The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“The Collector Comes After Payday” was originally published in Manhunt, August 1953.

“Insurance (The Long Wait)” was originally published in Menace, January 1955.

“May I Come In?” was originally published in Manhunt, January 1955.

“Homicide and Gentlemen” was originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 1961.

“IQ-184” was originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1962.

“The Seasons Come, the Seasons Go” was originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1966.

The Collector Comes After Payday

Originally published in Manhunt, August 1953

FRANKIE looked through a lot of bars before he found the old man. He was sitting in a booth in a joint on lower Market Street with a dame Frankie didn’t know. They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, and Frankie could see that their thighs were plastered together like a couple of strips of Scotch tape.

“Come on home, Pop,” Frankie said. “You come on home.”

The woman looked up at him, and her lips twisted in a scarlet sneer. The scarlet was smeared on the lips, as if she’d been doing a lot of kissing, and the lips had a kind of bruised and swollen look, as if the kisses had been pretty enthusiastic.

“Go to hell away, sonny,” she said.

She lifted her martini glass by its thin stem and tilted it against her mouth. Frankie reached across the booth in front of the old man and slapped the glass out of her hand. It shivered with a thin, musical sound against the wall, and gin and vermouth splashed down between the full, alert breasts that were half out of her low-cut dress. The olive bounced on the table and rolled off.

The woman raised up as far as she could in the cramped booth, her eyes hot and smoky with gin and rage.

“You little son of a bitch,” she said softly.

Frankie grabbed her by a wrist and twisted the skin around on the bone.

“Leave Pop alone,” he said. “You quit acting like a tramp and leave him alone.”

Then the old man hacked down on Frankie’s arm with the horny edge of his hand. It was like getting hit with a dull hatchet. Frankie’s fingers went numb, dropping away from the woman’s wrist, and he swung sideways with his left hand at the old man’s face. The old man caught the fist in a big palm and gave Frankie a hard shove backward.

“Blow, sonny,” he said.

For a guy not young at all, he was plenty tough. His eyes were like two yellow agates, and his mouth was a thin, cruel trap under a bold nose. From the way his body behaved, it was obvious that he still had good muscular coordination. He was poised, balanced like a trained fighter.

Frankie saw everything in a kind of pink, billowing mist. He moved back up to the booth with his fists clenched, and in spite of everything he could do, tears of fury and frustration spilled out of his eyes and streaked his cheeks.

“You get the hell out of this,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed, drinking and playing around this way.”

The old man slipped out of the booth, quick as a snake, and chopped Frankie in the mouth with a short right that traveled straight as a piston. Frankie hit the floor and rolled over, spitting a tooth and blood. He was crazy. Getting up, he staggered back at the old man, cursing and sobbing and swinging like a girl. This time the old man set him up with a left jab and threw a bomb. Frankie went over backward like a post, his head smacking with a wet rotten sound.

No one bothered about him. Except to laugh, that is. Lying there on the floor, he could hear the laughter rise and diminish and rise again. It was the final and utter degradation of a guy who’d never had much dignity to start with. Rolling over and struggling up to his hands and knees, he was violently sick, his stomach contracting and expanding in harsh spasms. After a long time, he got the rest of the way to his feet in slow, agonizing stages. His chin and shirt front were foul with blood and spittle.

In the booth, ignoring him, the old man and the woman were in a hot clinch, their mouths adhering in mutual suction. The lecherous old man’s right hand was busy, and Frankie saw through his private red fog the quivering reaction of the woman’s straining body. Turning away, Frankie went out. The floor kept tilting up under his feet and then dropping suddenly away. All around him, he could hear the ribald laughter.

It was six blocks to the place where he’d parked his old Plymouth. He walked slowly along the littered, narrow street, hugging the dark buildings, the night air a knife in his lungs. Now and then he stopped to lean against solid brick until the erratic pavement leveled off and held still. Once, at the mouth of an alley, he was sick again, bringing up a thin, bitter fluid into his mouth.

