The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

Murder of a Mouse

Originally published in Verdict Detective Story Magazine #5 1955.

“Justice is blind,” it’s said, and so is vanity. This is the story of a man who learned it for himself.

His name was Charles Bruce, and early in the morning he got out of bed and padded into the bathroom. Even barefooted in pajamas he gave, somehow, the effect of almost frightening arrogance and vanity. His overdeveloped ego was apparent in the set of his polished blond head that was hardly tousled after a sleepless night. It lay exposed in the clean lines of a face that might have made him a matinee idol if he had possessed even the rudiments of acting ability. His vanity was, as a matter of fact, almost a disease. It approached narcissism. It was the kind of vanity that, when it has no particular talents to exploit, acquires in frustration a special evil. It is frequently found in criminals.

Moving quietly and quickly, he shaved, brushed his teeth and hair, made all use of the bathroom that he would need to make. When he was finished, he removed a hypodermic syringe from the medicine cabinet and loaded the barrel with a potent anaesthetic he had acquired with considerable difficulty. Carrying the loaded syringe, he went back into the bedroom.

His wife Wanda slept in peace, her lips curved in the slightest smile over protuberant teeth. Her hair, fanned untidily on the white pillow around her head, was sparse and a kind of dun color, the color of a common mouse. It occurred to him, as he stood looking down at her with the syringe in his hand, that she possessed many characteristics that combined to achieve that mouse-like impression — the hair, the teeth, an overall scurrying timidity that seemed to view the world with bright, apprehensive eyes. A strange sort of woman to have a million dollars in her own name. Tragedies sometimes develop from incongruities like that — a woman like Wanda with that kind of money. This thought occurred to him, too, in those final moments before he acted, but the thought stimulated in him no pity, no abortive remorse.

She was sleeping on her back, her left arm curled up around her head on the pillow. Her hand was turned palm upward, which exposed the soft underside of her wrist, and this made the job easier, of course. He could see without difficulty, even standing erect, a linear bulge of pale blue vein. He sat down beside her on the edge of the bed, and she sighed and stirred but didn’t waken. Taking hold of the hand on the pillow and leaning his weight suddenly down upon her body, he slipped the sharp needle of the syringe into the soft flesh of her wrist and forced the plunger down.

She awoke with a sharp little cry, her eyes flying open with almost instantaneous understanding and terror, the understanding that what should have been the beginning of only another day was in fact the beginning of the last day. The initial cry repeated itself over and over, issuing from her throat like a pathetic, stereotyped plea, and her small body threshed futilely against the pressure of his. The anaesthetic injected, he placed both hands upon her shoulders and pinned her firmly, applying no more force than necessary and being careful not to dig into her flesh with his fingers. For he wanted no bruises. No signs of struggle.

The anaesthetic worked swiftly, and it was hardly any time at all until she slipped into an imitation of death that was, for her, a prelude to the real thing. He stood erect again, breathing deeply, sucking in and expelling air in a slow, rhythmic cadence. The needle, he saw, had torn the flesh of her wrist a little, but not seriously. The tiny wound would, as he had planned, be easily included in a later and larger one.

Turning away, he returned to the bathroom and ran cold water into the tub. While the water was running, he unwrapped a new razor blade and laid the shining and deadly bit of edged steel on the lavatory in readiness. Then, watching the water rise slowly in the tub, he considered details. How would she do it? Would she sit in the tub in the water? The idea of the bloody water staining the flesh of her body was repulsive to him, and he was certain that it would be repulsive to her. It was something she wouldn’t do, to sit in the water like that. No. She would be more likely to kneel beside the tub and let her arm hang over the edge. Or, better yet, she would sit. She would sit at one end, sidewise to the tub with her back against the wall, letting the arm hang over into the water. That would be the natural way, the comfortable way, the way she would probably do it if she were doing it of her own volition. Satisfied, he shut off the water taps and went back to her bed.

She was light in his arms. So very light. She must have weighed no more than a hundred pounds. Cradled in his arms, she looked like a sleeping child, her head dropping forward against his shoulder with an appearance of affection. Of this appearance, however, he was unaware. He was unaware of everything except the dominant necessity to do the thing right. In the bathroom, he set her on the floor in the position he had decided upon and recovered the tiny blade from the lavatory. He wiped it clean on a bit of tissue and put it between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. Holding it that way, between the two digits, he made the necessary quick incision in her left wrist and permitted the blade to drop free into the water. That’s what would happen, he thought. She would certainly let the blade drop into the water.

