Rocket to the Morgue Read online

  “Uh huh.” Marshall looked not too happy. “The last time I was mixed up in a case with Catholic religious clews, the goddamnedest things happened I’ve ever heard of in the history of homicide. Since then life’s been peaceful. Just nice ordinary routine restful murders. And now this rosary crops up . . .”

  Leona rose. “It’s been swell having a few minutes’ rest. Thanks, Terence. And now I’ve got to finish getting dinner ready. The Duncans’ll be here any minute.

  Lieutenant Marshall held his daughter in one arm and put the other around his wife. “I love you,” he said.

  “Which of us?”

  “Both of you. And Terry too.” He jerked his head toward the next room. “Is he asleep?”

  “Probably not.” Leona leaned over and made a face at the baby, who appreciated it. Then she put her lips firmly and warmly against her husband’s. “I’m lucky,” she said.

  While Leona bustled competently about the kitchen, Terence Marshall assembled whisky and soda and glasses on a tray. He glanced at the clock and at the door, and then settled down for a moment with Dudley Fitts’ latest volume of translations from the Greek Anthology. Occasionally he referred to his worn volume of the original and nodded with pleasure at the translation.

  It had been agreeable, in the cool walks of Oxford, for Rhodes Scholar Marshall to speculate on the possibilities of continuing the scholarly life—the contemplation of chaste and ordered beauty, the strict rigor and infinite flexibility of the scholastic mind. Then had come his chance acquaintance with young Southey and his introduction, through Assistant Commissioner Southey, to the methodical wonders of Scotland Yard.

  Here, he realized, in the police work so damned and scorned by the man in the street, was the one perfect career for the individual who combined good will, a well-trained mind, and a body which had brought him All-America honors for two years running. And he had succeeded in the career, though only by dint of keeping his mind and his good will as much under wraps as possible. If any of the boys were to see him now, his eyes coursing over Greek minuscules and his lips curved in quiet contentment, nothing but the fear of his athletic prowess could prevent mayhem.

  The doorbell rang, and he set the Greek Anthology aside.

  “Be there in a minute,” Leona called from the kitchen.

  Lieutenant Marshall opened the door to admit the Duncans. He had met them on the Harrigan case (that case of the Nine Times Nine in which “the goddamnedest things happened” and through which he had met the amazing nun whose name he had given his daughter), and their hesitant and confused romance had been the one note of happiness in that murderous business.

  Six months of marriage had changed them. Concha (Maria de la Concepción, to give the full name bestowed on her by her Spanish mother) was no longer a frightened and groping child, but a young woman beginning to feel for the first time sure of her place in life. And Matt Duncan was losing his bitter touchiness and slowly becoming willing to admit that people sometimes did like him and might even mean well by him.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Matt said. “Believe it or not, we were waiting for a streetcar.”

  Concha nodded. “And we have, by the latest statistics, the coldest corner in Los Angeles to wait on. I’m frozen.”

  “Until you’re twenty-one,” said Lieutenant Marshall, “I am strictly violating the California law by giving you a drink; but that makes it medicinal. I don’t think I’ll report myself.”

  Concha handed her host her coat and accepted a highball. “If we only had a car . . .” she murmured.

  Matt Duncan downed a quick straight one and refilled his glass. “If Stuart likes this novel I’m working on, we’ll see what can be arranged. Though if we get into the war, God knows if they’ll be selling cars. Or novels either.”

  “If?” said Marshall quietly.

  “Only I don’t see,” Concha insisted, “why we have to wait for any old novel. If you’d only—”

  Matt set down his glass. “Look. We are not going into that again.”

  “I only said—”

  “Let it go.”

  Marshall grinned. “Children . . . !” he said chidingly.

  Matt Duncan turned to him. “Terence, I like the touching story of your marriage. Arresting a girl in a vice-squad raid on a burleycue, and proposing to her while she was serving her jail sentence. You were a smart man to marry a woman with no money of her own.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’m certain neither Terry nor Ursula would object too strongly to having a mother who was an heiress.”

  “And it isn’t my own,” Concha argued. “It’s ours now, and why you shouldn’t use it to buy a car if you wanted to—”

  “Mary!” Matt’s voice was quietly grim.

