Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 120, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 733 & 734, September/October 2002

The Discount Club by Henry Slesar

Recently EQMM received the sad news that Henry Slesar, longtime contributor to tills magazine, had died. Though we don’t have an exact count, we believe his published short stories numbered over a hundred. Demanding as his writing schedule must have been, he managed at the same time to run the Slesar & Kanzer advertising agency. He was also, in the ’50s and ’60s, head writer of The Edge of Night, and of 24 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He’ll be greatly missed.

Marriage soon disposes of single friendship, so Jerry and Bobbi Spellman were pleased to discover that their new next-door neighbors were an amiable pair named Forster. Both couples were in their mid thirties. Pete Forster worked in the municipals department of a brokerage house, Jerry worked for a computer-parts company. Bobbi and Linda Forster loved to cook, and all four were rabid, if unexceptional, golfers.

One difference was Jimmy, the Spellman’s little boy, just emerging from the Terrible Twos. The Forsters were childless, but it was a kind of blessing since Linda offered her babysitting services anytime, would even board Jimmy if the Spellmans ever wanted to travel. As a matter of fact, they had been talking wistfully of a second honeymoon in Vegas, and when the notion surfaced at a shared barbecue, Linda said:

“Why don’t you stay at the Lido? I can get you a thirty-percent discount!”

Jerry did some quick calculations in his head. If Linda’s offer was for real, the luxurious Lido would cost less than the modest hotel they had in mind.

“We can also get you a great car-rental rate,” Pete grinned, chomping his hamburger. “What’s the usual?” he asked his wife, and Linda said: “Thirty-five percent, forty if it’s a compact.”

“Actually, we wanted to drive,” Bobbi said, “but we’ve had nothing but problems with our car lately.”

“We were just about to trade in that bucket of bolts, get a nice little Camaro, but you know what happened to the market.”

“Tell me about it,” Pete said ruefully. “Last month, my company chopped two hundred guys from the payroll...”

Jerry shivered in the sunlight. “Don’t talk about it. There are all kinds of rumors at our shop.” He looked towards his house, already second-mortgaged.

“Listen, in case you do decide to trade in your heap, we can help out there, too. We know a dealer in Encino, save you at least five, six grand.”

Jerry stopped eating and stared at his new backyard buddy. Pete didn’t seem like an empty-kettle sort of guy, making big booming promises he could never keep. By the time the last briquette turned cold, they had arranged a rendezvous with the dealer, a man named Charlie Wingate.

Wingate didn’t look any too happy to see Pete drive onto the lot, and Jerry decided they weren’t really friends. Wingate, a paunchy man, perspired all the way through Pete’s description of what they were after. Even when they went into the air-conditioned showroom, Jerry, meandering among the cars, could see the glint of sweat beads on Wingate’s round face. When Pete emerged, he was grinning toothily.

“Got you a sweetheart deal,” he said.

That’s what it was, Jerry told Bobbi at the dinner table that night. Their new car was going to be a bargain, probably cost them less than the repair bills for their present lemon. Bobbi had good news to relate, too. Linda had dropped by that afternoon, said she’d made a tentative booking at the Lido for them, what they called a Grand Suite, and, get this, it was only sixty dollars a night, including breakfast! “And this,” Bobbi said, handing him an envelope.

They were casino vouchers, made to look almost like real currency, although the half-naked showgirl in the center frame didn’t sustain the illusion. There were ten bills, each good for a hundred-dollar bet at any table game.

“How do they do this?” Bobbi wondered aloud. “The Forsters, I mean.”

Jerry wasn’t as curious. “They know people.” He shrugged. “Everybody knows somebody in some business or other. Look at my cousin Marty, didn’t we get a good deal on our vacuum cleaner?”

“Your cousin stiffed us,” Bobbi said. “He sold us the old model a week before the new ones were shipped.”

“Let’s not ask questions. Let’s just enjoy.”

But Bobbi couldn’t rein in her curiosity. When Linda dropped by for coffee and neighborhood gossip, she repeated the vacuum-cleaner story. Apologetically, Linda said she could hear the whine of Bobbi’s machine right across their intervening yard. If she ever wanted one of those super-quiet models, with great pickup, she could deliver one for at least forty off, maybe more. This time, Bobbi hesitated a second or two before saying, “Yes, sure! That would be great.”

There was one more blessing the Forsters had to bestow on the Spellmans. They asked about their luggage, and both admitted they were mortified every time they dragged their worn-out suitcases off an airport carousel. Of course, the Forsters had another discount deal to offer, but Jerry demurred.

“Hey, you guys have done enough for us! And besides, we want to save a few bucks to feed the slots!”

“Sixty percent,” Pete said, lifting his eyebrows and doing something comic with his mouth. “Does that tempt you? Name brands, your choice.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Bobbi said. “How many relatives do you people have?”

