Talmage Powell

So Near, So Dear, So Dead!

Mason was a young man; he was, however, also a sergeant of detectives, and had seen violent death often before this. But as he looked at the broken body of the beautiful girl at the foot of the stairs, he wanted to bury his face in his hands and let the sobs tear out of him. He had never dreamed that grief could be a thing like this, hard kernels in his throat, blinding his eyes, sending his brain reeling with the crashing echoes of his thoughts until he wanted to scream and drown the thoughts in the stricken sounds of his own racked voice. This death was different. This girl was Marilyn — and she was dead — and the dead are beyond recall! This was something very close to him.

Mason’s hands were in his pockets, clenched so tightly his nails bit into his palms. He took his eyes off her dead loveliness; he couldn’t look at her any longer. When the call had come into the station, he’d heard her name mentioned. It had flowed over him like a horrible electric shock. Marilyn — dead. But he knew one thing. He knew this was his case. His! Sergeant of Detectives S. D. Mason’s case — and if it were murder, he would hound her killer to the front door of hell.

Beside Mason, Hawkins cleared his throat. The sound grated in the spacious, tastefully furnished house. Hawkins was a lean rookie, just promoted to plain clothes. Hawkins had never killed a man. Hawkins, figuratively, still had fuzz on his chin. But Hawkins was likeable, and Mason didn’t mind being teamed with him. He looked at Hawkins, realizing the rookie wanted him to do something.

From Hawkins, Mason looked at the brisk man who had introduced himself as Doctor Dennison. He realized that Dennison had been speaking for some seconds to Hawkins. “Of course it was an accident,” Doctor Dennison was saying. “Mrs. Holcombe, the housekeeper, had set the small bundle of dirty towels from the bathroom hamper at the head of the stairs. Mrs. Blackwell started toward the stairs, doubtless glanced back, her attention drawn for a second, and her feet became tangled in the towels.”

Mrs. Holcombe, heavy, stolid, graying, sobbed softly. She was standing near the newel post. She might, Mason thought, be the sort of woman to leave a laundry bag where someone might trip over it. Mrs. Holcombe did not look overly bright. She was just an average domestic.

Mason raised his gaze to the stairway. Gleaming oak, the stairs rose straight to the upper hall. Here and there a towel lay, like markers of her brutal, hurtling fall to death. The laundry bag from which the towels had spilled lay half-empty on the seventh stair.

The short, pudgy man standing beside Mrs. Holcombe patted her shoulder. “You mustn’t blame yourself, Mrs. Holcombe. Accidents like this happen every day.”

Mason took in every line of the pudgy man’s plump face, sensed every facet of the smugness of the moon-faced man wore like a cloak. This was Cicero Blackwell, her husband. Marilyn’s husband. Mason felt sick, as if the bottom of his stomach had been ripped out. She couldn’t have loved a man like this. It had been wrong from the beginning. She had married Blackwell in haste, to heal the wounds of her pride, on the rebound from an affair with a guy named Mason.

Mason’s thoughts shuttled back. To the time he had met Marilyn. Another life ago. He’d been a beat cop on traffic duty. He’d given her a ticket, and looking at her, he hadn’t wanted her just to drive away. This was something different; this wasn’t just a cop handing a woman a ticket. He had blurted, “Why don’t you have dinner with me sometime and let me give you a lecture on the whys and wherefores of proper parking?”

“Is that a summons, Officer?” She had looked at him a moment, until red crept up to his ears. Then she had laughed and said, “It might be fun at that. Call me sometime.”

But from the first, he knew it was something that couldn’t be. She had too much money, and he had too much headstrong pride. It hadn’t worked, and she had married Cicero Blackwell, who was practically penniless but who was so rich in ancestral background that it didn’t matter.

Blackwell was looking at Mason now, and Mason wondered if she had ever told Blackwell about the young cop she’d once known. But Blackwell wasn’t looking at him as a past rival — Blackwell had something else in his eyes, something cautious, something like cold flame. It sent a little hunch along Mason’s spine. Blackwell’s gaze dropped away.