It took him almost an hour to get back to the shabby walkup apartment that was the best a guy with no luck could manage. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, gasping with pain. The smoky mirror above the lavatory distorted his face, exaggerating the ugliness of smashed, swollen lips drawn back from bloody gums. He patted his face dry with a towel and poured himself a double shot in the living room. He tossed the whiskey far back into his mouth beyond his raw lips, gagging and choking from the sudden fiery wash in his throat.

Dropping into a chair, he began to think. Not with any conscious direction. His mind functioned, with everything coming now to a bad end, in a kind of numb and lucid detachment. Suddenly, he was strangely indifferent. Nothing had happened, after all, that couldn’t have been anticipated by a guy with no luck whatever.

It was funny, the way he was no longer very concerned about anything. Sitting there in the drab living room in the dull immunity to shame that comes from the ultimate humiliation, he found his mind working itself back at random to the early days at home with the old man. Back to the days when his mother, a beaten nonentity, had been alive. Not a lovable character, the old man. Not easy on wife or kid. A harsh meter of stern discipline for all delinquencies but his own. A master of the deferred payment technique. In the old days, when Frankie was a kid at home, wrongdoing had never been met with swift and unconsidered punishment that would have been as quickly forgotten. The old man had remarked and remembered. Later, often after Frankie had completely forgotten the adolescent evil he’d committed, there was sure to be something that he wanted very much to do. Then the old man would look at him with skimmed milk eyes and say, “No. Have you forgotten the offense for which you haven’t paid? For that, you cannot do this thing.”

Wait till it really hurts. That had been the old man’s way.

Remembering, Frankie laughed softly, air hissing with no inflection of humor through the hole where his lost tooth had been. No luck. Never any luck. He’d even been a loser in drawing an old man — a bastard with a memory like an elephant and a perverted set of values.

The laughter hurt Frankie’s mangled lips, and he cut it off, sitting slumped in the chair with his eyes in a dead focus on the floor. It was really very strange, the way he felt. Not tired. Not sleepy. Not much of anything. Just sort of released and out of it, like a religious queer staring at his belly button.

He was still sitting there at three o’clock in the morning when the old man came in. He was sloppy drunk, and the lines of his face had blurred, letting his features run together in a kind of soft smear. His eyes were rheumy infections in the smear, and his mouth still wore enough of the cheap lipstick to give him the appearance of wearing a grotesque clown’s mask. He stood, swaying, almost helpless, with his legs spread wide and his hands on his hips in a posture of defiance, and Frankie looked back at him from his chair. It made him sick to see the old man so ugly, satiety in his flaccid face and the nauseous perfume of juniper berries like a fog around him.

The old man spit and laughed hoarsely. The saliva landed on the toe of Frankie’s shoe, a milky blob. Without moving, Frankie watched the old man weave into the bedroom with erratic manipulation of legs and hips.

Frankie kept on sitting in the chair for perhaps five minutes longer, then he sighed and got up and walked into the bedroom after the old man. The old man was standing in the middle of the room in his underwear. His legs were corded with swollen blue veins that bulged the fish-belly skin. On the right thigh there was an angry red spot that would probably blacken. When he saw Frankie watching him, his rheumy eyes went hot with scorn.

“My son,” he said. “My precious son, Frankie.”

Frankie didn’t answer. As he moved toward the old man slowly, smiling faintly, the pain of the smile on his mangled lips was a pale reflection of the dull pain in his heart. He had almost closed the distance between them before the old man’s gin-soaked brain understood that Frankie was going to kill him. And he was too drunk now to defend himself, even against Frankie. The scorn faded from his eyes and terror flooded in, cold and incredulous.

“No, Frankie,” he whispered. “For God’s sake, no.”

