Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

Horton slammed backward, stumbling over an easy chair and smashing to the floor on his back with his legs up in the air. Ross’s gun arched sidewise just as Big John Quinnel’s cleared its holster. The gambler waited until the muzzle of Quinnel’s gun had nearly steadied on him, then very deliberately placed a shot precisely between the big man’s eyes.

Lieutenant Redfern stood with his pistol muzzle drooping downward, staring from one dead man to the other and back again. After moving his head back and forth several times, he glared at Clancy Ross.

“You could have put one through Quinnel’s shoulder,” he accused. “You had plenty of time.”

“I guess I got rattled,” Ross said. “It scares me to have people point guns at me.”

The lieutenant, belatedly realizing that the gambler had deliberately created a situation which would end in gunplay, when he could just as easily have turned over the information he had to Redfern and have let an orderly arrest be made, also realized that there wasn’t much he could do about it aside from swearing a little.

He decided to do that.

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine , May 1957.

Samantha Withers wasn’t reticent about showing her feelings. “Can’t you remember anything, you idiot?”

Homer Withers was a small, round, mild-appearing man, and he seemed to shrink even smaller under the blast from his spinster sister. Though she routinely treated him as though he were a mental incompetent, it never occurred to him to fight back. For too many years he’d been conditioned to her domineering manner.

Samantha Withers was a head taller than Homer, thirty pounds heavier, and as muscular as a man. Though she’d never actually offered him physical violence, she often seemed on the verge of striking him, and the thought made Homer cringe. He was quite certain he’d be defenseless against her in a physical battle.

“The policy won’t lapse,” he said in a placating tone. “The agent sends in the premium money when it’s due, you see, and I simply repay him. I’ll mail the check right after dinner.”

“You’ll mail it right now, if you expect any dinner,” Samantha snapped. “And don’t forget it’s the mailbox you’re heading for.”

“I’m entirely capable of mailing a letter without detailed instructions,” Homer said with unaccustomed asperity. Then he wilted under the glitter of his older sister’s eyes.

He rarely rebelled enough to give her a tart reply, and invariably wished he hadn’t on the infrequent occasions he drummed up enough courage to do it. For usually she made his life miserable for days afterward.

He scooted out before she could open up her heavy artillery, but she managed to get in a parting shot. As he went down the porch steps, she shouted through the screen door, “Look both ways when you cross the street, stupid. Coming back I don’t care. Once the premium’s mailed, you can…”

Homer had heard it before —you can drop dead , for all I care. Those were the words, he knew, which he didn’t wait to hear.

Homer sighed. She probably would be glad if he were dead. Why did he put up with her constant carping? Discouragedly he answered the mental question as soon as he asked it. He put up with it because of unbreakable habit.

As long as he could remember his sister had dominated him, even while their parents still lived. Since their death fifteen years earlier, the domination had gradually increased until at middle age her grip on his whole life was an enveloping, suffocating thing which had squeezed from him the last ounce of resistance and the last drops of individuality.

“It’s not right for a person who’s so carefully avoided marriage to be the most henpecked man in town,” he thought, automatically following Samantha’s instructions to look both ways before crossing the street.

He reached the other side and walked vaguely past the mailbox in the direction of the drug store; he wondered what it would be like to die and be free of Samantha. He almost hoped that her repeated suggestion would come true when suddenly a new thought occurred to him. Wouldn’t it be nice if Samantha died?

This thought was so pleasant, he lost himself in it and nearly passed the drug store. He halted to consider what Samantha had sent him for, found his mind a blank and finally grew conscious of the envelope in his hand. Shamefacedly he retraced his way to the mailbox, dropped the letter and re-crossed the street. The dream persisted, however. As he strolled back up the street, he envisioned how pleasant it would be to return from work each evening to an empty and silent house, one where he could smoke in the front room, sit around without a necktie, or even in his undershirt if he chose. He could even have beer in the refrigerator.

He completely lost himself in the reverie. He had mentally gone through the ordeal of Samantha’s funeral, had completed the necessary period of mourning, and was busily converting her bedroom into a masculine den when he opened the front door. The daydream was so real, he let out a gasp when he saw Samantha standing there.

Samantha snapped at him, “What’s the matter with you? You look like you’re going to throw up.”

“I…I don’t feel too well,” he said.

He went upstairs to wash, jolted from his dream world into full awareness of reality. As he examined his pale face in the bathroom mirror, he realized how intolerable that reality was as long as Samantha was alive.

The idea of killing his sister came to him effortlessly and with no sense of shock. His sole emotional reaction was surprise that he’d never thought of it before.

Unfortunately Homer Withers discovered there was a vast gap between reaching a decision to kill and carrying out the decision. He didn’t discover this at once, however. That evening, as he prepared the hot chocolate he made for his sister each night, his plans took shape with remarkable ease.

Any plan as violent as strangulation was out of the question for the simple reason that Samantha was larger and stronger than he. Shooting or stabbing were ruled out because he had no desire to hang for Samantha’s murder. He toyed with the idea of staging a fatal accident but discarded it for the same reason he had discarded strangulation. He wasn’t at all sure that if he attempted to push Samantha out of a window or down a flight of stairs, he wouldn’t end up being the victim.

By the process of elimination he arrived at poison as the most practical means. A few minutes after he had carried Samantha’s hot chocolate into the front room, he knew how to administer the poison. He watched as she took a sip to test the temperature, then set the saucer on the floor and poured some of the chocolate into it from the cup.

Roger, Samantha’s cat, dropped from the window ledge, stalked majestically over to the saucer and sniffed at it. Roger licked tentatively, then sat down to wait for it to cool.

Homer decided that his sister took her chocolate so heavily sweetened it ought to disguise the taste of nearly any poison. It also occurred to him that her habit of sharing it with the cat presented a complication, but not a serious complication. Samantha liked her chocolate hot, while Roger preferred his cool; her cup always was empty before the cat lapped from the saucer.

He could simply wait until his sister had drunk the poison and died, then take the saucer away from Roger.

The next day Homer used his lunch hour for a visit to the public library, where he did some research on poisons. He decided on potassium cyanide for two reasons: it was quick and sure, and the death symptoms resembled those of a heart attack.