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I brought “Winner Takes All” to Bill Scott in February, 1959, with the title of “Money in the Family” on it. That struck me as an okay title, and still does, but the one Scottie put on it when he published it in the October, 1959 Trapped is sharper and more appropriate, and I have retained it here. By now I was doing a 10,000-worder for him for just about every issue, because things had become wobblier and wobblier for my regular science-fiction markets, one magazine after another shutting up shop. My ledger for the winter and spring of 1959 shows that I had begun to write quickie paperback novels with titles like Campus Love Club and Streets of Sin in order to keep the rent paid, and I was doing two, three, even four stories an issue for my beloved Trapped and Guilty. “Winner Takes All,” a Ray McKensie story, rolled together a number of the themes so typical of the two magazines: an unhappy marriage for money, murder, a crime gone awry.
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WINNER TAKES ALL
Twelve million dollars was a good reason for killing.
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Probably the one single great big mistake I made, that led to the trouble later, was to marry my cousin Elise. But at the same time, it seemed like a logical thing to do. After all, our grandfather had split his estate equally between us. If we married, we would reunite all that lovely money—twelve million shining dollars of it. So I married my cousin.
They say you aren’t supposed to marry first cousins, that it tends to perpetuate bad traits in the family line. Well, all that is true enough in a family that has a streak of insanity or hereditary haemophilia or something genetic like that. But the Prentiss family had a good health record. Nobody I spoke to advised against the marriage. The only tendency in the family, and I didn’t think it was hereditary, was a tendency to die young by violence.
You see my father, David Prentiss, committed suicide in 1931 when he was thirty and I was only two years old. He just couldn’t stand the Depression, according to his note—though the real story was that he was probably going to be indicted in some bond swindle. My mother, Gloria, was killed in an auto accident in 1943.
Over on Elise’s side of the family, her father, Charles Prentiss, my dad’s kid brother, died in a South American plane crash in 1950. His wife Laura took too many sleeping pills one day a year later. As for my father’s sister Elizabeth, she drowned off the beach in Atlantic City in 1938, a week before she was supposed to get married.
That efficiently wiped out a whole generation of the Prentiss family. There was still my grandfather, Mark Prentiss, the tough old patriarch who had built the family fortune and then outlived all three of his children. He died finally—of natural causes, let me add— in 1957, at the age of seventy-nine. He left about twelve million bucks. And there were only two heirs who divided the take equally—my cousin Elise and myself.
You might say that I could’ve been happy with a mere six million, that there wasn’t any need for me to marry Elise. But I didn’t think of it that way. For one thing, my grandfather had wanted it this way. He had called me to his bed a few hours before his death, and told me in so many words: “I don’t want to see the Prentiss fortune dispersed. Why don’t you marry Elise’s and found the family all over again?”
I wasn’t one to ignore a deathbed wish. Especially if the hook was baited with six million cookies.
–
At the time, I really didn’t know much about my cousin Elise. She had been raised and educated on the West Coast, and we had not met often: merely at one or two funerals, and at an occasional family dinner at my grandfather’s Long Island mansion. At the time of my grandfather’s death in 1957 I hadn’t seen Elise in over seven years.
I vaguely remembered a slim, rather plain girl of no particular grace or elegance. That impression was borne out when she flew in from Santa Barbara to attend our grandfather’s funeral.
She wasn’t plain, though. She was just downright ugly.
Let me make the picture clear. She was tall, nearly five feet eight, and extremely gaunt. Her cheekbones were sharp and edgy, thin arms seemed to be all elbows, and her eyes darted quickly around as the glances were tipped with knives. There was a trace of mustache above her upper lip. She was a somber, melancholy person as I suppose many women are if they have reached the age of twenty-seven without ever having known love.
No doubt I could’ve done better in a search for a wife if I had picked with my eyes closed. I had a considerable reputation as a man-about-women, you understand. My first experiences had come while I was an undergraduate at Princeton. I played on the varsity baseball team—I was too proud of my Prentiss nose to risk it in football—and I never went frustrated in the matter of women.
After college I served sometime in Korea, then—at my grandfather’s insistence—took a job in Wall Street. My income, from my salary and from my father’s small estate, was about $15,000 a year—enough to let me live comfortably enough. I maintained a bachelor apartment on the East Side, and a weekend home on Long Island on my grandfather’s land.
At the age of thirty, I was unmarried. I have never seen any reason to tie myself down permanently with a woman when it was so much more interesting and amusing to find a new partner every time I got bored with the old one.
But now I had a reason. A very good reason.
Six million dollars’ worth of reason.
Elise made arrangements to stay in New York for a while after Grandfather’s funeral. The will would have to be probated, and there would be other complications that would require her presence. She established herself in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria.
The day after the funeral, I invited her over to my apartment for cocktails and a discussion of our respective futures. The idea of marrying her was already firm in my mind. True, she was nothing much to look at, and probably she was utterly sexless, but I wasn’t worried about that. I knew I could find plenty of bed companionship elsewhere, and probably Elise would not object so long as I wasn’t obvious about it.
