The solitary drinker in dingy tropical whites had been quietly edging his way along the bamboo bar toward Jerry Waite for the past hour. But it was not until most of the others had said their goodnights and departed and the two were alone, except for Pancho the bartender and a couple or so in the far corner, that he actually made his pitch.
“Good evening,” he said, raising his glass. “Salud y pesetas.”
“The same to you,” Jerry said amiably, still wishing he knew how to get rid of the fellow.
But the older man sat down on the nearest stool. “Rumor has it that you’re an author,” he pressed.
Jerry nodded. Actually he was an author only in the sense that he made a living writing television scripts in Hollywood. Usually they were about “the Saint,” “the Falcon,” “The Shadow,” or “Bulldog Drummond,” but always involving the same Robin Hood, gentleman-crook character skating on thin ice just ahead of Scotland Yard, Center Street, or the Surete. However, he had written a novel or so, as yet unpublished. Writing assignments around the studios had been few and far between of late, and so Jerry’s harried agent had told him to take a trip somewhere and not to come back until he had some new, fresh ideas to offer the story- editors.
Somehow he had stopped off here in Mazatlan, on the upper west coast of Mexico and far off the usual tourist trails, staying on because the food here at the Hotel Grande was magnificent, if a bit bizarre—there had been iguana stewed in sherry for dinner tonight—and because there was a sloe-eyed señorita called Concepcion who sang lovely Andalusian songs and played the guitar in the dining room every evening.
Ordinarily Jerry Waite would have given this bleary barfly a quick brush-off, but tonight he was bored. He had just about exhausted the amusement possibilities of the town, having listened interminably to the street mariachis playing “Guadalajara,” “El Novillero” and “La Paloma,” purchased a briefcase and a riding-crop of half-tanned alligator leather, been photographed with the tame boa-constrictor from the hotel gardens looped across his shoulders, and got a rather bad burn while deep-sea fishing for swordfish. All this was a complete change from his accustomed haunts, and pleasant enough—all except for the routine with the snake, who was heavy and odorous and a lens-louse, continually waving its foolish, reptilian snout between him and the camera. But not one of these simple pleasures had inspired any original story ideas.
Not that Jerry anticipated getting anything interesting from this stranger at the bar either, except perhaps a chance to buy some flawed opals or perhaps the map of a supposedly lost gold mine. In his crew-cut and Palm Springs sport shirt Jerry looked younger than his thirty years; he was becoming accustomed to being taken for an easy mark. This “So you’re an author?” approach was a little different, however; it was another gambit. People who scrape up a conversation with a professional writer are always very anxious to find out where he gets his ideas, and does he work directly with a typewriter or use a pen, and what name does he write under, or else—
“I’ve got a story you can write,” the little man offered. Jerry knew those stories; they were always long and rambling, and based upon pure coincidence. “It’s about a perfect murder,” the other continued. “The perfect murder.” He waited hopefully.
“Afraid I’m not really very interested, my friend. But I’ll gladly buy you one drink.” Jerry snapped his fingers for Pancho, who was drowsing at the other end of the long bar.
“You don’t understand, Mr. Waite. The drinks, of course, must be on me.” The stranger, who now introduced himself as Thomas M. Baxter, produced a gold-tipped sealskin wallet stuffed with Mexican and American currency. “Cognac, please,” he told the boy in flawless Spanish. “And leave the bottle here.”
Jerry might still have made some excuse and pulled out, but he was to some extent obligated by the highball which was now being poured for him. Besides, he still hoped that the lovely and most elusive Concepcion might tonight keep her laughing half-promise to stop in for a nightcap and then let him see her home—or somewhere. I might as well, he thought, kill time this way.
