The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mysteries!

Originally published in New Detective Magazine, December 1952.

Chapter One

I was murdered at exactly eleven o’clock on a Monday evening. I am able to recall the time exactly because the tall clock in the foyer was striking the hour as I shoved the papers to the back of the desk and started up the long, dark stairway to the upper hall.

There were many things on my mind that night. I wondered where Vicky was, for one thing. She’d said at dinner that she was playing bridge at Thelma Grigsby’s tonight. Was it okay with me? Sure, I said. I had some work to do anyway. She’d pouted prettily, her hair like spun gold about her face in the soft candle light in the dining room — Vicky always liked dinner by candlelight.

“If only you could be a husband and an important man at the same time, Doug,” she’d said. “All this work and no play—”

“Gives mama spending money,” I said.

After dinner I went in the study. For a moment I stood looking at the desk. I didn’t want to sit down to it and face the mass of papers on it. I was tired, and I had that pain across my abdomen again. Maybe I was developing an ulcer. Was it worth it, the work and strain required to keep a few steps ahead of the rest?

Then I pushed the smothered feeling aside, ripped the cellophane off a fresh package of cigarettes, and sat at the cluttered desk.

I heard Vicky pass through the hallway and without quite realizing it I listened until I heard the car start in the driveway outside. The motor raced until it sounded as if it would throw a rod. Vicky had never been able to get a motor started smoothly.

I heard the motor whisper away to an idle and the liquid, golden sound of her voice came through the open study window that overlooked the driveway.

“Mr. Shoffner, we’ll cut some glads for the house tomorrow morning.”

I heard the old, tired voice of Wendel Shoffner answer, “Yes, mum.” He was our gardener and general handy man. He’d been with us a month now, a tired, sagging man with watery blue eyes and baggy pants.

The car engine raced again as Vicky left the driveway. Shoffner’s slow footsteps crunched by the window as he went to his room over the garage. I was still too taken with lassitude to get to work. Could we afford a glad garden and a man to keep it and the grounds up? Of course we couldn’t. You don’t live that way on the pay of an investigator attached to the office of the district attorney. But there are ways. You don’t have to act in an illegal manner, either. You just have to stretch a point here and there. Politics, some people call it.

I told myself that I had to get rid of this feeling of depression, the nagging sense that I was caged and on a treadmill. I had to shake loose the insinuation in my mind that it was all for nothing. Life was still sweet, very much so.

I wanted to live a very long time that night.

Lew Whitfield phoned me about nine o’clock. He had been elected D.A. a year ago on a reform platform. He was a short, deliberate man, given to flesh and losing his hair. He smoked black cigars and lived with his slender, greying wife and six children in a rambling barn of a house. “Only place big enough to hold the brood,” he would explain. There were croquet and badminton courts in his yard. His lawn was like the hide of a mangy dog, scuffed bare of its pitiful, dried-up grass by the pounding of many childish feet. He romped with his kids until his balding head gleamed with sweat and his breath grew short, and they tumbled all over him when he went into the house to sit down. Through it all he moved as placidly as a good-natured elephant.

“Going over the Sigmon brief, Doug?” he asked that night on the phone. A radio was blaring and a kid was screaming laughter in his house.

“Just starting on it,” I said. The Sigmon case wasn’t particularly fresh or interesting. It happened a dozen times a day in different parts of the country. Loren Sigmon, a scrawny, underfed, cheap punk. His girl friend, after an argument, had tipped us that he was the boy we were looking for to clean up a filling station robbery. Maybe they made up and she, in that sudden reversal of emotion that takes hold of such women, told him that he’d better scram before the coppers came. Or perhaps she was still angry and threw it in his teeth that he was going to jail, when he showed at her place. He wouldn’t tell us about that. He wouldn’t talk about anything. But we had him. I’d gone to her place not quite in time to keep him from shooting her to death.

Lew tried to tell me something about the Sigmon case over the radio and the noise of his children.

Then he said, “It isn’t important. Put it aside and bring Vicky on over. We’ll have coffee after canasta.”

“Sorry. Vicky’s out to win us a set of ashtrays or something at Thelma Grigsby’s tonight.”

We hung up, and I rocked back in the desk chair, smoking and thinking. You live along for years, and then somehow you start doing that. Thinking. Questioning. What have I done with the thirty three years of my life?

College, an investigator’s job with an insurance outfit. The war. And you remember the eruption of emotion that swept the country, the release from boredom, from the everyday treadmill that seems to have captured you. You return and meet Vicky and marry her. Then you set to work to build a future.

Yet one night, without warning, without reason, you find yourself unable to work, sitting and thinking...

I threw the pencil I’d been toying with on the desk. Dammit, I knew what was wrong with me. I was lonely. I wanted the sound of Vicky’s voice. I wished she were here to go with me to Lew Whitfield’s house. I wanted the noise of his kids, and Vicky’s eyes lighting as she looked at a dress Lew’s wife had made.

“Marge, however do you do it!” Yes, I could hear every inflection of her voice in my imagination.

Or perhaps she’d put her head next to the oldest Whitfield child, Sharon, over Sharon’s high school homework.

And then later we’d leave the Whitfields and drive across town, the soft Florida night a caress in our faces. We might stop someplace and dance a few minutes. Then home — and the warm darkness.

I was still very much in love with Vicky. That night I hoped we would have many, many years together.

At ten o’clock the phone rang a second time. I was deep in some notes Lew had made on a joint at the edge of town which was taking, we thought, illegal bets. Minor, but important. You go after those things and splash them big to keep the public convinced of your worth as a public servant. You like to keep the voters saying, “No organized crime in our community.” In our case it was true, as true as in any place in the nation. This was saying a lot, considering that we were in a Florida resort town on the Gulf coast while right across the state from us on the Atlantic side lay a city which had attracted the Kefauver committee itself.

On the second skirl, I picked up the phone. “Doug? Is Vicky busy at the moment?”

I caught my breath. My hand went a little chill on the phone. The voice was that of Thelma Grigsby. Her bridge parties never broke up as early as ten o’clock.