Frankie still didn’t say anything, and the old man tried to back away, but by that time it was too late, and Frankie’s thumbs were buried in his throat. His tongue came out, his legs beat in a hellish threshing, and his fists battered wildly at Frankie’s face. But it did no good, for Frankie was feeling very strong. He was feeling stronger than he had ever felt in his life before. And good, too. A powerful, surging sense of well-being. A wild, singing exhilaration that increased in ratio to the pressure of his grip.

The old man had been dead for minutes when Frankie finally let him go. He slipped down to the floor in a limp huddle of old flesh and fabric, and Frankie stood looking down at him, the narcotic-like pleasure draining out of him and leaving him again with that odd, incongruous feeling of detachment.

He realized, of course, that the end was his as much as the old man’s. It was the end for both of them. Recalling the .38 revolver on a shelf in the closet, he considered for a moment the idea of suicide, but not very seriously. Not that he was repelled by the thought of death. It was just that he didn’t quite have the guts.

He supposed that he should call the police, and he went so far as to turn away toward the living room and the telephone. Then he stopped, struck by an idea that captured his fancy. He saw himself walking into the precinct station with the old man’s dead body in his arms. He heard himself saying quietly, “This is my father. I’ve just killed him.” Drab little Frankie, no-luck Frankie, having in the end his moment of dramatic ascendancy. It was a prospect that fed an old and functional hunger of his soul, and he turned back, looking at the body on the floor. Smiling dreamily with his thick lips, he felt within himself a rebirth of that singing exhilaration.

At the last moment, he found in himself a sick horror that made it impossible for him to bear excessive contact with the dead flesh, so he dressed the body, struggling with uncooperative arms and legs. After that, it was so easy. It was so crazy easy. If he’d given a damn, if he’d really been trying to get away with it, he could never have pulled it off in a million years.

With the old man dead in his arms, he walked out of the apartment and down the stairs and across the walk to the Plymouth at the curb. He opened the front door and put him in the seat and closed the door again. Then, standing there beside the car, he looked around and saw that there was no one in sight. So far as he knew, not a soul had seen him.

It was then that the enormity of the thing struck him, and he began to laugh softly, hysteria threading the laughter. No-luck Frankie doing a thing like that. No-luck Frankie himself just walking out of an apartment house with a corpse in his arms and not a damned soul the wiser. You couldn’t get life any crazier than that. He kept on laughing, clutching the handle of the car door with one hand, his body shaking and his lips cracking open again to let a thin red line trace its way down his chin.

After a while, he choked off the laughter on a series of throaty little gasps that tore painfully at his throat. Lighting a cigarette, he went around the car and got in beside the old man on the driver’s side.

He drove at a moderate rate of speed, savoring morbidly the approach to his big scene. Now, in the process of execution, the drama of it gained even more in its appeal to him. It gave him a kind of satisfaction he had never known.

He was driving east on Mason Street. The side streets on the south descended to their intersections on forty-five-degree grades. Possessing the right-of-way, he crossed the intersections without looking, absorbed in his thoughts. For that reason, he neither saw nor heard the transport van until it was too late. At the last instant, he heard the shrill screaming of rubber on concrete and looked up and right to see the tremendous steel monster roaring down upon him.

His own scream cut across the complaint of giant tires, and he hurled himself away reflexively, striking the door with a shoulder and clawing at the handle. The door burst open at the precise instant of impact, and he was catapulted through the air like a flapping doll. Striking the pavement, he rolled over and over, protecting his head with his arms instinctively. The overwhelming crash of the Plymouth crumpling under the van was modified in his ears by the fading of consciousness.

On his back, he lay quietly and was aware of smaller sounds — distant screams, pounding feet, horrified voices, and, after a bit, the far away whine of sirens growing steadily nearer and louder.

Someone knelt beside him, felt his pulse, said in manifest incredulity, “This guy’s hardly scratched. It’s a God-damned miracle.”

A voice, more distant, rising on the threat of hysteria, “Christ! This one’s hamburger. Nothing but hamburger.”

