The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

The Average Murderer

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1967.

We came in after nine holes, Pete Decker and I, and sat across from each other at a table beside one of the windows overlooking the terrace and the golf course beyond. From where we sat, we could see a large part of the rolling course, seared in spots by the summer sun, with spaced and elevated greens like bright emerald islands in a fading sea. Fine old trees, allowed to survive where they didn’t intrude, cast ragged shadows on the clipped grass in a scattered, random pattern.

Inside the bar, it was cool and dark and quiet. Besides Pete and me, there was no one there except a bartender who brought us, without orders, the pair of gin and tonics that he knew we wanted. We sipped the drinks, which were astringently good with their strong taste of gin qualified by the delicate bitterness of quinine water, and looked out across the terrace from the dark coolness into the hot, white afternoon. We didn’t speak. In our silence, however, there was no unease, no conscious restraint. That’s the way it had been with Pete and me for many years. We always understood each other.

After a while, another man entered the bar from the terrace, set his golf bag against the wall inside the door, and walked over to the bar. His face was lean and brown and gave one, somehow, by a curious effect of antithesis, a feeling that it was either prematurely aged or preternaturally preserved. His body was also lean, the shoulders somewhat stooped, and the hair below his linen cap was hone white. He ordered a bourbon and water and drank it standing alone at the bar. There was about him an aura of withdrawal, a patina of astringent bitterness as apparent to the eyes as my tonic’s to the tongue. When he had finished his drink, as he turned to go, he saw Pete and me at our table and hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he nodded, a faint movement of the head that was barely discernible, and left the bar by the way he had come, reclaiming his golf bag by the door as he went.

“How long ago has it been?” Pete said.

“Ten years,” I answered. “Ten years last fall.”

“A lot has happened since then. It’s almost forgotten now.”

Pete was right. A lot had happened since Francis McRae stood trial for murder. Pete Decker, then the young county attorney who had prosecuted him, had achieved through politics a state-wide attention and acclaim that would have landed him in the governor’s chair, the youngest governor in our history, if he hadn’t had the bad luck to get the nomination in a year when opposition candidates all over the country rode in on the coattails of the big man upstairs. People we had known had gotten rich or gone broke or died or moved away, and wars that were not called wars had begun and ended. And I, Guy Powers, had moved away myself but had come home again to inherit my father’s business, and had gotten married. A lot had happened; a lot of good things, and a lot of bad.

You may remember the Healy-McRae case. That’s what it was called at the time, but Francis McRae actually stood trial alone. Rhoda Healy was charged as an accessory before the fact, and would have stood trial later if Francis McRae had been convicted. After he was acquitted, it was obvious that she could not have been his accessory, and so the charge against her was dropped. She could have been charged with the murder directly, of course, but the odds against convicting her, after Francis McRae’s acquittal, were far too great. A third possibility, a charge of collaboration as the partner of a second murderer unknown, was, in view of the evidence, or the lack of it, manifestly absurd.

To be exact, Francis McRae wasn’t acquitted. His first trial ended in a hung jury, and so did his second. After that, mainly because the county was reluctant to throw good money after bad in an effort that was beginning to look futile, the case was nol-prossed, and he went free.

The second jury, because it is somehow easy to follow a precedent, was split down the middle. The first was hung by one juror. The case for the people was soundly organized and expertly presented, as the eleven ‘guilty’ votes testified, but it was entirely circumstantial. It was based primarily on motive and opportunity, and the motive could be questioned, while opportunity, as any rational man knows, is not always exploited simply because it is present. In brief, there was room for reasonable doubt. That was my position, at any rate, and my position happened to be decisive, I was the twelfth juror.

Perhaps I should recapitulate the circumstances of the case. Rhoda Healy was a beautiful young woman with pale blonde hair, striking brown eyes, and flawless skin that looked always, the year around, as if it had been tanned by the summer sun. She was married to Neil Healy, the only son of extremely wealthy parents. Unfortunately, Neil was a kind of semi-invalid. The report was that he had suffered, as a child, a critical attack of rheumatic fever that had left his heart seriously impaired. However that may have been, he took precious good care of himself. He was, moreover, suspicious and demanding and abusive, a difficult person to get along with generally, and difficult to live with particularly. He did no apparent work, and was constantly under the observation and care of his doctor.

His doctor was Francis McRae.