Hawkins was still fumbling with the ball, doing the questioning, looking as if he wished to hell Mason would take over and earn his pay. The brisk doctor gestured a little with his hands as he spoke. “Yes,” Dennison told Hawkins, “I live next door. I heard Mr. Blackwell shout. I grabbed my bag and ran over, but one glance showed me — that it was too late. Broken neck. I then phoned the police, of course, being aware of the proper procedure.”

Mason had to turn away. Broken neck... lovely broken neck... The words hammered through his mind. They’ll put her under the earth, and the rains and snows will come, and the black nights will be a lonely shroud for her...

Mason moved about the wide, deep living room. It was a simple room, a kind room. It held memories of her footsteps, her voice.

Near the bookcase in the far side of the room was a telephone stand; beside the phone sat an empty box that had contained fishfood. The box weighted a grocery list. Mason looked at the fine, neat writing her living hand had put on the paper.

He turned back to the little group at the foot of the stairway, and words came from him abruptly. “You didn’t move her.”

“Move her?” Cicero Blackwell said. “Naturally not. I was in the basement. I thought I heard Marilyn give a muffled scream, the sound of a fall. I listened a moment, heard Mrs. Holcombe’s footsteps enter the house. Mrs. Holcombe screamed. I came up from the basement, and found Marilyn lying as she is now. I saw the position of her neck, knew that if any life remained in her, moving her would be fatal. I knew I needed competent help. I shouted for Doctor Dennison.”

“Who was in the house when she fell?”

“Only I,” Blackwell’s gaze crawled around the room to meet Mason’s. Blackwell’s gaze held faint contempt, as if he were thinking: You poorly-paid public servant — your trousers are unpressed and your suit is shiny at the cuffs; who are you to question me!

Mason returned the look with a sneer that caused young Hawkins to shuffle uncomfortably. Mason turned to the housekeeper. “Where were you, Mrs. Holcombe?”

The housekeeper raised her head.

“Me sir? I was in back, hanging out part of my wash. I had been in the house just a minute before it happened.”

“A minute?”

“Well, you know what I mean. Maybe four or five minutes. Back outside, I heard... her try to scream. I thought I was just hearing things, but after a few seconds came in the house to see, and there she was... on the floor like that.”

“What do you mean, you heard her try to scream.”

Mrs. Holcombe said, “Well, I... It was like she’d felt herself falling and had just time to get the scream started.”

“I see. Now let’s keep all this straight. You were here in the house about five minutes before Mrs. Blackwell’s death. Was she downstairs at that time?”

“Yes, sir. She said she would finish dusting the little sitting room upstairs and feed the two aquariums of tropical fish up there that Mr. Black-well keeps in the little sitting room — it’s a kind of den. I heard her walking upstairs just as I went out the back.”

“It jibes on all points,” Hawkins said. “She went up, started back down — and tripped.”

“No,” Mason said. His voice was thick, quiet — like an electric current in the room. “She made it safely back down!”

Doctor Dennison gestured one of those butterfly wavings of his hands that he used. “Preposterous!”

Mason said with that same thickness still in his voice, “She not only made it back down — she made it all the way to the telephone! Did she phone in a grocery order earlier in the day, Mrs. Holcombe?”

“Why — yes, she did!”

“And when she went upstairs as you went out the back she was going to dust the sitting room and feed the aquarium. That would certainly take all the elapsed time between your going out and your hearing the scream, wouldn’t it, Mrs. Holcombe?”

“I... I suppose so, sir.”

“And when she came back down the stairs,” Mason said, “she had an empty fishfood box in her hand. She evidently had used the last of it to feed the aquarium, and she brought the empty to make sure she got the brand name right. She carried that empty over to the telephone, and added fish-food to her order. It must have been added later — or it would have been written in the rest of the list. With the time element what it is, I don’t think she had time to go back up the stairs to do anything after she left that empty box on the phone stand — and the box being there seems to indicate that she had made her final trip down the stairs safely!”

The silence was a net, a breath of cold, a cobweb dashed over the room.

Mason let his gaze rest on her dead form once again. Remember me? Remember the flash of my teeth when I used to laugh at the way your ears were prone to redden, Mason? Remember the afternoon in spring we climbed the hillside together — right up to the clouds, and spread a picnic lunch and you said...

He felt the backs of his eyes stinging. He tore his gaze away and didn’t trust himself to speak.

