The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Деминг Ричард
- Год: 2016
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- ISBN: 9781479423507
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
The idea of killing his sister came to him effortlessly and with no sense of shock. His sole emotional reaction was surprise that he’d never thought of it before.
Unfortunately Homer Withers discovered there was a vast gap between reaching a decision to kill and carrying out the decision. He didn’t discover this at once, however. That evening, as he prepared the hot chocolate he made for his sister each night, his plans took shape with remarkable ease.
Any plan as violent as strangulation was out of the question for the simple reason that Samantha was larger and stronger than he. Shooting or stabbing were ruled out because he had no desire to hang for Samantha’s murder. He toyed with the idea of staging a fatal accident but discarded it for the same reason he had discarded strangulation. He wasn’t at all sure that if he attempted to push Samantha out of a window or down a flight of stairs, he wouldn’t end up being the victim.
By the process of elimination he arrived at poison as the most practical means. A few minutes after he had carried Samantha’s hot chocolate into the front room, he knew how to administer the poison. He watched as she took a sip to test the temperature, then set the saucer on the floor and poured some of the chocolate into it from the cup.
Roger, Samantha’s cat, dropped from the window ledge, stalked majestically over to the saucer and sniffed at it. Roger licked tentatively, then sat down to wait for it to cool.
Homer decided that his sister took her chocolate so heavily sweetened it ought to disguise the taste of nearly any poison. It also occurred to him that her habit of sharing it with the cat presented a complication, but not a serious complication. Samantha liked her chocolate hot, while Roger preferred his cool; her cup always was empty before the cat lapped from the saucer.
He could simply wait until his sister had drunk the poison and died, then take the saucer away from Roger.
The next day Homer used his lunch hour for a visit to the public library, where he did some research on poisons. He decided on potassium cyanide for two reasons: it was quick and sure, and the death symptoms resembled those of a heart attack.
Up to this point his planning had proceeded without a hitch. He didn’t run into a snag until he attempted to obtain the poison.
In a vague way Homer supposed that the law established certain restrictions against the indiscriminate sale of poisons. He was quite prepared to be questioned about its intended use when he bought his cyanide, and he expected to be asked to sign a poison register of some kind. For this reason he went to a downtown drug store where he was unknown, intending to give a fictitious name.
However, he wasn’t prepared to encounter a blank wall.
The druggist, an affable middle-aged man, chuckled indulgently when Homer told him in a diffident voice that he would like some potassium cyanide to use as a rat poison.
“You can’t buy cyanide without a doctor’s prescription, mister,” he said. “You can’t buy any poison without a prescription. It’s a federal law. Here’s what you want for rats.”
He produced a small, round tin labeled: Rat Poison. Homer looked at it doubtfully. “Do I need a prescription for this too?”
The druggist shook his head with a smile. “You only need a prescription for poisonous drugs which might be taken internally by a human.”
“Mightn’t this be taken by a human?”
The druggist shrugged. “Sure. Might even kill him. But chances are he’d throw it up. Rat poison contains white phosphorus, which is a deadly poison, but difficult to keep down. It works on rats because they don’t know how to vomit. Anyway, the main reason for the federal law is to prevent murders. I guess they figure a suicide would find some way to kill himself even if he couldn’t get poison. You might commit suicide with this, if you managed to keep it down, but you’d have a hard time poisoning anybody on the sly. The first sip would burn so bad, they’d spit it out without swallowing.”
“I see,” Homer said. “How much?”
As he left the store with the small tin in his pocket, he felt thankful that the druggist had been so informative. The thought of Samantha tasting her hot chocolate, spitting it out and realizing he had meant to kill her, sent him into a cold sweat. She would be quite capable of forcing him to drink it.
A block from the drug store he took the tin from his pocket, looked at it ruefully and rolled it into a sewer opening.
Not being a very resourceful person, this incident brought Homer’s murder plan to a dead stop. Aside from purchasing it in a drug store, he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to obtain poison. Murder remained in his mind, but it ceased to be an active plan. He relapsed into his dream world, and except that he had a new fantasy to entertain him, his life went on much as it had before he ever thought of murder.
For twenty-five years Homer had held the title of “chief clerk” at the law firm of Marrow and Fanner, a designation which implied more prestige than the job actually involved. He was chief clerk because he was the only clerk; his real status was that of an exalted office boy.
Five days a week he did routine office work for the law partners, each Friday faithfully brought home his pay and handed over half of it to Samantha. What was left barely covered his expenses, including carfare and personal needs and the monthly insurance premium.
On the surface this routine continued, but secretly Homer began to live an entirely different life. By a sort of schizophrenic process he succeeded in imagining, whenever he was away from home, that the murder was an accomplished fact and that he now lived in carefree isolation. Riding the streetcar to and from work, he would plan how he meant to convert Samantha’s old room into a den, would mentally frame newspaper ads for a cleaning woman to “come in” once a week, and would wrestle with the problem of what he ought to prepare for dinner that night.
However, he carefully avoided losing himself in the fantasy as completely as he had the evening Samantha’s murder first occurred to him, for he had no desire to repeat the experience of being frightened into a near faint by seeing his sister’s ghost. Each evening, just as he reached the porch steps, he automatically returned to reality in time to greet his sister without surprise. The fantasy would then take a slight twist; instead of the murder being fait accompli it would become a deed planned for the next day.
But, of course, the next day never arrived.
It was within Homer’s capacity to live in reasonable contentment with this fluctuating dream for years without taking any positive action and he probably would have if Samantha herself hadn’t unsuspectingly furnished the impetus necessary to jar him into action.
Samantha developed a cold accompanied by a hacking cough which required the services of the family doctor. By the time Samantha let him go, it was past ten p.m. The local drug store was closed when Homer arrived with the prescriptions. The other two drug stores also were closed.
Homer didn’t work on Saturday and he went out again with the prescriptions immediately after breakfast. Idly he looked them over.
The doctor had written both before tearing them from the prescription pad, then had ripped them off together so that they were still attached to each other by the glued top edge. Apparently he had flipped one sheet too many after writing the first, for there was a blank prescription sheet between them.
The top one was a prescription for some kind of nose drops. The bottom read:
Tab codeine XXX TT ½ gr.
Sig one tab. Q 3 H.
Though he was unacquainted with pharmaceutical shorthand, Homer recognized the word “codeine” from his research on poisons. He couldn’t recall whether or not it was a dangerous drug, but he did remember that it was some kind of opiate. Simultaneously it dawned on him that he had a blank prescription sheet, and with the original as a model, it would be a simple matter to forge a duplicate.