The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mysteries!

Life Sentence

Originally published in Manhunt, April 1960.

In my official capacity I’ve escorted many men to state prison, each handcuffed to me during the train ride. Several of them have been murderers. This one was in that macabre category, and the thing that interested me was that I couldn’t imagine him killing anybody.

As a matter of fact, his was the goriest murder of all. He had taken a heavy meat knife and chopped his wife so thoroughly that she was buried like a mass of hamburger.

His name was Hervie Taylor. He looked as if he should be on his way to keep books in an electric appliance store. This was precisely the job he’d had. If you’d noticed him at all against that background you’d have felt instinctively that he would never go far. He was an excellent bookkeeper. This, coupled with his natural colorless attributes, kept him in his dim corner writing his careful rows of figures while the world went its laughing, crying, loving, brawling, lustrous way.

He was a considerate little man, doing his best to keep from being an inconvenient appendage attached to me by steel. Some of them can’t help worrying their hand against the handcuff. Others want water. A few try to bury our hands in the seat to hide the cuff. Last one I took up before Hervie Taylor had to go to the bathroom every five miles or so.

Hervie sat beside me watching the scenery stream past, beautiful farming country of low. Rolling hills and green meadows, white houses and red barns. In this, he was different from the others. There are several stock reactions. Hatred for the beauty of the countryside. Bitterness. Nostalgia. Inner torture, if the man being taken away had a masochistic streak. Even hope, in a few.

Hervie Taylor simply sat and looked at the scenery.

He was a man of fifty, small-boned and not given to excess flesh. He had brown hair that he wore neatly parted. The hair had faded a little, but there was no gray in it. His eyes were dark brown, keen and intelligent. You’d never guess his age — or his crime — simply by looking at him. There was still the suggestion of boyishness in his face. A lively eagerness in his eyes that the monotony and cares of the years had not altogether extinguished.

He was of course going up for life. Perhaps he was thinking about it, now that each click of the wheels carried him that much closer.

“Do they have good food?” he asked.

“Simple, but substantial,” I said.

“Not a lot of sticky, sickening stuff or creamed mess on toast, I guess.”

“You guess right,” I said.

“It was the only mess Jassie knew how to cook, wanted to cook, or cared to eat,” he announced.

Jassie was — had been his wife. You’ve seen couples like them, a little guy with a woman who had spread, flabbed, and grown to three times his size. There’d been a lot of Jassie to chop up.

“I lived with Jassie thirty years,” he said idly.

“That’s quite a time.”

“Jassie never should have strung it out,” he said. “She changed. Or perhaps I did. Or maybe it simply took me a long time to get to know her.”

He must have loved her once, I thought.

As if suspecting the thought, he said, “She was a cute kid when we got married. Only having a husband made her feel secure, I guess. She had a man. She didn’t need to fix up any longer. She let herself go to seed in a hurry.”

“Some women are like that.” Mentally, I added: Only you don’t kill them for it.

“We never had children,” he said. “We — ah — never did very much of the necessary prerequisite to having children. Jassie didn’t want them around. Too much trouble, she said. I wanted a gang of kids. So the wife and I could sort of grow up all over again with them. Fellow with kids has got a good excuse to do lots of stuff like pitch a baseball in the back yard or tinker with a bike or take in a circus and eat hot dogs. Jassie didn’t like any of that. She had to have a man who’d come in, cook supper, wash the dishes, and sit in the living room with her. Sometimes she started snoring on the couch — she had a wet, blubbery little snore. Still, she liked to have her husband sitting there with her. It was his place, she said.”

“Fellow like you,” I suggested, “should have become a Boy Scout troop advisor or had a Sunday School class of boys.”

He looked at me as if I weren’t very bright. “I tried both of those things. It made Jassie ill.”

“Ill?”

“Yes. She’d have to call the doctor. She wouldn’t get better until I had loaded the house with chocolate creams and was staying with her again.” He sighed. “It got worse as time went on. She’d time me from the house to the store and back again. If I missed my bus, I’d have to explain every minute I was late.”

“Sounds pretty dull,” I conceded.