She showed up at my place wearing a gloomy black sheath of a dress clinging tightly to her skinny body. On a voluptuous woman, the dress would have been an eye-opener; on Elise it was a calamity. But I tried to overlook her lack of physical charms.
I mixed some martinis and poured them. Elise wandered around my place with a glass in her hand looking at the original paintings on the walls, the small Picasso sculpture.
“You have good taste, Ned. Did you furnish the apartment yourself?”
“People who have to call in interior decorators, Elise, are admitting their own helplessness. I furnished the whole place myself.”
She smiled, showing uneven pointed teeth. “That’s good. I approve of men who show independence of judgment and who have good taste in home furnishings.”
I could catch the innuendo. Elise was out to get me just as much as I was to snare her. Well, at least we had the same object in mind. It wouldn’t go badly if we were heading in one direction.
We had some more cocktails, and then we went out for dinner at a nearby French restaurant returning to my place around nine. We talked mostly about her. She lived in her parents’ home in Santa Barbara, alone except for a staff of servants. She had done a good deal of traveling—around the world twice, in fact—and, like many unattractive women, she had a keen, studious mind.
There was no mention in her conversation of any love affairs. She had inherited several hundred thousand from her parents, and lived off the income of that. She seemed as anxious to marry me as I was to hook her.
Naturally, neither of us brought up the matter directly. That wouldn’t have been tactful, only a day after Grandfather’s death. But we were educated people, and we knew how to get a point across without coming out to name it in the open. By the time, later that evening, that she gave me a cousinly peck on the cheek and stepped into the cab that would take her back to the Waldorf, we both knew that the matter had been settled:
We would marry as soon as decently possible, in view of the recent funeral.
–
As it turned out, we had to wait six months. By that time the will had cleared without difficulty, and we were each worth six million. After a month in New York, Elise flew back to California, with the understanding (always unspoken) that I would get in touch with her as I thought it proper.
In the meantime. I severed my business connections—when your worth six million, you can live comfortably on the interest of your interest—and spent my time having one final fling of bachelorhood. There was a long string of parties and of lovemaking.
I remember one party at which I made love to two different girls, four hours apart, taking them into a special bedroom whose door could be locked from within.
I sowed my last row of wild oats that winter, cutting a swath through New York’s daintiest, plumpest, pinkest, most bosomy girls. I knew there would be a substantial dry spell ahead of me before I could feel free to take a mistress.
At last, six months after the funeral, I phoned Elise long-distance, and in the course of a $200 phone call proposed to her, was accepted, and discussed certain financial arrangements. The next day, I flew to California. We were married in a civil ceremony at San Luis Obispo on the following Saturday.
We arranged to keep all our various homes, except for my grandfather’s mansion, which was an enormous nineteenth century relic for which we had no need. We could keep the Santa Barbara home for our West Coast visits, keep my apartment in Manhattan for trips to New York, and build a new home on half my grandfather’s land on Long Island, selling the rest of it. We also agreed to merge our various property and put into joint ownership, with the entire amount going to the survivor of us.
And so we made certain that the Prentiss tradition of violent death would be continued for another generation. At the time of marriage I had no thoughts in my head about murdering Elise. Maybe she had no plans for murdering me, either.
All that came later, perhaps.
–
We took a three-month honeymoon, beginning with a few weeks in Cuernavaca, after spending our wedding night in a small hotel near Santa Barbara. As I expected Elise was a virgin, and—also as expected—she had no great interest in sex. She tolerated my advances without enthusiasm. She lay in my arms like a wax doll, cool to the touch.
Like any honeymooners, we made love rather frequently at first, but Elise soon found subtle excuses for avoiding the marital act, and it was obvious that she would just as well do without it altogether.
By the time we returned from our three-month tour of Mexico and South America, we were making love no more frequently than a pair of seventy-year-olds. And Elise made it clear that she would prefer not only separate beds but separate bedrooms, wherever we were to live.
I didn’t mind that. I had known right from the start that she was going to be frigid. But I was worth six million dollars, and I would inherit six million more if my wife happened to predecease me, and that fact could make up for any amount of frigidity in Elise.
I began to look for love, for lovers.
So did Elise. I didn’t know that, then. And I wouldn’t have believed it even if she had told me to my face that she was deceiving me. Elise, sleeping with another man? Impossible, I would have snorted. Elise was as sexless as the Statue of Liberty. It was plausible enough that I would be cheating, but Elise—? No, that was beyond credibility.
Except that it was true. And at the same time she was plotting my murder.
We were getting plenty of newspaper publicity, of course. It’s always news when a man worth twelve million dollars dies, and it’s even bigger news when the only two heirs marry each other.
It was a little embarrassing at first to see our pictures splashed all over the tabloids and the gossip magazines, but we were both accustomed to it, since the newspapers had played us up big when we were children and our parents had died in their variously violent ways. And I knew that wherever we went, people were glancing after us and whispering, “Those are the apprentice Prentiss heirs. Twelve million dollars!”
