On Mr. Porterfield’s other side was Janice Cowan, perhaps the most prominent book editor in the mystery field. For years she had moved from one important publishing house to another, and at each of them she had her own private imprint. “A Jan Cowan Novel of Suspense” was a good guarantee of literary excellence, whoever happened to be Miss Cowan’s employer that year.
After the last of the panelists had been introduced, a thin, weedy man in a dark suit passed quickly among the group with a beverage tray, then scurried off the stage. Mavis Mallory took a sip of her drink, something colorless in a stemmed glass, and leaned toward the microphone. “What Happens Next?” she intoned. “That’s the title of our little discussion tonight, and it’s a suitable title for a discussion on this occasion. A credo of Mallory’s Mystery Magazine has always been that our sort of fiction is only effective insofar as the reader cares deeply what happens next, what takes place on the page he or she has yet to read. Tonight, though, we are here to discuss what happens next in mystery and suspense fiction. What trends have reached their peaks, and what trends are swelling just beyond the horizon.”
She cleared her throat, took another sip of her drink. “Has the tough private eye passed his prime? Is the lineal descendant of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe just a tedious outmoded macho sap?” She paused to smile pleasantly at Bart Halloran, who glowered back at her. “Conversely, has the American reader lost interest forever in the mannered English mystery? Are we ready to bid adieu to the body in the library, or—” she paused for an amiable nod at the slightly cockeyed Miss Trill “—the corpse in the formal gardens?
“Is the mystery, if you’ll pardon the expression, dead as a literary genre? One of our number—” and a cheerless smile for Professor Porterfield “—would have us all turn to writing Love’s Saccharine Savagery and Penny Wyse, Stockyard Nurse. Is the mystery bookshop, a store specializing in our brand of fiction, an idea whose time has come—and gone? And what do book publishers have to say on this subject? One of our number has worked for so many of them; she should be unusually qualified to comment.”
Mavis certainly had the full attention of her fellow panelists. Now, to make sure she held the attention of the audience as well, she leaned forward, a particularly arresting move given the nature of the strapless, backless black number she was more or less wearing. Her hands tightened on the microphone.
“Please help me give our panel members full attention,” she said, “as we turn the page to find out—” she paused dramatically “—What Happens Next!”
What happened next was that the lights went out. All of them, all at once, with a great crackling noise of electrical failure. Somebody screamed, and then so did somebody else, and then screaming became kind of popular. A shot rang out. There were more screams, and then another shot, and then everybody was shouting at once, and then some lights came on.
Guess who was dead.
That was Friday night. Tuesday afternoon, Haig was sitting back in his chair on his side of our huge old partners’ desk. He didn’t have his feet up—I’d broken him of that habit—but I could see he wanted to. Instead he contented himself with taking a pipe apart and putting it back together again. He had tried smoking pipes, thinking it a good mannerism for a detective, but it never took, so now he fiddles with them. It looks pretty dumb, but it’s better than putting his feet up on the desk.
“I don’t suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here,” he said.
They weren’t wondering. They all knew, all of the panelists from the other night, plus two old friends of ours, a cop named Gregorio who wears clothes that could never be purchased on a policeman’s salary, and another cop named Seidenwall, who wears clothes that could. They knew they’d been gathered together to watch Leo Haig pull a rabbit out of a hat, and it was going to be a neat trick because it looked as though he didn’t even have the hat.
“We’re here to clear up the mysterious circumstances of the death of Mavis Mallory. All of you assembled here, except for the two gentlemen of the law, had a motive for her murder. All of you had the opportunity. All of you thus exist under a cloud of suspicion. As a result, you should all be happy to learn that you have nothing to fear from my investigation. Mavis Mallory committed suicide.”
“Suicide!” Gregorio exploded. “I’ve heard you make some ridiculous statements in your time, but that one grabs the gateau. You have the nerve to sit there like a toad on a lily pad and tell me the redheaded dame killed herself?”
“Nerve?” Haig mused. “Is nerve ever required to tell the truth?”
