He said, “You know, it’s funny. But I feel the same way myself.
Killer Be Good
Originally published in New Detective Magazine, December 1952.
Chapter One
I was murdered at exactly eleven o’clock on a Monday evening. I am able to recall the time exactly because the tall clock in the foyer was striking the hour as I shoved the papers to the back of the desk and started up the long, dark stairway to the upper hall.
There were many things on my mind that night. I wondered where Vicky was, for one thing. She’d said at dinner that she was playing bridge at Thelma Grigsby’s tonight. Was it okay with me? Sure, I said. I had some work to do anyway. She’d pouted prettily, her hair like spun gold about her face in the soft candle light in the dining room — Vicky always liked dinner by candlelight.
“If only you could be a husband and an important man at the same time, Doug,” she’d said. “All this work and no play—”
“Gives mama spending money,” I said.
After dinner I went in the study. For a moment I stood looking at the desk. I didn’t want to sit down to it and face the mass of papers on it. I was tired, and I had that pain across my abdomen again. Maybe I was developing an ulcer. Was it worth it, the work and strain required to keep a few steps ahead of the rest?
Then I pushed the smothered feeling aside, ripped the cellophane off a fresh package of cigarettes, and sat at the cluttered desk.
I heard Vicky pass through the hallway and without quite realizing it I listened until I heard the car start in the driveway outside. The motor raced until it sounded as if it would throw a rod. Vicky had never been able to get a motor started smoothly.
I heard the motor whisper away to an idle and the liquid, golden sound of her voice came through the open study window that overlooked the driveway.
“Mr. Shoffner, we’ll cut some glads for the house tomorrow morning.”
I heard the old, tired voice of Wendel Shoffner answer, “Yes, mum.” He was our gardener and general handy man. He’d been with us a month now, a tired, sagging man with watery blue eyes and baggy pants.
The car engine raced again as Vicky left the driveway. Shoffner’s slow footsteps crunched by the window as he went to his room over the garage. I was still too taken with lassitude to get to work. Could we afford a glad garden and a man to keep it and the grounds up? Of course we couldn’t. You don’t live that way on the pay of an investigator attached to the office of the district attorney. But there are ways. You don’t have to act in an illegal manner, either. You just have to stretch a point here and there. Politics, some people call it.
I told myself that I had to get rid of this feeling of depression, the nagging sense that I was caged and on a treadmill. I had to shake loose the insinuation in my mind that it was all for nothing. Life was still sweet, very much so.
I wanted to live a very long time that night.
Lew Whitfield phoned me about nine o’clock. He had been elected D.A. a year ago on a reform platform. He was a short, deliberate man, given to flesh and losing his hair. He smoked black cigars and lived with his slender, greying wife and six children in a rambling barn of a house. “Only place big enough to hold the brood,” he would explain. There were croquet and badminton courts in his yard. His lawn was like the hide of a mangy dog, scuffed bare of its pitiful, dried-up grass by the pounding of many childish feet. He romped with his kids until his balding head gleamed with sweat and his breath grew short, and they tumbled all over him when he went into the house to sit down. Through it all he moved as placidly as a good-natured elephant.
“Going over the Sigmon brief, Doug?” he asked that night on the phone. A radio was blaring and a kid was screaming laughter in his house.
“Just starting on it,” I said. The Sigmon case wasn’t particularly fresh or interesting. It happened a dozen times a day in different parts of the country. Loren Sigmon, a scrawny, underfed, cheap punk. His girl friend, after an argument, had tipped us that he was the boy we were looking for to clean up a filling station robbery. Maybe they made up and she, in that sudden reversal of emotion that takes hold of such women, told him that he’d better scram before the coppers came. Or perhaps she was still angry and threw it in his teeth that he was going to jail, when he showed at her place. He wouldn’t tell us about that. He wouldn’t talk about anything. But we had him. I’d gone to her place not quite in time to keep him from shooting her to death.
Lew tried to tell me something about the Sigmon case over the radio and the noise of his children.
Then he said, “It isn’t important. Put it aside and bring Vicky on over. We’ll have coffee after canasta.”
“Sorry. Vicky’s out to win us a set of ashtrays or something at Thelma Grigsby’s tonight.”
We hung up, and I rocked back in the desk chair, smoking and thinking. You live along for years, and then somehow you start doing that. Thinking. Questioning. What have I done with the thirty three years of my life?
College, an investigator’s job with an insurance outfit. The war. And you remember the eruption of emotion that swept the country, the release from boredom, from the everyday treadmill that seems to have captured you. You return and meet Vicky and marry her. Then you set to work to build a future.
Yet one night, without warning, without reason, you find yourself unable to work, sitting and thinking...
I threw the pencil I’d been toying with on the desk. Dammit, I knew what was wrong with me. I was lonely. I wanted the sound of Vicky’s voice. I wished she were here to go with me to Lew Whitfield’s house. I wanted the noise of his kids, and Vicky’s eyes lighting as she looked at a dress Lew’s wife had made.
“Marge, however do you do it!” Yes, I could hear every inflection of her voice in my imagination.
Or perhaps she’d put her head next to the oldest Whitfield child, Sharon, over Sharon’s high school homework.
And then later we’d leave the Whitfields and drive across town, the soft Florida night a caress in our faces. We might stop someplace and dance a few minutes. Then home — and the warm darkness.
I was still very much in love with Vicky. That night I hoped we would have many, many years together.
At ten o’clock the phone rang a second time. I was deep in some notes Lew had made on a joint at the edge of town which was taking, we thought, illegal bets. Minor, but important. You go after those things and splash them big to keep the public convinced of your worth as a public servant. You like to keep the voters saying, “No organized crime in our community.” In our case it was true, as true as in any place in the nation. This was saying a lot, considering that we were in a Florida resort town on the Gulf coast while right across the state from us on the Atlantic side lay a city which had attracted the Kefauver committee itself.
On the second skirl, I picked up the phone. “Doug? Is Vicky busy at the moment?”
I caught my breath. My hand went a little chill on the phone. The voice was that of Thelma Grigsby. Her bridge parties never broke up as early as ten o’clock.
“She isn’t here,” I said. I hesitated. “Didn’t she stop by your place?”
“Why, no. Was she planning to?”
“No,” I said, surprised at how fast the word jumped out of me. “I just thought she might. I’ll tell her you phoned when she gets in.”
“Doug — is anything wrong?”
“Of course not. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, just a silly feeling the tone of your voice gave me.” She laughed. “Old worry bird, that’s me. We’ll be looking at you, Doug.”