And he continued to lie there in the screaming night with the laughter coming back and the wild wonder growing. What was it? What in God’s name was it? A guy who’d started and ended with a sour bastard of an old man and never any luck between. A guy who’d had it all, and most of it bad. A guy like that getting, all of a sudden, two fantastic breaks you wouldn’t have believed could happen. Walking out of a house with a body in his arms, scot-free and away. Surviving with no more than a few bruises a smash-up that should have smeared him for keeps. Maybe it was because he’d quit caring. Maybe the tide turns when you no longer give a damn.

Then, in a sudden comprehensive flash, the full significance of the situation struck him. Hamburger, someone had said. Nothing but hamburger. Thanks to the cock-eyed collaboration of the gods and a truck driver, he had disposed of the old man in a manner above suspicion. He lay on the pavement with the wonder of it still growing and growing, and his insides shook with delirious internal laughter.

In time, he rode a litter to an ambulance, and the ambulance to a hospital. He slept like a child in antiseptic cleanliness between cool sheets, and in the morning he had pictures taken of his head. Twenty-four hours later he was told that there was no concussion, and released. With the most sympathetic cooperation of officials, he collected the old man at the morgue and transferred him to a crematory.

When he left the crematory, he took the old man with him in an urn. In the apartment, he set the urn on a table in the living room and stood looking at it. He had developed for the old man, since the smash-up, a feeling of warm affection. In his heart there was no hard feeling, no lingering animosity. He found his parent in his present state, a handful of ashes, considerably more lovable than he had ever found him before. Besides, he had brought Frankie luck. In the end, in shame and violence and blood, he had brought him the luck he had never had.

Putting the old man away on a shelf in the closet, Frankie checked his finances and found that he could assemble forty dollars. He fingered the green stuff and considered possibilities. Eagerness to ride his luck had assumed the force of compulsion. In the saddle, he left the apartment and went over to Nick Loemke’s bar on Market Street.

He found Nick in a lull, polishing glass behind the mahogany. Nick examined him sleepily and made a swipe at the bar with his towel.

“What’s on your mind, Frankie?”

“Double shot of rye,” Frankie said.

His lips and gums were still a little raw, so he took it easy with the rye, tossing it in short swallows on the back of his tongue.

“Where’s Joe Tonty anchored this week?” he asked.

“What the hell do you care, Frankie? You can’t afford to operate in that class.”

“You never know. You never know until you try.”

Frankie finished his rye and spun the glass off his fingertips across the bar. It hit the trough on the inside edge and hopped up into the air. Nick had to grab it in a hurry to keep it from going off onto the floor. He glared at Frankie and doused the glass in the antiseptic solution under the bar.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Frankie? You lost your marbles?”

“Okay, okay,” Frankie said. “I ask for information and you give me lip. You going to tell me where Tonty’s anchored, or aren’t you?”

Nick shrugged. “All right, sucker. It’s your lettuce. Over on Third Street. Upstairs over the old Bonfile garage.”

Frankie dropped a skin on the bar and went out. Between Third and Fourth, he navigated a narrow, cluttered alley to the rear of the Bonfile garage and climbed a flight of iron, exterior stairs to a plank door that was locked. He pounded on the door with the meaty heel of his fist and got the response of a crack with an eye and a voice behind it.

The voice said, “Hello, Frankie. What the hell you doing here?”

“This where Tonty’s anchored?”

“That’s right.”

“Then what the hell you think I’m doing here? You want me to spell it out for you?”

The crack widened to reveal a flat face split in a grin between thick ears. “My, my. We’re riding high tonight, ain’t we?”

“You want my money or not?”

The crack spread still wider, and the grinning gorilla shuffled back out of it. “Sure, Frankie, sure. Every little bit helps.”

Frankie went in past the gorilla and down the long cement-floored room to the craps table. It was still early, and the big stuff wasn’t moving yet. Just right for forty bucks. Or thirty-nine, deducting a double shot.

Frankie got his belly against the edge of the table and laid a fast side bet that the point would come.

It came.

