The Deal by Carl Martin

Sybil Marchand had come screaming into the world with a bellow that foreshadowed her extraordinary life. Now seventy-one years later, wasting away between silken sheets in what was certain to be her death bed, she pondered equally unconventional ways of leaving it.
A young doctor had just left after confirming the diagnosis of three specialists: she was suffering from abdominal cancer. The malignancy had attached itself to both kidneys and several other vital organs. Surgery was impossible. With treatment, she might live another year; without it, she had no more than six months. They made no promises, gave no guarantees.
This last physician, a falsely smiling fool like the others before him, seemed to think that life—any kind of life—was preferable to death. She knew better. A life without quality was far worse than no life at all. She didn't relish the idea of turning into a pain-filled, foul-smelling, whining lump—or, if narcotics were used to deaden her agony, a mindless vegetable. No. there had to be another way. A quicker way, a better way, a way that allowed her to salvage some dignity.
She considered suicide, but rejected the idea—not for religious reasons, but for purely practical ones. She was bedridden. Her energy level was very low. She could no more leave this room than she could fly to the moon. Even if she could somehow reach the study where her last husband's pistol was kept, she might botch the job and be no better off.
The same was true for any pills she might obtain. Her system was contaminated with so many different medications. What would be a lethal dose for someone else might merely be crippling for her. That left only one other alternative—murder.
Her own.
She had to find someone to do the job for her.
Luckily her mind was as sharp and clever as ever. Sybil Marchand hadn't always been wealthy. In fact, she hadn't always been Sybil Marchand. She had been born in a small Pennsylvania mining town and lived the first fifteen years of her life as Sally Majcik. Then she had fled to New York with a passing motorist who had stopped at the diner where she worked.
In the decades that followed, she outlived four husbands and traveled around the world four times. Most people thought her wealth inherited, but it wasn't. Her husbands has provided the seed money, but her fertile mind had made it grow. In fifty years she had never paid more than fifty cents for a dollar's worth of goods or service, never come out second best in a business deal, and never settled for less than the best.
She was now rich beyond the young Sally Majcik's wildest dreams, but wealth was little comfort. Nor were the silken sheets on her bed nor a house filled with valuable antiques. Her only solace would be in solving the problem that faced her. Beside herself, who did she know who mgmt do anything, absolutely anything, for money?
She lay motionless for a long time, her frail arms at her sides in what might have been a rehearsal of her final posture. At last she reached out a bony, spotted, ring-covered hand she no longer recognized as her own and pushed the button to summon her nurse/companion.
Megan Casey, a slender person hardly more than a girl despite her white uniform, appeared immediately. "Yes, Mrs. Marchand?" she asked with an accent that betrayed her Irish birth.
"Megan, do you remember--the antique dealer--who's been wanting--to buy my Fabergé egg?" she asked, referring to the jewel-encrusted oval that was the most valuable piece in her collection.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Call him. Tell him I want--to see him. Right away."
She watched as the young nurse left the room to make the call. Mrs. Marchand thought she saw a lot of herself in the girl. Perhaps if she had had children one of them would have been like Megan.
Aldo Lester followed Megan into Mrs. Marchand's bedroom the next afternoon. The old woman asking to see him was certainly a switch after the way she had humiliated him a year ago, the last time he had made an offer for her Fabergé egg. As if a hundred thousand dollars was an insult! True, that was far below the market value, but a dealer deserves a profit, doesn't he? Besides, it wasn't as though she needed the money. The tight-fisted old witch probably had her first alimony check.
Marchand was propped up with four pillows. She had lost half her body weight since he had seen her a year before. He could see veins like blue spiderwebs through the translucent, tightly drawn skin on her hands and arms. Rather than sinking into the pillows, she lay on top of them, making hardly an impression.
He had come expecting an arduous negotiation, but he revised his thinking after seeing her. Perhaps she wouldn't be as difficult to deal with as she had been. The year before she'd been a formidable, powerful woman in full control of her domain. If her hold on life was as tenuous as it appeared, perhaps her grip on the Fabergé egg was weakening, too.
