: Mark Hurdlestone; Or The Two Brothers by Moodie Susanna - Fiction

@FreeBooksTue 06 Jun, 2023

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MURDERER'S CHAIN

If Maudie had only given me the ten thousand dollars to invest in the Martian Development Company there would have been no reason to kill her. The money would have been more than tripled and my financial troubles would have been over. But Maudie has always been so unreasonable. Even though she grudgingly admitted that I had been right in the Martian venture, she still had no faith in my business judgment. She was as adamant as ever about parting with the smallest fraction of her vast fortune when I had the opportunity to step in on the ground floor of the Balsavius Six Mining Corporation.

Balsavius Six, in case you don't know, is the newest planet which Earth's space ships have touched. Everything about Balsavius has been kept strictly hush-hush. Only a handful of people have the slightest concept of the value of the new planet's mineral deposits. It just happened that one of the men in on the top secret was my friend Sylvester, and he was willing to cut me in on a slice of the corporation he was forming for as little as five thousand dollars on the line.

The problem was how to get my hands on that much folding stuff. The answer should have been easy. Maudie was one of Earth's wealthiest women and, after all, Maudie was my mother-in-law. The trouble with Maudie was that she was narrow-minded, prejudiced, I might say bigoted. She liked to boast that her family have come from good, solid Earth stock from the beginning of time and, while she mingled with the socially elite from Venus, she considered Martians crude, and refused to entertain guests from what she described as "the minor planets."

Maudie's second trouble was that she was mean. Although her daughter, Isabelle, and I have been married for eight years, Maudie never did more than to provide us with a modest allowance. She always felt that I should work which, after all, is pretty non-sensical when there are so many ways for a man with a little capital to get rich quick.

Isabelle isn't like Maudie. She's easy-going, pliant, susceptible to flattery and, on Maudie's death, Isabelle would inherit her full fortune. So with a deal like this in the offing, it didn't take any great brain to see that Maudie's rapid demise would remove the single obstacle that stood between myself and untold wealth.

The thought of killing Maudie had come often to my mind since my talk with Sylvester but the available weapons all seemed too crude. I'm a fastidious person and the idea of shooting or stabbing Maudie was just too vulgar. One of the more subtle poisons might have turned the trick, but certainly nothing as obvious as cyanide or arsenic. As for curare or beleston, to be frank, I hadn't the foggiest notion where to lay my hands on them.

That's the way things stood when I just happened to stop in front of the window of Melvin Rosy's House of Fantastic Jewelry in Greenwich Village. I'd passed by the shop many times but I'd never paused to look in. Of recent years, the Village has filled up with all sorts of peculiar people, Martians, Venusians and the little green men from outer space. One thing I'll have to hand to Maudie, she was right about calling some of these people uncouth. Some of the Galaxians really are riff-raff.

Out in front of the store were some long pink fliers advertising the jewelry within. I picked one up idly, for it had just occurred to me that Maudie's birthday was the next day and that it might not be a bad idea to soften her up with a gift. I looked at the monstrous chunks of jewelry in the display window--rings, bracelets and whatnots, decorated with staring eyes, floating amoebas and gilded kidneys. Maudie was a pushover for spectacular accoutrements but this stuff exceeded even her flamboyant taste.

Probably I would have walked on by if a couple of lines at the top of the flier hadn't caught my attention. They were written by some old time humorist called S. J. Perelman and he described the jewelry as being like, "an egg balanced on a cone, an erg balanced on a bone, a hag balanced on a roan."

That last part seemed a perfect description of Maudie--"a hag balanced on a roan." Almost by instinct I started to climb the crooked stone steps to the shop. The door was open and the proprietor was standing behind the counter. Other than that the place was empty.

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