With that sort of publicity, we couldn’t help but be surrounded by people who wanted to be our friends in hopes that we would entertain them lavishly.
We gave some extravagant parties in our Manhattan apartment, and in our country place after it was built, and we had an entirely different set of friends on the West Coast who gathered at our Santa Barbara place when we were there.
Popular as we were, surrounded by eager companions, it was no problem for me to find a mistress. The only problem was to pick out the right one from among the bevy of girls.
–
I finally chose my first post-marital mistress just about seven months after our marriage. By that time Elise and I had practically slipped into a brother-sister relationship. We slept in separate bedrooms, and I went to her room only when I felt an urgent and uncontrollable need. At such times, Elise would receive me more-or-less willingly. She never came to my bedroom of her accord though.
She was a studious woman, as I said, and she was making some sort of collection of rare books and medieval manuscripts. I took only a passing interest in what she was doing. She was spending big money on her hobby, sometimes as much as $50,000 for a single book, but I never made any objection. For one thing, our investments were doing well and our wealth was increasing faster than we could spend it. For another half the money was really hers, and I had no right to object to her spending it, so long as she didn’t simply squander it. And buying rare books is not squandering; there are few better investments nowadays.
Anyway, it seemed that she had to go to California to consult some experts at the Huntington library in Pasadena. The Pasadena trip came up suddenly, while we were in residence in New York. I was in the middle of a complicated scheme for bond-pyramiding that required my personal attention, and I didn’t want to leave for the West Coast. We had just returned from a stay in California five weeks before.
“You don’t mind if I go alone, do you, darling?” Elise asked me. “I won’t be gone more than a week, at most. You can take care of yourself can’t you?”
“I’ll manage,” I told her. “You go browse around the old manuscripts, and I’ll hold the fort here.”
She left the next day. I was too busy to see her off at the airport.
But I realized that for the first time since our marriage I was completely alone. Free to do whatever I wanted, for a week. A bachelor again.
What better time to begin an affair?
I had picked the girl already. Her name was Janice Tyler; she came from a distinguished but unfortunately no longer wealthy New Jersey family, an older brother, killed during the Korean War, had been my roommate during our junior year at Princeton. She had come to visit him there one weekend, an awkward, half-grown girl of thirteen.
But ten years had changed her. Now, at twenty-three, she was a cat-like creature with tawny, pantherish grace and a splendid body. She had come to pay us a visit after our return from our honeymoon. “I read about you in the papers, and I remember having met you once at Princeton,” was her gambit. “You were my brother’s roommate.”
I could see from the beginning what she was after in coming to renew acquaintance with me. She had been married briefly, at nineteen, divorced at twenty under scandalous circumstances—her husband at fault I believe.
A beautiful girl of twenty-three who had been divorced and whose family has little wealth but high social standing is a perfect candidate for mistresshood. She is no longer considered eligible for marriage, having neither wealth nor an untarnished reputation, and girls like that generally prefer making a successful liaison with someone of wealth to making an unsuccessful marriage with someone of low social standing.
Janice, then was ideal. I was attracted to her at once. She had everything Elise lacked: fire, sparkle, beauty, passion. And I could afford to overlook the fact that she had no money.
The night Elise left, I phoned Janice. She lived by herself in a studio apartment in Greenwich Village, working in some sort of editorial post on a woman’s fashion magazine.
“Free tonight?” I asked her.
“I could be,” she replied cautiously. “Anything interesting doing?”
“That depends on you. My wife left for California this afternoon. She won’t be back for about a week or so.”
“Oh,” Janice said. There was a world of subtle meaning in that simple syllable.
“I’m giving a small party at my place tonight,” I told her. “Very small.”
“How small?”
“One guest. If she’s willing to accept.”
“Might you be referring to me?”
“I might.”
“What time should I come?” she asked
–
She showed up at ten minutes after eight. I had been waiting for her arrival with uncontrollable impatience. It had been months since I had made love to anybody but Elise, and more than a week since I had last gone into Elise’s bedroom. I felt like a champion bull waiting to be put out to stud.
Everything was in readiness. The champagne, the hors d’oeuvres, the soft music. We had no sleepover servants in the apartment, and I knew that the butler and the maid would be discreet if they came across any souvenirs of Janice’s visit the next day.
The evening swam wonderfully along. Janice was wearing a low-cut gown that revealed her creamy breasts, and it had been so long since I had fondled a woman’s bosom—Elise was flat as a board—that I nearly fell upon her the moment she slipped off her wrap. But I controlled myself.
We drank and listened to music, and danced a little, and talked of mutual friends and of Elise’s passion for old manuscripts. And then, as smoothly and as naturally as though I had hired her for the night, we went into the bedroom and made love.
She was splendid. Apparently she had been taught by skilful masters in the three years since her divorce because she responded with ardor and spectacular talent. Her body had the fine, tense muscles of a superb athlete, but there was nothing muscular about her; the strength lay beneath the smooth golden skin. She was like a wonderful cat in her emotions, in her grace, even in her purr of contentment afterward.