“Truth? You wouldn’t recognize the truth if it dove into one of your fish tanks and swam around eating up all the brine shrimp. The Mallory woman got hit by everything short of tactical nuclear weapons. There were two bullets in her from different guns. She had a wavy-bladed knife stuck in her back and a short dagger in her chest, or maybe it was the other way around. The back of her skull was dented by a blow from a blunt instrument. There was enough rat poison in her system to put the Pied Piper out of business, and there were traces of curare, a South American arrow poison, in her martini glass. Did I leave something out?”
“Her heart had stopped beating,” Haig said.
“Is that a fact? If you ask me, it had its reasons. And you sit there and call it suicide. That’s some suicide.”
Haig sat there and breathed, in and out, in and out, in the relaxed, connected breathing rhythm that Lori Schneiderman had taught him. Meanwhile they all watched him, and I in turn watched them. We had them arranged just the way they’d been on the panel, with Detective Vincent Gregorio sitting in the middle where Mavis Mallory had been. Reading left to right, I was looking at Bart Halloran, Dorothea Trill, Darrell Crenna, Gregorio, Lotte Benzler, Austin Porterfield, and Janice Cowan. Detective Wallace Seidenwall sat behind the others, sort of off to the side and next to the wall. If this were novel length I’d say what each of them was wearing and who scowled and who looked interested, but Haig says there’s not enough plot here for a novel and that you have to be more concise in short stories, so just figure they were all feeling about the way you’d feel if you were sitting around watching a fat little detective practice rhythmic breathing.
“Some suicide,” Haig said. “Indeed. Some years ago a reporter went to a remote county in Texas to investigate the death of a man who’d been trying to expose irregularities in election procedures. The coroner had recorded the death as suicide, and the reporter checked the autopsy and discovered that the deceased had been shot six times in the back with a high-powered rifle. He confronted the coroner with this fact and demanded to know how the man had dared call the death suicide.
“ ‘Yep,’ drawled the coroner. ‘Worst case of suicide I ever saw in my life.’ “
Gregorio just stared at him.
“So it is with Miss Mallory,” Haig continued. “Hers is the worst case of suicide in my experience. Miss Mallory was helplessly under the influence of her own unconscious death urge. She came to me, knowing that she was being drawn toward death, and yet she had not the slightest impulse to gain protection. She wished only that I contract to investigate her demise and see to its resolution. She deliberately assembled seven persons who had reason to rejoice in her death, and enacted a little drama in front of an audience. She—”
“Six persons,” Gregorio said, gesturing to the three on either side of him. “Unless you’re counting her, or unless all of a sudden I got to be a suspect.”
Haig rang a little bell on his desk top, and that was Wong Fat’s cue to usher in a skinny guy in a dark suit. “Mr. Abner Jenks,” Haig announced. “Former editor of Mallory’s Mystery Magazine, demoted to slush reader and part-time assistant.”
“He passed the drinks,” Dorothea Trill remembered. “So that’s how she got the rat poison.”
“I certainly didn’t poison her,” Jenks whined. “Nor did I shoot her or stab her or hit her over the head or—”
Haig held up a hand. There was a pipe stem in it, but
it still silenced everybody. “You all had motives,” he said. “None of you intended to act on them. None of you planned to make an attempt on Miss Mallory’s life. Yet thought is creative and Mavis Mallory’s thoughts were powerful. Some people attract money to them, or love, or fame. Miss Mallory attracted violent death.”
“You’re making a big deal out of nothing,” Gregorio said. “You’re saying she wanted to die, and that’s fine, but it’s still a crime to give her a hand with it, and that’s what every single one of them did. What’s that movie, something about the Orient Express, and they all stab the guy? That’s what we got here, and I think what I gotta do is book ’em all on a conspiracy charge.”
“That would be the act of a witling,” Haig said. “First of all, there was no conspiracy. Perhaps more important, there was no murder.”
“Just a suicide.”
“Precisely,” said Haig. Huff. “In a real sense, all death is suicide. As long as a man’s life urge is stronger than his death urge, he is immortal and invulnerable. Once the balance shifts, he has an unbreakable appointment in Samarra. But Miss Mallory’s death is suicide in a much stricter sense of the word. No one else tried to kill her, and no one else succeeded. She unquestionably created her own death.”