Neil and Rhoda lived in a white-painted brick house that was absurdly large for a young couple with no children and, if gossip could be credited, no prospects of any. Francis habitually stopped at the house twice a week professionally, although he later admitted that most of these visits were no more than doubtful psychological placebos, and frequently he was at the house in the evenings socially, without his stethoscope, so to speak. He admitted, in fact, with what seemed a perverse determination to see himself hanged, that Neil’s heart was in much better condition than Neil liked to admit, and that his patient, with only reasonable care, might have anticipated many years of life. It was the meat of the prosecution’s case, you see, that Neil Healy, dying too slowly to give satisfaction, if dying at all, had been nudged along by Dr. Francis McRae with the blessing and perhaps the help of Rhoda Healy. Pete Decker argued brilliantly that Francis and Rhoda were having an affair, and he was able to present testimony and evidence that supported, but did not prove, his argument. In this matter, again his most effective witness was Francis McRae himself. Francis denied that he and Rhoda were having an affair, but he said flatly, with go-to-hell belligerence, that he damn well wished they were. That wish, in the minds of eleven jurors, was unequivocally father to the deed.

Anyhow, to drop back a bit, Neil Healy suddenly died. Considering his medical history and the persistent impression of his precarious condition, this was no great surprise. Francis McRae signed the death certificate, and it appeared briefly that events would proceed normally to the end that is our common denominator. But no such luck. The elder Healys got their wind up and demanded an autopsy. Rhoda Healy, as the widow, refused to authorize one, and Francis McRae, once more with that strange obduracy that threatened to damn him, supported her refusal. The elder Healys, however, were rich and locally powerful, and had connections. They were instrumental in securing a court order, and Neil was opened for inspection. It was discovered that he had been given, by one means of ingestion or another, a lethal dose of white arsenic. It was murder. No doubt about it.

Well, who has better opportunity to poison a man than the doctor who is caring for him? And if the doctor and the man’s wife are having an affair, who has a better motive? And if it’s all circumstantial, and damn thin at that, what of it? It’s neat, it’s logical, and in the hands of an expert like Pete Decker, it’s deadly. I was astonished when I was summoned for jury duty, but I was glad of the chance to sit in on the case. In fact, I was so eager to serve that I told a necessary lie. I said, in response to a stock question, that I had no objection to the death penalty. That was all right, however, because if I had been convinced of Francis McRae’s guilt, I’d have voted guilty, death penalty or no.

I’ve already indicated the ingredients of the people’s case, and there’s no good in detailing it. I’ll only repeat that the execution, thanks to Pete Decker, was brilliant. As a minority of one, I thought the defense was stronger, but it was often poorly handled, and it had the critical weakness of sometimes seeming fanciful. It was contended that a doctor, if he wasn’t a fool, could easily devise a better way to kill a patient than by feeding him arsenic. It was argued, the defendant’s wishes to the contrary notwithstanding, that there was not a shred of real evidence to show that his relationship with the victim’s wife had ever been more than platonic. It could hardly be denied, however, that the victim had been fatally dosed with white arsenic, and it was in an attempt to offer an alternative to the defendant’s guilt that the defense constructed its most fanciful hypothesis. Neil Healy, it was contended, had been a vindictive man; on occasion, a vicious man. He had frequently betrayed overt hostility toward his wife. Character witnesses were introduced to support the contention and testify to the evidence of hostility. So far, so good. Tenable, at least. From there on, however, the defensive position was pure conjecture. It was argued that Neil Healy, aware that he was dying, or at least believing that he was dying, had devised in a tortured and distorted mind the devilish scheme of poisoning himself in such a way as to excite suspicion and implicate the wife he had wrongly distrusted and hated. She was the one he wanted tried for murder. Dr. Francis McRae, because of his position, was merely the unfortunate victim of circumstances.

We, the jury, listened. Later we voted and split. Eleven went one way, and one the other. I, the splinter, was subjected to every kind of pressure short of violence by the block. They reasoned, they cajoled, they bullied, they sweat and cursed and tried again. But I didn’t waver. I took the English position of not proved, and there I stood. At last we gave up and went home, and it was shortly thereafter that I went away at the age of thirty. When I was brought back at the age of thirty-two by my father’s death, the case had been nol-prossed, finished. That was, as I had just said in response to Pete Decker’s question, ten years ago.

Pete was looking out the window and across the rolling golf course toward a giant elm that spread its branches between the earth and the sun.

