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

Psycho-Symptoms

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1968.

On the sun-kissed crescent of private beach adjacent to Uncle Joe’s luxurious Florida home, Biff sat on the enormous towel beside Reena’s relaxed, bikinied form. Lying on her stomach, she murmured a warm, sleepy sigh as Biff lazily rubbed suntan lotion on her perfect back.

They were a striking young couple, she with her leggy figure and jet-black hair and Biff tall, wide-shouldered, sinewy, his short-cropped blonde hair tousled from their swim.

With his eyes fixed on the rambling tile and glass home sketchily visible beyond the lush foliage of Florida landscaping, Biff said, “He’s really taking Aunt Ethel’s death hard. Moped in his room all day again today.”

“It’s all so tragic,” Reena murmured drowsily, “that your Uncle Joe was driving the car when they had the smashup that killed his wife. The poor dear blames himself. He wishes he’d been the one not to walk away.”

Biff’s mouth tightened, thinning away its usual expression of boyish petulance. “If he hadn’t, think of all the money we’d have now! He has no blood relation, except me.”

Reena’s large, violet eyes flashed open. “Biff, really!”

His gaze met hers. “You’ve thought about it, too. Don’t tell me you haven’t.”

Her drowsiness evaporated. She flipped about, sat up. “I’ve also thought about the penalty. No matter how clever, murderers do usually get caught, darling.”

“I haven’t the stomach for it, either,” Biff admitted. “But if cats are subject to multiple skinning, there’s more than one way to bury a man.”

Reena reached for cigarettes and paper matches, her slender hand trembling a little. “Buried alive... shut away somewhere... Is that a bit closer to what you mean?”

“He really is in a state. The right kind of push should send him over the edge. If he were declared incompetent and bundled off to a private sanitarium, my appointment as administrator would be little more than a formality by any court in the state. We’d have control of all his money. Neatly. Safely.”

Her eyes slanted in a conspiratorial glance. “Biff, you’re terrible.”

He matched her sly smile. “It wouldn’t be as if we were vicious,” he said. “He’s lived more than his own share of years, and with the wife he doted on for thirty-five years gone, he has nothing much left.”

Reena’s smooth brow crinkled. “It would take some doing.”

“But the price is right, and the opportune moment is now, while he’s suffering the aftermath of Aunt Ethel’s horrible death.”

Reena drew hard on her cigarette. “He wouldn’t be the only rich man for whom the doors never open.”

“Not by a long shot,” Biff agreed. “You pick the right place, cross the right palms, and Uncle Joe joins the forgotten stored-aways forever. Right off the top of my mind I could name at least four members of the Yacht Club who have antique, but oh-so-rich relatives tucked safely away in expensive sanitariums.”

Reena studied him. The small, frothy surf of the Gulf of Mexico made a salty whisper on the sand. A wheeling gull screamed.

“I could weep,” she murmured, “thinking of poor Uncle Joe rattling around in that lonely house with all its memories.”

“And its ghosts of Aunt Ethel,” Biff said.

Uncle Joe was one of those lean and wiry men with sandy coloration who seem to forget to age after they’re fortyish. His life had been energetic, productive, satisfying, until a week ago. Then everything had seemed to end in a grinding and tearing of metal. He’d swerved to avoid a kid driver who’d shot onto the highway from a side road; swerved, and lost control, and glimpsed a concrete bridge abutment materializing out of the night...

The car had been totaled, and Uncle Joe hadn’t seemed able to understand the miracle that had left him unscathed, except for a few bruises, while the life had been crushed out of Ethel.

When Biff and Reena came up from the beach at sunset, Uncle Joe was still in his room. He didn’t make an appearance until almost midnight. At that time, Biff was sprawled on a recliner in the Florida-room, sipping beer and watching a late TV show. Biff flipped the recliner upright as Uncle Joe brushed past him and turned down the sound on the TV.

“Hey,” Biff said, “what’s the idea?”

Uncle Joe crossed a finger on his lips for silence. He stood listening for a moment, then said, “Can’t hear her from here, like I could from the windows of my room. Come on.”

Before Biff had a chance to question him, Uncle Joe had crossed the room and was sliding back the glass panel that yielded on the patio. A breeze had freshened with the coming of darkness, and now it was sighing almost angrily through the stand of royal palms whose shadows marked the twining driveway. Far beyond the swaying banana plants and poinsettias of the profuse garden, a glimmering necklace of light marked the causeway connecting the island of plush estates with the mainland, where Sarasota cast a diffused glow against scudding clouds.

The shadows folded about Uncle Joe as he stalked toward the greenhouse where Aunt Ethel had grown her prize orchids.

“Uncle Joe,” Biff said, tagging behind, “what in blazes...”

“Shhh! Listen!”

