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

Originally published in Manhunt, December 1955.

Chapter 1

Peter Roche first saw her the afternoon of the day before Christmas. When he got home, she was sitting in front of the fire in the library with Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She drew on the cigarette, drank from the glass, and exhaled a thin blue cloud of smoke. He learned that it was a characteristic trick of hers, that sequence — drag, drink, blow. She nodded a headful of mahogany curls and looked at him with eyes that seemed black in the room but turned out later in the light to match almost perfectly the color of her hair.

“You must be Peter,” she said.

Her voice was throaty, as warm and mellow as the Scotch that lubricated it, as soft and lazy as the blue smoke it rode on.

He gave her a twisted grin and said, “Why must I be Peter? Why can’t I be Paul?”

She shook her head, the mahogany curls dancing and shimmering. Firelight and shadows flickered across her face.

“I know you’re Peter because your father told me all about you. ‘Only son,’ he said. ‘Slim and handsome and clever as the devil and no damn good,’ he said. You’re twenty-eight. You flunked out of medical school four years ago, and you haven’t done anything constructive since. Last year it cost five grand to buy you out of an affair with a predatory blonde. To coin an expression, you’re a cad, sir. I think I’m going to like you very much.”

“Do you? That’s nice. I’m a guy who likes being liked by beautiful women. I also like to know their names. You see, the possibility of being sued or blackmailed by a woman whose name I don’t know is rather embarrassing. It’s a weakness in my social adjustment.”

She went through the smoke and Scotch sequence, her moist lips curling in a sly kind of smile. Beyond the drifting veil of smoke, her dark eyes glittered with malicious humor.

“My name is Harriet, and I’m usually called Etta, but you may call me Mother.”

He stood watching her, giving his adrenals time to slow down and resume normal production. She lay back in the rich brocade embrace of the big fireside chair with all the audacious presumption of a cowbird in the nest of a warbler. Although she didn’t move, she somehow gave the impression of stretching, of luxuriating sensuously in the flexing of flat muscles. A sheath of black wool was tailored to the contours of her body. His eyes descended nylon to wriggling toes. Her discarded shoes, a pair of thin soles with essential straps and incredible spikes, were half buried in shaggy white pile.

“I’m an extremely regressed adult,” he said. “I need a lot of mothering.”

“Maybe we can make a game of it.”

“Good. It ought to be more fun than canasta.”

She laughed. It was a soft and gauzy scrap of sound that seemed to ascend and fade and thin to nothing. It was as if she had blown out more smoke through the vapors of Scotch.

“I’m beginning to think I may get my kicks out of having a son. Such a convenient method, too. Ready made and ready for love. I’m really quite relieved. I though you might hate me.”

“So I might. I’ll let you know the exact state of my feelings when I learn what this is all about. Are you trying to tell me that you and Senator Big are married?”

“Senator Big? Is that what you call him? It has a disrespectful sound. Perhaps you’re not such an affectionate son, after all.”

“Affectionate with the Senator? You’d just as well try being affectionate with a party caucus.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t found him so unresponsive. Generally tender, I’d say, with brief interims of passion. Just enough to make things interesting.”

“With you, I admit, it would be easier. The Senator always had a fine eye.”

“Thank you.”

“Where is he now, by the way?”

“Upstairs lying down.”

He started where he’d stopped on his other tour of inspection, with her wriggling roes, and reversed his way back up nylon and black wool to her mahogany eyes. They were still glittering with malice, but he had a feeling that the malice was not integral, was only assumed as a temporary attitude until his own was determined.

“So you really are married,” he said softly. “You really hooked the old boy.”

“That’s a rather crude way to put it, but essentially correct.”

“Pardon my crudity. You married him, of course, because you love him as a noble servant of the people. All you want is to share the life of a great man.”

She laughed again, and this time it was a freer and fuller laugh, filled with the solid stuff of genuine amusement. “Well, let’s not go to the other extreme. After all, he’s only a State senator, not national, and I understand he’s served certain vested interests a hell of a lot better than he has the people. I’d say my position is somewhere around the middle.”

“What’s in the middle? The neat little fortune the Senator’s acquired quite incidentally from his long years of service?”

She lifted her glass and looked into it. “Do you find that thought disturbing? Well, no wonder. It must be quite a shock to find yourself no longer sole heir. My glass seems to be empty. Would you mind filling it? Scotch and soda.”

“Certainly, Mother. Ice?”

“No ice. Just a dash of soda.”

He walked over and got her glass and carried it to a portable bar that had been wheeled in. He made hers heavy and one straight for himself and carried them back to her. She reached up and took the one that was hers, and her fingers in the small action trailed lightly across the back of his hand. They were long and slender, and their touch suggested exceptional talents.

“I’m curious,” he said.

She looked up at him at a sharp angle through thick lashes. “About what?”

“You and the Senator. How you managed it.”

“It was voluntary on his part, I assure you. As a matter of fact, he was quite urgent about it. It’s true that he placed himself in a vulnerable position, but I was not compelled to take advantage of it.”

“Maybe that’s lucky for you. Others have tried from an advantage and failed. When he bought off my blonde last year, he showed remarkable skill in the details of the transaction. He knocked her down from ten grand to five and boxed her in so she can’t ever come back for more. Experience, I suspect.”

“Poor girl. Obviously out of her class.” She smiled lazily and tilted Scotch and soda through the smile. “Do you have a cigarette?”

He gave her one and lit it and watched her swallow smoke. She sat there wriggling her toes and alternating Scotch and smoke, and he used the time to empty his own glass. When it was empty, he carried it back to the bar.

“If you’ll excuse me now,” he said. “I think I’ll go upstairs.”

Depositing her glass and crushing her cigarette in a tray, she stood on stocking feet and reached slowly for the ceiling, stretching with a supple twisting of her body.

“Of course. But you haven’t kissed me. Isn’t it proper for a son to kiss his mother? I know so little about such things. I’m afraid you’ll just have to take the initiative until I learn.”

Now there was something in her eyes besides the glitter of malice, a smoky haze that looked as if it might have risen behind them from her cigarette. Her smile was still lazy, but also provocative, and he went over and covered it. At first her lips were very still, yielding to pressure, and then they opened and responded with a soft expulsion of smoked Scotch and a queer little moan, and before it was finished it was such a motherly kiss as even Freud had never dreamed of. After a minute, she broke away and walked across the room to windows covered by heavy green drapes. She parted the drapes with one hand and stood looking out through the cold glass into the sudden winter’s dusk, and he stood and watched her against the glass, and as he watched, a light came on beyond the lawn, and between the light and the glass the snow slanted down in large, wet flakes.

Turning, he walked to the door.

“Peter,” she said.

He stopped and looked back over his shoulder, and she had turned away from the windows, letting the drapes fall together across the glass behind her to shut out the night and the falling snow. Her lips were parted in a little smile that possessed a quality of deadliness, and her eyes were shining.

“About my position in the middle,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you. I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out.”

Chapter 2

The sun was white and hot, just past the zenith. The trees on the lawn stood still in the breathless day. From his room in the east wing of the house, Peter could look down upon the stone terrace that covered part of the ground area between the east wing and the west. From its high place in the sky, the sun shot a sharp angle between the wings. White light rebounded from the colored, glittering flags. Down there on a bright red chaise longue on wheels, Etta lay stretched on her stomach with her head cradled on her arms. She was wearing a pair of white twill shorts that looked from a distance like a small part of Etta that hadn’t been previously exposed to the sun. Her body above and below the brief break was the color of cocoa. On a round wrought-iron table beside the lounge was a tall glass. The glass had parallel red, blue, and yellow stripes painted around its circumference from top to bottom. It was empty.

