Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 5, April 1974

Nice and Dead by Lawrence Treat

There was no noise... no blood. All had gone off exactly as planned. There was nothing between him and safety — nothing but a dead girl’s shadow.

He spotted her sitting alone at the far side of the big hotel dining room. Although the place was far too expensive for him to afford, his car had broken down and he was there for the night. Watching her, he decided to stay on.

She was a soft, cottony blond with buttery skin and a yearning heart, and he characterized her with sound and unerring judgment — rich, single and ready to be plucked. By him. As to why they’d let her run around loose, he couldn’t understand, until she said she’d been a widow for only six months. Her husband, it turned but, had been killed in an airplane accident and she was recuperating from the shock.

She told him that much about herself after he’d made contact on the hotel veranda and they’d exchanged names. Grace Worthington. Alec Condon. A lovely evening. The air’s so soft and balmy. Let’s stroll down to the lake, shall we?

There, they stood on the dock and watched a golden moon loom up over the hills. She chatted in a high, adolescent treble and she kept clasping and unclasping her filigree bracelet. He wondered how much it had cost.

“What do you do?” she asked him.

“I paint.”

“Oh! Areal artist!”

He smiled down at her. Maybe women didn’t love all artists, but they usually fell for him. For a while. And long enough to finance him until he met the next one. Only this time, there would be no next, for Grace was obviously too rich to let go. Besides, he found her pleasant enough, with the naiveté of a child.

“You’re quite lovely,” he said, applying a technique that was tried and true. For, when a tall, handsome artist flatters a woman and does it with a combination of humility and dash, how can she resist?

“You’re quite lovely,” Condon said, “and I’d like to paint your portrait. Would you mind?”

Her pale blue eyes danced with excitement.

“I’d love it,” Grace said. “It would be nice.” And, still nervous and still fingering the bracelet, she let it slide out of her grasp and drop into the water.

“Oh, my!” she said, embarrassed. “How stupid of me!”

“I’ll get it for you,” he said, and he took off his shoes and prepared to make the gesture gallant and chivalrous.

“Would you really? That would be nice.”

Nice!

In the subsequent three years, he figured Grace had spoken the word upwards of fifty thousand times. She uttered it in a childish tone which, at the beginning, seemed to ache for his approval. Later on, however, he regarded it as a whine, a steady, unending, namby-pamby yack that went on tirelessly, with the dreary monotony of a leaky faucet.

They were married three months after they met, and they went to Europe on their honeymoon. She left her bag containing her passport on the plane, which continued on to Rome. The passport had to be flown back, and didn’t arrive until the next day.

“We can stay at the airport hotel,” Alec Condon said.

She accepted the suggestion as if he’d decided where to have lunch.

“That would be nice,” she said.

The passport arrived in due course, and they went on to the hotel where they had reservations. There, she discovered she’d forgotten her vanity case.

“I must have left it at that other place,” she said.

“I’ll phone and see if it’s there.”

“That would be nice,” she said.

For the rest of the trip he took charge of her passport and he even managed to overcome his annoyance at the trail of losses at hotels, restaurants, buses and stations. After all, when she lost something she merely went out and replaced it. He was realist enough to see the stupidity of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, although, naturally enough, the idea occurred to him. Even, it beckoned.

Still, he was reasonably content that first year. She built him a studio behind their luxurious suburban house. It was an expensive studio, where he painted pleasant little landscapes in the intervals between doing portraits of her. Otherwise, he puttered. And the studio became his sanctuary which she visited only to sit for him or else by specific invitation.

By the second year, the financial card by which he was attached to her grew strained, and her compulsive carelessness became a daily torment for him. She had two cars stolen because she’d forgotten to take the key out of the ignition while she’d gone shopping. She regularly mislaid her reading glasses, her purse, her mink stoles.

Condon kept wishing that she’d die so that he could inherit, but he shrank from doing anything about it. He resented her, not angrily, not head-on, but with a slow, repressed, icy venom that gnawed at him like acid. He dreamt of killing her and woke up frustrated to find that the dream was fantasy. He had many schemes and many devices, but he refrained from murder for the sound reason that year after year she increased her wealth. The stocks she bought, went up; the ones that she sold, went down.