She stayed the entire night, leaving shortly before dawn, and the next day I had orchids sent to her apartment. The implication would be clear to her, I was sure: I had enjoyed her performance, and hoped for her frequent companionship.
I saw Janice frequently during the rest of my week of bachelorhood. Unfortunately, Elise returned on schedule, and that put a temporary crimp in things. But not for long, though. There were ways of arranging things with Janice. She came at my beck and call, whenever Elise turned her back. The servants, of course, were pledged to silence by healthy bonuses.
I managed to see Janice several times a week, at her place or at mine. And, of course, she regularly attended the parties we gave, coming alone or with some escort. In public, naturally, we gave no hint of her status.
I sent her gifts surreptitiously. She had only to suggest it, and it was hers. The mink stole, the flame-red Jaguar, the sapphire—she had the best. She knew what I was worth, after all, and from her point of view our relationship made sense only so long as it was worth her while. For by reserving her time for me, she was damaging what slim chances she still had in the matrimonial sweepstakes.
Gossip travels. Perhaps Elise didn’t know, but others soon guessed. There were sly smiles. Unavoidably, there were certain confidantes. There was no doubt that Janice was the mistress of some wealthy New Yorker and I guess suspicion just naturally fell on me.
Elise made no objections. If she knew at all, she gave no sign. She was increasingly cooperative, absenting herself for whole weekends at a time to inspect manuscripts in Boston or Philadelphia; she even flew to London by herself, leaving me to blessed weeks with Janice.
There were interruptions, of course. We paid our regular visits to Santa Barbara, and it was impossible for Janice to follow me across the country. For the sake of form, too, Elise and I had to take vacations together; we spent a month in the Mediterranean countries, and I sent longing postcards back to Janice (never signing my name, of course—but she knew who they were from).
It was a pleasant enough arrangement. My wife gave me no trouble, my mistress was charming and beautiful and adoring, and I had all the money I could possibly spend. For nearly a year after the beginning of my affair with Janice, matters drifted along smoothly and without any hitches.
And then I discovered that Janice had higher ambitions than to be my mistress for an indefinite period. She had her heart set firmly on becoming, sooner or later, the second Mrs. Ned Prentiss.
But there was an obstacle in her way: Elise.
–
The truth came out one afternoon in early spring. Elise had gone to Harvard to consult with an authority on mediaeval literature, and Janice was at my apartment. We had made love, and afterward Janice lay curled on the rug in a provocative position, while I sat near her and contemplatively eyed the lush curves of her flanks and breasts and buttocks.
We had had a few drinks and by this time Janice knew me well enough to be extremely frank in conversation.
She said “Do you plan to stay married to Elise forever, darling?”
I sat up startled. Janice rarely if ever talked about Elise.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” Janice rolled over, stretching coyly. “You don’t love her. You probably never did. Do you love me?”
“Of course.”
“Wouldn’t you like to be married to me? To spend every night with me, instead of having to hide and duck like this?”
“It might take some of the fascination out of our affair if we made it legal,” I said, and there was more than a shred of truth in my words.
Janice pouted prettily. “If that’s the way you feel about it—”
I drained my glass. “I was only teasing. But aren’t you happy this way?”
“Some. I’d be happier if I didn’t have to worry about Elise. Then we could travel, do things together openly, no more subterfuges—”
I shrugged. “Elise is worth six million dollars, all of which becomes mine on her death. It’s ridiculous to divorce six million dollars.”
“Don’t you have enough money as it is?”
“One never has enough,” I said with a light smile. “With Elise’s money I could build castles—purchase islands—”
“But do you expect her to die in the next forty years? She isn’t even thirty yet. And she seems to be in perfectly good health.”
“She is, dammit,” I said. “Her kind can live to be a hundred. The thin, wiry kind.”
“There you are!” Janice exclaimed. “You said it yourself. You won’t think of divorce because of all the money you’ll inherit when she dies, but you don’t expect her to die for centuries. And in the meanwhile we can’t get married.
“Don’t you see the flaw in your argument, darling? You may never inherit. Unless Elise dies suddenly, I mean. But that’s improbable—another Prentiss tragedy, after what happened to your parents and hers—”
I shook my head gently. The discussion was beginning to bore me. I held out my hands.
“Let’s not think about morbid things, sweetheart. Come to me.”
But in the days that followed, I began to think increasingly of morbid things. Janice’s little conversation had awakened me to the realities of the situation, and had put some brand new ideas in my head.
I saw now that I had been living in a fool’s paradise. I had married Elise for her money, nothing else. But I couldn’t really call her money my own until she was dead, and with her lean, rugged constitution she might well live to be a thousand. I might wait forever to cash in on my marriage—and in the meanwhile, youth and Janice, would slip away from me.
And I realized that I genuinely loved Janice. If it hadn’t been for Elise’s money, I would have married Janice at once.
I was in a dilemma: so long as Elise lived, I was not free to marry Janice. And Elise would probably outlast me, on the basis of mere expectancy. I could divorce her, marry Janice, and forfeit Elise’s money—or I could remain married to Elise, living in perpetual hope of inheriting the other half of the Prentiss fortune, and gradually lose Janice.