Around her submerged hand and wrist, the water reddened swiftly, the depth of the color fading at its spreading fringe to a sickly pink. He watched for a moment the spreading stain, and then he left the bathroom for the last time. He left her for the last time, too, of course, but he felt no particular sense of parting. Even in the intimacy of marriage, he had been aware of her only vaguely as a person. Primarily as a symbol, a source of supply, a kind of million dollar personification.

He moved unhurriedly around the bedroom, gathering his clothes. He dressed with his usual fastidious attention to details, and the result of all this careful attention was, strangely, an effect of casual perfection, as if he’d just thrown his clothes on anyway and they had somehow assumed just the right drape and lines. When he was dressed, he packed an expensive leather bag with additional items of clothing and set the bag on the floor by the door through which he would leave. Crossing the room from the door, he sat down at a desk between windows and wrote a few lines on a single crisp sheet of paper, the top sheet of Wanda’s stationery, which she’d touched, so that her prints were undoubtedly on it. He already had the lines formulated in his mind, and so he wrote swiftly: Dear Wanda, I’ve tried to be honest with you about Carol, and I’m trying to be honest now. We’ve decided to marry as soon as I can get free. I’m going to a hotel and will send later for the rest of my things. Please don’t try to contact me personally, but I’ll be happy to talk with your lawyer about a divorce. I assure you that I’ll cooperate fully, and I’m very sorry if this causes you any distress.

He signed the note with his first name only and then crumpled the paper in his hand and dropped it on the floor, as it might have been crumpled and dropped by someone in a powerful emotional reaction. By a mousy little woman, for example, whose handsome and adored husband was leaving her. A pathetic little woman, really, in spite of a million dollars, who could find, in the bitterness of desertion and in the distorted satisfaction of a terrible recrimination, the final strength it would take to slash her wrist.

His lips twitched with a touch of irony at the idea of recrimination, and he went over and picked up his bag and left, locking the door of the apartment behind him.

Walking down the hall to the elevator, he was a picture of ease and well-being, one of life’s lucky boys, broad shoulders and narrow hips accentuated subtly by fine tailoring. The rhythmic scissoring of his legs was crisp and certain but managed to convey an impression of effortless motion that contributed to a total effect of thoroughbred arrogance. He was a man whose mind was untroubled by intimations of misfortune or suffering or disgrace. He was a man to whom such things just didn’t happen.

The elevator boy, who secretly hated his guts, smiled pleasantly with a professional regard for the side of the bread the butter was on. “Good morning, Mr. Bruce. Leaving us for a while?”

Charles glanced down at the bag in his hand and nodded shortly. “Yes.”

His incisive monosyllable discouraged further questions, and the operator, watching the straight back, almost military in bearing, cross the lobby downstairs and exit through the street doors, compensated for the feeling of inadequacy Charles always gave him by calling him mentally a conceited bastard.

Outside on the curb, Charles waited a few moments until he caught the eye of a cruising cabby. “Ambassador Hotel,” he said, and relaxed in the back seat. The cabby shot a glance at his reflected face in the rear view mirror, and he also, like the elevator boy, used mentally the word bastard. The term was prompted by a kind of impersonal envy, however, and was qualified by the word lucky instead of conceited. Some guys have all the luck. Looks and dough. Nothing on their minds but spending the next buck on the next beautiful dame.

As a matter of fact, Charles wasn’t thinking of money and women at all. Not that he didn’t think of them quite often. It was just, at the moment, that he was absorbed by another matter that had gained temporary dominance. Sitting there in the back seat of the cab, watching through glass the streets that assumed in the early sun a sparkling, deceptive look of cleanliness, he wondered how long it took for a life to drain away through a neatly opened artery in the wrist. He had for a moment a very vivid vision of darkening water, but he was, apparently, not disturbed by the vision. Looking out at the sparkling streets he didn’t see, he even smiled a little now and then.

He was admitted to the lobby of the Ambassador by a doorman six and a half feet tall (all the doormen at the Ambassador had industrious pituitarics; this gave them a special look; in their vivid uniforms, a kind of Queen’s Guard look) and he was relieved of his bag by a bellhop who looked like a sophomore out of the best frat in a good college, which was another calculated specialty of the Ambassador. At the desk, he was subjected to a cool appraisal by a cool clerk who might have been, from his appearance, a controlling stockholder in the corporation that owned the string of fancy hotels of which the Ambassador was one. Charles did not mind the appraisal. He was hardly aware of it. He was so used to acceptance, even privilege, that the possibility of anything else had ceased to be a concern in his life. He signed for a room and ascended ten floors with the bellhop.