“She isn’t here,” I said. I hesitated. “Didn’t she stop by your place?”

“Why, no. Was she planning to?”

“No,” I said, surprised at how fast the word jumped out of me. “I just thought she might. I’ll tell her you phoned when she gets in.”

“Doug — is anything wrong?”

“Of course not. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, just a silly feeling the tone of your voice gave me.” She laughed. “Old worry bird, that’s me. We’ll be looking at you, Doug.”

“Sure,” I said.

I replaced the phone and sat there looking at it for a moment. It had never occurred to me to mistrust Vicky. She came and went pretty much as she pleased. But tonight my tired mind began asking questions. Was there something behind her absences during the past few weeks? Was this, tonight, a simple matter of her having changed her mind about attending the bridge party? If so, why hadn’t she returned home? There were several places in Santa Maria, movies, the homes of friends, where she might have gone alone, of course. But she hated to go anywhere for a good time alone.

I found it hard to break the chain of thought, once it had started. She had taken an interest in water skiing recently, which occupied most of her afternoons. She was rehearsing a play with a little theater group, and that took several of her evenings. Had she really been at those places? Was there another man?

The question cut through my consciousness with a pain as acute as physical torture. I couldn’t sit still any longer. I had to get up and walk about the study. The very silence of the house, the oppressive heat of the night ate away at me.

It happened. Hell, it happened so many times every day that a man was a complete fool to think it could never happen to him.

I’d never fooled myself into thinking that nine men out of ten who looked at Vicky wouldn’t like to take her from me. I’d never blamed them, and I’d never been of a jealous disposition. She had that natural animal magnetism that was felt the moment she entered a room. Blonde, golden, a tall, striking woman. She knew how to dress to advantage, but that attraction would have been felt had she donned a mother hubbard.

Yet I had never once believed that any other man would ever succeed in stirring Vicky’s feelings to the point that would lose her to me. She was too damn forthright and honest for that. Or had I been simply too smug and sure of myself?

I was frightened at the thought of losing her. I tried to reason myself out of my state of mind, but my reason would not respond to the reins.

My reason became cold and clear and remembered a dozen little things. The far-away look in her eyes during the past few weeks. The rapt expression of her face. Sometimes I’d had to voice a question or statement twice. It was as if her thoughts, her interests were elsewhere at the moment.

I recalled the night a week ago when I’d called for her at the Bath Club. She’d come into the club room with its long bar and bamboo tables and chairs, and when she’d seen me, sudden fright had flared in her eyes. She’d been out on the terrace, and when I’d suggested going out there, she had pleaded a headache and rushed me home.

Who had been concealed by the warm darkness of the terrace? Whom had she been with out there?

I ripped the next to last cigarette out of the package, lighted it from the one I’d smoked down. Bitterness had crept into my reasoning now. I had probably raised a brow myself at the situation some time or another. A man enwraps himself in the task of giving his wife an ever higher standard of living, leaving her lonely, more and more leisure on her hands, free to draw the assumption that she is unloved.

With Bill Farnsworth and his wife it had been that way. And I recalled a remark I’d made to Vicky the night Bill’s wife had walked out on him, “Can you really blame her? How about him. After all he couldn’t expect her to become nothing more than a hot-house plant. She’s a flesh and blood woman.”

Vicky was that, very much so. A flesh and blood woman.

A light tap sounded on the jamb of the study doorway. I glanced up. Old Shoffner said, “Anything else I can do before I turn in for the night, Mr. Townsend?”

I shook my head. He was looking at me closely, and I colored a trifle and stopped running my fingers through my already tousled hair.

As he turned to go, my voice stopped him. “I suppose Mrs. Townsend is pretty busy with the garden these days?”

He hesitated. “She works at it.”

My gaze held the attention of his salt-and-pepper stubbled face. “Come in, Shoffner. Sit down.”

“I’m really tired, Mr. Townsend. Been hauling muck for the flowers.”

“You can spare another moment. I don’t get to see much of her, Wendel. I hardly know how she spends her days. Is there anything I could get, a gift to please her? Does she ever talk of anything she feels she missed?”

He remained rigid in the doorway, twisting his dirty cap in his hands. “She doesn’t talk to me much, Mr. Townsend.”

“I’d thought she would. She’s always so full of chatter, and out there gardening, I figured she might talk quite a lot. Her birthday is next month. I’d like to get her something very special.”

“She hasn’t said anything about it. I’m afraid I can’t help you, Mr. Townsend.”

I stood looking at him. He had a rather grim, seamed face, and I suspected that he knew the trend my thoughts were taking and recognized that I was offering him the opportunity to tell me anything I might need to know.

“She probably stays busy with her friends,” I suggested.

Shoffner nodded, and I said, “She knows a great many young matrons her age. I suppose they call for her in the afternoon to go shopping.”

“Yes, sir.”

He was looking more uncomfortable with each passing moment. I waited for him to add anything he knew about the people who called for her when I was away. Perhaps the man who’d been on the Bath Club terrace had never called here, but Shoffner’s reluctance, the cold bead of his washed-out blue eyes was answer enough. He knew something. But he was not going to get mixed up in anything. He was thinking of his job and how hard it might be for him to find another at his age.

“I’m really very tired, Mr. Townsend.”

“All right, Shoffner. Goodnight.”

He went away from the study and I heard the rear screen door slam behind him. I sat down again at the desk.

Chapter Two Mind over Mayhem

It couldn’t be true, I told myself.

Vicky would never be unfaithful to me. Damn it, I almost wished that Thelma Grigsby hadn’t phoned tonight.

I tried to concentrate on my work. I had done a ratty thing, trying to pump old Shoffner. Bringing out the family skeleton before a servant. Spying on Vicky, who was a part of me, without whom I never could live.

I realized that I was exhausted. Conflicting feelings of shame and then anger — when I thought of a stranger on that dark terrace — beat at my mind. I would never give Vicky up; not as long as I thought there was any chance at all of continuing life with her. She must know that. She must realize the depth of my feeling. It seemed incredible, come to think of it, that she, who was so very kind and thoughtful, could do anything to hurt me.