Time after time she’d remark, casually, “You know those five hundred shares I just bought? They went up ten points.”

“Then sell them,” he’d say.

“I just can’t bear to. They’re much too nice.”

In the next month they went up another dozen points, and she forced herself to sell them.

“I hate to,” Grace said, “but I’m afraid, I must.” And the following week they plummeted down to the price at which she’d bought.

Can you kill a woman like that?

Still, as Alec Condon told himself after he’d met Myra, money isn’t everything, and he’d have been greedy not to be satisfied with Grace’s fortune at its present level. In fact, Myra so assumed, the, first time he brought her to his studio.

“I like it here,” she said. She was quick, clever and direct, and she not only knew her own mind, but she knew Alec’s as well.

“I like it, too,” he said, “but it belongs to Grace.”

“Then divorce her.”

“What about the studio? It isn’t even mine.”

“Oh, we’d live in the big house. This is much too small.”

“And Grace?”

Myra put her arms around him.

“Grace,” she said, “is your problem. But really, darling, you can’t have both of us.”

“I have, now.”

“I want a home and a husband and a family.”

“What about money?”

At the word, Myra grew almost dreamy.

“Money!” she said.

Alec thought of his dreams, but he was a practical man and he knew it was time to carry them out.

“I’ll marry you one year from now,” he said decisively, “but I don’t want you to go through the embarrassment of being hauled into court as a co-respondent. Leave the state, Myra. Stay away and don’t even write me. Understand?”

“Why, Alec!” she said. “How clever of you!” And she kissed him. It crossed his mind that she understood far too well.

He was, however, no fool, and he did nothing precipitously. He studied murder methods in fiction and fact, and found out that the more complicated the scheme, the more likely to backfire. A blunt instrument, he learnt, is the best weapon, and it should be disposable. A wooden mallet, for instance, being burnable, is the perfect instrument. For, even though the autopsy may show splinters that can be identified as a certain kind of wood, if you have no weapon to compare the splinters with, what good the analysis?

The same approach went for an alibi. The complicated alibi is the easiest to break. But to claim that you were home reading or balancing your check book — how can anyone prove otherwise? So — a wooden mallet, and the alibi that he’d been working in his studio. That much was definite.

Still, who had any reason to kill Grace, except a husband who wanted her money in order to marry another woman? Alec was vulnerable, unless he could hand the police a better suspect than himself.

He got his next idea from a newspaper, which reported a daring jewel robbery in which thieves had broken into a house a few blocks away, ransacked a safe and tied up the owner. Thus far, the account stated, the police had no clues.

Fine, Alec decided. Grace would be killed by a jewel thief who left no clues. There remained only the problem of persuading her to leave some jewelry in the house, and then finding the proper thief.

The first part was easy. Alec had seen Grace’s diamond necklace, valued at fifty thousand dollars. She kept it in the vault and wore it.

“I’m sure I’d lose it,” she said. “And it’s not only worth a lot of money, but it was my mother’s. It’s a real heirloom.”

“Bring it out just once,” he said, “Wear it for my birthday.”

“That would be nice,” she said.

Which gave him plenty of time in which to find his thief.

He hung around a few of the shadier bars for the better part of a week and dropped hints that he had a proposition for somebody who knew how to dispose of top-quality diamonds. In due time he was told that one Two-Story Murphy, known as Toosh, might be interested. Consequently Alec sat down one evening at a corner table in the OK Bar, dawdled over a beer and waited.

The man who presently sat down on the other side of the table had a long, narrow head, a long, high-bridged nose and hard, gimlet eyes. The eyes seemed to bore through Alec in the effort of judging him and making sure he was no cop, had no connection with cops, and was leary of them. Eventually Alec passed inspection.

“They tell me you want to talk to somebody about something,” the man said.

“Maybe,” Alec said. “You’re Two-Story Murphy. Is that right?”

“They call me Toosh. What do you want?”

“Know how to cash in on some diamonds? Say a necklace, for instance?”

“Let’s see it.”