Carrying a tennis racket, Peter went downstairs. He stopped inside long enough to mix Tom Collinses in glasses to match the one on the table on the terrace and then went out onto the terrace with the racket under his arm and a glass in each hand. Etta didn’t look up. Her body was covered with a thin film of clear oil. The oil gave her skin a soft, shiny look like satin. He set the lull glasses on the table beside the empty, and Etta raised her head slowly and looked at him over a shoulder. Her eyes had a glazed, unfocused look, as if she had wakened from some very deep sleep.

“Hello, darling,” she said.

“I brought you a cold drink. Tom Collins.”

“Thanks. You’re a very thoughtful son.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Is this the boy who called me Mother? What’s the matter, Peter? Feeling sensitive?”

Sitting beside her on the edge of the lounge, he leaned down and touched her lightly with his lips just below the short hair on her neck. A tiny shiver moved through her skin peripherally from the point of contact, and she rolled over and swung her legs off the opposite side.

“I think you’d better hand me my Collins, darling.”

He handed it to her, and she took a swallow and looked at him across the red interval with a little smile twisting her lips.

“Playing tennis?”

“If you’ll play with me.”

“In this heat?”

“You play better when it’s hot.”

“All right. I’ll get my shoes and racket.”

She went inside, carrying her drink. He waited on the lounge and sipped his own. The sunlight bounced and hung shimmering above the flags, and he could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes. He drained his glass, letting the last fragment of ice slip down into his mouth. It melted immediately on his tongue. Time was white and hot and utterly silent, and it did not move. In eternal, unmoving Time only the things moved that were not eternal — the earth and the sun and Etta on the terrace behind him.

“Are there balls at the court?” she said.

“Yes. I left some there yesterday.”

“Okay. I’ll bet you ten on a set.”

“You’re on.”

They went down across the back lawn to the court and began volleying for service, and she won after a couple of minutes, and he knew he was in for a time because her service was very good. She reached high for the ball, rising on her toes and arching back for power, and her racket came up and over in a strong, clean sweep that met the ball at just the right instant of its descent to send it like a bullet over the net at a shallow angle that was mean. The ball skittered off the packed clay with practically no bounce. In all the games they played, he never broke her service.

It was so hot. Sweat kept running down into his eyes to impair his vision, and between the sweat and ascending heat waves, the proximate earth was a blurred distortion. Across the net, Etta’s cocoa body moved and altered and took a thousand shimmering shapes. He could see, even at a distance through the bright haze, how perspiration quickly dampened and darkened her white shorts where they stretched tight over her hips. It was hot as hell, and hell was too hot for tennis. They traded games on services to deuce and then decided to call it quits.

Beside the court was a shed in which were kept a roller and a marker and odds and ends of equipment. They went over and dropped onto the grass in the parallelogram of shade that the shed cast, and Etta lay back with her arms folded up under her head.

“A man could die in heat like this,” he said.

“Die?” Her voice had a soft, crooning quality. “Not you, Peter. Not you and not me. Not for a long, long time. Not until we’ve done all the things I want us to do.”

He looked down at her, and her eyes were wide open and staring up into the sky with shining intensity, as if, by sheer mental effort, she were projecting herself into the hard, blue brilliance. A trickle of perspiration moved slowly downward from the hollow of her throat. He leaned over her, blocking her vision of the sky, and the strangely provocative scent of oil and sweat came up from her into his nostrils.

“I’ve been wondering about something,” she said.

“About what?”

“I’ve been wondering how many men have died because they carried too much insurance.”

“You’d better quit wondering. Lots of women had wished they had — after it was too late. It’s usually pretty obvious, you know. They hardly ever get away with it.”

“I know. So I’ve been wondering about something else, too. I’ve been wondering how many men have died because their wives carried too much insurance.”

“Is that supposed to make sense?”

“It could. Would you like to hear how? It’s just a hypothetical case, of course. A kind of game.”

“I like games.”

“Well, suppose, for instance, that I had a policy for fifty thousand, double indemnity. Suppose I were to die in an automobile accident. The Senator’s the beneficiary, so he gets paid off. One hundred grand.”

“Very sacrificial of you. Rather wasted, though, I’d say. The Senator doesn’t really need it.”

“Wrong, Peter. He needs it, all right. His affairs aren’t in as good shape as you think they are. That’s why the policy is essential. For you, Peter. Because I’d be dead, naturally, and you’d be sole heir again.”

“Just wait for the old man to die?”

“That might be a long time. By that time, he might have spent the hundred grand or found another heir. On the other hand, a man loses a beautiful young wife that way, it might crack him up. He might commit suicide.”

“And I’d be sole heir. I’d be something else, too. I’d be a natural for the rap. Remember what I said about wives hardly ever getting away with it? That goes for sons, too.”

“You have no imagination, darling. You’re a charmer, and I love you, but you have absolutely no imagination. When the Senator died, you’d be somewhere else, of course. Somewhere with people. There’s nothing like an alibi to keep you clear.”

“Sure. I can see that. So I do it by sticking pins in his image. I do it by black magic.”

“Wrong. You do nothing at all. You know, there’s a certain advantage to being dead, Peter. No one suspects you of anything but being dead.”

Her eyes were slightly averted, staring past him into the brilliant sky. They were lash-shadowed and sleepy and filled with the soft stuff of dreams.

“That’s quite a hypothetical case,” he said. “You must have spent a lot of time on it.”

She smiled faintly at the sky. “I like to dream. It amuses me.”

“Has it amused you to locate a body to leave for yours when you die in this accident?”

“That should be no problem. In the right kind of accident, almost any body would do. I’d only need a dentist.”

“A dentist?”

“Yes. Because of teeth, you see. That’s the way they identify bodies that can’t be recognized.”

“He’d have to be an accessory. How do you go about picking up a dentist to act as accessory to murder? Just canvass the prospects? Insert an ad in the help-wanted column, maybe?”

“He’d have to be picked carefully. It would take time, because he’d have to be developed. Persuaded.”

“I can imagine the persuasion, and I don’t like it.”

“Don’t be childish, darling.”

“What about afterward? Just send him about his business? Just say thanks and good-by?”

“Something like that. With reasonable compensation for his services, of course. An accessory to murder doesn’t make trouble, darling. He can’t afford to.”

He leaned back and stared off down the slope of earth beyond the tennis court to where it dropped away above the river. The drop was almost perpendicular, and the river was hidden at the foot of the bluff, but he could see on the other side the wide fields of the bottoms stretching eastward to a chain of low hills. The fields and the foliage on the hills looked parched and faded in the hot, white light.

He was thinking of the suburban road that ran in front of the house. He was remembering that the road and the bluff converged downstream. The road came downgrade to the bluff and turned sharply to parallel it for a short distance. An inadequate rail fence had been erected along the bluff, but a car coming down the grade and failing to make the sharp turn would surely crash right through.

It was a good place for a bad accident, he thought.

