Michael Gray Novels Read online

  The Michael Gray Series

  Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore

  The Murder of Eleanor Pope

  The Murder of Ann Avery

  Murder of a Mistress

  Murder of a Wife

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  Diversion Books Omnibus Edition 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-452-3

  More from Henry Kuttner

  The Time Trap

  Book of Iod

  Elak of Atlantis

  Prince Raynor

  Murder of Eleanor Pope

  Murder of a Mistress

  Murder of a Wife

  Murder of Ann Avery

  The Best of Henry Kuttner

  Robots Have No Tails

  Ahead of Time

  Earth’s Last Citadel

  Mask of Circe

  Man Drowning

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1956 by Henry Kuttner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition August 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-368-7

  To

  Albert W. Mason, Jr.

  with thanks

  1

  T​he spinning hum of the roulette wheel was in her ears as the door closed softly behind her. Part of her mind was still upstairs in the casino, listening to the chime of ice in a glass, the clicking of chips on the tables, the hurried rattling of dice in their whirling cages. That memory kept her safe for a moment or two.

  She walked along the driveway and through the open gates. She turned left and began to walk down the hill. There was a street lamp at the curb, but its glow was ghostly in the thick fog. Glittering drops of moisture showed already in the satiny sheen of her smooth, pale hair and on her lashes. She blinked quickly, trying to see beyond the shrouding darkness.

  The fog pressed down on San Francisco from the Cliff House to the Ferry Building. It lay sluggishly down the length of Market Street. It heaved up until it wrapped around Coit Tower, high above the city. It drained away light and sound and swallowed them in a submarine abyss of empty blackness.

  She was alone now.

  She was alone with herself.

  She paused to listen. That was an error. Now there was not even the echo of her high heels tapping hastily on the sloping sidewalk. There was no sound at all.

  She might have been the only one alive in a dead city … a dead world.

  The curves of her lips drew tight. She adjusted the strap of her handbag on her shoulder, brushed the fog drops from her lashes, and began to walk again. She walked faster now, but with a certain wariness.

  She had parked her car too far away. There were two more blocks to walk. On her left, now, should be a park, but she could not see it. She could see nothing but the small patch of glistening sidewalk just before her, and the pale, clouded glow of the street lamps. Everything else was lost in the secret, empty folds of the shrouding night.

  It was a mistake to be alone. It was always a mistake to be alone.

  … Yet something stirred, deep within her, with a strangely guilty delight, as though somehow it saw and welcomed the death that burst through the fog in sudden, exploding violence.

  The strong hand drove down and clamped bruisingly on her mouth. Like dancers in a nightmare two figures, writhing together, reeled from the street into the deeper blackness of the park.

  The other strong hand rose, gripping something rough and hard. It hammered down.

  There was a sound.

  Then there was a silence. And after that came a quick, faint scratching, and a match flared, held low.

  She lay on her back, watching the fog blindly, her lips parted a little. Near her head lay a rock, small enough to fit a hand, large enough to kill with. Its sharp edge glistened.

  On the grass was the handbag where it had fallen. A cigarette lighter had spilled out of it, and as the match died, red light caught and flashed on the initials jeweled on the lighter’s side: E. P.

  The jewels flared like fire in the fog.

  The match went out.

  2

  ​Gray stretched in his office chair, conscious of the ache along his back. He was a tall, thin man with rather untidy red hair and a casual ease of movement. But that wouldn’t last, he reflected glumly, unless he managed to squeeze some exercise into his overcrowded schedule. For a man who liked golf and swimming, it was surprising how little time he had for either.

  The sounds of San Francisco came muffled into the office, a reminder to Gray’s patients of the world outside that must eventually be lived in. A ship’s mournful hooting sounded through the early evening.

  Gray glanced at his wrist watch. It was nearly seven. He had time for a reasonably quick dinner before the meeting. He opened a desk drawer, took out the manuscript of the speech he was to give tonight, folded, and put it into his inside coat pocket. Little by little, his mind let go of the day’s work and problems and began to turn toward the evening’s program. He wondered how his speech would be received. The psychiatric society that was meeting tonight was one of the big ones, and very careful about choosing guest lecturers. Gray hoped for the best.

  He opened the door, switched off the light, and stepped into the reception room. Then he saw the man who was waiting.

  Trouble, he thought instantly.

  He couldn’t have told why. But the buried, secret, sensitive part of the mind can react to signals that are not consciously understood, and Gray knew that very well. He looked at the man, searching for the source of the warning.

  There was nothing unusual. Gray saw a strongly built man in a tweed suit; he was a blond with pale blue eyes, and his age might have been thirty. So far, an ordinary man.

  But there were a few things faintly wrong.