Alone in his room, he unpacked his bag and disposed of the contents neatly. Then he put the bag in the closet and sat down for a cigarette. Reviewing his activity dispassionately to that point, he could think of nothing that he had done or failed to do that was sufficient to crack his calm assurance. He had proceeded throughout with bold strokes. Except for the one major point of murder, he had been perfectly open. He had mentioned Carol in the note, and his affair with her could be verified by several parties, although he had been careful that Wanda herself had known nothing of it. He had been so open that no one, not even the most obtuse investigator out of Homicide, if it came to that, would suspect him of murdering Wanda for motives that could so easily be pinned on him. But he didn’t for a moment really think that it would ever come to Homicide. The alternate was too credible. An ugly, neurotic little woman like Wanda and a man like him. Suicide, indeed, would be the only really credible disposition of the case.

But wouldn’t she have taken steps to exclude him legally from inheritance? Wouldn’t she have seen to it, in the end, that he could never touch that beautiful million? This, of course, was ridiculous. He smiled dreamily into the thin blue smoke of his cigarette, thinking what any competent psychiatrist would do to a contention like that. A shattered woman committing suicide in the intensity of neurotic anguish simply doesn’t take time to tie up loose ends. If she was capable of that she would never commit suicide at all. No. She would do it as it would be assumed that Wanda had done it, quickly and blindly and without rational thought.

Having been open to this point, the strategy would be, of course, to continue that way. No reason at all, for example, why he shouldn’t see Carol. As a matter of fact, it would strengthen his position as a man who had not tried to dissemble and had nothing to hide.

Passing to Carol, his thoughts lost their cool quality of detachment. They acquired, as they always did when she was their subject, heat and a certain wildness, reverting now to the remembrance of past instances in his relationship with her, and now pressing forward hotly to the anticipation of more to come. Carol, beautiful and hard and calculating. Carol, his kind of woman, stone and fire, remembered and anticipated in a hundred positions and places. In the soft and scented and designed clusk of a dozen fancy lounges with a thin stem of brittle glass between her scarlet-tipped fingers and her lips glistening from the touch of a martini or a daiquiri or a Pink Lady or whatever it happened to be at that particular time. In sand and sun with her golden-brown body barely broken by flimsy scraps. In other places when it was broken by nothing whatever.

At this moment she would be in bed, still asleep, her heavy pale hair shining on the pillow, her exciting body shadowed slightly by a haze of sheer nylon. Her lips would be parted, just barely parted, with bright enamel just visible between them, and the shadows of lashes that were real would be cast below closed lids. The imagery of her lying there like that was so strong in his mind, so real and so prescient, that he forgot completely, for a while, the image of the other woman who was still a pertinent factor in his life, the one sitting by the tub with her arm dangling in red water. The one who also slept, but differently and more deeply.

He sat in the room for perhaps thirty minutes, and then he went out and caught a cab, and within another thirty minutes he was ringing the bell of the door behind which was the reality of his imagery. It took her a long time to open the door, verifying the validity of his thoughts of her asleep, and when she finally came, she had pulled over the haze of nylon a second haze that did a little, but not much, to diminish transparency. He went in, and she closed the door behind him, and they met and fused in a spontaneous generation of heat that was a kind of emotional combustion. Her lips were restless and hungry, her hands and body aggressive in conquest.

After a while, hunger somewhat abated, she said, “Did you do it, Charles?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s done.”

“She’s dead?”

“Certainly. You can’t bleed freely very long and not die.”

“Was it hard?”

“No. It was simple. Very easy. It went just the way I planned it.” He went over to a table and helped himself to a cigarette from a silver box. He made no motion to light the cigarette but stood revolving it slowly between the fingers of his two hands. “The hard part is coming up. It’ll take guts, darling.”

She followed him to the table and took the cigarette from him. She carried it to her lips between index and middle fingers and waited with the cigarette still between the fingers until he had picked up the lighter that matched the box and furnished flame. She exhaled smoke in a long plume, and her lips curled around the cigarette in a quiet little smile that suggested some kind of amusing esoteric knowledge.

“Don’t worry about my guts,” she said.

He took one of her hands and held it palm up, stroking the palm slowly and softly. “Are you sure? Are you quite positive you can take it? Her supposed suicide will create a hell of a stink. We’ll be torn to shreds. You know the things that will be said. Lots of people will call us a pair of murderers. Morally, that is.”

“Morally?” She lifted shoulders to indicate what she thought of morally. “What about legally?”

“Legally we’re safe enough. They can’t substantiate anything by suicide. I doubt if they’ll even seriously consider anything but that.”

“What about the money?”

“It’s all right, I tell you. The only thing that’s left is to carry the thing through. If you play it wrong, if you say the wrong things or break down the least little bit, we’re sunk. If we give them nothing more than they have now, they can never definitely establish anything against us even if someone gets an idea or two.”

She turned away from him and crossed to the windows. Against the light, the double haze of nylon was nearly dissolved. He stood behind her, watching her, the pulses in his temples and throat throbbing suddenly and painfully like a trio of malignancies. She looked out into the bright light and spoke to him over her shoulder.

“Look, darling. You talk about my guts. You talk about my breaking down. I thought you knew me better than that. I thought you knew me as well as I’ve ever been known by anyone on earth. I guess I was mistaken, though, and so I’d better set you right. To look at me now you might not realize it, but I was one of seven kids. My old man was a leery bum, and my old lady was a whining slattern. I’ve eaten so damn much bread and potatoes just to fill my belly that I never want to see a potato or a loaf of bread again. I’ve worn cast-off clothes that weren’t fit to wear when they were new, and I’ve had rags against my skin that were so damn rough they gave me gall. I got me a philosophy early in life, darling, and there isn’t anything in it, not one damn thing except what happens in bed, that you aren’t supposed to pay income tax on.”

She turned suddenly and faced him. “Look at me. I’m soft, aren’t I? I’m lots of fun in the right time and place, aren’t I? Just a soft, generous girl? If you got that idea, you’re crazy. I want you all right, darling, I want you like hell, but I want you with a million bucks, and I wouldn’t have you for keeps any other way. Now forget about my guts, darling. And forget about my caring a damn what anyone thinks or says.”

He went over to her then, and she was soft, as he had known perfectly well she was, and she was also hard, hard as a diamond beneath the softness, and he had really known that perfectly well, too. Not that he cared. He preferred it that way. It only made him want her more, because he was, after all, just the kind of man who would want a woman like that.

They used up an hour, and when he was ready to leave, he said, “I mentioned your name in the note. That means someone will probably be here on his way to me. When he comes, whoever he is, tell him I’m at the Ambassador, and I’ll be there waiting for him. Open trail leading nowhere, that’s the strategy, darling.”

“When do you think they’ll find her?”

“It’s our maid’s day off, so possibly not until morning. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all set up for them, whenever it is.”

She touched the tip of a finger to her lips and his. “Okay. Whoever it is and whenever it is, I’ll send him on.”

He left her with that and went back to the Ambassador, and it was about nine hours later when he heard her voice again. The next time was on the telephone, and he was just thinking about going down to the dining room for some dinner when the bell rang.

He lifted the instrument and said hello, and she said, “He was here, darling. He just left.”

“Already? Who found her? How did it happen?”

“I didn’t ask. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to sound too curious about things like that.”

“All right. I’ll wait for him here.”

He hung up and waited, and it was only a short time before the desk rang up to tell him that there was a man from the police to see him. He told the desk to send the man up, and he waited the last couple of minutes in the open doorway to the hall.

The cop was a thin, middle-aged man with shoulders stooped almost to the point of deformity, and this seemed to make his arms hang down farther than normal, which gave him, in that one respect, a rather simian appearance. He took off his hat politely and spoke with a tired voice.

“Mr. Bruce?”

“Yes. Are you the policeman?”

“That’s right. Name’s Benson.”

“Come in, please. I’ve been wondering what on earth you could want with me.”

Benson walked into the room and turned as Charles closed the door.

“I’m afraid it’s bad news. Your wife, Mr. Bruce. She’s dead.”

“Dead!” Charles gave a passable impression of shock. “She was all right this morning when I left. That is, I assume she was. As a matter of fact, she was still sleeping, and I didn’t disturb her.”

“Maybe you disturbed her a hell of a lot more than you thought, Mr. Bruce. Anyhow, she’s dead.”

Charles ran fingers through his hair and worked his features into a simulation of concern. “See here, Mr. Benson...

“Sergeant.”

“All right. Sergeant. The point is. I may be somewhat responsible if Wanda’s done anything...

“We found the note.”

“I see. Well...

Benson cut across his words with a gusty sigh and said with quiet bitterness, “Look, Mr. Bruce. I’m not the one to explain it to. I’m just a guy running an errand. There’s a big-shot lieutenant down at Headquarters wants to talk with you. He’s the one, so if you’ll just come along.”