He laid three more in a hurry, betting the accumulation and mixing them pro and con without thinking much about it.

The points came or not, just as Frankie bet them.

When the dice came around to him, he was fat, and he laid the bundle. He tossed a seven, made his point twice, and tossed another seven, letting the bundle grow. Then, playing a hunch without benefit of thought, he drew most of the bundle off the table.

He crapped out and passed the dice.

Across the table, Joe Tonty’s face was a slab of gray rock. His eyes flicked over Frankie, and his shoulders twitched in a shrug.

“Your luck’s running, Frankie. You better ride it.”

“Sure,” Frankie said. “I’ll ride.”

It kept running for two hours, and Frankie rode it all the way. When he finally had a sudden flat feeling, a kind of interior collapse, he pulled out. Not that he felt his luck had quit running for keeps. Just resting. Just taking a breather. He descended the iron steps into the alley and crossed over to Market for a nightcap at Nick’s. A little later, in the living room of the apartment, he counted eight grand. It was hard to believe, little Frankie with eight big grand all at once and all his own. Not even any withholding tax.

He was shaken again by the silent delirium that was becoming an integral element of his chronic mood, and he went over to the closet and opened the door, looking up at the old man in his urn.

“Thanks, Pop,” he said. “Thanks.”

He slept soundly and got up about noon. After a hearty lunch, he went to the track with the eight grand in his pocket. He was in time for the second race, and he checked the entries. But he didn’t feel anything, so he let it go.

Checking the entries in the third, he still didn’t get any nudge. Something seemed to be getting in the way, coming between him and his luck. Maybe, he realized suddenly, it was the warm pressure of a long flank against his.

He turned, looking into brown eyes that were as warm and the touch of flank. Under the eyes there was a flash of white in a margin of red, and above them, a heavy sheen of pale yellow with streaks of off-white running through it. At first, Frankie thought she’d just been sloppy with a dye job, but then he saw that the two-toned effect was natural.

“Crowded, isn’t it?” she said.

Frankie grinned. “I like crowds.”

He was trying to think of what the hair reminded him of when he got the nudge. His eyes popped down to the program in his hands and back up to the dame. Inside, he’d gone breathless and tense, the way a guy does when he’s on the verge of something big.

“What’s your name, baby?”

The red and white smile flashed again. “Call me Taffy. Because of my hair, you see.”

He saw, all right. He saw a hell of a lot more than she thought he did. He saw number four in the third, and the name was Taffy Candy. One would bring ten if Taffy won, and even Frankie, who was no mental giant, could add another cipher to eight thousand and read the result.

Don’t give yourself time to think, that was the trick. If you start thinking, you start figuring odds and consequences, and you’re a dead duck. He stood up and slapped the program against his leg.

“Hold a spot for me, baby. If I’m on the beam, it’ll be a big day for you and me and a horse.”

He hit the window just before closing time and laid the eight grand on Taffy’s nose. At the rail of the track, he watched the horses run, and he wasn’t surprised, not even excited, when Taffy came in by the nose that had his eight grand on it. It was astonishing how quickly he was becoming accustomed to good fortune. He was already anticipating the breaks as if he’d had them forever. As if they were a natural right.

Like that girl in the stands, for instance. The girl who called herself Taffy. Standing there by the rail, he thought with glandular stirrings of the warm pressure of flank, the strangely alluring two-toned pastel hair, the brown eyes and scarlet smile. A few days ago, he wouldn’t have given himself a chance with a dame like that. He’d have taken it out in thinking. But now it was different. Luck and a few grand made a hell of a difference. The difference between thinking and acting.

With eight times ten in his pocket, he went back to the stands. Climbing up to her level with his eyes full of nylon, he grinned and said, “We all came in, baby, you and me and the horse. Let’s move out of here.”

She strained a mocking look through incredible lashes. “I’ve already got a date, honey. I’m supposed to meet a guy here.”

“To hell with him.”