“And shot herself?” Gregorio demanded. “And stuck knives in herself, and bopped herself over the head? And—”
“No,” Haig said. Huff. “I could tell you that she drew the bullets and knives to herself by the force of her thoughts, but I would be wasting my—” huff! “—breath. The point is metaphysical, and in the present context immaterial. The bullets were not aimed at her, nor did they kill her. Neither did the stabbings, the blow to the head, the poison.”
“Then what did?”
“The stopping of her heart.”
“Well, that’s what kills everyone,” Gregorio said, as if explaining something to a child. “That’s how you know someone’s dead. The heart stops.”
Haig sighed heavily, and I don’t know if it was circular breathing or resignation. Then he started telling them how it happened.
“Miss Mallory’s death urge created a powerful impulse toward violence,” he said. “All seven of you, the six panelists and Mr. Jenks, had motives for killing the woman. But you are not murderous people, and you had no intention of committing acts of violence. Quite without conscious intent, you found yourselves bringing weapons to the Town Hall event. Perhaps you thought to display them to an audience of mystery fans. Perhaps you felt a need for a self-defense capability. It hardly matters what went through your minds.
“All of you, as I said, had reason to hate Miss Mallory. In addition, each of you had reason to hate one or more of your fellow panel members. Miss Benzler and Mr. Crenna are rival booksellers; their cordial loathing for one another is legendary. Mr. Halloran was romantically involved with the panel’s female members, while Mr. Porterfield and Mr. Jenks were briefly, uh, closeted together in friendship. Miss Trill had been very harshly dealt with in some writings of Mr. Porterfield. Miss Cowan had bought books by Mr. Halloran and Miss Trill, then left the books stranded when she moved on to another employer. I could go on, but what’s the point? Each and every one of you may be said to have had a sound desire to murder each and every one of your fellows, but in the ordinary course of things nothing would have come of any of these desires. We all commit dozens of mental murders a day, yet few of us ever dream of acting on any of them.”
“I’m sure there’s a point to this,” Austin Porterfield said.
“Indeed there is, sir, and I am fast approaching it. Miss Mallory leaned forward, grasping her microphone, pausing for full dramatic value, and the lights went out. And it was then that knives and guns and blunt instruments and poison came into play.”
The office lights dimmed as Wong Fat operated a wall switch. There was a sharp intake of breath, although the room didn’t get all that dark, and there was a balancing huff from Haig. “The room went dark,” he said. “That was Miss Mallory’s doing. She chose the moment, not just unconsciously, but with knowing purpose. She wanted to make a dramatic point, and she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.
“As soon as those lights went out, everyone’s murderous impulses, already stirred up by Mavis Mallory’s death urge, were immeasurably augmented. Mr. Crenna drew a Malayan kris and moved to stab it into the heart of his competitor, Miss Benzler. At the same time, Miss Benzler drew a poniard of her own and circled around to direct it at Mr. Crenna’s back. Neither could see. Neither was well oriented. And Mavis Mallory’s unconscious death urge drew both blades to her own body, even as it drew the bullet Mr. Porterfield meant for Mr. Jenks, the deadly blow Mr. Halloran meant for Cowan, the bullet Miss Cowan intended for Miss Trill, and the curare Miss Trill had meant to place in Mr. Halloran’s glass.
“Curare, incidentally, works only if introduced into the bloodstream; it would have been quite ineffective if ingested. The rat poison Miss Mallory did ingest was warfarin, which would ultimately have caused her death by internal bleeding; it was in the glass when Abner Jenks served it to her.”
“Then Jenks tried to kill her,” Gregorio said.
Haig shook his head. “Jenks did not put the poison in the glass,” he said. “Miss Lotte Benzler had placed the poison in the glass before Miss Mallory picked it up.”
