Frankly, in the next two hours there was more drinking and gaiety in Mayfield’s party than I’d expected under the circumstances, but everything went smoothly until about eight o’clock, when an immense, middle-aged woman walked into the lounge, had two quick drinks and asked the barman where she could find May-field.
Unfortunately, he told her. I intercepted her at the door. She said she was a reporter sent by the Associated Press to cover Maxine Treadway’s murder. I was about to order her to leave when Mayfield’s press relations advisor, who had overheard the exchange, invited her to join the party.
I was suspicious of the woman because the police had alerted us to be on the lookout for someone meeting her description, for what reason they didn’t say. To play safe, I asked the desk to call AP to verify her identity. Then I went back to keep an eye on her. She had a few more drinks and, during a lull in the conversation, cleared her throat and loudly asked Mayfield if she could ask a few off-the-record questions.
Politely, he said he had no comment other than that he deplored murders, but she persisted. She said what bothered her most about the story was that the local authorities seemed so sure the ex-convict Phelan was the killer, closing their eyes to all other possibilities. For instance, she said, a confidential source had told her Maxine Treadway had a secret lover.
Some people ordered the woman to stop the questioning, but Mayfield said, since this was off the record, that his ex-wife’s amoral character was well-known, that she almost always had a lover and it was almost always the same kind of man: younger than she, already successful in his chosen field but with a still-promising future. Gradually she would become more possessive and demanding until, at the end, there were usually very ugly scenes, some of which were no doubt chronicled in detail in personal journals she had kept for years, for whatever her reason.
At this point the desk told me the AP said the woman was an impostor. I demanded her identification, but she ignored me, got up and started to leave. When our security man tried to detain her, she shoved him violently out the door and into some of the sportsmen at the public bar. They threw him bodily back into Mayfield’s party. I don’t know exactly what happened next, but in the melee that followed our lounge sustained damages which I conservatively estimate at eight thousand dollars...
Warily, Ben circled the house. It seemed unoccupied and unguarded, so he decided to risk everything with a direct approach. He darted up the back steps, picked the lock to the back door and slipped inside.
No alarms sounded. Fine, his gambit had worked. Swinging the flashlight beam around, he moved from the kitchen to the dining room and then to a study. If the journals were still here, that’s where they’d probably be.
They were, piled in cardboard cartons — stacks of loose-leaf notebooks with double-spaced, rough-typed pages.
Squinting under the light of his torch, Ben flipped through the books. These were highly personal reminiscences all right, but they were old incidents, lurid recollections of past years.
Finding the current book took time, but ultimately he unearthed it and began to read.
Behind him, a floorboard creaked. Before he could turn around, something heavy came down on his skull with blinding force.
He came to in the trunk of a moving car, gagged and bound tightly. His head throbbed. How long he’d been unconscious, he didn’t know. He tried to roll over, but couldn’t. This was a small car; probably a purple sports car.
It was all too unreal. The knot of fear in his stomach got bigger and bigger. What the hell was going on?
The car slowed, turned, proceeded at modest speed, turned again and stopped. Then it moved a few more yards. There was a clank as an automatic garage door fell back into place. The driver cut the engine. Footsteps echoed on concrete, and the trunk’s door swung open.
Peering down at Ben was a trim, mid-thirtyish man in a modish business suit. His eyes were shielded by tinted glasses and his hair had been coiffured by a professional. Ben had never seen the man even once before in his life.
“Nice of you,” the man said, “to break into Maxine’s studio for me. I’d been hanging around since dark, trying to figure how to do it. And nice of you to find her latest journal, the one where she had so many things to say about me.”
He hauled Ben from the trunk and dropped him to the floor. Apparently, the garage adjoined a house.
“Maxine told me about you,” the man went on. “Understand, I don’t want to kill you, but I have no choice. Fortunes of war, plus the question of which of us can contribute the most in our life spans — and I’m afraid you’re already a loser.”
Pensively, he folded his arms.
“I’ll admit,” he continued, “from your point of view this isn’t fair. It’s never the right time to die, is it? But it isn’t easy for me, either. I didn’t have to make a conscious decision about Maxine, I just killed her in a rage. Picked up the figurine and bashed her head in. I’d told her I’d found a woman nearer my own age, with the right kind of family, someone who’d help my career. But Maxine wouldn’t let me go through with it. She said she’d wreck the marriage before it could begin, and I couldn’t allow that.”
His eyes strayed to the car.
“Of course. I’ll just put you to sleep. Carbon monoxide. You won’t feel any pain and I’ll dispose of your body at leisure. There’s a deep lake not far from here. Wrapped in a weighted canvas bag, your body will never be found.”
Quickly and silently, he tied Ben into a heavy chair, positioned him near the car’s exhaust and kicked the engine into life. Before stepping into the house and closing the door, he said: “Too bad, kid. I wish it could be some other way, but it can’t.”
The engine kept running. Ben began to cough and found himself getting sleepier and sleepier. This was it, then? He’d die without even knowing who killed him, or what this was all about...
“Ben? Are you all right, Ben?”
He opened his eyes. He was outside, lying on his back. Looming over him was Ernestine Barr, and behind her were half a dozen other faces, most of them under policemen’s caps.
“He’s confessed,” she continued, lifting Ben to a sitting position and loosening his bonds. “After we found you in his garage, he had to.”
“But how—”
“Deduction. Once I decided you really were innocent, all came clear. Improbable as it seemed, there was only one solution. So I kept screaming it to the police, and when they finally checked and found that our man really did smoke a pipe, own a red-lined raincoat and drive a purple sports car, we came straight here.”
“But I still don’t understand. Who is the man? And how did he get into Maxine’s cottage without being seen?”
“He wasn’t seen,” Ernestine said, “because there was nobody to see him. The road crew had already gone home. And much later that day, he deliberately misstated the time of death by several hours to give himself an alibi. Maxine’s secret lover, whose office at the state medical school is a block from her studio, was Dr. Jurgen Von Wythe, the man who performed the autopsy.”
Turnabout
by Joyce R. Wilson
Even the most perfect plan may take a turn for the worse.
At thirty-six, Tony Cajek was a very tired, middle-aged hit man. It wasn’t a matter of facing up to the finality of his situation. Cajek had accepted the verdict with icy calm; he had rationalized that all men are inevitably faced with a catastrophe at some point in their lives. His happened to come sooner than expected. He had learned to cope with the vicissitudes of life, but now the agony and futility of simply existing from day to day had forced him to reevaluate his concept of life.