I stood there, listening to him, wanting to get away, but his words hypnotized me the way a snake hypnotizes a rabbit.
“Do you know what the matter is with my wife?” he asked, leaning forward to stare at me. “I’ll tell you: she’s mad about money. That’s all she thinks about. If I hadn’t any money she wouldn’t stay ten minutes with me. Do you know what the first thing she wanted me to do as soon as we were married? She wanted me to take out an accident insurance policy. She got a man from an insurance company to talk to me. He tried to persuade me to take out a hundred thousand coverage. To stop her nagging me — and God! how she nagged! — I told her I had taken out the policy. She wouldn’t believe me until I showed her the signed policy, but she didn’t know I tore it up once she had seen it.” He showed his teeth in a bitter, snarling grin. “Do you know what happened then? We went to a party. I got a little high and she insisted on driving. Like a fool I let her. I went to sleep. Somewhere up the mountain road she stopped, got out of the car to talk to a pal of hers who had stalled his car right across the road. She set the parking brake or at least she said she did when the police questioned her. Anyway, the car rolled down the mountain side with me in it. It’s taken me a long time to figure that one out. Do you know what I think now? I think she wanted the hundred thousand dollar insurance pay-off more than she wanted me.”
“I don’t want to listen to any of this,” I said. “You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You could be right, Regan, but it’s a thought that’s now going round and round in my head. Now she’s found another lover I’ve got to watch out for myself. The man who stalled the car was a pal of hers. He could have been her lover. They could have cooked up the accident between them. There was a time the police thought so, only I was in love enough with her to tell them I had touched the parking brake. I believed in her then, but not now.”
I didn’t believe a word he had said, but I was glad he had sounded off. It made it that much easier for me to kill him.
“I’ll get along, Mr Delaney,” I said and started to move towards the verandah steps.
“Wait a moment,” he said: “about this set you’re making for me. Can you fix me up with a remote control gadget? I want to be able to turn the set on and off without wheeling this chair up to it every time I want to use it. Isn’t there some gadget I can have to operate the set from my chair?”
It was when he said that I suddenly saw in a flash how I could kill him.
A remote control unit was the answer.
All I had to do was to make the unit alive, and in his metal chair, the jolt of electricity stepped up by coming through the TV set would kill him as surely as if he were sitting in the electric chair!
I kept moving because I was scared if he saw the expression on my face he would know I was planning to kill him.
I said over my shoulder, “Yes, I can fix that for you, Mr Delaney.”
I went straight back to my cabin to examine this idea he had given me. I was pretty sure this was the solution to the problem I had been wrestling with last night: how to kill him and get away with it.
I realized now the only safe way to kill him was to make his death look like an accident.
Death by accidental electrocution was the answer. It had to look like an accident, so Sheriff Jefferson would be the one to handle the investigation. If it looked like murder, Jefferson would have to call in the Los Angeles police, and I wasn’t going to risk having those experts making an investigation.
It wouldn’t be difficult to fool an old man like Jefferson, but I didn’t kid myself I could fool Lieutenant John Boos of the LA Homicide Squad. I had met him once when I had worked in Los Angeles, and I knew him to be a hard, smart cop with a long string of murder arrests to his name. I had no intention of tangling with him.
The accidental electrocution idea was right, but there were some obvious snags I had to solve before I could put the plan into operation.
The first move was to complete the set I was building. So I went over to the shed I used as my workshop and started to build the set.
As I worked I thought of Gilda.
With every wire I soldered into place, with every valve I put into position, I told myself I was getting nearer to giving Gilda her freedom and beginning a new life with her.
I must have been out of my head, but that’s the way a man can act when he is in love with a woman just out of his reach as I was with Gilda.
II
First thing on Monday morning, I loaded the set onto the truck and drove over to Blue Jay cabin.
I hadn’t seen Gilda since Delaney had hit her, and I wasn’t anxious to see her. I had thought of her ceaselessly, but I didn’t want to meet her face to face until I had completed my plan. I was scared she might say something that would turn me away from the plan, and I was determined to go through with it if it was the last thing I did.
As I drove up towards the cabin, I saw her washing down the Buick.
I didn’t slow down.
She glanced around, and for a brief moment our eyes met, then I was past her.
Delaney was reading the newspaper. He looked up as he heard the truck and, dropping the paper, he wheeled himself to the rail of the verandah.
“Here it is, Mr Delaney,” I said, “as promised.”
“Nice work, Regan. What’s it like?”
“You can judge that for yourself,” I said and carried the loudspeaker up the steps and into the lounge.
It took me about half an hour to install the set, then I explained to Delaney how it operated.
As soon as I put an LP record on the turntable and turned up the volume, I could see the impact the reproduction made on him was what I had been sure it would be.
“Why, it’s like having a live orchestra in the room!”
What pleased him most was the remote control unit which I clipped to the arm of his chair. It was a small thing with three knobs: one to turn the set on and off, the other two to take care of the contrast and the volume.
When I had bought the control unit each knob had been heavily insulated with rubber caps. These I had removed together with the rubber backing so that its steel base now rested on the steel arm of Delaney’s chair.
Finally, after he had examined everything, tested everything and watched a short film on the TV, Delaney turned the set off, using the control unit, and he looked at me, his face animated.
“Some set! It’s a sale!”
“You have the best, Mr Delaney,” I said, my eyes on his hand, resting on the control unit.
Then he said something that showed me that luck was working on my side, “You don’t happen to know of a woman who would come out here and run the cabin, do you? This damned Mexican servant of ours isn’t coming any more. She says it’s too far for her to walk from the bus stop. She’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
The Mexican maid had been one of the major snags in my plan. I couldn’t have gone through with the plan that was now taking shape in my mind if there had been anyone else in the cabin at the time he died. Now the snag had suddenly ironed itself out.
“I’ll ask around, Mr Delaney, and if I hear of anyone, I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you and thanks again for the set. I’ll send you a cheque.”
He put his fingers on the knob of the control unit and turned on the TV.
It gave me a crazy sensation to see his fingers on that knob. If luck kept coming my way, on Friday when he did that, he would be a dead man.
I left him staring at the lighted screen and drove fast past the garage.
Gilda stood by the Buick, looking towards me. I half raised my hand, but I kept on. I didn’t look at her as I passed her. In the driving mirror I could see her, staring at me, obviously startled.