Fletcher Flora: The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

A tiny nightlight made a meager glow. The luminous face of a clock leered at him through the darkness from a bedside table. On the bed, a prone and ample mass stirred and muttered. Another gentle snore followed.

Now! thought Gaspar. Now!

The length of lead pipe at the ready, he moved toward the bed.

Behind him, the silence was split by the merest whisper of sound. Then his head exploded with a clap of thunder and a blinding bolt of pain, and he was swallowed by the absolute night at the end of his particular world.

Rudolph came in the door from the attached garage and went directly to Winifred’s room. He crossed to the bathroom and turned on the light above the lavatory. As he washed his hands, he spoke to Winifred, who was sitting up in bed against the headboard. She was gently stroking a cat that lay purring in her lap.

“Well,” said Rudolph, “that’s done.”

“Did you have any difficulty, dear?” she asked.

“Oh, no. I was careful not to be seen, of course. It was simply a matter of leaving him at the mouth of a dark alley on a side street. It’s a very rough neighborhood, the haunt of thugs and criminals and undesirable people of all sorts. He was, I’m sorry to say, exactly the kind of man who would be likely to frequent such a place. I emptied his pockets, and I’m sure, considering the blow on the head and all, that it will pass as an accidental killing in a routine mugging.”

“My dear, you’re so clever.”

“Not at all. Very little cleverness was required to deal with Mr. Vane. He was quite a dull fellow.”

“Did you find his car?”

“No, but it scarcely matters. Wherever it’s found, there will be reasonable explanations for his leaving it there. It’s sufficient that he didn’t leave it nearby.”

“It’s a shame that the ten thousand dollars can’t be recovered.”

“No matter. A paltry sum, surely, to invest in our continued security and happiness.”

Rudolph emerged from the bathroom and began to pull on his coat, which he had removed.

“Must you return tonight?” she asked.

“I’m afraid I must. My weekend has been intolerably disrupted as it is. Besides, it is better to sustain the fiction that I didn’t come back here.”

“Yes. Of course, dear. Imagine that stupid man thinking that his dirty spying would make the slightest difference to us!”

“I’m tempted to remark that he simply underestimated my appeal to the distaff side, but it would be immodest. Let me just say that I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my marital life.”

“Thank you, my dear. It’s sweet of you to say it.”

“And now I must rush. I really must.” He went to the bed and leaned over to receive a chaste and tender kiss on his smooth cheek. “Good-night, Winifred. I’ll see you tomorrow evening, as usual.”

“Drive carefully, dear,” she said. “Give my best wishes to Angela.”

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine , August 1967.

We came in after nine holes, Pete Decker and I, and sat across from each other at a table beside one of the windows overlooking the terrace and the golf course beyond. From where we sat, we could see a large part of the rolling course, seared in spots by the summer sun, with spaced and elevated greens like bright emerald islands in a fading sea. Fine old trees, allowed to survive where they didn’t intrude, cast ragged shadows on the clipped grass in a scattered, random pattern.

Inside the bar, it was cool and dark and quiet. Besides Pete and me, there was no one there except a bartender who brought us, without orders, the pair of gin and tonics that he knew we wanted. We sipped the drinks, which were astringently good with their strong taste of gin qualified by the delicate bitterness of quinine water, and looked out across the terrace from the dark coolness into the hot, white afternoon. We didn’t speak. In our silence, however, there was no unease, no conscious restraint. That’s the way it had been with Pete and me for many years. We always understood each other.

After a while, another man entered the bar from the terrace, set his golf bag against the wall inside the door, and walked over to the bar. His face was lean and brown and gave one, somehow, by a curious effect of antithesis, a feeling that it was either prematurely aged or preternaturally preserved. His body was also lean, the shoulders somewhat stooped, and the hair below his linen cap was hone white. He ordered a bourbon and water and drank it standing alone at the bar. There was about him an aura of withdrawal, a patina of astringent bitterness as apparent to the eyes as my tonic’s to the tongue. When he had finished his drink, as he turned to go, he saw Pete and me at our table and hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he nodded, a faint movement of the head that was barely discernible, and left the bar by the way he had come, reclaiming his golf bag by the door as he went.

“How long ago has it been?” Pete said.

“Ten years,” I answered. “Ten years last fall.”

“A lot has happened since then. It’s almost forgotten now.”

Pete was right. A lot had happened since Francis McRae stood trial for murder. Pete Decker, then the young county attorney who had prosecuted him, had achieved through politics a state-wide attention and acclaim that would have landed him in the governor’s chair, the youngest governor in our history, if he hadn’t had the bad luck to get the nomination in a year when opposition candidates all over the country rode in on the coattails of the big man upstairs. People we had known had gotten rich or gone broke or died or moved away, and wars that were not called wars had begun and ended. And I, Guy Powers, had moved away myself but had come home again to inherit my father’s business, and had gotten married. A lot had happened; a lot of good things, and a lot of bad.

You may remember the Healy-McRae case. That’s what it was called at the time, but Francis McRae actually stood trial alone. Rhoda Healy was charged as an accessory before the fact, and would have stood trial later if Francis McRae had been convicted. After he was acquitted, it was obvious that she could not have been his accessory, and so the charge against her was dropped. She could have been charged with the murder directly, of course, but the odds against convicting her, after Francis McRae’s acquittal, were far too great. A third possibility, a charge of collaboration as the partner of a second murderer unknown, was, in view of the evidence, or the lack of it, manifestly absurd.

To be exact, Francis McRae wasn’t acquitted. His first trial ended in a hung jury, and so did his second. After that, mainly because the county was reluctant to throw good money after bad in an effort that was beginning to look futile, the case was nol-prossed, and he went free.

The second jury, because it is somehow easy to follow a precedent, was split down the middle. The first was hung by one juror. The case for the people was soundly organized and expertly presented, as the eleven ‘guilty’ votes testified, but it was entirely circumstantial. It was based primarily on motive and opportunity, and the motive could be questioned, while opportunity, as any rational man knows, is not always exploited simply because it is present. In brief, there was room for reasonable doubt. That was my position, at any rate, and my position happened to be decisive, I was the twelfth juror.

Perhaps I should recapitulate the circumstances of the case. Rhoda Healy was a beautiful young woman with pale blonde hair, striking brown eyes, and flawless skin that looked always, the year around, as if it had been tanned by the summer sun. She was married to Neil Healy, the only son of extremely wealthy parents. Unfortunately, Neil was a kind of semi-invalid. The report was that he had suffered, as a child, a critical attack of rheumatic fever that had left his heart seriously impaired. However that may have been, he took precious good care of himself. He was, moreover, suspicious and demanding and abusive, a difficult person to get along with generally, and difficult to live with particularly. He did no apparent work, and was constantly under the observation and care of his doctor.