  Concha shuddered. “You’re going to have to shelter me, Lieutenant. He never uses my real name unless he’s mad as anything.”

  “And I’ve got a right to be mad. Here I—”

  Terence Marshall sighed relief as his wife came in.

  “I won’t ask you do you want to see the children sleeping,” she greeted the guests, “because you’ve always been such perfect lambs about it that I feel you ought to be let off for once. And besides dinner’s ready.”

  The Duncans looked pleased at both announcements.

  “I want you to do me a favor, Concha,” said Lieutenant Marshall as he served seconds of the rabbit.

  “Do it,” Matt advised his wife. ‘There isn’t any favor could repay Leona’s cooking.”

  “I’m jealous,” Concha pouted. “What I cook he just sits down and eats and never says anything about. Only maybe that’s just as well . . . What’s the favor, Lieutenant?”

  “I do wish you’d get around to calling me Terence. I hate to seem official off-duty. But this is an official favor at that. I need Sister Ursula’s advice on something, and I want you to drive out to the convent with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Hell, I don’t quite know. But I can invade the Stately Mansions of the Rich with the greatest aplomb, and I can even manage not to look too out of place in a queer dive; but the one place in the city of Los Angeles where I feel like a peculiarly sore thumb is that convent. Come along and hold my hand.”

  “On one condition: Leona has to give me the recipe for this rabbit.”

  “Fair enough. Mind if I steal your wife tomorrow afternoon, Matt?”

  “He won’t even notice. He’s in labor with a fantasy novel.”

  “Oh. More rabbit, Matt? Sympathetic magic for fertility?”

  Matt Duncan looked up startled and brooding. “Thanks. Look, Terence. From all your experience, what is the one safe and certain way of committing murder?”

  “At an offhand guess, the only sure way I know is to take your victim to Washington. I think it’s fifteen years now since the capital police got a conviction on murder. Would that fit your plans? Only of course if it was a woman they could get you on the Mann act. I suppose murder is an immoral purpose.”

  “It’s a man,” said Matt darkly. “A male at least.”

  “Fun,” observed Leona. “We have murder at the dinner table all the time, but it’s always after the fact. This is a new approach. Who’s the victim?”

  “My darling dearest Hilary. Hilary St. John Foulkes, to you.”

  “Foulkes?”

  “The only son and heir of the late great Fowler Foulkes, whose demise is mourned by none so much as by the poor bastards who have anything to do with his son.”

  “But who is Fowler Foulkes?” Leona asked.

  Marshall laughed. “My wife! She loves mysteries, but get her on the truly important matters of reading . . . Hell yes, I grew up on the Dr. Derringer stories, and there’s never been anything to touch them. Sacred, that’s what they are. But why murder Hilary?”

  “Meet him,” said Matt. “Just meet him once. That’s all. You don’t need any extra motives. In fact, I haven’t even got that far, and look at me.”

  “Murder in the absolute and altrui
stic?”

  “Not quite. But what’s your recommendation on method?”

  “Introduce me to him some time and I’ll diagnose. You’ve got to pick the method for the individual. Artistry in Crime; that’s the Marshall motto.”

  “Let them talk,” Concha conceded tolerantly. “But Leona, about this rabbit—”

  “Oh yes. It’s simple as anything, that’s the nice part of it. Have your rabbit all cut up and jointed and put in a baking pan. Over it you slice up onions and green pepper and salt pork, and sprinkle it with paprika. No salt, remember; the pork takes care of that.”

  “Our wives can exchange recipes far more easily than we can,” Marshall went on to Matt. “Murder doesn’t reduce itself to formula so readily. You have to grasp the inexorably right but fleeting instant.”

  “Pour a cup of boiling water over it and bake it in a medium oven for an hour (that’s usually enough) or maybe an hour and a half. About half way through you can take off some of the liquid; the rabbit sort of melts. And make your gravy with that and what’s left in the pan when you’re through.”

  “That’s the easiest way to cook rabbit I ever heard of, and” Concha set down the bone she had been gnawing and wiped her fingers, “far and away the best. Got a pencil, Matt?”

