Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 24, No. 3, March 1979

Murphy’s Day by Ernest Savage

I could hear Henry Taylor breathing in my ear through the receiver, and he could probably hear me breathing in his.

“Twenty thousand,” he had said, “isn’t a hell of a lot of ransom to ask in this day and age,” and I’d agreed with him. Now we were thinking about it, each in his own way.

I’d taken his call at ten-thirty in my apartment. He was at his office and had just finished a conversation with the kidnapper of his wife, Bella. A man had just told him he could have her back for $20,000 and I think it bruised his pride. Twenty thousand dollars is what you pay for a car, not a wife. I would have put him in the hundred-thousand-dollar ransom class, minimum; and he would put himself higher than that, I thought. He had the inflamed ego of all self-made zillionaires.

“How does he want it?” I said finally.

“He didn’t say what denominations, Sam.” Taylor sounded irritated, as though he would fire the man for inefficiency if he knew who he was. “He said to put the money in a five-by-twelve-inch manila envelope.”

“What?”

He repeated the instructions and I asked, a little stiffly, “Well, Henry, are you gonna?” He was sounding as though maybe the whole thing should be handled by his secretary. I’m not too fond of Mr. Henry Taylor, with whom I’d done business before.

“Of course I am,” he said indignantly, and again we breathed into each other’s ear.

“Tell me what he said,” I said. “All of it.”

“He said he had Bella and would do unspeakable things to her if I didn’t pay him twenty thousand dollars.”

“Are you quoting exactly? Did he actually say ‘unspeakable things’?”

“Yes, he did.”

“What kind of voice — the rhythm, the tone? Cultured? Educated?”

“I would say educated. But muffled, as if spoken through a handkerchief. Sam, will you help me?”

“What else did he say?”

“To be in the lobby of the Bancroft Building with the money sealed in the envelope and stand in front of the third telephone booth from the end at exactly one-thirty this afternoon.”

“You personally?”

“Yes, damn it — me.”

“I suppose you’ve got a board meeting,” I said snottily, “that’ll interfere.”

“You can damn well believe, Train, that I’ve got better things to do with my time than this!” He’d almost snarled it and I grinned into the mirror over my telephone table. Taylor was a self-made tycoon (like most of them — I mean, who else would make one?) in the import-export business and had more than his share of arrogance.

“When did you see her last?” I said more civilly.

“This morning, at home. She left the house around seven-thirty. I was eating breakfast.”

“Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t ask?”

More heavy breathing in my ear — then, aggressively: “No. I didn’t ask.”

“How was she dressed?”

“I—”

“You didn’t notice. O.K., Henry, few husbands do. But it would be nice to know where she was headed, wouldn’t it? I mean like for a swim, or what?”

“You’ll help me with this, Sam?”

“What would you like me to do — lend you the money? O.K., I’m kidding, but can you raise it that fast?” It became an honest question before I got it all out; I’d damn near had to sue him once to collect a modest fee.

“Of course I can,” he said.

“Could you raise — say, fifty — that fast?”

“Possibly not. Why? All he wants—”

“I was just wondering,” I said. “What else did our man say?”

“The usual stuff. Don’t call the cops, nothing but unmarked bills, etcetera.”

I paused, listening to the echo of the easy, casual voice, and thinking sardonically, How quickly we adapt — to anything. Kidnapping was nearly epidemic on a global scale, spreading like some new game of chance, and everybody was in on its special language and rules. The “usual stuff.” He should have been raging mad — and scared.

But I let all that pass. I’m a professional, I keep telling myself, with no values but those the client demands. The eyes in the mirror looked shifty. “What line did he call you on,” I asked, “your private one, or the company’s?”

“My private. Bella probably gave it to him.”

“Did you ask?”

“No.”

“O.K.” I had a mental picture of the lobby of the Bancroft Building with its dozen or so phone booths toward the rear just past the double bank of elevators. “At one-thirty I’ll be in the fourth booth from the end. After you take your call I’ll bump into you as you leave the booth and you drop something — the envelope, maybe. While we’re fumbling around with that, smiling amiably all the while, tell me what he said. O.K.?”