I rose from the desk. I thought, You’d better stiffen your spine, Townsend, and start thinking like a man. Vicky started life with you without too many material comforts. You had a small inheritance. You’ve invested wisely and well, thanks to politics, and the inside dope you’ve had. You could even take a year, two years off, and coast, putting Vicky first in your life. Quit working so hard, chewing so hard at the muzzle. Even if some joker has caught her in a bored, lonely mood, you can win her back.

The clock in the foyer began striking eleven. I went out of the study, crossed the sunken living room with its square, modern furniture that Vicky had chosen.

I was feeling better as I started up the stairway. I was glad I had lived this night with its introspection. I must admit that things hadn’t been right between Vicky and me for several weeks now. We’d grown distant. I would stop the drift in that direction; for tonight I’d experienced the sodden fear that would only be the beginning of my feeling should I ever lose her.

I was almost at the top of the stairs. The upper hallway was hot and very dark. I fumbled for the light switch; and then I sensed that I was not alone. A rustle of cloth, a whisper of breathing, and I knew another presence was in the hallway with me.

I was not afraid at first; no time for that. Only jarred to a sudden immobility. The instant of my indecision was my undoing. And then terror!

The gun crashed and a tongue of flame lashed toward me. It was quite close. A searing pain shot through my head and I had the swift sensation of a sickness like vertigo multiplied a thousand times. There seemed to be nothing beneath me except black nothingness. I fell, loose jointed and with a complete lack of control over my limbs. End over end, elbows bumping, legs flying like strands of rubber, I jolted all the way to the foot of the stairs, to the parquetry of the entry foyer.

I jolted to rest with my limbs at awkward angles. I could feel no pain now. I could, in fact, feel nothing, except the wild terror that came with this feeling nothing.

I tried to move, and could not. I was wrapped in a blackness, a helplessness that made of my body a lump of cold clay. Then I heard the footsteps coming down the stairs, and I seemed to know that they belonged to a man. A light fell on my face, and I guessed that my eyes were open; for I could see the light like the haze of a faint moon almost obscured by clouds.

The light moved. He had moved. I heard his breathing, like two skeins of silk being rubbed together. I supposed that he was giving me a quick examination by the light of a flashlight. What he witnessed must have satisfied him. The light vanished, and after a considerable time I decided that I was again alone.

As I became accustomed to this numb lack of sensation, some of the sickening fear of it left me. I was feeling no tiredness; no pain, as if in the next moment I might swoop off to some world beyond the stars. The images of my thoughts were possessed of that same peculiar weightlessness that had taken my body.

Was this the experience of death? The question did not seem at all surprising to me right then, but very concrete and real. I doubt that I would have been surprised had several beings of this strange world floated forward to bid me welcome to their company.

I was human, and therefore concerned first with myself. Next followed a flood of questions regarding the man who had shot me. I didn’t doubt that the murder had been a deliberate one. He had known I would turn out the study light, cross the living room with its dim night light and walk up the stairs.

Had it been a burglar? I dismissed that possibility. The smart second story man never enters a house with the male head present and visible — as I had been through the open study window. Neither does the smart house-breaker carry a gun. The risk of a much stiffer sentence — even the chair — if caught armed is too great.

There was still the remote chance of course that he’d been a very dumb second story artist, but in that case he would have bolted and run. Instead this man had been cool, in full possession of his nerve as evidenced by the fact he’d followed me down to make sure he’d done the job right. His examining me before taking flight was proof enough that he’d been waiting in that upper hall for the express purpose of murdering me.

But why? Doug Townsend had few enemies — and those Lew Whitfield and every policeman in Santa Maria could also claim. I’d only been a part of every investigation I’d worked so far. If some minor hood had finished his sentence I had done nothing to provoke him to return and commit murder. True, there was young Loren Sigmon, whose crime I’d eyewitnessed. But he was safely in jail. So there seemed little possibility that my work or anything connected with it was the motive for my murder.

I experienced a fresh fright at the detached manner in which my mind could view the situation. This was me! Put a few tears into it! This is personal, Townsend.

Personal, but still a problem in criminology, and my mind went ahead in its own fashion, as if, being released from body, it was for a time released from all emotional hedges also. Coolly, my mind went about the business of sorting out motives for murder. There are only two, provided the murderer is not insane. Passion, and gain.

Passion was most probably out. I had quarreled with no one, insulted no one; I had not been sufficiently vicious to drive anyone to murder.

Was a killing for gain to be any more seriously considered? Wealth of course is a relative matter, and it was possible that my earthly possessions, a good home, two cars, several decent investments that were putting money in the bank, were great enough for someone to value them higher than my life. But those things of course would all go to Vicky once this inert hulk at the foot of the stairway was buried.

There was only one possibility left, a mixture of the two motives. Passion and gain so interwoven that the motive became a single driving force. A desirable woman, plus the estate of the deceased.

Can hell hold any greater torture? The desirable woman. Vicky. The deceased. Doug Townsend.

In desperate agony I wanted to be done with this reasoning. But my mind, with a grim, macabre relentlessness clung to that one idea, for there was no other with any substance.

Perhaps he had been plotting this very act that night I’d been so close to him, when only the curtain of darkness on the Bath Club terrace hid him from me.

Fresh light came, a shimmering in a fog. Footsteps moved toward me, around me. Someone had heard the shot and hurried to the scene...

I couldn’t see him. Just one flick of my eye muscles would have put him in a line with my vision, but the muscles were dead, powerless and the vision was dim and distorted.

I experienced a great need for his presence. He was human — he was living. Don’t go away! Look at me and tell me that this is not death!

A door slammed and fresh footsteps whispered into my foggy world. They stopped then came forward with a rush. “Doug! Oh, Doug!”

It was Vicky. Thank heaven, in that moment the sound of her voice was too dear for me to think of murder and its motives. Whatever the man had done, Vicky had had no part of it. Vicky would never be a party to a thing like this.

