A Choice of Murders, page 19
“Don’t say anything,” said the sergeant swiftly. And then the door pushed open and Haywood came in.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, not meeting the woman’s eyes. “Reckon you’d best not go down. He—ain’t pretty.”
“That wouldn’t be no change,” the woman assured them all. “Well, a man that mean must have had enemies.”
“Reckon you won’t have to look far for this one,” jeered Maggs.
“I’ll have to ask you to come along to the station,” the sergeant continued, paying no attention to the interrupter.
“To make a statement about these hoodlums? I understand.”
Those small sharp hazel eyes met his without fear. He knew a wave of reluctant admiration for her; she must know how this was going to end, but she stood as steady as a house built upon the rock.
“Reckon I wouldn’t care about staying here alone with him the way he is,” she added. “We’ll take Bellman along with us.”
“We’ll see to Bellman,” the sergeant promised.
“He’s a good lad. Anyone might be proud…” For an instant there seemed a chance that she’d waver. Then she cried angrily, “Ain’t the rest of you going to get along? I don’t recall inviting none of you…”
“Leave your address,” said the sergeant to Pryce, who was fiddling nervously with the hat he’d taken off. “And don’t go anywhere we can’t reach you. See?”
The man nodded and dived for the door. Curly shook like a figure of perpetual grief. Beyond speech, beyond reproaches.
“You shud ha’ gone while you had the chance,” said the woman in sudden rage. “Now you can hang along of him one of these days.”
“Get the pair of them back to the station,” the sergeant told Haywood sharply. “The lady and me ’ull wait here till the doctor and the boys come to do their stuff. Ring from the box at the crossroads. Maybe you’d like to put a few things together,” he added gently to the woman. “We’ll be locking the place up for the time being.”
“Come on, you,” said Haywood to the savage Maggs. He came across and caught him by the arm, but the big fellow wrenched himself free.
“Don’t hustle me,” he said. “Where’s your manners? I got to say good-bye to the lady, ain’t I? Know what they say, missis, about women always getting the last word? Reckon you got that all right; had it a while back, you did, when you said blood will tell.”
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: Out of the blue there came into my visual imagination this ill-assorted couple of jailbirds staring down at a lonely house occupied by a woman alone. I don’t know when I thought of the dog, or when I knew a murder had been committed. I was fascinated by the set-up and went after it. Now I could tell you what all my people looked like, including the dog, a crossbred collie of a type I have never owned.
A Matter of Scholarship
Anthony Boucher
No scholar can pretend to absolute completeness, but every scholarly work must be as nearly complete as possible; any omission of available data because of carelessness, inadequate research, or (most damning of all) personal motives—such as the support of a theory which the data might contradict—is the blackest sin against scholarship itself…
Such were my thoughts as I sat working on my definitive Murderous Tendencies in the Abnormally Gifted: a study of the homicides committed by artists and scholars. The date was October 21, 1951. The place was my office in Wortley Hall, on the campus of the University.
My conclusions seemed unassailable: Murder had been committed by eminent scholars (one need only allude to Professor Webster of Harvard) and by admirable artists (François Villon leaps first to the mind). But in no case had the motivation been connected with the abnormal gift; my study of the relationship between homicidal tendencies and unusual endowments established, in the best scholarly tradition, that no such relationship existed.
It was then that Stuart Danvers entered my office. “Professor Jordan?” he asked. His speech was slurred, and he swayed slightly. “I read your piece in the Atlantic on Villon (it sounded like villain) and I said to myself, ‘There’s the guy to help you.’”
And before I could speak, he had placed a large typewritten manuscript on my desk. “Understand,” he went on, “I’m no novice at this. I’m a pro. I’ve sold fact-crime pieces to all the top editors.” He hiccuped. “Only now it strikes me it’s time for a little hardcover prestige.”
I stared at the title page, which read Genius in Gore, and then began flipping through the book. The theme was my own. The style was lurid, the documentation inadequate. He had taken seriously the pretensions to learning of such frauds as Aram and Rulloff; he had omitted such a key figure as the composer Gesualdo da Venosa. But I had read enough in the field to know that his abominable work was what is called “commercial.” He would have no trouble in finding a publisher immediately; and my own book was scheduled by the University Press for, at best, “sometime” in 1953.
“Little nip?” he suggested, and as I shook my head he drank from his flask. “Like it? Thought maybe you could help—well, sort of goose it with a couple of footnotes…you know.”
I looked at this drunken, unscholarly lout. I saw myself eclipsed in his shadow, the merest epigone to his attack upon my chosen Thebes. And then he said, “Of course that’s just a rough first draft, you understand.”
“Do you keep a carbon of first drafts?” I asked idly. And when he shook his addled skull, I split that skull’s forehead with my heavy paperweight. He stumbled back against the wall, lurched forward, and then collapsed. His head struck the desk.
I tucked the obscene manuscript away, wrapped the paperweight in a handkerchief, carried it down the hall, washed it, flushed the handkerchief down the toilet, returned to my room, and called the police. A stranger had wandered into my office drunk, stumbled, and cracked his head against my desk.