Chapter 3

The street door of the bar closed behind him with a whisper. He stood in beige pile, his pupils adjusting to shadows, and listened to the sounds of brittle glass in contact, the rise and fall of small talk over cocktails, a subdued blue voice against a background of strings. Then he saw Etta looking at him from a booth across the room. She lifted her glass by its slender stem in a brief salute, and he went over and sat down in the booth across from her.

“You’re late, darling,” she said.

“Sorry. I’ve been having my teeth cleaned.”

She had lifted her glass to drink again, but the action was suspended suddenly with the edge of crystal just touching her lips. Her breath stirred slightly the gin and vermouth, and her eyes, wide and still and black in the contrived dusk, stared at him across the golden surface. After a moment, with an odd little sigh, she tipped the glass and set it down again.

“Poor dear. It’s always such an ordeal going to the dentist. You’d better have a drink at once.”

“I could use one, all right.”

He signaled a waiter and asked for bourbon and water. When it arrived, he drank half of it quickly and sat looking down into the remainder, turning the glass with fingertips around suspended cubes.

“I’ve been looking for a good dentist myself,” she said. “Would you recommend yours?”

“I think he’d do. I’m very particular about dentists, and I had this one investigated thoroughly.”

“What’s his name?”

“Foresman. Norton Foresman. He’s in the Clinical Center Building.”

“Perhaps I should arrange an appointment with him.”

“It might be a good idea. I’m sure he’d appreciate it. He needs the money.”

“Yes? I thought dentists were generally prosperous.”

“Oh, his income’s good enough, but his expenditures are out of proportion. Unfortunately, he has expensive tastes.”

“Such as?”

“Such as women and horses and the Riverview Casino.”

“Has he been losing?”

“He and the horses. The women and the casino are way ahead. You know Jeb Shannon? He owns Riverview, and he’s holding a bundle of Foresman’s paper. About eight grand’s worth. I’ve dropped some to Shannon myself, and I know how he operates. He’s a tough guy with connections, and he doesn’t like to wait too long. With Foresman, it’s getting to be almost too long.”

“I see. It means the doctor would probably be susceptible.” She drained her glass and sat smiling quietly at the exposed olive. “What does he look like, Peter? Tell me some more about Dr. Norton Foresman.”

“He’s tall. About two inches taller than me. He’s vain and arrogant, and I have a feeling that he could be dangerous. Ladies’ man, as I said. Wavy blond hair and rather florid complexion. He has good shoulders, and he carries himself as if he might have done some amateur boxing, but he’d run to fat if he ever let himself go. Handsome, if you like the type. Too handsome, maybe. Maybe handsome enough to make persuasion fun.”

Moving her smile from the olive to him, she reached past her glass and his and touched his hand with long fingers, and under the table below the intimacy of fingers, he was aware of the simultaneous intimacy of knees. He felt again, as he had felt a thousand times, the dark hunger for her that was often fed but never satisfied, and he knew, as he had known from the first, that there was nothing at all that she wouldn’t do for whatever she wanted, but he knew also that he would never care so long as one of the things she wanted was Peter Roche.

“Don’t worry, Peter,” she said. “Don’t worry for a minute. Persuasion may be fun for Dr. Foresman, but not for me, because the only fun for me is you, and anyhow it can’t be helped. Tell me, darling, how much do you think he’d charge to look at my molars?”

“Offhand,” he said, “I’d guess about ten thousand dollars.”

Chapter 4

Same bar, same booth, but the year in a quarter turn had changed its season. The sun had lost is warmth and was a pale wash in the street outside, cut by a chill wind.

Peter sat over a bourbon and watched the door. A bright scrap of paper danced across the concrete walk and was trapped for an instant against glass.

A man opened the door and went out.

Another man opened the door and came in.

A man and a woman came in together.

The woman was dressed in a navy blue suit and wore a silver fox around her shoulders. She had short mahogany hair under a chip of a blue hat with a tiny red feather on it, and she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and very shortly she would order a very dry martini. The man was tall and blond in expensive tweed, and there was arrogance in the carriage of his head and elastic in his walk. He looked like he would order Scotch.

He did. Peter could see it all from his position. He gave the martini and the Scotch time to diminish by half, and then he went over to the table where the man and the beautiful woman sat.

“Hello, Etta,” he said.

She looked up and smiled and said, “Oh, hello, Peter,” and Dr. Norton Foresman stood up politely and permitted his face to express a nominal amount of interest when Etta introduced them.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “The stepson.”

Peter nodded. “It’s very funny, isn’t it? My being Etta’s stepson, I mean. People always get a laugh out of it.”

“I’d say that it’s more fortunate than funny. For you, that is. Will you sit down and have a drink with us?”

Peter smiled and thought, If you only knew how fortunate it is for me you Goddamn molar mechanic. If you only knew!

He said, “No, thanks. I just had one. See you at home, Etta.”

He went out into the sun that had no warmth and turned down the street two blocks to the slot where he’d left his car. Behind the wheel, he lit a cigarette and looked at his watch. Five-thirty, she’d said. It was five now. He finished the cigarette and lit another from the butt and was acutely conscious of the drag of time.

The wind was stronger in the street. Pedestrians leaned into it, or scurried before it, and made what breaks they could of one another.

Autumn, he thought. Another little tag of time. The tags change, but time stays fixed forever. In the meanwhile, you sit in the static forever and suck cigarettes. In the meanwhile, you sit over endless bourbons and wonder endlessly how persuasion is going, and what forms persuasion takes, and you curse with stale impotence the louse that persuasion profits.

At five-twenty-five he started the car and swung out into traffic. Driving slowly, killing five minutes, making three right turns that brought him back to the street above the bar, he saw then with the inevitable visceral disturbance that she was already waiting for him at the curb, her skirt whipped by the wind around her long legs. He stopped in the traffic lane in defiance of angry horns while she came off the curb and got in beside him. Sliding over against him, she let her head fall back against the upholstery and laughed softly.

“Darling,” she said, “what a relief! You’ve no idea what a bore our dentist is.”

“You didn’t look so bored to me.”

She rolled her head and looked up at his face. “Darling, are you going to be difficult again?”

“I’m sick of Dr. Norton Foresman, that’s all.”

“So am I. Believe me, I was never so sick of anyone in my life before. It’s only because he’s essential. You know that. We’ve got to have him.”

“It’s taking a long time. I never thought it would take so long.”

“We have to be sure. It would be fatal to make a mistake.”

“How much longer?”

“Not long. Not much longer now.”

“Sure. Not much longer. Well, I don’t mind waiting. It’ll be easy. I’ll just drink bourbon and think about the pair of you.”

“You said you wouldn’t brood, darling. You promised you wouldn’t talk about it.”

“Tell me the truth, Etta. Aren’t you rather enjoying yourself?”

“Stop it, Peter.”

“A big, handsome guy like him ought to be very amusing.”

“Damn it, Peter, cut it out! You go on brooding like this, you’ll end up wrecking everything. You’re going pretty sour, you know. Next thing, you’ll be getting violent.”

“Pardon me for going sour. I know it’s unreasonable of me.”

“All right, Peter, all right. Just quit thinking about it. Just think about how it will be when it’s all over. Think about you and me and all the places we’ll go and all the things we’ll do and all the time we’ll have to spend together.”

“And all the money.”

“Yes. And all the money. It wouldn’t be fun without money, Peter. Not for me and not for you. We don’t have to kid ourselves about that.”

