One Good Turn Deserves Another

Sensitive Content. Several murders are committed by the antagonists.

One Good Turn Deserves Another

By Phillip Owens

He was enjoying his third double Scotch and soda on the rocks, taking in the view from the front window of his rented high-rise apartment. It was midnight Saturday night, and the city was alive with lights. The street lights, the far-off glow of an open-air stadium where the second half of a twilight double-header professional baseball game was minutes from ending, the slow-moving headlights of a thousand cars, and the distant, faint twinkling of the red-and-blue lights of a few emergency vehicles all added to the midnight rainbow glow of the city.

He was pleased with himself and the overwhelming success of the simple ingenuity of his long-range plan. Now, he had a new wife; she was his fifth wife. And like the others before her, she would add to his fortune, making him even wealthier. And for this, he could hardly wait.

*

In the lobby of the high-rise apartment building far below, a man lounged in a far corner, away from the elevators, reading the early edition of the next day's newspaper, when he noticed a woman entering the front doors.

She was of average height, a little plump, with medium-length blonde hair, and dressed neatly but not to attract attention. With one swift glance around the room, she noticed the man in the corner and crossed over to him, taking the seat adjacent to his.

"Hello, Martin," she said to him. "What are you doing here?" she asked him.

"The same thing you are, Mildred, Shadowing Nick Murdock."

"Nick Murdock?" She said incredulously.

"Sure."

"But I'm not shadowing him. I'm…" She stopped short, a wave of suspicion flooding her mind.

"Well," Martin said. "If you're not shadowing him, whom are you shadowing?"

Since she and Martin were insurance fraud investigators, she instinctively knew she could trust him implicitly.

"A woman named Margaret White."

"What?"

"Yes, why? Do you know her?"

"Do I know her? Boy, I'll sure say I do," he said, incredulous.

"Why? What's going on?"

"If you're following her, her name is now Mrs. Murdock, in case you didn't know about her recent marriage."

"What recent marriage?"

"I think you and I need to compare notes on this case, Mildred," he said, glancing sideways at her. "Nick isn't her fiancé anymore. He's her husband.

#

Martin came into the case about a year ago on a beautiful, sunny Saturday afternoon in June. It was an exquisite day for a June bride. Jennifer Gordon was happy beyond words. She and her new husband Nick Murdock, thirty-five, tall, dark, and handsomely Irish Celtic, were winging their way to a dream honeymoon in the Hawaiian Islands. They had planned to stay there for an entire month. From there, they would head to other islands in the South Pacific, then into Mexico, rounding out a two-month extravagant honeymoon vacation before returning home.

They were in the hotel a scant week when a frantic Murdock called the hotel operator, informing him that his wife, while bathing, had suffered an electrical shock caused by an electric curling iron falling into the bathtub from the edge of the sink where it had been plugged in. He thought she was dead, but he was not sure.

"Could you please send help?" he screamed into the mouthpiece.

"Yes," the hotel operator said, alarmed. Nothing like this had happened before. They had the windows securely fastened with shatterproof glass so no one could open them and jump to their deaths; even the door to the roof was locked. When the insurance claim was submitted a few months later, it went through immediately, and no one suspected a thing.

A few weeks later, while attending a policeman's convention, Martin mentioned the case and its particulars to a friend who was also attending it. He remarked that it resembled one he'd investigated about a year earlier. This fatality involved Murdock's sister, who had suffered an electrical shock while bathing; a hair dryer had fallen into the bathtub while she was soaking, and it was plugged in, fatally electrocuting her.

Upon questioning others at the convention, it was learned that Murdock had also lost his mother three years earlier. She, too, suffered an electrical shock from a curling iron falling into the tub while bathing.

#

When Martin returned to his office, he began an all-out investigation of Murdock. It was learned that before his mother died, he had lost three other wives, all precisely in the same type of "accident." They were all insured for one hundred thousand dollars with a double indemnity clause for accidental death. The reason he had gone undetected was that all of the fatalities had occurred in different cities and states, and he had used separate insurance companies when he'd had them insured. Recently, his fourth wife died the same way, making six murders altogether. With the double indemnity clause of one hundred thousand dollars on each woman, each policy paid two hundred thousand dollars, making a grand total of one million, two hundred thousand dollars, paid to him as the sole beneficiary.

#

"Oh my God," Mildred said quietly.

"Yes," Martin said. "Now, he's upstairs ready to kill wife number five, victim number seven, and he'll probably kill her the same way as he did the others."

"Wow."

"Indeed."

"He going to have a little trouble with this wife," Mildred said with a slightly devious chuckle.

"What do you mean?"

"They're two of a kind."

"What do you mean?"

"It seems our next 'intended victim' had racked up quite a record of her own."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. She's been married three times herself, and each husband has died of potassium poisoning. Since potassium is found in the body naturally, it's virtually impossible to prove an overdose, so we can't prove a thing. Still, it's more than a coincidence that all of her husbands would die that same way."

"True," he agreed. "How does she administer it?"

"In a highball."

"In a drink, eh?"

"Yes. That way, you can't taste it."

Just then, an ambulance, siren blaring, stopped at the apartment's entrance. The paramedics exited the vehicle, got the gurney and their medical bags from the back of the vehicle, and entered the building. As they rushed up to the elevators, Martin and Mildred were on their feet, hurrying to join them.

"The forty-fifth floor," the paramedic said to the elevator operator.

"Right," the operator responded.

The ride up to the forty-fifth floor seemed to take an eternity before the doors opened, allowing them entrance into the corridor. They rushed down to number forty-five-seventeen. Finding the door locked, Martin and the paramedics broke it down. They were amazed by what they saw:

Murdock was sitting in an easy chair. A partially consumed drink had slipped from his hand and fallen to the carpeted floor, the glass breaking. His eyes were opened unnaturally wide, with a livid, almost purple hue on his face and blue around his lips and nose. He was dead. Rushing into the bathroom, they found his new wife in the tub, a plugged-in curling iron in the water, and the lights in the room were out. She, too, was dead.

"But how," Mildred said, "how did she get in here?"

"That's easy," Martin said.

"Easy?"

"Yes. She must have spiked the whiskey with the potassium without his knowledge, possibly while he fixed her bath. That's how he prepared things," he added parenthetically. "Then, she came in, sat in the bathtub, not suspecting a thing, and he juiced her. Afterward, he called the front desk to tell them he thought his wife was dead. While waiting for the ambulance and paramedics to arrive, he poured himself a congratulatory drink or two, and that killed him."

"Yeah, must be. Well, that finishes up our work, doesn't it?"

"Yes," Martin said, "Instead of one killing the other, they killed each other. Sort of ironic, isn't it?"

"Yes," Mildred said. "It's like the old saying: 'One good turn deserves another.'"

"Yes, or 'turn-about is fair play,'" Martin added.

"Hey," a paramedic called out. "You guys finished here?"

"Yes," Martin said. "We're finished."

"Good. We'll call the cops and the coroner."

With that, the paramedic pulled out his cell phone and made the calls. For the next several hours, the police and coroner would collect the bodies and every bit of evidence in the apartment. Martin and Mildred were interviewed, their stories added to the official police report.

Eventually, it would be ruled a double homicide, and with both perpetrators dead, there was no one to arrest, and the case would be closed.

The End