a point of driving by his tumble-down place in the Cadillac, when we’d be going to dinner at the home of one of my friends, or to spend the evening at the Country Club. Verna got the point, all right. She was crazy about the mink coat I’d bought her. She got a big bang out of buying clothes at the best shops, fixing herself up. I’d been a little nervy about introducing her to my friends, at first. But Verna caught on fast. In no time at all she looked classier than any of the debutantes from the Country Club set, girls who’d been to Eastern finishing schools.

I guess Verna was glad she’d married good old Joe Adams, all right. My wife has a position in this town. Mother’s folks had owned a lot of property around here, and my mother had not only held on to it, she’d developed it. Yes, Verna could hold her head high, being the wife of the President of the Adams Realty Company.

Thinking about Verna made me feel stronger. I struggled to my feet, went out of Doc’s office. There was nobody in the back room. I went out the rear door of the pharmacy. That way I could go down the alley, into the rear door of my apartment house, save walking in the sun all around the block. Just those few steps in the heat made me feel woozey again. I had to lean up against the wall for a while once I’d gotten inside my building, letting the air-conditioning cool me off.

I went down the hall to the lobby. Sam, the elevator man, was nowhere in sight, as usual. I leaned on the bell until he shuffled out from wherever it is that he hides. I chewed him out good. “I don’t pay you for taking siestas,” I told him. “Do you expect me to walk up two flights on a day like this?”

He gave me some excuse about helping a tenant carry in some luggage. “That’s your story,” I said. I leaned against the elevator wall. When we got to my floor, it took me a minute to straighten up. He ran that elevator very fast.

“Can I help you to your apartment?” he asked me, taking hold of my arm.

I yanked away from him. “Take your dirty hands off me!” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he muttered, slamming the door right on my heels.

It made me mad. I put my back against the wall, thinking about him in that elevator. The cables snapping, him throwing up his arms, his eyeballs rolling, screaming as he went down, down, down... I giggled. “Not the elevator, Joe, old boy,” I told myself. “Remember, you own this building.”

My door was locked. I rattled at it a few times, got out my key, scratched around a bit, finally got the door open. “Verna!” I called as I stumbled in.

I heard some movement behind me, turned around. “Oh, no!” I screamed. “No, don’t!” But something solid caught me right on the jaw. My head seemed to explode. I had a sensation of falling.

When I came to I was lying on the floor. It hurt to open my eyes. My head was aching so bad I was whimpering. When I tried to move, I seemed to be clutching something heavy in my hand. I focused on it, to see what it was. It was one of my set of bronze horses that I used for book-ends. I stared at it, trying to figure out why I had it. Moaning, I let loose of it, tried to sit up. Stirring around made me sick as a dog. I just made it into the bathroom.

After a while I dunked my head in cold water, took some aspirins. I studied the swelling on my chin, trying to fit the pieces together. Then I thought of something. Something that I’d seen as I was sitting up, just as the nausea hit me. I stood there, holding on to the washbasin, telling myself that I had to be wrong. I hadn’t really seen anything, any body lying there on the floor at my feet.

I don’t know how long it was that I stood there, how long before I finally forced myself to go back to the living room. It was true, all right. My mother-in-law was lying right there where I remembered, stretched out on her face beside the telephone stand. I went over, knelt down beside her, picked up her limp wrist, let it drop hastily. My God, she was already getting cold! Her head was turned away from me, but there was blood on the floor around it. I didn’t want to look any farther.

I staggered back to the sofa, sat down shivering. Details started coming back to me, about what had happened when I came into the room. But I still couldn’t understand any of this. I knew who hit me, all right. I had seen him plain. It was my good friend, Doc Palmer! And Verna had been there, too, right behind him, looking very white and strange.

I couldn’t figure it out. Even when it dawned on me what must have happened, I just couldn’t take it in. Verna and Doc! I couldn’t believe it. Not that I’d put it past Doc, in a way. I mean, we were friends. I didn’t think he’d do it to me. But I know Doc is a chaser.

But Verna! I couldn’t imagine her with Doc. This was all wrong. Phoney, wrong, impossible. This had to be one of those things I think of, one of those day-dreams of mine. But there was my mother-in-law. The deed had been done, and Doc had done it. I had to accept the fact. Doc had been here with Verna, thinking that I was asleep back there in his office. She had come in, had found them. There’d been a row. I could picture that. She had probably threatened to tell that wife of Doc’s, maybe even had picked up the phone. He let her have it. Then I had come in...

