Cushman Mapes reared stiffly. “How ridiculous!”
“You married her in Chattanooga. I can tell you all about your honeymoon, if you wish. Mrs. Kirkland kept a record to hold you in line. You brought her here, furniture and cash, and killed her. You knew she’d been seen locally — she was here long enough to be seen before she was dispatched — so you made up the Miss Leggett, the housekeeper tale, to explain her. Later, you got worried and added a Mrs. Dalton. This extra touch turned against you in the long run. No one ever saw Mrs. Dalton, by the way, but your pal, Mrs. Kirkland.” He addressed Mrs. Kirkland. “How about it, you want to tell your side of it first?”
She shook her head. “It’s all a pack o’ lies.”
“You know that wooden fisherman’s bobber you found in the woodshed?” McGavock asked her. “I hate to tell you, but that wasn’t a bobber at all. It was a gag. Intended for you. Cushman was saving it for you, if pressure got too strong on him.”
Tennant was interested. “But why would he gag her? You only gag strangers. An acquaintance can later identify you—”
“Just what Cousin Cushman was going to tell the sheriff, my boy, if he was ever questioned. But Mrs. Kirkland would never identify anyone when he’d finished with her. That gag was made to gag a corpse.”
Lamplight shone on Mrs. Kirkland’s evil, withered face. After a moment, she said, in a toneless voice: “I’ll tell what I know.”
Cushman Mapes said harshly: “Shut up, you fool. They’ll have to produce a body.”
“Mrs. Kirkland raises mighty fine asters,” McGavock remarked. “I wondered about it. Six years ago, I learn, the John Halbruck trucking and hauling company, 12 East Market Street, hauled a nice big wagonload of fine black river-loam out to her place and dumped it on her red clay flower garden. Every year or so, they say, she calls them up, and they renew it.”
Cushman Mapes said quickly: “Mr. McGavock, I’d like to talk. I’d like to give you my version of this tragic affair—”
“In the garden, eh?” Littleton Tennant frowned. “Fire, water, air, and earth. And it was earth. Just like the Bender family out in Labette County, Kansas, in 1873. They murdered travellers and buried them in the orchard behind the house. Ten to twelve victims, as I remember it.”
McGavock raised an eyebrow. “Executed, when—?”
“Killed later, according to rumor. But at the time they escaped.”
McGavock said coldly: “Well, friend, here are two that won’t.”
Keep the Killing Quiet
by C. P. Donnel, Jr.
If that needle-nosed Sesame Warner had ever guessed that her quiet, self-effacing spouse Twiford held the key to the year’s most sensational gang killing, her razor-edged tongue would surely have slashed him to ribbons.
A tenet of psychology is that when a man falls out of love with his wife, his next choice is almost certain to resemble her physically. I am forcibly reminded of this on the occasions when I see my ex-neighbor, Mr. Twiford Warner, out for an evening walk with his current poodle.
In the twenty years I have known Twiford, he has always owned a poodle named Molly. When illness or old age accounts for one, he buys another, as exactly like her predecessor as he can. Upon each he lavishes a grave, undemonstrative affection.
That Twiford’s poodles invariably closely resembled his wife, Sesame Warner, there could be no doubt. Since it is obvious that no man could see Sesame Warner in a rosy light for many weeks after the honeymoon, I once suspected that Twiford’s choice of pup was a cruel, sardonic lampoon of his wife’s looks. When I got to know him better, I realized that I was wrong. Whatever obscure subconscious urge made him pick the first one, I am positive that he was not deliberate in his caricature of his spouse, however strong his dislike was.
Sesame Warner was a thin, acid woman, with a needle nose in a narrow face framed by drooping, untidy hair. Her tongue, too, was pointed and much feared in our quiet suburb. And her ambitions for her husband were selfish, unbounded — and unfulfilled.
Twiford Warner was quite content with his position as head of the bookkeeping department of Miller’s, Inc., a department store, and Sesame’s vigorous, ruthless maneuvers to make a Man of Distinction of him — as when she plugged him for City Council, or her unseconded (even by him) fight to run him for state senator, or her ridiculous and shameless politicking to have him named president of Miller’s when old Harvey Miller died — consistently came to naught. It is possible that Sesame knew, in her secret heart, that she was licked before she started. That, I have always believed, is why her bitterness nourishes itself on the sole occasion when Twiford achieved momentary notoriety, and inexcusably, to her way of thinking, muffed his chance to become nationally famous for a few days.
You must remember. The papers called it the most sensational gang murder of Prohibition. It was Twiford who returned from a long evening stroll with one of his Mollies to report that on a dirt road off Round Hill there was a bullet-proof limousine holding three bodies.
Once the bodies were identified as Dave “Speed” Oast, Chicago Lon Ucci, and Machine-gun Larkin, Oast’s chauffeur, the lid blew off. Chicago Lon Ucci was Capone’s sole rival in the Midwest. Speed Oast had reamed millions from the New York-New Jersey beer and artichoke rackets. Machine-gun Larkin had something over a dozen murders at his door, but no convictions.
Police ascertained that Oast and Ucci had met at a roadhouse on the Boston Post Road to cement a working agreement that would make them collectively stronger than any organization then operating. They were, the police decided, on their way to New York to celebrate the pact when, on a short cut that skirted the edge of our community, their car was forced to the side of the road — a mark on a telephone pole explained the dent in their bumper — by parties unknown who had then proceeded to crack their skulls with certain weapons never discovered and tried to hide the car and its cargo on a side dirt road. All three, the autopsies showed, had been drinking heavily, and Chicago Lon Ucci’s pearl-handled revolver had one shot fired.
Police and reporters swarmed in on us, and as quickly departed when the investigation shifted to New York and Chicago. The Capones were questioned — as usual without result. The Detroit Purple Gang and the St. Louis beer crowd knew nothing. There were no arrests.
I even came in for a pinch of flash-powder myself since it was to my house that Twiford Warner came to call the police. For this, Sesame never forgave him, even though it was plain that he did it in what was generally regarded as a laudable effort to spare her frayed nerves.
Sesame did not fail to make a point of this neglect. Twiford, she informed all and sundry, had “calmly showed up” with his “damned dog on a string” and never told her a thing until the police arrived.
Nor was Twiford’s subsequent behavior calculated to sweeten her. Not only did he refuse to dramatize himself, but he also turned down a swinging offer to describe his experience on a national radio network. He refused, too, to address seven eager civic clubs on his feat, and when the mayor, carried away by excitement, offered to put him on the Police Commission, Twiford reasonably replied that a mere accident hardly qualified him for the post. Sesame raved, but to no avail. Even Molly the poodle seemed affected, for she turned churlish and howled for three nights in a row.
I don’t know why at this late date the burden of Twiford’s secret should nag at me so much. Maybe it was cumulative effect, but it was now actually interfering with my sleep and my piece of mind. Finally, in desperation, I looked up an old college friend, Dr. James Barrington, who had developed quite a reputation as an expert in criminal psychology. I begged him to come to dinner, but we had drifted apart years ago, and I must admit that it was not until I dropped a hint of what was on my mind that he rather reluctantly agreed.