He was dubious. “Shouldn’t we meet beforehand somewhere?”

“No. If you’re being watched, you’re being watched starting now. You concentrate on getting the money — and the right size envelope. I suspect that’s important. I’ll see you at one-thirty.”

I hung up and the face in the mirror wasn’t smiling now. There had been two other kidnappings in the San Francisco area in the last fifteen days, both pure extortion, both similar to this in all respects but the amount demanded. It’s another way the poor have found to bedevil the rich, and it works more often than not.

I got up, went into my kitchen, and poured a cup of lukewarm coffee from the morning’s pot. I would have to change clothes. I was dressed for tennis and would have been playing right now except that my partner had phoned a little earlier and cancelled out. He’d slipped getting out of bed and sprained his wrist — or so he said. Outside my window it was a bushy-tailed, blue-eyed day under a crackling sun. A dangerous day. A day for Murphy’s law to prevail, a day for mirrors to crack at an angel’s glance. More unprofessional ruminations — but any day Taylor replaces tennis has got to be bad. Besides, I was remembering the trouble I’d had collecting from him before. Like most of the rich, he figures it should all flow in and none out. That’s how they get that way.

The Bancroft Building is about a twenty-minute walk from my apartment on Van Ness, and I was there at one-fifteen. I bought a paper from the newsstand at the front of the lobby and glanced around, but saw nothing unusual. A man was in the fourth phone booth from the end and when he left I replaced him. The third booth was empty and stayed that way until Taylor arrived at two or three minutes before the half hour and stepped into it, glaring at me through the glass. At exactly one-thirty I heard the phone ring in his booth and I watched him raise it to his ear, listen, frown, and then hang up.

I almost knocked him off his feet when we collided a few seconds later outside the booths, and he wasn’t smiling amiably as he stooped to retrieve the bulky envelope he’d dropped. He’d lost his usual cool arrogance. Maybe the reality had finally penetrated — some bad guys had got hold of his wife.

“He wants me to go immediately to a phone booth on the thirty-eighth floor of this building,” he said gutturally, “and do what it says on the top of page three hundred and eighty of the phone book in that booth.” He straightened up. “Come with me, Sam.”

“No. And smile, damn it!” The thing was beginning to become vaguely clear to me, like the sound of a distant band approaching. “Go do it!”

I walked back toward the newsstand up front and stopped there, looking back as Taylor disappeared aboard an elevator. Then the music got louder in my head and I walked briskly, nearly running, to the big bronze mailbox implanted on the wall between two elevators and looked at the collection schedule on the front. The next pickup was at 1:40. It was now 1:37. Two letters flashed down the glass chute into the box as I stood there before moving away again, back toward the newsstand.

Taylor must be on the thirty-eighth floor by now, reading the instructions in the phone book, which would tell him to drop the fat envelope down the mail chute on the wall, and then a minute or two later, a mailman — fake, I was telling myself — would pick it up and take it away. The music was blaring now in my head as loudly as a passing parade.

I saw the guy in the mailman’s uniform come in from the alley behind the building, pass the line of phone booths, and angle across the lobby to the big bronze box. He was small and skinny and seemed nervous, his uniform ill-fitting, too wide in the shoulders.

I looked around for a cop, but there wasn’t one in sight. Then I trotted out to the street as the fake mailman emptied the bronze box into his canvas carrying sack. I saw nothing but pedestrians. (Where are the cops when you need them?) I nearly ran back through the Bancroft lobby out to the alley where the U.S. Mail truck was parked and there was no cop there either, but the door of the mail truck was unlocked — further indication that the guy was a fake — and I boarded it quickly and stepped back into the body, out of sight. The guy he’d swiped the uniform from wasn’t in the truck, so he must be someplace else, maybe dead. I got out my old Walther .38, glad now I’d brought it along. Sweat began to build around my eyes as I waited.

He looked as innocent as Bambi the Fawn as he got back in the truck, but I knew better. The Walther traced a wiggly zero between his eyes and he slumped weakly backwards onto the cab floor.

“No!” he said.