  Matt fumbled for his pencil and looked across at the Lieutenant. “About that murder, Terence. You think I’m kidding, don’t you?” His smile was set and harsh.

  2.

  With lightning decision Captain Comet switched off the televisor and pressed the synchrosynthetic seleni-chromium mesh on his space-tanned wrist.

  Adam Fink, the androgynous robot, clanked into the room.

  “Quick!” snapped the lithe but brawny Captain. “The Centauri III is even now leaving the space port with a cargo of contraband xurghil weed for Venus. Take Gah-Djet, the mechanical brain, and travel at once to X-763, the maneuverable asteroid. Intercept the Centauri at the point marked Q prime on this orbit.”

  The electronic pattern-grooves of Adam Fink’s metal mind recorded his master’s orders. He turned clanking to go.

  “And remember that Princess Zurilla of Neptune is aboard. No harm must befall her!”

  The robot’s head clanked in a jerking nod, and he left the room. Captain Comet’s tense muscles flexed as he switched the televisor on again and beheld the central control room of the Interspacial Patrol.

  “Z-999,” he barked.

  Suddenly the machine faded and went dead. A pulsing arc of purple light grew in the middle of the room and forth from it stepped a green-bearded Centaurian.

  “Xix!” Captain Comet gasped. “Xix, the xurghil-smuggler!”

  Joe Henderson jerked the copy from his typewriter and looked at the stack of blank paper-and-carbon sandwiches beside him. “I’ve got the Captain in an awful fix now,” he said.

  The little man on the couch yawned. “Grensham wants that copy end of this week.”

  “He’ll get it. I’m darned if I know quite what happens next, but he’ll get it.”

  “In the last ten minutes,” said the little man reflectively, “your typewriter pinged twenty-five times. It averages ten words to the line. That makes two hundred and fifty words. From Grensham that’s two fifty. So in ten minutes of lying here on the couch, I’ve made a quarter. Life could be worse.”

  Joe Henderson’s face in repose had an almost adolescent blankness. His slow shy smile gave it warmth and charm. “I know, you old horse thief. All the time I’m typing, I think, ‘Every ping, a penny for Phyn.’ ”

  “Life could be worse,” the agent repeated. “Like for instance there could be more than one Hilary Foulkes.”

  Henderson frowned at the pile of unused paper. “What’s wrong with Hilary? I met him once with Vance, and he seemed harmless.”

  “Didn’t I tell you about the deal I arranged with MacNamara?”

  Henderson made a distasteful face. “MacNamara? I don’t think so.”

  “We were going to launch a reprint mag called Galactic Stories. Signed up with the Foulkes estate for a Dr. Derringer reprint in each issue. All announced and everything. But that sonofabitch Hilary slips over a clause I don’t read. It says at the rates we pay we’ve got to print reprinted from blank copyright blank by blank by permission of Hilary Foulkes, in type just as big as the title. Otherwise we pay five hundred smackers per story.”

  “I don’t know as I’m any too sympathetic there. You know what a racket this reprint stuff is.”

  “How come a racket? We give the public good reading matter cheaper than it could ever buy it first hand.”

  “Sure, and cut the throats of us poor dopes that write it.”

  “Stuff and nonsense, Joe. You don’t understand business. Writers never do . . . But who the hell’s going to read a reprint story if it says Reprint on it? Not that I mean we sail under false pretenses, but you don’t have to go reminding them like that. And who can pay five hundred sinkers for pulp rights? So that’s how come Galactic Stories folded.”

  Henderson nodded, not listening. “Look! Gah-Djet the mechanical brain’ll spot those androids of Xix’s with his detecto-tendrils and then . . .” He fed fresh paper into the typewriter, poised his fingers for an instant, and set to work.

  M. Halstead Phyn (Author’s Representative—Fantasy and Science Fiction Our Exclusive Specialty) heard the first ping with pleasure and felt the round copper coin jangle into his pocket. “All the same,” he muttered, “some day I’m going to take that Hilary bastard. And not for pennies.”

  3.