“You’ve no idea,” he said. “For a time, I tried to make friends. You know, have somebody drop into the house and play bridge or have a little dinner. The experiences were horrible. A couple would drop in and Jassie wouldn’t stir. I’d have to cook the dinner and explain her illness. Newly made friends usually dropped in only once, the house was usually... well, dirty, unmade, you know. Sometimes the dirty dishes and garbage container made it smell. Anyway, Jassie would never return a visit. As time went on, she got worse, of course.” He looked at me calmly and I got a mental picture of Jassie, spreading over the couch as the years spread over her. Jassie so helpless, demanding every moment of his time, hemming in every second of his life.

“After a long time,” he said in a tone more introspective than he’d used before, “I realized I must leave Jassie. I had no money. We never had any money. I didn’t make much, and she knew the amount to the penny. She didn’t know how to handle money. We arrived at every payday flat broke. Week by week — sort of like a motion picture that’s going nowhere.

“Although I lacked money, I did get a chance to go in business. A man who knew my work offered me the same starting salary and a small interest if I would go into a new venture he was starting.

“Jassie wouldn’t hear of it. It was risky. I wouldn’t be able to work set hours. Sometimes I’d have to work nights or on weekends. The business was bound to fail. Everything must go on just as in the past.”

“Did the business fail?” I asked.

“Most ironically,” Hervie Taylor said. “The man who took the place I was offered absconded with considerable funds. He was later caught and punished, but the damage to the business was done. He’d spent the stolen money. I’m certain,” he added solemnly, “the story would have been different had I entered the venture. I would have worked hard. I would never have touched the first penny.”

I believed Hervie Taylor on that point. Until he’d chopped up Jassie, his record had been without blemish.

“Please understand,” he said, “how this affected me. Here was a business ruined and gone in which I might have found delight, interest, even excitement. So for the first time I left Jassie.”

“First time?”

He nodded. “I slipped my clothes out of the house and moved to a hotel. I left her a note saying I would send her money each week. Believe me, I had no intentions of living a dissolute life. But I did have a glorious evening, just able to walk the streets. Jassie came to me. She begged. She wept. She implored. She just now realized how much she loved me, she said. She’d do better.”

He looked out the window for a few moments. “Women,” he said, “have emotional weapons they use against men sometimes, some women. You can’t feel this weapon, you can’t name it. It’s like an invisible net and the more you struggle against it, the more you feel like a monster and brute. Do you know what I mean?”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve never had your experience.”

“You haven’t a Jassie,” he said. “I went back to her. And for a little while she was different. She even cooked a steak or two. It didn’t last, this new Jassie. Before long she was back in her rut, only more so.”

“You left her again?”

“Yes. This time she came with the tears, the imploring, the promises. They didn’t work. The next, evening a seedy looking guy with the photostat of a private detective’s license in his wallet came to see me. He said that Mrs. Taylor was his client and I was through mistreating her. His threat was veiled, but I understood. I returned to Jassie.”

“That was the last time you left her?”

“Oh, no. She hemmed me in worse than ever. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. This time I would really run away, go to another city, change my name.”

He paled a little, remembering. After a moment, he said, “She caught me slipping out of the house. Know what she did? She whipped the literal hell out of me. That’s what she did. I mean, she used her fists. She knocked me down and kicked me and dragged me to my feet and knocked me down again. This went on for a considerable time. I really don’t know of anything more shattering that can happen to a man. I despised myself. She despised me just as much. For years she had counted out my pocket money to the penny. Now she even told me what to eat for lunch. It was never much. I’ve never known the human heart could hold so much hatred as I felt for Jassie.”

“You didn’t run away again,” I said.

“No. I knew it would be no use. A week later, after I’d cooked supper one night, she called to me to bring her food to the living room so she could finish watching one of her interminable TV programs. A strangely nerveless feeling came over me. I found myself with the knife in my hand. Funny... when the knife disappeared in her, she gave a little squeak for all the world like a fat, gray mouse.”

We rode a little in silence. We were almost at the prison now. Hervie Taylor sat at his window to catch the first sight of it.

“Relax,” I said. “There are no whips or sadistic guards in displace.”

“Relax?” He turned to look at me. “But I understand it’s a model prison. Weekly movies, a machine shop, a prison brass band, a nice library, even a baseball team.”

“That’s right,” I said.

His reply was brief, simple, and straight to the point. A beatific smile brought out the boyishness in his face. He looked out the window toward the distant grey walls of the prison. “Freedom,” he said.