Biff bumped into him as Uncle Joe jerked to a stop. From beyond the greenhouse, a woman’s voice was calling: “Joseph... Dear, the orchids... Don’t let my flowers die, Joseph...”

“Somebody,” Uncle Joe muttered tightly, “is a darn good mimic. Sounds just like Ethel.”

“What are you talking about, Uncle Joe?”

“The voice, of course.” Uncle Joe snapped. “Listen... there it is again!”

From the darkness came a thin wailing, a disembodied plea for Uncle Joe to give the orchids tender care.

Biff winced as Uncle Joe grabbed his arm. “Biff, I know blamed well you heard her that time!”

“Not a thing, Uncle Joe. Just the wind...” Biff touched Uncle Joe gently on the shoulder. “Just take it easy. You’re having a tough time believing Aunt Ethel is really dead, that’s all.”

Uncle Joe shook Biff’s hand away. He gave Biff a strange look. “I’m more aware of the fact than anyone else,” Uncle Joe bit out. “I also know that the dead don’t come back and talk!”

“Sure they don’t,” Biff agreed smoothly, “at least so that just anybody can hear them.”

Uncle Joe kept staring at Biff, and Biff had a satisfying glimpse of glinting, clammy sweat on Uncle Joe’s pale face.

“Biff, why would you pretend not to hear that voice?”

“I wasn’t pretending. But if it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll pretend that I did.”

Uncle Joe’s gaze drifted to the shadows of the greenhouse. “Somebody was out there. Biff...”

“Yes, Uncle Joe?”

“Where is Reena?”

“Reena?” Biff echoed. “Why, in her room of course.”

“You certain about that?”

“Certain,” Biff said glibly. “She had a headache — too much sun on the beach today — and went to bed early. I looked in on her just before you busted into the Florida room.”

Biff enfolded Uncle Joe’s taut shoulders with his arm. “Have a nice tall toddy, Uncle Joe. Relax. Get some sleep. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

Later, Biff watched Reena brush her hair at her dressing table. He stood behind her with a nightcap drink in his hand. Their eyes met in the mirror.

“You were perfect darling,” he grinned.

Her brush paused in mid-stroke. “I heard what he said out there, Biff. Sounded for a second like he was onto us.”

“He was scared and desperate for a logical explanation,” Biff assured her. He patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry, baby. He’s a tough old codger, but by the time we’re through with him, he’ll be walking on his hands!”

Uncle Joe kept to his room most of the next day. Just before nightfall, Biff, from the Florida room, saw Uncle Joe sneak to the greenhouse, and he smiled thinly as he watched Uncle Joe prowl about. It’s getting to him, Biff decided with warm satisfaction; he’s less sure of himself with every passing hour.

Shortly after midnight, Biff heard the sound for which he was waiting — a yell from Uncle Joes room, the banging of a door — and he entered the hallway as Uncle Joe rushed past.

Biff took a leaping step, caught Uncle Joe’s arm. “What is it, Uncle Joe? Prowler in the house?”

“Out there, hovering over the far end of the greenhouse,” Uncle Joe was breathing hard. “Ghostly figure... wearing a white lace dress. Ethel’s dress. I’d recognize it anywhere.”

Uncle Joe broke away, and Biff had to run to catch up with him in the patio.

Uncle Joe jarred to a stop, jerked up an arm, and pointed. “Look, Biff, going around the side of the greenhouse!”

A white figure seemed to flow along the side of the greenhouse in supernatural silence.

“What is it, Uncle Joe? I don’t see a thing.”

A stiffness settled through the old man’s body. He drew in a breath. “Biff, I know what I saw. And I’m not crazy. I tell you, I’m definitely not crazy!”

“Of course not,” Biff soothed. “Come on. We’ll have a drink. It’ll relax you and you can get some sleep.”

Biff led the way into the kitchen. While he mixed a pair of stiff drinks and pressured one into Uncle Joe’s hand, Biff chatted about the weather, the upcoming regatta at the yacht club, and Uncle Joe’s Friday golf dates with Dr. Ned Barringer, the wealthy psychiatrist who was Uncle Joe’s oldest friend.

“Maybe,” Biff said mildly, “you ought to ask Barringer about these voices and visions.”

“I don’t need Ned Barringer in a professional capacity,” Uncle Joe snorted. “Never have. Never will.” Biff smiled to himself. Uncle Joe’s quick vehemence was a clue to the uncertainty and fear growing within him.

Uncle Joe finished off his drink, then snapped his fingers as a sudden thought came to him. He wheeled and hurried out.

Biff followed. “What is it, Uncle Joe?”

Uncle Joe didn’t answer. He strode across his bedroom to the adjacent dressing room, yanked open a closet door, and then just stood, staring at the white lace dress.

“It was positively scrumptious,” Biff told Reena when they were alone in their room, “that look on his face.”

