Warren Murphy - Death Therapy

"Okay," said the younger one. "How much you want?" Sweet as you please, he said that.

"How much you got?" asked Boom Boom.

"I'll give you guys a hundred apiece. And well call it even."

"Fifty,"said the old honky with the briefcase.

"Make it a hundred. Why not," said the younger screwball. "Fifty doesn't go far these days."

"A hundred here, a hundred there. It all mounts up. Make it seventy-five."

"Okay.Seventy-five," said the younger honky.

"Can ah get involved in this heah thing?" said Boom Boom, waving the gun wider because obviously someone was missing something. "This is mah holdup and ah got a right to say what ah's gonna get."

"Seventy-five be all right with you?" asked the younger honky.

"No," said Boom Boom.

"No way," said Piggy and Dice. "We wants it all. Everything you got. That briefcase too."

"Well, sorry," said the younger honky and then it all happened very fast. Boom Boom was shrieking and jumping up and down, shaking his hands which flopped as though attached to his arms only by loose rubber bands.

Piggy and Dice were on the ground, their legs stiff and then Philander thought he saw the flash of a white hand in the street light, but he could not be perfectly sure. He was still seeing the flash come at him when someone told him he was now in the hospital emergency room and everything was all right.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mrs. Vance Withers did not tell the police everything. Yes, she awoke during the night to find her husband dead in bed. No face. It was horrible. No. She had heard nothing. Nothing.

"You mean to tell us, lady, that somebody did that to your husband and you didn't hear a thing?"

The detective sat on her new divan, his $75 suit on her $1,800 leather divan, and dared to speak gruffly to her as he pencilled things into a little notebook. He was only a sergeant or something.

"Does your colonel know you speak like this to people?"

"I'm a cop, lady, not a soldier."

"Well, General Withers was a soldier," said Mrs. Withers icily. She had thrown on a flimsy pink something and now wished she had worn something heavier. Like a suit. And perhaps conducted the interview on the porch. She did not like the sergeant being so familiar. It was akin to disrespect for the departed General Vance Withers.

Two white-clad attendants removed the general through the living room on a wheeled stretcher. A white sheet covered what was left of his head.

"Yes, ma'am. We are aware the general was a soldier."

"I sense a certain disrespect in your voice, Sergeant. There is insubordination in manner, you know."

"Lady, I am not a soldier."

"That should be apparent to anyone."

"You are the only one, Mrs. Withers, who was with the general when that terrible thing happened. I'm afraid that makes you a suspect."

"Don't be absurd. General Withers was a four-star general and a good candidate for five stars. Why should I kill him?"

"Rank is not the only relationship, lady. Like sometimes there are other things between men and women, you know?"

"You really aren't a soldier, are you?"

"You still claim you heard nothing?"

"That is correct," said Mrs. Vance Withers. She pulled her pink nightdress tighter around her shoulders. She was an attractive woman with the sexuality of incipient middle age, a last longing fling of a body no longer designed to bear children.

Only—Mrs. Withers had a little secret. But she had no intention of sharing it with an enlisted man. So she listened to the grubby police corporal or whatever he called himself and remembered just a few hours before, thinking she heard something and turning in bed. And then she felt those delicious hands quiet her eyes gently, just the fingertips on her eyelids, and then the strong but velvet smooth hands awakened her body until, almost as if electrically shocked, she was alive with desire, throbbing, demanding, needing and then there was fulfilment as she had never dared dream fulfilment. Shrieking in sudden and complete ecstasy.

"Vance. Vance. Vance."

And the magnificent hands were still there, to keep her eyes gently shut and in blissful satisfaction. Complete, she returned to sleep, and awoke again only when she thought she felt Vance salivating on her shoulder.

And she turned and her husband's pillow was a mass of blood. What she had felt was his blood.

"Oh," she had said. "Oh, no. No."

And then she phoned the police and here she was, somehow not totally distressed. Although Vance was destined for a fifth star. She just knew it. What a way to die, on the threshold of your fifth star. She grieved with her husband's memory,

"I'm going to ask you again, Mrs. Withers. Your husband's head was literally taken off and you heard nothing? Not even a scream?"

"No," she said. "I heard nothing. One cannot hear hands move."

"How do you know it was hands?"

Hmmm, she thought that was a mistake.

"Well, lady," said the policeman, "don't think we think human hands could do that."

Mrs. Withers shrugged. These enlisted men were so stupid really.

CHAPTER EIGHT

There were definite advantages to being the confidential secretary to a banker from the centuries-old house of Rapfenberg. The salary was good. There was a lot of travel. There was a sense of excitement and the feeling of being in on important things—even if, sometimes, they were a little too complicated to understand.

It was a sweet job, especially for a twenty-four-year-old American girl who had originally come to Zurich to ski. Eileen Hamblin told herself that again as she tried to convince herself that the last three months had not really been so bad.

There had been no travelling and that, she realized, was the source of her discomfort. She had been virtually chained to this awful desk for three months because Mr. Amadeus Rentzel had work to do in Zurich and that had, for the very first time, introduced in her the suspicion that banking might be dull. Just plain dull. Banking, she thought in a very un-Swiss-like manner, could be just a boring pain in the ass.

If she had been a better secretary, she might have tried to learn something about banking, finance and monetary policy, so she could perhaps share in the excitement others seemed to find in them. Gold was gold and silver was silver. They were used for jewellery. But money was used to pay the rent. She could find no possible relationship between the paper currency she used at the grocery store and somebody's pile of gold buried in some fort somewhere.

Mr. Rentzel had tried to explain, but it was useless. And now he no longer tried. And for the past three months, he had been different somehow, spending more time at his desk, always deep in charts on cash and reserves and gold flow.

She remembered the day it had started, how he had come out of his office and said "Gold stocks are dropping on the New York Stock Exchange."

"That's nice," she said.

"Nice?" he said. "It's awful."

"Is there anything we can do about it?"

"Not a damn thing," he said, disappearing back into his office.

From that day on, her first job every day was to begin checking gold prices on major stock exchanges around the world. In the last month, they had been going up and so had Mr. Rentzel's spirits.

Suddenly Mr. Rentzel became extremely popular. Formerly, he would travel all over the world—with Eileen—to see clients. But now the clients were coming to him. A regular United Nations in the last month. Orientals. Russians, even.

There was another one today. His card had read "Mister Jones." Eileen had allowed herself a very small, very controlled smile. The man had an accent like Ludwig Von Drake, and if he were Mr. Jones, she was Jacqueline Onassis.

The man known as Mr. Jones was inside Mr. Rentzel's office now, nervously fingering the catches on a black leather attaché case, which was fastened to his arm with an old-fashioned pair of handcuffs.