The crime, if such it can be considered, was as nearly perfect as any of which I have knowledge. It is also unique in being the only instance of a crime committed by an eminent scholar which was motivated by his scholarship…
* * *
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: What really brought the story on was that Ellery Queen said he’d like to see some short-short-shorts. I thought it was an interesting technical challenge. The book in question in the story—that is, the matter of the relation between murder and other talents—is a problem that has long fascinated me. When I thought of using it as a theme, the plot seemed to follow immediately out of it.
Nonie
Helen Kasson
It passed for an accident, but it was murder.
It’s funny how you can look at some things a hundred times and forget them, and then a momentary glimpse will burn a scene or the look in someone’s eyes ineffaceably on your mind, so that you can never escape it.
That’s the way it is with Nonie’s face. I can remember, as if it were yesterday, that day I found her alone with a dead man and one who, with the blood he had in him, might better be dead, and I can see the release in her pale eyes and the gratitude which she could not word.
She stood in the queer, high-necked, long-sleeved dress she always wore, her pinched face almost happy, yet not knowing when she would hear a noise and find him, the child, squirming, convulsing, drooling, and then perhaps there’d be two dead. But two dead were better than two alive, or even one alive, if the one happened to be Klaus Klauber, so I left, content in the knowledge that she was free from the man she called husband, and knowing too that her misbegotten child could not harm her yet awhile.
It was strange, all of it—the way Klaus Klauber appeared on May Sonders’ farm one day and stayed on, working the fields and feeding the stock, sleeping in the shack behind the barn that had been built for a smokehouse and never used.
Ed Sonders had been like that. He’d build a new corn-crib and then decide the old one was good for another year. So there’d be the new building standing empty and getting weatherbeaten, waiting for the old one to fall down. That was the way with the smokehouse, until Klaus Klauber hired out to May and moved his dark, knotty body onto the cot May set up for him out there.
Ed had been dead two years when Klaus appeared.
If you passed in the evening, you’d see Klaus sitting on a box tilted back against the smokehouse wall, and he’d always be alone. At first our farm hands used to walk over after the chores were done, but he was rude and unfriendly, and they soon stopped coming. Perhaps it was his disfigured face which made him reluctant to make friends, perhaps his accent, and perhaps too it was his alienness which aroused their curiosity. (Anyway, they never fully satisfied it.)
No one knows exactly when it was that he moved into the house. The rumor started, grew, and finally the fact existed, was accepted in a sort of abeyant horror which never quite died out, but no one took it upon himself to reprimand May Sonders, and May never came to town after that so that the eager righteous didn’t get a chance to snub her.
Nonie was thirteen then, and though she had not yet lost the power of speech, she seldom used it. Even when as children we ran through the fields together or, like young animals, rolled naked in the hay, at that time hardly realizing that one body was different from the other, she spoke little. Her flesh was there, and mine, but she held her own part of herself away, shielded it, as if she feared being known even by me who, if she had allowed it, would have been as close to her as it is possible for two people to be.
So, it is not strange that the thing which had been used so seldom, the thing held so tenuously, was what she lost when she saw her mother fall into the combine.
Or did she see it? Perhaps she had come running when she heard Klaus shout, perhaps she arrived only in time to see what the flailing knives had left, to stand transfixed, knowing already that her voice was gone, watching the wheat still coming out relentlessly, blood-stained and virulent.
How did May happen to fall into the combine? No one ever knew. Nonie shook her head in dumb denial of everything the sheriff asked her, and there was no other witness but Klaus himself.
Anyway, however it had happened, Nonie accepted the inevitable as, earlier, she must have accepted Klaus. Yet, how had she forced her child eyes even to admit his image—the evil scar running from eye to nose, the heavy lips—how forced her barely-formed body to contact with his? It might have been the hypnotism of the weak by the strong. Perhaps she had stood powerless, mentally impaled on the gleam in his malformed eye, waiting for him to take her.
Or perhaps, one night as she walked through the fields, he came up behind her, and turning she saw not the dark foreigner but the gentle man she had dreamed as she mothered her dolls. And then, with the feel of his maleness (for up to that time she could have known no man) and the moon throwing an aura around him, and the awakening of feelings she could not yet understand, perhaps she wanted him.
I can imagine him saying, “Nonie,” in that queer, foreign accent, and her, caught motionless in the midst of motion, waiting, frightened, until the smell of the earth and the cattle and that eminent maleness overcame her. No one ever knew, but there was the fact that she was pregnant and that, two months after her mother died, Klaus came to the townspeople who had taken her in and said he wanted to marry her. (He owned the farm by that time; he had papers to prove it.) Nonie didn’t object and they knew she was pregnant, so they let her. What else could they do?
Then we began wondering again—not so much about how May died, but why. Had Klaus felt compelled to give his child a name? By his standards, was allowing a nameless child to be born worse than what he had already done? Or was he that conventional—that he needed the head and foot, the framework of the marital bed, established, before the child, illegally conceived, should lie within it?
We wondered. And then, from the hills, came strange rumors. A passing farmer had seen Klaus in high rage, striding the fields at noon, tearing the wheat with a whip, trampling the stalks back into earth with his heavy boots, the fiery scar throbbing, the eye flashing in its malformed socket.