  Such a man would usually have a ruddy complexion; this man was pale. His nails were carefully trimmed, but unusually short, as though they had been bitten down and then buffed. His left wrist had a pale strip where a wrist watch had been. He smelled of strong tobacco. And somehow it was the wrong smell. It didn’t belong to this man.

  The little things are usually the most significant.

  But there was something less tangible that flashed a warning signal to Gray and made the skin prickle along his back. He knew this reaction. It always came to him unexpectedly, and it was always the same acute sense of the uncanny. Yet the cause might be any one of a dozen or a hundred different things.

  So he merely said, “Were you waiting to see me?”

  The man glanced past Gray at the two inner
doors. One said Michael Gray; the other, Nathan Elder, M.D. This was a double suite, and Gray shared it with Dr. Elder, a general practitioner. The arrangement was useful, since general medicine and psychotherapy work hand in hand.

  “You’re Gray—the psychoanalyst?” the man asked.

  “That’s right,” Gray said.

  “My name’s Dunne. Howard Dunne.”

  “I thought I recognized your voice. But wasn’t our appointment for four o’clock?”

  Dunne said, “I’m sorry. My watch was … it’s being repaired. I lost track of the time.”

  “I see,” Gray said. “Well, could we make it tomorrow, then?”

  Dunne said quickly, “I’ll be out of town for a week or so. If you’re busy now, I’ll phone when I get back.”

  “Would you like to do that?” Gray asked.

  “If you’re busy,” Dunne said, and stood up. He was poised. His next movement, Gray realized, would be toward the outer door. And now the faint wrongness in the man’s attitude vanished as though it had never existed. The sense of hesitancy disappeared. Dunne looked relieved. Gray knew why. He had wanted an excuse to leave. Until he had got that, he had been anxious.

  But why did he need an excuse to leave?

  He doesn’t want to see me, Gray thought. He’s afraid to. But he needs my permission to go. Or is it really permission? How do I look to him?

  Then, for an instant, he looked through Howard Dunne’s eyes at the tall red-haired man who was Michael Gray—who was much too busy to give a patient the help he needed. For an instant he thought with Dunne’s mind and felt with Dunne’s emotions. It was a guess, no more than that, at this stage. But at least it was based on one vital acceptance: Dunne was right. In the unknown world of Dunne’s mind, there was only one reality that could be accepted by the psychoanalyst as he searched for an answer. It was Dunne’s reality. So Gray, as he searched, forgot himself and gave the initial acceptance that must always be given.

  It had taken no time at all. And Gray had learned very little. But the faint, warning prickle ran along his spine again. He felt surer than ever that he faced trouble.

  He thought of the meeting and felt the manuscript of his speech rustle as he breathed. All right. He’d skip dinner. He’d make an exception. Because if he didn’t, he knew he’d worry about it.

  Dunne was already turning toward the outer door.

  Gray said, “I’m not that busy, Mr. Dunne.”

  Dunne stopped moving. There was something close to panic in his abrupt pause. Then his eyes slid away from Gray’s and he said, “I don’t want to interfere with your plans.”

  “It’s a little after seven,” Gray said. “I can give you half an hour or so tonight. Would you like to do that?”

  “It’ll take more than half an hour.”

  “Much more,” Gray agreed. “We couldn’t finish the job tonight anyway. But we can make a start, if you like.”

  Dunne muttered something. Still, he turned toward the inner door, so Gray moved ahead of him, opened it, and switched on the lights again. He stepped back and let Dunne precede him. Then he followed, and, as he closed the door, the sounds of the city faded to a murmur.

  “Have a chair,” Gray said. Dunne glanced toward the couch against the wall.

  “I thought you’d want me to lie down,” he said.

  “Perhaps I will later. What’s the hurry?”

  Dunne sat down. So did Gray. The psychoanalyst waited. Dunne took out a pipe and a tobacco pouch and killed time filling and lighting the pipe. When he did, Gray understood why the strong tobacco smell had seemed wrong. Dunne didn’t like pipe tobacco. The way he smoked showed that.

  Gray waited.

  Dunne looked carefully around the office. It was a noncommittal room. There were a few pictures on the wall, a bookcase with a lamp and a metal statuette of a satyr on top of it, a small table bearing a vase of flowers and a replica of an Egyptian cat, sitting watchfully as though staring at the bronze satyr. Behind the desk was a metal filing cabinet. That was all, except for the couch.

  Finally Dunne looked at Gray.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll be late for that meeting,” Dunne said. “I might as well tell you. I read about it in the paper today. That’s why I came late.”

  Gray repressed a grin.

  “You must have had a good reason,” he said blandly.

