The Collected Mystery Stories, page 25
“I don’t understand.”
“The woman never hired me.”
Michael Haig stared.
“Never hired me, never knew of my existence as far as I know. She and I didn’t set eyes one upon the other until the night I stuck a carbon-steel Sabatier chef’s knife between her ribs. For all I know the poor woman adored her husband and never would have harmed him for the world.”
“But—”
“So I killed her and went on my way, Michael, and then about a month later I happened to be in Philadelphia for reasons I can’t at the moment recall, not that they matter, and whom did I chance to see emerging from Bookbinder’s after a presumably satisfying lunch than the Bicycle Tire King of Trenton. Do you know, the mind is capable of extraordinary quantum leaps. All at once I saw the whole thing plain, saw just the shape the entire legend would take. All I had to do was kill the fool and my place in my profession was assured. It was the sort of thing people would talk about forever, and everything they said could only redound to my benefit. I followed him, I stole a car, and—” he spread his hands “—and the rest is history. Or legend, if you prefer.”
“That’s … that’s incredible.”
“I saw an opportunity and I grasped it before it could get away.”
“You just killed him for—”
“For the benefit that could not help but accrue to my reputation. Killed him without a fee, you might say, but there’s no question but that his death paid me more handsomely in the long run than any murder I ever undertook for immediate gain. Overnight I became the standard of the profession. I stood head and shoulders above the competition as far as potential clients were concerned. I had an edge over men with infinitely more distinguished careers, men who had far more years in the business than I. And what gave me this advantage? An elementary hit-and-run killing of a former client, an act that but for the ensuing publicity would have been pointless beyond belief. Remarkable, isn’t it?”
“It’s better than the legend,” Michael Haig said. There was a film of perspiration on his upper lip and he wiped at it with his forefinger. “Better than the legend. If people knew what you actually did—”
“I think it’s ever so much better that they don’t, Michael. Oh, if I were to write memoirs for posthumous publication it’s the sort of material I’d be inclined to include, but I’m not the sort to write my memoirs, I’m afraid. No, I think I’d rather let the legend go on as it stands. It wouldn’t do me much good if my public knew that Wilson Colliard was a man who once killed one of his clients for no reason at all. My reputation has been carefully designed to build a client’s confidence and that’s the sort of revelation that might have the opposite effect entirely.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything at all,” Colliard advised. “But let me just pour us each one final tot of sherry.”
“I’ve had quite a bit already.”
“It’s very light stuff,” Colliard said. “One more won’t hurt you.” And, returning with the filled glasses, he added, “We ought to drink to legends. May the truth never interfere with them.”
The younger man took a sip. Then, when he saw his host toss off his drink in a single swallow, he imitated his example and drank off the rest of his own sherry. Wilson Colliard nodded, satisfied with the way things had gone. He could scarcely recall a more pleasant afternoon.
“Minimize your risks,” he said. “Seize the moment. And look to your professional reputation.”
“The three points of the Assassin’s Credo,” Haig said.
“Three of the four points.”
“Oh?” The younger man grinned in anticipation. “You mean there’s a fourth point?”
“Oh, yes.” Colliard studied him, paying close attention to his guest’s eyes. “A fourth point.”
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“Squash the competition.”
“Oh?”
“When it’s convenient,” Colliard said. “And when it’s useful. There’s no point doing anything about the bunglers. But when someone turns up who’s talented and resourceful and not without a sense of the dramatic, and when you have the opportunity to wipe him out, why, it’s just good business to do so. There are only so many really top jobs available every year, you know, and one doesn’t want them spread too thin. Of course when you eliminate a competitor you don’t noise it around. That sort of thing’s kept secret. But there have been eight times over the years when I’ve had a chance to put the fourth principle into play.”
“And you’ve seized the opportunity?”
“I could hardly do otherwise, could I?” Colliard smiled. “You’re number nine, Michael. That last glass of sherry had poison in it, I’m afraid. You can probably feel the numbness spreading. It already shows in your eyes. No, don’t even try to get up. You won’t be able to accomplish anything. Don’t blame yourself. You were doomed from the start, poor boy. I shouldn’t have agreed to see you this afternoon if I hadn’t decided to, uh, purge you from the ranks.”
The younger man’s face was a study in horror. Colliard eyed him equably. Already he was beginning to feel that familiar sensation, the excitement, the thrill.
“You were quite good,” he said charitably. “For as long as you lasted you were quite good indeed. Otherwise I’d not have bothered with you. Oh, Michael, it’s a crazy business, isn’t it? Believe me, lad, you’re lucky to be getting out of it.”
WHEN THIS MAN DIES
The night before the first letter came, he had Speckled Band in the feature at Saratoga. The horse went off at nine-to-two from the number one pole and Edgar Kraft had two hundred dollars on him, half to win and half to place. Speckled Band went to the front and stayed there. The odds-on favorite, a four-year-old named Sheila’s Kid, challenged around the clubhouse turn and got hung up on the outside. Kraft was counting his money. In the stretch, Speckled Band broke stride, galloped home madly, was summarily disqualified and placed fourth. Kraft tore up his tickets and went home.