“I haven’t got it, but I can tell you where you can get hold of it, and it’s going to be the easiest job you ever fell into in all your life.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“The necklace, which is insured for fifty thousand.”

Toosh nodded. “You want to collect the insurance, and I get the ice. How do I know this is on the level?”

“What are you scared of?”

“You,” Toosh said, “I don’t like you.”

“I don’t like you, either, but this is business. Interested?”

“What do I do?”

“I give you an address. I give you the time and place and date. The door of this house will be open, or at least unlatched, and you can walk in. That’s all. I tell you where the necklace is, and you pick it up and leave.”

“I’m not walking into no house. That’s dangerous. I’m a second-story man. What if somebody sees me?”

“Look,” Alec said. “You know what a modus operandi file is, don’t you? The M.O. You’re a second story worker, so if you walk in the front door, the police never even think of you. Never.”

“What if somebody sees me?”

“Then you walk out. You claim you rang the bell and nobody answered, so you opened the door. No crime, is it?”

Toosh thought for a long time. He tapped his fingers on the edge of the table. He lit a cigarette and tamped it out. He stroked his cheek. He stared at Alec. Then Toosh finally spoke.

“What’s the address, and when do I do it?”

“Seventeen Seventy-five West Lime. On September fourteenth. At exactly eight o’clock. Not a minute earlier and not a minute later. Is that clear?”

“I got a battery watch. Never fails.”

“How old is the battery?”

“Two months.”

“Okay. Just don’t lose it.”

“You trying to teach me about watches, or you got a job for me?”

“The timing’s important. At exactly eight o’clock you walk into this house and take the first doorway to the left. There, you’ll find the necklace on a coffee table in front of the couch. It’s a marble-topped table. The street light gives you enough illumination to see it. Pick up the necklace and examine it, and if you think it’s not worth the money, forget the whole business. But I guarantee that the necklace is worth fifty thousand, and maybe a lot more. So pick it up and go. All yours. I never see you again, and you never saw me in your life.”

“Give me ten bucks now, just to show you’re not kidding.”

Condon took out his wallet and removed a ten-spot.

“Here,” he said.

Toosh accepted the bill, got up and walked away.

Good, Alec told himself. All set. Grace called everything nice. Well, her murder would be nice, too.

For the next few months, preceding his birthday, he was a model husband. He attended Grace like a lovesick swain. When she lost her purse, he produced an extra one from his pocket.

“I had it with me, just in case you lost yours,” he said, handing it to her.

Grace took it gratefully.

“That’s nice,” she said.

“I like to make it easy for you,” he said. “I know you mislay things, but it’s because you’re dreamy and your mind is on higher matters. I don’t mind.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

On September fourth he reminded her of her promise to wear the necklace on his birthday.

“I won’t forget,” she said.

Nevertheless he reminded her again the next day, and every day thereafter.

The following Tuesday he found a broken piano leg in a deserted lot on the next street. He hefted the thick, heavy piece of lumber. Teak, he decided. It was strong, and the narrower turning at the base gave him an excellent grip. Perfect, he told himself. Not only a good weapon, but it obviated the risk of his being identified as the man who’d bought a mallet of the kind and type matching the splinters extracted from the dead woman’s skull.

He liked the phrase and, applying it to Grace and thinking of her as the dead woman, he pitied her and began almost to like her. Then he thought of Myra, and his determination hardened. He wanted Myra and he wanted Grace’s money, and he was going to have them both.

On the morning of his birthday Grace kissed him. He told her to get the necklace from the vault and he offered to go with her, but she refused.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll have it.”

She came home at noon and showed him the necklace.

“Better give it to me,” he said. “I’m afraid you might lose it.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Not this. Never.”

In the afternoon he went for a ride. He was excited and he kept telling himself that everything would go according to schedule. The only element over which he had no control was Toosh’s arrival. It Toosh failed, then Alec would have the somewhat risky job of disposing of the necklace. Otherwise, he was home free. He’d play the part of the distraught husband and he’d have nothing to tell the police except that he’d found his wife dead and the necklace gone. He’d state that he’d been in his studio all evening, which would be true. There would be no complications and no points on which he could be tripped up.

