Psychomania: Killer Stories Read online

  “Consider the murders, Viardot. All planned and executed with meticulous care down to the last detail. Mad but methodical. And then with the last killing he allows himself to be caught on the spot in a state of drunken stupor. It makes no sense. Saint-Loup is a physical and mental wreck, Viardot. He has not and never has had the capacity for these crimes.”

  “Then how and why was he present at the scene of the crime?”

  “It was as he said. He received a message supposedly from us, but in fact from the killer. Being deranged and almost certainly drunk at that time of night, he went there. Of course the killer was taking a risk, but fantastic arrogance is part of the extreme criminal’s nature. Besides, the killer undoubtedly knew Saint-Loup and was thereby able to obtain or purloin private access to the requisite pavilions, temples and chalets.”

  “Then in God’s name who is it, Dupin?”

  “I believe I know, but we need to flush out our culprit. If this fails then we must be content with our result. There may be no more murders, but I don’t think the game is quite over as far as our killer is concerned. I want you to do something for me, Viardot. I want you to make it known that the Marquis has died in custody - perhaps even committed suicide - and that we are fully satisfied that that is the end of the matter.”

  Viardot gave his consent with a small shrug and Dupin then issued further instructions.

  Dupin spent the day making more arrangements. He told his manservant Marcel to visit his mother and stay the night with her at her house. In the evening Dupin dined at Bignon’s. There he met the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who was working on a translation of Poe’s “The Raven”. Dupin dared to suggest to his literary friend that “Le Corbeau dit Jamais plus!” was an accurate but otherwise wholly inadequate rendering of “Quoth the Raven, Nevermore!”

  “My dear Stéphane, not even a French raven would ever say ‘Jamais plus’,” said Dupin, but his advice fell on deaf ears.

  The church of Saint-Roch was chiming the hour of nine when Dupin returned to his apartment on the Rue Saint-Honoré.

  As he stepped into his own hallway he paused to scent the air; then, detecting an unfamiliar perfume, he took up the lighted oil lamp that Marcel had left for him on the hall table and entered the library. He was expecting company.

  A slight movement of the shadows in the corner of the room convinced him that he was not alone.

  “Good evening, madame,” said Dupin. “You are here a little earlier than I had anticipated.”

  “I saw your servant go out. I thought I would take my chance.”

  Out of the shadows stepped a tall, statuesque woman with a heavy veil over her face. It was, as a result, hard to tell her age, but she must have been somewhere in her fifties. She wore a dress of shimmering silk, dark green like a dragonfly’s wing, trimmed with black lace.

  “You know who I am then?” she said, her voice trembling a little.

  “I believe so. You are Eugénie Santerre, better known to the world as Eugenia Santelli, the opera singer.”

  “I am, or rather was, La Santelli. Prima Donna Assoluta of the Paris Opera.”

  “Why have you come here?”

  “I have come to tell you that you are wrong. You, the great, the one and only, the first of all detectives who penetrated the secret of the Rue Morgue, who unravelled the affair of Marie Roget and many others, are utterly mistaken. You are nothing but a doddering old fool. Whatever powers you may once have possessed have been dribbled away in absinthe and idleness.

  “In your vanity you imagine you have solved the great mystery of the Paris Exhibition Murders of 1867, but you have not! The Marquis de Saint-Loup who has died in your custody is absolutely innocent, and I can prove it.”

  “Innocent is hardly a word I would use with reference to the Marquis, madame, but if you mean that he did not perpetrate those murders, I know that and never for a moment imagined that he was guilty of them.” Dupin heard Santelli gasp, but she stood her ground. “However, I would be most interested to know how you can prove that he was not the killer.”

  “Simple! I was with him at the time of the murders.”

  Dupin laughed. “I see! You were going to go to the jail, tell the authorities that you were with him and have him released. Then he would at last be truly in your power. You may even have fondly imagined that he would marry you as he had promised all those years ago in the days of your glory. But this is foolishness, madame. You were not with the Marquis at the time of the murders.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Because you committed the murders yourself, madame.”

  There was a silence in the room. Both Dupin and Santelli remained utterly still. It was as if each were daring the other to make the next move.

  “You can prove nothing, Dupin.”

  “On the contrary, madame! It would be a matter of the utmost simplicity, for example, to establish that it was you who discovered the body in the French Pavilion, thereby alerting the authorities, deliberately too late, to the whereabouts of your final atrocity. Need I go on?

  “But there is one thing I have yet to understand, madame. Why did you want to draw me into this business? All that mystification with the Green Fairy. That was for my benefit, was it not? Why did you want to humiliate me so much?”

  “My brother was Alphonse Santerre. Perhaps you remember him?”

  “Ah! The great Banque de Paris swindle. I remember it.”

  “It was your evidence that convicted him. If you hadn’t insisted to the police that the clerks Gatinet and Fauvinard were too lowly and stupid to have devised the whole scheme, and that there must have been a mastermind behind it, he might have escaped justice. I even came to you, to this very apartment here, and begged you on my bended knees not to pursue the case against my brother. Dear God! I even offered myself to you. And I was beautiful then.”

