“Hm-m-m!” said Agatha. “Still mooning after that girl? Don’t be an old fool.”
He had not seen Agatha come in. He did not quite see her now. He saw a sort of vision of a cornucopia that would give him money that would give him the apparatus that would give him his time machine that would give him success that would give him Faith.
“If you must moon instead of working—if indeed you call this work—you might at least turn off a few switches,” Agatha snapped. “Do you think we’re made of money?”
Mechanically he obeyed.
“It makes you sick,” Agatha droned on, “when you think how some people spend their money. Cousin Stanley! Hiring this Simon Ash as a secretary for nothing on earth but to look after his library and his collections. So much money he can’t do anything but waste it! And all Great-uncle Max’s money coming to him too, when we could use it so nicely. If only it weren’t for Cousin Stanley, I’d be an heiress. And then—”
Mr. Partridge was about to observe that even as an heiress Agatha would doubtless have been the same intolerant old maid. But two thoughts checked his tongue. One was the sudden surprising revelation that even Agatha had her inner yearnings, too. And the other was an overwhelming feeling of gratitude to her.
“Yes,” Mr. Partridge repeated slowly. “If it weren’t for Cousin Stanley—”
By means as simple as this, murderers are made.
The chain of logic was so strong that moral questions hardly entered into the situation.
Great-uncle Max was infinitely old. That he should live another year was out of the question. And if his son Stanley were to pre-decease him, then Harrison and Agatha Partridge would be his only living relatives. And Maxwell Harrison was as infinitely rich as he was infinitely old.
Therefore Stanley must die, and his death must be accomplished with a maximum of personal safety. The means for that safety were at hand. For the one completely practical purpose of a short-range time machine, Mr. Partridge had suddenly realized, was to provide an alibi for murder.
The chief difficulty was in contriving a portable version of the machine which would operate over a considerable period of time. The first model had a traveling range of two minutes. But by the end of the week, Mr. Partridge had constructed a portable time machine which was good for forty-five minutes. He needed nothing more save a sharp knife. There was, Mr. Partridge thought, something crudely horrifying about guns.
That Friday afternoon he entered Cousin Stanley’s library at five o’clock. This was an hour when the eccentric man of wealth always devoted himself to quiet and scholarly contemplation of his treasures. The butler, Bracket, had been reluctant to announce him, but “Tell my cousin,” Mr. Partridge said, “that I have discovered a new entry for his bibliography.”
The most recent of Cousin Stanley’s collecting manias was fiction based upon factual murders. He had already built up the definitive library on the subject. Soon he intended to publish the definitive bibliography. And the promise of a new item was an assured open-sesame.
The ponderous gruff joviality of Stanley Harrison’s greeting took no heed of the odd apparatus he carried. Everyone knew that Mr. Partridge was a crackpot inventor.
“Bracket tells me you’ve got something for me,” Cousin Stanley boomed. “Glad to hear it. Have a drink? What is it?”
“No thank you.” Something in Mr. Partridge rebelled at accepting the hospitality of his victim. “A Hungarian friend of mine was mentioning a novel about one Bela Kiss.”
“Kiss?” Cousin Stanley’s face lit up with a broad beam. “Splendid! Never could see why no one used him before. Woman killer. Landru type. Always fascinating. Kept ’em in empty gasoline tins. Never could have been caught if there hadn’t been a gasoline shortage. Constable thought he was hoarding, checked the tins, found corpses. Beautiful! Now if you’ll give me the details—”
Cousin Stanley, pencil poised over a P-slip, leaned over the desk. And Mr. Partridge struck.
He had checked the anatomy of the blow, just as he had checked the name of an obscure but interesting murderer. The knife went truly home, and there was a gurgle and the terrible spastic twitch of dying flesh.
Mr. Partridge was now an heir and a murderer, but he had time to be conscious of neither fact. He went through his carefully rehearsed motions, his mind numb and blank. He latched the windows of the library and locked each door. This was to be an impossible crime, one that could never conceivably be proved on him or on any innocent.
Mr. Partridge stood beside the corpse in the midst of the perfectly locked room. It was four minutes past five. He screamed twice, very loudly, in an unrecognizably harsh voice. Then he plugged his portable instrument into a floor outlet and turned a switch.
It was four nineteen. Mr. Partridge unplugged his machine. The room was empty and the door open.
Mr. Partridge knew his way reasonably well about his cousin’s house. He got out without meeting anyone. He tucked the machine into the rumble seat of his car and drove off to Faith Preston’s. Toward the end of his long journey across town he carefully drove through a traffic light and received a citation noting the time as four-fifty. He reached Faith’s at four fifty-four, ten minutes before the murder he had just committed.
Simon Ash had been up all Thursday night cataloging Stanley Harrison’s latest acquisitions. Still he had risen at his usual hour that Friday to get through the morning’s mail before his luncheon date with Faith. By four thirty that afternoon he was asleep on his feet.
He knew that his employer would be coming into the library in half an hour. And Stanley Harrison
