The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mysteries!

In my official capacity I’ve escorted many men to state prison, each handcuffed to me during the train ride. Several of them have been murderers. This one was in that macabre category, and the thing that interested me was that I couldn’t imagine him killing anybody.

As a matter of fact, his was the goriest murder of all. He had taken a heavy meat knife and chopped his wife so thoroughly that she was buried like a mass of hamburger.

His name was Hervie Taylor. He looked as if he should be on his way to keep books in an electric appliance store. This was precisely the job he’d had. If you’d noticed him at all against that background you’d have felt instinctively that he would never go far. He was an excellent bookkeeper. This, coupled with his natural colorless attributes, kept him in his dim corner writing his careful rows of figures while the world went its laughing, crying, loving, brawling, lustrous way.

He was a considerate little man, doing his best to keep from being an inconvenient appendage attached to me by steel. Some of them can’t help worrying their hand against the handcuff. Others want water. A few try to bury our hands in the seat to hide the cuff. Last one I took up before Hervie Taylor had to go to the bathroom every five miles or so.

Hervie sat beside me watching the scenery stream past, beautiful farming country of low. Rolling hills and green meadows, white houses and red barns. In this, he was different from the others. There are several stock reactions. Hatred for the beauty of the countryside. Bitterness. Nostalgia. Inner torture, if the man being taken away had a masochistic streak. Even hope, in a few.

Hervie Taylor simply sat and looked at the scenery.

He was a man of fifty, small-boned and not given to excess flesh. He had brown hair that he wore neatly parted. The hair had faded a little, but there was no gray in it. His eyes were dark brown, keen and intelligent. You’d never guess his age — or his crime — simply by looking at him. There was still the suggestion of boyishness in his face. A lively eagerness in his eyes that the monotony and cares of the years had not altogether extinguished.

He was of course going up for life. Perhaps he was thinking about it, now that each click of the wheels carried him that much closer.

“Do they have good food?” he asked.

“Simple, but substantial,” I said.

“Not a lot of sticky, sickening stuff or creamed mess on toast, I guess.”

“You guess right,” I said.

“It was the only mess Jassie knew how to cook, wanted to cook, or cared to eat,” he announced.

Jassie was — had been his wife. You’ve seen couples like them, a little guy with a woman who had spread, flabbed, and grown to three times his size. There’d been a lot of Jassie to chop up.

“I lived with Jassie thirty years,” he said idly.

“That’s quite a time.”

“Jassie never should have strung it out,” he said. “She changed. Or perhaps I did. Or maybe it simply took me a long time to get to know her.”

He must have loved her once, I thought.

As if suspecting the thought, he said, “She was a cute kid when we got married. Only having a husband made her feel secure, I guess. She had a man. She didn’t need to fix up any longer. She let herself go to seed in a hurry.”

“Some women are like that.” Mentally, I added: Only you don’t kill them for it.

“We never had children,” he said. “We — ah — never did very much of the necessary prerequisite to having children. Jassie didn’t want them around. Too much trouble, she said. I wanted a gang of kids. So the wife and I could sort of grow up all over again with them. Fellow with kids has got a good excuse to do lots of stuff like pitch a baseball in the back yard or tinker with a bike or take in a circus and eat hot dogs. Jassie didn’t like any of that. She had to have a man who’d come in, cook supper, wash the dishes, and sit in the living room with her. Sometimes she started snoring on the couch — she had a wet, blubbery little snore. Still, she liked to have her husband sitting there with her. It was his place, she said.”

“Fellow like you,” I suggested, “should have become a Boy Scout troop advisor or had a Sunday School class of boys.”

He looked at me as if I weren’t very bright. “I tried both of those things. It made Jassie ill.”

“Ill?”

“Yes. She’d have to call the doctor. She wouldn’t get better until I had loaded the house with chocolate creams and was staying with her again.” He sighed. “It got worse as time went on. She’d time me from the house to the store and back again. If I missed my bus, I’d have to explain every minute I was late.”