Right then I could have forgiven her of anything. I had never needed her more. The presence of living human beings had driven a fresh awareness of my present state through me. A fresh terror.

Surely she would drop by my side. Her hands would touch me. Yet the moment lengthened and I heard a voice, Shoffner’s. “Easy, Mrs. Townsend. You look pretty green. I heard something that sounded like a shot and ventured to come in just a few seconds before you got here. Don’t you think we’d better call a doctor and the police?”

He must have helped her to a chair. She moaned softly and the moan mutated into weak, soft sobbing.

“Yes, the police. How could he have done it?” And then she whispered brokenly, “Oh, Doug — how could you?”

If I had hoped there was a limit to the depths of torture, I knew better now. For a moment her words brought only a stunned, blank nothingness to my mind; then the insinuation behind them began to sink in. I didn’t understand. Desperately I thought, Darling, if I could look at your face at this moment, would I see something there I’ve never beheld before?

The last prop beneath my world was shattered completely. I might possibly have accepted oblivion right then; but oblivion failed to come. If this were death, then death was far from oblivion.

Only minutes passed before they came. The doctor. The police. My co-workers. I don’t know how many of them there were. At times it seemed the room was filled with the babble of many voices; then again there was the silence of emptiness.

Lew Whitfield came, of course. I sensed it was he when I heard the elephantine pad of footsteps on the foyer carpet. He stood over me during one of those silences before going down the two short steps that led to the living room.

The vague outlines of his heavy-jowled face came through to me. I could fill in the details of his expression, the pain in his eyes as they seemed to sink in the fat rolls of their sockets, the bitter passing of color from his ruddy cheeks, the sorrowful drooping of his heavy lips.

“My God,” he said, like a prayer, “this is terrible.” His words might have been inane, considering the situation, but I knew the meanings behind them. The days we’d worked together, the trust between us, the feeling of being on the same team. Those were the wonderful things Lew was talking about.

“He looks pretty gory, doesn’t he, with his right temple all torn and bloody. His eyes, glassy and staring — as if looking at hell itself.”

“He doesn’t look like Doug Townsend,” Lew agreed with tears in his voice. “Where is Vicky?”

“Out in the kitchen. A matron is feeding her coffee.”

“She find him?”

“No, the yardman heard the shot and came in the house just before she got here.”

“I can’t believe it,” Lew said. “I just can’t believe it. How much more have you got to do here?”

“We’re about finished, photos all taken, statements down. It seems like a clear-cut case of suicide. His wife told us he kept the revolver upstairs in their bedroom when he was off duty. He must have gone up, got it, and came back down. Maybe he was planning to do it in the study, or the kitchen, or out in the yard someplace. Or maybe he was only thinking about it, toying with the idea, and the impulse became suddenly overwhelming. The gun is in his hand, and he does it right here in the foyer. We’ve found only one set of fingerprints on the gun — his.”

I knew the scene as well as if I’d been able to stand away and look at it. I’d been through the scene before, in a different role, of course. A far different role. The body inert in death. A photographer, a lab man, a cop or two in uniform and a couple in plain clothes. Most of them smoking nervously, until the air was thick and blue with the smoke, ashes scattered on the carpet. All of them prowling like restless shadows in the knowledge that they were human and this dead thing had been human too. Nervous neighbors on the lawn trying to gawk through the windows, shushed away by the patrolman assigned to that duty. The phone screaming, and the sound of weeping.

But always the dead one was the center of the scene, the hub around which the prowling took place, the subject of all the questions.

That flat, droning voice which had been speaking with Lew spoke again: “Charlie Markham is out of town. So the autopsy will have to wait. Of course Mrs. Townsend’s own doctor came over as soon as the servant called. We have plenty already to establish the time of death. The shot, heard by Shoffner at about eleven. The wound still oozing blood when Mrs. Townsend came in. The body still warm when the doctor got here. The doctor hoped for a second that Doug was still alive. But there was no heartbeat, no response of his eye pupils to light. Death must have been instantaneous.”

“All right,” Lew sighed. “Send the body on over to the funeral home. Markham will be back early in the morning, in a few hours. We’ll do the autopsy then.”

There was a tired finality in Lew’s voice, a deep touch of sadness. The case was closed as quickly as it had begun. His friend was gone. In two or three days the funeral would be held. The rains would wash the grave and the massed flowers would wither to nothing. Would there be rest for me then?

That reasoning part of me which refused death was overcome with bitterness and despair that bordered on madness. He was safe. His plan had been successful. Only a little while now and he would have to meet her in the darkness over a terrace no longer. Let the rains wash the face of the grave and the seasons change, and he would be able to call openly on Doug Townsend’s widow.

My mind writhed in agony. To know that he bad not only robbed me of life, but of everything else that had given that life significance as well — even Vicky — the very completeness of his triumph was the most refined torture of all.

Soon he would know how complete his triumph had been. He could stop his restless pacing, his sweating, his watching the clock and hearing it tick, wherever he was waiting for. He had made one mistake, I knew now. He hadn’t meant for me to catch him in the upper hall. He would have preferred to arrange it better. He’d had to fire before he was ready. But his luck had held. He had been close enough to me so that there must be powder burns on the torn flesh of my temple. His quick examination of me had shown him there was still a slender chance his plan for making it suicide would succeed.

Yet he wasn’t sure that his luck had held, and during these present long minutes he must be enduring an agony akin to my own.

They must have moved me. I was aware of no movement, no sensation in any part of me. Light came and went, fuzzy, distorted. A voice said, “Watch that end of the stretcher. You almost dropped him.”

“Hell, he wouldn’t feel it. It wouldn’t matter to him.”

An engine came to life. An ambulance, I supposed. The purring of the engine stayed close to me, and I guessed that I was taking a ride. To the city morgue...

I wondered what he was like. Tall, good-looking. It would take somebody like that to attract Vicky. A good dancer. Not necessarily a smooth talker, but a good one. Vicky was always fastidious in her conversation. He would have a good face, too, and a smile open and honest. A mask, shielding the workings of his mind and the morbid plotting in his heart.