“Good thing you kept him in the kitchen and gave me plenty of time to put the dress back,” Reena said. She wriggled more comfortably in her boudoir chair and sipped a drink.

Biff leaned down and kissed her lightly. “We’re a terrific team, darling. It was wonderful, really inspired, your standing on the ladder at the far end of the greenhouse for the first appearance. Seemed as though the figure in the lace dress was hovering against the sky.”

Reena reached and tousled his hair. “I do believe you’re enjoying the game, darling.”

“Who wouldn’t, with a fortune on the table? Aren’t you?”

“More fun than a Beaux Arts masquerade,” Reena assured him.

Biff paced the carpet, rubbing his palms together. “Sure you’ve got everything in order for tomorrow?”

“To the last detail,” Reena promised. “I’ve the photograph of Aunt Ethel. The artist in Sarasota is a genius, no less, as well as money hungry and most discreet. Don’t worry. By tomorrow night we’ll have a death mask of Aunt Ethel so lifelike you’ll expect it to speak.”

“Luminous, don’t forget,” Biff said. “One that glows in the dark. While you’re across the bay tomorrow getting the mask fixed up, I expect I should phone Dr. Ned Barringer. It’s time for the worried and solicitous nephew to ask a question or two about his uncle’s condition...”

Biff timed his phone call to intercept Barringer as the doctor was preparing to go to lunch. Biff chatted about Uncle Joe’s golf game for a moment, then his voice broke lamely, “To tell you the truth, doctor, I’d like you to make the usual Friday date this week something more than a round of golf.”

“In what way?” Barringer had a quiet voice that, even so, suggested substance and command.

“Well... he hasn’t been himself since Aunt Ethel’s death.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You are?” Biff asked brightly, then quickly changed his tone. “You are? I didn’t know anyone else had noticed. He’s getting — I hate to say this — but, well, worse every day. Thinks he hears her voice. Believes he sees her walking in the garden at night.”

“Thank you, Biff. You did the right thing in calling me.”

Biff hung up, containing a yelp of pure joy.

That night, it seemed that Uncle Joe would never go to sleep. Biff and Reena waited in their bedroom, trying to read, pacing the floor, watching the clock, mixing drinks to keep their hands and minds busy.

Finally, when the deep quiet down the hall had remained unbroken for more than an hour, Reena crossed to the table near the windows and poured her third drink. “Biff, he simply must be asleep by now! Why wait longer?” Biff took the glass from her hand and downed half the slug of straight whiskey. “Okay, get the mask!”

Reena hurried to her closet, slid the door open, stood on tiptoe, and lifted an oval-shaped hatbox from the top shelf. She carried it to the bed, opened it with Biff hovering beside her. The empty eye sockets of Aunt Ethel’s countenance looked up at them. Biff caught his breath as Reena lifted out Aunt Ethel’s face. He’d seen the death mask earlier, but he stared in fascination. Reena was right. The artist in Sarasota had done a terrific job. Looking at the shell of Aunt Ethel with the vacant, parted lips, Biff felt the hackles creep across his neck.

“Hello, Aunt Ethel, you stupid old biddy.”

“Hurry, Biff!” Reena said. “I can’t take much more of this waiting.”

“You won’t have to. The old boy might even favor us with a heart attack when he gets a load of this.”

Biff dropped to one knee beside the bed and dragged out the slender bamboo casting rod he’d cached there earlier. Reena handed him the mask, and he attached it to the end of the pole with two pieces of black silk string. With the pole extended, Aunt Ethel’s kindly old visage seemed to float in midair.

“Now don’t forget to give me time to get in his dressing room,” Biff said. “I’ll work from there. I don’t dare stick the pole in from the hallway. If he bolts — and he’s bound to — that’s the door he’ll use.”

While he was speaking, Biff slipped into a black dressing gown, turned the collar up, and pulled an old dark deckhand’s stretch cap over his head and ears. In darkness, he would be an invisible shadow.

Reena gave him a little shove toward the door. “Don’t worry about my end of it, darling. Just get moving!”

Biff peeked out, then slipped into the hallway. He tiptoed to Uncle Joe’s doorway carrying the disjointed sections of the casting rod and death mask tucked lightly under his arm.

He put his ear against the door. The room beyond was silent. He turned the doorknob with the delicate touch of a safecracker, opened the door a few inches, and listened again. He heard Uncle Joe’s breathing; shallow, but regular and even. Uncle Joe was sound asleep.

Biff eeled into the room, closed the door soundlessly, and crept across the thick carpet, as silently as an inching caterpillar.

In Uncle Joe’s dressing room, Biff treated himself to a long-drawn breath. Slightly ajar, the dressing room door was a perfect shield, not that he needed one in the darkness. Feeling with his fingers, he connected the sections of the long, thin bamboo pole. He shook out the death mask and it swung freely. Its pale, frosty glow seemed to leap at him.

