Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 33, No. 1, January, 1988

Family Rates Available by John H. Dirckx

I keep my conscience in an old cigar box in the bottom drawer of my desk. That way I can get at it when I want it, but it doesn’t get in my way when I don’t want it.

For years I ran a pawn shop. Besides selling articles acquired in the normal course of business, I did a comfortable trade in stolen merchandise. I wasn’t a fence. I never knowingly bought hot merchandise from a thief in my life. If you’re as astute as you think you are, you’ve already figured out that I’m a thief myself. Or was, until my big windfall. That was where having a flexible conscience really paid off.

I had a simple, foolproof system of acquiring electronic equipment and jewelry for nothing and keeping it on ice for two years before marketing it. I don’t want to talk about that. This isn’t an autobiography, just the story of my last heist — the one that made it possible for me to relocate in the tropics and live like a retired dentist.

It was just after sunset on a foggy, sultry September evening when I parked my van on Teagarden Street, right around the corner from the Ashloe residence. The house faced on a cul-de-sac and I didn’t want any complications to arise when I was ready to leave.

I sat in the van absorbing atmosphere and memorizing topography while I waited for the shadows to congeal. Not that I hadn’t sat there in another car at the same hour on previous evenings. All the houses thereabouts were big, solid-looking, and old. The lots were likewise big and the trees were likewise old. The whole neighborhood wore an air of drowsy respectability and prudently stashed cash.

Weedless lawns sprawled like velvet in the failing light. Chandeliers with cut-glass pendants blazed in vaulted dining rooms. Now and then an expensive sports car pulled into a driveway, restoring some battle-weary executive, financier, or plumbing contractor to the bosom of his family. Somewhere a piano was being played with more zeal than grace.

Traffic was thin on Teagarden Street. A Little League baseball team filed along the sidewalk, poking their boring, embryonic faces at me through the gloom. Once a flash of lightning lit up the landscape again for an instant, followed long after by a remote, dull thump of thunder like a trunk lid closing in an attic.

At seven o’clock I got out of the van, opened the rear door, and removed a clipboard and a bulky parcel wrapped in brown paper. The box inside the wrapping was practically empty, but I don’t think a chance passerby would have suspected that from the way I carried it. I’d been practicing.

I walked around the corner into the cul-de-sac and started up the stone steps that cut diagonally across the sloping lawn toward the Ashloe house. Halfway up the steps I paused in the shadow of some willows to listen to a noisy dialogue trailing out of an open window somewhere on the ground floor.

“You said you didn’t want it.” A middle-aged man, peevish by nature and just now belligerent.

“I never said anything about it, one way or the other.” A middle- aged woman, waspish by nature and just now incensed.

“I asked you at least five times—”

“Probably ten times. I never said I didn’t want it. I said I wanted to think about it for a while.”

“Well, that’s not saying ‘yes,’ is it?”

“But why couldn’t you have waited till I talked to—”

“No, but listen to me. Did you ever once say, ‘Yes, I want it?’ ”

I moved out of the shadow of the trees and climbed the remaining steps to the deeper shadow of the porch. I could smell recent cooking there, something with oil and herbs, and the voices of the debaters came clearer than ever. The session closed abruptly when I rang the bell.

After a moment the porch light came on and tired eyes inspected me without much curiosity through the window in the door. I squared up my face with the window, making sure my cap was visible from inside, and said, “Delivery” loud enough to be heard by the neighbors. The door swung open.

I hate people who are taller than I am. Especially women. She was the archetypal untamed shrew — self-centered, supercilious, and permanently indignant.

“What is it?”

“Delivery, ma’am. Sign here, please.”

She scowled at the clipboard, reached for the pen I offered her, changed her mind, fumbled in her jacket pocket for glasses. The diamond ring on her finger was old, probably older than she was. I would have given her eight hundred tops for it at the shop. I could have sold it for thirty-five hundred.

While she was putting her glasses on, I moved into the foyer and set the parcel down on the floor. Under cover of the clipboard I slipped an automatic out of my belt so that, by the time she could see it, it was pointed straight at her liver. I shut the front door gently with my foot.

“What is it?” she asked again, stupidly.

“Well, it isn’t a delivery,” I said. Someone just around a corner was stirring coffee, clanking the sides of the cup with the spoon. “Get your husband in here.”