  “Yes, I recollect now. Vaguely. And did I...?”

  “No, you did not.”

  “I am relieved to hear it.”

  “You’re not a man at all, Dupin. You’re a machine! A mere calculating, detecting machine. You have no heart!”

  “And you, madame, who butchered and mutilated those wretched women in cold blood, to humiliate me and to spite and take possession again of your precious Marquis, you accuse me of having no heart?”

  “My heart is broken. I have suffered more than any woman deserves to suffer. And it goes on! My brother is out of prison now, but his life has been ruined. He lives with a drab on the Rue de Lappe and cries like a baby if there is no money to buy him the oblivion of drink.

  “I went to Saint-Loup to ask if he might do something for Alphonse and he merely laughed in my face. That man for whom I sacrificed so much! He possessed my very soul, but then he threw it away on a whim, and before he left me he did something else to me that I can never forgive.”

  “As I thought! It was the Marquis de Saint-Loup who made you a contralto.”

  “My God! You understand everything!”

  “It is well known in musical circles, madame, that the venereal infection of syphilis can affect the vocal cords by deepening their register, and this is truer among women than men. Many years ago Maestro Rossini told me of it.”

  “It is true. I hated being a contralto. When you have been a great soprano, a Prima Donna Assoluta, everything else is dust and ashes in the mouth. And it was not only my voice it affected. Look!”

  She drew aside her veil. The left side of her face was redder than the other side. Little clutches of broken veins blossomed on her cheeks and forehead, and it looked as if on that side, the features had somehow slipped downwards. The left-hand corners of her mouth and left eye were pulled down, so as to resemble one half of a badly made Mask of Tragedy.

  “So you planned to mutilate others as you had been mutilated,” said Dupin. The tone of his voice surprised Santelli, even Dupin himself, because it was not angry or indignant, merely sad, meditative and i
nfinitely weary. “But where will it all end, madame?”

  “Here!” said La Santelli, and Dupin saw that she had drawn from her reticule an elegant pearl-handled pistol of American make. She pointed it at him, but he made no move. At last he too was in her power, she thought, but only for a moment.

  She couldn’t help noticing that Dupin was not looking directly at her any more but at something behind her right shoulder. A trick of his?

  Almost involuntarily she began to turn to see what it was he was looking at and at that moment a voice behind her said: “I’ll take that, if you please, madame!”, and her pistol arm was seized in a firm grip by Commissioner Viardot.

  A gendarme appeared as if from nowhere and put handcuffs on La Santelli, who by now had begun to scream. The screams transformed themselves into hysterical laughter as she was being led away.

  Auguste Dupin’s library has several entrances, not all of them immediately visible to the naked eye.

  ~ * ~

  Paris, July 2nd, 1867, a little before five

  Commissioner Viardot and Dupin were seated at a table in the

  Café Momus drinking coffee.

  “I must congratulate you, my dear Viardot,” said Dupin. “I understand you are to receive a commendation from the Emperor himself for your resolution of this case.”

  “Are you sure that I can say nothing about your part in the affair?”

  “I absolutely forbid it. If you do I will be besieged by nuisances requesting my services as a detective. Old ladies will be demanding that I find their pet dogs for them and I shall never know another moment’s peace. One of the few blessings of old age is that you cease to crave celebrity.”

  “Very well, my friend, I shall leave you to your absinthe and your obscurity. But tell me one thing. You seem to have known from the start that the perpetrator was a woman. How was that?”

  “It had to be a woman. The crimes were simply too elaborately conceived for a man’s mind. Male and female criminalities have different motives. In men it is always the desire for power, for control pure and simple. In women vindictiveness is the ruling motive: getting even. What is that line of Congreve about ‘a woman scorned’ that the English always misquote?

  “In some cases this longing for vengeance becomes a mania, a disease of the psyche, as you might say, especially when it is exacerbated by a disease of the body like syphilis. La Santelli saw an opportunity to wreak vengeance both on me and the good Marquis. She almost succeeded.”

  “But at what cost!”

  “A cost she wanted to pay. All such killers are out to take vengeance on the world, and that means, ultimately, that they must take vengeance chiefly on themselves, for the world has shrunk to the size of their own diseased brain. But the real clue to the sex of the killer, as you yourself intimated at the very beginning, my dear Commissioner, was in the absinthe.”

  “How so?”

  “Each of those wretched women had been plied with the Green Fairy before being killed, so that they were rendered weak and could offer up no resistance. That implied a weak assailant. No male killer would ever have done that. It would have offended his vanity to suppose that he could not overpower a woman by sheer strength and without the adventitious aid of a drug. The whole object of the venture would have been defeated; but a woman’s motive, even a madwoman’s motive, is more subtle and devious. Ma se mi toccano dov’e il mio debole, Sarò una vipera, sarò. Cross me in love and I become the deadliest of vipers.”

  “Dante?”