His right hand dropped from the wheel to her knee, and he felt her instant response, heard the soft whisper of breath sucked suddenly into her throat. It was always like that. It never failed. His ability to make her respond at once and with intensity was the last remnant of whatever dominance he may once have felt. It sustained him in his sour waiting, in the concession that no man can make and not be sick.

Passing into the suburban area of the city, they began the gradual ascent to the bluff above the river. Crossing the crest of the rise, they dropped down the brief descent to the lip of the bluff and the frail fence along it. The good place for an accident.

Abruptly, he stopped the car beside the fence and looked out and down to the shrunken gray stream in the valley, lean from the long dry months.

“I think I’ll get away for a while,” he said.

Her eyes were briefly startled. “Away? Where?”

“Up to the lodge, I think. Maybe I’ll do some hunting.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Until you’re ready. Until Dr. Norton Foresman has been persuaded.”

“I see.” She picked a cigarette from her purse and lit it with the dash lighter. The smoke piled up on the windshield and spread out in a small, billowing cloud. “I think that might be a good idea. You’re in a dangerous mood, darling. You need to get some of the tension out of you.”

“When you want me, write General Delivery at King’s Center. It’s a little junction development about six miles from the lodge. I’ll drive down every day or so to check.” Twisting suddenly in the seat, he seized her by the hair and jerked her head back. “Say it won’t be long, Etta. Say it again.”

She reacted to his violence with a pleasure that was almost masochistic.

Her mouth shaped against his the pattern of her assurance.

“Soon, darling. Just as soon as I can.”

Chapter 5

The lodge was a rustic, single-story structure of unpeeled logs. It was built into the side of a hill and had acquired with time an appearance of being almost part of the hill. Below the lodge, in the hollow at the foot of the hill, was a clear stream, spring-fed, in which game fish could be taken in season. The surrounding hills were the remnants of an ancient orogeny, their thin top-soil broken by countless outcroppings of rock and nourishing a sparse growth of brush and scrub timber. In the hills were quail and plenty of small game.

Peter hunted sometimes during the day, tramping the hills with a 12-gauge shotgun, and there was something in the country that renewed assurance, an atmosphere of incredible age that reduced passion and violence and all human aberrations whatever to the status of petty absurdity. But the nights were bad. The nights were times of distorted imagery, and he brooded with a growing hatred over the morbid details of Dr. Norton Foresman’s planned corruption.

Every second afternoon he drove down to King’s Center and inquired for mail in the tiny post office. There was no letter the first week, nor the second, but the fourth day of the third week the letter was there. With the current phase of the waiting finished, all the malignancy seemed to drain from him like a poisonous fluid released by incision, leaving him strangely quiet, almost apathetic, and he drove all the way back to the lodge with the letter unopened in his pocket.

He read it in the living room of the lodge in front of the natural stone fireplace:

It was unsigned. He dropped the envelope and the single sheet of crisp paper on the fire and watched them burn. Her written words were as real as her voice, as if she had whispered them with her lips brushing his ear, and now his brief apathy was gone as quickly as it had come. He felt, sitting there while the papers curled in ash, the first faint lift of excitement, the rhythmic acceleration of his pulse.

The fifteenth. What was today? His stay at the lodge had stretched interminably in a kind of deadly hiatus, and he had to return to the day of his arrival and repeat in his mind the succession of subsequent days to the present in order to locate himself in time. It was the fourteenth, he discovered. Tomorrow was the day.

He packed his few things, killed a bottle he’d been working on, and went to bed. He slept poorly, disturbed by random imagery, and awoke early. It was exactly seven o’clock when he steered his car off the narrow hill road onto Highway 56.

An hour and a half later he pulled into the wide gravel parking area in front of the junction restaurant. The building was long and low, covered with red shingles, sitting diagonally in its location to face the right angle formed by the meeting of highways. One wing was obviously a dance hall. The Venetian blinds at the windows of this wing were closed, and it had the drab, depleted look that seems to come by day to all places that live by night. The central part of the building and the other wing were the restaurant and the kitchen. In the corner of the window beside the entrance was a large sign with crude black letters that said: Open.

He got out of the car and went inside and climbed onto a stool at a long counter. Behind the counter, a waitress in a starched white uniform filled a thick tumbler with water and set it in front of him. She had hair the color of rust and as dry as hay. The flesh below her eyes was dark and sagging, and her face must have been put on in the dark. She stared wearily over his head, waiting for him to speak.

“Just coffee,” he said.

She filled a cup from a glass pot and set it on the counter, slopping a little of the black brew over into the saucer. Beside it, she put a miniature milk bottle filled with cream. He pushed the cream aside and lifted the cup, twisting on the stool in order to look out through the plate glass window to the gravel parking area in front.

“What time’s the next bus to Kaw City due?” he said.

“Eight-fifty-five. Five minutes now.”

He looked at his watch and verified it. “Thanks,” he said.

He lit a cigarette and sat alternating swallows of black coffee with inhalations of smoke, and suddenly he remembered that this was Etta’s habit, and he wondered with a trace of bitterness that was far too weak to signify incipient rebellion if his unconscious adoption of it was a measure of his seduction. He had just finished the cigarette and the coffee when the bus pulled up beyond the window and stopped with a series of pneumatic gasps.

At first he thought she hadn’t come. The single passenger to alight, a woman, stood for a moment beside the bus and then picked up a cheap yellow suitcase and crossed to the entrance of the restaurant and inside. Her short hair was the color of platinum, in startling contrast with her dark eyes. Her vivid scarlet mouth was like a soft, wet wound. She was wearing a cheap fur coat that hung open from the shoulders to expose a green knit dress that clung to her body as if it were charged with static electricity. She walked with a practiced swaying of hips on spike-heeled green sandals fastened to her ankles by narrow straps. She was crude and vulgar and beautiful. The impression she made was like a physical impact. With dye and paint and the emphasis of natural assets, she frankly elicited a primitive reaction.

Standing by Peter’s stool in a cloud of heavy scent, she said, “That your car outside, Mister?”

“That’s right.”

“Going to Kaw City?”

“Yes.”

“How about giving a girl a lift?”

“What was the matter with the bus?”

She shrugged. “So times are tough. So my ticket ran out. You want a character reference for a lousy lift?” Her voice was coarse, a voice he had never heard before, a product of gin and a million cigarettes. He laughed and dropped a dime on the counter and stood up.

“When I give a girl a lift, I prefer her not to have any character. You ready to go, or do you want coffee?”

“I’m ready.”

They went outside to the car, and he wheeled it onto the highway and across the junction. She laughed softly, stretching her body in the seat beside him, and he thought he could hear in the laughter a kind of restrained exultation, and it occurred to him suddenly that she was feeling an intense sense of release, of freedom, as if her changed appearance were not so much disguise as the abandonment of one, the assumption at last of the overt expression of herself.

“My God,” she said, “I feel awful. How do you like me, Peter?”

“Just asking?”

She laughed again and pressed against him. “Was it bad, darling? The waiting? Was it very bad?”

“It was bad.”

“It won’t go on forever. Remember that.”

“This time will be longer.”

“It can’t be helped. This is the way it has to be done. You know it is.”

“I know. Is our dentist definitely in?”

“He’s in. For ten grand plus.”

“What does the plus mean?”

