Moving stealthily, he went inside and in the bedroom found a handkerchief and several lengths of rope. Coming soundlessly back to the kitchen he looped the handkerchief over his wife’s slumped head and suddenly pulled it over her mouth as she jerked up her head, and knotted it behind. As she began to struggle (and now this was the worst, the most dreaded part of it) he struck her in the face, knocking her to the floor where she momentarily lost consciousness. When she came to a few moments later she found herself helplessly bound, hands and ankles, staring up at her husband. The sound of falling rain filled the starkly still kitchen, drumming.
“Now you can see how sincere I was about this thing,” Gregg said. “Now you can see how important it is to me. I asked you, Kay; I asked you to put an end to something that no longer had reason to exist. But you wouldn’t. All right. Now I’ll do it.”
Gregg closed the kitchen window. Then he closed the door. Once more he looked down at his wife.
“I’m going to do this very sweetly for you, Kay,” he said, “Some husbands make a bloody and painful massacre, of it, with knives or hammers or guns; but I’m going to be most gentle with you. You just close your eyes and go to sleep. People will say what an awful thing it was, that you just couldn’t bear to live any longer.”
He went to the stove and began turning on the jets, one at a time, until from each of the four jets there rose a deadly almost inaudible hiss. He avoided looking at each as he backed toward the door. He began to feel ill; he wanted to get out as quickly as possible.
The plans were running through his mind: he would leave the boy at her sister’s (telling the sister, of course, that he had left Kay in a most depressed frame of mind) and come back later and ‘discover’ her. He would untie her and then call the police and lament over the terrible tragedy. Oh, he would accept some of the blame, for having been a philanderer, but that would be a minor and inconsequential stigma, and well worth it.
“Goodbye, Kay,” he whispered without looking at her as his wide-eyed, voiceless, helpless wife squirmed frantically on the floor.
Gregg went downstairs and outside. The rain had almost stopped. He called Jamie from the basement and the boy popped out, running excitedly, the engineer’s hat on his head. Taking the animated boy by the hand, Gregg said, “Your mother’s not feeling so well, Jamie, Come along and we’ll go to a movie.” Without protest, the boy took his father’s hand and followed. When they got to the corner, Gregg looked back at the windows. Then he turned and went quickly on.
The following morning the three most talkative women on Chester Street met in Joseph Tompkins’ grocery.
“Isn’t it awful,” Mrs. Fairley said “I think it’s an absolute shame and tragedy.”
“But does anyone know why?” asked Mrs. Duffy.
“No,” said Mrs. Tinny. “It happened and no one yet knows why.”
“What’s all this talk this morning?” Mr. Tompkins asked.
“Haven’t you heard?” Mrs. Fairley asked.
“If I’d heard,” the grocer said crankily, “I wouldn’t be asking, now would I?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Fairley, “the police came last night and arrested Mr. Gregg. No one knows why.”
“He had a bad side to him,” Mrs. Duffy said. “I always said it.”
“And that little Jamie is right off the same branch,” Mrs. Fairley said. “Why, do you know what he did yesterday? He was fooling about in the cellar and turned off the gas for the whole house.”
“Did he? Well,” Mrs. Tinny said righteously, “a boy like that deserves a good whipping.”
Isn’t It a Perfect Crime?
by James Gilmore
Among the flora and fauna of these United States, I read somewhere recently, is a plant called “the mother-in-law plant”, whose distinguishing characteristic is that it is almost impossible to root out, once it has taken hold in the chosen spot it calls home.
The thirty-three years Ira had spent as a Certified Public Accountant had taught him the importance of details. Details and figures were his life, the only things he really trusted or understood. And now, as his train slowly pulled out of the Minneapolis Depot and snaked its way across the old stone bridge over the Mississippi, he sat back in the privacy and comfort of his compartment, put on his steel-rimmed bifocals and studied the details of his master plan for the last time.
As he did, a self-satisfied smile crept across his lips. He looked upon the plan as his work of art, his masterpiece. It was Ira Hovel’s blueprint of the perfect crime. Oh, he knew others had tried it before and failed; but, then, they didn’t have his training or passion for detail.
He took out a pencil, wet the lead with the tip of his tongue, and crossed out item number one. It had already been accomplished. Ira’s wife, Emily, and his mother-in-law, Bertha, had driven him to the depot and seen him board the 11 p.m. train to Chicago. During the past seven years it had become a regular Sunday night ritual. He smiled again as he thought how fortunate he was to have a client with a branch in Chicago. The weekly trip to check their books had been the inspiration for his plan. Without it, he would have given up hope long ago. And at fifty-seven a man needs hope.
Ira crossed out the second item on the list. It, too, was a simple detail. All he had to do was tell the porter he didn’t want to be disturbed — no matter what — until the train reached Chicago. To make sure the man followed his orders, he had tipped him five dollars. He knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.
The third item was hardly more difficult. Ira merely had to slip off the train when it reached St. Paul without being seen. To accomplish it, he’d just walk to the last car, where the porter didn’t know him, and get off. He knew from years of experience that porters and conductors are too busy with boarding passengers in St. Paul to pay any attention to one getting off, especially one as inconspicuous as himself.
In a way, item four had proved to be the most challenging. Ira needed a car for the forty-five minute drive from the St. Paul Union Station to his home in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. At first he planned to rent one, but he finally gave up the idea as too dangerous. The rental agencies required positive identification; he would have had to sign for the car and shown his driver’s license. He just couldn’t afford to take chances like that. He finally solved the problem by buying an old, but perfectly serviceable, 1951 Ford. It cost him exactly two-hundred and fifty dollars, a lot of money for one night’s work, but with so much at stake it was worth every last penny. Ira had driven the car to the station parking lot the morning before. It was there now, waiting for him.
The fifth item was the most important of all, and by far the most difficult. It would be difficult because, basically, Ira was a very proper man; violence and crime repelled him. And since murder was the most violent of all crimes, it held a particularly repugnant position in Ira’s mind. But what was he to do? Even at the age of eighty-three, his mother-in-law, Bertha, was much too healthy, and much too stubborn, to die all by herself. And Bertha had to die, it was the only way Ira could live.
The method of the murder had also posed somewhat of a problem. Ira had absolutely no working knowledge of firearms, besides they were noisy and, he imagined, quite messy. He finally settled on strangulation — it was quick, clean and quiet. And, since Bertha, in spite of her monstrous personality, was not a large woman, he couldn’t imagine that it would be any trouble at all. Getting into her bedroom would not be difficult — her room was on the ground floor in the back of the house — he had even unhooked her screen window that very morning just before church. And he knew Emily wouldn’t hear a thing, even if Bertha managed to scream before she lost consciousness, because she always took a sleeping pill when he was out of town.