“There’s a lot of nonsense repeated about murder and murderers,” he said.

“Nonsense?” I said. “How so?”

“Well, it grows out of the consensus that murder is the supreme violation of the individual’s rights. Inasmuch as it deprives him of the right to live, it negates all his rights to everything else. The murderer, therefore, is looked upon as an arch criminal, a deadly and constant threat to society. That, I say, is largely nonsense. The average murderer, if such a term is acceptable, is not a threat to society at all; he is, at one time or another, a threat to another individual. Do you follow me?”

“Conceding the distinction between individual and social threats, vaguely.”

“I simply mean that the average murderer is not a repeater. Driven by powerful motives to the supreme crime, he kills once and once only. His crime is the crisis of a lifetime. He is unlikely to reach such a crisis again. If he goes undetected and unpunished, it is probable that he will go on to lead a normal and perhaps useful life.”

“Wait a minute. How about your professional killers? How about your homicidal psychopaths who are driven to kill again and again?”

“They are the exceptions that prove the rule. You read most about these kinds of murderers, of course. Why not? They make sensational reading. Murder, Incorporated, for example. A long line of almost legendary murderers like Dr. Cream, for example. But these habitual killers are a tiny minority. They hog far more than their share of attention. Most murderers, even when caught, pass off the scene after creating a nominal disturbance and are soon forgotten. And consider, please, the multitude of murderers who are never caught, and the innumerable murders, indeed, that are never recognized as such. The murderers in these cases are not detected simply because they never kill again, and therefore do not multiply the chances of detection. Oh, I know. We repeat the old shibboleth that murder will out. That’s another bit of nonsense. The average murderer, having committed his murder, is no greater danger to the rest of us than the rest of us are to him or to each other. It’s ironical, isn’t it? The only time he is a menace is before he has committed his crime, which is precisely the time nothing can be done about him. Once his crime, his solo murder, has been committed, it is, even when he is caught, too late. In effect, we are simply closing the barn door after the horse is gone.”

“Do you suggest that the murderer, for all the danger he is, had just as well go free?”

“With the exceptions I have just allowed. I’m not talking about punishment, you understand. That’s another matter.”

Our glasses were empty. I signaled the bartender, and he brought us a full pair. Pete was still staring out the window toward the giant elm, as if its enduring strength brought him a measure of comfort.

“Are you thinking,” I asked, “of Francis McRae?”

“Not exactly.” He smiled slightly, and there was, I thought, something sad in the smile. “I’ll tell you something, after all these years, that may surprise you. I was never convinced of Francis’ guilt.”

“Oh, come off. You worked like a dog on the case. It was, on your part, a masterful job. You certainly gave no sign of entertaining doubts.”

“As prosecuting attorney, it was my job to present the best case I could. I have no regrets about that. Nevertheless, I was never convinced that Francis McRae was guilty. Oh, Neil Healy was murdered, all right. I never swallowed that fantastic alternative the defense offered. But he was not, I think, murdered by Francis McRae. Francis had no motive, you see.”

“What about the affair between him and Rhoda? God knows, you made a strong circumstantial case for it.”

“It was essential. Without that motive, I had no case at all. But I never believed it.” He lifted his glass and drank, still staring out the window. “She was having an affair, of course. But not with poor Francis, however much he wished for it. She was having an affair that was conducted with such discretion that nobody knew it, and precious few even suspected it.”

“Then you had better be grateful that I was on that first jury. If I hadn’t been, you’d certainly have convicted an innocent man.”

“I’m grateful. Please accept now my delinquent expression of gratitude.” He brought his eyes inside at last, and sat staring into his glass. “Did you ever wonder how you happened to be summoned for that jury?”

“Jurors are selected by lot. Everyone knows that.”

“True. But a lottery, by the right man in the right place, can be fixed.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you planted me on that jury?”

“I needed you. I needed you to keep me from deliberately committing a worse crime, however legal, than the one on trial.”

“That’s absurd. How in the devil could you have possibly anticipated that I’d hang the jury?”

“I just told you. The average murderer is not a repeater, not even when his second murder could be committed in perfect safety within the law by an ostensibly good citizen doing his duty.” He pushed his glass away, still half full, and stood up abruptly. “Well, I have to get on home. Goodbye, Guy. Give my best to Rhoda.”

He went out the same way Francis McRae had gone before him. I emptied my glass, then emptied his. As I told you in the beginning, we always understood each other.