“He thinks it means me. I’m supposed to contact him after you’ve been disposed of.”

“What happens when you don’t?”

“Nothing happens. He’ll be an accessory to murder, and there won’t be any thing at all that he can do about it.”

“I almost wish he’d try. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like killing someone just for fun.”

“Don’t think crazy, Peter. He’s an arrogant fool. We’ll use him and drop him off with his stinking ten grand and that’s all of it.”

“When do you want to die?”

“The sooner the better. Tomorrow night, if possible.”

“What if they don’t go to Foresman about the teeth?”

“They will. He’s my dentist, and the teeth will be all they’ll have to identify me with. That’s your job, Peter. You’ve got to be sure there’s nothing else left.”

“I’ll make sure.”

“Who will you use?”

He shrugged. “Who knows: Someone.”

Someone. Nobody. An indefinite pronoun waking at this moment, perhaps, in some drab room to the gray light of another drab day, remembering with sickness or indifference, but certainly not pleasure, the traffic of the spent night. He wondered for the first time who she was and where she had come from and whether, in the end, she would mind so much dying for a reason she would never know. Dying violently, a small and essential technicality, because she happened to be available and had a set of teeth.

Then he was struck by a wild thought. What if she had plates? What if they were to find in the charred wreckage of the car at the foot of the bluff beside the river a set of dentures? It would be a wonderful example of the biter bit, the kind of ending you found in the little one page stories. The thought adhered to his mind, swelling with enormous significance and grim comedy, and he began to laugh softly on the verge of hysteria, his body shaking with the effort to contain the laughter.

Etta drew away and looked at him sharply. “What’s the matter, Peter?”

“Nothing. I just thought of something.”

“Of what?”

“I was wondering what would happen if she had false teeth.”

“For God’s sake, Peter, cut it out! You’re not breaking up on me are you?”

“I thought it was very funny.”

“I don’t like it when you think and talk crazy.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“All right. Just take it easy. And you’d better let up on the bourbon, too. You’ll never make it through this in a fog.”

“Don’t worry about it, I said. I’ll be all right.”

“Sure, darling. You’ll be all right. You’ll be fine.”

She relaxed against him again, and he drove on into the city in silence. The highway fed them through suburban and urban residential districts into the congestion of the downtown area, and at last she said. “Let me off at the bus station. Peter.”

“Where are you going from there?”

“I don’t know. I’ll find a room.”

“How shall I contact you?”

“I’ll rent a box at the post office. I’ll let you know the number as soon as I get it. I’ll tell you what name to use, too.” Reaching into her purse, she handed him a piece of cardboard stamped with black and red numbers. “Here’s the claim check for my Olds. It’s parked in the garage across from the Envoy Hotel. You can pick it up there when you’re ready. The Senator’s at the Capitol and will be there for at least another week. I left home yesterday and told the servants I’d probably be returning tomorrow night. Do it then if you can. They’ll think it happened when I was coming back.”

“All right.”

He pulled into the unloading zone in front of the bus station, and she got out quickly and removed her suitcase from the rear. Leaning through the open window, she said, “You take it from here, darling. You know what to do so do it well, and do it fast. Later, when you think it’s right for the finish, send me the word and I’ll come back.”

“I’ll let you know.”

He leaned toward her across the seat, and their lips met in brief, hot adherence, and then she turned and walked swiftly away, her hips swaying in the exaggerated rhythm of her new character, the cheap yellow case swinging at her side. He watched her until she turned the corner and disappeared.

Chapter 6

It was a mean and narrow street on the lower side of the city where the earth declined from its suburban heights to the level of the river. The black water lapped in the night at its low embankment. Along the street at wide intervals, street lamps cast light like yellow grease in stagnate puddles on old brick, exposing here and there the ugly debris of the life that passed and shed its odds and ends in passing — paper and cans, the shards of broken bottles.

At the curb near the corner, Peter parked Etta’s Olds, a gleaming incongruity of bright chrome and enamel. Walking down the sidewalk along the faces of crumbling buildings to a dim and solitary rectangle of weak light in the mass of surrounding darkness, he turned and stepped up into a short hall. From beyond a closed door at the end of the hall came the pulsing, wanton rhythms that marijuana makes. On a straight chair beside the door, tilted back against the wall with heels hooked over the chair rungs, was a fat man with bleary, colorless eyes and a slack mouth half open in an expression of witless decadence. The bleary eyes moved over Peter indifferently as he went past and through the door.

The torrid music was like a blast of hot wind. Smoke drifted horizontally in wavering strata. The small dance area was congested with writhing anatomy. At tables and in booths, inhibitions had largely ceased to function. Peter found an empty stool at the bar and crawled on. No one paid any attention to him, and he sat waiting, watching in the mirror behind the bar the action on the dance floor. After a while, as he had anticipated, there was a voice at his shoulder.

“Drinking alone, honey?”

He shifted his eyes in the mirror to the reflection of a thin and gutted face that achieved by device and the kindness of shadows a suggestion of the prettiness it had once had. The skin was dry and sallow, sunken between sharp bones. It was, he thought, a face that might have been ravished and dehydrated by a high fever.

“I’m not drinking at all,” he said. “How do you get service?”

“You have to know the technique. Shall I try?”

“Why not?”

The technique was simple. She turned and gestured, and a squat bartender came down on the other side of the bar. His round, oily face was bland. His tiny, pinched mouth, tucked under a swollen nose, twitched back over shrunken gums. Peter specified bourbon and water, and the woman said, assuming his acceptance of the weary routine, that she’d have hers in ginger ale. When the drinks were in their hands, she said, “There’s a booth empty,” and he said, “That’s convenient,” and they went over and sat down on the same side of the table.

She sipped her pale, professional drink. “My name’s Roxy,” she said.

“It’s a nice name. Mine’s Peter.” A waiter materialized periodically with full glasses. Peter drank what he had to and spilled what he could. Roxy, pressing against him, played her weary part with automatic fidelity. The whole place was hot and panting, and after so much time and bad whisky, there was a churning rebellion in his stomach, a growing turbulent sickness.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said suddenly.

“Why?”

“It’s too crowded.”

“Don’t let it bother you. No one pays any attention.”

“It’s my Puritan background, baby. I like privacy, and I’m willing to pay for it.”

She arched her thin eyebrows and formed a red circle with her lips. “I work here. You know that. I’m not supposed to run out with the customers.”

“Who’d notice?”

She hesitated for a moment, then said, “All right. You go out alone. I’ll meet you at the alley entrance in a few minutes.”

He got out of the booth and went out through the hall past the fat man in the chair to the street. The air was astringent in his throat and lungs. His head cleared a little, and the revolution in his stomach subsided to a turgid unrest. Walking swiftly, he went down to the corner and back on the side street to the alley entrance. Three or four steps down the alley, he stopped and stood quietly, pressed against the damp brick of an old building.

Down the alley, a door opened and closed, projecting and extinguishing a weak swath of light. For a second, his ears caught faintly a wave of crazy reefer rhythms. High heels rapped briskly on brick, coming abreast, and pushing away from the wall, he hooked an arm. She spun around with a startled curse, the curse cutting off abruptly when she recognized him.

“You scared hell out of me, honey,” she said.

“Sorry. The car’s right down the street.”