“Very well. I suppose there are certain formalities in these matters.”

“That’s right, Mr. Bruce. Formalities.”

It was a short ride to Headquarters. The traffic was heavy, but Benson threaded the police car through it expertly, and they were there quickly. They found the lieutenant in a small room sparsely furnished with essential items, and he was a younger man than Benson, although he ranked him, and this might have been a reason for Benson’s tired and quiet bitterness. The lieutenant’s name turned out to be Tomlinson. He had a hard square face and competent square hands, and his brain was fairly effective, too. Next to being a lieutenant, he was proudest of knowing about things like predicate nominatives and how to use them. He studied books at home.

He introduced himself. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Bruce. I’m Lieutenant Tomlinson of Homicide.” Homicide, he said. So it had come to that so soon. After the initial shock, Charles wasn’t especially concerned, however. He imagined, thinking about it, that probably all suicides were at least perfunctorily investigated by Homicide.

He sat down and said, “Sergeant Benson tells me my wife is dead, Lieutenant, but that’s all I know. I wish you would be kind enough to explain.”

“Certainly, Mr. Bruce. I’ll explain some things to you, and you can explain some to me. That’s why you’re here. Your wife apparently committed suicide.”

Charles sagged a little in his chair, doing it quite effectively. He was silent for a moment, staring at the floor, before he spoke again.

“I was afraid of that, with the police concerned and all.”

“Was that the only reason you were afraid of it? Because the police were concerned?”

“No. Sergeant Benson has told me that you found my note, so you must be aware of my grounds for fear. I may say in defense, however, that I never really thought she’d do it.”

“Do what?”

Charles let his eyebrows rise in a brief expression of cold surprise. “Why, kill herself because I left her, of course.”

“You think she did that?”

“It certainly seems very obvious.”

Lieutenant Tomlinson shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so.” He kept on shaking his head, and his face seemed suddenly much older. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think she killed herself at all. I think she was killed. Possibly by you, Mr. Bruce.”

The sudden violent constriction in his chest was a kind of pain that Charles had never known. It was as though a powerful centripetal force had closed in upon his heart, and he wanted to cry out with the pain, but nothing of what he felt showed in his face. Not the least indication of it. There was nothing in his face but icy and arrogant disdain.

“You’re insane,” he said.

“Perhaps.” Tomlinson turned side-wise and said, “Mr. Creely.”

That was the first instant that Charles was aware of a fourth person in the room. The man called Creely stood up from his chair against a wall and came forward. He was about the same height as Charles but much thinner, with narrow shoulders, and he must have been twenty years older. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit that was obviously expensive, and he used the cane in his right hand, leaning upon it heavily, as if it were utilitarian. His face was deeply lined, beginning to sag a little from its frame.

Tomlinson said, “Mr. Creely’s the one who found your wife.”

Charles stood to face Creely. “How could that be so? I believe I know all my wife’s friends, and this man is a stranger. If she was dead in the apartment, who let him in?”

“No one let me in, Mr. Bruce.” Creely’s voice was dry and precise. “I let myself in. With this.”

He extended a hand, palm up, and lying in the palm was a key. Charles lifted incredulous eyes from the key to Creely’s face, and he experienced a feeling that might have been terror when he saw the steady, virulent hatred in the man’s eyes. It’s always a shock to see hatred in the eyes of a stranger.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t you?” Creely’s laugh was an arid whisper. “Surely a man like you has no difficulty in understanding the significance of a key to a lady’s apartment. I used it discreetly, Mr. Bruce. Only on those occasions — rather frequent, I must say — when you were using the one you have to another lady’s apartment.”

Tomlinson cut back in, speaking slowly in a kind of cadence timed by the shaking of his head, “Your wife was apparently having an affair, Mr. Bruce, just as you were. Mr. Creely has been able to establish pretty definitely that he and your wife planned marriage. It seems she intended to tell you within a few days.” He stopped talking, but his head kept right on shaking, and after a moment his voice picked up the tempo again. “So you see, Mr. Bruce, it isn’t likely your wife would have killed herself because you’d left her. It isn’t likely she’d have cared at all.”

That was the wholly incredible thing. The thing that had never seriously crossed his mind. That she wouldn’t care. Most of all, that she had planned to leave him — him! — for a gray, sagging, crippled specimen like Creely. And in the final phase of his destruction, with the terrible realization that the police would pin it on him since they knew Wanda was not a suicide, it was the cruel cut to his vanity that hurt him most. It actually drove him a little mad.

It took both Tomlinson and Benson to pull him off Creely.