I tried to figure what I should do. The police! I would have to call the police.

“My God, that horse!” I thought in sudden horror. After he had hit me with it, he had put it into my hand! My fingerprints were all over it!

I was crouched by the corpse, scouring frantically at the murder weapon with my pocket handkerchief, when they all burst in on me. It was very confusing. There were so many of them. Burgess, the cop. Sam, with his eyeballs bugging out. Verna, clutching a big bag of groceries and screaming. And Doc.

“I knew there was something wrong,” Doc was telling the cop, speaking very loud and fast. “He was acting very strange — making threats, terrible threats. I thought he went to sleep — that he was sleeping off his drunk in my office. I saw Mrs. Adams go by with her groceries, so I called her in. I thought the two of us could get him home. But he was gone! I got scared, all of a sudden. I thought you’d better come along with us, just in case. And I was right. My God! I was right!”

I was so mad, I went for him with the horse. “He did it! He killed her!” I kept yelling as Sam and Burgess jumped me, held me down, put handcuffs on me.

Do you know, nobody believed my story! Not even my lawyer. Oh, he went through the motions. He hired some expensive detectives to check on Verna and Doc. They couldn’t pick up a whiff of gossip connecting them. Verna had been seen by a score of people, pushing a basket around the local supermarket at the approximate time of the murder. Doc Palmer’s hired help were positive he’d been in the store all afternoon, except when he’d been in his office, getting me settled down.

I’d told Jack Pearson, the clothier, that I was going home to attend to some business. Harry, the bartender, testified that I’d been threatening to kill my mother-in-law for some time. Doc Palmer testified that I’d told him that I was really going to do it this time, that I was going to kill the old bat.

Verna’s testimony really clinched it. What she said, and the way she said it. We were divorced by then, of course, but it was obvious she was terribly reluctant to put the noose around my neck. But the prosecutor forced her to admit that the beauty shop had called to cancel her mother’s appointment while I was still home, eating lunch. That I knew that she, Verna, would be out shopping. That I knew that her mother would be home alone.

After Verna’s testimony, I began to wonder myself if I had done it. I was so sure that I had accurately remembered what went on that afternoon. But maybe something had slipped a cog in my mind. The only thing I could cling to, the only way I could keep hold of my sanity, was the fact that I could not visualize any discharge of violence. Even drunk as I was, that deed would have branded itself into my consciousness.

The jury was convinced. They brought in a verdict of guilty. I got twenty years. My lawyer said I was lucky.

The only person who believed my story about Doc and Verna was Doc’s wife. I didn’t even tell it on the stand, by the way. My lawyer decided I’d better not testify. He said I’d make a poor witness, and that making a completely unsupported statement like that about my wife would prejudice the jury! By that time in my trial I wasn’t even sure myself what I had seen. I don’t believe it would have made much difference, anyhow.

But Doc’s wife must have believed me. She divorced him right after the murder. Only she named a little blond clerk at the store as corespondent, and made it stick, too.

Verna came to see me at the jail, one time, just before I was taken to the State Prison to begin my term. My last appeal had been turned down. Verna’s divorce was final, with a settlement that had pretty well cleaned me out. There was only one bit of unfinished business.

“Thank you for coming,” I told her, through the wire netting that separated us. “You look very beautiful.” She did, too. Young, and sleek, and expensive. She was wearing the mink coat, and her shining dark hair was wrapped around her head in some complicated way. Her black dress was that plain, figure-hugging kind that costs so much money, and she had on the diamond clip I’d bought her.

“Your lawyer said you had to see me,” she stated.

“Verna, I can’t go up there without knowing,” pleaded with her. “What really happened that day?”

“What do you mean, what really happened?”

“Verna, I wasn’t that drunk. I know that Doc was there, when I went into that room. I know that you were there. I remember what happened. I’ve got to know why. Verna, were you having an affair with Doc?”

“With that old goat?” Her nostrils flared with disgust. “Give me credit for better taste!”

I felt a flood of relief. One of the worst things I had had to face, among all the adjustments I was having to make, was the idea of Doc with Verna. Of the guy enjoying my wife, on my money, while I was in jail for his crime.