So he took a good pull at his glass. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Baxter, why the perfect murder doesn’t exist,” Jerry said patronizingly. “In real life there never has been one and never will be, because if anybody knows the secret it spoils the perfection. Oh, I grant you that some murderers get away with it—take Lizzie Borden. But that is just luck, or inefficiency on the part of the law. And in fiction it’s a completely threadbare formula. Somebody commits the foolproof murder, everything goes off like clockwork, and then just as he’s gotten away with it. Bingo! He forgot one little detail or something—”
“I know, I know,” interrupted Baxter. “Only in this story I’m telling you, it’s different. This fellow, this friend of mine who killed his wife, didn’t make any mistakes!” He refilled both their glasses, carefully adding a modicum of fizz-water. “You can check up on it if you like, it was in all the newspapers. Happened back in St. Louis, three or four years ago. Sam Durling—that was his name—did away with his bitch of a wife, and it all worked out just as he’d planned—with one or two unimportant exceptions—and nobody ever suspected him at all.”
Jerry blinked, and edged away a little. “Then how—”
“How I know about it? Well, we were fellow norteamericanos in a foreign land and we got to be close friends. I guess he just had to tell somebody, and he had nothing to lose because he wasn’t a fugitive from justice or anything. And I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if his achievement got put down on paper by somebody who knows how to juggle words like you do. It’s too good to keep to oneself. You could change the names and minor details around when you write the story, couldn’t you?”
“Why, I guess so. That’s the usual thing.”
Mr. Baxter nodded approvingly, and then bent his bleary, red-rimmed eyes on the operation of refilling both their glasses again without spilling a single drop. “Durling was—well, he is a very unusual type—a good-looking but bookish sort of fellow, about my size but five or six years younger, and without a gray hair in his head. He’d been holding down various jobs in the publicity and business promotion game, doing pretty well at it too, I gather, when he met this woman. Her name was Martha Mears, and from what he told me she must have been in some ways a very unusual and perhaps even a brilliant woman. When he met her—it was on a summer vacation up at Lake Tahoe—she was running a little shoestring cosmetic company, making and distributing her own line of cosmetics and beauty preparations. She’d been a chorus girl and model in her earlier days, and she still had a dazzling pink-and-whiteness that was a wonderful walking ad for her products, though I guess she never had to use them or anything else in that line. Some women are like that.”
“Not any of the ones I know around Hollywood,” Jerry put in.
“Well, anyway,” the little man continued, “they were attracted to each other from the first. Sam saw a gold mine in her and her beauty stuff. She just didn’t have the promotional know-how to promote it right, that’s all. Of course you’ve heard of Martha Mears Natural Beauty Aids?”
“I can’t say that I have,” Jerry Waite admitted, his eye still hopefully on the door.
“Shall I warm that up just a little?” Baxter poured a stiffish slug. “To be brief, Durling got her to form a corporation, with himself as executive vice-president in charge of publicity and promotion. He splurged on national advertising, featuring the fact that all of the Martha Mears products were natural. No drugs or minerals or synthetics, just the miraculous touch of modern science on the everyday things of the woods and fields and farms and gardens around us. Mostly a gag, of course. But according to Sam, you should have seen how the feminine public fell for the Butternut Skin Cream, the Oak Leaf Rinse, the Cranberry and Raspberry Lipstick. Real cream and butter in the face creams, real flowers for the scent in everything. It went over like a house afire, I gather. And more or less inevitably Sam and Martha drifted into a partnership which became a twenty-four-hour-a-day thing, and eventually they got married.”
“So the story has a sex angle, huh? That’s indicated.”
“Yeah, sure. But like many another man before him, Sam Durling found out that it’s awfully easy to make a bad wife out of a good mistress. He soon discovered that Martha hadn’t really become Mrs. Durling, he’d become Mr. Mears—and you can spell that in small type. The new plant was booming with prosperity, and the orders and the cash were rolling in by the basketful, but instead of gaining more authority around the place, Sam found himself reduced to the ridiculous standing of a prince-consort. And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it, for the business was in her name. In fact, the business was her name! Oh, he had a small percentage of the stock, but nothing in line with what he should have had because he and he alone had had the ability and the imagination to increase the business a hundred-fold.
“You see, the business was Martha’s whole life, it was her family and her children, and she’d gotten incredibly jealous of Sam’s importance there. I guess she had the nature of a queen bee, and the only male she could tolerate around her was a drone. After about a year after they were married, she kicked Sam upstairs to the post of general manager, which meant nothing at all since she did the managing anyhow, and she hired a handsome young new vice president in charge of sales and promotion to do his old job. She and the new guy began to have what they called business conferences about two evenings a week, and Martha banished Sam to the spare bedroom because she claimed he snored. You see how all this was the beginning of the end, don’t you? It was inevitably building up to murder.”