My thoughts whirled back to Vicky. A thousand memories of her came through to me. She’d been working for a living when I’d met her, a secretary in a lawyer’s office. Her employer had been defense counsel on a case to which I’d been attached. Vicky and I had met over a dry mass of legal briefs. But she had been almost illegally beautiful and I’d taken her to lunch, and after that the world was a different place for me.

I’d looked at her with eyes that made everything about her perfect. She’d grown up right here in Santa Maria. Her mother had never been well and her father had never made quite enough money out of his trio of fishing boats. Yet it had been a wonderful life, she’d said. A barefoot kid in jeans and T-shirt, a kerchief binding the mass of gold that was her hair. More tomboy than girl when she was small, scampering about her father’s boat with sun and spray in her face.

She’d finished school and worked part time to get her business course. Then her job for a couple of years before I’d met her.

“Really a very dull and uninteresting life,” she said once with a smile. “I wish I were made for better things.”

“You are!” I’d told her fervently.

And she had been. She had a good mind. She never ceased bettering it by good reading. She had a natural sense of good taste — a flair for clothes. She took to an ever higher mode of life with simplicity and a naturalness that was amazing.

Could this woman have been a part of a plot to kill me? Had some foreknowledge of the plan caused her immediately to label my death as suicide? Had the sudden, wild turbulent emotion of a love affair killed the Vicky I’d known, leaving in her place a creature beyond my normal understanding?

I thought of husband-murders from the time of Ruth Snyder. Quiet women, delicate women. Women who had trod the marriage path with gentleness. But one day the monotony had become suffocating. The routine and dull respectability had become unbearable. And the smoldering fires had erupted, all the more violent because they had been buried so long and so deep within here.

Let me finish dying. Let this be over. There must be an end even to this horrible torture...

The purring of the engine ceased. A man grunted. Light came again, like milk splashed in water. There was a fresh mumble of voices.

“The D. A. says leave him on a slab until Charlie Markham gets back in town and can make an autopsy.”

“Looks terrible, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, I’ve fixed ’em for the casket when they looked worse. Fixed a farmer once who’d used a shotgun.”

“Well, you’re the undertaker. Me, I wish I’d never studied medicine. I don’t like this interning.”

“Oh, undertaking’s all right. But right now I want to get back to bed. I’ll undress him and throw a sheet over him. I’m glad that Markham won’t start the autopsy ’til morning.”

Time passed and light faded again. I lay naked on the slab and each marching minute brought the autopsy closer. My mind crawled away from the knowledge of that experience. The deadly quiet about the autopsy table. Then the click of a scalpel, the gleam of it...

My mind stopped working for a terrible moment.

Chapter Three The Death of Me

The slab on which I lay was cool. That fact in itself was not surprising. Santa Maria’s leading undertaking establishment was also the town morgue, as is often the case in small cities. And the stone slab supporting me was just as cool as the air conditioning of the place had made it. Yet it was not the workings of my mind alone that told me the slab was cool. I was aware of the coolness. I could feel the coolness.

Alone in this dark, silent house of death, my mind screamed a question. How could this be? What was happening to me? The dead do not return.

I lay there with a fresh urge to move a muscle, to flick an eye. I was powerless to do that; yet I could feel the coolness of the slab against my calves and buttocks.

How much time passed I have no way of knowing. I was too caught up in the grip of a new, fearful knowledge to think of anything else. With the coming of day, Charlie Markham would arrive. The autopsy would be performed on a living man!

Every post mortem that I’d ever witnessed came marching across my thoughts. The slash of the knife, the removal of the vital organs, the splitting of the scalp, the sawing of the skull... my thoughts became a wild, silent screaming.

A pain began to ooze from the right side of my head through my brain. A tingling touched my toes. Still I could not move or bring my eyes in focus.

Light began coming back into the room, slowly, grayly. Dawn. How much longer until Markham came? I almost wished he would hurry and get it over with.

Then I gradually realized that the ceiling over my face was of plaster — I could see it. And I could feel the clammy sheet clinging to me from my waist downward. The pain in my head was excruciating now; so great that it brought a gasp from me. A gasp — which meant that my lungs were functioning normally.

My hands were like two dead weights as I tried to move them. I tried again and the effort succeeded.

My heart was pounding now, rocketing blood through every artery, bringing a singing sensation through the pain in my head.

It took me perhaps five minutes to sit up. I was dizzy and almost fell from the table. I clung to my senses until the dizziness had passed, pulled my feet around, and felt them drop to the floor. The pain in them, through my toes, was almost unbearable as I tried to stand.

I next took cognizance of my surroundings. The room was bare, the table in its center, two doorways leading from it.

I drew the sheet around me, stood up, and fell to the floor. I spent several gasping moments in a prone position before I was able to clutch at the leg of the table and crawl to my feet again.

Like a baby tottering through its first steps, I made my way to the doorway across the room. It opened into a hallway, and I closed it again. The second door opened into a small washroom. My clothes were there on hangers.

Before I tried to put my clothes on, I looked at myself in the mirror of a medicine cabinet on the wall. I almost retched at the grey-faced man who stared back at me. Blood had run down the side of my head, matting my hair. There was a heavier, uglier clot on my right temple. I bathed it gently in the corner wash basin. It was too sore to stand washing thoroughly, but I got most of the blood off.

I looked again in the mirror. Color was seeping back to my cheeks now. The wound was a nasty gash in the flesh and the bullet had torn its way along the bone, but had not penetrated the skull.

I slipped into my clothes, weak, gasping. I stood a moment before leaving the room, gathering strength. I was seething now with a fierce hatred that sent ripples of heat out through my being. I didn’t know how it had happened. I didn’t know why.

I knew only that I was back in the land of the living. I had returned — to find my murderer!

Gray dawn hung over the alley behind the funeral home. I reached the mouth of the alley. The streets were still deserted except for a passing milkman and a whistling boy with a bag of newspapers slung across his shoulder. Santa Maria was still drugged with sleep. The gulf breeze was cool and fresh across my face. Save for the extreme, blinding pain in my head, I was feeling better by the minute. The last thing I’d done before leaving the washroom had been to find a compress and tape it over my temple.