Her eyebrows arched their plucked backs, and a practiced tease showed through the lashes. “What makes you think I’d just walk off with you, mister?”

Frankie dug into his pocket for enough green to make an impression. The bills were crisp. They made small ticking sounds when he flipped them with a thumb nail.

“This, maybe,” he said.

She eyed the persuasion and stood up. “That’s good thinking, honey,” she said.

A long time and a lot of places later, Frankie awoke to the gray light that filtered into his shabby apartment. It was depressing, he thought, to awake in a dump like this. It was something that had to be changed.

“Look, baby,” he said. “Today we shop for another place. A big place uptown. Carpets up to your knees, foam rubber stuff, the works. How about it, baby?”

Beside him, Taffy pressed closer, her lips moving against his naked shoulder with a sleepy animal purr of contentment.

So that day they rented the uptown place, and moved in, and a couple months later Frankie bought the Circle Club.

The club was a nice little spot tucked into a so-so block just outside the perimeter of the big-time glitter area. It was a good location for a brisk trade with the right guy handling it. The current owner was being pressed for the payment of debts by parties who didn’t like waiting, and Frankie bought him out for a song.

It was a swell break. Just one more in a long line. Frankie shot a wad on fancy trimmings, and booked a combination that could really jump. With the combo there was a sleek canary who had something for the eyes as well as the ears. The food and the liquor were fair, which is all anyone expects in a night spot, and up to the time of Linda Lee, business was good.

After Linda Lee, business was more than good. It was booming. The word always goes out on a gal like Linda. The guys come in with their dames, and after they’ve had the quota of looking that the tariff buys, they go someplace and turn off the lights and pretend that the dames are Linda.

Linda Lee wasn’t her real name, of course, but it suited her looks and her business. Ostensibly, the business was dancing. Actually, it was taking off her clothes. In Linda’s case, that was sufficient. As for the looks, they were Linda’s, and they were something. Dusky skin and eyes on the slant. Black hair with blue highlights, soft and shining, brushing her shoulders and slashing across her forehead in bangs above perfect unplucked brows. A lithe, vibrant body with an upswept effect that a guy couldn’t believe from seeing and so had to keep coming back for another look to convince himself.

She sent Frankie. At first, the day she came into his office at the Circle Club looking for a job, he didn’t see anything but a looker in a town that was littered with them. That was when she still had her clothes on.

He rocked back in his swivel and stared across his desk at her through the thin, lifting smoke from his cigarette.

“You a dancer, you say?”

“Yes.”

“A good one.”

“Not very.”

That surprised Frankie. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and let his eyes make a brief tour of her points of interest.

“No? What else you got that a guy would pay to see?”

She showed him what she had. Frankie sat there watching her emerge slowly from her clothes, and the small office got steadily smaller, so hot that it was almost suffocating. Frankie’s knitted tie was hemp instead of silk, and the knot was a hangman’s knot, cutting deeply into his throat until he was breathing in labored gasps. The palms of his hands dripped salty water. His whole body was wet with sweat.

When he was able to speak, he said, “Who the hell’s going to care about the dancing? Can you start tonight?”

She could and did. And so did Frankie. For a guy with a temperature as high as his, he played it pretty cool. He kept the pressure on her, all right, but he didn’t force it. Not that he was too good for it. It just wasn’t practical. The threat of being fired doesn’t mean much to a gal with a dozen other places to go. By the time Frankie was desperate enough for threats, he was having to raise her pay every second week to hang on to her.

She liked him, though. He knew damned well she liked him. He could tell by the way the heat came up in her slanted eyes when she looked at him. He could tell by the way her hands sometimes reached out for him, touching him lightly, straying with brief abandon. But she was like mercury. He couldn’t hold her when he reached back.

The night he decided to try mink, he came into the club late, just as Linda was moving onto the small circular floor in a blue spot. He stood for a minute against the wall, holding the long cardboard box under his arm, watching the emerging dusky body, his pulse matching the tropical tempo of drums in the darkness. Before the act was over, he moved on around the edge of the floor and back to the door of Linda’s room.