They went down to the Olds and got in. Lowering the window beside her, she sat strangely upright in the seat, lifting her face with a kind of pathetic greediness into the rush of cold air, and as he drove, he thought he could see from the corners of his eyes a faint flush of color in her sallow cheeks. The Olds moved cautiously through narrow streets of predominate darkness, emerging finally into a brighter section where incandescents and neons repelled the shadows, passing after a short while into the avenues and broad boulevards tilted upward toward the high ground above the river.

On the suburban road at the crest of the rise, where the earth descended again to the lip of the bluff, he stopped the Olds. Twin shafts from the headlights sliced down through the darkness past the rail fence into emptiness. Then he leaned forward and extinguished the lights suddenly, and in the instant after extinction, before his eyes could adjust, the night was complete and impenetrable, a soft and tangible pressure that filled him with a momentary terror, as if it were he who was about to die.

She twisted toward him on the seat. “Why are we stopping here? I’m getting cold.”

There was no fear in her voice, no rising awareness of danger, but only a slight nasality, the hint of a petulant whine.

“Have you ever been up here before?” he said.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“I thought maybe you’d like the view. Look behind you.”

She twisted away in the opposite direction, looking back through the rear window. Behind and below them, the lights of the city were spread in wide display. She sat that way a long time, twisted in the seat to look back at the lights, and then she said, “It’s pretty. It’s been a long time since anyone bothered to show me anything pretty.”

“I thought you might like it,” he said.

And then, because it had to be then, because he could never bring himself to the point again, he reached out and took her by the throat from behind. She tried to twist around to face him, clawing at his hands and threshing her legs in a desperate diffusion of energy, but she was not strong, even in a struggle for life, and it was only a little while until she was dead.

Afterward, he proceeded quickly, according to plan. He removed a can of gasoline from the rear and soaked the interior of the car. He started the engine and pressed the accelerator down, wedging it with a piece of wood. With the high singing of many horses in his ears, he pulled the body over under the wheel, switched on the headlights, and dropped a lighted match on the upholstery. Finally, he pulled the automatic transmission lever into drive position and simultaneously released the hand brake, and the big car leaped away, careening. He stood and watched it crash through the fence at the edge of the bluff and catapult blazing into space. After a moment that seemed forever, he heard from below the crashing of steel and a detonation that was like a giant expulsion of air.

Slipping off the side of the road, he ran. Carrying the empty gasoline can, he ran at a tangent and downward through the dark toward the street below where his own car waited.

Chapter 7

The colored flags of the terrace were littered with dead leaves that had blown in on the wind. A pile of them had gathered in a corner against the adjacent walls of the house. There was no wrought-iron table there now, no gaily striped glass. The chaise longue was gone, and Etta was gone, because Etta was dead and buried in Kaw City, and there were more things gone and going than it paid to think about.

Someone knocked softly, and Peter turned away from the window and went over and opened the door. A man stood in the hall with his hat in his hands. He was short and fat, his belly lapping the waist band of his trousers. He had a round face splattered with freckles and a tiny, sucked-in mouth that looked like a deep dent in a batch of bread dough. He turned his hat around and around by the brim in stubby fingers. His name was Smalley, and he was a detective.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Roche,” he said. “May I see you for a minute?”

“Certainly.” Peter stepped back into the room. “Come in.”

Smalley came into the room and stood waiting, turning and turning his hat, while Peter closed the door and came back past him.

“Won’t you sit down?” Peter said.

Smalley shook his head. “Thanks. I’ll only be a minute.” He looked past Peter and out the window to the opposite wing of the house. His eyes were small and pale, red-rimmed and watery, and every once in a while he knuckled them as if they pained him. “I’ve been talking with your father,” he said.

“Has he finally accepted the fact that it was really Etta?”

“I think so.” Smalley knuckled his eyes, and let them drop to the floor. “I think I convinced him,” he said.

“You’re certain, then?”

“Yes. No possibility of a mistake now. The identification is complete.”

“How’s that?”

“We had her dentist check the teeth. Dr. Norton Foresman. You know him?”

Peter was aware suddenly that he’d drawn his breath and held it. He released it slowly on a long, fading whisper, and the room blurred and faded and slowly returned in a diminishing spiral of dizziness. “Yes,” he said. “I know him. Professionally, that is. I’ve been to him myself once or twice.”

“I see. Well, as I said, he made the identification positive. The insurance will be paid promptly now. I’ve just told your father, the senator, as much.”

“Then there’s no hope at all? That it might not have been Etta?”

“None whatever. I’m sorry.”

“Well, it’s not too great a shock to me. I’ve felt from the beginning that it couldn’t have been anyone else. I’m afraid the old man was holding out pretty grimly, though. How did he take it?”

Smalley turned and turned his hat and scuffed a toe against the rug. “That’s really what I stopped to speak to you about. On the surface, he took it calmly enough. And that’s the trouble. He took it too calmly. Not a normal kind of control, if you know what I mean. He’s withdrawn, drifting out of contact, and that’s a danger sign.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t like to mention this, to frighten you needlessly, perhaps, but I think under the circumstances that I’d better. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, Mr. Roche. I’ve watched it happen.” Smalley lifted his eyes to the light. Behind a thin film, they had a bright, blind look. “I’m thinking of suicide, Mr. Roche.”

“Suicide!”

“Yes. I know it must seem incredible to you. It always does, and maybe in this case it really is, but if you’re wise you’ll watch him for a while. Just keep him under observation.”

“I think you must be mistaken. The old man never struck me as the type who would go off the deep end. Not even over something like this.”

“There’s a breaking point, Mr. Roche. A time when a man feels he’s simply had enough. It comes to all of us, and most of us get past it all right, but a few of us don’t. Well, it’s your affair, of course. I just thought I’d mention it for what it’s worth.”

“I know you mean well. Thanks very much. Will you have a drink before you go?”

“No, thanks.” Smalley put his hat on his head, took it off again, blinked into the light, and turned back to the door. He looked over his shoulder and nodded several times and let himself out into the hall.

Peter stood quietly in the room and listened to an exultant, interior singing of joy and triumph.

How cooperative of the old man, he thought.

How very cooperative of him to make his death and the means of his death predictable.

And time, at last, moved swiftly.

The time was now.

Chapter 8

He waited for her to come. He sat alone in the library where he had first met her, and it seemed a long time ago. For a moment he could see her in the chair by the fire, a soft and sinuous cat with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, smiling at him lazily through a transparent veil of smoke. The vision was so vivid that he had the feeling that it would survive all tests, that if he arose and approached her she would set the glass aside and lift her arms to accept whatever he had to give. He took a swallow of his own drink and looked away toward the draped windows, but she had moved from the chair in the instant of his shifted view and was there ahead of it, poised and provocative against dark green.

Behind him in the hall, rasping across his raw nerves, the front door bell rang. He was on his feet at once, as if he had been propelled physically by the sound, his pulses pounding in his temples. Carefully and slowly, exercising deliberate control he lifted his glass and drained it. Then he set the glass on a table by the bottle that had supplied it and walked with measured, unhurried steps into the hall and down to the door. His sensation was one of gaseous lightness, as if he were moving under a soft, external force that was in no way his own toward an end that was inevitable, and the door floated open in his hand without weight or resistance.