“Tucker!” she called, on a note that a male seal might have found inviting.

“What is it?” came in an impatient rumble from around the corner. My arrival seemed to have drastically curtailed both of their vocabularies.

She smirked at something on the ceiling. “Come and see.”

A chair scraped on ceramic tiles. A big man in his shirtsleeves shuffled in and took it all in a glance. “We don’t have any money in the house,” he announced with finality. He had the poker face of a businessman who had spent his life talking to people just like himself, lying his way into lucrative deals and out of ugly messes.

“That’s not what I heard. Let’s all go into the living room. Keep away from the windows.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the automatic and he couldn’t be bothered to look at it. They stood in the middle of the living room while I drew heavy drapes and turned on a couple of lamps so I could see what they were up to.

“Sit down. Nobody else in the house, is there?”

We sat. The furniture was comfortable, expensive, not new.

“There’s nobody here but us.” Ashloe was talking, examining the palms of his hands. “And we haven’t got anything worth stealing.”

“Not true. I know about the coin collection. I’m here to get it.”

Ashloe didn’t flicker an eyelash but his wife twitched and squirmed as if I’d stepped on her big toe. “There isn’t any coin collection here,” she snapped. “It’s at the bank.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s in a big safe in the next room, and the key is on a chain around your husband’s neck. Make it easy on yourselves. I don’t want to hurt anybody, but I’m not leaving here without the coins. I’ve got all night, and I happen to know you’re not expecting any visits or phone calls.”

“How can you possibly know that?” She’d never needed assertiveness training. She probably wrote the leading textbook in the field. “My sister—”

“You haven’t got a sister.”

“Just shut up, will you, Ruth?” Ashloe shifted in his chair, eyeing me covertly as if he were pondering a deal and sizing up my smarts. “Most of the coins are at the bank, mister. What’s left isn’t worth killing anybody for.”

I was on the point of telling him I had no intention of killing anybody when I realized that that might considerably weaken my position. “Or being killed for, right?”

He conceded the point with a sideways twitch of the head but otherwise sat tight. His wife put her glasses away and fumed silently at him from across the room. I waited.

“You know,” he said finally, “these are gold coins we’re talking about. They won’t work in a cigarette machine.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“And no dealer will touch them unless you can show where you got them.”

“There are dealers, and then there are dealers. If I Can’t unload them as coins, I know somebody who can turn them into ingots.”

After that he suddenly quit talking. Anybody would have thought he was more outraged by the thought of my melting down his coins than by having me steal them from him in the first place.

Without turning my back on them I got the empty box from the foyer and took off the wrapping paper. It was a wooden case I’d had for years. A brand-new typewriter had been packed in it along about 1935. They don’t make them like that any more. I put the case down on the coffee table and lifted off the lid. From inside I took a coil of rope and tossed it across to Mrs. Ashloe.

“Tie his ankles together, and then tie them to the middle leg of the couch. Do it right the first time. There’s two pieces of rope there. The other one is for his, wrists.”

She hesitated at least half a minute before picking up the rope and running it through her fingers. Then something clicked behind those hard eyes and she went to work with a will.

Ashloe snorted, started to say something, but didn’t. She made a workmanlike job of it, square knots and all. Before she started on his wrists he got unsteadily to his feet for a moment, clutched at his throat, and then dropped back onto the couch like a puppet with the strings cut. If he was making a show of being sick, I wasn’t buying it.

When she’d finished, I checked her knots before fishing inside Ashloe’s collar for the chain with the key. It wasn’t there. I tried his pockets. Nothing.

“Come on, folks. This won’t get you anything but maybe some bruises. Where is it?”

She’d sat down again on the far side of the room. I started toward her. Something in my look must have bothered her, because she blurted, “I don’t know where he put it!” with the sincerity of panic.

“I’ll bet he knows, though, doesn’t he?” I put down my automatic on the coffee table, sat down next to it, and got her left hand in both of mine. The antique diamond ring wouldn’t come off over her knuckle.

“I didn’t bargain on this,” I said, to Ashloe rather than to her. “Too bad it’s so hard to get off.” I was reaching for my pocket knife when she suddenly twisted forward and snatched at the automatic.