In my thoughts a plan of action was forming, he must not know that I was after him. Secure in the belief of his success he would be emboldened, until the moment came for me to strike.

Somehow a way must be found to keep hidden my disappearance from the funeral home, the fact that I still lived. That would take some doing. There was one man with the power to swing it. Lew Whitfield.

Normally I could have walked the distance from the funeral home to Lew’s house in ten minutes. Today that movement required a full thirty minutes. I hurried as fast as I could. I knew that my absence from the funeral home might be discovered at any moment and an alarm raised. I passed few people. Dock workers. Fishermen. I got a glance or two from some of them, the kind of glance they might give a man who’s been out all night on a drunk and got in a fight.

I was reeling on my feet when I arrived at Lew’s. His large, old frame house loomed against the red eye of the rising sun like a hulking barn. For three years Lew had promised himself to paint the place next summer.

I walked around the side of the house to his study window. The window was open against the Florida weather, as I had guessed it would be. The screen, however, was locked. My head was spinning, and it took me a few seconds to figure a way out of that. Then I remembered the pen knife in my pocket. I used it to cut a small hole in the screen through which I could slip a finger and throw the hook latch.

I pulled the screen out, crawled over the sill, and collapsed on the floor of Lew’s study. I was going again, back into that nether world of shadows. I clenched my hands and almost screamed aloud. I was slipping — slipping. The shadows were heavier. Sweat broke cold on my forehead. The effort of my exertion had been too much. Over me the shadows came.

The blackout didn’t last long. I woke slowly, blind with that ache in my head. I could hear footsteps moving about overhead. A child came running down the steps outside the door, and from the back of the house I heard Marge Whitfield, “Breakfast!”

I heard the scramble toward the dining room. Then the house was silent as the family ate.

I pulled myself across the floor, up on the leather couch against the wall. I sat down with a deep sigh. Lew’s desk, as cluttered as my own, was across the room from me.

Fifteen or twenty minutes passed before Lew came into the study. The door swung open, admitting him, partially concealing the couch. He closed the door. He was alone. He patted his stomach as if his breakfast had been the best; and then he walked to the window and stood looking out at the day, lost in thought. Perhaps he was thinking of the friend he’d lost.

When he turned, he saw me.

He had nerve. His face drained of color and his body went rigid, but he made no outcry upon beholding the apparition before him.

He breathed out explosively, crossed the room, and reached out to touch my shoulder.

“It’s really me, Lew. You’re not seeing things.”

“But how, Doug? How?”

“I don’t know myself, yet.”

“I’ll get Marge, Vicky — a doctor.”

“No, wait! No one must know, Lew, until we’re ready. Until I say the word.”

“But, man, you may be dying.”

“You’re probably right, but I’ll take long enough in the process. I have that feeling. That I won’t die until I find him.”

He dropped to a sitting position on the edge of the couch beside me. “I don’t understand any of this, Doug!”

“You thought last night I tried to kill myself,” I said, “but such a thought was the furthest thing from my mind. Somebody tried to murder me.”

He found a cigar in his pocket with fingers that shook. Then he dropped one flat word: “Who?”

“I don’t know. That is, I don’t know his name. I can’t think of anybody who would have done it — except maybe the man who’s been fooling around with my wife.”

“So you know that? Although ‘fooling around’ might be a little strong.”

I cut a quick glance at his face. “You mean you’ve known for some time?”

“Nothing definite, Doug. Just talk I heard — behind your back.”

I felt more than a little ill. “The old saying has some ground under it, then, about the husband being the last to know. You’re going to help, Lew. First, you’ve got to get hold of that undertaker. Next you’ve got to dig into — her recent past. Find the man. Find out if he’s the kind who might commit murder for a beautiful woman who will come into considerable material comforts and money through her husband’s death.”

He made no move to interrupt as I tried to bring back everything that had passed through my mind last night. I told him of the growing distance between Vicky and me lately. I told him about the incident on the Bath Club terrace.

“Thelma Grigby’s phone call only brought the matter to the forefront of my mind. Now we’ve got to lay a trap for him. He mustn’t know that his plan has failed — until it’s too late to do him any good.”

Lew’s heavy face had taken on a greyness. “It might hold water,” he admitted. “It’s an old story. But what of Vicky?”

“I have to know about her, too,” I said slowly. “She was pretty quick to tell the world that I’d killed myself. If she was covering for him, I... I’ve got to know that, too, Lew.”

“It’s a pretty hateful business,” he said, rising. “But we deal with hateful things every single day in our line.”

“Then you’ll help?”

“I’m your friend,” he said simply. “And I’m the D.A. I don’t know whether or not it’s ethical for me to hide you, to conceal the fact that you’re still living — I don’t have a precedent to establish the ethics of the case, do I? But if there’s a would-be killer in our town, I want to know it.” He hesitated. “It’ll take some fixing, Doug. With the undertaker, Charlie Markham — one or two others I’ll have to bring into the thing.”

“You can do it,” I said.

“I’ll try.”

A little later that morning Lew got his family out of the house. I learned then that they’d brought Vicky over for the night. Marge and the kids were taking her home. I wondered what it would be like in that silent, empty house. What thoughts would pass through Vicky’s mind as she went from room to room, each with its own flood of memories?

Lew brought me food; then he took me upstairs to a small back room with windows on two sides overlooking his side and back yards. There was a three-quarter bed in the room, a scarred bureau, a night stand holding a lamp, and a single boudoir chair.

Next Lew brought a visitor up to the room, a tall, florid man who wore grey tropicals and a pince-nez. He was Doctor Hardy, and he knew the story and we could trust him, Lew assured me.

I was silent during Hardy’s examination; then when he stood up and snapped his bag shut, I asked, “Do you know what happened to me? Can you explain it?”

“Certainly,” he said. “You’ve been deeply depressed lately?”

“For some time,” Lew put in. “He’s been working too hard.”

“And of course you were deeply frightened when the shot rang out and the bullet struck you?”