She stood in the spill of light in a posture of breathless waiting that seemed cataleptic in its strange rigidity, and the intensity of her excitement was something tangible that reached him and touched him and stirred within him an identical emotion. For a long moment they stared at each other across the narrow space that was all that was presently left of the separation, and then her breasts rose and descended, and he could hear the extended whisper of her breath.

“I got your message,” she said softly.

“I see. Come in.”

She came swiftly into the hall and turned as he closed the door.

“Is it all right?”

“Yes.”

“The servants?”

“Gone for the night. I saw to that.”

“Where’s the old man?”

“Upstairs in his room. In bed. Your death knocked him out, darling. I didn’t really anticipate his taking it quite so hard. Even the detective on the case noticed it. And was disturbed by it. He warned me to be on the watch for suicide.”

“That’s good. That’s very good.”

“I know. That’s why I sent you word to come. Right now everything’s favorable. It’s the psychological time. If we do it now, we’ve got everyone thinking the way we want them to think. You’ll just have to make it look like suicide, that’s all. You’ll have to be sure.”

“I’ll be sure, darling. I’ll be very sure.”

Then, as if they had been pressing all this time against invisible barriers that collapsed suddenly, they moved together and locked with an almost brutal impact of bodies, and it was a long time before she let her head fall back away from him, her bright dyed hair hanging.

She said dreamily, “And now it’s almost over, darling. After so long.”

“Almost. The big risk, one more time of waiting, and then nothing left.”

“No, darling. You and me left. You and me and what all the money will buy. How am I for a dead woman?”

“As good as you ever were alive. Lucky for us, since you have to stay dead. Have you seen anyone you know?”

“No. No one.”

“How did you come?”

“By bus. I took a taxi from the depot to an address about a mile away. I walked from there.”

“No one saw you approach the house?”

“No one at all. I’m sure of that.”

“All right.” He stepped back, her hands trailing off his shoulders and down his arms to hang quietly at her sides. “I’d better go now. I’m meeting a party at a club in half an hour. That’s my alibi in case I need one. I don’t think I will. You’d better allow me at least an hour.”

“Yes, darling. I’ll wait.”

“I’ve arranged everything so you won’t be disturbed. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I won’t worry.”

He turned and walked to a hall closet, from which he took hat and coat. He put them on and returned most of the distance to Etta, stopping a couple of feet away, the interval that would widen into the final separation that must still be endured.

“Good-by, darling. Last good-by.”

“Yes. The very last.”

He wanted to touch her, to feel again the assurance he gained from the touch of her flesh, but he didn’t. Turning away, he opened the door and paused, looking back for an instant before shutting himself out. She returned his look with dreamy eyes. On her bright lips was the small smile of a child who anticipates a pleasure assured and at hand.

Chapter 9

It was strange, very strange, and he couldn’t understand it. It was all done, all over, the risks taken and survived, and now the tensions should have been relaxed, a sense of triumph and power dominant in his mood. But it wasn’t that way at all. He was depressed, afflicted with a deep anxiety that was much like fear.

In his room in the empty house, the night held back by stone and wood and glass, he turned in his mind to the beginning, which was Etta, and worked back in detail through the events that followed, and he could see again, for the thousandth time, that nothing had gone wrong, that everything had worked almost miraculously to plan, and that it was now, in the time of triumph, wholly irrational to submit to despondency.

Even the last most precarious detail of all had gone with incredible ease, the intended interpretation accepted without a shadow of suspicion that could be detected. He could see again the commonplace figure of the detective named Smalley, could hear as if they were actually repeated at the moment of his recollection the detective’s exact words and the monotonous inflections, or lack of them, with which they were spoken.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Roche. You’ll recall that I suggested this possibility.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I discounted the possibility too much. I never really felt that the old man would do it. I suppose there’s no chance of its having been anything else?”

“What else could it be?”

“I see what you mean. The only alternative is even more shocking. Even more incredible.”

“Well, I don’t think we need to concern ourselves with alternatives. It was suicide, all right. Open and shut, as I see it. The position of the wound, the presence of the gun, the motivation — all these make a convincing case.”

“All right. I guess I must simply accept it. Thank you for your consideration.”

“Not at all, Mr. Roche. I only wish I could have convinced you in time that this might happen.”

That easy. That fantastically simple. All things in order and moving smoothly toward the projected end — the funeral, the payment of the insurance, the business of the will. And now Etta. Due and past due, Etta and the far places.

In the hall, the upstairs extension began to ring, and he listened to it without moving, wondering if he should let it ring or go out to answer it, and when it continued to ring imperiously in long bursts, he submitted and went out into the hall.

“Peter Roche speaking,” he said, and a masculine voice responded that he didn’t immediately recognize.

“Good-evening, Mr. Roche. Dr. Norton Foresman here.”

He waited, aware that his breath was caught painfully in his suddenly constricted throat, but after a while he spoke quite calmly, somewhat surprised that he could manage it.

“Yes?”

“I dislike bringing this to your attention,” Dr. Foresman said, “but I’m quite sure you’ll understand. It’s your dental bill, Mr. Roche. For professional services. It’s now delinquent, and I’m afraid I must insist upon immediate payment.”

“You mean Etta’s bill? The one she made before her accident?”

“Yes. Surely you’ll want to assume her obligations.”

“Certainly. Legitimate ones. That particular bill, however, has been paid in full.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Roche. Far from it. A small initial payment was made. No more.”

“Ten thousand dollars, I believe.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s a small payment?”

“Under the circumstances, yes. For the type and quality of the work, I mean. A very small payment, I should say.”

His voice was bland, a smooth, smooth voice, and Peter wondered if this was the sound of destruction, a sound as soft and smooth as a dentist’s dun, and he felt the return in force of the cold hatred that had begun and grown with persuasion, and he was all at once no longer depressed, no longer anxious on the dark edge of terror, and he felt, instead, nothing but the cold, complete hatred and a kind of excitement that was collateral to the realization that twice was not enough and that there would have to be, after all, one more a third time.

“What’s the balance of the bill?” he said quietly.

Foresman’s voice took on a tone of expansion, of subtle patronage. “You understand, of course, that we dentists are rather like doctors in that we try to keep our fees flexible. In this way, they can be made commensurate with the patient’s ability to pay. I hear that you have come into quite a considerable amount recently, Mr. Roche. The balance of the bill is fifty thousand dollars.”

“Don’t you think that’s rather exorbitant?”

“Not at all. In the beginning, you’ll recall, the actual fee was reduced in consideration of a bonus of sorts. It is now apparent even to an optimist like me, Mr. Roche, that the bonus will never be paid. In lieu of the bonus, the fee itself has been raised.”

“I see. I think we’d better meet to discuss this.”

“I thought you might want to do that, and I’m perfectly agreeable.”

“When?”

“No time like the present. I think we should get this settled as quickly as possible.”

“Where?”

“My apartment should be a congenial place. I’m calling from there now. It’s in the Bellmar Arms on Northeast Boulevard. The corner of 76th. The apartment is first floor rear on the left as you enter. Just walk straight down the hall from the entrance. I’ll have a cocktail waiting for you.” His voice was friendly.

“Thanks very much.”

Cradling the phone, he went back into his room. He looked at his watch and saw that it was close to nine o’clock. Moving with certainty under the impulsion of the cold hatred and intense excitement that left him strangely assured and decisive, he put on coat and hat and removed a .38 calibre revolver from the top drawer of a chest. With the .38 a kind of definitive weight in his pocket, as if it were the final answer to everything, he went downstairs and outside to the garage. Driving with a light foot on the accelerator, he followed the bluff road to the corner where Etta had died, not long ago, by proxy, and turned up the short grade to the crest and down toward town.