Hawkins’ cough was loud in the silence. “But if she never went back up the stairs — it means somebody broke her neck, set it up to look like an accident. Who’d do it, I wonder?”

“Her husband,” Mason said.

Blackwell’s lips tightened until their redness had vanished. “I’ll speak to the commissioner about this! Here I am, my wife dead, and you’re saying...”

“That she had a lot of money, a vault full of money, and you had none. You had nothing but blue blood and a taste for luxury. What if she had decided to leave you? What if she had stayed as long as she could take you? If she divorced you, she’d take her money with her. You’d be left penniless — and your tastes couldn’t take that, not the old, degrading, hateful problem of finances all over again. Murder might have been easier.”

“Murder?” Blackwell’s jaw muscles knotted. “I’ll get you for this!”

“That may be. But if she had any ideas about divorcing you, you’d better admit it. I’ll never rest until I dig into every angle of this thing, no matter how irrelevant it might seem — every angle that could occur to one human brain!”

His eyes fought Blackwell’s eyes a few seconds. Their gazes met, locked, wrestled for mastery. “You’re being difficult about this, Mason! Perhaps Marilyn did think of divorce now and then. But I was in the basement at the time she fell. She was alone up here. It couldn’t have been murder — only an accident!”

“You can prove you were in the basement?”

“No. But I was down there in my woodworking shop,” Blackwell spaced the words well apart in time, hammering them at Mason. “I was down there stripping water-proof veneer to make a latticework, but no one was with me. However, it seems to me that very fact should prove my wife’s death an accident. If I had intended to murder my wife, I’d have been more carefully...”

“He...” Mrs. Holcombe said suddenly, “he really was in the basement, sawing strips for the lattice at the time Mrs. Blackwell fell. I could hear the saw going from up here before I went out with the tub of wash to hang up. The basement windows were open from the back yard, I could still hear the saw. It was going all the time I was out there, until I heard Mrs. Blackwell’s scream. The saw was still going when I came in the house, found Mrs. Blackwell, and shouted for Mr. Blackwell. He turned it off when I screamed and came running up the stairs.”

“Just the sound of a saw?”

Mrs. Holcombe looked blank.

“I mean,” Mason clarified, “that a saw would have to be ripping through wood to make much of a sound.”

“Oh, I could hear the saw ripping right through the wood!”

“And just why did you take an interest in the sound of the saw on this particular day?”

“Why, he was making a lattice-work for me!” Mrs. Holcombe said, as if it should be obvious to anyone. “I had mentioned a lattice I wanted on my cottage. It’s out on the rear of the property. Mr. Blackwell works in wood for fun, a hobby. Anybody’d listen to Mr. Blackwell saw strips for a lattice they wanted very much. I planned to have flowers...”

She droned on. Not just anybody would listen to the saw, Mason thought, but a Mrs. Holcombe would — and if Blackwell knew she would, knew she would maintain he’d been in the basement the whole time making her a lattice, it would be one of the finest alibis a man ever had...

Mason bit his lips, walked toward the basement stairs.

The basement was vast, well-lighted. Mason stood at the foot of the stairs. On across the basement was the fat furnace, stoker, coal bins. About him were the habiliments of Blackwell’s shop, drill press, lathe with face plate, racks of tools, a few shavings and a mound of sawdust on the floor. The odor of paints and lacquers; jigsaw, planer, emery wheels.

A pile of wooden strips, each about an inch and a half in width, sagged their middles between two sawhorses near Mason. On the long saw bench, straddling the blade of the saw was another long strip and the wider piece of waterproof veneer from which it had almost been severed, the strip Blackwell’s saw had been cutting when Mrs. Holcombe’s scream had sounded.

Mason moved about the basement, stopped. On the concrete floor beyond the saw bench lay a heavy discarded screen door spring, and a broken brick. He looked from them to the veneer on the saw, and his face whitened. He opened and closed his hands, and went back up the basement stairs.

Then he was looking at her again. Remember me? Remember the first time you kissed me, Mason? Remember how soft the night was, how quiet? Remember how we didn’t speak for a long time, there on the edge of the lake where we’d driven? We couldn’t speak, we never wanted to speak again and break the spell. Remember when I was a living, breathing, pulsating Marilyn, Mason? But we let pride and money stand in our way. And now it’s too late — beyond recall...