“But then why?” I kept on. “Why did it happen?”

“You really want to know?” She looked around to be sure we were not overheard. Her eyes sparkled as if with joy — a kind of malicious joy. “Well, I’ll tell you.”

“Doc killed her, all right. Here’s what really happened. They called to cancel Mother’s appointment just after you left. Mr. Cecil had been overcome by the heat. So we did the dishes, watched some television. Then Mother got some washing together and took it down to the laundry machine in the basement. While she was gone, Doc Palmer came steaming in. He had some wild idea that we’d be alone for the afternoon, and he was going to make the most of it. That old creep had been giving me the eye ever since we moved into the neighborhood, but I’d never so much as give him the time of day. I still can’t figure why he thought I would.

“So he was making himself very objectionable, and I was fighting him off. At that point Mother came in. Well, there was quite a scene.”

“Yes,” I said. “I imagine there was.”

“She just about raised the roof. First she was going to call the police. Then she said, no, she would call his wife. His wife would see that he paid for this, without involving us all in open scandal. She picked up the telephone to call his wife. It was then that he snatched up the bronze horse, hit her with it.” She grimaced, stopped, recalling the moment.

“Then what happened?” I pursued.

“Well, after a while we knew that she was dead. We were just standing there, sort of in shock, when we heard you at the door. Then you came in, and he hit you.”

“He thought fast, your friend. He saw at once how it could be blamed on you. He planned it all out in an instant. We went down the back stairs. I went to the supermarket, acted like I’d been there for some time. He went back to his store. Only a few minutes had gone by, really, from the time he’d left. Nobody’d missed him. Our alibis stood up fine. Then we went back and discovered the crime, with a policeman as a witness. You played your part fine, Joe. We found you wiping off the fingerprints. You tried to use the murder weapon again on an innocent bystander, accused him of the crime, acted so crazy nobody believed a word you said.”

“But why, Verna? Why did you back him up, let him get away scot free, after he killed your mother? I can see how you might have had to go along with his plans, up in the apartment. You were in fear of your life. But once you’d gotten away, why didn’t you go for the police? Everyone would have believed you. I would have. You and Doc as lovers — it never made sense to me, even when I was forced to think it. Did he threaten you?”

She leaned back gracefully, regarded me with insolent amusement. “You haven’t gotten the picture yet, have you, Joe,” she purred. “Look at it from my point of view. If I’d called the cops on Doc, sure, he’d be sitting where you are now. And I’d still be married to you.”

She bent toward me, her lovely young face close to the wire. Fury contorted that face, and hate, and a hot resentment that made me shrink back in sudden shame. “The things you did to me, you and Mother!” she whispered. “She made me marry you, and you know she did, you nasty, rich old man. When I was just a kid. When I was scared and insecure and thought that the man I loved didn’t want me. I was freed from her, that day. I saw a chance to be free from you, too. So I took it. And I won. I’m free!”

She stood up, shrugged into her mink, gathered up her purse and gloves. The interview was over. “I’m marrying Charlie next week,” she told me as she left.

I couldn’t think at first who Charlie was. Then it came to me. The beatnik fellow, of course. Verna’s first love.

I suppose I should hate Verna. She certainly ruined me. But somehow I can’t. All my life I’d hated people. People who annoyed me, who insulted me. Some people who said terrible things to me, destroyed the most precious thing a man can have, his respect for his own manhood. I punished those people in my fantasies. But that was all I ever did. I never had the guts to do anything more.

Verna is really a lot like me. For a long time, I guess, she was living a life she didn’t much like. She probably had her dreams about being free, her own master, with the money and the things money buys, that I’d taught her to need.

In a split second she had a chance to make her dreams come true. It was a long shot. A very risky gamble. If there’d been any tenants home that afternoon who’d heard the uproar in our apartment. If anybody had seen her or Doc. If one thing had gone wrong, she’d have been in terrible trouble.

It wasn’t easy for her on that witness stand, either, deliberately swearing my life away. It had been a painful, pitiful thing to watch. But she had done it.

She fell into a situation like the ones I’m always setting up, in my mind. She had the nerve to carry through. She acted. That’s why I can’t find it in my heart to hate her. The fact is, I admire Verna.