“Well, you been paying Miss Marla Scanlon plenty. One final payment — to me — will finish it for good. Just chip in five thousand dollars apiece, and I’ll protect you all from the aftermath of this terrible thing.”
“I won’t do it,” Mr. Grenick said, “not five thou—”
“Yes, Bob, I think you will,” Mr. Friedland said. He eased his backside to the edge of his desk and brought his eyes back to me. “How do you propose to do it, William?”
“It ought to be simple as picking corn when the sun ain’t hot,” I said, “With your newspapers and TV on my side, and Judge Corday on the bench, and Mr. Grenick handling the case for the state, I ought to come off all right. I’ll say that I had been hanky-pank with Marla Scanlon. I’ll say she was giving me the boot. I’ll say we got in a big fight and I lost my head and killed her without really meaning to. Nobody in this town really cares that she’s gone, nobody to question or suspect what you do. I figure the judge should give me about three years for manslaughter. I’ll behave good and be on parole inside of a year.”
“And then?” Judge Corday said.
“I’ll just take my fifteen thousand and go back to Comfort,” I said. “None of us has got to worry about any of the others going back on the contract, account of we’re all in this together and we sink or swim together.”
“William,” Mr. Friedland said, “I think you’ve got a deal. How about it, friends?”
Both the judge and Mr. Grenick were quick to nod.
“I suggest,” the judge said, “that you and William contrive to rehearse a bit in private, Bob.”
“A good idea,” the prosecutor said.
“And you’ve fine material to work with here,” Mr. Friedland said. “You won’t have to worry about William botching his part.”
“Well, gentlemen,” I said, “let’s get finished up here with the practice questions and all, soon’s we can. I reckon I ought to get to police headquarters in a reasonable time. It’ll look better if I surrender myself and show them how sorry I am for what I done to that girl.”
“Excellent, William, excellent,” Mr. Friedland said.
I got to admit it looked pretty excellent to me too. I’d go back to Comfort a little over a year from now with over fifty thousand dollars, counting the fifteen thousand these men would cough up.
Miss Marla Scanlon, in life, had had an eye on the future. When I’d made her open the wall safe in her apartment before I strangled her I’d picked up a little over forty thousand.
Folks around Comfort, North Carolina, are all eligible for this poverty program the government is running. It’ll sure be nice, going back and being the richest man in the whole damn town. The air is clean, the scenery eye-popping, the likker mellow, and the girls all corn-fed beauties. I might even hire myself a chauffeur and personal errand boy — only I’ll make sure his name ain’t William.
The Confident Killer
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1967.
Nom Roddenberry took the news of her daughter’s death like a durable hill woman. Her sallow, bony face went as gray as fog. Her slate-gray eyes went out of whack as she tried to keep on seeing me. Her gnarled hands lifted and grabbed her wrinkled cheeks, as if she could make a physical pain that would lessen the hellfire scorching her inside. A wail like a cat caught in a steel trap split her thin lips.
Then she steadied, pulled her shoulders together, stood gasping behind the counter in her cafe. “Gaither... Jerl Brownlee murdered my girl?”
“That’s what I’m trying to say, ma’am.”
She took off the clean white smock that she wore over her simple gray dress as her cafe uniform and came around the counter, a small, spry woman that the Smoky Mountain winters and endless toil had whittled down to a collection of hickory sticks and leather.
“Is Pretty at Doc Weatherly’s undertaking parlor now, Gaither?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Will you walk over with me?”
“You know I will!”
“And tell me the whole of it.” Her fingers were like wires on my wrist “Every last detail. You hear me, Gaither?”
She turned over the cardboard sign that hung inside the glass part of the cafe door. The sign said “Closed.” We stepped onto the sidewalk. The old lady closed and locked the door, then stood a minute looking up and down the dusty street like she was a stranger, although she’d lived in the town of Comfort all her life.
“Not much here to satisfy a gal young’un who dreamed of fancy clothes and big city excitement, Gaither.”
“She wasn’t a bad girl, ma’am.”
“That she wasn’t, Gaither. Just too innocent and ignorant of the ways of the world and too — attractive to men.”
With me at her side, Mom Roddenberry thought of the short eighteen years of Pretty’s life, I reckon, as she set off with dogged hill-woman’s stride. “I’m listening, Gaither,” she prodded.
So I told her how Pretty Roddenberry had come to her end, as we tramped toward the old gingerbread house where Doc Weatherly lives upstairs and undertakes on the ground floor.
Pretty had met her death in cruelly simply manner. She’d sneaked up to the Brownlee lodge to keep a date with Jerl. He was the last of the Brownlees, had inherited a timber and tobacco fortune, and figured he was cock of any walk he cared to set foot on.
Jerl didn’t show up in Comfort often, preferring to spend his time and squander his money in resorts where fancy women were plentiful. With a bunch of friends, he had boozed it up at the UT-Clemson game last week, which took place in Knoxville. The swanky Brownlee lodge being on a thousand-acre estate across the line in North Carolina, the gang had trekked over and kept the party roaring.
They caroused over land, lake, and mountainside for three days before they fizzled out. Finally Jerl was left alone, surly and restless. He got to thinking of that cute little trick he’d made a few passes at previous when he happened to be in Comfort, so he called her on the phone, and she was dumb enough to sneak up there.
Who knows what went through Pretty’s excited mind as she dolled up in her best dress and perfume? Did she think she could tease her way into that rustic mansion and let it go at that? Did she think Jerl would actually take her away from the drabness and boredom of an isolated little mountain town such as Comfort? Did she kid herself into thinking she might even have a chance of marrying into the Brownlee millions?
Ever how her noggin worked, when the showdown came she just couldn’t snatch off her clothes and jump into young Jerl’s bed. But she’d called her shots all wrong. She hadn’t figured on the size of Jerl’s spoiled selfishness. His boozing had sharpened all the meanness in him. Even sober, he reckoned that anything he wanted should be his for the taking.
Pretty fought him. It must have been an unholy sight, Pretty struggling and begging for mercy, of which there was none in the inflamed face before her. She barked his shins and scratched his face; then he knocked her down and busted the back of her head. Maybe she struck the big fireplace or a piece of the heavy furniture.
Jerl thought he’d killed her then and there. He dragged her out put her in his car, got in and drove a ways across the mountain until he was off the estate, then shoved her out. He must have thought he was reasonably safe. Days, even weeks, might pass before anybody found Pretty’s body. By then, Jerl figured, it wouldn’t matter what folks suspected. Suspecting and proving are two different matters. He’d just deny that she ever had come to the lodge. Nobody, he reckoned, could prove that some hill renegade hadn’t seen her walking up the road and got passionate ideas.
Only thing, Jerl hadn’t figured on a situation which the Brownlees themselves had set up. For years the Brownlee estate had been posted and the old man, before his death, had kept a mean caretaker up there to enforce the rule. As a result, the thousand acres teemed with game, and a mountain farmer with a taste for fresh meat had set out that morning to do a little poaching, thinking Jerl’s drinking party had adjourned to the lowlands and wouldn’t bother him.