“Why didn’t the guy get a divorce?” demanded Jerry, who had himself shipped off two wives to Reno.
Baxter shrugged, and clinked the bottle against their glasses again. “I asked Sam the same question, but he said divorce was out. He’d built the whole thing out of peanuts; it was a million-dollar enterprise, and he wasn’t going to be shoved out into the cold with only his few shares of stock and maybe a little settlement, and everybody laughing at him. It was a point of pride with him, and when he found out that Martha was trying to needle him into giving in and letting her divorce him, after he realized that she had drained him dry as a cornhusk and now wanted to toss him aside like—”
“Like a worn-out glove?” Jerry was lightly stealing a glance at his watch. It was almost two o’clock in the morning, and if Concepcion didn’t come soon, she wasn’t coming at all.
“Exactly,” Baxter nodded, continuing in a voice that was only slightly fuzzed. “So Sam dug in his heels and tried to sweat it out. He told me that nobody ever had any idea of what he had to take from that woman. Gone was the big, jolly, laughing playmate who used to tremble with desire when he kissed her and scream with delight when he tickled her. By this time she outweighed him by almost twenty pounds, and she began to take a sort of sadistic delight in pushing him around—only when they were alone, of course; in public they were still the devoted couple. When they first married, he had talked her into giving up the penthouse apartment she’d always lived in, and they bought a big house in the suburbs. Servants at the time were difficult to find and harder to keep; according to Sam she never got along with any of them, and they were always quitting or being fired. In the gaps between servants, it was Martha’s insistence that Sam himself should do the housework; since he was the one that had wanted the big house, and he certainly was only in the way around the plant, except for the once-a-month newsletter he still wrote up, mostly for appearances sake. Martha tightened up on the money, too—and Sam said she even locked up the liquor cabinet too, keeping the key in her handbag.”
“Cruel and inhuman treatment,” Jerry said sympathetically. “She was really asking for it, wasn’t she?”
“Exactly! According to Sam. Of course this is his side of it, but he had no reason to lie to me, and it all adds up. Martha was out to make life so miserable for him that he’d have to give in and take a powder, but like many of us little guys he was stubborn as a mule. We have more pride and self-respect than most people—and besides, there was his rightful share of the business at stake. So having a good deal of free time on his hands, Sam began to read everything he could find on the subject of murder. At first it was sort of just a ‘let’s pretend’ game with him, and then it began to solidify into something real. He decided that the extreme situation justified extreme measures. Murder was, of course, morally wrong, but this was an exception. But he was damn determined not to get caught. He saw that most people who are driven to that extremity fail because they do it in the heat of passion and leave traces all over, or else they try to be too clever, so that their plan topples over of its own weight. The thing had to be simple—as simple as a stage magician’s trick when you get it explained.
“His first thought, naturally, was poison. Martha, like many women of her type, was something of a hypochondriac, always dosing herself for some imaginary ill. But according to the books Sam read, nowadays there are always exhumations and autopsies and all that sort of unpleasantness, even years later. A man could never be sure he was really safe.
“Next, he thought of simple violence, because there had been a wave of brutal hammer murders and robberies in the city a few months before. But he wisely had little confidence in his ability to stage the thing properly, to jimmy windows and carry out all the other details in a way that would make it look professional to the police. Besides, he was not a bloodthirsty person, and the very idea of bludgeoning or shooting someone to death was repugnant to him. Martha was a very beautiful woman, and he couldn’t bring himself to think of spoiling that perfect pink-and- whiteness.”
“I see the point,” Jerry admitted. The brandy was getting to his head, but the story was beginning to get to him, too. ‘‘Go on.”
