The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

The Vital Element

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

I would never again love the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico... never find beauty in its blue-green color... never hear music in its rustling surf...

The dead girl had been hurriedly buried in the Gulf. She was anchored in about thirty feet of water with a hempen rope that linked her lashed ankles to a pair of cement blocks.

I’d stirred the water, swimming down to her depth. Her body bobbed and swayed, with her bare toes about three feet off the clean, sandy bottom. It was almost as if a strange, macabre, new life had come to her. Her long blonde hair swirled about her lovely gamine face with every tremor of the water. A living ballerina might have enjoyed her grace of motion, but not her state of being. I wept silently behind my face mask.

A single stroke sent me drifting, with my shoulder stirring silt from the bottom. I touched the rope where it passed into the holes in the cement blocks and out again. A natural process of wear and tear had set in. The sharp, ragged edges of the blocks were cutting the rope. In a matter of time, the rope would part. Her buoyancy would drift her toward the sunlight, to the surface, to discovery.

I eeled about, careful not to look at her again, and plunged up toward the shadow of the skiff. My flippers fired me into open air with a shower of spray and a small, quick explosion in my ears.

I rolled over the side of the skiff and lay a moment with my stomach churning with reaction. Sun, blue sky, the primitive shoreline of mangrove and palmetto, everything around me was weirdly unreal. It was as if all the clocks in the world had gone tick, then forgot to tock.

“You’re a too-sensitive, chicken-hearted fink,” I said aloud. I forced myself to peel out of my diving gear, picked up the oars, and put my back into the job of rowing in.

I docked and tied the skiff, then walked to the cottage with my gear slung across my shoulder. Sheltered by scraggly pines, the lonely cottage creaked tiredly in the heat.

I stood on the sagging front porch. For a moment I didn’t have the strength or nerve to go inside. The cottage was its usual mess, a hodgepodge of broken down furniture, dirty dishes, empty beer bottles and bean cans, none of which bothered me. But she was strewn all over the place, the dead girl out there in the water. She was portrayed in oil, sketched in charcoal, delicately impressed in pink and tan watercolors. She was half finished on the easel in the center of the room, like a naked skull.

Shivering and dry-throated, I slipped dingy ducks over my damp swim trunks, wriggled into a tattered T-shirt, and slid my feet into strap sandals. The greasy feeling was working again in the pit of my stomach as I half-ran from the cottage.

Palmetto City lay like a humid landscape done with dirty brushes as my eight-year-old station wagon nosed into DeSota Street. Off the beaten tourist paths, the town was an unpainted clapboard mecca for lantern-jawed farmers, fishermen, swamp muckers.

I angled the steaming wagon beside a dusty pickup at the curb and got out. On the sidewalk, I glimpsed myself in the murky window of the hardware store: six feet of bone and cartilage without enough meat; thatch of unkempt sandy hair; a lean face that wished for character; huge sockets holding eyes that looked as if they hadn’t slept for a week.

Inside the store, Braley Sawyer came toward me, a flabby, sloppy man in his rumpled tropical weight suit. “Well, if it ain’t Tazewell Eversham, Palmetto City’s own Gauguin!” He flashed a wet, gold-toothed smile. “Hear you stopped in Willy Morrow’s filling station yestiddy and gassed up for a trip to Sarasota. Going up to see them fancy art dealers, I guess.”

I nodded. “Got back early this morning.”

“You going to remember us country hoogers when you’re famous, Gauguin?” The thought brought fat laughter from him. I let his little joke pass and in due time he waddled behind the counter and asked, “You here to buy something?”

“Chain.” The word formed in my parched throat but didn’t make itself heard. I cleared my throat, tried again, “I want to buy about a dozen feet of medium weight chain.”

He blinked. “Chain?”

“Sure,” I said. I had better control of my voice now. “I’d like to put in a garden, but I have stump problems. Thought I’d dig and cut around the roots and snake the stumps out with the station wagon.”

He shrugged, his eyes hanging onto me as he moved toward the rear of the store. “I guess it would work — if that bucket of bolts holds together.”

I turned and stared at a vacant point in space as the chain rattled from its reel. “Easier to carry if I put it in a gunny sack, Gauguin,” Sawyer yelled at me.

“That’s fine.” I heard the chain clank into the sack.

Seconds later Sawyer dropped the chain at my feet. I paid him, carried the gunny sack out, and loaded it in the station wagon. Then I walked down the street to the general store and bought a few things — canned goods, coffee, flour, and two quarts of the cheapest booze available, which turned out to be a low-grade rum.

