Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

“Never!” Leonard cried. “We shall succor you!”

“But I’m guilty...”

Leonard broke his brisk pacing. “What’s that got to do with it? Guilt or innocence is beside the point.” Leonard’s face flushed even pinker with a sense of impending victory. “The record, you said — and it’s there, in the record — the way out. The fact remains that the officers who came to your room and arrested you entered without your permission and found the murder weapon.”

Stanley began turning slowly on the bunk. Leonard nodded with delight at the first small show of animation.

“That’s right, Stanley, the arresting officers were guilty of illegal entry — not in arresting you, mind you, but in searching your room.” Stanley stood up, eyes glazed, as if trying to comprehend all that was being offered to him.

“You mean,” Stanley said, “the technicality will put the gas chamber on the moon as far as I’m concerned?”

Leonard looked as if he were about to dance a jig and click his heels. His smile was radiant. “I mean exactly that Stanley, fellow human being, victim of a vicious society.”

“How about that?” Stanley said. His hands thrust out, and before Leonard knew what was happening, Stanley’s hands were on his throat.

Leonard emitted a single muffled scream as Stanley cracked his head against the wall.

Stanley was still beating Leonard’s head against the stone when the guard rushed in. Glimpsing the guard’s movement. Stanley quietly turned loose of Leonard’s neck and let the dead plumpness collapse to the floor.

Stanley looked at the guard’s ashen face and noted the trembling in the hand that held the drawn gun. The guard was terribly upset, and Stanley was coldly impersonal about that.

“This time,” Stanley said, “I want you people to be very careful. Don’t make any technical mistakes!”

Then with very tired movements he crossed to the bunk, settled himself, and lay staring at the wall.

Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , September 1970.

Paralyzed from the waist down, the rich old man lay in bed and contemplated the absurdities of life, death, and the game of golf.

The bandages were off now, and a silver stubble glinted where the skull had been shaven. Under craggy brows his gray eyes were coldly clear as he watched the play of sunlight through the tall windows of his spacious bedroom. He haled the antisepsis of the hospital room and had wanted the hell out. If he had to be flat on his back for a while, let it be in his own giant four-poster bed. But he hadn’t counted on returning to a conspiracy to kill him...

Miss Castleberry, the private nurse, was a plump pleasant shadow beside the bed as her light touch on his hickory-like wrist checked the strong, steady pulse.

He was a lean, rugged, rawboned old man, gnarled and toughened by early hardships and a lifetime of work. Unlike most old men he’d never thought much about dying. Until that outlandish accident, death had seemed as remote and impersonal as it had when he was, say, twenty-five.

He wasn’t afraid to die. But the way he would die was what stuck in his craw. The accident had failed to kill him. But the accident had set him up. Who could say that an old man, not long out of brain surgery, hadn’t simply stopped breathing during the night? Who could prove that he hadn’t taken an overdose of sleeping pills, an old man preferring the peace of final sleep to paralysis for the rest of his life.

He didn’t know how The Rats would tip him over the edge. He couldn’t actually prove that they would. His suspicions could be dismissed as the ramblings of a senile old man. But he knew. His death was being arranged, right here in his own house, and he felt a sense of degradation and personal violation. He’d felt much the same way many years ago when without warning a small rattlesnake had bitten him above the left ankle. He’d stomped the snake to a pulp and then walked three miles across the sun-blasted Texas earth to the drill site and medical aid. The snake’s attack had been a blasphemy, an outrage against his sense of decency and fair play...

Miss Castleberry dropped his wrist and made a pleasant face.

“A man of thirty-nine should have your heartbeat and pulse rate. What are we having for lunch?”

The thought of food had lost its usual savor. But he’d never cowered before any threat in his life, so he was damned if he’d start now. “A steak,” he said, “burned on the outside and bleeding in the middle.”

“Tiger meat,” Miss Castleberry laughed.

“Maybe Katherine will arrive in time to join me,” the old man said. “Her plane lands at one o’clock. An hour from the airport — hold the steak. Miss Castleberry, and then make it double.”

Dropping his head back, he half closed his eyes. He heard the starched rustle of Miss Castleberry departing, the click of the door as it closed, leaving him alone in the silence.

Katherine, his niece, was the only member of the family still absent. The thought was a reminder of how few people he really had. There was George, his son, who could pretend that he was having no part in his father’s murder. And Claudia, George’s wife, who could plan it with all the emotion of a Lady Macbeth. And Elwyn — he of the hippie hair and bell bottoms of psychedelic hues — who could execute it.

My son. My daughter-in-law. My grandson. The old man wept silently.

For them the emergency summons had been a happy announcement. The old geezer worth $6,000,000 was in brain surgery. Perhaps he would die under the scalpel. They had flown joyfully in from New York.

But the old geezer hadn’t died on the operating table. The heart, the constitution and iron will, had pulled the old geezer through. He would, the doctors were certain, regain at least partial use of his legs in time and live to see any great-grandchildren that Elwyn might spawn. The time for The Rats to strike was here, now — or wait another lifetime to inherit the six millions.

The news of the old man’s accident had taken much longer to reach Katherine. She was off in some remote village in the mountains of Bolivia, where she was serving as a Peace Corp volunteer. Probably the message had finally been handed to her by a barefooted courier and the ragged, brown-skinned people of the village had shared their meager rations to pack her out by burro.

Such a long arduous trip for Katherine to make, all because of an errant golf ball and an accident almost too freakish to be believed. The sliced tee shot on the eighteenth hole fading into the trees — the opening between two live oaks that offered enticing distance down the fairway — the one-up advantage the old man was dead set on holding — the ball sitting up well on a small clump.

The old man had chosen a three wood and the gamble on reaching the green. Grip, stance, balance — eye on the ball, body turn, pivot, downswing, with the club-head hissing, packed with power. Then the slight yielding of twigs and desiccated vegetation under the firm left side — just enough to result in a slightly pulled shot. The ball had hit a live oak trunk dead-center and returned straight to his temple with a speed a little less than that of a bullet. Two sounds, like the rapid-fire echo of a cracking pistol. A flare of white light through the old man’s brain. Then temporary oblivion...

The old man heard the sigh of his bedroom door. George, Claudia, and Elwyn came in and ranged along the foot of his bed. The old man’s eyes swept them, and their images underwent a subtle transformation. He could imagine them with twitching whiskers. Rats. Skittering toward the prize. Sniffing at the bait, cautious, but ready to dart and strike and flee back to their hole with a six-million-dollar morsel in their mouths.