“Plus the fact that a scandal would have hurt the value of the business,” Baxter went on. “So he finally got rid of all the books on toxicology and legal medicine that he’d been secretly collecting, and turned to the daily newspapers. Has it ever occurred to you how clearly the nation’s press reflects the complex dramatic phases of our daily lives, how they mirror the changing kaleidoscope of human comedy and tragedy and hold it fast forever? Or at least until the bound back issues in the libraries yellow and crumble away?”
“It has,” nodded Jerry Waite, who subscribed to several clipping services in hopes of getting new story ideas.
“Everything that has ever happened, everything that will ever happen, is set down somewhere in the columns of the newspapers,” Baxter went on. “That was Sam Durling’s belief, anyhow. He had plenty of time—he spent weeks and months poring over the bound volumes of back issues in the public library. And eventually he found just what he was looking for—it was Fate, he said. The item was buried in the back pages in the second section of the newspaper, but there was a completely new and original method of committing murder, which required no complicated preparation or equipment, involved no brutality nor spilled any blood, and left absolutely no traces. Its own inventors had used it successfully—though they had had a lovers’ quarrel later and spilled the beans out of spite. They fumbled, but Sam knew he wouldn’t fumble…
“Well? Go on, man!” Jerry saw Concepcion standing in the doorway, wearing only sandals and a blazing tropical sarong. And she was smiling. He half-rose, motioned her to the booth near the windows, and called out, “Un momentito, darling!” She pouted, but sat down—and he sent Pancho over with a drink.
“You can look it all up for yourself,” Baxter was saying. “The only new, the only perfect way of committing murder. It was a United Press dispatch from Chiloe, Chile, dated December 3rd, 1946. Sam had it with him, and showed it to me. It was a honey, and as you can imagine, he lost no time in putting it to the test.
“By that time, Martha and he had settled into a sort of status quo, a waiting game, each trying to sit the other out. But knowing her one weak spot, Sam started to lay the preparatory groundwork. He took to leaving around the house various magazines containing articles on cardiac trouble, and once or twice when she came down to breakfast, he’d remark casually on how flushed she looked. You of course know the old truism about medical students, how they almost always managed to find in themselves the symptoms of any disease they are studying? He even brought home a couple of old medical textbooks that he’d found in a secondhand bookstore, leaving them on the library table. Within a week or so Martha was watching herself for pains in the chest and left shoulder, shortness of breath and tingling of the extremities. She had swallowed the bait.
“Those who seek shall find, and before too long a time she was calling in her doctor and complaining of certain symptoms of heart trouble. He took electrocardiograms, and gave her all sorts of tests, and said she probably had nothing to worry about, but that she should take things easy, cut out smoking so much, and only take one drink after dinner. And he’d call in a week or ten days, at ten bucks a call—you know how most doctors make a good thing out of a rich patient. So then Martha really began worrying.
“Just at that time the couple were again without a servant, and Sam was staying home most of the day to keep the house running. Then he’d go down to the plant at night and do what routine work still came to his desk, mostly the newsletter and various advertisements and promotional stuff.
“The night he chose was a Monday, when Martha rarely made social engagements or held her so-called conferences with her succession of handsome young executive-type vice-presidents. Immediately after dinner she made herself a mild highball and retired to her bed with a book, as was her habit. Sam let himself out of the house and drove down to the cosmetics plant in the family Cadillac. The executive offices were of course deserted, except for the cleaning women who were sweeping up, emptying wastebaskets and ashtrays, and so on. They soon left, leaving no one else in the building except the watchman, and Sam knew that the man would on no account disturb him when the light was on in his office.
“The PBX switchboard was dead, so nobody could reasonably expect him to answer the phone. As soon as the cleaning women had put away their mops and pails and left, Sam left quietly by the side entrance, and walked down the street a few blocks to a neighborhood movie. There were a hundred or so cars parked in the vacant lot behind the theater, the owners practically certain not to need them until the end of the second feature. Sam was prepared to ‘hot-wire’ the ignition of one of them, but luck was with him and he found a flashy yellow coupe with the keys still in the dash. He drove quietly home, parking the car in the circular driveway. He let himself in and tiptoed upstairs; Martha was asleep as he had expected, dead to the world like the tired, healthy animal she was, with the reading light still on. She must have been a deep sleeper; anyway when she woke up, she found herself wrapped up snugly in a canvas which covered her from chin to ankles, and which tied beneath the bed—”
“A restraining-sheet!” Jerry interrupted. “Like they use for alcoholics and psychotic patients.”
