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  MURDER ON HER MIND, by Rufus King

  Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, December 1957.

  The home of Dr. Helmut Seibermann in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, had been one of the towns old-style houses with high ceilings, a good many over-decorative plaster frescoes, and quantities of interior wood paneling in the most dismal imaginable taste.

  However, there were compensations. The grounds surrounding it were extensively and richly landscaped with semitropical plants and trees, and it was constructed in such a manner that the doctor had been able to set aside an entire suite on its ground-floor rooms for his practice of psychiatry.

  And the dwelling had not been altered in any essential particular since he had settled there after his flight from Vienna a good many years ago. He had managed to bring with him sufficient assets to tide him over the period of readjustment, and the house had gradually been transformed through numerous changes into a place of considerable dignity and charm.

  This had largely been brought about by Dora, an impressionable New York girl with whom he had fallen in love shortly after coming to the States. They had been married in Fort Lauderdale.

  Today Dr. Seibermann was a happy man. He liked being an American citizen. He was contented with his practice, which embraced members of the prosperous local families and of the even wealthier winter residents. He respected and in his mature, quiet fashion still loved Dora. Their daughter, Freda, he worshiped. She was a young woman now, socially prominent, and engaged to a career diplomat in the Polish Embassy in Washington. Yes, the United States of America had indeed been kind.

  But there were occasional disturbing notes, too, and now it was with astonishment and a prickling of worry that he heard his receptionist—a skinny young creature in glasses named Miss Foot—announce that a Countess Carlotta Zaleski was in the waiting room. The countess had no appointment, but wished to see the doctor on a matter of the most urgent importance.

  “Ask her to come right in, please.”

  Years had gone by since he had seen Carlotta, even though he and her husband Stefan occasionally would meet in the never quite successful effort to instill a warm glow into a friendship that was suffering the inevitable erosion of long absences and many new interests. He had never really liked Carlotta and had even been mildly repelled at moments, precisely as he would have been repelled by a sleekly dormant, well-bred water moccasin.

  But he greeted her in the friendliest fashion when she entered the consulting room, and inquired at once about dear Stefan.

  “He is well, Helmut, as always,” she said. “He is fishing just now with the Willbanks on their boat off Bimini—some tournament or other about tuna.”

  “Good. Then it is not your husband you are here to consult me about.” Dr. Seibermann instinctively, almost defensively, allowed a clinical touch to mingle with his amicable air. “Miss Foot said you wished to see me professionally. Surely not about yourself? You are one of the least neurotic persons I have ever known.”

  “No, Helmut. It is about my brother-in-law, Damon Pike. Did you ever meet him?”

  Dr. Seibermann shook his head. He sat at his desk and regarded Carlotta with clinical interest. Her surface elegance had always fascinated him because of her remarkable ability to carry it off. She was such an ugly woman. Not in a grotesque sense but nothing, no individual feature, seemed right about her. It was as though a rag doll had been dressed, through some child’s caprice, in high-style.

  That the consultation should be about her brother-in-law puzzled him, for the modes of living of the Pikes and the Zaleskis were poles apart. Florence Pike—Carlotta’s younger sister—lived with her husband, her son Otis (he was the only child of her first marriage) and her daughter Jo in the great family estate of Live Oaks, some miles inland from the ocean. Carlotta and Stefan, on the other hand, maintained a pied-à-terre on Halcyon’s golden coast shore.

  The two sisters were separated to a further extent by the fact that the Zaleskis lived up to the hilt, keeping a town house in Paris, a triplex in New York, and a shooting box in Scotland, whereas the Pikes remained vegetating in Live Oaks.

  No, so far as Dr. Seibermann’s knowledge went, Carlotta until now had never had the slightest regard for her sister’s family, let alone Florence herself. On the contrary, he could remember any number of times when Carlotta had referred to Florence in the most disparaging terms, as though she were some stumbling block to the efficient progress of society itself. It was very odd.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “It will have to be partly at secondhand, Helmut. Otis came over this morning hoping to see Stefan, whom he regards with a callow sort of hero worship. But Stefan was at Bimini, so he settled for me. He asked me whether I knew of a good psychiatrist, and quite naturally I told him about you. What it amounts to is this: Otis feels that his stepfather is turning into a homicidal maniac.”

  Dr. Seibermann suppressed a brief desire to smile. “Just how old is Otis?”

  “Twenty-two. I’ll admit he’s a bundle of moods, but there’s nothing wrong with his mind. He’s brilliant, really. His current phase is abstract painting.”

  “Let’s go into this a little more fully, Carlotta. Suppose you start with Damon.”

  Carlotta gave him the picture as Otis had drawn it for her. First she established Damon Pike as the man his friends considered him to be—a kindly man, an earnest man with the ordinary run of worries, both emotional and economic. The fact that he drank a lot and lost his temper on occasion in no sense made him unique. Such, Carlotta said, was Damon’s public side.

  But apparently the private, the family side, held a contrasting pattern that tinged on horror. With an increasing frequency there were alternating moods of excessive exhilaration and a sullen, brooding despair which exhibited itself outwardly in outbursts of a jealous rage. The jealousy appeared to be oddly directly against Florence’s dead first husband, Ursin Caldwell.

  There had been one violent scene, accidentally witnessed by O
tis, when Damon had threatened his wife with death. Finally, there was the incident of the snake.

  “A whip, really,” Carlotta explained. “Damon sliced a coral snake into strips, lengthwise, and tied them to the end of a stick—to make a knout. Otis thinks he did it while the snake was still alive. The whip was found in Damon’s golf bag.”

  “It is good that you did not put off coming tome about this,” Dr. Seibermann said, overcoming a thin chill of revulsion. “Obviously I can reach no conclusion until I have examined Mr. Pike. Until then you must accept what I say as though we were discussing a purely hypothetical case. But from what your nephew has observed—from that coral snake incident alone—I would subscribe to the belief that a man like that is dangerous.”

  Half of Dr. Seibermann’s mind was on his provisional diagnosis while the other half continued to be occupied with the enigma of Carlotta’s hidden motivations. Money, it seemed likely, had something to do with it. He was familiar, because Stefan had so often complained about the injustice involved, with the conditions of the sisters’ inheritance. A large fortune was held in trust, with the income equally divided between Carlotta and Florence. The principal remained untouchable by either, the entire business going to the surviving sister in the event of one sister’s death. But what, he wondered, would that have to do with Carlotta’s unnatural solicitude over her brother-in-law’s state of mind?

  “Whether Mr. Pike is a manic-depressive,” he went on, “a paranoiac, or is suffering from schizophrenia would have to be determined. Manic-depressive would seem the most probable. Actually there is such a frequent overlap that mere terminology becomes meaningless at times. But the fact, the danger lies in a strong possibility that such a man may turn into a killer. Remember, this is entirely hypothetical, but there seems little doubt but that grounds do exist for having him brought before a lunacy board, and possibly committed.”

  He blurted impulsively, before he could prevent the words from coming out, “That’s what you wish, Carlotta, isn’t it?”

  It surprised and shocked him to find her breaking into laughter, as though she had discovered in what he had just said something indescribably amusing. His professional dignity was profoundly affronted. Never in all his years of practice had he been laughed at, and the experience was galling. He wanted to shove her straight out of the house and into the street. He controlled himself with an effort. “You are hysterical,” he said.

  “Helmut, I simply couldn’t help it. You are so wrong. Oh, not in your diagnosis, but in the way you have misjudged me.”