“Terrible. Just terrible,” the little man said, without pausing to say hello.
“What’s that?” Logan asked calmly.
“I’ve just been talking to the doctors at Bellevue about Tritt,” Pinkson said. “He seems all right, and they’ve released him. Unfortunately, he can answer every question except ‘Where’s the money?’ ” Logan held firmly to the money in his pocket and continued to extend his sympathies.
Back at his apartment, Logan borrowed a portable typewriter from the man upstairs. Then he sat down and wrote a note:
Dear Mr. Pinkson:
I’m returning the money. I’m so sorry. I guess I didn’t know what I was doing. I guess I haven’t known for some time.
After looking up Tritt’s initials on an old deposit slip, he forged a small tidy W.T. to the note.
Logan wiped his fingerprints from the bills and wrapped them, along with the note, in a neat package.
Then he drove to the post office nearest Tritt’s apartment and mailed the money to Pinkson at the bank.
In the morning, Mr. Pinkson telephoned Logan at the university. “Well, it’s all cleared up,” he said, relieved but sad. “Tritt returned the money, so the bank is not going to press the charges. Needless to say, we’re dropping Tritt. He not only denies having taken the money, he also denies having returned it.”
“I guess he just doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Logan said.
“Yes. That’s what he said in the note. Anyway, Mr. Logan, I–I just wanted to call and apologize for the trouble we’ve caused you.”
“Oh, it was no trouble for me. I was glad to be of help,” Logan said quietly. “Delighted, in fact.”
They said goodbye then, and Logan walked across the hall to begin his ten-o’clock botany lecture.
The Compleat Murderess
by Virginia Jones
Virginia Jones’s “The Compleat Murderess” is one of the thirteen “first stories” which won special awards in EQMM’s Tenth Annual Contest. Considering that it is the work of a newcomer to the detective-crime field and a beginner in the art of assembling words and phrases, Mrs. Jones’s story is irresistible: it is delicious and witty.
The author is in her early forties, the mother of two strapping sons. Her husband is an attorney for an oil company. For a full year before writing and submitting her first story, Mrs. Jones attended a creative writing class at the University of Tulsa, under the direction of Mrs. LaVere Anderson. “The Compleat Murderess” was, of course, written between household chores. The only previous writing Mrs. Jones had done were a few book reviews — of detective stories, needless to say — for the “Tulsa World” and a Sunday column for the same paper on “The Effect of Mystery Story Reading on a Busy Housewife” (that was not the exact title, but if Mrs. Jones still has a clipping or carbon copy, we would love to read her column!).
More comment to follow — but only after you have finished Mrs. Jones’s delightful tale of an ineffectual little woman who, in the “sport” of murder, earned the right to be called “the compleat mangier”...
Mrs. Boswell stared moodily at the powdered glass she was stirring into the mashed potatoes. She was busy preparing dinner for a husband who wanted to leave her and she had planned a menu guaranteed to speed his departure. If her method was unorthodox, at least the meal was well-balanced in murderous fashion. The meat patties contained just a touch of roach paste, the salad was sprinkled with bits of bamboo splinters from an old table mat, and the cream pie had been sitting out on the warm back porch for two days, developing its own lethal bacteria.
Her husband entered the house promptly at six o’clock. He threw his hat at the closet and, as usual, missed. He hung his coat over the doorknob, took his shoes off in the living room, and stretched out on the couch to read the evening paper. In five minutes, as usual, he was snoring, and Mrs. Boswell, standing in the doorway, hands on her aproned hips, eyed him happily. “Soon he’ll be sleeping The Big Sleep,” she thought to herself. Then she went over and shook his shoulder, saying, “Frank, dinner’s ready.”
He got up from the couch, pushed past her into the dining room, and looked at the food on the table. He turned down the corners of his mouth and said, “I had the same thing for lunch. Can’t you ever fix anything different? Scramble me a couple of eggs.”
Mrs. Boswell sighed resignedly, threw the dinner into the garbage pail, and scrambled some eggs. She was not surprised that her first plan had miscarried. In the books she had been reading, the murderer nearly always failed the first time. “Try, try again,” she said to herself encouragingly.
Amy Boswell, a small timid woman with the inner strength of a dish of gelatin, was ineffectual in almost everything she tried to do, and she did not really think she would prove any more proficient at murder than she had at being a good wife to Frank.
She had proved ineffectual even on their honeymoon. Frank had spent their wedding night tying trout flies in a cold, rustic cabin in the Rockies, while Amy hunched before an oil stove, doing her best to look feminine and enticing in a long flannelette nightgown topped with a sweat shirt. She had yet to learn from bitter experience that Frank, given even odds, was more ardent as a fisherman than as a lover. Lures were more important to him than allure.
The days that followed were painful to remember. She had proved a disappointment to Frank from the moment her waders sprang a leak and she found herself swamped in the middle of a swift-moving, rocky stream. She could not sleep in the high, rarefied air of the mountains; the half-cooked greasy fish made her ill, and her fair, tender skin attracted mosquitoes from as far away as Cripple Creek.
After the honeymoon Amy discovered that Frank was not only addicted to fishing, he also liked badminton, ice skating, hockey, sail boating, skin-diving, and horses. The garage and his closet was crammed with multitudinous gear, the magazine rack was full of sports magazines, and the basement stocked with goggles, masks, fins, rackets, spears, skis, and a large outboard motor.
To Amy, whose idea of a good time was lunch in town and an afternoon at a movie, Frank was an enigma. And to Frank, Amy was a sportsman’s Jonah. No matter how hard she tried, during the long years of their marriage, she could never catch a fish; her line invariably caught in a bush or snagged on Frank’s pants. Outboard motors quit dead the moment she stepped into a boat. Sails ripped, golf balls gravitated toward water hazards, and tennis balls flew to the net like homing pigeons. Her ankles had a tendency to weaken on a hike, and she could not even play ping-pong without cracking her head on the furnace pipes in their basement clubroom.
Frank did not give up easily. For many years he took her with him on hunting trips, and other hunters scurried prayerfully whenever Amy appeared, middle-aged and shapeless in her red flannel shirt and khaki pants, firing her gun wildly at anything that moved. It was not until she shot Frank’s hat off one early morning in a duck blind that he finally decided it was hopeless.
Then he began leaving her at home while he went off with more congenial hunting partners. In the meantime, however, he had discovered that Amy’s ineptness was not confined solely to field and stream. She not only couldn’t cook greasy fish, she couldn’t cook anything well. Meals were never on time, and when they belatedly arrived, they were likely to consist chiefly of a badly made noodle casserole which she had run across in an old cookbook. Shirts not only failed to come back from the laundry, sometimes she couldn’t even remember which laundry she had sent them to. It was not a lack of intelligence. It was just that her mind skipped blithely over the more mundane matters of daily living.