Baxter smiled and nodded gravely. “Then my friend Sam did what had to be done. The gag slipped a little, but there was nobody to hear her—or so he thought at the time. The whole thing took only a little over two hours. He placed an empty whiskey bottle by the head of the bed, a glass beside it, left all the lights blazing and tiptoed out. Taking the canvas with him, of course.”
“But how—?” Jerry cut in. Across the barroom he could see Concepcion tapping her little foot angrily, but he blew her a kiss and sent her another drink, turning back to the narrator. He gulped his drink. “Go on, man!”
“Well, he got into the borrowed coupe and drove back to the parking lot behind the theater, leaving the car almost where he had found it. Then he went on down the street to the plant, let himself in by the side entrance, and sat down at his desk. From a locked file he took an imposing sheaf of neatly-penciled manuscripts which he put in the Outgoing box for one of the secretaries to transcribe—it was copy for a sixteen-page booklet that was a week overdue, and certainly a good evening’s work. He had even provided himself with a lot of spoiled and crumpled sheets to half-fill the wastebasket, and with half a dozen cigar-butts and appropriate ashes and matchstubs to litter the ashtrays and the desk.
“It took him perhaps ten minutes to arrange the office so that anyone in the world would have sworn that he had been burning the midnight oil there all evening. He took a last look around, then turned out the lights and left by the front entrance, saying goodnight to the dozing watchman as he went out. Taking his own car, he drove sedately home, where began the last and most difficult phase. But his story was well worked out. He had come home and been surprised to find a light in his wife’s room. He had gone in to her, discovered her sad condition, and called an ambulance at once, then her doctor. There wasn’t the slightest doubt, the slightest question but that poor Martha had choked to death during a severe cardiac attack. The doctor had been treating her heart—it was all in the records. He signed the death certificate without a moment’s hesitation.”
Baxter beamed, and raised his glass.
“Wait a minute,” Jerry Waite protested. “That alibi—”
“That was just the sort of alibi that an innocent man would have,” the other pointed out. “Not that the police ever did more than make the most routine investigation, a bare formality because of the medical history. Sam confessed that he did have a few moments of sweating when he learned that a necking couple had been parked near the house during Martha’s last hours. But their statements helped rather than hindered, for they said that they had heard the unmistakable sounds of a loud drunken party, of women shrieking and laughing—”
“Laughing?”
“Oh, yes.” Baxter nodded. He smiled again, showing almost all his teeth. “I guess it’s time to tell you what was in that clipping Sam Durling carried so tenderly in his wallet. I can pretty near quote it from memory: ‘Chiloe, Chile (UP) Narciso Quesada and his married paramour Violeta Manaos Cerpa, confessed yesterday that they had killed her husband, Manuel Cerpa, by tickling him to death. The couple tied Cerpa to a table and tickled the soles of his feet with chicken feathers until he choked to death, police said, from laughing.’”
There was a long silence. “I’ll go to hell!” whispered Jerry Waite, almost reverently. “You mean to say that that could kill?”
The other nodded. “Perhaps some people are more ticklish than others, I don’t know. But it worked fine with Manuel Cerpa and with Sam’s wife, the only two times it’s been tried. At the inquest, the coroner and his jury decided that while Sam was faithfully slaving away at the cosmetics factory, his wife Martha had been carrying on with some unknown lover who drove a yellow coupe—the petting couple had noticed the car in the driveway, of course. The carousing and lovemaking had brought on a heart attack, maybe while the boyfriend was still there. It was hardly surprising that he never came forward. Sam, of course, was dutifully crushed and heartbroken at the funeral and after. Martha hadn’t made a will, so he inherited the business and everything. After a decent interval he sold it out for something over a million dollars after taxes, and started to make preparations for a trip abroad to forget his great sorrow…”
Concepcion, her bright-swathed hips swinging with feminine fury, went suddenly out of the bar, but Jerry Waite did not even notice her leaving. ‘‘And that’s all there is to it?” he demanded, still awed.
