Erle Gardner - Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Murderer’s Bride and Other Stories

Once having snared his victim into matrimony, it was a part of Ives’s campaign to stress his wealth and his exciting plans for their future together. He disapproved of his wife’s friends. He wanted to get her away from everything pertaining to her drab past.

None of his requests seemed odd to Nan. She was more than willing to escape from the colorless life she had always lived. She cooperated wholeheartedly by investing his money in beauty treatments, in charm and posture lessons, and in a sizable wardrobe of new clothes. Larry’s wife, Nan reasoned, must be groomed to entertain as an attractive and charming hostess. She even took foreign-language courses so that she would be a credit to him when they went abroad. To Nan, life had just begun, and she planned to live it in the fullest possible manner.

The drain on Larry’s capital caused him some dismay. It seemed a rather unnecessary expenditure on a woman who would be laid to rest in a few months. But the results, he had to admit, were esthetically satisfying. He was astounded at the change in the woman who had been drab Nan Palmer. She continued to wear her dark hair in a manner which best suited her simplicity. Her figure became strikingly attractive, and her taste in clothes proved to be unerringly chic — as well as consistently expensive.

Her first bashful responses to love had suddenly been swept along on a tide of released emotion until Ives found himself thinking of “retiring” and settling down to enjoy himself with his loving wife.

However, the chains of habit are strong. Sooner or later a man always returns to what the police list in their files as modus operandi. And so there came the day when Ives brought up the matter of life insurance.

Ives didn’t care for large policies. He preferred small policies with different companies, and he knew of several companies which wrote insurance by mail. In fact, Ives had a most comprehensive knowledge of life insurance. His wife saw nothing suspicious about this. Her husband had a brilliant mind and a dazzling fund of general information.

After nine months of marriage Nan still couldn’t believe her good fortune. She would sit by the hour while Larry was scanning the newspapers, watching him with her heart in her eyes. He was wonderful.

Ives, despite himself, followed his habit of scanning the papers, although somewhat reluctantly. In the past he had always been impatient as he built up his file of unusual but fatal accidents. Now, when he would gladly have taken a more leisurely course, it seemed that suitable accidents were described in every issue of the newspapers.

One class of fatal accident, however, claimed Ives’s attention with a certain fascination. These accidents were capable of artistic developments which thrilled the creative urge in his soul.

Ives had three clippings on these: one had occurred on Lake Mead, another on Lake Tahoe, and the third on Lake Edward. The fatalities were such as to lend themselves admirably to Ives’s scheme. They were particularly suited to the place at which he had chosen to become a grieving widower.

People went out in boats with outboard motors. The weather was warm, the surface of the lake was fiat calm. They stopped the motors and drifted along far out from shore. The urge to jump in for a cooling dip where they needed no bathing suits became irresistible. So over the side they went.

Though the lake was calm, there was a gentle breeze. The weather station placed it at two to five miles an hour. However, because the boat was drifting slowly along with that breeze, the boaters didn’t notice it. It wasn’t until they had been swimming for a minute or two that they turned their attention to the boat. They saw it some 200 yards away. Startled, they started swimming toward the boat.

Panic led them to assume a pace they couldn’t maintain. For a while they were gaining; then they slowed down in breathless fatigue. The boat glided in effortless mockery, steadily moving, always out of reach. Again the swimmers, lured by the seeming nearness of the boat, spurted into frenzied swimming.

Unless they were unusually strong swimmers they could never make it. The boat would be drifting as fast or a little faster than they could swim. So they became panic-stricken.

By the time the most powerful swimmer in the group, who had worked himself into a state of almost complete exhaustion, finally decided to quit the futile pursuit of the drifting boat, at least one of his companions was missing. Once a swimmer reaches a point of complete exhaustion in fresh water, panic will do the rest.

Three accidents. Ives needed a fourth in order to make his scheme perfect.

He found it on page one of the second section of the paper:

DRIFTING BOAT CAUSES TRAGEDY ON HAVASU LAKE.

Larry looked over at his wife. For a long moment he hesitated; then he slipped a sharp penknife from his pocket and cut the clipping from the paper.

“What is it?” Nan asked.

“A report on some mining activities, dear... How would you like to take our boat and trailer over to the Colorado River?”

“I’d love it, darling!”

Larry sighed and regarded her speculatively, almost wistfully. Then he tightened his lips with firm decision. After all, Ives was a businessman, and the premiums on those insurance policies, not to mention Nan’s extravagances, amounted to a fairly heavy outlay.

It was the duty of Corporal Ed Cortland to read all the crank mail that came to the police department.

This mail was of all sorts: rambling dissertations from persons who felt they were being persecuted, anonymous tips from disgruntled neighbors, phony confessions from persons who bad no real knowledge of the details of the crimes to which they were confessing. They had read newspaper accounts of some crime, and brooded over it, and finally had sought to make atonement for some real or fancied sin they had committed by confession to one they hadn’t.

Corporal Cortland had a trained eye in such matters. He could spot the type of writer from a glance at the first paragraph.

The fifty-second letter that he opened on this May morning was different from the others. It read:

“I am writing to the police department because I don’t know to whom else I can write.

“I knew Nan Palmer when she worked up here. She was steady, industrious, a quiet girl who gave the best years of her life to an invalid mother.

“Then Prince Charming came along. He gave the name of Lawrence B. Ives, and he really was handsome. None of us could see why he was so attracted to Nan.

“It was a whirlwind courtship. They took a plane to Yuma and were married. Soon after that they moved away. And Nan never wrote to any of her friends.

“I wouldn’t have had any idea where she was living if it hadn’t been that an insurance company wanted to find out something about her in connection with an insurance policy she was taking out. The investigator talked with me. He told me she was living somewhere in or near Los Angeles.

“I still thought nothing of it until I happened to be looking through an old illustrated magazine in cleaning out some of the papers in my attic.

“I saw a man’s picture and knew there was something familiar about the face. At first I couldn’t place it, then I suddenly realized it was Lawrence B. Ives.

“Only this time he wasn’t going under that name, but under the name of Corvallis E. Fletcher.

“His picture had been published in connection with a tragic accident. He had gone up with his wife in a light plane and had persuaded the pilot to do a few stunts. Both passengers had reported their safety belts were firmly fastened, but it turned out that Mrs. Fletcher hadn’t understood the proper method of fastening her seat belt. She had been thrown out of the plane and had fallen 3,000 feet.