Perhaps, I thought, Elise would be good enough to oblige me by getting herself killed. Hardly a month went by without her taking a plane flight somewhere; it was the only way she would travel, even for short hops down to Philadelphia or up to Boston. Nowadays, plane transport was reasonably safe. But there are always a few crashes, even today, and I hoped faintly that someday Elise might be on board one. It was, I knew, improbable; fate had already dealt our family so many accidental deaths that the law of averages virtually protected Elise and myself.
As for murdering Elise—well, that thought never occurred to me then. I thought it was sufficiently shocking that I would wish my wife’s death in an airplane crash. But murder? Surely that was going a little too far, I thought. No matter how convenient it would be to have Elise die in the near future, I could never bring myself to carry out the act myself.
Or so I thought, in my innocence. It had never occurred to me that perhaps Elise, too, might be waiting for my death—and might not be so scrupulous as I was about arranging it herself.
I shrugged the first attempt off as a mere fluke. It happened at our Long Island place. We had bought a new car, a Bentley, and Elise wanted to take it out for a spin in the countryside. I went down to the garage with her and waited on the driveway while Elise sat in the car, letting it warm up, and studying the unfamiliar dashboard.
A few minutes passed, and then she called out to me.
“Ned, would you come here for a moment? I’m having some trouble.”
I trotted toward the garage, and when I was about ten yards from it the Bentley came roaring out, straight at me, like a shot from a cannon. I don’t know what jungle-inherited reflex made me jump aside. But I did, getting off to the left just in time. The car struck me a glancing blow on the hip, knocking me down, and came to a halt about fifty feet further up the driveway.
Elise came running toward me. Her face was pale. “Ned, are you alright?”
“Just—just a little shaken up,” I said, getting to my feet. My whole right side ached, and I was going to be sore for a week, but nothing seemed broken. “What on earth happened, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. I thought it was in neutral, and then I touched something and it came spurting out like that—oh, hold me, Ned!”
I held her thin body against my own. She was shaking uncontrollably, and at the time I thought it was simply a nervous reaction at how close she had come to killing me. But her anguish was really disappointment. I had been lucky, that was all.
The next incident happened three weeks later. We were in Santa Barbara, as it happened. We had stayed up late entertaining some of Elise’s friends. I saw Elise to her bedroom around two-thirty. Retiring to my own room, I spent some time scribbling a note to Janice. Putting it in an envelope, I sealed it, slapped an airmail stamp on it, and tiptoed through the house to place it in the mailbox in our front yard, where it would be picked up around dawn before Elise might happen to notice it.
The letter safely mailed, I returned to the house and began to tiptoe upstairs. Suddenly I realized Elise was standing at the top of the landing looking like a ghost in her pale nightgown.
“Still up? I thought—”
There was an enormous explosion and I heard plaster shatter just behind my right shoulder. It was like being back in Korea again. I dropped automatically, and as I rolled down the stairs she blazed away twice more in the darkness.
“Elise! For the love of Mike, it’s me!” I shouted, crouching behind the banister. I was shaking all over. “Put the damn cannon down!”
Well, the police came, and half the town was awakened and Elise had hysterics. I guess I explained five hundred times that night that we each had guns in our bedrooms, and that I had gone out to mail a letter and Elise had mistaken me for a prowler. It was logical enough. And Elise’s hysterics seem genuine. The incident never even made the papers; some well-placed cash took care of that.
It was the second near-miss in a month, though. If Elise’s aim had been a little better there would have been another Prentiss planted in the family mausoleum. I had let the Bentley incident slide by. And this could be explained away legitimately too. But I was beginning to get worried. Just beginning. I was naïve, and then.
–
The third time left me with little doubt. Elise was after 100% of the Prentiss money.
It was at a yacht party aboard a boat belonging to a friend of ours, Mack Johnstone. We were having some cocktails on deck. There were seven or eight of us there, including Elise and various friends.
One of the friends was a chap named Dick Laurence, a tall, Ivy League sort of fellow of about twenty-seven, who had gone to college with Elise and later drifted to New York, and had been moving in our general social circle.
Janice had been invited to the party, too, but she had begged off; she found it uncomfortable to be in small groups that included Elise.
I was standing near the bow, looking out into Long Island Sound and not paying much attention to what was going on. Behind me, a lot of drinking and laughing was taking place. Dick Lawrence had been in the Navy, and he was doing a comic Captain Bligh routine, fooling around with the yacht’s rigging.
Sheer blind luck saved me. I bent down to tie my shoelace. I heard a scream and looked up just in time to see the massive boom pass through the air where my head had been.
It seemed Dick Lawrence had accidentally released it. If I hadn’t bent at just the right moment, I would have been clubbed in the back of the neck and probably killed instantly by the blow, as well as being knocked overboard to certain drowning
The incident took most of the wind out of me. I was sick over the bow, and green in the face for most of the day. Dick Lawrence fell all over himself to apologize for his clumsiness. He was nearly in tears. He certainly put on a convincing act.
