“You may apply at any company you desire,” he added, “provided, of course, that it is a reputable one. Monica, dear, isn’t our old friend, Jeremy Hodges, a representative for Pacific Coast Mutual? See if his card is in my desk.”
The card was in the desk.
“I’ll call him and make the appointment, if you wish,” Revere concluded, “but if you do go to Hodges, please, for the sake of an old man’s pride, say nothing of why you are doing this. I don’t want it gossiped around that Gavin Revere is reduced to making deals.”
His voice broke. He was further gone than Leo had expected — which would make everything so much easier. Leo accepted the card and waited while the appointment was made on the phone. It was a small thing for Leo to do — to humor an old man not long for this world.
While he waited, Leo mentally calculated the value of the huge ceiling beams and hardwood paneling, which would have to come out before the wreckers disposed of Gavin Revere’s faded glory.
Being as perfect a physical specimen as nature would allow, Leo had no difficulty getting insurance. Revere was satisfied. The marriage date was set, and nothing remained except discussion of plans for a simple ceremony and honeymoon.
One bright afternoon on the patio, Leo and Monica, her face shaded by another large-brimmed hat, and Gavin Revere in his wheel chair, discussed the details. As Revere talked, recalling his own honeymoon in Honolulu, Monica steered him about. The air was warm, but a strong breeze came in from the open end of the area where the paving sloped gently toward the precipice.
At one point, Monica took her hands from the chair to catch at her hat, and the chair rolled almost a foot closer to the edge before she recaptured it. Leo controlled his emotion. It could have happened then, without any action on his part. The thought pierced his mind that she might have seen more than she pretended to see the day she found him at the low wall. Could it be that she too wanted Gavin Revere out of the way?
Monica had now reached the end of the patio and swung the chair about.
“Volcanic peaks,” Revere intoned, “rising like jagged fingers pointing Godward from the fertile, tropical Paradise...”
Monica, wearied, sank to rest on the shelf of the low wall. Leo wanted to cry out.
“A veritable Eden for young lovers,” Gavin mused. “I remember it well...”
Unnoticed by Monica, who was busy arranging the folds of her skirt, the old wall had cracked under her weight and was beginning to bow outward toward the sheer drop. Leo moved forward quickly. This was all wrong — Monica was his deed to Mon-Vere. All those magnificent estates were poised on the edge of oblivion.
The crack widened.
“Look out—”
The last words of Leo Manfred ended in a kind of eerie wail, for, in lunging forward, he managed somehow — probably because Gavin Revere, as if on cue, chose that instant to grasp the wheels of the chair and push himself about — to collide with the chair and thereby lose his balance at the very edge of the crumbling wall.
At the same instant, Monica rose to her feet to catch at her wind-snatched hat, and Leo had a blurred view of her turning toward him as he hurtled past in his headlong lunge into eternity.
At such moments, time stands as still as the horrible photos in Gavin Revere’s gallery of faded glory, and in one awful moment Leo saw what he had been too self-centered to see previously — Monica Revere’s face without a hat and without shadows. She smiled in a serene, satisfied sort of way, and in some detached manner of self-observation he was quite certain that his own agonized features were an exact duplication of the face in the death scene.
Leo Manfred was never able to make an accurate measurement; but it was well over 200 feet to the busy superhighway below.
In policies of high amounts, the Pacific Coast Mutual always conducted a thorough investigation. Jeremy Hodges, being an old friend, was extremely helpful. The young man, he reported, had been insistent that Monica Revere be named his sole beneficiary; he had refused to say why. “It’s a personal matter,” he had stated. “What difference does it make?” It had made no difference to Hodges, when such a high commission was at stake.
“It’s very touching,” Gavin Revere said. “We had known the young man such a short time. He came to deliver my automobile from the garage. He seemed quite taken with Monica.”
Monica stood beside the statuette, next to the enlarged still of the death scene. She smiled softly.
“He told me that he was a great fan of Monica Parrish when he was a little boy,” she said.
Jeremy handed the insurance check to Gavin and then gallantly kissed Monica’s hand.
“We are all fans... and little boys... in the presence of Monica Parrish,” he said. “How do you do it, my dear? What is your secret? The years have taken their toll of Gavin, as they have of me, but they never seem to touch you at all.”
It was a sweet lie. The years had touched her — about the eyes, which she liked to keep shaded, and the mouth, which sometimes went hard — as it did when Jeremy left and Gavin examined the check.
“A great tragedy,” he mused. “But as you explained to me at rehearsal, my dear, it really was his own idea. And we can use the money. I’ve been thinking of trying to find a good script.”
Monica Parrish hardly listened. Gavin could have his dreams; she had her revenge. Her head rose proudly.
“All the critics agreed,” she said. “I was magnificent in the death scene.”
Roy Vickers
The Color of Truth
Good News: The first new Department of Dead Ends story in five years!...
Better News: and this new DDE novelet is first-rate — an excellent example of Roy Vickers’ technique by which he projects the events leading up to the tragedy so realistically, and the events leading up to the solution so convincingly, that again you will think you are reading the facts in a true case...
Best News: and, most exciting of all, Mr. Vickers has promised that this story will be the first of a new series about the never-say die, elephant-memoried DDE...
Welcome back, Department of Dead Ends — welcome home!
It is unreasonable to call a murder successful merely because the murderer cannot be apprehended. No sane man plans a murder only to escape detection. He plans to alter the pattern of his own life — for his own future enjoyment — and the murder is but a troublesome and dangerous preliminary. By a murderer’s scale of values, he owes it to his victim to have a good time on the proceeds.
Harry Finchmoor failed to have a good time even when the money rolled in and the “unsolved mystery” was comfortably tucked away in the Department of Dead Ends — and it was this failure which led to his undoing.
The murder had been occasioned by the victim, John Chester Brendwright, playing dog-in-the-manger with nearly a square mile of poor agricultural land which had suddenly acquired a high industrial value. There was no “dirty work” in the deal. If Brendwright had been as ready as Finchmoor and the rest to make a large and legitimate profit, he would not have been murdered.
The murder, clumsy enough in itself, was covered with some ingenuity, but Finchmoor can hardly be credited with this. He lurched along a path paved by the personality of his victim. It was as if Brendwright had plotted to get himself murdered.