“Yes!” I said. “Get up and drive this thing to the Central Police Station.”

“No,” he said, even more feebly. “Don’t shoot — please. It’s a felony to — rob the United States—”

“You don’t say,” I said. Another band was marching over the horizon of my mind, dimly heard, but coming fast. “Where’s the other guy?”

“What other guy?”

Oh boy, I thought. “You’re an honest-to-goodness mailman, aren’t you?”

“What the hell did you think I was?” He was getting some strength back.

I lifted the canvas carrying sack from his lap and dumped the contents on the floor of the truck at my feet. Taylor’s big manila envelope stuck out in the pile of ordinary business letters and I picked it up, half gloating but completely puzzled.

“That’s a felony,” the mailman said.

“Yeah, I know, and a bullet between the eyes is fatal — facts of life.” I began to step over his legs to the door. He grabbed the envelope and we got into a ludicrous tug-of-war over the thing, one corner of it ripping off in his hand before I finally got over him and out to the alley, mad now. I put the Walther in his left nostril and said softly, “You forget it, I forget it — right? You shouldn’t have left your door unlocked.”

He closed his eyes and seemed to go to sleep. I put the Walther back in its holster and Taylor’s money in my side coat pocket and walked toward the street where the sun danced off the passing cars like laser beams.

I was back in my apartment at quarter after two, feeling some word not yet coined, a blend of miffed and puzzled — mizzled, maybe. Thoroughly mizzled. I didn’t want to call Taylor, who was no doubt back in his office making money, because I didn’t know what I wanted to say to him. But, I called his home and after some jockeying around with a foreign-accented maid I got the housekeeper, currently Mrs. Malvern. In the nine months I’ve been acquainted with the Taylor menage, there have been three housekeepers. Some people I know don’t change shirts that often.

“Mrs. Taylor, please,” I said with a certain hauteur I’m capable of when speaking to housekeepers. “I know she’s not there, but would you kindly tell me where she can be reached?”

“The playhouse, I would think,” Mrs. Malvern said. “She’s in rehearsal.”

I groped. “Ah yes, the — er—”

“Marin Mummers Society,” Mrs. Malvern said. “In Sausalito.”

“Of course,” I said, thanked her, and hung up.

Isabella Taylor, I remembered, had been an actress of sorts before Henry married her some twenty years ago. Maybe she thought she still was.

I’d put the coffee on to warm when I came in and was pouring myself a cup when someone knocked on my door, an almost unheard-of occurrence. People don’t knock on my door unless they’ve phoned beforehand, and since Murphy was stalking the streets today I got out the Walther before I opened the door with a snap and stepped slightly aside, ready to blast.

A tall, thin, cruel-faced man was standing there, his right hand in his jacket pocket holding a gun pointing at my heart. For an instant it was a Mexican stand-off, but then the cruelty on his face melted like wax and his blue-jeaned knees began to shake. I’d never seen him before. I slowly eased the pressure off the Walther’s trigger. My shot would have tom his chin off.

“Don’t!” he whispered and pulled his hand from the jacket pocket, empty. “Look — no g-g-gun.” I grabbed him by the hand and drew him through the door and, just for the hell of it, twirled and dropped him to the floor on his face, my knee at the base of his spine in the follow-through.

“Speak,” I said. “Where is she?”

“Oh, God,” he blubbered into the rug. “Oh, God. Please—”

“Where is she?”

“In a motel. She’s waiting. Please, that hurts.”

I stood up and watched him roll over slowly. Then he sat up, rubbing his arm, and I stuck the Walther in my belt.

“What motel?”

“Just outside town — Sausalito. The Bayside, or Bayview, something like that. I’ve got the phone number.”

“Have you called her yet?”

“No.”

“You were going to filch the ransom money first.”

He looked up. “It seemed insane to — just to let it go. Twenty thousand dollars! We could use it, believe me. I mean — just to let it go?”

“Who’s we?”

“The Marin Mummers. I’m the director.” His chin lifted a little with a touch of pride. He had an actor’s protean face. It looked as honest now as a scoutmaster’s.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Paul Travers. What’s yours?” He tried a winsome smile.