“Scared to death.”

“That’s almost my precise diagnosis,” Hardy said. “Lying in your foyer last night you were in a state of very acute catalepsy, a nervous condition in which the power of your will and of sensation are suspended. It arises from prolonged depression and acute fright. It’s more common, in its less acute phases, than many people would think. Your condition was aggravated by the wound, of course, which came very close to killing you.”

“A doctor examined me,” I reminded him.

“Of course. But in a state of acute catalepsy no heartbeat was audible. No pulse could be felt. Your eye muscles had completely lost for the moment the power of contraction, of focusing; so your eyes responded to the doctor’s light exactly as a dead man’s would respond. That is, no response at all. In short, you exhibited several signs of death, and in the moment the doctor is not at all to blame for interpreting your state of suspended animation as he did. We’re human, too, you know. We make mistakes like the rest of the race, though often our mistakes are never known — they’re buried.”

With a smile and a last admonition that I should be in a hospital under observation, Hardy prepared to leave.

I felt a lassitude taking hold of me, and then I slept.

The sun was dying a crimson death in the gulf when I awoke. I was ravenous, but forced to wait until Lew should show up, as he did half an hour later. There were a dozen questions trying to spill out of my mind, but my first interest right then proved to be the food he brought. Once I started eating, I felt as if I would never be filled again.

“I had to ring Marge in,” he said, watching me spoon up the last drop of the broth in the bowl. “She’s too much the homebody for me to succeed long in sneaking food up here and keeping the door locked. She was shocked, of course.”

“And Vicky?”

He hesitated. “We’ve found the man, Doug.”

I tried to keep my voice casual. That was impossible, and the word quivered when it came out of me: “Who?”

“Keith Pryor.”

“The water-skiing instructor at the Bath Club.”

Lew nodded, and a silence came to the room. I recalled Pryor to my mind. I’d met him when he’d first come to the club three months ago. We’d had him at our table two or three times for drinks. He’d danced with Vicky during a couple of our evenings at the club. He must have been every day as old as I, but he looked more boyish. Slender, but extremely well knit with wide shoulders. A lean, almost hungry face, topped with close-cut sun-scorched blonde hair. With his deep suntan, the brilliant white of his teeth flashed when he smiled, and he had an easy, relaxed air about him. On the whole he was the kind of man who would appeal to every lonely instinct in a woman.

“Have you got anything on him?” I asked.

“Only a little. He’s not exactly a gigolo, but he’s never made much money and he likes to live high. Two items on his record. A Jax woman had him arrested for making off with some of her jewelry, but in the end broke down in court and admitted she’d given it to him, as he’d claimed, bringing the charges later because he’d walked out on her. An assault charge in Miami. He punched an irate husband in the nose in one of the beach clubs. But the man’s wife testified for Pryor. Pure self defense, she said. Nothing at all between her and Pryor. Her husband was just a nasty-minded old man, she said.”

“A nice boy. Does Vicky know any of this?”

“Of course not! You listen to me, Doug! You’re hurt because she happened to look at another man twice in a weak moment. She’s never been alone with him, though they’ve met at the club and parties. Maybe she was lonely. You’ve been moody, depressed, you’ve neglected her.”

“Dammit, Lew, are you for her or me?”

“I’m for both of you, son, and don’t forget that!” he said in a rough tone. “But I want you to stop acting like the emotionally wounded little boy. You’re jealous and mad as hell, deep down, and in a way I can’t blame you. But just because Pryor’s made a play for her doesn’t mean she’d ever be a party to hurting you.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“You’re damn right I’m right. Now forget it. I’ve got things to do. I’ll see you in the morning. How’s the head?”

“Better.”

“Then take some more of those pills the doctor gave you and rest. That’s the thing you need most.”

There wasn’t much time. Every meal I ate, every nap I slept brought the sands that nearer to a finish. We could not keep secret the disappearance of the body from the funeral home indefinitely. The time would come for a burial, for an official statement. Lew knew all that as well as I did. He knew how far he had his neck out.

But there was, for me, too much time. Time in which to think, to picture Keith Pryor gradually making head way with Vicky — perhaps holding her in his arms. To watch them in the tortured eye of my mind standing close together. How many times had she lifted the warm softness of her lips to his? How many words thick with passion had he murmured to her?

I tried to keep the pictures out of my mind.

Lew came to my room the next morning with a downcast expression. She had seen Pryor last night. I knew that even before he spoke. They’d met on a downtown corner, gone to a dine and dance place in a cheaper section of town. They hadn’t come in until very late. The shadow that Lew had put on their trail had reported that they hadn’t danced much. They’d talked with people in the juke joint, drifted on to another in the raw section of town. They hadn’t been at all romantic, the shadow had reported.

Good, I thought with grim satisfaction. Maybe it’s going sour between them, with death a black blight on their feelings. Maybe the husband, dead, stands between them now far more than the living husband had.

Or perhaps he was simply playing it smart, biding his time, not rushing her.

I sat there thinking about it a long time after Lew had gone. The pictures of him and her together came back more vivid than ever. I wondered how much more of this waiting I could endure.

The second day passed, and I knew my nerve was going. I was cracking up and I seemed unable to halt the process. Lew wasn’t moving fast enough. He had found nothing conclusive. The second night his shadow had lost Vicky and Pryor across town in a section of cheap hotels.

Lew was a worried man that night. He wouldn’t take his eyes off my face. He insisted on staying in the room until I had gulped the pills Hardy had given me.

But I palmed them instead and drank the water as if I were swallowing the pills. I lay back across the bed, closed my eyes, and after a time Lew went out. I waited until I heard his footsteps fade downstairs; then I sat up, threw the pills under the bed, and began dressing. I didn’t put on my shoes. I wanted no echoing footsteps as I slipped down the rear stairs out of the house.

I stayed in shadows and used back streets. I was still weak, and it took me thirty minutes or better to get from Lew’s house to my own. My place was dark, and I didn’t go in. I stood in the shadows of a row of royal palms across from the house watching, waiting. Expecting the two of them together.