I don’t hit women — not even gaunt, feisty ones that remind me of a third-grade teacher who hit me plenty of times with a solid brass ruler. But I put myself between her and that automatic so fast that I bounced her back into her seat.

After that I got a bit rattled. I kept the automatic in my right hand and used my left on the ring with a violence augmented by clumsiness and frustration. She whimpered twice and then howled, “Tucker!” in an unmistakable tone of reproach.

Tucker stirred. His color didn’t seem too good. He licked his lips twice — before saying, “Mustard pot. Top shelf.”

I let her have her hand back and picked up the empty box. Without a word she led me into the next room, which looked like a cross between a den and an art museum. Two facing walls consisted entirely of glass-fronted display cases full of statuettes, pottery, and glass and china bric-a-brac — the kind of stuff a man in my line doesn’t give a second look. She lifted down a squat, ugly china pot with pictures and French writing running around it and poured out the key on its long chain.

I relieved her of the key. I’d already spotted the phone in the room and I steered her away from it before I opened the safe. Between two arched doorways, one of which we’d just come through, stretched an expanse of paneled wall, blank except for a small chrome-plated clock. I swung the clock aside, put the key into the lock thus revealed, and rolled back the heavy camouflaged doors of the coin vault.

The coins were on open shelves, each in its own recess, in narrow trays covered with red, green, and blue velvet. Ashloe might or might not have more coins on deposit at the bank, but there were more than enough here to make the trip worthwhile.

I pulled a rubber glove on my left hand in case I touched something that would hold a fingerprint. Without ceremony I started tipping the coins out into the box. Mrs. Ashloe came over and helped me, still keeping one wary eye on the pistol. Under cover of the noise we were making, she leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, “Kill him.”

“What?”

“I want you to shoot him. Now.”

I stopped dumping trays. “Why?”

She went on dumping trays. “Thirty-three years, that’s why. Thirty-three years with Tucker Ashloe is more than flesh and blood can bear.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to get a lawyer?”

“No, it wouldn’t. I don’t just want to be rid of him, I want to get my hands on his money.” She spilled two more trays into the box. “Don’t look at me like that. He’s got millions, and we live from hand to mouth. Any one of these coins would pay our grocery bills for the past six months.”

I handed her a couple. “Have some caviar on me.”

She threw them into the box with the others. “Don’t be silly. I’m talking business. Keep your voice down and come in here.”

Remembering her lunge for the pistol, I made her go first and kept my distance. She led me down a long, straight, dark, plushly carpeted hall that ended at a window seat. From there we could see the back of Ashloe’s head as he sat on the couch in the living room, figuring up how much he was going to get out of his insurance company for the stolen coins.

I drew the curtains across the window and put on the light in the hall. When we sat side by side on the window seat, our eyes were nearly level.

“You mentioned business,” I said, talking hardly above a murmur. “My business isn’t killing people. Why should I risk the electric chair just because you’re greedy? I’ve already got what I want.”

A cynical smile tinged her bleak features with a gleam of hellfire. “Nobody ever gets all he wants. I’ll pay you more than those coins are worth if you walk in there now and shoot Tucker.”

“Nothing doing. What’s to keep you from turning me over to the police when I try to collect?”

“I’ll pay you in advance. Right now.”

“And what were you thinking of paying me with? If you have to scrape for grocery money—”

“Listen. That man in there—” she pointed at him as if he were a piece of furniture she wanted hauled away “—owns Visatergo Compressor Corporation, a Fortune 500 company. You certainly know that. You seem to know everything else about us.”

“I checked out your domestic arrangements.”

She rolled her eyes. “The only domestic arrangement around here is not spending any money. He’ll only let me have a cleaning lady one half-day a week. My car is nine years old. I even have to cut his hair, what’s left of it. The man simply has a phobia of spending capital. And since he reinvests every penny the company earns, everything he has is capital. He calls that a cash-flow problem.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said. “Great management, rotten business.”

“Well, listen here.” She was getting thoroughly worked up. She caught at my words like a dog snapping at flies. “Tucker Ashloe’s got a cash-flow problem he never dreamed about. I’ve been skimming the household accounts for more than twenty-five years. Had to. Self-defense.”

I almost laughed out loud. “So where’s the beef? You get your money, one way or the other.”

“But this is peanuts compared to what I could have if he weren’t holding the purse strings. Six hundred thousand, as against forty-odd million.”

