Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 6, May 1961

Richard checked with the kitchen clock. “Twenty minutes. That means I left here supposedly at five minutes to nine. And if I take the short-cut I’ll arrive at my office at my usual time. What a perfect alibi.”

“Huh?” said Emma. She was pouring out a cup of coffee that looked very weak. “How much sugar do you want in this?” she asked.

It was the last dull question she was ever to ask in a life filled with dull questions. For at that moment her husband came up behind her with a waffle-iron and struck her a savage blow across the skull.

“One lump, I think, will be quite sufficient,” said Richard softly, gazing down at her sprawled, silent body.

She stopped breathing even before he’d wiped his fingerprints from the murder weapon and laid it carefully on the floor at her side. Eight minutes later he had taken the few bills from her purse, scattered the rest of the contents around the kitchen, broken the latch on the back door to make it appear that the thief had had an easy time entering, and sped away in his car without being spotted by any of the neighbors. He arrived at his brokerage office with an air of confident elation, as if he had no doubt at all that the market would climb a hundred points in the course of the day.

The morning went well. The Acme Finance office called him a few minutes after he was settled at his desk. They mentioned their conversation with his wife, apologized for annoying him in the midst of work and asked when they could expect their payments. He promised to get a check off immediately.

Next a deal he’d been negotiating for several months was concluded in the most satisfactory imaginable fashion, giving him a larger commission than he had originally estimated. And to make the morning even more special, he was able to get Linda alone in his office for a long, delicious three minutes.

“How daring you’ve gotten, Mr. Mott,” she whispered breathlessly, pulling away reluctantly from his embrace.

“You haven’t seen anything yet.”

“Oh, darling, I’m happy. Are you?”

“This has been the happiest morning of my life,” he assured her.

They kissed again, and then she was gone, her green eyes twinkling with promise and desire.

Afterwards he sat and planned his strategy for when the police arrived. He never felt more in control of a situation. Only the slight prickling across his stomach, which he first experienced during his early morning encounter with Emma, marred his otherwise perfect day.

He attributed the pain to no breakfast, and decided it might prove helpful when the police came. Like an accomplished actor he would use his distress as a prop to make his first shock of grief seem wholly natural and convincing.

He was completely confident that he could handle the police. His friends and business associates would present no problem. It was only himself he feared — himself asleep, dreaming, talking, confessing. The first twenty-four hours would be the most dangerous. Tonight it was imperative that he sleep alone, isolated, with no one close enough to eavesdrop on his telltale dreams.

Once that first troubled sleep was behind him, the memory of Emma’s death would be far less likely to break through the walls of his sleeping mind.

He spotted the two detectives precisely at five o’clock. One small and chinless, the other large and rumpled. They crossed toward his office like two pallbearers carrying an invisible coffin. This is it, he thought, feeling the knot inside him explode into a hundred smaller knots.

“Mr. Mott? Mr. Richard Mott?” They were standing just inside his doorway.

“Yes?” His expression was innocent, guileless. “Can I help you?”

“I’m afraid we’ve got bad news for you, sir. It’s your wife. She’s been murdered. She was found by a neighbor just before noon.”

He let a pencil fall dramatically from his fingers, his stomach somersaulting on cue, the blood draining from his face. What a performance! He tried to rise, startled by his limplessness, the burning sensations in his stomach suddenly recurred, running pell mell through him.

“God God! I—”

He staggered, swayed, and would have fallen if one of the detectives hadn’t reached out to support him. “The poor guy. You can’t blame him. A shock like that can—”

The next few minutes were blurred, unfocused, a rollercoaster of sounds and movements. His ability to feign such deep, searing agony, amazed him. His whole body seemed on fire. Several times he felt himself to be on the verge of fainting.

After a time he opened his eyes. The first dizziness had passed. A dozen office faces peered at him from the doorway. He was lying flat on his back and a doctor from across the hall was examining him.

“Emma...”

“Shhh,” said the chinless detective. He and the doctor stepped to a corner of the room and conferred. A moment later the detective picked up the phone, and dialed a number.

Richard tried to sit up but the doctor’s hand gently restrained him. He felt numbed, light-headed.

“But it’s Emma. She’s dead. I want to know what happened.”