But she came alone. She swung the green sedan in the driveway, entered the house, and I saw lights flash on. She appeared in the living room window for an instant, going toward the phone alcove. I moved quickly across the street, into my own yard. I could see her through the window. She was across the expanse of living room, talking quickly with someone on the phone. Then a shadow, the shadow of a man, long, distorted, showed briefly against the living room wall. Before I could catch a breath the light in there snapped off, and then Vicky screamed.

I hit the front door. It was locked. I fumbled for a key. A voice shouted from inside, “Stand back, or I’ll shoot her.” Sweat popped out on my face. I heard a door slam, and I ventured the key into the lock then. Another door slammed, and I tore toward the rear of the house. I heard the surging roar of the engine of the green sedan. I was hearing his words over and over, “Stand back, or I’ll shoot her.”

I knew him. I’d recognized the voice.

I hurled myself across the yard toward the driveway just as the big car careened out of the drive into the street with a scream of tortured rubber.

I stood there a moment, gasping. Then I forced strength into my shaking legs and charged back into the house.

My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly dial Lew Whitfield’s number. His phone screamed twice before anyone answered, and then it was Marge, not Lew. “I’ve got to talk to Lew,” I bellowed.

“He’s not here, Doug. He just got a phone call from Vicky. He’s on his way over there now.”

“He’ll be too late. Marge! Shoffner’s got her! He barreled away from here with her in my green sedan. Got that? Old man Wendel Shoffner, my yardman, has Vicky as hostage, at his mercy, in my green car. Call headquarters. Tell them to make it an all-car signal. That’s an order from the D.A.’s office!”

She got it, she said, and I didn’t waste any more time. I slammed down the phone and pushed my reeling body back out of the house. The second car, the light coupe Vicky usually drove was still in the garage. There was a key for it on my ring.

The sedan had disappeared by the time I got the coupe on the street. It had turned west, and I turned that way also. In the distance I heard a siren. Lew would get the call. A dozen cars would get the call. They’d pinpoint my home — and we would get him. But it would all be less than worthless if he harmed Vicky first.

I heard another siren and then another. They were converging on the downtown area. I saw the swarm of cars when I skidded the coupe into Central Avenue. A fire truck rounded an intersection and clanged to a stop just ahead of me. Patrolmen were trying to move the crowds gathering on the sidewalk, and a searchlight threw its yellow tongue up the side of the six-story Parker Building.

I’d stopped the coupe, but I couldn’t let go of the wheel when I saw that light snake its way up the face of the building. I knew then that he had her up there and we might never get her down alive.

Somehow I crawled out of the car and was able to stand. I found Lew standing beside his own car. He was snapping orders. To firemen with a net. To the cops rigging a loudspeaker system.

“For God’s sake, Lew, be careful!”

He showed only brief, surprise at seeing me. “We’re doing that. Doug: If we wanted to take chances, we’d send men up after him.”

I could see them now. Vicky and Shoffner, near the low parapet around the building roof.

Shoffner’s voice rang out thin and high-pitched: “Go away! All of you go away, or I’ll push her over!”

Lew’s shudder almost matched my own. “He’s cracked. He’s gone. Loony as they come. He’s Loren Sigmon’s father, Doug.” I stiffened. I had been the single eyewitness to Sigmon’s crime.

Lew said, “He was probably out to get you from the minute he went to work for you. We found some dirt from your garden in your bedroom near the night table where you kept your gun. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have meant much to us — either you or Vicky could have brought it in — but to Vicky it suggested Shoffner. She remembered that Shoffner had been working in muck that afternoon, bringing it in for the flower beds. She slipped into his rooms, found some pictures of Sigmon in the old man’s things. She went to some of Sigmon’s old haunts last night and tonight with Keith Pryor. She was asking questions and must have got a few answers. She phoned me that she was certain of the old man’s identity. But before I could get to your house, he snatched her, found himself cornered, the street blocked, and dragged her in the building.”

Now she was six stories above the street. This, then, was the ultimate torture...

“You’ll never talk him down, Lew,” I said. “There’s only one way — let him know he isn’t guilty of actual murder. I’ll have to go up, alone—”

A trooper was standing near me. I slid the carbine he was holding from his hand.

Lew made no move to stop me. He knew that Shoffner might kill, me, but he knew too that this was something I had to do. For myself. For Vicky.

The stairs upward were long, silent, manned by patrolmen who sucked in breath when they saw me, a man they’d believed dead. The last flight of stairs was steeper and narrower, leading up to the radio tower on the roof. I saw Shoffner and Vicky the moment I pushed my exhausted body out on the roof. The spotlight limned them, Shoffner behind Vicky, waving a gun, yelling threats.

Shoffner must have been dropping quick glances behind him to make sure no one else was coming on the roof, for he saw me.

“Don’t take another step,” he shouted, and his full intent was in his voice. “I’ll push her!”

“I came to help you,” I said. “I don’t want you getting yourself into any worse trouble.”

My voice brought a little cry from Vicky’s throat, and a startled gasp from Shoffner.

“You can’t be Townsend!” he said in a thick, fearful voice.

“But I am. Move away from her, Shoffner. And I’ll come toward the light. You can see for yourself.”

I took another step. A little of the light caught my face. The old man screamed and started shooting. Vicky crawled aside. I hated to do it, but I squeezed the trigger of the carbine. The bullet hit him high in the chest. He stumbled back against the parapet.

And then he was suddenly gone.

The gun slid from my fingers as Vicky stumbled toward me. The boys who came to the roof found us locked in a tight embrace, Vicky’s face burrowed into my neck, hard sobs racking her. She was trying hard to tell me something about being a fool, about never having let a pipsqueak gigolo turn her head for a moment, but about having been lonely. But until I’d gone she’d never known what loneliness meant. She’d told Pryor that and he had understood; he had been willing to help her in any way he could in bringing her husband’s murderer to bay. Did I believe her?

Her question echoed in my mind. Yes, I believed her. I knew that I would never doubt her again. I led her toward the stairs.

“Darling, it’s time,” I said, “that we were going home.”