Mrs. Marchand dismissed Megan with a curt, "I'll cal you if I need you." She didn't speak again until the bedroom door had closed. "Perhaps we can do business now, Mr. Lester?"
"You mean you want to sell the Fabergé egg?"
"No. I want you to perform a service for me. In return for which I will give you the egg."
He couldn't keep the smile off his lips. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to kill me," she said.
He looked away and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then back. When he looked at her again, her deep-set eyes were still fixed on him. He had made no move to leave the room and was sure the significance of that hadn't been missed.
"Of course, you're wondering how you can get away with it," she said.
"If I were considering it, that would be a concern," he allowed, "as would the payment."
"Good. Then we have only the details to agree upon."
That evening, dressed in his oldest, darkest clothing, Aldo Lester approached the Marchand home after dark. He made his way up to the side entrance. The door was unlocked, as the old woman said it would be.
Once inside, he made his way to the rear stairway, using a tiny penlight to show the way. He mounted the steps to the third floor, being careful to place his weight on the edge of the treads where they were least likely to make a sound.
He could hear voices coming from Mrs. Marchand's room. He pointed his light at his watch. It was three minutes to ten. He was exactly on time. He stepped into a small alcove to wait
According to their plan, the old woman was going to send her nurse to the kitchen to get her a cup of hot chocolate at ten. As soon as she was gone, the way would be clear for him.
It would take the girl fifteen minutes to prepare the hot drink. That was all the time he would need to send the old woman on her way to hell and make it look like a burglary had gone wrong.
He heard the nurse come into the hall and stepped farther back into the shadows until she had passed. He gave her time to get well down the stairs before he entered the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
The old woman was sitting up in bed. "Did you bring something?" she asked.
He reached under his jacket and brought out a two-foot length of iron pipe. He held it out for her inspection.
"Good," she said. "Let's get on with it."
"Not so fast. The egg—where is it?"
"In my nightstand," she mumbled.
He opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out a plush case. Inside was the Fabergé egg and a handwritten bill of sale made out by Mrs. Marchand. As agreed, it carried a date six months earlier.
"Satisfied?" she asked testily.
Yes, indeed," he said, folding the receipt and putting it in his breast pocket.
"Remember we want this to look like a burglary--you have to take my jewelry."
He set the egg aside so he could grip the iron pipe with both hands and raised it high over his head. Mrs. Marchand turned her head to the side and closed her eyes. The muscle along her jaw-line tensed. He paused, looking down at her until she looked to see what was delaying him. Then when she could see it coming, he brought the pipe crashing down on her skull. He had planned to deal only the one fatal blow, but he struck her twice more. The first blow was for her, but the next two were for him.
He let the bloody pipe fall to the carpet--the weapon had a rough surface so he wasn't worried about leaving fingerprints--then he hurriedly slipped the loose rings from the woman's bony fingers and dropped them into his pocket. He scanned the room to make sure he hadn't overlooked anything obvious, picked up the plush case and hurried to the door.
When he opened it, the light from the room illuminated the slim, white-uniformed figure off megan Casey. She stood with her feet firmly spread, holding an ugly black automatic pistol in the two-handed grip of an experienced shooter. The weapon leaped in her hands four times, but he heard only the first shot.
After the bodies had been removed and Megan's statement had been taken, most of the police left the crime scene. Two detectives hung back, reluctant to leave the young nurse in such a huge, dreary house after what had happened. They sat with her in the large kitchen, drinking tea and talking.
"You're lucky you heard the burglar and knew where the pistol was kept," one said.
"And knew how to use it," the other added. "It will be a while before we identify the man. All he had in his pockets was the jewelry he'd taken.
"Did Mrs. Marchand have any children?" the first one asked.
"No. She outlived all her relatives," Megan said. "She was alone."
"Then who'll get all this?"
"I will," Megan said quietly. "She wanted me to have it. Said I was a lot like her."

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Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine