Beware the Curves

legalized murder. It was carefully designed to be such. I didn’t know it at the time. The expedition didn’t stand one chance in a thousand. The cards were stacked against them, and Karl Carver Endicott made damn certain that the cards were stacked against them.
    “After a while Karl came to me with tears in his eyes. He said he had just received word that the entire party had been wiped out. They were, he said, long overdue and he had sent planes out to search. He’d also sent out ground parties. He’d spared no expense.
    “It was a terrific shock to me. Karl did his best to comfort me and finally offered me security and an opportunity to patch up my life.”
    She stopped talking for a moment and gave her gloves such a vicious twist that the skin over the knuckles went white.
    “You married him?” I asked.
    “I married him.”
    “And then?”
    “Later on he fired one of his secretaries. She was the first who told me. I couldn’t believe my ears. But everything fitted in with other facts as I’d come to know them.
    “This ex-secretary told me that Karl Endicott had made a very careful examination in order to pick out a locale for a suicide trip. He had sent John Ansel to his death just as surely as though he had stood him up in front of a firing squad.”
    “Did you go to your husband and face him with the facts?” I asked.
    “There wasn’t time,” she said. “I had the most terrible, the most awful, unexpected, devastating experience. The telephone rang. I answered it. John Ansel was on the line. The other member of the expedition had perished. John had survived absolutely incredible hardships in the jungle, had finally reached civilization, and then had learned that I was married.”
    “What did you do?”
    She said, “In those days I hadn’t learned to control my emotions. I became completely, utterly hysterical. I told John that I belonged to him, that I always had belonged to him, that I had been tricked into marriage. I told John I must see him. I told him that I was leaving Karl immediately.
    “And then I did something that I shouldn’t have done. Then I— I want you to understand, Mr. Lam, that I was hysterical. I... I was suffering from a terrific shock.”
    “What did you do?” I asked.
    “I told John over the telephone exactly what the score was. I told him that he had been sent into the jungle on a mission that constituted legalized murder.
    I told him that Karl wanted him out of the way and that the whole thing had been deliberately planned so that he could trick me.”
    “Then what?” I asked.
    She said, “For a while there was an absolute silence, then a click. I couldn’t tell whether the person at the other end had hung up the telephone or whether the connection had been broken. I finally got the operator and told her I’d been cut off. She said my party had hung up.”
    “What date was this?” I asked.
    “That,” she said bitterly, “was the date my husband met his death.”
    “Where was John Ansel when he phoned you?”
    “In Los Angeles at the airport.”
    “All right. What happened?”
    “I can’t explain everything that happened without telling you something about Karl. Karl was ruthless, possessive, cold-blooded and diabolically clever. When Karl wanted something, he wanted it. He wanted me. I think one of the main reasons he wanted me was because, after he had made the first overture, he found that I was not responsive.
    “By the time of John’s telephone call, things were getting to a point where I had learned a great deal about Karl’s character, and I think he had gone a long way toward getting over his infatuation, if you want to call it that. After all, being married to an unwilling woman whose heart is elsewhere satisfied Karl’s love of conquest, but that was about all.”
    “You faced your husband with what you had learned?”
    “I did, Mr. Lam, and I would have given anything if I had only used my head instead of letting my emotions run away with me. However, for months I had been fighting myself, controlling my emotions, keeping myself under wraps. When I blew up, I blew up all over. We had a terrific scene.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I slapped his face. I— If I had had a weapon I would have killed him.”
    “And then you walked out?”
    “I walked out.”
    “And what happened?”
    “John Ansel had been at the airport. There was a helicopter service to Citrus Grove. He took the helicopter, picked up a taxicab and drove