Another had heard unaccountable sounds floating out of the night. “Like the moan of the wind,” he said, “but there was no wind.” And one day my folks picked up Nonie trudging the road to town and, for the first time, saw her in that high-necked, long-sleeved dress she was to wear for the rest of her life.
“Is the horse lame?” they asked, and she, flushing, nodded.
It was then they noticed a change in Nonie. She was not quiet but unquiet, restless, almost guilty, afraid to meet their eyes, and this toward people whose fathers had worked beside her grandfather and who, themselves, had held her hand to guide the first steps she took.
Strange reports, but strangest the one we had known longest, that Nonie was going to have a child. Inconceivable, that those two people could have mated and conceived, that that dark blood and Nonie’s were to commingle in one being—as inconceivable as that there could be offspring of dog and cat, wolf and ewe, ape and woman.
And yet, one night Klaus was in town, riding high on the wagon-truck as if it were a black charger, knocking at Tennent’s door with his heavy fist and shouting in his guttural voice for the doctor.
I remember the first time I saw the child—Joel, they called him—how surprised I was to find him small and delicate. I had expected somehow that the dark blood would submerge the fair—that the strength of Klaus would dominate. Yet, here was an old-young child, like Nonie, belying, to all outward appearance, the father who gave him life.
You would think, with the birth of Joel, that we’d have lost interest in the lives of Klaus and Nonie. When two people marry and have a child, even though their union seemed unbelievable before, the very fact of two becoming three puts the seal of nature on their being together. And perhaps we might have accepted their marriage and thought no more about it, had it not been for the child himself.
At the age of three, he started falling into convulsions—“fits,” some called them. So, our curiosity reawakened, we watched the hill farm and discovered that Joel was not a child at all, but, silent and melancholy, he seemed more a dwarfed adult harboring the soul of Klaus in Nonie’s body. We’d see him hunched on a pasture fence staring sullenly at the ground, or leaning against a side of the bam scuffing a hole in the dirt with one toe, or walking home from school alone, passing groups of playing children without raising his eyes.
Strangely, his schoolmates never bothered him. Perhaps, like Klaus, he held them at such a distance that they did not dare; or perhaps they had been told about his fits—or had seen him lying rigid on the ground—and feared to tease him lest they bring one on.
At any rate, he never seemed to need companionship. Nor did he need Nonie, after he was independent of her mother-protection. You’d see her looking at him, mutely, tenderly, and there’d be pleading in her eyes—but he never looked at her. Or, she’d put out a hand to touch his head and he’d draw away, repulsing her with every muscle in his body. I felt sometimes that she must welcome even the convulsions when they came, for then she could touch him, hold him close, mother-like.
For a while I was over there quite often. Father had given me a stallion which, as he grew older, developed a mean streak. I could handle him most of the time, but he’d go wild now and then, rearing and pawing the air with his front feet when I tried to saddle him. At rutting time he was downright crazy, and hardly a day passed that he didn’t break loose, galloping across the fields to jump the fence. Klauber’s mare was usually in the far pasture where Fury couldn’t get her, but once I arrived to find her scratched and bleeding in the field next to ours, and Klaus after Fury with a whip.
That horse was a killer and shouldn’t have been antagonized, but he had lost some of his energy by then and was snorting and plunging in only a half-hearted way. I was afraid Klaus would be angry with me, until I noticed his eyes. They were strangely awakened—eager almost—but there was no anger in them. When he saw me, he stopped short.
“That’s a fine horse.” His voice was breathless, and his accent seemed more foreign than ever as it bumped over his lips.
I said, “Yes,” not telling him how fractious Fury was, because when a man owns a horse he never speaks anything but good of it.
“Do you want to sell him?”
“No.” Fury was mean, but he was my own, and I didn’t want Klaus to have anything which had belonged to me.
“If you ever do, let me know.”
I managed to keep Fury at home after that, so I didn’t have reason to visit their farm. Anyway, it depressed me. The fields were well-tended, but the stock, what was left of it, had a woebegone, neglected look. I remember seeing a cow with one eye missing near our pasture fence, and I remember wondering what peculiar accident could have caused that. Even the chickens seemed ragged and submissive. But strangest was the mongrel dog that prowled the fields, his hair off in scarred patches, lame in one leg, one toe missing, a hook in the tail where it had been broken and never set.
Perhaps that was what had frightened the boy, had sent him into those writhing fits. Perhaps at three or younger, he came on his father in the barn, or fell asleep in the hayloft and wakened to a scream below, or peered around the corner of the house to see Klaus—maybe only wringing the neck of a chicken to be eaten later, or killing a pig to smoke the meat for winter, or maybe—worse. Still, it was the look on Klaus’ face which must have done it, the eye caught between scar and brow gleaming, the lips curled back, the cruel nose widening at the warm blood smell. I can imagine him, the child, standing transfixed for a moment, then running to throw himself down in the orchard, there to empty his stomach as if he might rid his mind of the foul picture with the bits of half-digested food.