I didn’t connect it, at the moment, with Elise. She had been on deck, but nowhere near Dick at the time the boom came loose. I was shaky because this was the third time in less than two months that I had nearly made the obituary columns, but I didn’t fully suspect my wife—yet.
Two days later, though, Janice gave me a bit of news that supplied the clincher.
“I got a bit of gossip for you,” she said, grinning devilishly.
“Juicy gossip?”
“The juiciest. Brace yourself.”
“I’m braced.”
“No, I mean sit down. This will shake you.”
I went along with the gag and sat down. I glanced expectantly at her. “Well?”
“Your wife’s got a lover,” she said calmly.
I felt as though I had been hit by a flying boom. “What?”
She nodded smugly. “I’ve got it on the best authority. Can’t name the source, but you remember two weeks ago when she was supposed to be in Boston browsing around musty old libraries? Well, she wasn’t really there. She was seen in Miami with Dick Lawrence. Do they have any manuscript collections in Miami?”
I was glad I was sitting down. I felt a cold sweat break out all over me.
“With—Dick—Lawrence?” I said in a tiny, quivering voice.
“That’s what I said. Why, what’s the matter, Ned? You look absolutely demolished! It can’t be that improbable that Elise should have a secret life!”
I shook my head. It wasn’t the fact that she was deceiving me that upset me so much. It was unlikely, but you never can tell about some women. Surely by now she knew that I was carrying on with Janice, and I certainly couldn’t condemn her for taking a lover herself.
What really rocked me was the name of her lover. Elise had failed twice to kill me, with the car and with the gun. The third time, she had kept her distance, but it had been Dick Lawrence who lowered the boom.
The situation was clear. Elise wanted to get me out of the way, fast. And now she had a cohort who could help in concocting little “accidents” for me.
I had been lucky three times. But my luck couldn’t hold out forever. In that moment I realized I had no choice. I had to murder Elise, in self-defense as much as anything else. I had to get her before she got me.
–
It requires a certain change in your entire set of mental attitudes when you first make up your mind that you must kill your wife. Until the actual moment of the crime, of course there are certain cordialities that must be continued: Smiles at the dinner table, things like that. It takes a good actor to pose as a loving husband while plotting murder within. It takes a superb actor to pose as a husband who loves a wife he knows would like to see him dead.
I was not a superb actor, or even a very good one, but I did my best to keep up a pretense of domestic harmony while waiting for my chance to murder Elise. I had few moral scruples about the act I planned. After all, it was not as though I was murdering her only for her money, though I couldn’t deny that that was a major aspect. But basically I was murdering her to save my life, even if I might never be able to convince a court of it.
During the next week I took the trouble of engaging a private detective to follow my wife around. Elise had planned several major trips—there was a book auction in Chicago, she said, and rarities that she wanted to inspect in the library of the University of Minnesota. She no longer even bothered to ask me if I cared to accompany her on these trips.
I had her shadowed, and the report was that she had, indeed, gone to Chicago for the book auction—but that she had met there a young man named Lawrence, and spent with him the time that she was supposedly putting in at Minnesota.
It was definite, then—not hearsay. Elise had a lover. And evidently she was determined to get rid of me and marry him.
I paid the private detective and sent him on his way. I tried to figure out why Elise, who seemed so passionless, so neuter, would ever trouble to have an affair.
The only answer that seemed sensible was that this Dick Lawrence was an adventurer who was interested in Elise’s money, and for the sake of that money was willing to pretend that Elise was Aphrodite incarnate to him. No woman, no matter how plain, no matter how neuter, can fail to respond to expert flattery from a good-looking man younger than she is, especially if she already knows that her husband has been frequently unfaithful to her.
Now that I understood the psychology of Elise’s actions, I was ready to start seriously thinking about how I was going to kill her. I knew I did not have much time. Sooner or later, if I waited long enough, Elise and her lover would think up some new way of disposing of me—and this time there would be no miscalculations.
–
Luck rode with me. It was late summer by this time, the dog-days of August. Normally we spent as little time as possible around New York during August, because of the sticky humidity, but there was some important book sale the following week that Elise wanted to attend at a New York gallery, and so she was here.
It was a blazingly hot weekday morning. We were out at our Long Island place, and we were operating with a skeleton staff of servants. That operated in my favor: the fewer possible witnesses, the better.
Elise said, “I think I’ll take a swim. It’s too hot even to think.”
“Fine. I’ll join you.”
“I’ll meet you at the pool,” she said.
I got slowly into my swimsuit and took a quick look around the house, making sure the maid was elsewhere and the butler had really gone into town to make some purchases. The gardener and the chauffeur were off today.
The pool was in the back of the house, surrounded by a concrete walkway. As I came out I saw Elise, an absurdly boyish figure in her swimsuit, readying herself for a graceful dive. Elise was an excellent swimmer. My throat was dry. My pulse pounded. This, I thought, was a perfect moment.
She arched into the water; I saw her thin legs slip under the blue, and a moment later she bobbed up, shaking her head like a skinny seal.