On the lower level of the town, he hit Northeast Boulevard at 52nd and turned right toward higher numbers. At 76th, he passed in front of the Bellmar Arms and made a left turn, parking at the curb in comparative darkness near the alley. Getting out, he walked back along the side of the building and around to the front entrance. Through the glass of the doors, he could see the first floor hall running from front to rear directly ahead of him. He went inside and up three shallow steps and down the hall to the last door on the left. He rang a buzzer, and the door opened, and Dr. Foresman was very polite and gracious with a smile on his face.

“You’re very prompt, Mr. Roche. Won’t you come in, please?”

Peter went past him into the room and turned. Dr. Foresman followed and stopped, his deteriorated athlete’s body poised with a kind of vestigial grace, the ceiling light glittering on the hard waves of his hair. He gestured toward a table on which sat a cocktail shaker and glasses.

“I promised you a drink. Martinis. May I pour you one?”

“No, thanks. I’m only staying a minute.”

“Oh? In that case, I assume you want to get right down to the matter of the fee.”

“The blackmail, you mean.”

Dr. Foresman smiled and shook his head. “Not at all. You will agree, I’m sure, that I was led to anticipate a bonus. I won’t say that I was actually double-crossed, but at least I was permitted to believe something that was never really intended. However, I’m prepared to be agreeable and accept the additional fifty thousand instead. You, of all people, will surely not consider that amount excessive for such a bonus.”

“How much will the next fee amount to? And the next, and the next?”

“No. I thought you might be afraid of something like that. This closes our association. I give you my word.”

“What makes you think you can get away with this? You’re in this yourself, you know. Suppose I simply refuse to pay.”

“That would be unfortunate. It’s true that I’m involved, but not so deeply as you, I think you’ll admit. I’ve thought it through very carefully, and I’m sure I could manage to escape any very serious consequences for my part in this business. At any rate, Mr. Roche, don’t make the mistake of thinking I won’t go through with this. To put it rather crudely, you’ll pay or else.”

The fury and the hate were very exhilarating. Actually, Peter felt better than he’d felt for many long months. There was in him a kind of perverted happiness that was wholly unreasonable. He took the .38 from his pocket and pointed it at Foresman.

“Oh, I’ll pay,” he said. “I’ll pay in full.”

He shot him twice in the chest and watched the succession of fear and shock in the dentist’s face, watched with pleasure the collapse and terminal twitching of the big body that would go no further to fat. Then, swiftly, before blood could stain the carpet, he heaved the body into his arms and carried it the length of the living room and into a bedroom and across the bedroom to a window overlooking the alley. Depositing the body on the floor with its back against the wall in a sitting position, he raised the window and unfastened the screen and saw that there was a narrow strip of grass between the building and the alley. Some low-growing foundation shrubs had been planted close to the building. Pushing the body through the window, he lowered it to the ground behind the shrubs. Then he refastened the screen and closed the window and went back through the bedroom and living room into the hall and outside. He saw no one. So far as he knew, no one had seen him. Or heard him. He had gambled on sound-proofing and apparently won.

On the side street, he turned his car into the alley and stopped behind the Bellmar. Still moving swiftly and with the blind assurance that precluded in his mind the possibility of detection, he dragged Foresman’s body from behind the shrubbery and onto the rear floor of the car. Behind the wheel, he drove on down the alley, emerging on the side street at the far end and turning back onto Northeast Boulevard.

Behind the lodge, he stopped beside a weathered plank shed and went inside. Fumbling in almost total darkness, he found a spade and a pick-ax and carried them out to the car. He leaned the tools against the car and turned his attention to the rear seat. Under persuasion, the beginning of the last that he would be subjected to, Dr. Norton Foresman slipped out.

The body was cumbersome and elusive, a monstrous burden that bore down upon him with terrible weight and threatened with every step to slip from his shoulder. Climbing the slope against which the lodge was built was grueling labor, but after that, beyond the crest, it was easier going, downgrade a short distance into a dry gulch. In the gulch he dropped the body with a dull, sodden thud and stood for a minute with his chest heaving, gulping the cold night air. Then he returned to the car for the tools.

Chapter 10

He went into the lounge of the hotel that had been designated and looked around for an empty booth or table, but there wasn’t any, so he sat instead at the bar on a stool with a vacancy on the left. He could see the entrance from the lobby reflected in the bar mirror, and after about ten minutes spent with a bourbon and water he could see Etta in the entrance. The vacancy still existed on the left, and she came across and filled it.

“Darling,” she said, “I thought it would take forever.”

“There was a lot to do. Assets to liquidate, debts to pay. The old man had a lot of debts. I didn’t dream he owed so much.”

“I told you that. Remember? I said we’d need the insurance.”

“Well, we’ve got it. A hundred grand.”

“I considered getting in touch with you, but I didn’t think it would be wise.”

“It’s just as well you didn’t.”

“Will they ever find him?”

“I don’t think so. I’m sure of it.”

“You did it well, darling. I’m proud of you.”

He drained his glass and waited again for the bartender’s bit. Then he said, “Well, it’s over now. All over and done.”

“The bad part. The good part just beginning. Are you free to go away?”

“Yes. Everything’s been taken care of.”

“Good. I’ll take a plane south tomorrow. You follow in a couple of weeks. You know where to meet me.”

“I know.”

Then he lifted his fresh drink and looked up into the reflected, red-rimmed eyes of the fat little man named Smalley.

“Good-afternoon, Mr. Roche,” Smalley said. “I don’t believe I’ve met your stepmother.”

Peter looked at Etta and felt for a second a thrill that could not be sustained and died almost instantly. She was sitting very upright on the stool with her chin lifted and her cheeks burning with color. Her eyes, focused unwaveringly on Smalley’s reflection, were shining with a bright, hot light. Unable to bear the sight of her terrible excitement, he turned his own eyes down to the untasted drink before him and said dully, “So you’ve known all along.”

Smalley looked startled and shook his head. “On the contrary. I haven’t been very smart in this business, Mr. Roche. I didn’t suspect a thing until after Dr. Foresman disappeared.” He sighed and drew the fingers of one hand across his eyes. “It’s no credit to me that I know anything now. It was really Dr. Foresman himself who put me straight. You see, we went through his office files when he disappeared, and we found a certain dental chart there. A kind of map of a person’s teeth, you know. It was clearly labeled as being Mrs. Roche’s, and it was not identical with that of the woman who died in the accident at all. Not even similar. That tore it, of course, and a child could have reconstructed what had actually happened. That was lucky, I guess, because otherwise I’d probably never have been able to do it. Naturally, we kept quiet until you got around to leading us to your collaborator. Which you have. And now if you could see your way clear to leading us to Dr. Foresman’s body, it would wrap things up nicely, and we’d appreciate it greatly.”

Again Peter looked at Etta, and she hadn’t moved, and he realized with a kind of incredulous, weary wonder that she was already thinking beyond the moment of ruin and planning the moves and countermoves of the final deadly game still to be played with the gathering forces of retribution, and his submission was completed by the evidence of her strength.

“He’s buried in the hills,” Peter said dully. “I’ll take you there.”