Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 5, April 1974

He spotted her sitting alone at the far side of the big hotel dining room. Although the place was far too expensive for him to afford, his car had broken down and he was there for the night. Watching her, he decided to stay on.

She was a soft, cottony blond with buttery skin and a yearning heart, and he characterized her with sound and unerring judgment — rich, single and ready to be plucked. By him. As to why they’d let her run around loose, he couldn’t understand, until she said she’d been a widow for only six months. Her husband, it turned but, had been killed in an airplane accident and she was recuperating from the shock.

She told him that much about herself after he’d made contact on the hotel veranda and they’d exchanged names. Grace Worthington. Alec Condon. A lovely evening. The air’s so soft and balmy. Let’s stroll down to the lake, shall we?

There, they stood on the dock and watched a golden moon loom up over the hills. She chatted in a high, adolescent treble and she kept clasping and unclasping her filigree bracelet. He wondered how much it had cost.

“What do you do?” she asked him.

“I paint.”

“Oh! Areal artist!”

He smiled down at her. Maybe women didn’t love all artists, but they usually fell for him. For a while. And long enough to finance him until he met the next one. Only this time, there would be no next, for Grace was obviously too rich to let go. Besides, he found her pleasant enough, with the naiveté of a child.

“You’re quite lovely,” he said, applying a technique that was tried and true. For, when a tall, handsome artist flatters a woman and does it with a combination of humility and dash, how can she resist?

“You’re quite lovely,” Condon said, “and I’d like to paint your portrait. Would you mind?”

Her pale blue eyes danced with excitement.

“I’d love it,” Grace said. “It would be nice.” And, still nervous and still fingering the bracelet, she let it slide out of her grasp and drop into the water.

“Oh, my!” she said, embarrassed. “How stupid of me!”

“I’ll get it for you,” he said, and he took off his shoes and prepared to make the gesture gallant and chivalrous.

“Would you really? That would be nice.”

Nice!

In the subsequent three years, he figured Grace had spoken the word upwards of fifty thousand times. She uttered it in a childish tone which, at the beginning, seemed to ache for his approval. Later on, however, he regarded it as a whine, a steady, unending, namby-pamby yack that went on tirelessly, with the dreary monotony of a leaky faucet.

They were married three months after they met, and they went to Europe on their honeymoon. She left her bag containing her passport on the plane, which continued on to Rome. The passport had to be flown back, and didn’t arrive until the next day.

“We can stay at the airport hotel,” Alec Condon said.

She accepted the suggestion as if he’d decided where to have lunch.

“That would be nice,” she said.

The passport arrived in due course, and they went on to the hotel where they had reservations. There, she discovered she’d forgotten her vanity case.

“I must have left it at that other place,” she said.

“I’ll phone and see if it’s there.”

“That would be nice,” she said.

For the rest of the trip he took charge of her passport and he even managed to overcome his annoyance at the trail of losses at hotels, restaurants, buses and stations. After all, when she lost something she merely went out and replaced it. He was realist enough to see the stupidity of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, although, naturally enough, the idea occurred to him. Even, it beckoned.

Still, he was reasonably content that first year. She built him a studio behind their luxurious suburban house. It was an expensive studio, where he painted pleasant little landscapes in the intervals between doing portraits of her. Otherwise, he puttered. And the studio became his sanctuary which she visited only to sit for him or else by specific invitation.

By the second year, the financial card by which he was attached to her grew strained, and her compulsive carelessness became a daily torment for him. She had two cars stolen because she’d forgotten to take the key out of the ignition while she’d gone shopping. She regularly mislaid her reading glasses, her purse, her mink stoles.

Condon kept wishing that she’d die so that he could inherit, but he shrank from doing anything about it. He resented her, not angrily, not head-on, but with a slow, repressed, icy venom that gnawed at him like acid. He dreamt of killing her and woke up frustrated to find that the dream was fantasy. He had many schemes and many devices, but he refrained from murder for the sound reason that year after year she increased her wealth. The stocks she bought, went up; the ones that she sold, went down.

Time after time she’d remark, casually, “You know those five hundred shares I just bought? They went up ten points.”

“Then sell them,” he’d say.

“I just can’t bear to. They’re much too nice.”