“Sam Train. Where were you in the Bancroft Building — on the thirty-eighth floor?”

“Yes.”

“You phoned Mr. Taylor from there at one-thirty — to the booth in the lobby?”

“Yes.”

“And when he showed up on the thirty-eighth floor you went down to the lobby. Did you know the mail would get picked up at exactly one-forty?”

“Yes. I’d checked the mailman a half dozen times. He was never more than a minute off. Like clockwork. I figured he’d be gone before Taylor got back down to the lobby.”

“And then what?” I said. “You weren’t planning to hijack the mail, were you?”

“No.” Travers shivered. He was still frightened, still rubbing his arm. “I couldn’t do that,” he said. “Violence makes me ill. I was going to point out to him that there was no addressee on the envelope and tell him that I’d dropped it down the chute by mistake. I was going to ask him to give it back.”

“And then what, Travers? You saw me in his truck in the alley and figured I was doing what? Sticking him up?”

“Yes!” His eyes flashed with new spirit. “I thought it was just one of those awful things — that for the first time in the history of the universe that particular postal truck was getting held up — and I got mad.”

“And followed me here.”

“Yes, getting madder by the minute. I simply couldn’t let you take my money, so I hyped myself into acting like the world’s deadliest gunsel and taking it back, but—” He shrugged.

“At the critical moment, the act failed. You fell apart.”

“Yes. When I saw that horrible gun. I told you I can’t stand violence.”

“Who thought this up?” I said. “You?”

“Mostly, yes. The details were mine. The idea of faking a kidnapping was strictly Bella’s, but when she insisted the ransom couldn’t be more than twenty thousand, I thought of the mail-chute thing. I used to work in the Bancroft Building. You can get twenty thousand into one of those envelopes if you try.”

“You tried?”

“Yes.”

“What was the idea, Travers? Was she testing him?”

“Yes, testing his love for her, if any, and also — mostly, I think — just to get his attention. She’s been in four plays for the Mummers this past year and he hasn’t come to any one of them. I mean, think about that. It became vital for her to let him know she’s alive. Do you understand, Mr. Train?”

“Yes. But why the twenty-thousand limit?”

Travers had quit rubbing his arm and had gotten a cigarette lit and going. He had long supple fingers that liked to keep moving.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I guess it’s because she had no idea of collecting it and simply didn’t want him to lose any more than that. The idea of recovering the stuff was strictly mine, Mr. Train. She knows nothing about it.”

“Maybe,” I said, “she was afraid of overpricing herself. Some husbands I know would pay that much and more to get rid—”

“I know,” said Travers. “I know some too.”

“Would Taylor?”

“I don’t know. It’s almost unthinkable though, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “Not on a day like today. Do you love her, Travers?”

“Yes, I do. But platonically, Mr. Train. She’s very talented. She’s very good.”

“She loves him?”

“Yes. Without limit.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“No, sir. I was trying to help her. What bothers me is her unhappiness.”

He was rubbing his arm again and knocking ashes on my rug. I don’t smoke, but I do have ashtrays and like people to use them. On Thursday, Martha, my cleaning woman, would pounce on that ash like a cat on a baby mouse. Then I’d catch hell. “Get up,” I said. “There’s an ashtray in the kitchen. Also coffee. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be calling her about now?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“That he delivered the money. That’s all she wants to know. Just that he delivered the money. She’ll think it means he still loves her, and maybe he’ll even come to opening night this Friday.”

I poured two cups of coffee and drank some of mine, looking out the window at Van Ness Avenue two floors below. The sun was still coming down like Apollo throwing knives and my mind boggled at the million dramas going on out there that I would never know about, that wouldn’t open on Friday and close three weeks later, but would go on forever, unnoticed and unreviewed, important only to their audiences of one or two. All she wanted to know was that he still loved her and she’d commit a half dozen felonies to find it out. Wow, Murphy, I thought, go home and sleep it off before you bring it all down around our ears.

“And when you tell her he delivered the money,” I said. “Then what?”