Linda said, “Pete has family in Wisconsin, but I don’t have any, not since my father died last year.”

“You might say we have a kind of club.” Jerry grinned. “A discount club.”

Bobbi, with Jimmy in a stroller, accompanied Linda to the small store downtown called Amelio Luggage. The old proprietor had a heroic white moustache and kindly blue eyes, but something altered their color when he saw Linda appear behind mother and baby. Bobbi was startled to see the moustache quiver and hear the old man say:

“Not again! Not again, summabitch! Why don’t you leave me alone?”

Linda flushed with embarrassment. “I’m just bringing you a customer, Mr. Amelio, we’re not looking for anything expensive!”

“Everyt’ing expensive when you people come in here!” He balled a small fist and slammed it soundlessly on a stack of cosmetic cases. “No more, you hear me? No more!”

“All right, all right! No more, Mr. Amelio!” Linda grabbed Bobbi’s arm and wheeled her about, whispering harshly into her ear, “The old man’s crazy. Senile!”

Bobbi was mystified by the event, but Linda didn’t offer any further explanation, or even an apology. She asked if Bobbi wanted to look at luggage at Robin’s Department Store, admitting she had no discount clout there. Bobbi said no, Jimmy was getting cranky, and she hadn’t started dinner yet...

Bobbi didn’t mention the incident to her husband. Jerry hadn’t known about the luggage hunt, and he was in a bad mood as it was. The office rumors about cutbacks were becoming a reality; sixty low-level employees had been handed pink slips. Jerry, who was only a notch ahead, didn’t see why he should be spared. He spent the evening totting up monthly expenses, moaning about the two mortgages they carried, even questioning the wisdom of the Las Vegas trip but stopping short of suggesting cancellation.

The Forsters gave their neighbors a small party before their departure, and Jerry marveled at the array of costly whiskeys and liqueurs Pete hauled out of the liquor cabinet. When Pete and Linda invited them to view the cellar, Bobbi stayed behind, not trusting her high heels on the steep wooden steps. Jerry gasped when he saw row after row of wine bottles. Jerry was no expert, but he recognized some of the labels, including a rack of Mouton Rothschilds that he knew sold for a couple of hundred dollars in restaurants.

That night, preparing for bed, Jerry noted Bobbi’s uncharacteristic silence and asked her about it. She said: “Did you know Linda’s name was del Castro? Her maiden name, I mean.”

“No, so what?”

“They have these pictures on the piano? When you went down to the cellar, I was looking through them and I saw some snapshots stuck in the frames. They must have been at least twenty years old, they had writing on the back. Names and dates, you know?”

“Does this have a point, or what?” Jerry hadn’t lost his irritable mood of the last three days.

“There was a picture of Linda as a child, clowning with this gray-haired man — it said ‘July 1982, Johnny del Castro and his monkey.’ Somebody’s joke, I suppose. But I recognized him, Jerry! The same big face, all that sleek white hair...”

She finally had his attention. “You don’t mean that del Castro? The gangster?”

“Yes! The one who died in prison last year!”

“Killed,” Jerry amended. “Murdered by an inmate.”

“Poor Linda,” Bobbi said automatically. “I mean, if she really is — was — his daughter. When you think about it, there’s a definite resemblance.”

“Okay,” her husband said. “So she’s his daughter. What does that make her, a housewife gangster?”

Bobbi didn’t say any more about it that night, but it affected her sleep. Her own father had been a garden-supply dealer in Scranton, but his real dedication was to the church. He had been a deacon as well as an occasional lay preacher, and while there was no fire and brimstone in his personality, he could be flinty and judgmental, strict with his two children, Bobbi and her brother Timothy. He would have been proud of Timothy if he had lived long enough to see him ordained.

The Forsters were a continual subject of conversation, but not in Las Vegas. The city assaulted all their senses, and the Spellmans reeled between casinos and restaurants and gaudy stage shows. The Lido wasn’t as glamorous as they expected, but it didn’t bother them.

All Jerry cared about were the blackjack tables; he barged from one to another looking for the Lucky One, distributing his free vouchers and then dipping into his wallet. Bobbi was preoccupied with the electronic slots, hypnotized by their light displays and discordant music; she paid no attention to the mania which had seized her husband. Only later, when the damage had been done, did she realize that it wasn’t entertainment Jerry had been seeking in Las Vegas but salvation.

The third night, a man in a tuxedo sidled up to him and quietly asked him to come along. He had a slablike jaw and cold eyes, and he didn’t respond to Jerry’s one-word question. Jerry was taken into a small, well-appointed office, and the man behind the desk wasn’t smiling. “Who gave you those vouchers?” he said. He looked ordinary, but Jerry was frightened.