  Austin Carter was waiting for the phone to ring. He sat in a chair and resolutely refused to pace. Calmly indifferent, that’s what he was. He reread a paragraph for the fifth time and suddenly found himself wondering what book he was reading.

  He looked at the spine. Memories of a Useful Life, by Nehemiah Atchison. He threw it down and shouted, “Where the hell did we acquire Nehemiah Atchison?”

  Bernice Carter looked up from the portable typewriter. When her husband was working, he used the office model in the study and embedded himself in the cottonwool of a sternly enforced silence. Bernice had composed her first saleable story in the office of a weekly news-sheet, answering questions about local politics between sentences. Sometimes now her stories refused to go right unless she was shouted at occasionally.

  “He’s some sort of great-second-uncle of Matt Duncan’s. Those memoirs were privately printed as an inspiration to his family.”

  Austin Carter pitilessly kicked Nehemiah across the floor. “Damned if that’s the kind of inspiration I need right now.”

  “They’re pretty funny, in a nice stuffy way.” Bernice’s voice was as cool and fresh as her skin and her eyes. “I read them the other night.”

  Carter grunted and stared around. “Where’s my solitaire cards?”

  “In the study, I guess. Look, sweet: you know everything about the market. How much sex will Don stand for?”

  “In a word, none.” Carter half smiled. “Remember that story where my mathematical genius liked to watch women’s breasts because they were such beautiful fifth-order curves?”

  “I remember. Don changed it to heads. But that sounded all right.”

  “The hell it did. Heads aren’t fifth-order curves. I don’t mind his improving my morals, but I do object to his bolloxing my mathematics. What sly obscenity are you planning to put over on the poor man?”

  “No; I guess I’d better behave. But this one’s an interplanetary romance, and I just couldn’t help wondering about the physiological aspect. Pity . . .”

  Carter had risen to hunt for his cards, but now he contented himself with merely pacing. “Something will happen,” he muttered. “I know it. It can’t help but go wrong. There’s a jinx on this novel, and that jinx is our darling Hilary.”

  “But Hilary hasn’t got anything to do with this now.”

  “He’ll find some way. And all because I refused to pay him a hundred dollars. Can you tie that? So I wanted to use quotations
from the Derringer stories for chapter-head quotes in the novel. God knows that’s not infringing on his territory. It wouldn’t cut in on his sales. If anything, it’s just another free plug. But would Hilary see it that way? One hundred dollars to use that handful of quotes, and the most I could hope to get on royalties out of the damned book would be four, five hundred.”

  “Never mind,” said Bernice soothingly. “If this film sale goes through, you’ll be practically in Hilary’s class yourself.”

  “In a class with that? Madam!” He glared at the phone. “Bixon says the trend is all of a sudden toward fantasy pictures now, and Weinberg at Metropolis is hot as hell on this.”

  “He says.”

  “They must be through conference by now. Bixon said he’d call me as soon as— What shall we do with our ill-gotten gains, Berni?”

  “Pay income tax.”

  “There’ll be some left. Every time you hear people complaining about how much they paid in taxes, just stop and figure out how much must be left if they had that big an income. We’ll have some left; and what shall we do?”

  “Save it for me to live on while you go to war.”

  “No. I don’t doubt we’ll be at war soon enough. But let’s be mayflies and carp the diem before it dies. Anyway, you’re practically self-supporting. You know what I’d like to do?”

  “Charter a space ship.”

  “Of course. But failing that I’d like to take you around to the National Parks and Monuments. Especially the Monuments, and above all Canyon de Chelly. I don’t know another spot that has the combination of absolute beauty and historical impact that that Canyon has. The sheer titanic walls and the peaceful green—”

  “You’re like Macbeth, sweet,” said Bernice. “When you get to an emotional peak of tension, you go all lyrical. You—”

  The telephone rang.

  Austin Carter answered it. “Hello.—Oh yes, Bixon. Yes.—Yes.—I see.—Of course.” His voice was trailing down from hope to resignation. “Yes.—Well, there’s always another time.—Sure, let me know. ’Bye.”

  “They didn’t like it,” Bernice translated.

  Carter’s brown eyes glowed with fury. “They liked it all right. Weinberg was nuts about it, in fact.”