Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

“Clever of you,” Hawes admitted. “I missed that. But you did make one very bad mistake.” He folded his arms in a gesture of patronizing superiority.

Baudelin lifted his graying brows in disbelief. “And what might that be?”

“The note’s too damn long. No one would believe it was really written by someone who was about to kill himself. It rakes up too much past history. You wrote that confession as if there were a huge audience of readers out there who’d never heard of you or Claudette or Elana, so you had to tell them everything they needed to know to follow the story. That isn’t the way anyone would write a suicide note.”

The composer shook his head right and left. “I disagree with you most profoundly. You are a former music critic for a newspaper, so your instinct is always to write so that the great audience can follow what you are saying. Besides, my friend, your style is long-winded, even when you write about me.”

Hawes lifted himself out of the wing chair, crossed to Baudelin, and kissed him lightly on each cheek like a French dignitary awarding a medal. “I won’t argue it any further. Round Number Thirteen — this is the thirteenth round, isn’t it? — goes to you. I can afford to give you one round, I think. The score is now nine to four in my favor, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Nine to four,” Baudelin conceded. “But you were always a good manipulator, you know, while I am simply a guileless old naif who scribbles funny marks on music paper. Should I not have what you call a handicap?”

“You old fraud,” Hawes chuckled, “you’re as devious as I am any day and you know it, and just as adept at the game of plotting against me as I am at plotting against you. So no handicap. The first to take eleven rounds is the winner. I’ll make my move within our usual week’s time, and I warn you now that I plan to do something especially fiendish to repay you for this clever one.”

“As you please.” Baudelin shrugged. “Then I leave you to hatch your scheme in peace.” With two fingertips he retrieved the confession he had drafted and silently left the room.

He could not restrain his excitement as he descended the stairs. It had worked! The look on Hawes’s face as he read the confession had betrayed him. He had never seen such a look of terrified guilt in his life. It had been the sudden numbed panic of a person with a monstrous secret who without warning and beyond human expectation has been exposed. There was no other way of interpreting Hawes’s reaction.

True, he had recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. H.Joshua Hawes had murdered Elana in the manner and for the reason Baudelin had written in the confession. His face had given him away, as Baudelin had been praying it would when he set this trap. What was it Hamlet had said? “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king?”

He was not sure when he had begun to suspect — four months ago, perhaps five. He had never believed his adorable Elana could have killed herself, without explanation, without leaving a note or even a hint. And he could not accept that she had died by accident, for in that case he himself must be some kind of accursed creature, whom no woman could love without paying with her life. And so her death had to be murder, and the only person who lived with them, the only one who could have put the sleeping pills into her Turkish coffee, was Hawes.

Like an evil god Hawes had been manipulating Baudelin’s life for seven years, managing his business affairs, publishing interpretations of his music, taping their conversations for use in his books — in the maze of the musical milieu Hawes was the researcher, and Baudelin the experimental rat. He had wanted Baudelin to continue the doom-haunted works of the second period, and so Elana had to die. The only difference between the typed confession and reality was that, in fact, Hawes felt no remorse at all.

Baudelin knew he could prove none of this in a court of law, that there was no way he could make that stare of blubbering terror reappear on Hawes’s face for the benefit of a judge and jury. But he didn’t need a judge and jury for what he intended to do.

In the study, as sunset turned the distant hills violet and orange, he reread the confession. When he had reassured himself, he swiveled to the steel typewriter table and fed a fresh sheet of cream bond into the carriage and rewrote the third page.

“... can be expiated in only one way. And so I shall go to the liquor cabinet and pour myself a final snifter of apricot brandy, mixed with an overdose of sleeping pills. It is at least a fitting way to die.

“Baudelin, old friend and benefactor, do not curse my memory, I beg you.”

He forged Hawes’s signature again at the end of the confession which now was conveniently marked with Hawes’s fingerprints, and put the three sheets away in a desk drawer beneath a sheaf of sketches for a concerto. Then he took the original third sheet into the downstairs bathroom, tore the sheet into tiny bits, flushed them down the toilet, took the bottle of sleeping pills out of the medicine cabinet, brought it into the kitchen where he crushed the tablets to powder, and poured the powder into the decanter of apricot brandy. When he was finished he replaced each thing where he had found it, cleaned his work space carefully, and went back to the study to wait for the sounds of Hawes stumbling downstairs to refill his glass.

Somewhere in a distant meadow he could still hear the laughter of children playing.

VICTIM: Here he comes, oozing crocodile tears. Could I but throw off this illness and grow pert once more, they would be real tears. Still, he will weep sincerely when he finds the vaults bare. I have spent all to buy future life. But now my heart is faint, my belly writhes, my hands clutch at the sheet as if it were the thread of life, and all my members fall to trembling. My throat is choke-full of dust. This is the taste of death.

MURDERER: Now he dies. The sun will not sink below the horizon, I think, before he is gone and all falls to me. But I must show grief even as I rejoice in my heart. Wealth and mastery are now mine, and I will ram through great works and far outbuild him. Set your mind at rest, I keep telling myself: for the tomb will mask it. What I have done will remain forever hidden.

DETECTIVE: Ha! Then I’m right. The state of the mucous lining and a rough chemical analysis of the skin confirm my hunch. Later I’ll hike over to the lab for more conclusive tests. But I can tell you now how you met your end. Someone fed you arsenic. Unfortunately, it’s a bit late for an official autopsy report in your case, you poor old bundle of rags, you poor old mummy.

When the shop bell rang, I looked up from the account books and groaned. I had enough trouble managing the old man lately without that woman coming around to ruin things completely.

He watched her grimly, his mouth thinned to a tight, self-righteous line — judge, jury, and executioner. I closed the books and hurried to the end of the counter.

“Father, please,” I said.

“Please, nothing. I meant what I said. If that woman steals something today, I’ll turn her over to the authorities.”

I kept my voice low, but his was rising in agitation. “Let’s go back into the office and talk,” I urged quietly. A glassed-in area lay directly behind the counter where it was possible to work and watch the aisles at the same time. He hung back stubbornly, but I coaxed him in and closed the door.

“There’s no reason to discuss it,” he said.

“There’s every reason. Her father has a lot of influence in this town. If you think you can humiliate him without reprisal, you’re dangerously mistaken. If she takes something, why can’t you simply charge it to his account as you’ve done in the past?”