It was the servants’ night off and they’d tell the police that Mrs. Condon often forgot to close the front door. They’d say that Mr. and Mrs. Condon got along well and never quarreled. Friends would corroborate the statement. The police would also find out that Grace had taken her necklace from the vault specifically for her husband’s birthday. Alec would say she’d showed it to him at lunch, and that he’d been touched by her act.

The police might or might not dig up his affair with Myra. If they did, it would be obvious that he and Myra had broken up some time ago. If they went so far as to question her, he was reasonably certain that she’d cover up.

“Alec Condon?” she’d say. “I haven’t seen him in months, and what’s more, I don’t want to. After the way he threw me over, we’re finished.”

Around six that evening he garaged the car and entered the house via the front door. He unlatched it and called upstairs.

“Grace?”

“Oh, Alec!” she said. “Come up, won’t you?”

“I thought I’d go over to the studio for a little while.”

She came to the head of the stairs. “Now? On your birthday? When I’m wearing my necklace just for you? Please — at least come up and look.”

“Sure,” he said amiably, and he climbed the staircase.

She was wearing a long, velvet gown, and he blinked. “You’re all dressed up.”

“I have to be, when I wear this,” she said, touching the necklace. “Isn’t it nice?”

“Very.”

“I thought we might go out to dinner. Would you like to?”

He hesitated before answering. In order to give himself plenty of time to bum the weapon and possibly some other articles along with it, he’d counted on not “discovering” the body until midnight. Furthermore, he’d visualized it as being found in a dressing gown and he’d expected to say that she’d retired early, while he’d gone over to his studio. But now, seeing the way she was dressed, he saw that he’d have to change the original plan and advance his time schedule.

So be it, he thought. He’d manage.

“Dinner out will be fine,” he said. “I’ll make a reservation.”

“I already did,” she said. “Nine o’clock, at the Hermitage.”

Again he made his calculations. Kill her at a quarter of eight, then wait until eight for Toosh to arrive. Then over to the studio in order to clean up and dispose of the weapon. He’d discover the body at eight-thirty and call the police at once. Nothing wrong with that, provided Toosh came promptly. But could Alec rely on that? He decided he had to.

“You think of everything,” he said to Grace, with excessive politeness. “I’d better shower and get dressed.”

“That will be nice,” she said.

He agreed.

At seven-fifteen he took the teak piano leg from his closet. Barefoot, he tiptoed down the back stairs and, walking softly, he entered the big living room. He placed the weapon next to the couch, where it would be out of sight. Then, still moving stealthily, he returned to the rear stairs and went up to his room. At seven-thirty he emerged again, but noisily, whistling raucously.

“Grace?” he called out. “Ready?”

“But it’s so early. We can’t go yet.”

“I know. Let’s sit down in the living room and wait. I like it there.”

“That would be nice,” she said.

The living room, ample enough to seat a dozen guests comfortably, was in semi-darkness. The street lamp, casting a series of beams through three long windows, struck the coffee table, the near end of the couch and the mahogany secretary-desk. Grace started to switch on the lights, but he stopped her.

“No. Wait a minute.”

She obeyed, but in the dim light, her expression seemed strangely hesitant. “Why, Alec? Why?”

“Come here,” he said.

She advanced towards him, not quite smiling, sensing that he wanted something unusual from her and hoping it would be pleasant.

“Turn around a moment,” he said. “Your dress — isn’t it tom?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, “but—”

When her back was to him, he struck. She fell with scarcely a sound, and he clubbed her again, twice, until he was certain she was dead. Then he took the gloves from his pocket and leaned down to unfasten the necklace, but the gloves were too thick and too awkward for him to manipulate the delicate catch.

He took them off and noticed the blood on them. They’d have to be burnt, along with the piano leg. Luckily it was a cool evening, lighting a fire in his studio wouldn’t look suspicious, and if later on the police decided to take the fire apart and sift the remains, the gloves would be indistinguishable ashes and the weapon would be just one more charred log. He had nothing to worry about.

Nevertheless his hands shook. The light was bad and he couldn’t see how the catch worked. Suddenly, in a flash of rage, he ripped at the necklace and tore it off, scratching her skin and jerking up her head. It thumped down, and he staggered back.