“Friends of ours,” he said. “The Forsters.”

The man slid his eyes over to his big-jawed associate. “Married name,” he said.

“Don’t use any more,” the man said icily, and Jerry told him they were all gone, along with five hundred cash and money obtained via credit card, a fact he had kept from Bobbi. “Then you lost enough here. Pack your bags and get out. And tell your friends, no more ‘discounts.’ You got the message?”

Jerry got it. Bobbi didn’t. She thought Jerry had misunderstood; she was having too much fun; she loved carting buckets of quarters to the cashier’s counting machine, not worried by the fact that she was losing more than she was gaining.

They were driving home when the picture cleared in his mind.

“They didn’t like del Castro,” he said. “I’ll bet he had a stake in the Lido. Maybe these guys arranged that knife in the shower—”

Bobbi was shocked, but incredulous. “That’s for the movies! That’s not real life!” But she thought about it, and began to shiver. “That old man in the luggage store — he was afraid of Linda, of both of us! Even with Jimmy there, in his stroller, he was afraid!”

“The guy at the auto agency,” Jerry said. “He was nervous — too nervous. Maybe scared! My God, Bobbi, what are these people really about?”

Bobbi couldn’t wait to get home, to pick up Jimmy and return him to his own bunny-filled nursery. The Forsters were jolly, but they soon gauged their mood. Pete said: “You lost, huh? Not too much, I hope.”

“It was a good thing we were bounced, or it might have gotten worse.”

“Bounced?”

Jerry related the story and saw the Forsters look at each other with an expression bordering on guilt. That emboldened Bobbi to ask: “Please tell us what it’s all about! We know it has something to do with your father.”

Pete brought out a bottle and bucket of ice. He made the drinks, but allowed Linda to do the explaining.

“I loved my father,” she said in her preamble. “I didn’t know what he was, what he did for a living, until I was almost in my teens. My mother kept me in a kind of vacuum, but she died when I was twelve, and my father got his name in the papers, and one day he was on television, holding a hat in front of his face. I still have the hat.” There was a hint of tears, but it was brief.

“He was sentenced to prison when I was nineteen, a year before I met Pete. They said it was racketeering charges, but he denied it to me, and I believed him. What Daddy’s little girl wouldn’t?

“About a week before they locked him up, Daddy came to see me, and he was carrying an envelope. He said he couldn’t leave me any money, those so-called ‘friends’ of his had bled him dry, but he had something else he wanted me to have. It was a confidential list, he said, a very important list of companies and people, people who would help me get along. All I had to do was use his name, tell them who I was, and they would be glad to give me big discounts on all kinds of things. I didn’t understand at first; I didn’t have enough money to buy refrigerators and vacuum cleaners and trips to the Caribbean...

“Then he explained. Most of these people would give me forty, sometimes fifty percent off the regular price. He said I could make a business out of it. If I told people I could get them thirty percent off, that would leave ten, even twenty percent for me. Like a cruise, for instance. One trip could net me two, three thousand dollars, with no effort. You see what he meant?”

Bobbi said, clearing her throat: “So when we booked the Lido, bought that car, the vacuum cleaner — you got paid, too?”

Pete said: “It was still a bargain, wasn’t it? You got to admit it was a bargain.”

“Yes,” Jerry said, eager to restore relations.

“But there must have been a reason,” Bobbi said. “Why did these people give you those discounts? Did it have anything to do with your father’s ‘business’?”

Jerry started to say something, but Bobbi squeezed his knee.

Pete said: “Like I said, it’s a kind of club... a very private club. And listen, if you want to join — we could give you a copy of the list! We’ll split whatever you make, fifty-fifty! That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“You’d be surprised at the names on that list!” Linda was looking more relaxed now. “Not just retail stores. Top executives, union leaders, all kinds of people ready to do favors—”

“But why?” Bobbi said. “Because they had to? Because they were afraid that something would happen to them, to their families, if they didn’t?”

Linda’s face darkened. “That’s no way to look at it, honey.”

“Johnny del Castro was in the protection racket!” Bobbi said. “That’s what your father did for a living, the newspapers said it was the job the mob assigned to him! Am I right?”

“My father is dead! We don’t slander the dead!”

“Here, look!” Pete said eagerly, sliding what looked like a telephone book from the second tier of the coffee table. He flipped open the leather flap and showed them a neatly typed list.

“Look at all the local union bosses — the department stores — the hotels — cruise ships—”

Bobbi couldn’t help skimming the names on the first sheet. There were at least five pages to the document. It must have taken Johnny del Castro and his cohorts years to intimidate so many people, to make them fear for their lives, their children...

“It’s not as if we mean them any harm,” Linda said. “We don’t threaten anybody, don’t you realize?”