“Hold on a minute. You mean you’ve saved all this cash you’ve been skimming?”

“Sure. It’s money he thinks I spent, but I didn’t. That’s what skimming means, doesn’t it?”

That time I did laugh, right in her face. “You’ve been hoarding up all this money behind his back, not spending it, and you think he’s stingy. Whatever phobia he’s got, I think you caught it.”

She didn’t like that a bit but in the circumstances she decided to let it pass. “Let’s say I’ve been saving for something like this. I’m offering you six hundred thousand dollars in cash — old bills, mostly twenties, a few fifties — to kill my husband and then get lost.”

“You’ve got it here?”

“I’ve got it here. You’ll have it in your hands five minutes after he’s dead.”

“Impossible. Five minutes after he’s dead I’ll be on the interstate with a load of bricks in my right shoe. Your neighbors will hear the shot and be—”

“Don’t you have a silencer? Maybe you could use a pillow.”

“You’ve been watching too much TV. This isn’t a Saturday night special, it’s a .45.”

She pondered. “If I pay you in advance, how do I know you’ll really kill him?”

You’d just have to trust me.

She thought some more. “How do I know you won’t kill me, too?”

“I guess you don’t. This killing business was your idea in the first place, you know.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“I’ll see that six hundred thousand first.”

“Say you’ll do it.”

“I’ll do it.”

She kept the money in a space under the bottom shelf of a built-in cupboard in the master bedroom. About a third of it fitted into the wooden case on top of the coins. We put the rest into two double-strength shopping bags.

She arranged it all neatly on the kitchen table. Here she didn’t need to whisper. “Okay, you’ve got your cash, now do it.”

“First I’ve got to get the ropes off him and tie you up.”

“Tie me up? Why?”

“It’ll look better if the police find you tied instead of him. A burglar wouldn’t tie somebody up and then shoot him.”

She was frowning dark clouds of doubt. “He’s going to wonder why you’re untying him.”

“I’ll tell him I’ve got what I came for and I don’t want to leave anything behind that could be traced to me. I’d better stick this stuff in the van before I go back in there.”

“If you do, I’m coming with you. You re not going to drive away from here—”

“Wake up, lady. All you need is for one stray neighbor to see you walking out to the van with me, and your goose is cooked. You stay in the house. Come to think of it, I’m going to lock you in that closet I saw with the key in the door.”

“What do you want to do that for?”

“It’ll only be for a minute. In case you get second thoughts and decide to call the police as soon as I go out the door.”

The second thoughts were already coming to her thick and fast as I shut the closet door on her and turned the key. She put several of them into words. Passing through the hall, I noticed that Ashloe was sitting awfully still, and detoured for a reconnaisance. His color was worse than ever — about the shade of grape soda. He hadn’t been breathing for the last ten minutes or so.

I got the ropes off him fast, hoping they hadn’t left marks. Then I scrambled out the kitchen door with my double armload of loot, cut across the side yard as I’d planned earlier, and came through a hedge just opposite the van. By now it was completely dark and no cars passed on Teagarden Street while I was loading the stuff into the van. I took it on the lam, as they say in cheap fiction, and my native haunts knew me no more, as I once heard a preacher express it.

Now comes the part about the liberal conscience. If I’d been a man of scruples, I would have had to give Mrs. Ashloe her money back. Maybe you’ll say I earned the six hundred thousand by scaring Ashloe to death, but that’s not quite true. The knowledge that I was stealing his coin collection didn’t kill him, and neither did the fear that I was going to hurt him. He died because he thought I was down the hall murdering his wife, as he’d hired me to do when he visited my shop after hours a week earlier. He’d given me a cash advance, and the coins were the final payment.

I followed his scenario exactly as he’d written it, until he made a last-minute plot change by hiding the key to the coin vault so I couldn’t get it until he told me where it was. But that’s not why I didn’t kill his. wife. I never meant to kill her in the first place. I walked into that house with an empty gun. Just being in the same room with a loaded one makes my palms sweat.

So I guess the moral of the story is that if you’ve got no moral fiber it’s awfully convenient not to have any moral convictions to speak of, either.

Visatergo Compressor Corporation just declared an extra dividend.

I wonder who she pretends she’s stealing from now.