So he was in no mood for jokes that morning. He opened five of the six letters that came in the morning mail, and all five were bills, none of which he had any prospect of paying in the immediate future. He put them in a drawer in his desk. There were already several bills in that drawer. He opened the final letter and was at first relieved to discover that it was not a bill, not a notice of payment due, not a threat to repossess car or furniture. It was, instead, a very simple message typed in the center of a large sheet of plain typing paper.
First a name:
MR. JOSEPH H. NEIMANN
And below that:
WHEN THIS MAN DIES
YOU WILL RECEIVE
FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS
He was in no mood for jokes. Trotters that lead all the way and then break in the stretch do not contribute to a man’s sense of humor. He looked at the sheet of paper, turned it over to see if there was anything further on its reverse, turned it over again to read the message once more, picked up the envelope, saw nothing on it but his own name and a local postmark, said something unprintable about some idiots and their idea of a joke and tore everything up and threw it away, message and envelope and all.
In the course of the next week he thought about the letter once, maybe twice. No more than that. He had problems of his own. He had never heard of anyone named Joseph H. Neimann and entertained no hopes of receiving five hundred dollars in the event of the man’s death. He did not mention the cryptic message to his wife. When the man from Superior Finance called to ask him if he had any hopes of meeting his note on time, he did not say anything about the legacy that Mr. Neimann meant to leave him.
He went on doing his work from one day to the next, working with the quiet desperation of a man who knows his income, while better than nothing, will never quite get around to equaling his expenditures. He went to the track twice, won thirty dollars one night, lost twenty-three the next. He came quite close to forgetting entirely about Mr. Joseph H. Neimann and the mysterious correspondent.
Then the second letter came. He opened it mechanically, unfolded a large sheet of plain white paper. Ten fresh fifty-dollar bills fluttered down upon the top of his desk. In the center of the sheet of paper someone had typed:
THANK YOU
Edgar Kraft did not make the connection immediately. He tried to think what he might have done that would merit anyone’s thanks, not to mention anyone’s five hundred dollars. It took him a moment, and then he recalled that other letter and rushed out of his office and down the street to a drugstore. He bought a morning paper, turned to the obituaries.
Joseph Henry Neimann, 67, of 413 Park Place, had died the previous afternoon in County Hospital after an illness of several months’ duration. He left a widow, three children and four grandchildren. Funeral services would be private, flowers were please to be omitted.
He put three hundred dollars in his checking account and two hundred dollars in his wallet. He made his payment on the car, paid his rent, cleared up a handful of small bills. The mess in his desk drawer was substantially less baleful, although by no means completely cleared up. He still owed money, but he owed less now than before the timely death of Joseph Henry Neimann. The man from Superior Finance had been appeased by a partial payment; he would stop making a nuisance of himself, at least for the time being.
That night, Kraft took his wife to the track. He even let her make a couple of impossible hunch bets. He lost forty dollars and it hardly bothered him at all.
When the next letter came he did not tear it up. He recognized the typing on the envelope, and he turned it over in his hands for a few moments before opening it, like a child with a wrapped present. He was somewhat more apprehensive than child with present, however; he couldn’t help feeling that the mysterious benefactor would want something in return for his five hundred dollars.
He opened the letter. No demands, however. Just the usual sheet of plain paper, with another name typed in its center:
MR. RAYMOND ANDERSEN
And below that:
WHEN THIS MAN DIES
YOU WILL RECEIVE
SEVEN HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS.
For the next few days he kept telling himself that he did not wish anything unpleasant for Mr. Raymond Andersen. He didn’t know the man, he had never heard of him, and he was not the sort to wish death upon some total stranger. And yet—
Each morning he bought a paper and turned at once to the death notices, searching almost against his will for the name of Mr. Raymond Andersen. I don’t wish him harm, he would think each time. But seven hundred fifty dollars was a happy sum. If something were going to happen to Mr. Raymond Andersen, he might as well profit by it. It wasn’t as though he was doing anything to cause Andersen’s death. He was even unwilling to wish for it. But if something happened …
Something happened. Five days after the letter came, he found Andersen’s obituary in the morning paper. Andersen was an old man, a very old man, and he had died in his bed at a home for the aged after a long illness. His heart jumped when he read the notice with a combination of excitement and guilt. But what was there to feel guilty about? He hadn’t done anything. And death, for a sick old man like Raymond Andersen, was more a cause for relief than grief, more a blessing than a tragedy.
But why would anyone want to pay him seven hundred fifty dollars?
Nevertheless, someone did. The letter came the following morning, after a wretched night during which Kraft tossed and turned and batted two possibilities back and forth—that the letter would come and that it would not. It did come, and it brought the promised seven hundred fifty dollars in fifties and hundreds. And the same message:
THANK YOU
For what? He had not the slightest idea. But he looked at the two-word message again before putting it carefully away.
You’re welcome, he thought. You’re entirely welcome.