  “No, Rossini. The Barber of Seville. I can remember La Santelli as Rosina singing those very words.” Dupin looked at his watch. “Ah! Five o’clock. It is time, my dear Viardot, for you to go to receive your commendation from the Emperor. You must hurry. The great and powerful wait for no man because they know their greatness and power is as fleeting as a fairy’s flight. I must also hurry, for it is L’Heure Verte. Garçon!”

  As if by magic the waiter appeared with Dupin’s glass of absinthe. It was the Green Hour and Viardot left his friend to perform, priest-like, his ritual with the water, the sugar cubes, the silver spoon, and a glass half-full of a pale green fluid that looked like a distillation of young grass in sunlight.

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  ~ * ~

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  The Secret Laws of the Universe

  ED THOUGHT THE toaster had a disapproving aspect. “Have you told your wife yet?” It was difficult to tell which part of the toaster the voice was coming from.

  Ed sought to avoid eye contact, but had no idea where not to look. “I don’t want to worry her.”

  “Human beings like to be prepared, or at least to have the illusion. It’s characteristic of your race.”

  “They’re not my race.” When the toaster began to harangue him, demanding some sort of explanation, Ed left the kitchen. He’d been speaking emotionally, not logically of course. Often he didn’t feel like part of the human race, and he didn’t expect anyone to understand this, but he wasn’t about to be embarrassed in his own home by an appliance.

  Behind him, he heard his toast pop up with a ding: done. The toaster sighed.

  “It’ll get cold if you just leave it there.” His wife glanced over the paper at him. She had her own breakfast spread out over her end of the dining-room table - ham and scrambled eggs, a carafe of black coffee, bagel and cream cheese, and a bowl of freshly sliced fruit, all the colours artfully arranged.

  “I don’t like my toast hot. Cool is fine with me.”

  “Well, nobody likes it cold.”

  “I said cool, not cold. And with a little bit of strawberry jam on top, it tastes great.”

  “I’d be happy to fix your toast when I make my own breakfast, however you want it fixed, Ed. I’ll even stick your toast in the freezer, if that’s what you really want.”

  “Well, I appreciate that.” It was a marriage lie, and marriage lies don’t count. “But you have a job to get to. And I have to be able to do a few things for myself.”

  Jillian gazed at him with her head slightly tilted. “I guess I can’t argue with that.”

  The coffee carafe said, “Tell her you’re going to kill her, Ed. You owe her that much, for all she’s done for you.” Or perhaps it was the chandelier. One of the bulbs blinked and buzzed, sending painful pulses directly into Ed’s brain.

  They all acted as if he wanted to kill her. Clearly no one understood. He went back into the kitchen and retrieved his cooling toast from the top of the toaster. It caught on the edge of the slot until he ordered, “Let go, dammit.” He slapped it on a plate.

  Back in the dining room he stared at his plate with the burned square of bread. He’d forgotten his table knife.

  Was it okay to put the jam from the serving spoon directly on to his toast if he hadn’t touched the bread with his lips? He reached over and took the spoon out of the jam, loaded it, and deposited the bright red spread on the edge of his plate, cognizant that Jillian was watching him, waiting for any mistake so that she might instruct him in some fine point of etiquette. He guided his toast across the protruding jam, being careful not to let any of it spill on to the table.

  Of course he knew this convoluted methodology couldn’t be the way things were normally done, but at least he hadn’t contaminated anything or messed up the tablecloth. She couldn’t call him on that. Sometimes he had to jump through hoops simply to avoid the tiniest of mistakes. The jam wasn’t evenly spread but at least he’d achieved some coverage.

  “You’re calling your doctor today, right?” She sipped her coffee, gazing at him unblinking.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Those headaches aren’t going to go away by themselves.”

  Ed didn’t say anything. His toast was frowning at him. Whether that meant the toast agreed with Jillian and was expressing its disapproval, or the toast wanted Ed to say something back to Jillian, anything that meant he was a man with his own voice, Ed did not know, beca
use unlike the toaster, the chandelier, and the carafe, his toast apparently had no speaking apparatus.

  But the displeasure of the toast was palpable, even more so because of its silence. Unable to eat anything so disapproving, Ed picked up his plate and the jar of jam and returned to the kitchen.

  “I’m hardly surprised you’re not hungry,” the toaster said. “Guilt rarely whets the appetite.”

  In response Ed pushed the unhappy toast into the garbage disposal and turned it on. The toaster cried out in alarm.

  Ed stood with hands on either side of the sink and stared out the window. It was a bright morning, the sun lending its glow to flowers and lawn. It was the kind of day he would have loved to just lie down in the grass and take it all in, letting the warmth spread through his limbs and set fire to his blood. That was one of the few perks available to temporary life forms, experiencing that interchange between air and sun and flesh, one’s body a soup of cells thriving and cells dying. A toaster could never know this pleasure, or a chandelier, and yet a toaster could be repaired endlessly, if one ignored practical economics, or its bits recycled into some other machine. And that chandelier might hang in the house for the next family, or the one thereafter, long after Ed was gone. Longevity had always been unfairly distributed. Shouldn’t his life be worth more than a stone’s?