Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“Yes. Of course.”

He looked thin and worn, almost ravaged, in his wilted seersucker. His right hand moved again in that hesitant gesture as he turned and went out of the room.

Standing quite still, listening, Mrs. Dearly heard his steps receding in the hall, then the front door closing behind him. She continued to stand there, listening intently. She had heard the movements of the police car and the Jaguar in the drive, and now, after several minutes, she heard the police car in the street, its engine starting and the swiftly diminishing sound of it as it sped away.

The silence of the house gathered around her, and she turned in silence and went through the hall into the kitchen and downstairs from the kitchen into the basement. She walked directly to the wall to her left, the wall toward the side yard where the power mower stood at rest between the clipped and shaggy grass; and she was just reaching overhead for the circular handle of a valve when someone spoke behind her.

“I don’t believe I’d do that if I were you, Mrs. Dearly,” the voice said.

How strange it was! she thought afterward. Following the first moment of terror, when her breath stopped and her heart withered, she was immediately calm and lucid and without any fear whatever. She thought clearly before turning around that Douglas must surely be kept a secret now, however difficult it might be, for he would be considered a motive at the very least, if not a conspirator — and the funny thing about it was that Douglas was not a motive at all, but only a kind of fringe benefit.

“I thought you had gone, Lieutenant,” she said.

“Dickson went,” he said. “As for me, I must confess to intruding again. I came in through the basement window there.”

He walked over and stood beside her, looking up at the valve she had intended to turn. To the right of the valve, slanting down toward the basement floor, were about six feet of pipe that made a right turn, by means of an elbow joint, and passed through the concrete foundation.

The Lieutenant began again. “While I was waiting for you to come home this afternoon from wherever you were, I got to wondering how your husband might have been poisoned — if he was poisoned, which was at least a possibility. In a container of something to drink, perhaps? In something he ate, perhaps? But that would have been dangerous, and foolishly so. The container to be analyzed. The remains of the food, ditto. Then I walked along the side of the house, and I noticed that the ground under the outside faucet was damp — and it came to me. What does the kind of man who loves working in the yard, as your husband did, almost invariably do when he gets hot and thirsty? He takes a drink from the outside faucet. Usually from his cupped hands. That’s what your husband did, Mrs. Dearly, and that’s what you knew he would do.”

The Lieutenant paused, still staring up at the valve with an expression of admiration, almost of wonder. Perhaps he was waiting for Mrs. Dearly to speak, but at the moment Mrs. Dearly did not feel like speaking.

“It was clever,” he went on. “You’re a clever woman, Mrs. Dearly. Between that inside valve and the outside faucet there are six feet of one-inch pipe. It was almost perfect for your purpose, wasn’t it? A perfect container. First, you closed the inside valve and drained the six feet of pipe. This you did merely by opening the outside faucet, letting the water in the pipe flow out, then closing the faucet afterward. Then, with a wrench, you disconnected the six feet of pipe below the valve and put into the pipe, your perfect container, whatever you used to kill your husband. This done, you reconnected the pipe to the valve, opening the valve to let water run through and fill the pipe. By closing the valve after the pipe was filled, you had a deadly liquid ready to run from the outside faucet whenever it was opened.

“It wouldn’t run long or as freely as it would have run with the valve open, of course, for six feet of one-inch pipe will hold by my arithmetic only about one quart of water. But that was enough. It was sufficient to give your husband a long, fatal drink. And now you have come down here to open the valve again and to flush from the pipe what may be left of the poison. What kind of poison did you use, Mrs. Dearly? Well, never mind. I don’t expect you to tell me. Something nearly tasteless, of course, and soluble in water. We’ll find out.”

Mrs. Dearly sighed and dusted her hands by brushing them softly together. She was feeling positively exhilarated.

“It is not I who is clever, Lieutenant,” she said. “It’s you. What you have said is logical and rather convincing, I’m sure, but it is only a theory, and it will be quite exciting to see if you can prove it or not.”

But Mrs. Dearly’s exhilaration was only that of excitement, no more. The Lieutenant had no difficulty proving his theory — there was enough poison left in the pipe, and it wasn’t long before they found Douglas...

Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , March 1964.

Fanny Bauer had an idea how to kill Loren. It seemed like a good idea in the beginning, and the more she thought about it the better it looked. She got the idea from watching a late movie on television. This is not intended as a criticism of television, which already gets more than its share, but just shows you how simply a murder can sometimes begin.

If you have to blame someone, blame the Sioux — or the Cheyenne — or was it the Apaches? They were in the movie that Fanny saw, an old Western, and they took the hero, tied him up with wet rawhide thongs, and left him out in the sun. Wet rawhide shrinks as it dries, as almost everyone knows if he will only stop to think about it, and the idea was to make the rawhide cut into the flesh of the hero. It turned out that the hero was rescued by the United States Cavalry, but he was only tied by the wrists and ankles, anyhow, which would have been painful for a while, but not fatal.

What if a wet rawhide thong were tied around someone’s throat? Fanny thought.

She kept it impersonal to start with, sort of academic, and it wasn’t until later that the throat became Loren’s. She didn’t know if the Sioux — or Cheyenne or Apaches — had ever used this method to strangle a captive, for it wasn’t in the movie; but she did have a vague memory of having read about it in a mystery story sometime or other. The movie merely stirred up the memory of the story and so she couldn’t claim any originality for the idea — although it required, after all, a certain amount of cleverness to apply it.

And Loren Bauer was certainly an ideal subject. Or victim.

In the first place, as a retired political boss with a severe deficiency of ethics, he had made at least a hundred bitter enemies who would gladly strangle him if given the chance.

In the second place, he was now relatively vulnerable, having had a stroke that left him with legs that were practically useless.

In the third place, he was always taking some kind of drug for the relief of his physical discomfort or his conscience or both, and it would be quite easy to give him enough to knock him out, although not enough actually to kill him, because of what might be discovered post mortem .

In the fourth place, he was rich.

In the fifth place, it was beginning to look as if he were going on indefinitely refusing to die naturally, for his heart was sound, in spite of the stroke, and he adhered rigidly to his low cholesterol diet and had given up smoking.

In the sixth place, he was too old for Fanny by some thirty years, and it was high time he was discarded, if not replaced.