Mason lifted his gaze from her, to the little group about her dead body. He must never look at her again. He couldn’t open the dam; he couldn’t stand the flood of memories.

“Blackwell,” Mason’s voice was deadly, “I think I know how you managed it. It was cunning — and daring — and almost perfect. You made no direct attempt to alibi yourself. You knew Mrs. Holcombe would think you’d been in the basement and come forward and say so, which would have made the alibi a hundred times stronger. Who would question a husband admitting he was alone with his wife in the house at the time of her death, with his housekeeper alibing him?”

“But he was...” Mrs. Holcombe began.

“No — you only believed he was. He knew today was your wash day, that you’d be in back and could hear the saw ripping through wood from there. He was doing something for you — your lattice — that would plant the sound of the saw in your mind. But when he heard your footsteps overhead going outside, he started a new strip on the saw. As soon as the saw cut through a few inches, just enough to clear the blade, he tapped a staple or wire nail in the forward end of the veneer, hooked a strong screen door spring to that, stretched the spring to the forward end of the work table. The pressure of the spring pulled the wood forward against the saw, kept it cutting, and to keep the wood from working up over the saw, he placed a piece of brick on it. With the saw rigged to continue cutting, the strip was long enough to give him time to come up here.

“His wife thought nothing of his appearance. Perhaps he had a piece of wood in his hand — but he had just come out of his shop, hadn’t he? Perhaps her back was to him when he struck her without the slightest warning. As she slumped unconscious, he broke her neck, something that’s easily done with an unconscious person if you give his — or her — head just the right quick snap.

“It was a very simple matter for him to drop her at the foot of the stairs, toss the towels at random on the stairs from the laundry hamper, and scurry back to the basement.

“He thought he had played in luck. If he hadn’t had the chance to kill her then, he’d simply have waited. It would have been nothing but one effort lost that only he knew about. Back in the basement, he ripped away the spring, pulled the staples or nails, and tossed the spring and brick over in the side of the basement, to be disposed of later. He figured there was nothing suspicious in them anyway — and there wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t noticed the one mistake he did make — that empty fishfood box on the phone stand that he overlooked — and tried to figure how he could be up here and down in the basement sawing wood at the same time.”

Sweat was gleaming on Blackwell’s face. And the face was gray. It looked flabby, bleated, swimming in Mason’s gaze.

“That fishfood box was a mighty little thing to trip you, Blackwell. But now there’s no stopping me. I’m going to send you to the electric chair! Now that we know what to look for, we’ll find it. If you hit her with a block of wood, maybe a few of her hairs snagged on its edge. We’ll wear you down, like cats with a rat. Damn you, we’ll fry you, Blackwell! So many little things we’ll find to nail you in the chair!”

Blackwell lunged. His eyes were mad. His fist crashed in Mason’s mouth. Mason sprawled back, tasting blood.

Mrs. Holcombe’s scream, Doctor Dennison’s shout, Hawkins’ roared curse all blended with the frantic pound of Blackwell’s running feet.

He took the nearest way out, directly through the French doors. Across the lawn, toward the hedges and trees there that would shelter him, where he could lose himself, and perhaps make a dean escape.

But he didn’t reach the hedges. Mason and Hawkins pounded onto the lawn. Hawkins fired, missed.

Mason fired, and didn’t.

Blackwell, almost to the hedges, threw up his hands loosely, took two more staggering steps, and crashed to his face.

Hawkins was beside Mason when Mason reached the body of Cicero Blackwell. Hawkins looked at the back of Blackwell’s head and felt sick. He had to turn his face away.

“Sometimes,” young Hawkins muttered, “I ain’t sure I’m cut out to be a cop.” He wiped his hand over his forehead, stared at Mason and whispered, “Tell me, Mason, what it felt like. I mean, he was getting away and you had to stop him — but what did it feel like when you raised the gun and blew the back of his head out?”

Mason’s face was set, slick. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of it. At the second I shot her murderer, I felt closer to her than I ever did before. He’d forfeited every right to her, by killing her, hadn’t he? And as I raised the gun, drew a bead, and pulled the trigger, I felt kind of like I was being married to her...”

Content

Talmage Powell
So Near, So Dear, So Dead!