The Talmage Powell Crime Megapack Page 8

  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 s
till 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.