Robert Artur - Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.122, No. 6, October 1, 1938

...and Paul Stapp with only seconds left to enjoy the most beautiful day God ever made.

She had signed her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man but he knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now.

One day he came home and there was a cigar butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other. There were gasoline-drippings on the asphalt in front of their house, and they didnt own a car. And it wouldnt be a delivery-vehicle, because the drippings showed it had stood there a long time, an hour or more at least. And once he had actually glimpsed it, just rounding the far corner as he got off the bus two blocks down the other way. A second-hand Ford.

She was often very flustered when he came home, hardly seemed to know what she was doing or saying at all.

He pretended not to see any of these things; he was that type of man. Stapp, he didnt bring his hates or grudges out into the open where they had a chance to heal. He nursed them in the darkness of his mind. Thats a dangerous kind of a man.

If he had been honest with himself, he would have had to admit that this mysterious afternoon caller was just the excuse he gave himself, that hed daydreamed of getting rid of her long before there was any reason to, that there had been something in him for years past now urging: Kill, kill, kill. Maybe ever since that time hed been treated at the hospital for a concussion.

He didnt have any of the usual excuses. She had no money of her own, he hadnt insured her. He stood to gain nothing by getting rid of her. There was no other woman he meant to replace her with. She didnt nag and quarrel with him. She was a docile, tractable sort of wife.

But this thing in his brain kept whispering: Kill, kill, kill. Hed fought it down until six weeks ago, more from fear and a sense of self-preservation than from compunction. The discovery that there was some stranger calling on her in the afternoons when he was away, was all that had been needed to unleash it in all its hydra-headed ferocity. And the thought that he would be killing two instead of just one, now, was an added incentive.

So every afternoon for six weeks when he came home from his shop, he had brought little things with him. Very little things, that were so harmless, so inoffensive in themselves that no one, even had they seen them, could have guessed fine little strands of copper wire such as he sometimes used in his watch-repairing. And each time a very little package containing a substance that well, an explosives expert might have recognized, but no one else.

There was just enough in each one of those packages, if ignited, to go Fffft! and flare up like flashlight-powder does. Loose like that it couldnt hurt you, only burn your skin, of course, if you got too near it. But wadded tightly into cells, in what had formerly been a soap-box down in the basement, compressed to within an inch of its life the way he had it, the whole accumulated thirty-six-days worth of it (for he hadnt brought any home on Sundays) that would be a different story.

Theyd never know. There wouldnt be enough left of the flimsy house for them to go by. Sewer-gas theyd think, or a pocket of natural gas in the ground somewhere around under them.

Something like that had happened over on the other side of town two years ago, only not as bad, of course. That had given him the idea originally.

Hed brought home batteries too, the ordinary dry-cell kind. Just two of them, one at a time. As far as the substance itself was concerned, where he got it was his business. No one would ever know where he got it. That was the beauty of getting such a little at a time like that. It wasnt even missed where he got it from.

She didnt ask him what was in these little packages, because she didnt even see them, he had them in his pocket each time. (And of course he didnt smoke coming home.)

But even if she had seen them, she probably wouldnt have asked him. She wasnt the nosey kind that asked questions, she would have thought it was watch-parts, maybe, that he brought home to work over at night or something. And then too she was so rattled and flustered herself these days, trying to cover up the fact that shed had a caller, that he could have brought in a grandfather-clock under his arm and she probably wouldnt have noticed it.

Well, so much the worse for her. Death was spinning its web beneath her feet as they bustled obliviously back and forth in those ground-floor rooms. Hed be in his shop tinkering with watch-parts and the phone would ring. Mr. Stapp, Mr. Stapp, your house has just been demolished by a blast!

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.

He knew she didnt intend running off with this unknown stranger, and at first he had wondered why not. But by now he thought he had arrived at a satisfactory answer. It was that he, Stapp, was working and the other man evidently wasnt, wouldnt be able to provide for her if she left with him. That must be it, what other reason could there be? She wanted to have her cake and eat it too.

So that was all he was good for, was it, to keep a roof over her head? Well, he was going to lift that roof sky-high, blow it to smithereens!

He didnt really want her to run off, anyway, that wouldnt have satisfied this thing within him that cried: Kill, kill, kill. It wanted to get the two of them, and nothing short of that would do. And if he and she had had a five-year-old kid, say, he would have included the kid in the holocaust too, although a kid that age obviously couldnt be guilty of anything. A doctor would have known what to make of this, and would have phoned a hospital in a hurry. But unfortunately doctors arent mind-readers and people dont go around with their thoughts placarded on sandwich-boards.

The last little package had been brought in two days ago. The box had all it could hold now. Twice as much as was necessary to blow up the house. Enough to break every window for a radius of blocks only there were hardly any. They were in an isolated location. And that fact gave him a paradoxical feeling of virtue, as though he were doing a good deed; he was destroying his own but he wasnt endangering anybody elses home. The wires were in place, the batteries that would give off the necessary spark were attached. All that was necessary now was the final adjustment, the hook-up, and then

Kill, kill, kill, the thing within him gloated.

Today was the day.

He had been working over the alarm-clock all morning to the exclusion of everything else. It was only a dollar-and-a-half alarm, but hed given it more loving care than someones Swiss-movement pocket-watch or platinum and diamond wrist-watch. Taking it apart, cleaning it, oiling it, adjusting it, putting it together again, so that there was no slightest possibility of it failing him, of it not playing its part, of it stopping or jamming or anything else.

That was one good thing about being your own boss, operating your own shop, there was no one over you to tell you what to do and what not to do. And he didnt have an apprentice or helper in the shop, either, to notice this peculiar absorption in a mere alarm-clock.

Other days he came home from work at five. This mysterious caller, this intruder, must be there from about two-thirty or three until shortly before she expected him. One afternoon it had started to drizzle at about a quarter to three, and when he turned in his doorway over two hours later there was still a large dry patch on the asphalt out before their house, just beginning to blacken over with the fine misty rain that was still falling. That was how he knew the time of her treachery so well.