Inch by inch, he extended the pole out into Uncle Joe’s room. By leaning forward a little he could bring the mask within inches of Uncle Joe’s face, or send it swooping to the ceiling.

Come on, Reena, he thought tightly, get with your end of it.

As if on cue, a moaning voice rose in the darkness. “Joseph... Ohhhhhh, Joseph...”

Biff dropped the pole, letting the mask float about six feet directly above Uncle Joe’s sleeping face.

“Joseph... can’t you hear me calling? Joseph...”

Biff gulped. He could have sworn it was Aunt Ethel’s voice wailing the name from some cold, damp, sepulchral place. Slipping along close to the windows outside, Reena was really doing it up brown.

“Joseph... Come to me... I need you, Joseph... You must come...”

Suddenly, there was no sound of Uncle Joe breathing. Biff knew he was awake — awake, and paralyzed for a fractured second. Biff gave the rod a slight twitch, and Aunt Ethel’s shimmering face made little movements against the dark ceiling. It seemed, even to Biff, that the mask was the source of the ghostly voice.

Uncle Joe recovered the capability of sound at last. “Aaaaggghhh...!” he screeched.

Snatched from slumber by the circumstance, even a stronger man might have fainted. Uncle Joe leaped straight up, then came down in a crash of bedsprings and tangle of covers.

Aunt Ethel’s face swooped toward him. He floundered to one side, tripped, spilled from the bed onto the floor. He left a trail of bed linens as he fought the entanglements to the door and the hallway beyond.

Biff quickly broke down the rod, stuffed it and the mask under his dressing gown, then ran to the hallway. It was empty. Biff ran to his own room, opened a closet, and pushed the ghost-making paraphernalia out of sight. As he closed the closet and turned, Reena slipped in from the hallway, a bit disheveled and breathless.

“He cut a swath through the garden like a small hurricane,” Reena said.

Biff rubbed his hands together. “Good!”

“Should we go look for him?” Biff speared her with a glance.

“Perish the thought! We go beddy-bye. Just a pair of innocents who slept through the experience of a pixilated old man. How could we know he was so far gone, until someone discovers him wandering in his nightclothes?”

Reena fell to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. “You really are terribly clever, darling.”

“I know,” Biff said. “Let’s tuck in and dream of his millions.”

It seemed to Biff that he had barely drifted off before a hand was shaking his shoulder, awakening him roughly.

Biff blinked against the bedroom lights that had been turned on. His sleep-gritty eyes focused on the figure of Uncle Joe. Seeing that Biff was awake, Uncle Joe drew back from the bed, and Biff’s first thought was that Uncle Joe looked a bit ludicrous. The old man was swallowed by a bathrobe that he’d borrowed from someone and draped over his nightclothes. It hung to his fingertips and flapped about his ankles.

Reena stirred in her warm cocoon of sleep. “Wassa matter, darling?—”

“It’s Uncle Joe. He’s back.”

Reena’s eyes snapped open. She sat up as Biff got out of bed and stood beside Uncle Joe.

Biff patted Uncle Joe’s shoulder. “There, there now. Just take it easy. What are you doing running around in the middle of the night in that funny looking getup?”

Uncle Joe slapped Biff’s hand away. “You crummy young punk! I borrowed the robe from Ned Barringer. I went straight over there. Figured it was about time a good psychiatrist and I talked about your case.”

Biff’s mouth fell open. “My case?”

“When I heard a voice that you denied hearing,” Uncle Joe said icily, “it meant one of two things. I was crazy, or you were a liar. If you were a liar, it meant you and Reena were up to something. It wasn’t hard to figure then what it was and what your motive was. I hoped I was wrong about you two. I hoped you wouldn’t go through with it.”

Uncle Joe watched Reena slip quakingly to Biff’s side.

Uncle Joe’s eyes raked over them. “But I sort of hoped in vain, didn’t I? And tonight I figured it was high time I got something done — before you let the thought of all that money poison you into doing something really crazy, like murdering me in my sleep!”

Uncle Joe switched his gaze to the doorway. Numbed, hypnotically, Biff and Reena turned their heads. The portly figure of Dr. Barringer loomed before them. Worse, Barringer wasn’t alone. He was followed by two huge fellows in white coats.

Uncle Joe walked over to the doctor. The two giants in white coats advanced. Biff and Reena sagged against each other in a half faint.

Vaguely, Biff glimpsed Uncle Joe and Dr. Barringer leaving the room arm in arm. Barringer was speaking words of comfort to his dearest friend and fiercest golfing pal. A little of what Barringer was saying drifted back:

“Just remember, Joe, you’re not the only fine senior citizen of wealth to have a weirdo family offshoot comfortably and securely ensconced in a discreet private sanitarium. Believe me, right in our golfing gang I could name some names. But of course I never reveal privileged information...”