He was breathing heavily and he began talking to himself. “Take it easy. Nothing to worry about. Everything is like she’d want it to be — real nice!”

At the word, he let out a guffaw of laughter, but he cut himself off at once. Still, the momentary outburst steadied him, and he went about the rest of his business as unemotionally as if it was a daily chore. Walk over to the coffee table and place the necklace on the edge, squarely in the light. Return to the couch and move it, so that the body will be screened off. Then sit down and wait.

It was twenty of eight. What do you do while you sit near the body of your wife and wait for a thief to come in and help himself to a piece of jewelry?

You take a memo pad from the desk and start to write down every item that remains to be done. But, before you put down the first word, you warn yourself not to. You have to dispose of the sheet with the writing on it, so what good is the memo? And besides, you have to worry about the pencil impression left on the second sheet. So you replace the pad and you check the items mentally, one by one. Then you look at your watch. Five minutes have gone by.

Alec thought of the money he’d inherit and of the stocks Grace had invested in. He tried to review them in his mind, starting with American Tel and Tel and ending up with Zenith. He was partway through when he heard the front door open. He ducked down behind a chair, and peeked over the top of it.

The man who came in was not Toosh. He was taller, heavier and somehow menacing. He hesitated at the entrance to the living room, glanced around and then spotted the necklace. He walked over and picked it up.

Alec, panic-stricken that the wrong man had the necklace and that Toosh would arrive later on and make a fuss, accuse Alec of breaking his word, stood up and called out sharply.

“You. What are you doing here?”

The man swung around to face the direction of the voice, and he hunched up his huge shoulders and peered into the half-light. He loomed up threateningly, as if he was spoiling for a fight. Nevertheless his words were almost apologetic.

“I didn’t expect anybody to be around,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I’m asking the questions. You walk into a house and grab the first thing you see. Put it back — hear me?”

The big man examined the necklace then glanced at Alec, still partly hidden in the darkness.

“Never mind names,” the guy said. “Toosh sent me.”

“What for?”

“You ask too many fool questions. Toosh got a job he couldn’t turn down. What’s it to you? You wanted somebody to lift this, and that’s me. Any objections?”

“Beat it,” Alec said. His voice came out in a croak, and he repeated the words, cracking them out hysterically. “Beat it. Get out!”

The big man didn’t move.

“You got a nerve,” he said. “Invite me in and then get mad over nothing. Something wrong around here?”

Alec didn’t answer. The big man snorted, held the necklace up to the light and inspected it carefully. Apparently it met with his approval. He muttered something, put the necklace in his pocket and went out. He closed the door gently.

Alec, staring into the darkness, smiled.

“I did it,” he said, with quiet satisfaction. “I did it. Me, Alec Condon — I’m free, and I’m rich!”

He felt a vast relief and he wanted to run, to shout or dance or go driving into the night. He thought of Myra waiting for him. Then he thought of the ordeal ahead, and he focused on the program that he’d set himself.

He went about his task efficiently. Move the couch back to where it belongs. Overturn a chair or two to make it look as if Grace had put up a struggle. Alec, surveying the scene and noting details, realized that he’d done precisely the right thing in tearing the necklace from her neck, for it built up the picture of violent robbery. He knocked over a lamp and heard the bulb break. So much the better.

All he had to do now was return to his studio, light a fire and drop the weapon and the blood-stained gloves in it. Until eight-thirty or so he’d stare at the flames and think of Myra. Then he’d return to the main house and start the crucial performance of pretending to find the body before notifying the police.

He felt supremely confident as he left the house via the back entrance, crossed the lawn to his studio and climbed the two steps to the small porch fronting the studio. He pushed open the door and reached for the switch. Before he touched it, lights were snapped on. In the blaze he saw Grace’s friends clustered at the rear of the big room.

“Surprise!” they called out. Then, on signal, they began to sing.

“Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you, Happy birth—” Then, as their eyes grew accustomed to the light and they saw him standing there, holding a broken piano leg and a pair of stained gloves, they stopped.

So did Alec Condon.