“I’d like to sign it over.”
“Your husband had good reasons for setting it up the way he did.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you have anyone to help you?” he asked impulsively. He knew at once he had put too much of what he felt in his voice. He tried to cover by saying, “There’ll be a lot of arrangements. I mean, it could be considered part of my job.”
He detected the faintly startled look in her eyes. Awareness made them awkward. “Thank you very much, Mr. Darrigan. I think Brad will help.”
“Can you get that woman over to stay with you tonight?”
“I’ll be all right.”
He left her and went back to the beach to his room. In the morning he would make whatever official statements were considered necessary. He lay in the darkness and thought of Dinah, of the way she was a promise of warmth, of integrity.
And, being what he was, he began to look for subterfuge in her attitude, for some evidence that her reactions had been part of a clever act. He ended by despising himself for having gone so far that he could instinctively trust no one.
In the morning he phoned the home office. He talked with Palmer, a vice-president. He said, “Mr. Palmer, I’m sending through the necessary reports approving payment on the claim.”
“It’s a bloody big one,” Palmer said disconsolately.
“I know that, sir,” Darrigan said. “No way out of it.”
“Well, I suppose you’ll be checking in then by, say, the day after tomorrow?”
“That should be about right.”
Darrigan spent the rest of the day going through motions. He signed the lengthy statement for the police. The Drynfellses were claiming that in the scuffle for the paper, Davisson had fallen and hit his head on a bumper guard. In panic they had hidden the body. It was dubious as to whether premeditation could be proved.
He dictated his report for the company files to a public stenographer, sent it off airmail. He turned the car in, packed his bag. He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, smoking cigarettes, looking at the far wall.
The thought of heading north gave him a monstrous sense of loss. He argued with himself. Fool, she’s just a young, well-heeled widow. All that sort of thing was canceled out when Doris left you. What difference does it make that she should remind you of what you had once thought Doris was?
He looked into the future and saw a long string of hotel rooms, one after the other, like a child’s blocks aligned on a dark carpet.
If she doesn’t laugh in your face, and if your daydream should turn out to be true, they’ll nudge each other and talk about how Gil Darrigan fell into a soft spot.
She’ll laugh in your face.
He phoned at quarter of five and caught Palmer. “I’d like to stay down here and do what I can for the beneficiary, Mr. Palmer. A couple of weeks, maybe.”
“Isn’t that a bit unusual?”
“I have a vacation overdue, if you’d rather I didn’t do it on company time.”
“Better make it vacation, then.”
“Anything you say. Will you put it through for me?”
“Certainly, Gil.”
At dusk she came down the hall, looked through the screen at him. She was wearing black.
He felt like a kid trying to make his first date. “I thought I could stay around a few days and... help out. I don’t want you to think I—”
She swung the door open. “Somehow I knew you wouldn’t leave,” she said.
He stepped into the house, with a strange feeling of trumpets and banners. She hadn’t laughed. And he knew in that moment that during the years ahead, the good years ahead of them, she would always know what was in his heart, even before he would know it. And one day, perhaps within the year, she would turn all that warmth suddenly toward him, and it would be like coming in out of a cold and rainy night.
Death Writes the Answer
(aka This One Will Kill You)
He held the magazine up as though he were still reading it, but he watched her across the top of it, ready to drop his eyes to the story again should she look up.
For the moment the excitement, the carefully concealed anticipation, of the past month faded, and he wondered, quite blankly, why he was going to kill his wife. Myra had no major faults. In the eight years of their marriage, they had had no serious quarrels.
Peter Kallon looked across the small one-room apartment at her, and slowly the dislike and the determination built up again in equal quantity. It had started about six months before, and then it was only an intellectual game. How would a man kill his wife without fear of discovery? And, in the midst of the game, he had looked at Myra with the cold objectivity of a stranger and found that the eight years had changed her.
Eight years had thickened her figure, put a roll of soft tissue under her chin, but the years had done nothing to alter that basic untidiness which he had once found so charming.
Peter Kallon was a very tidy man. By day he entered neat columns of figures on pale yellow work sheets. His linen was always fresh, his razor in the exact same spot on the bathroom shelf, trees inserted in his shoes each night.
But Myra, even though childless, seemed to find it impossible to handle the housekeeping details of an efficiency apartment with its minuscule bath, cubbyhole kitchen, Murphy bed. Eight years of litter had worn away his quite impressive patience with the monotony of water dripping on sandstone.
The thought of being a widower was quite engaging. Peter Kallon had a passion for puzzles. Crosswords, cryptograms, contests. He attacked all with equal dry ardor. Murder became a puzzle.
And a month ago he had arrived at the final detailed answer.
He looked across at her. A strand of graying brown hair hung down her cheek. She sat with one leg tucked under her, an unlaced shoe on the swinging foot. She was reading a novel, and as she came to the end of each page she licked the middle finger of her right hand before turning the next page. That little habit annoyed him. Long ago he had given up trying to read any book Myra had finished.
It would be such a pity to have the answer and not put it into effect.
Lately he had been looking at the young girls on the street and in the office. There was the clean line of youth about them.
Myra set the book aside, smiled over to him, and scuffed her way into the kitchenette. He heard her fill a glass with water from the faucet, heard the small familiar sound she made in her throat as she drank. He knew that as she came back into the room she would be wiping her mouth with the back of her right hand. She was.
It would never do, he thought, to say, “Myra, I’m tired of being married.” Poor Myra. She would never be able to support herself. That would mean quite a drain on him, supporting two establishments. No. Murder would be tidy. Myra could die without knowing that he had grown to hate her and her ways with all the dry passion of a careful, fastidious man.
She turned on the transistor radio, spun the dial to a station. Myra continued to read.
“You’ve got two stations there,” he said.
She cocked her head on one side, listening. “But you can hardly hear that other one.”
He came angrily across the room and reset the dial. She never did anything crisply and purposefully. Never on time, never able to move fast.
Most murders were too hasty. The motive was too clear. Their few friends would never suspect him of having a motive to kill Myra. He knew that their friends considered them beautifully adjusted.
When murders weren’t too hasty, they were too contrived, too full of details that the murderer was incapable of handling neatly.
The perfect murder, he had decided, could be quite detailed, if the details were handled by a man competent to do so. A man like Peter Kallon. He was the sort of man that no one had ever called Pete. Not even his mother or his sister.