“Then sell them,” he’d say.
“I just can’t bear to. They’re much too nice.”
In the next month they went up another dozen points, and she forced herself to sell them.
“I hate to,” Grace said, “but I’m afraid, I must.” And the following week they plummeted down to the price at which she’d bought.
Can you kill a woman like that?
Still, as Alec Condon told himself after he’d met Myra, money isn’t everything, and he’d have been greedy not to be satisfied with Grace’s fortune at its present level. In fact, Myra so assumed, the, first time he brought her to his studio.
“I like it here,” she said. She was quick, clever and direct, and she not only knew her own mind, but she knew Alec’s as well.
“I like it, too,” he said, “but it belongs to Grace.”
“Then divorce her.”
“What about the studio? It isn’t even mine.”
“Oh, we’d live in the big house. This is much too small.”
“And Grace?”
Myra put her arms around him.
“Grace,” she said, “is your problem. But really, darling, you can’t have both of us.”
“I have, now.”
“I want a home and a husband and a family.”
“What about money?”
At the word, Myra grew almost dreamy.
“Money!” she said.
Alec thought of his dreams, but he was a practical man and he knew it was time to carry them out.
“I’ll marry you one year from now,” he said decisively, “but I don’t want you to go through the embarrassment of being hauled into court as a co-respondent. Leave the state, Myra. Stay away and don’t even write me. Understand?”
“Why, Alec!” she said. “How clever of you!” And she kissed him. It crossed his mind that she understood far too well.
He was, however, no fool, and he did nothing precipitously. He studied murder methods in fiction and fact, and found out that the more complicated the scheme, the more likely to backfire. A blunt instrument, he learnt, is the best weapon, and it should be disposable. A wooden mallet, for instance, being burnable, is the perfect instrument. For, even though the autopsy may show splinters that can be identified as a certain kind of wood, if you have no weapon to compare the splinters with, what good the analysis?
The same approach went for an alibi. The complicated alibi is the easiest to break. But to claim that you were home reading or balancing your check book — how can anyone prove otherwise? So — a wooden mallet, and the alibi that he’d been working in his studio. That much was definite.
Still, who had any reason to kill Grace, except a husband who wanted her money in order to marry another woman? Alec was vulnerable, unless he could hand the police a better suspect than himself.
He got his next idea from a newspaper, which reported a daring jewel robbery in which thieves had broken into a house a few blocks away, ransacked a safe and tied up the owner. Thus far, the account stated, the police had no clues.
Fine, Alec decided. Grace would be killed by a jewel thief who left no clues. There remained only the problem of persuading her to leave some jewelry in the house, and then finding the proper thief.
The first part was easy. Alec had seen Grace’s diamond necklace, valued at fifty thousand dollars. She kept it in the vault and wore it.
“I’m sure I’d lose it,” she said. “And it’s not only worth a lot of money, but it was my mother’s. It’s a real heirloom.”
“Bring it out just once,” he said, “Wear it for my birthday.”
“That would be nice,” she said.
Which gave him plenty of time in which to find his thief.
He hung around a few of the shadier bars for the better part of a week and dropped hints that he had a proposition for somebody who knew how to dispose of top-quality diamonds. In due time he was told that one Two-Story Murphy, known as Toosh, might be interested. Consequently Alec sat down one evening at a corner table in the OK Bar, dawdled over a beer and waited.
The man who presently sat down on the other side of the table had a long, narrow head, a long, high-bridged nose and hard, gimlet eyes. The eyes seemed to bore through Alec in the effort of judging him and making sure he was no cop, had no connection with cops, and was leary of them. Eventually Alec passed inspection.
“They tell me you want to talk to somebody about something,” the man said.
“Maybe,” Alec said. “You’re Two-Story Murphy. Is that right?”
“They call me Toosh. What do you want?”
“Know how to cash in on some diamonds? Say a necklace, for instance?”
“Let’s see it.”
“I haven’t got it, but I can tell you where you can get hold of it, and it’s going to be the easiest job you ever fell into in all your life.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“The necklace, which is insured for fifty thousand.”
Toosh nodded. “You want to collect the insurance, and I get the ice. How do I know this is on the level?”
“What are you scared of?”
“You,” Toosh said, “I don’t like you.”
“I don’t like you, either, but this is business. Interested?”
“What do I do?”
“I give you an address. I give you the time and place and date. The door of this house will be open, or at least unlatched, and you can walk in. That’s all. I tell you where the necklace is, and you pick it up and leave.”
“I’m not walking into no house. That’s dangerous. I’m a second-story man. What if somebody sees me?”
“Look,” Alec said. “You know what a modus operandi file is, don’t you? The M.O. You’re a second story worker, so if you walk in the front door, the police never even think of you. Never.”
“What if somebody sees me?”
“Then you walk out. You claim you rang the bell and nobody answered, so you opened the door. No crime, is it?”
Toosh thought for a long time. He tapped his fingers on the edge of the table. He lit a cigarette and tamped it out. He stroked his cheek. He stared at Alec. Then Toosh finally spoke.
“What’s the address, and when do I do it?”
“Seventeen Seventy-five West Lime. On September fourteenth. At exactly eight o’clock. Not a minute earlier and not a minute later. Is that clear?”
“I got a battery watch. Never fails.”
“How old is the battery?”
“Two months.”
“Okay. Just don’t lose it.”
“You trying to teach me about watches, or you got a job for me?”
“The timing’s important. At exactly eight o’clock you walk into this house and take the first doorway to the left. There, you’ll find the necklace on a coffee table in front of the couch. It’s a marble-topped table. The street light gives you enough illumination to see it. Pick up the necklace and examine it, and if you think it’s not worth the money, forget the whole business. But I guarantee that the necklace is worth fifty thousand, and maybe a lot more. So pick it up and go. All yours. I never see you again, and you never saw me in your life.”
“Give me ten bucks now, just to show you’re not kidding.”
Condon took out his wallet and removed a ten-spot.
“Here,” he said.
Toosh accepted the bill, got up and walked away.
Good, Alec told himself. All set. Grace called everything nice. Well, her murder would be nice, too.
For the next few months, preceding his birthday, he was a model husband. He attended Grace like a lovesick swain. When she lost her purse, he produced an extra one from his pocket.
“I had it with me, just in case you lost yours,” he said, handing it to her.
Grace took it gratefully.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“I like to make it easy for you,” he said. “I know you mislay things, but it’s because you’re dreamy and your mind is on higher matters. I don’t mind.”