Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 1, No. 12, December 1956

A Soft Spot for Maddy by Fletcher Flora

Brandishing a mallet whilst sitting beside a baby carriage or caressing a bottle marked “Poison” as I stir Grandmother s nocturnal chocolate has not won for me a reputation as a sentimentalist — though I hasten to add these acts were committed to the celluloid of television.

Nevertheless, sentiment is an endearing quality. Freddie had sentiment. He’d go to any length to keep from degrading Maddy, or humiliating her...

Freddie Foley had this soft spot for Maddy Dakin. A soft spot as big as a silver dollar right in the middle of the old ticker. A lot of girls a guy would go for in a big way for one or more of various reasons, like they were really stacked or looked classy in their clothes or were good workers in close, lots of reasons like those, but it was different with Maddy. There just didn’t seem to be anything special about Maddy at all. Oh, not that she was a goon or had anything actually wrong with her, and as a matter of fact she was sort of small and neat and pretty enough in a conservative way, but it was just that she didn’t have anything special.

Maybe it was because she got next to Freddie young. A guy remembers what happened to him young. He remembers it and builds it up in his mind as being a hell of a lot more than it really was, and he gets to be a sucker for it. Like Freddie. He remembered how he used to take Maddy to these crummy high school football games, and she’d let him feel her knee under the blanket, and how she looked all moist and excited and just too damn happy in her cheezy little voil formal the night of the senior dance when they were graduating — which he’d thought a thousand times he’d never make and damn near hadn’t — and most of all he remembered the summer night soon afterward when he’d borrowed a jalopie from a buddy and had driven her out to this place along the river where people parked and the cops didn’t bother you about it.

He’d thought she might be sort of scared and reluctant and have to be coaxed and all, but it didn’t turn out that way, to his surprise, and as a matter of fact she was pretty fierce and aggressive, as if she were afraid he’d change his mind and chicken out at the last minute, and afterward she cried about it. She didn’t cry because she was scared or sorry or anything like that, and as far as he could understand it she seemed to be crying because she was happy in the same way she’d been happy at the dance in the cheezy voil, only more so. She huddled against him in the front seat of the jalopie, crying and crying in this terribly quiet way with the tears rolling down her cheeks and getting into her voice, and she said, “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Freddie, don’t ever leave me. You ever leave me, Freddie, I’ll die, I’ll simply die, and I swear to Jesus I will.”

The way she said Jesus like that made a big impression on Freddie, because she didn’t use profane or dirty words like a lot of girls, and it was plain that she wasn’t swearing at all, but was saying a kind of prayer. The thing about it was, the impressive thing, she was saying the prayer to him, to Freddie Foley, and it made him feel big, big, like God, like everything in the world and the whole damn universe belonged to Freddie Foley God, the trees and the river, the moon and the stars up there above the river, just every single thing there was.

Freddie didn’t forget all this. You’ve got to give him credit. Even after he got away from home and got associated with Duke Gore’s outfit, he didn’t forget. At first, of course, he was just a sort of errand boy for the Duke, nothing that amounted to much, but the Duke always had an eye out for new blood, young guys with talent coming up, and he took a liking to Freddie because Freddie was a hard worker who took things seriously and was always ready to undertake anything that was asked of him. A lot of these young guys were always shooting the angles and looking for shortcuts to where they wanted to go, but Freddie played by the rules and could be relied on to do a thing right, and Duke liked this. He’d make a point of giving Freddie a good word now and then, just to let him know he was keeping an eye on him, and he kept giving him a little bigger cut in this or that operation. After a while Freddie was making a hell of a lot of money and had plenty of important connections besides.

The thing that really put him in solid with the Duke, though, was the time he saved the Duke’s life, which was in all the papers at the time, and also later when Freddie was tried for it. The reason he was tried, he killed a guy who tried to kill the Duke and would have succeeded, too, if Freddie hadn’t been around. This guy was someone the Duke had pulled a fast deal on, and he went crazy over it. He laid for the Duke on the street at a spot the Duke had to pass, and he got in behind the Duke with this .45 and was about to shoot him in the back, but Freddie was there and shot the crazy guy first. Naturally the Duke was grateful for this, and he had his own lawyer handle Freddie’s case, and Freddie got out of it. The only real trouble they had was because Freddie didn’t have any permit for this gun he was carrying, the gun he used to kill the guy with, but they smoothed it over.

Anyhow, after the trial, Freddie was really uptown, and he had all these connections and knew all these really classy dames who were mostly entertainers in various places, and you’d think that he might have forgotten Maddy by that time, which you really couldn’t blame him for if he had, but he hadn’t. He got this big apartment with a lot of blond furniture and a bar and all, and he moved Maddy in. Of course he had a one-night stand now and then with one or another of these classy women he knew, the singers and dancers and such, but he was careful not to let Maddy find out about it, her not being hurt by what she didn’t know, and she was the only one he kept up a regular relationship with. He was good to her, and bought her all kinds of fancy clothes and jewelry and stuff with the big money he was taking in on the cuts, and he even talked once or twice about their getting married someday when he found the time, but he never found it. What it was, he had this soft spot.