“Come on in, Ned! It’s wonderful!”
“Right with you,” I called.
I came slowly to the edge of the pool and looked around. The coast was clear. I knelt by the poolside and pretended to be examining something at the rim of the pool.
“Come here for a minute, will you?” I said. “Have a look at this.”
Obediently, suspecting nothing, Elise swam over. She reached the side of the pool and hovered there, treading water and looking up at me.
“Well? What is it?”
“You’ll have to come closer.”
She did so, and as she came within reach I caught her by the back of her head and cracked her forehead sharply against the tiled rim of the pool, enough to stun her if not to render her completely unconscious.
I felt her go limp. Holding her shoulders, I gently thrust her down until the top of her head was several inches below the surface of the water. Her hair, floating free, drifted upward to the surface. I held her there for a long moment, glancing around just in case one of the servants should pick this minute to come round back.
No one came.
Bubbles drifted up from below for a few moments. Then the bubbles ceased.
I released my light grip on her shoulders. She glided down through the clear light-blue water and came to rest at the bottom of the pool.
She seemed to be sleeping.
The next part was the worst of all. An inflated rubber mattress lay near the edge of the pool, and I stretched out on it, face down, closing my eyes, and pretended to be taking a nap in the warm morning sun. This was very important. I could not move. I had to be able to say I had been asleep while she drowned.
I wasn’t sure how long I would have to wait until she was beyond the help of possible artificial respiration, but certainly fifteen minutes would be more than enough. I counted the seconds off silently to myself: thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three.
Fifteen tortuous minutes crept by. Then, opening my eyes, I glanced at my wristwatch. My count had been good; it was seventeen minutes since I had pushed her under. I yawned, stretched, rose sleepily to my feet.
“Elise? Gosh, I had a good nap. Think I’ll get some swimming in now. Elise? Where are you, Elise?” I called in feigned alarm.
I peered over the edge of the pool. There she was; she had risen a little but she was still beneath the surface, floating limply, face-down.
“Elise! My God, Elise!” I screamed.
Carefully remembering to keep my wristwatch on—I was supposed to be panicky, after all—I leaped into the pool, hauled her out, threw her down on the rubber mattress. Her skin was cold, clammy to the touch.
Crouching over her, I began administering artificial respiration. At the same time, I yelled loudly several times for the servants. They came on a run, the maid, and the butler who had returned from town by this time. They looked horror-stricken.
“Get a doctor,” I jabbered. “An ambulance. Get the police, too. I think Mrs. Prentiss has drowned!”
They ran hurriedly into the house, while I continued to administer treatment to my poor Elise. Shortly afterward, cars began arriving—police, doctors, reporters, half the town. I stood by numbly while they worked over Elise—in vain—with pulmotors. Inwardly I was calm, but I contrived to appear the picture of the dazed, grief-stricken husband. I babbled out my story over and over again.
“Sleeping on that mattress...didn’t hear a thing...she must have hit her head...woke up and found her lying on the bottom...”
After an hour of fruitless work, Elise was pronounced dead. For most of that time I had half-dreaded that they might succeed in reviving her, and she would rise from death to accuse me. But nothing of the sort took place. She was thoroughly dead.
The coroner’s report followed quickly. They had discovered the bruise on her forehead, and they reconstructed the drowning about as I wanted them to: the late Mrs. Prentiss had struck her head against the side of the pool, perhaps while diving, and had gone under without an outcry that might have awakened her sleeping husband. Death had been by drowning.
The newspapers naturally had a picnic with the story. ANOTHER PRENTISS TRAGEDY, they trumpeted. They dug out the old cuts of my parents and Elise’s, and painstakingly traced each violent death in our family, with special attention to the drowning of my Aunt Elizabeth in 1938. They had made much of me as The Last of The Prentisses, sole heir to a multi-million dollar fortune.
One of the papers dug up a photo of me at the age of fourteen, standing dazedly next to the wreckage of the auto in which my mother had killed herself after a drinking bout, and ran it next to a snap-shot of me standing apparently stunned with grief above Elise’s blanket-wrapped corpse.
It all went off very well. When an intelligent man puts his mind to a project seriously, he can usually succeed—even if the project is the murder of his wife.
–
A week after the funeral, I flew to Canada, where I sometimes rented a little hunting lodge. I told people I simply wanted to get away from society for a while, until the tragedy had lost its impact for me.
I stayed there a month. Janice joined me after the first week. It was a highly agreeable month.
We returned to New York separately. I had plenty of business to attend to. Elise’s will named me as sole heir, which was no great surprise—we had drawn up our wills together, shortly after our marriage, naming each other as only heir.
There was plenty of complicated red tape involved in the formal transfer of Elise’s possessions to my sole ownership. It was a nuisance, but a necessary one, and at least the various bookkeeping changes were complete. The goal I had worked for ever since my grandfather’s death had been accomplished. I was the master of the Prentiss millions. At the age of thirty. I was set for life. It was a pleasant prospect.
