Хал Эллсон - Mink Is for a Minx

“How’d you do it, Walter,” Jacoby said, “with his own thirty-eight I’ll bet.”

Walter Midge lay back on the stretcher. Then the big man smiled like a child. “Yeh, that’s right, I done it with his own gun.” The big man smiled like a happy child, and then, suddenly, the big man scowled and his eyes narrowed as he stared up at nothing. “Maybe I did it, maybe I didn’t, copper. You get me my lawyer. Yeh, that’s it, my lawyer. I ain’t talking.”

Lieutenant Jacoby closed the ambulance door behind Walter Midge and watched the ambulance drive away in the cold morning. A jet flew over the city high up. On its way to Brazil maybe, Jacoby thought to himself. Poor Little Maxie.

Killing Marion was going to be, in a way, the best part of it, John S. Johns thought as he pointed the pistol at his secretary and mistress. The icing on the cake, the final touch that would bring him safe, alone, and rich to the life he wanted.

“John! Don’t point that at me, please,” Marion said.

“I’m sorry, Marion,” John S. Johns said. “I really am.”

In a way he was sorry. She had a fine body, she knew what to do with it, and he supposed she did love him in her smothering, clinging way. But he was going to be free of his wife, his stupid children, his job, and of Marion and her tedious love. That was the way he had planned it from the start. A clean sweep, the past dead with no loose ends, no excess baggage.

One man could hope to vanish, but a man and a woman had to leave a trail. And he would have to watch her every minute. John S. Johns was not going to risk the universal mistake of taking a woman who could turn against him any minute, who had a hold on him the rest of his life. A new life, that was what it was all for. A new life with a half a million dollars in his pocket.

Marion’s blue eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and disbelief. “Please, John, don’t play games with me — not now.”

John S. Johns sighed. “It’s not a game, I’m afraid, Marion. I’m tired of you. I’m sorry but it’s that simple. You’re just too dull, my dear. I could just leave you, but you know too much about my plans.”

Now there was only terror in the blue eyes. “I helped you! Without me you couldn’t have done any of it! John, please, please!”

“No, I couldn’t,” he said. “You did help me, and I’m truly grateful. Look at it this way, Marion. You’re proving your love, you’re going to die for me.” And John S. Johns smiled at his secretary and mistress as he squeezed the trigger.

The sound of the aircraft’s engines covered the shots. He had counted on that. In the dark night no one had even noticed Marion and himself standing in the shadows near the edge of the field.

John S. Johns made sure she was dead, then he picked up the two suitcases and ran toward the waiting aircraft. One more step and it was finished. It was a drastic solution. But, then, he had counted on her unquestioning help, her complete trust to the end, and her own folly had betrayed her.

Johns was a student of human nature, and it was his discernment in that respect which had made his whole plan possible. She had been too devoted, too trusting, and had provided an irresistible temptation that a man like himself could hardly be blamed for succumbing to.

Johns had begun to work out his plan three months ago. After twenty-two years in the office of Jamesville’s leading bank, he had worked up to be first vice-president in the main office at the munificent salary of $15,227.70 a year. The odd seventy cents was a courtesy of IBM, the exact percentage of his worth having been calculated by machine.

Everything in the bank was done by machine, for old man Moss, the president, trusted no human being. So John S. Johns received his salary (less than $1000 for each endless year he had worked in the same bank), lived moderately well, owned his own home, belonged to the second-best Country Club, sent his three children through college, and was bored beyond belief.

That was where Marion Astor came in, and, three months ago, the plan.

Marion had been his mistress for five years. At first she had made life very much more interesting for him. And then it changed, and he found that what he had was not a daring and illegal mistress, but only another wife. Marion became a second wife as domestic and boring as his real wife, Maude. Younger, blonder, stupider, but just another Maude after all.

Marion was as faithful as any wife, as unimaginative, as little a challenge. Marion liked to stay home and cook him dinners. She hated going out, and she understood him. An illegal wife, no more, and Johns did not want to be understood. He did not want a cozy second home. He wanted to be dazzled, challenged, and tempted.

There were times when Johns thought of himself as another Gauguin. Like Gauguin he had a good business, a good wife, children, and a position in the community. And like Gauguin he felt he was worth more than that.

He wanted to be free. He realized, at last, that no woman, no place, could thrill him for very long. To truly live he had to be free. But unlike Gauguin it was not a desire to paint that drove him on. It was simply a desire to live well and with adventure. And to do that he needed a great deal of money.

The obvious answer was his bank. There were two problems: to steal the money and to get away without being caught. To steal the money would require a careful plan if he was not to be caught before he even left the bank. And to get away with it would require an even better plan.

So John S. Johns began to study the people around him. He had always been a student of human nature, and it had helped him establish a record of never making a bad loan at the bank. The first thing he decided was that his wife, Maude, could be counted on not to care where he was if he timed the move to coincide with one of her Girl Scout or PTA weekends. His children would not even be aware that he had gone away for a long period.

Marion would do anything he asked as long as he took her with him to live in some cottage with his pipe and slippers in her hand. Only his golf cronies, and his other bachelor friends would miss him unless — he was sent out of town on business.

His plan had already begun to take shape when he turned his attention to the bank. Old Moss, the president, was a man of remarkably suspicious nature who could be counted on to jump instantly to an obvious conclusion if he remotely suspected a man of dishonesty. It would make no difference how long Moss had known the man. In fact the longer the president had known a man, the more he would be inclined to suspect that he was capable of committing any crime, from arson to murder.

The executive vice-president, Joseph Sackville, was John S. Johns’ immediate superior. And Sackville was a business snob. The one important thing in Sackville’s life was his position at the bank. The executive vice-president considered himself a partner and not an employee of old man Moss. What Moss did, Sackville would want to do. The executive vice-president could be counted on to reject any task that Moss would reject.

Finally, the only other man with full access to the vault, Head Teller Meade Lewis, was a wizened bachelor who still dreamed of being a woman chaser. That Lewis had never had any success with women only seemed to make the man more of a Casanova.

There was not a female in the bank under forty who had not been asked to go out by Meade Lewis. Marion was no exception, and John S. Johns began his plan with Marion and Meade Lewis.

As he had expected, Marion made only a faint protest when he outlined what he had in mind.

“But John, I don’t know if it’s right.”

“If you mean is it criminal, yes it is,” he said, “but it is right. It’s right for us, darling. I can’t take living this way much longer. A man and woman in love should not have to resort to deception. We’ll go to some quiet place, take a small house, and live for each other. If there was any justice, such happiness would not be denied us.”