I’d stowed the stuff beside the gunny sack, closed the tailgate, and was walking around the wagon to get in when a man called to me from across the street. “Hey, Taze.” The man who barged toward me looked like the crudest breed of piney woods sheriff, which is what Jack Tully was. Big-bellied, slope-shouldered, fleshy faced with whisky veins on cheeks and nose, his protruding eyes searched with a sadistic hunger. His presence reminded me that not all Neanderthals had died out ten thousand years ago.

He thumbed back his hat, spat, guffawed. “Kinda left you high and dry, didn’t she, bub?”

An arctic wind blew across my neck. “What are you talking about, Sheriff?”

He elbowed me in the ribs; I recoiled, from his touch, not the force behind it. “Bub, I ain’t so dumb. I know Melody Grant’s been sneaking out to your shack.”

“Any law against it?”

“Not as long as the neighbors don’t complain.” He gave an obscene wink. “And you got no neighbors, have you, bub?”

His filthy thoughts were written in his smirking, ignorant face. No explanation could change his mind, not in a million years. Might as well try to explain a painting to him.

“Maybe she ain’t told you yet, bub?”

“Told me what?”

“About young Perry Tomlin, son of the richest man in the county. She’s been seeing him, too, now that he’s home with his university degree. Going to marry him, I hear, honeymoon in Europe. Big come-up for a shanty cracker girl, even one as pretty as Melody. I reckon that shack’ll be mighty lonesome, knowing you’ll never see her again.”

“Maybe it will, Sheriff, maybe it will.”

“But...” We were suddenly conspirators. He gloated “...there’s one thing you can waller around in your mind.”

“What’s that, Sheriff?”

“Son of the county’s richest man is just getting the leavings of a ragtag artist who’s got hardly a bean in the pot.” Laughter began to well inside of him. “Bub, I got to hand you that! Man, it would bust their blood vessels, Perry’s and the old man’s both, if they knew the truth.”

Raucous laughter rolled out of him, to the point of strangulation.

When I got in the station wagon and drove off he was standing there wiping his eyes and quaking with mirth over the huge joke.

Back at the cottage, I opened a bottle of the rum, picked up a brush, and stood before the easel. I swigged from the bottle in my left hand and made brush strokes on the unfinished canvas with my right. By the time her face was emerging from the skull-like pattern, the rum had begun its work. I knew I wasn’t cut to fit a situation like this one, but the rum made up a part of the deficit.

I dropped the brush and suddenly turned from the canvas. “Why did you have to leave me? Why?”

She was, of course, still out there when the gunny sack dragged me down through thirty feet of water. Her thin cotton dress clung to her as she wavered closer. Behind and beyond her a watery forest of seaweed dipped and swayed, a green and slimy floral offering.

I felt as if my air tanks were forcing raw acid into my lungs as I spilled the chain from the gunny sack. My trembling hands made one... two... three efforts... and the chain was looped about her cold, slender ankles.

I passed the chain through the holes in the cement blocks, and it no longer mattered whether the hempen rope held. The job was done. No risk of floating away.

In the cottage, I picked up the rum jug and let it kick me. Then I put on a clean shirt and pants and combed my hair nice and neat.

I went to the porch and took a final look at the bloodstains on the rough planking. My eyes followed the dripping trail those blood droplets had made down to the rickety pier and the flat-bottom skiff. Before my stomach started acting up again, I dropped from the porch, ran across the sandy yard, and fell into the station wagon.

I pulled myself upright behind the wheel, started the crate. Through the non-reality of the day, the wagon coughed its way over the rutted, crushed seashell road to the highway. Trucks swooshed past and passenger cars swirled about me.

On the outskirts of Palmetto City, I turned the wagon onto the private road that snaked its way across landscaped acreage. The road wound up a slight rise to a colonial mansion that overlooked half the county, the low skyline of the town, the glitter of the Gulf in the far distance. A pair of horse-sized Great Danes were chasing, tumbling, rolling like a couple of puppies on the vast manicured lawn.

A lean, trim old man had heard the car’s approach and stood watching from the veranda as I got out. I walked up the short, wide steps, the shadow of the house falling over me. The man watched me narrowly. He had a crop of silver hair and his hawkish face was wrinkled. These were the only clues to his age. His gray eyes were bright, quick, hard, as cold as a snake’s. His mouth was an arrogant slit. Clothed in lime slacks and riotously colored sport shirt thirty years too young for him, his poised body exuded an aura of merciless, wiry power. In my distraught and wracked imagination he was as pleasant as a fierce, deadly lizard.

