10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 86: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ie + . for fifty thousand dollars, double in- demnity because of the way Ned had passed away. We gave Ned a nice funeral, noth- ing too elaborate. I was one of the pall- bearers. Cherry put on a great show. And she looked wonderful in black. She kept moaning and wringing a lit- tle lace handkerchief for all the world as if her heart were breaking. I had ~ to signal her not to overdo it. ; We planted him in a lot out at the » Easyrest Cemetery and ordered a og headstone with the inscription: Ned 7 Oliver, Beloved Husband of Cherry. Rest in Peace. I didn’t drive her home. [ didn’t see her for a whole week. And then I paid what was ostensi- bly a condolence call. After that I saw her more often. And in two months we were married. I moved into the neat white house that Ned had built for his wife, and I settled down to keep Cherry amused. Abd i a Lied \ otha ‘Ay # CAE alah Au a P a AYBE you think I got a bargain. You’re wrong. Oh, Cherry loved me all right, It wasn’t that. It was her health. She began to crack, to go to pieces. She lost weight. Her com- plexion got sallow. Her beautiful dark eyes lost their brilliant fire and got dull and heavy. The doctor couldn’t understand it. Me, I couldn’t figure it out either. It wasn’t her conscience; it wasn’t re- morse about Ned, nothing like that. I was with her when it happened— when Cherry died. She went right be- fore my eyes. She was dressed in a silk beans coat, listening to the radio. It started with a gentle shudder that shook her body. She must have known what was com- ing for she stared at me with an in- credulous look in her frightened eyes and reached out her hands, crying, “Max, Max,” in a thin, shocked voice. Then she slid off the chair and rolled over on the floor. A spasm like epilepsy rippled through her violent- ly and her fingers clutched at her breast as if to stop the horrible pain =f > AS Se nse SS eed Tes ae : ae Ne = z= é Ete « a een at that was distorsing her Reha | _ But nobody wil There eimai: a thing I could do, [Z = SS just sat there, transfixed, helpless, like © ys . a man caught in the grip of a night- mare—and I watched her suffer. It didn’t take too long. One last final shudder that caught at her mouth like a hand and stretched intoadeathlike = = grin that froze there, andshelay very | still, her wide-eyed face drenched in a rosy pool of light from the lamp. ee Cherry was dead. I knew thateven before I stumbled to her side and felt = = 8 8 — her pulse... . ee The rest of it is all somewhat hazy. | I remember only parts of it. They come back to me even now, jerking me out of my sleep with a yell. Se The police had to get the coroner to a do an autopsy. I guess it was the way = = ~— she died. And they found the arsenic — in her stomach and traces of it in her liver and in the roots of her hair. Chronic arsenic poisoning, it was. It was in the headache tablets she’d been in the habit of taking. They found the box and they discovered the arsenic. They proved that I had bought some rat poison. I had, but not to kill Cherry with. I swear it. My fin- gerprints were on the box of tablets. — Of course they were. Hadn’t I brought her that box more than once? The district attorney said that I had murdered Cherry to get the fifty thou- ~~ sand dollars she had inherited from = — Ned. He did more than just sayit.He = ~~ convinced a jury. That’s why I’m here now. In this Ss death cell. Waiting for them te take = me into that little room where they ge drop the capsule that releases the gas that takes all your troubles away. | They’ll have to drag me. I don’t think © I’ll be able to walk it. oe It’s driving me mad—mad, I keep telling them, but it’s like beating my = head against the bars, Can’t you see ss why? That's what Ned had been talk- — =- z = ing about that night when I left him 2S in the garage, about killing Cherry. — SS ae He did it. He put the arsenic in those 3 tablets. He hated her. He wanted = =e see her suffer. He killed Gherry. ee <— =