Everything went along like this for quite a long time, couple of years or so, and chances are it would have gone on for a lot longer, maybe forever, if it hadn’t been for this long, limber blonde named Moira. A strip dancer was what she was, but she didn’t take it off in any of these crummy dumps like most of the bump and grind babies work in, and she didn’t even bump and grind, so far as that goes. She had worked out these tricky little routines that she called art, and she moved around and dropped her panties to high-brow music like Stravinsky or someone like that, and it caught on. She worked the good clubs for a lot of dough and had been married three times without much luck. The point is, she got booked into one of the Duke’s clubs, and Freddie saw her and went for her, hard, and she went for him, too, and things got complicated.

What complicated things was Maddy. All the other times Freddie had gone for someone, it had been on a temporary basis, which was understood and agreeable on both sides, and Maddy hadn’t made any difference one way or another. As it turned out, though, this Moira had some very peculiar ideas, which may have been put into her head by undressing to Stravinsky, and one of these peculiar ideas was that a girl ought to have a license to shack up. At first Freddie couldn’t see this as being essential to the arrangement, and he said so.

“Well,” Moira said, “it may not seem essential to you, but it does to me. You can take it or leave it.”

“You mean to tell me,” Freddie said, “that there’s nothing doing unless we get married?”

“That’s right, honey,” Moira said. “You’re number four or a goose egg.”

By this time, Freddie was in quite a condition over this limber blonde, to say the least, and he was ready to marry her or anything else that was necessary to getting things settled satisfactorily, but he kept thinking about Maddy, how she’d take it and all, and he knew she’d take it damn hard. The way he saw it, what with this soft spot he had, she was a kind of childhood sweetheart who’d always loved him and been faithful to him and hadn’t, moreover, been unreasonable about legal commitments and such things, and one thing you didn’t do, you didn’t break the heart of your childhood sweetheart who’d practically prayed to you and made you feel like God.

“The truth is,” he said, “I’ve already got a permanent arrangement.”

“You mean you’re already married?” Moira said.

“No,” he said, “not exactly. It’s only that I’ve got things set up with this girl sort of permanently.”

“Well,” she said briskly, “you can get it unset permanently, or you can stay away from me permanently, and in the meanwhile you don’t need to come back until you’ve made up your mind about it one way or the other.”

The trouble was, she meant it. Freddie sweat it out for a week or ten days, thinking she’d give in eventually, but it finally got across to him that this limber blonde Moira wasn’t a giving-in kind of woman, and he went to see the Duke. He respected the Duke and was willing to take his advice on most matters, but in this case the Duke couldn’t see that he had any problem.

“It’s simple,” the Duke said. “You unload this dame, that’s all.”

“The truth is,” Freddie said, “I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for her and don’t want to do it.”

“In my opinion,” the Duke said, “a soft spot in the heart is the same as a soft spot in the head.”

This struck Freddie as being pretty sharp, one of those little epigrams you sometimes read and remember, and he decided that it was true. The only thing to do was to get it over with quickly, the same way you jerked a piece of tape off a hairy spot, and he went up to the apartment with all the blond furniture and the bar in it. Maddy was waiting for him, like she always was, even when he hadn’t been around for a week or more, and they had a couple of drinks and got to talking, and after a while he had a third drink and thought he was ready to tell her.

“Look, baby,” he said, “there’s something you got to know.”

“What is it?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “it’s pretty damn important to both of us.”

She looked at him with her eyes sort of clouded up and solemn, waiting for him to tell her what it was that was so important, and he got to remembering all the things that had happened, feeling her knee at the football games and taking her to the dance in the cheezy voil and having her the first time out there by the river, and he couldn’t come out with it, it was simply impossible, and pretty soon she said, “Are you in trouble again, honey? If you’re in trouble, I want to be in it with you,” and that tore it for sure. She was a genuine lady, that’s what she was, and you couldn’t just throw a genuine lady out on her can like any tramp. It was sure to make her feel degraded and washed up and not wanted any more, and it wasn’t right to do it.

“Forget it, baby,” he said. “It’s no trouble, and I guess it’s not so important after all.”

He stayed around a while longer and then left and went down to a club of the Duke’s, a dark little place on a crummy street, not the fancy spot where Moira was taking it off to Stravinsky. He went there because he wanted to see a fellow called Slivers who patronized the place. This Slivers was a fellow who did odd jobs for the Duke, and when he came in Freddie beckoned him over and bought a drink.

“I’m wondering if you’d like to do a little work,” he said.

“For the Duke?” Slivers said.

“No. For me personally.”

“Well, I got nothing on hand right now. I might be interested if the fee’s right.”

“Five hundred.”

“The Duke pays me a thousand.”

“This is simple work. Fast and easy. No risk. It’s like finding the money in the street.”

“If it’s so easy, why don’t you handle it yourself?”

“Reasons. Personal ones. You interested or not?”

“I’m listening.”

“There’s this girl. She lives in apartment 503 out at Castle Arms. I pay the rent. I just came from there, and she’s alone. She’ll be alone, because I’m the only one who goes there, and I’m not going back.”

“What are the risks?”

“I already told you. None. She’s alone. The place is even soundproof. You walk up and do it and walk away, that’s all.”

“When do I get the five hundred?”

“I’ll wait here for you.”

“Okay.”

Slivers stood up, started away.

“Do it neat,” Freddie said.

“I always do it neat,” Slivers said.

After he was gone, Freddie carried his glass over to the bar and got it filled up again.

“Remember that I’m here,” he said to the bartender. “I’ll be here all evening.”

He went back to his table with his full glass and sat down. It was funny, he thought, how it was when you had a soft spot for someone. You’d go to all kinds of trouble to keep from humiliating them or making them feel bad or anything like that.