“Almost all,” said Baxter quietly. “When you write the story you ought to end it there, probably.” He was speaking with laborious precision, and had to grip the edge of the bar with both hands to steady himself. “Until one night—the last night Sam was ever to spend in that big house. He was peacefully asleep about four o’clock in the morning when there came a heavy hammering on the front door. Finally he got up and put on a dressing gown and went downstairs, to admit the police.”
“The police! But I thought you said—”
“Wait. In spite of anything he could say or do they took him away with them. They put him in a back room in an outlying station house and beat him with a rubber hose off and on for forty-eight hours.”
Jerry’s face went blank, and his eyes narrowed. “But then it isn’t the perfect murder!”
“Just a minute. He finally confessed, of course. A full confession. He repudiated it at the trial, and hired the best lawyers he could get, but the jury found him guilty without a recommendation for mercy, the judge pronounced the death sentence, and off he went to State’s prison. The appeals failed, and he sat in Death Row for what seemed like an eternity, and then one morning they came and got him and slit his trousers and shaved his head and dragged him down the hall to a Little Green Door…”
“And then?” Jerry prompted breathlessly.
“And then he woke up, of course—in his own bed at home. All of it had been a nightmare, after the time he dreamed he woke up and heard that hammering on the door. Call it conscience, call it what you will. But he told me he’d dreamed it several other times since then, with only minor variations on the theme. Once or twice he’s actually got as far as the electric chair itself, but he’s always awakened in time. Devilish real it was, though—at least as he described it.” Baxter shuddered. “So there’s the story of The Perfect Murder, my young friend. Shall we have another bottle of cognac?”
Jerry Waite thought he had had enough. “Perhaps we both have,” the other agreed. They went upstairs together, with Jerry steadying the other man. It turned out that Baxter’s suite was only a few doors down from Jerry’s, at the far end of the corridor.
“How about coming in for a nightcap?” the older man asked hopefully.
Jerry thanked him and said no.
“We could even play some gin rummy, maybe? Or some chess?”
“Not tonight, thanks.” Jerry turned toward his own room, but over his shoulder he could see Baxter struggling with his key, shoulders slumped. Jerry locked his door, slipped out of his clothes and threw himself raw on the bed, letting the softness of the little breeze from the Pacific cool his body.
“Perfect murder my eye,” he finally decided. “I don’t believe it. The old guy was lonesome, and he just wanted somebody to talk to and an excuse to stay up and drink himself blotto. But he was good—he almost had me believing it for a while.” Jerry turned over and was asleep in five minutes.
Something jerked him awake just before daylight, and he sat up in bed and cursed the parrots until he realized that this voice was no jungle fowl greeting the new day. It was a man somewhere here in the hotel, screaming as if he were being torn to pieces by the red-hot pincers of Torquemada’s inquisitors. It is usually a good idea to mind one’s own business in a foreign hotel at night, especially if like Jerry Waite you can speak only a few words of the language, but there are sounds no human ear can long endure.
He grabbed up a robe and ran out into the hall, joining the other guests who were excitedly gathering there. They moved uncertainly down the length of the hall, toward the door from behind which the hellish screams were coming.
Finally the manager appeared, a big blond Mexican with black trousers over his nightshirt, and after some fumbling with a ring of keys the door was opened, and they went in and woke up “Mr. Baxter” and he stopped screaming.
Jerry was foolishly reminded of the line in the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip—“Rollo, you brought it on yourself!’’ He couldn’t help wondering what would happen if someday the dream went on past the point where the executioner reached for the switch, but probably Baxter-Durling would always wake up just in time. That was the hell of it. Anyway, from one point of view you could still call it The Perfect Murder.
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: The hotel bar, the senorita, and the crashing bore who tied himself to the famous visiting writer are all real. Or were once. The gimmick—the press clipping of a murder by tickling is genuine. And it seemed to me that a man, not basically the murderer type, might be punished by his subconscious so that he received the punishment which the law missed. Sort of a death wish thing. The New England Conscience.