“Then Miss Benzler—”
“Was not trying to kill Miss Mallory either,” Haig said, “because she placed the poison in the glass she intended to take for herself. She had previously ingested a massive dose of Vitamin K, a coagulant which is the standard antidote for warfarin, and intended to survive a phony murder attempt on stage, both to publicize The Murder Store and to discredit her competitor, Mr. Crenna. At the time, of course, she’d had no conscious intention of sticking a poniard into the same Mr. Crenna, the very poniard that wound up in Miss Mallory.”
“You’re saying they all tried to kill each other,” Gregorio said. “And they all killed her instead.”
“But they didn’t succeed.”
“They didn’t? How do you figure that? She’s dead as a bent doornail.”
“She was already dead.”
“How?”
“Dead of electrocution,” Haig told him. “Mavis Mallory put out all the lights in Town Hall by short-circuiting the microphone. She got more than she bargained for, although in a sense it was precisely what she’d bargained for. In the course of shorting out the building’s electrical system, she herself was subjected to an electrical charge that induced immediate and permanent cardiac arrest. The warfarin had not yet had time to begin inducing fatal internal bleeding. The knives and bullets pierced the skin of a woman who was already dead. The bludgeon crushed a dead woman’s skull. Miss Mallory killed herself.”
Wong Fat brought the lights up. Gregorio blinked at the brightness. “That’s a pretty uncertain way to do yourself in,” he said. “It’s not like she had her foot in a pail of water. You don’t necessarily get a shock shorting out a line that way, and the shock’s not necessarily a fatal one.”
“The woman did not consciously plan her own death,” Haig told him. “An official verdict of suicide would be of dubious validity. Accidental death, I suppose, is what the certificate would properly read.” He huffed mightily. “Accidental death! As that Texas sheriff would say, it’s quite the worst case of accidental death I’ve ever witnessed.”
And that’s what it went down as, accidental death. No charges were ever pressed against any of the seven, although it drove Gregorio crazy that they all walked out of there untouched. But what could you get them for? Mutilating a corpse? It would be hard to prove who did what, and it would be even harder to prove that they’d been trying to kill each other. As far as Haig was concerned, they were all acting under the influence of Mavis Mallory’s death urge, and were only faintly responsible for their actions.
“The woman was ready to die, Chip,” he said, “and die she did. She wanted me to solve her death and I’ve solved it, I trust to
the satisfaction of the lawyers for her estate. And you’ve got a good case to write up. It won’t make a novel, and there’s not nearly enough sex in it to satisfy the book-buying public, but I shouldn’t wonder that it will make a good short story. Perhaps for Mallory’s Mystery Magazine, or a publication of equal stature.”
He stood up. “I’m going uptown,” he announced, “to get rebirthed. I suggest you come along. I think Wolfe must have been a devotee of rebirthing, and Archie as well.”
I asked him how he figured that.
“Rebirthing reverses the aging process,” he explained. “How else do you suppose the great detectives manage to endure for generations without getting a day older? Archie Goodwin was a brash young man in Fer-de-lance in nineteen thirty-four. He was still the same youthful wisenheimer forty years later. I told you once, Chip, that your association with me would make it possible for you to remain eighteen years old forever. Now it seems that I can lead you not only to the immortality of ink and paper but to genuine physical immortality. If you and I work to purge ourselves of the effects of birth trauma, and if we use our breath to cleanse our cells, and if we stamp out deathist thoughts once and forever—”
“Huh,” I said. But wouldn’t you know it? It came out huff.
As Dark as Christmas Gets
It was 9:54 in the morning when I got to the little bookshop on West Fifty-sixth Street. Before I went to work for Leo Haig I probably wouldn’t have bothered to look at my watch, if I was even wearing one in the first place, and the best I’d have been able to say was it was around ten o’clock. But Haig wanted me to be his legs and eyes, and sometimes his ears, nose, and throat, and if he was going to play in Nero Wolfe’s league, that meant I had to turn into Archie Goodwin, for Pete’s sake, noticing everything and getting the details right and reporting conversations verbatim.
Well, forget that last part. My memory’s getting better—Haig’s right about that part—but what follows won’t be word for word, because all I am is a human being. If you want a tape recorder, buy one.