“Then later today, around five, five-thirty, I’ll drop her off on the road near her house — with tape marks on her wrists and a few other touches — and then she’ll stumble into the house and they’ll have this fantastic coming together in the vestibule—” His voice trailed away sardonically.

“You don’t believe that’s what’ll happen?”

He shrugged. “It’s a fairy tale, isn’t it?”

He was probably right, but I didn’t say so, my recall of her clearer now. She was an energetic, eager-eyed, blondish woman of forty or so with not enough to do, a home-grown neurotic in full flower. She probably should have had four or five kids, but Taylor, I knew, couldn’t be bothered. “What was supposed to have happened this morning?” I said. “How was she supposed to have been snatched?”

“The story is, I phoned her to come down to the playhouse at eight o’clock this morning for some special rehearsal, but she was intercepted in the parking lot by the kidnappers — a man and woman she’d never seen before. She was blindfolded and taken somewhere in a rattly old car. Then she was forced to disclose her husband’s unlisted office phone number before being made to take some kind of a sleeping pill. That’s all she’ll remember until she’s dumped out of the same car near her house. And of course she’ll take a couple of her own sleeping pills an hour or so beforehand, so her dopiness will be real. Neat, eh?” He smiled theatrically.

“It has the virtue,” I conceded, “of simplicity. Her car’s at the playhouse parking lot?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better call her,” I said. “The phone’s over there. Tell her you’ll be there in a half hour or so. Don’t tell her I’ll be with you.”

“Mr. Train?”

“What?”

“Would you donate a thousand dollars of that ransom money you’ve got in your pocket to the Marin Mummers for a new curtain? We desperately need a new curtain.” He was good. He was a man of about thirty-five, but his face shone just then like a choirboy’s. I wanted to ask him to make that cruel face for me again, but it didn’t seem fitting.

I smiled. “It’s not mine to give, Travers.”

“Would he even miss it?”

I weighed the question. “Like a tooth,” I said judiciously. “Go call her.”

At first she was frightened at the sight of me, and then pleased when I said quickly, “Henry hired me to find you. I’m Sam Train — remember?”

“Of course,” she said, and flung the flimsy motel door wide. “Henry truly hired you?” She was inordinately pleased.

“Yes. Right after he got the call from your kidnapper here.” I gestured toward Travers, who was beginning to understand this caper was a bit more serious than a drawing-room charade. We’d driven over in my car and I’d lectured him on the facts of life — at least the few I understand.

“He’s got the money too,” Travers said in feigned admiration. “He filched it from the mailman.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Taylor was wide-eyed. “Should you have done that?”

“From your point of view, why not? What’s one more crime on the list?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“As well you might. You’re in the process at this very moment of committing a dozen or so felonies, and I’m in the process of deciding whether to conspire with you in them or have you arrested.”

“You wouldn’t!”

It was a way of getting her full attention and I pressed it a bit further. “You expect me to tell Henry this kidnapping is for real?”

“Of course.”

“You expect me to deliver you and the money back to your husband without another word about it?”

“Of course.”

She meant it. She needed some sign of his love and would start a war to achieve it. I glanced at Travers, who was looking bland, and then at my watch, which said 3:55. Murphy still had several hours of daylight left and whatever plan I made to handle this contretemps would have to be made with care.

“What we might do,” Travers said, “is follow the original plan.”

“No. I want to be there when they meet. I want to deliver her straight into her husband’s arms.”

“You want the credit, is that it?”

“No. I’ve got the credit already. I want to be there to hand him my bill. I don’t trust the mails. What you’ll tell him,” I said, turning to Mrs. Taylor, “is that you woke up in this strange motel room, stumbled outside to a phone booth, and called me because you remembered me from before and didn’t think he’d want the police in on it. Luckily, I happened to be home. O.K.?”

“O.K.,” she said. “That means we both called you.”

“Right.”

“Should I take my Seconals now?”

“Any time.”

“And me?” Travers said.

“You vanish,” I said, and went over and sat down at the rickety motel table and put through a call to the cause of all this.

