Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 4, September 1967

A Fitting End by Eleanor Lucas

Heel, chaser, he was everything I hated. Incidentally, he was also dead — with a bullet where his brain used to be...

The real test, I thought, will he if he recognizes me. I adjusted the heavy wig and made sure my eye liner hadn’t smeared. In the small mirror I could hardly recognize my own face. The pale lipstick, too, helped to change the contours. Satisfied, I pushed open the door to the apartment and went in. I knew it would be open. The bum always left it unlocked until the milk was delivered.

Herbert Corwin whirled, surprised, and then seeing it was a woman, smiled.

“Aren’t you in the wrong apartment?” he asked.

“I’m selling cosmetics,” I answered in the hoarse voice I had practiced.

He laughed. “I don’t need any.”

“Let me give you a free sample, anyway,” I said, opening my black sample case. I knew now my disguise was perfect.

He waited, a smirk on his handsome face. I could hardly look at it, it disgusted me so. As deftly as I could with my kid gloves, I picked the gun out from among the jars, pointed it and fired. There was a soft “Pptt” through the silencer.

Herbert Corwin fell On the drab, gray carpet.

I walked over to the desk and sat down at the telephone. “I want to report a murder,” I said.

The newspapers carried a full account. Herbert Corwin found shot in “love nest”. Murderer seen fleeing scene of crime. Body discovered by door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman, Vanessa Everly, who gave a full description of the fleeing woman.

I was rather proud of that part.

The description I had given of his wife was accurate right down to her freckles, her ruddy complexion and her glasses. I mentioned her straight brown hair, cut short and rather mannish. There could be no mistaking Alice Corwin from that description.

I was careful, too, not to tell more than I might conceivably have been able to see had Alice Corwin actually been running away from the apartment, as I said she was. I was positive that the police hadn’t the faintest idea that I made the whole thing up.

And the delicious part of it is that Alice Corwin was not at home when the police came to question her. She drove up in her Chevy station wagon and was unloading grocery bags from the back when they came around to the garage and saw her.

It must have given them quite a thrill to see the very woman they had just heard described in such detail. She wasn’t wearing a hat, and her short straight hair was somewhat mussed from worming the sacks out of the car.

She denied knowing anything at all about the apartment or about her husband’s love affair, but I don’t think they believed her. Herbert Corwin has been in too many sordid messes involving other women, generally well-publicized squabbles.

The identity of the current lady love was not known. The apartment was rented out to a Mrs. Carl Hollingsworth, but it was certain that that was not her real name.

The police searched the apartment thoroughly, but could not find the gun, nor was it found in a search of the Corwin house. Alice Corwin’s statement that she was shopping in a super-market had been checked, but as is so often the case in those large, impersonal markets, she saw no one she knew who might be able to identify her, so she has no real alibi.

There is no doubt that she had motive enough and to spare.

Suddenly developments took a new turn then... Vanessa Everly disappeared. Her picture has been published in the newspapers again, with an appeal to anyone who can identify her. I am confident no one can. The address I gave the police was, of course, a phony, and when they inquired for Vanessa Everly at the Appleton Cosmetics Company, they were told most indignantly that no one by that name or description had ever been associated with them.

The report is that the police now believe Vanessa Everly to be the murderer of Herbert Corwin, but the problem remains, who is she?

I have no fears whatsoever about Vanessa Everly’s being found. I studied the picture in the paper carefully. I was pleased with my disguise. No one could possibly recognize me. Even the lines of my face looked different.

The police have again demonstrated their remarkable efficiency. With very little to go on, they have uncovered the identity of Mrs. Carl Hollingsworth, the woman to whom the apartment had been rented.

The papers say she is Loreen Mulford, the wife of a prominent local businessman. There were several pictures of her, hiding her face from the camera, but you could see that she was a real beauty. Her heavy auburn hair couldn’t be hidden by the suede purse she held up to shield her, nor could her lovely figure.

So the search was on at the Mulfords. The whole house was turned nearly upside down, with Mr. Mulford threatening to sue, and Loreen Mulford denying everything, hysterically following them around, begging them to leave her alone.

They found the evidence they were looking for, all right. Stuffed back of an old wheelbarrow in the Mulford’s garage, they found a large cardboard box chock-full of evidence. There was a black sample case full of cosmetics; there was a black wig, and best of all, in the false bottom of the sample case, they found the murder weapon, the gun that had killed Herbert Corwin. I took care of those little details, all right.

So everything fell into place.

Loreen Mulford, they decided, was Vanessa Everly. Her face disguised with heavy make-up, and a black wig on her head, she had gone to the apartment she shared with Herbert Corwin, and shot him. After reporting the murder, she had told the police a story of seeing a woman running away from the scene of the crime, and had furthered the lie by involving the wife of the dead man.

A tidy case, wouldn’t you say?

The police thought so, just as I had planned they would when I planted the evidence in the Mulford’s garage. I had already placed the grocery bags in my station wagon, and, with my face scrubbed, I was back in my own identity when the police came to tell me my husband had been shot.

Everything was going so well.

Then someone got the bright idea of trying the wig on Loreen’s head.

And it didn’t fit!

That wig wouldn’t begin to go on over Loreen’s thick auburn hair. It perched on top of her head, and no amount of tugging would bring it down, short of ripping it.

Then they tried it on me.

I fought them! Oh, I fought them! But they got it on me anyway. And it slid so easily over my short, mannish hair cut, just as if it had been designed for me.