The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories

“He was going to call the police,” she said. “It was all because he insisted on getting everywhere early. His plane didn’t leave until six, and I planned to start driving him to the airport at five. But he was all packed and ready to go before four. I intended taking the station wagon, figuring I’d make some excuse if he asked why I wasn’t driving the Buick. But Lawrence tried to be helpful. Without my knowing what he intended doing, he went out to the garage at four o’clock and backed the convertible out for me.”

She paused to crush out her cigarette and light another. “When I heard the car start up, I rushed out back to stop him. I did get him to drive it back in the garage, but it was too late. He’d already noticed the damage. And he guessed at once what had caused it. He used to read every inch of both papers, so he knew the police were looking for a green Buick. He didn’t even ask me. He just looked at me in a horrified way and said, ‘Helena, you killed that old man.’”

She blew twin streams of smoke from her nostrils, creating a curious mental impression on me. With her immobile face and motionless body, the smoke issuing from her nostrils made her look like a carved oriental idol.

Tonelessly she went on, “There wasn’t any reasoning with him, Barney. He was the most self-righteous man who ever lived. It didn’t mean a thing to him that I might go to jail for months or years if I was discovered. I actually pleaded with him, but he was determined to phone the police. We have five phone extensions and one of them is in the garage. He marched over to it like an avenging angel and was dialing O when I picked up a wrench and hit him over the back of the head.”

I said huskily, “Why’d you wait until now to mention all this? Why not before we started for Chicago?”

“Because I wanted to make sure you’d help me get rid of the body,” she said serenely. “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to dispose of it myself. And you might have backed out of the whole deal if you’d known about Lawrence.”

“What makes you think I won’t anyway?” I asked. “I’m not an accessory to this yet. Suppose I just walk out?”

Helena yawned slightly. “Then I suppose I’d be caught. But I doubt that the police would believe you knew nothing about it. I’d tell them it was you who killed Lawrence, of course. And even if they didn’t believe me, they’d certainly never accept your story that you had nothing at all to do with it. Particularly after the motel proprietor identified you as the man who’d been with me.”

She was right, I knew. No cop would ever believe I’d transported a body three hundred miles without knowing it, or that the woman I was traveling with had kept it on ice in her bathtub for three days without my knowledge. I had to save Helena in order to save myself.

If it was possible to save either of us.

I didn’t waste any time upbraiding her. In the first place it wouldn’t have accomplished anything, and in the second place I didn’t think it would bother her in the least.

“Let’s go over to my cabin where I can think,” I said wearily.

I spent the next twenty minutes thinking, pacing up and down and chain smoking while Helena calmly watched me and sipped a highball. I had one straight shot myself. I would have preferred a highball, but I refused to use any more of Helena’s ice.

Finally I stopped pacing and faced her. “Look,” I said. “I think I’ve figured out how to get rid of him, but before we even discuss that, we’ve got to plan a story to cover you. When your husband doesn’t show up Monday, you’re going to have to act as a normal wife would. First phone his bank to ask if they’ve heard from him. Then on Tuesday wire convention headquarters in New York. They’ll wire back that he never showed, of course. Soon as you get that wire, you’ll have to phone the police and put on a worried wife act. Think you can manage all that?”

She nodded indifferently.

“Then the hard part will start. First the police will discover he never caught that plane, so they’ll know he disappeared in St. Louis...”

“I thought of that two minutes after I killed him,” Helena interrupted. “He’ll be listed on the flight.”

I stared at her. “How?”

“It was only four when all this happened,” she said. “By four twenty I had Lawrence stripped, his clothes hidden in the garage and his body in the car trunk. Then I went back inside, told Alice I wouldn’t be home for dinner after I took Mr. Powers to the airport, and she could go home. I also told her I intended driving up to my sister’s in Columbia the next morning, so she could take the week off. I had her out of the house by four thirty.”

“How’d that get your husband listed on the plane flight he was supposed to take?” I asked.

“I haven’t finished. As soon as Alice left I phoned Harry Cushman. He took a taxi to the house, picked up Lawrence’s ticket and plane reservation and went straight to the airport. He flew to New York under Lawrence’s name and took another plane back under a different name as soon as he arrived. When the police start looking for Lawrence, they’ll start looking in New York.”