“Mr. Tomlin?”

He nodded. “And you’re the tramp artist who’s become a local character. Didn’t you see those no trespassing signs when you turned off the highway?”

“I’ve got some business with your son, Mr. Tomlin.”

“Perry’s in Washington, tending to a matter for me. He flew up yesterday and won’t be back for another couple days. You call, and make a proper appointment. And get that crate out of here — unless you want me to interrupt the dogs in their play.”

My stomach felt as if it were caving in, but I gave him a steady look and said in an icy voice, “If Perry’s away, you must be the man I want to talk to. Sure. Perry wouldn’t have killed her, but you didn’t share your son’s feeling for her, did you?”

“I don’t believe I know what you’re talking about.” He knew, all right. The first glint of caution and animal cunning showed in his eyes.

“Then I’ll explain, Mr. Tomlin. Yesterday I went to Sarasota to try to interest an art dealer in a one-man show. When I got back this morning I found some bloodstains. They led me to the water. I spent the morning diving, searching. I found her in about thirty feet of water.”

I expected him to say something, but he didn’t. He just stood there looking at me with those small, agate eyes.

“It wasn’t hard to figure out,” I said. “She’d come to the cottage to tell me it was all over between us. The shanty cracker girl was marrying the richest son in the county. But you didn’t cotton to that idea, did you?”

“Go on,” he said quietly.

“There’s little more. It’s all very simple. You sent Perry out of town to give you a chance to break it up between him and the cracker girl. Not much escapes your notice. You’d heard the gossip about her and the tramp artist. When you couldn’t find her in town, you decided to try my place. I guess you tried to talk her off, buy her off, threaten her off. When none of it worked, you struck her in a rage. You killed her.”

The old man stared blindly at the happy Great Danes.

“Realizing what you’d done,” I said, “you scrounged a rope, couple of cement blocks, and planted her in thirty feet of water.” I shook my head. “Not good. Not good at all. When the blocks sawed the rope in two, a nosy cop might find evidence you’d been around the place; a tire track, footprint, or maybe some fingerprints you’d left sticking around.”

He studied the frolicking dogs as if planning their butchery. “You haven’t named the vital element, artist; proof of guilt, proof that I did anything more than talk to her.”

“Maybe so,” I nodded, “but could a man in your position afford the questions, the scandal, the doubts that would arise and remain in your son’s mind until the day you die? I think not. So I helped you.”

His eyes flashed to me.

“I substituted a chain for the rope,” I said. “The cement blocks will not cut that in two.” I drew a breath. “And of course I want something in return. A thousand dollars. I’m sure you’ve that much handy, in a wall safe if not on your person. It’s bargain day, Mr. Tomlin.”

He thought it over for several long minutes. The sinking sun put a golden glitter in his eyes.

“And how about the future, artist? What if you decided you needed another thousand dollars one of these days?”

I shook my head. “I’m not that stupid. Right now I’ve caught you flat-footed. It’s my moment. Everything is going for me. You haven’t time to make a choice, think, plan. But it would be different in the future. Would I be stupid enough to try to continue blackmailing the most powerful man in the county after he’s had a chance to get his forces and resources together?”

“Your question contains a most healthy logic, artist.”

“One thousand bucks,” I said, “and I hightail it down the driveway in the wagon. Otherwise, I’ll throw the fat in the fire, all of it, including the chain about her ankles and my reason for putting it there. And we’ll see which one of us has most to lose.”

Without taking his eyes off my face, he reached for his wallet. He counted out a thousand dollars without turning a hair; chicken feed, pocket change to him.

I folded the sheaf of fifties and hundreds, some of them new bills, and slipped it into my pocket with care. We parted then, the old man and I, without another word being spoken.

The station wagon seemed to run with new life when I reached the highway. I felt the pressure of the money — the vital element — against my thigh.

The chain on her ankles had lured Tomlin, convinced him that he was dealing with a tramp interested only in a thousand bucks, so he had signed his confession of guilt by putting his fingerprints all over the money.

I didn’t trust the gross sheriff in Palmetto City. I thought it far better to take the vital element and every detail of the nightmare directly to the state’s attorney in St. Petersburg.

I was pretty sure the battered old station wagon would get me there.