In November I married Janice. It was only three months since Elise’s death, which scandalized some people, but the idle rich are always doing scandalous things, and nobody objected too strenuously. We honeymooned in the Virgin Islands and Haiti, returning to New York in April after several months at my Santa Barbara property.
We were splendidly happy. Janice was radiant in her new role as Mrs. Ned Prentiss, and as my wife she was no less voluptuous than she had been as my mistress. With Elise safely in her grave and Janice legally installed in my bed, I had no troubles at all in the world. For those six months between November and April I might have been the happiest man on Earth.
A week after our return to New York, Janice suggested we drive out to the Long Island place. I had closed it up after Elise’s death, and it would take a week’s notice to get the servants together and have them make the place ready to inhabit.
I told that to Janice. But she was insistent. “Let’s go out there anyway, shall we? Just for the drive. It’s such a lovely spring day!”
She was beautiful, and so was the day, and I was easily persuaded. We drove out there in her little Jaguar, with Janice behind the wheel, the windows rolled down all the way, the spring air whistling about our heads.
When we reached the place, I was a little surprised to see another car pulled up in the driveway. It was a car I didn’t recognize—a Chevrolet several years old. Frowning, I said to Janice as we drove up, “Who on Earth could that be? Everyone knows this place is closed up.”
She didn’t answer. She pulled her car up right alongside the other in our wide driveway. A tall young man got out of the other car.
He was Dick Lawrence.
I hadn’t seen him since before Elise’s death. He had not even come to the funeral. I couldn’t imagine what he might be doing out here today.
We got out of our car. Lawrence came toward us. He glanced at Janice and said simply, “You’re late. It’s half past two.”
“I couldn’t help it,” she replied. “He didn’t want to come, for a while. And then there was lots of traffic on the road.”
I looked at them, bewildered. “What have you two cooked up? A surprise party?”
Lawrence smiled strangely. “You might call it that, Prentiss. Yes. A surprise party.”
There was something about his tone of voice that troubled me.
“What’s this all about?” I demanded. I didn’t feel any need to be polite to someone who, after all, had been my late wife’s lover.
Lawrence smirked. “Should we tell him?”
“Might as well,” Janice said.
Lawrence said, “You’re going to do Jan and me a tremendous favor, Prentiss. You’re going to die and leave her all your money.”
“I’m—what—”
Janice said, “Dick and I have been in love for years, Ned. Practically ever since he first came East. But he didn’t have any money, you see, and neither did I—but you and Elise did. So we decided to get friendly, me with you and Dick with Elise.”
“And you cooperated by killing Elise,” Lawrence went on. “That leaves only you between us and the money, old man. And we damned well have to get you out of the way, don’t you see?”
I saw. I saw plenty. I started to dive back into the Jaguar, but before I could get the door open Lawrence said, “You’d better not do that,” and there was a little gun in his hand.
I straightened up. Cold sweat broke out all over me. “What are you going to do—just shoot me down?”
“Not unless you make us do something as crude as that.”
I looked at Janice. “This is all some kind of practical joke, isn’t it? Well, I don’t think it’s very funny.
“It’s no joke, Ned.”
“No—joke?”
She shook her head. “Dick made love to Elise and I made love to you, and we each tried to talk our partners into murder. Either Elise would murder you and we’d murder Elise or you would get her. Which is what happened. Now we get you, and I inherit all your money.”
My jaw sagged. The devils had planned it all so carefully—manipulating Elise and me like chessmen, goading us to murder, waiting to dispose of the survivor and cash in! It was the most hellish thing I had ever heard.
“All right,” Lawrence said. “I think we’ve done about enough talking.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“You’re going to get into the Jaguar with the windows closed and the engine running. You’re just going to sit there and let the carbon monoxide fumes run into your lungs. I’m going to stand outside and watch. If you make the slightest phony move—Like trying to start the car, or pulling down windows—I’ll use the gun and think up a story later.”
He held the gun on me while Janice thrust me into the Jag, rolled up the windows, turned on the engine. I began to quiver with fright. Lawrence stood outside, arms folded, the gun in one hand. If I made an attempt to save myself, he could easily put a bullet through the windshield. That would be suicide for me. The only thing I could do was wait, and hope against hope that some rescuer would arrive.
Minutes passed. The odorless gas was rapidly entering the car. I was getting dizzy. I could see them standing outside, tense-faced and anxious, waiting for me to die. And then they could drive away and leave me. Tomorrow Janice might report me missing. There would be a search. I would be found in the car out here, dead. ANOTHER PRENTISS TRAGEDY, the newspapers would scream. And the last. Janice would inherit.
My thoughts became blurred. I smiled ironically. If only I had been content! If only I hadn’t wanted Elise’s money too! But I had, these two adventurers had wanted my money, and now—
Dying.
Why won’t help come?
Too—late
Can’t—breathe—
Starting—to—black—out—
Can’t keep head upright. Through the windshield—Janice and Lawrence—no longer nervous. Laughing, now. A hell of a way for a millionaire to die.
I hear Elise’s ghostly laughter.
Then everything goes black.