Chapter I: Front Matter

THE TRAP

Colby’s murder plan was perfect--except at one point

By Murray Leinster

This is a very instructive story. It deals with the value of a reputation, the best way to commit murder, what to do with embarrassing letters, and where stolen thousand-dollar bills may be exchanged or spent with the minimum discount--all of which information is useful; but mostly it deals with the value of a reputation.

Colby had thought about reputations rather carefully, but the sound of the shot with which he killed Grahame had not quite died away before he remembered the reputation of Detective Sergeant Nesbit. Then cold sweat came out on his forehead.

He stood stock-still for a matter of seconds, with a horrible sick feeling coming all over him. Grahame, of course, caused none of that feeling of nausea. Grahame had acted according to schedule. The load of buckshot went into his skull just where the spinal column entered it. While the thunderous crash of the gun still echoed among the nearer tree trunks, his arms went stiffly out in an aimless gesture and he fell with a slight splashing sound in the leaf-littered mud underfoot. Colby stood still, with thinning smoke coming out of the gun barrel, while the echoes died away to a dimming murmur among the trees, until even that sound was lost in the noise of the breeze in the bare branches overhead and the dry rustling of lingering brown leaves.

It was very peaceful, here among the trees. The brown clothing of the crumpled figure on the earth blended in color with the carpet of leaves. Any living creatures that might have been within hearing had been startled into immobility and silence by the shot. Colby had not yet moved even his feet after pulling the trigger. There was no sound at all, except a faint trickling noise from a little stream some twenty yards to the right.

Colby pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead--not at all the conventional thing for a murderer to do, of course; but he was not thinking of the dead man at his feet. He was thinking of Nesbit.

He stood with his handkerchief held rather absurdly before him, listening to the stillness. Then he moved to put the handkerchief away. His gun interfered irritatingly. Somehow his hands fumbled. Eventually he shifted the gun to his left hand and stuffed the thing into his coat pocket.

The silence continued. All the world seemed full of a vast immobility, a vast quietude, which was only emphasized by the faint whispering of dry branches and drier leaves overhead. The stillness was reassuring. Nesbit would never know of this! Colby’s plan was too well worked out for him ever to find out anything.

The murderer bent over the huddled mass at his feet. Grahame would have ten thousand dollars on him. Colby searched for it industriously; but it is a curiously unhandy business to go through another man’s clothes. One’s hand catches, the linings follow one’s fingers out of the pockets, one spills things messily--especially if the other man happens to be dead.

Colby went into one pocket after another. A little trace of panic came over him. He found a cigarette case, a lighter, a handkerchief, a notebook, twenty or thirty dollars loose in a vest pocket. Then he remembered--it would be in a money belt, of course.

He unbuttoned Grahame’s vest clumsily and fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. It was unpleasant to have to search like this. Colby felt hideously ashamed--not of the murder, of course, or even of the fact that he was a thief; but searching like this, searching a dead man’s clothing, made him feel unclean.

No, there was no money belt. Colby swore, a trifle shaken. Grahame must have the money on him! He was a free-lance bootleg operator. He had come down to make a deal for two thousand gallons of corn whisky. Colby told him that he had been running a still for three months, and wanted to sell all his product in a lump, avoiding constant dealings and mysterious trucks and cars, and so eliminating the probability of suspicion. Grahame must surely have brought the money; but where was it?

Colby felt sick with disappointment before he had finished hunting. Every pocket contained its appropriate objects--a knife, a watch, a luck piece, scraps of paper with undecipherable notations on them, a newspaper clipping in an envelope.

Pure despair filled him the instant before he thrust his hand into Grahame’s inside breast pocket. But the wallet was there, and the shock of finding it brought back confidence. He should have known! Dealing as Grahame did, the man knew all the tricks of the trade. An inside breast pocket is the one place that a dip will never touch. It is the safest possible receptacle for any valuable.

Colby opened the wallet. Four twenties, six hundreds, and ten, twelve, thirteen other bills--thousand-dollar bills. Colby’s breath whistled in his nostrils. Much better than he had expected! He had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before.

He folded them and thrust them into his own breast pocket with a strong sense of satisfaction. He felt a sort of professional gratification at remembering why one should use a breast pocket. Now there remained only the business of getting rid of Grahame and going back to town and making his proper report. He had everything worked out. Nesbit would never even hear of this affair. He was safe!

He rubbed his handkerchief carefully over every article that he replaced in Grahame’s pockets, to remove possible finger-prints. The woods remained very quiet. To be sure, as the effect of the single shot wore away, there were little sounds near by. An old dog squirrel barked reassuringly, and his wife and relations came out of their holes and went about their businesses. A partridge that had frozen into stillness at the sound of the shotgun came to life and darted to a more promising spot. Colby heard it scratching and rustling among the fallen leaves.

It whirred off into nowhere when he picked Grahame up, however, and the squirrels lapsed abruptly into utter silence when his feet crackled on leaves and small branches as he staggered toward the stream with his burden.

Twenty yards, no more. He had seen the glitter of the stream curving toward the footpath before he shot Grahame. It was an unimportant little watercourse, nowhere more than half a dozen paces across, and it murmured and sang pleasantly to itself over its gravelly bed.

Colby went painstakingly down to its margin. He knew exactly where he was and what he was going to do. After a heavy rain the stream ran with a strong current. It was always carving at its banks or making minor changes in them, and at one spot it had undermined the six-foot clay wall which confined it so that a hollow of considerable depth was roofed over only by tree roots and the earth on top of them. Sooner or later that roof would cave in.

It was easy to push the dead body into the hollow, where it was well hidden. Few people ever came near this place, anyhow. No one would ever dream of creeping in there and risking a cave-in for no purpose. With one single rain of any size, the roof would probably collapse and bury Grahame securely. No one would ever think of looking for a missing man under a cave-in of that sort.

Colby climbed up the bank and tested the roof with his foot. It quivered promisingly. He stamped. He stamped harder. With a sticky thumping of rain-softened earth, it gave way. Small rootlets snapped, falling earth cascaded, and Grahame was safely buried under three feet of soil.

There was absolutely no suspicious sign above. The cave-in looked perfectly natural. No searching party would ever dream of anything hidden under there. No searching party would ever look for Grahame, anyhow. He had come up from Richmond by train, and had ostensibly gone out to hunt with Colby. Colby would explain that as they walked back along the concrete road toward town, a car had come by, headed for Richmond, and in it was an acquaintance of Grahame’s. The man had hailed Grahame and offered a lift, which the latter had taken.

There would be no inquiry, no investigation. There was no need for anything of the sort. It was unlikely that any one in Richmond knew where Grahame had gone.

After Colby had spent twenty minutes clearing away tracks and had carefully dropped one or two blood-spattered leaves into the hollow of a double-trunked poplar, there was absolutely no evidence of a murder anywhere except under that collapsed bank. There was the money in Colby’s pocket, of course, but nobody would know anything about that for a long time--not even Nesbit.

Colby had done his murder in an absolutely perfect way. As you see, this story is instructive.