“Could anyone have known you ordered it?”
“I don’t know, perhaps. I believe I called from the office here.”
“Are you married?”
“I’m a widower. I live alone, if that’s what you mean.”
“What would you do when you got a bottle of cologne?”
“Do? Well, I’d use it, I suppose. I—” Padgett smiled at me. “That’s very odd. I mean, that you would ask that. As a matter of fact I have something of a reflex habit — I smell things. Wines, cheeses, tobacco. I expect I’d have smelled the cologne almost at once. But you couldn’t have known that.”
“Who could have known it? About that habit?”
“Almost anyone who knows me. It’s rather a joke.”
“What does your company make, Mr. Padgett?”
His pale face closed up. “I’m sorry, much of our work is secret, for the government.”
“Maybe Rauwolfia serpentina? Something like it?”
I had stopped at the library to do research. Chalmers Padgett looked at me with alarm and a lot of suspicion.
I said, “Do you have a heart condition, Mr. Padgett? A serious condition? Could you die of a heart attack — easily?”
He watched me. “Have you been investigating me, Mr. Fortune?”
“In away,” I said. “You do have a heart condition?”
“Yes. No danger if I’m careful, calm, but—”
“But if you died of a heart attack, no one would be surprised? No one would question it?”
“There would be no question,” Chalmers Padgett said. He studied me. “One of our subsidiaries, very secret, does make some Rauwolfia serpentina, Mr. Fortune. For government use.”
“Who would want you dead, Mr. Padgett?”
A half hour later, Mr. Padgett and I stopped for the drugstore owner, Mr. Johnson. Padgett rode in the back seat of the car with Sergeant Hamm and me.
“Rauwolfia serpentina,” I said. “Did you ask the M.E.?”
“I asked,” Sergeant Hamm said. “Related to common tranquilizers. Developed as a nerve gas for warfare before we supposedly gave up that line of study. Spray it on the skin, breath it, a man’s dead in seconds. Depresses the central nervous system, stops the heart cold. Yeah, the M.E. told me about it. Says he never saw a case of its use, but he’d heard of cases. Seems it works almost instantly, and the autopsy will show nothing but a plain heart attack. A spy weapon, government assassins. No cop in New York ever heard of a case. Who can get any of it?”
“P-S Chemical has a subsidiary that makes some; very secret,” I said. “Under pressure in a bottle, it spurts in the face of anyone who opens it to sniff. Dead of a heart attack. The bottle drops from the victim’s hand, the pressure empties the bottle. No trace — unless you test the bottle very carefully, expertly.”
“In my case,” Chalmers Padgett said, “who would have tested the bottle? I die of a heart attack, there would be no thought of murder. Expected. I ordered the cologne, the bottle belonged in my apartment. No one would even have noticed the bottle.”
We stopped at a Park Avenue apartment house and all went up to the tenth floor. The man who stood up in the elegant, sunken living room when the houseman led us into the apartment was big and florid-faced. Something happened to his arrogant eyes when he saw Chalmers Padgett.
“Yes,” Mr. Johnson said, “that’s the man who asked me to show him the vaporizer, who was alone in the store with the packages.”
Chalmers Padgett said, “For some years we’ve disagreed on how to run our company. He won’t sell his share to me, and he hasn’t the cash to buy my share. He lives high. If I died, he would have the company, and a large survivor’s insurance. He’s the only one who would gain by my death. My partner, Samuel Seaver. He’s the one.”
I said, “Executive vice-president of P-S Chemical. One of the few people who could get Rouwalfia serpentina.”
The big man, Samuel Seaver, seemed to sway where he stood and stared only at Chalmers Padgett. His eyes showed fear, yes, but confusion, too, and incredulity. He had planned a perfect murder. Chalmers Padgett’s death would have been undetectable, no question of murder. No one would have noticed Seaver’s lethal bottle, it belonged in Padgett’s room.
However, Roger Tatum had dropped the package, Boyd Connors had taken it home and opened the bottle. Boyd Connors had no heart condition. Boyd Connors’ mother did not believe the heart attack. The bottle had not belonged in Boyd’s room.
Sergeant Hamm began to recite, “Samuel Seaver, you’re under arrest for the murder of Boyd Connors. It’s my duty to advise you that—”
“Who?” the big man, Samuel Seaver, said unwittingly. “Murder of who?”
95
The Odor of Melting
Edward D. Hoch
The thing he remembered most vividly from the last instant before the plane hit the cresting Atlantic waves was the odor of melting, the pungent wisp of a smell which told him the electric circuits had gone. Then there was no time for anything else — no time to reach the passenger compartment, no time for anything but a clawing endeavor to survive.
He couldn’t have lived long in the freezing waters, but it seemed that he bobbed like Ishamel for days, the only survivor of this black disaster, clinging to one of the plane’s seats until at last some unseen hands were lifting him. Perhaps he was bound for heaven, or for hell. He no longer cared. He merely slipped into a quiet slumber where the dreams were thick and deep, like the waters of the Atlantic...
When he opened his eyes, some time later, a man in white slacks and a white turtleneck sweater was bending over him. He was aware of the man’s face, and of the coolness of the sheets against his naked body, and nothing more.
“How do you feel?” the man asked.
“I... I don’t know. I expected to be dead. Where am I?”
The man smiled and felt the pilot’s forehead. “We saw the crash and pulled you out of the water. You’re very lucky. It’s an awfully big ocean.”
Now he was aware of the gentle swaying of the room, and he knew he was on a boat of some sort. “What ship is this?” he asked.
“The yacht Indos.” The man smiled at the pilot’s blank expression. “Owned by J. P. Galvan. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”
He tried to connect the name with something in his memory, and then suddenly everything else flooded back. “The President!” he gasped. “The President was on the plane! I must—”
He was struggling to get out of bed, but the man restrained him. “You were the only survivor. There is nothing you can do now.”
“How long have I been here?”
“You’ve been sleeping. It’s almost seven hours since we pulled you from the water.”
“But... my God, I’ve got to get word to Washington!”
“That’s been taken care of. They know you’re here.”
“But the President! I’ve got to tell them what happened. I was the pilot — it was my responsibility!”
“Rest for a while. Mr. Galvan will want to speak with you soon.” The man turned and went out, perhaps to summon the owner of the yacht.
Alone between the cool white sheets, he ran over the whole thing again in his mind. He’d been the chief pilot of the presidential plane for only six months when the President of the United States decided on a flying trip to France and West Germany. The visit, and the high-level talks that accompanied it, had been most successful. The President and his advisors had been pleased when they finally boarded the plane in Paris for the return flight.
They were more than an hour out to sea when it happened, suddenly and without warning. An autumn storm blowing up from the tropics — perhaps an offshoot of some distant hurricane — had hurled a single lightning bolt at the plane, knocking out the radio and electrical systems. It was a freak accident that shouldn’t have happened; but it did.