It was 5:15 when he steered his mole-grey Mercedes SL-480 between the brick gateposts of his drive and tooled up the long curving approach to the house. I’d parked my Dart a quarter of a block away and was waiting because I wanted him there first. Now I followed him in, Bella coming awake in the front seat beside me, looking right for the role of recent kidnappee. Travers had done a makeup job on her, tape marks around the wrists, a discreet rip at the shoulder of the dress, a dirt smear across the forehead, and the Seconals. She was putting her heart in it. She wanted it to work more than anything else in the world, and I was going to see that it did.

My phone call to his office had pulled him out of a conference and at first he’d asked if I couldn’t call back later. When I finally got him I told him to be home by five o’clock to greet his recovered wife or I would personally bring him back in several parts. The tardy fifteen minutes I’d give him — a tie-up on the bridge, maybe — but he’d played it awfully close.

I took her in through the kitchen door and we found him in the den mixing a drink, as though this were the end of any ordinary day. Then he frowned, his eyes flicking past me to her, and he leaned dramatically against the frame of the door. He put down his glass and stepped toward her, and in one of those magical retrogressions they were both young again and the love glowed between them for an instant like heat lightning. He said, “Bella,” thickly, and his arms enclosed her like wings.

This, I thought, is too good to be true — and of course it was. It couldn’t last any more than lightning can be fixed in the sky. But it had happened and maybe the power of the thing would linger through enough time to matter.

It made Taylor self-conscious. “Sam!” he said heartily. “Lord God, how can I thank you for this? I can’t tell you how frightened I was.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, I suppose,” Bella said almost coyly, still pressed against his chest, “you could pay him.”

“Why, certainly,” Taylor said, still hearty.

“No need, Henry,” I said. “I’ll just keep” — I pulled the envelope of ransom money from my pocket, torn corner up — “this.”

The euphoric moment shattered. Henry turned a pasty tone of grey and Bella, with some vestigial sense of values, said, “Why, Mr. Train, that’s ridiculous! Twenty thousand dollars!”

“No!” Henry said, and then cleared his throat and said it again. “No. It’s perfectly all right, darling. You’re worth twenty times that much to me.”

“I won’t hear of it,” Bella said, hut she was pleased.

“Mrs. Taylor,” I said, “you’re right. Give me a piece of paper and I’ll tote up a hill for Henry right now. Besides, I borrowed this from the U.S. Postal Service and I’ll have to turn it back in for processing. Right, Henry?”

“Right! Oh, right!”

Mrs. Taylor, out of her depth with anything vaguely legalistic, was mollified, and Henry seemed visibly delighted with the plan.

I grinned at him satanically as he pressed his wife back against his chest and mouthed something at me over her shoulder. But I turned and went to the desk in the corner of the elegant room to do up my bill.

“Dear Henry,” I wrote on a piece of his wife’s scented notepaper, “my charges to you are as follows:

I folded the note, sealed it in an envelope, and wrote on the outside: “Personal. For Mr. Henry Taylor.”

He was mixing drinks again, Bella slumping in a chair, the Seconals once more at work. A pair, I thought, uniquely deserving of each other, with lovelorn Bella getting the worst of it. I put the envelope on the bar next to Taylor and he said, sotto voce, “Sam, don’t go — I want to talk to you—”

“Sorry, Henry,” I said. “I’ve got to meet a guy named Murphy downtown and if I’m late by thirty seconds, he’s apt to kill me.” I didn’t want to hear his explanation just then, knowing it might even be convincing, and I didn’t want to be convinced. I wanted only to leave them alone together and give the small tender thing between them a chance to grow, because they’d both taken high risks in giving it life.

I said goodbye quietly and went back out to the Dart parked on the apron in front of the seven-car garage. I stood there for a moment, debating. I had a choice to make. I could either keep the envelope as a kind of souvenir of the day they let Murphy loose, or take it over to one of the garbage cans lined up alongside the garage and dispose of it there. I went over to the garbage cans.

I put my finger in the torn corner of the manila envelope and ripped it open along the top. Then I took one of the bills from the thick mass of them and put it in my pocket. That one I’d keep just for the hell of it. The rest I dumped into the garbage can because I didn’t know any kids I could give play money to.

Then I drove home. Very carefully.