  Dunne was startled. Whatever reaction he had expected, it wasn’t this matter-of-fact approach.

  He tried again.

  “There wasn’t anything wrong with my watch. I’ve got it in my pocket. I came late on purpose. So I wouldn’t have to see you.”

  Gray said, “But you did come to see me. You came late on purpose, but you needn’t have come at all, if you hadn’t wanted to. Why?”

  After a pause, Dunne said in a low voice, “I can’t tell you that.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” Gray said. He watched Dunne lay his pipe, which had gone out, in the ashtray by his chair. Then Gray held out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Try one of these?” he asked.

  Dunne took a cigarette, lit it, and smoked silently. Finally Dunne shook his head almost savagely.

  “I can’t say anything,” he told the analyst. “I want to, but I can’t think. I don’t know how to start.”

  “That’s natural enough,” Gray said. “Nobody finds it easy to talk to a stranger. That’s why I usually start by asking questions.”

  “I don’t know if I can answer them,” Dunne said. “I’ve seen four people already, and one interview was enough. It’s so damn hard to talk about these things.”

  “What do you feel I’d do if you talked about these things?”

  Dunne moistened his lips.

  Almost inaudibly, he said, “Have me locked up.”

  “Where?”

  “You know what I mean. A mental institution.”

  “Ever been in one?”

  “Of course not!” Dunne snapped. “I’m—” He stopped.

  Gray leaned back and blew a smoke ring.

  “I wonder if somebody’s been feeding you a line?” he said thoughtfully. “You know, it’s usually harder to get into a mental hospital than out of it.”

  “You don’t know Sam. My brother-in-law. He’s got my wife to sign commitment papers already. It’s a frame-up. I’m sane enough. But I’m being railroaded into an asylum. Now what the hell can you do about that?”

  “I can’t tell yet,” Gray said.

  Dunne said, “You see—I’m sane now. But I couldn’t stand being locked up. That’s one—the one thing I’m afraid of. If they locked me up, I wouldn’t stay sane long. There really isn’t anything you can do. You couldn’t treat me in an asylum, could you?”

  “I do it sometimes,” Gray said.

  Dunne said quickly, “But the place is down in Los Angeles. A private sanitarium. How about that?” He was ready to get up and walk out. It was what he wanted.

  Gray said nothing.

  Dunne turned his head to stare at the analyst, and there was a challenge in his eyes.

  “What can you do for me?” he asked. “Suppose I am crazy?”

  Gray said, “Emotional illness has to be diagnosed, like physical illness. I’d have to know quite a bit about you before I could answer your question. Right now, I don’t know. There isn’t much time left, so suppose I ask you a few questions. Okay?”

  “… Okay.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Have you had a physical check-up lately?”

  “Last month,” Dunne said. “Physically, I’m fine.”

  “What business are you in?”

  “Advertising.”

  “What are you going to do when you leave this room?”

  Dunne opened his mouth and closed it. Then he said angrily, “Pick up a girl in some bar and make a pass at her.”

  The psychoanalyst
smiled.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll have to stop now, I’m afraid. But I’ll need to ask a lot more questions.”

  “Can you take me on?”

  “I can’t tell yet,” Gray repeated. “First I’ll have to get enough information so I can try to decide whether analysis would benefit you. The diagnosis comes first. Your trouble may be psychological, physical, or social. For all I know, your brother-in-law may be the one who needs analysis, not you.”

  Dunne seemed surprised.

  “But suppose I need analysis?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you how the situation looks to me, and you can decide for yourself,” Gray said. “Now—when would you like to come in again?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Aren’t you going out of town?”

  “No,” Dunne said, with a distant challenge in his voice.

  “Then what about four o’clock?”

  But this was too definite. Dunne hesitated.

  “All right,” he said at last, and stood up. So did Gray.

  “Four o’clock,” the analyst repeated. “Good-by.”

  “Good-by,” Dunne said, opening the door. But on the threshold he turned suddenly.

  “Suppose I told you I’d committed a murder?” he asked.

  Gray said calmly, “We can talk about that tomorrow.”

  Dunne hesitated. Then he said sharply, “I doubt if I’ll show up.” He swung around and marched across the reception room. He jerked open the outer door and went out.

  The psychoanalyst picked up Dunne’s pipe from the ashtray and laid it on his desk. Dunne would be back. Probably, right now, he didn’t intend to return. But under the fear and anger storming across the surface of his mind were the deep, powerful forces that really determined his actions. Something, far down in that secret place, like a prisoner locked in a black dungeon, had asked Gray for help. And had begun to accept help. The pipe was a token. “I’ll be back,” it seemed to say for its owner. “I’ve left part of me here. So I’ll have to come back.”