Her eyes lighted up like those of a child who catches her first glimpse of the Carnaval parade. “Vraiment?” she asked joyfully. “You are not joking, Gaston?”
He shook his head, smiling at her tenderly.
She kissed him with even more passionate gusto than usual. Gaston returned her caress.
That was the exact moment when the curious cinema-like scenes of his life mentioned earlier in this chronicle began to flash with incredible speed before his inward eye.
Suddenly, violently, he wrenched his lips from hers and with agonized intensity whispered, “Where did you get the lipstick you are now wearing, Henriette?”
She attempted to resume their kiss. “In your pocket,” she said, “when I hung up your jacket just now. The sample of Petal Pink you brought me. Why? Does it taste funny?” She giggled.
His arms tightened around her as the first dreadful strictures began. “It tastes like death,” he said.
But she was no longer listening.
9 from 12 Leaves 3
by Steve O’Connell
To make a club extremely exclusive, curtail its membership. This may be accomplished by destroying those individuals found to be in excess, a method that has much in its favor: (1) The members ousted in this way won’t complain. (2) A refund of paid dues will riot be requested.
“The conclusion is inescapable,” Albert Florian said. “Someone in this club has been murdering its members.”
Which one of you two — besides me — has been murdering members of this club, I wondered fretfully.
“When we organized in 1946, there were a round dozen of us,” Florian said. “For thirteen years we met annually on the twentieth day of October. But now we discover that within the space of one year nine of our members have met with fatal accidents.” He regarded Gerald Evans and me rather severely. “I believe that we all agree that this looks a bit suspicious.”
Evans and I nodded.
We three were in one of the private dining rooms at Blutow’s on Sixth Street for our annual meeting. This year one of the restaurant’s smallest rooms proved adequate.
Florian ticked off the fatalities. “Carson, Abnernathy, and Terwilliger met with automobile accidents.”
I had arranged two of those. Carson and Abernathy both had homes at the tops of hills with delightfully suitable winding and precipitous roads leading to their bases. A simple adjustment upon the steering apparatus of their respective automobiles and they descended neatly and quickly from garage to eternity.
But who had disposed of Terwilliger? It was a puzzler indeed.
“Phelps fell or jumped from the roof of a ten story building.”
Do you realize how few — if any — windows of modern air-conditioned buildings are actually meant to be opened? I had to carry Phelps all the way to the roof before I could dispose of him. I suffered an excruciating backache for weeks.
“Schaller was electrocuted when his radio fell into his bathtub.”
Now that could have been an accident. However I know that Schaller had no use for tubs. He was a shower man.
“Wentworth accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun.” Florian shook his head slowly. “But we all know that he was deathly afraid of firearms and would never allow any of them in his home.”
My plans had called for him to fall off a cliff near his house. Really a beautiful view.
“Llewellyn walked into a train.”
Not my work.
“Naison was struck on the top of the head by a rivet as he took his constitutional past an apartment building under construction.” Florian showed teeth. “It was dusk and no work was at the moment in progress, but nevertheless the only conclusion the police could come to was that it was an accident.”
I wondered how that had been done. Did the murderer lurk high in the scaffolding, rivet poised between thumb and forefinger, waiting for the appropriate moment?
“And Dodsworth fell off the dock at his summer cottage and drowned.”
A direct crib from my plans, I thought indignantly. I too knew that Dodsworth couldn’t swim.
Florian pointed to the unopened magnum in a place of honor in the center of the table. “Now obviously our club members were not eliminated in order to gain possession of that bottle.”
Obviously not.
In 1946, all twelve of us were junior officers on the cruiser Spokane — united by our reserve status among the trade school boys and the prospect of impending discharge from active service.
It followed that we should gather together for a misty party of farewell before we scattered to various parts of the States. As the evening became wetter, our regrets at the possibility of our never seeing each other again became unendurable and the inevitable annual reunion was suggested.
The bourbon was excellent and the suggestion blossomed until we found ourselves in the throes of a Last Man Club.
The terms were the usual. The last survivor of our group would have the honor of drinking our duly dedicated bottle of champagne in lonely grandeur. Providing, of course, that his stomach had not so aged that the feat was impossible. And we chose a centrally located city as our meeting ground.
If we had left it at that, presumably most, if not all of us, would have been alive to attend our fourteenth meeting.
However, we realized that time has a tendency to alter one’s economic status, possibly for the worse, and so each one of us contributed five hundred dollars of our accrued pay toward a fund to be used to defray travel expenses for those of us who might need it.
A formal agreement Was drafted which stipulated that besides the champagne, the last survivor would also inherit what remained of the fund.
If anything did remain.
And that specifically accounted, for the present depleted state of our club.
At the suggestion of Terwilliger, an investment man, who could not tolerate the idea of idle money, our six thousand dollars had been invested.
Terwilliger had chosen stocks in an insignificant little oil company.
The company is no longer insignificant and the shares were now worth almost a million dollars.
Florian regarded me for a moment. “I rather suspect that you’re the murderer, Henry. You’re the only Harvard man among us.”
“It’s remarkable that the police haven’t gotten suspicious,” Evans said.
Evans fancies himself an artist; I’ve seen some of his paintings and while I am not a master of judgment in matters aesthetic, I do reflect that he is indeed fortunate that he does not have to pursue art for a living. He boasts of an inheritance.
“These ‘accidents,’ ” Florian said, “occurred in widely separated points of this country. Evidently no one but us knows that there is a connecting link between them all.”
“Why don’t we call them to the attention of the authorities?” I suggested. Naturally I wasn’t serious. But I was interested in seeing which one of them would object.
“That could present some difficulties,” Florian said. “Suppose the heirs of the nine untimely deceased went to court, claiming that in the course of normal longevity they might eventually have gained possession of the million. It could lead to an anarchy of lawsuits.”
“Couldn’t we just call this whole thing quits?” Evans asked. “Dissolve the club and divide the fund three ways?”
Florian is a lawyer. He shook his head gloomily. “As a labor of love, I made the provisions of our club absolutely iron-clad. In the event we dissolved the club, the fund would go to the Yale Alumni Society.”
I shuddered. That stipulation had been entered without my knowledge. “Then must we all wait to be murdered? A chilling prospect!”