For two weeks no letter came. He kept waiting for the mail, kept hoping for another windfall like the two that had come so far. There were times when he would sit at his desk for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, staring off into space and thinking about the letters and the money. He would have done better keeping his mind on his work, but this was not easy. His job brought him five thousand dollars a year, and for that sum he had to work forty to fifty hours a week. His anonymous pen pal had thus far brought him a quarter as much as he earned in a year, and he had done nothing at all for the money.
The seven-fifty had helped, but he was still in hot water. On a sudden female whim his wife had had the living room recarpeted. The rent was due. There was another payment due on the car. He had one very good night at the track, but a few other visits took back his winnings and more.
And then the letter came, along with a circular inviting him to buy a dehumidifier for his basement and an appeal for funds from some dubious charity. He swept circular and appeal into his wastebasket and tore open the plain white envelope. The message was the usual sort:
MR. CLAUDE PIERCE
And below the name:
WHEN THIS MAN DIES
YOU WILL RECEIVE
ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS.
Kraft’s hands were shaking slightly as he put the envelope and letter away in his desk. One thousand dollars—the price had gone up again, this time to a fairly staggering figure. Mr. Claude Pierce. Did he know anyone named Claude Pierce? He did not. Was Claude Pierce sick? Was he a lonely old man, dying somewhere of a terminal illness?
Kraft hoped so. He hated himself for the wish, but he could not smother it. He hoped Claude Pierce was dying.
This time he did a little research. He thumbed through the phone book until he found a listing for a Claude Pierce on Honeydale Drive. He closed the book then and tried to put the whole business out of his mind, an enterprise foredoomed to failure. Finally he gave up, looked up the listing once more, looked at the man’s name and thought that this man was going to die. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? They sent him some man’s name in the mail, and then the man died, and then Edgar Kraft was paid. Obviously, Claude Pierce was a doomed man.
He called Pierce’s number. A woman answered, and Kraft asked if Mr. Pierce was in.
“Mr. Pierce is in the hospital,” the woman said. “Who’s calling, please?”
“Thank you,” Kraft said.
Of course, he thought. They, whoever they were, simply found people in hospitals who were about to die, and they paid money to Edgar Kraft when the inevitable occurred, and that was all. The why of it was impenetrable. But so few things made sense in Kraft’s life that he did not want to question the whole affair too closely. Perhaps his unknown correspondent was like that lunatic on television who gave away a million dollars every week. If someone wanted to give Kraft money, Kraft wouldn’t argue with him.
That afternoon he called the hospital. Claude Pierce had been admitted two days ago for major surgery, a nurse told Kraft. His condition was listed as good.
Well, he would have a relapse, Kraft thought. He was doomed— the letterwriter had ordained his death. He felt momentarily sorry for Claude Pierce, and then he turned his attention to the entries at Saratoga. There was a horse named Orange Pips which Kraft had been watching for some time. The horse had a good post now, and if he was ever going to win, this was the time.
Kraft went to the track. Orange Pips ran out of the money. In the morning Kraft failed to find Pierce’s obituary. When he called the hospital, the nurse told him that Pierce was recovering very nicely.
Impossible, Kraft thought.
For three weeks Claude Pierce lay in his hospital bed, and for three weeks Edgar Kraft followed his condition with more interest than Pierce’s doctor could have displayed. Once Pierce took a turn for the worse and slipped into a coma. The nurse’s voice was grave over the phone, and Kraft bowed his head, resigned to the inevitable. A day later Pierce had rallied remarkably. The nurse sounded positively cheerful, and Kraft fought off a sudden wave of rage that threatened to overwhelm him.
From that point on, Pierce improved steadily. He was released, finally, a whole man again, and Kraft could not understand quite what had happened. Something had gone wrong. When Pierce died, he was to receive a thousand dollars. Pierce had been sick, Pierce had been close to death, and then, inexplicably, Pierce had been snatched from the very jaws of death, with a thousand dollars simultaneously snatched from Edgar Kraft.
He waited for another letter. No letter came.
With the rent two weeks overdue, with a payment on the car past due, with the man from Superior Finance calling him far too often, Kraft’s mind began to work against him. When this man dies, the letter had said. There had been no strings attached, no time limit on Pierce’s death. After all, Pierce could not live forever. No one did. And whenever Pierce did happen to draw his last breath, he would get that thousand dollars.
Suppose something happened to Pierce—
He thought it over against his own will. It would not be hard, he kept telling himself. No one knew that he had any interest whatsoever in Claude Pierce. If he picked his time well, if he did the dirty business and got it done with and hurried off into the night, no one would know. The police would never think of him in the same breath with Claude Pierce, if police were in the habit of thinking in breaths. He did not know Pierce, he had no obvious motive for killing Pierce, and—
He couldn’t do it, he told himself. He simply could not do it. He was no killer. And something as senseless as this, something so thoroughly absurd, was unthinkable.
He would manage without the thousand dollars. Somehow, he would live without the money. True, he had already spent it a dozen times over in his mind. True, he had been counting and recounting it when Pierce lay in a coma. But he would get along without it. What else could he do?