“No,” Bobbi said. “You don’t have to. They’ve already been threatened. You’re just keeping their fear alive.” She stood up and looked at her husband, and Jerry rose, too. “We have to go. Would you bring Jimmy downstairs, please?”

It was Tim who convinced her, or rather Father Timothy, sounding so much like their own father that Bobbi could imagine she was on a direct line to Heaven. In truth, she was almost sorry she’d called him, knowing he would have as stern and unshakable a view as Dad’s. He told her:

“Can you get a copy of that list, Barbara?” It was her preteen name, the one on her baptismal certificate. “You said they offered it to you.”

“Yes, they did. They wanted us to go into ‘business’ with them!”

“It’s a list of prisoners,” he said. “People in bondage to these criminals. You can free them, Sis.”

“But they’re not at any risk,” Bobbi said in meek protest. “No real danger, not from the Forsters, for heaven’s sake. Crazy as it sounds, they’re not really bad people—”

“They’re doing the work of the Devil,” Tim said. “And you’ll be aiding and abetting them if you don’t do something about it.”

She didn’t wait to hear him repeat his favorite quotation from Burke, about how the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Or women.

She was still brooding about the call when Jerry arrived home, two hours earlier than usual. She smelled alcohol on his breath even at the distance he chose to keep when he announced the news he had forecast a month ago. He was “downsized.” He was trimmed. He was canned. He was fired.

Perhaps wanting to get out all the bad news at once, he also told her about his Las Vegas madness. He confessed that he had lost more than the five hundred in cash. He had used their credit card to enrich the casino by another three thousand. His severance pay would cover the next two mortgage payments, but after that they were looking into oblivion.

He was expecting a domestic battle. He couldn’t understand why Bobbi merely turned away and went upstairs to the bedroom.

She could only deal with one problem at a time.

She called the local precinct from the bedside phone, jotting down the number on her “Things to Do” pad. She spoke to an indifferent sergeant named either Macon or Mason, but he wouldn’t give her the “appointment” she asked for. “Just come down here and we’ll get you someone to talk to,” he said. She said she would be there in the morning.

Jerry spent the night on the sofa, presuming that was what Bobbi wanted. He was gone when she came downstairs, holding a cranky Jimmy in her arms. Could she bring a three-year-old to a police station? The only alternative was to call Heather, a high school dropout who was a sometime babysitter.

The officer she was assigned to at the 35th Precinct didn’t fit the stereotype. He was a short, balding man with a nervous manner, only mildly interested in the complaint she was bringing to his cluttered desk. Oddly, most of the clutter seemed to be travel folders. His name was Hamsun.

“You told the desk sergeant you wanted to report a crime, Mrs. — ” He couldn’t remember her name, even though she had pronounced it clearly.

“Yes,” she said. She clutched the wooden handles of the big handbag she carried. She wasn’t sure she could explain her dilemma properly, but she knew the name of Johnny del Castro would get his full attention.

Before she could say it, his phone rang. He listened with a frown, shuffling the folders on his desk. He finally made sense of what he was hearing and glared at Bobbi.

“You said your name was Spellman?”

“Yes.”

“What do you people think we are, an answering service?” He shoved the receiver at her. “It’s for you — your husband!”

She was only momentarily baffled, remembering that she had scrawled the precinct number on a pad and noted the name of Sergeant Macon or Mason alongside it.

“For God’s sake,” Jerry said, “what the hell are you doing there, Bobbi?”

“I’m doing what I have to do, Jerry.”

“You’re ratting on the Forsters! You can’t do that! They’re our friends — never mind that del Castro stuff! They’re friends!”

“They’ve been using us!” she said, feeling her eyes dampen. “We were only members of their damned ‘discount club’!”

“They’re friends, and I can prove it! Last night, after you went to bed, I went over to the Forsters, I told them what happened to me, and Pete, he said maybe there was something he could do about it—”

“What are you talking about?”

“The list, Bobbi, the list! There were names on it, people in my company — do you understand? He made a couple of phone calls — this morning I got a call from my supervisor, Harry Ward — he said my pink slip was a ‘clerical error’—”

Her vision blurred momentarily as the tears were released. But then her eyes cleared. Officer Hamsun looked different, older, more troubled as he studied a travel folder with a Hawaiian beach on the cover.

“Bobbi, I’m back at work! Harry came in ten minutes ago, said I might be getting some new duties because of the cutback, but he’d make sure I got an increase to go with it...”

When Bobbi hung up, Hamsun leaned back and waited for her to register her complaint. Instead she said: “Are you thinking of going to Hawaii?”

“Yeah, that’s what the wife wants. She thinks I’m a millionaire.”

She struggled to remember the name she had glimpsed on the list. Then it came to her. “Do you know the Paradise Palms hotel? It’s on the big island — it’s gorgeous! And I can get you a thirty percent discount.”