Inside, he lay the box on the dressing table and sat down. Waiting, he could hear faintly the crescendo of drums and muted brass that indicated Linda’s exit. The sound of her footsteps in the hall was lost in the surge of applause that continued long after she had left the floor.

She closed the door behind her and stood leaning against it, head back and eyes shining, her breasts rising and falling in deep, rhythmic breathing. Light and shadow stressed the convexities and hollows of her body.

“Hello, Frankie,” she said. “Nice surprise.”

He stood up, pulses hammering. “Nicer than you think, baby. I’ve brought you something.”

She saw the box behind him on the dressing table and moved toward it, flat muscles rippling with silken smoothness beneath dusky skin. Her exclamation was like a delighted child’s.

“Tell me what it is.”

“Open it, baby.”

Her fingers worked deftly at the knot of the cord, lifted the top of the box away. Without speaking, she shook out the luxurious fur coat, slipped into it and hugged it around her body. She stood entranced, her back to Frankie, looking at her reflection in the dim depths of the mirror.

Closing in behind her, he took her shoulders in his hands. Capturing the hands in hers, she pulled them around her body and under the coat. Her head fell back onto his shoulder. Her breath sighed through parted lips. He could feel in his hands the vibrations of her shivering flesh.

She said sleepily, “You’re a sweet guy, Frankie. A lucky guy, too. You’re going places. Too bad I can’t go along.”

“Why not, baby? Why not go along?”

Her head rolled on his shoulder, her lips burning his neck. “Look, Frankie. When I go for a ride, I go first-class. No cheap tourist accommodations for Linda.”

“I don’t get you, baby. You call mink cheap?”

“It’s not the mink. It’s being second. It’s the idea of taking what’s left over.”

“You mean Taffy?”

She closed her eyes and said nothing, and Frankie laughed softly. “Taffy’s expendable, baby. Strictly expendable.”

“Just like that? Maybe she won’t let go.”

“How the hell can she help it?”

“She’s legal. That always helps.”

“Married? You think Taffy and I are married?” He laughed again, his shoulders shaking with it. “Taffy and I are temporary, baby. I never figure it any other way. Nothing on paper. All off the record. We last just as long as I want us to.”

She twisted against him, her arms coming up around his neck. Her breath was in his mouth.

“How long, Frankie? How long do you want?”

His hand moved down the soft curve of her spine, drawing her in. He said hoarsely, “As far as Taffy’s concerned, I quit wanting when I saw you. Tonight I’ll make it official.”

She put her mouth over his, and he felt the hot flicking of her tongue. Then she pushed away violently, staggering back against the dressing table. The mink hung open from her shoulders.

“Afterward, Frankie,” she whispered. “Afterward.”

He stood there blind, everything dissolved in shimmering waves of heat. At last, sight returning, he laughed shakily and moved to the door. Hand on the knob, he looked back at her.

“Like you say, baby — afterward.”

He went out into the hall and through the rear door into the alley. There was a small area back there in which he kept his convertible Caddy tucked away. Long, sleek, ice-blue and glittering chrome. A long way from the old Plymouth.

Behind the wheel, sending the big machine singing through the streets, he felt the tremendous uplift that comes to a man who approaches a crisis with assurance of triumph. His emotional drive was in harmony with the leashed power of the Caddy’s throbbing engine. Wearing his new personality, he could hardly remember the old Frankie. It was impossible to believe that he had once, not long ago, been driven by shame to a longing for death. Life was good. All it required was luck and guts. With luck and guts, a guy could do anything. A guy could live forever.

At the uptown apartment house, he ascended in the swift, whispering elevator and let himself into his living room with the key he carried. The living room itself was dark, but light sliced into the darkness from the partially open door of the bedroom. Silently, he crossed the carpet that wasn’t actually quite up to his knees and pushed the bedroom door all the way open.

Taffy was reading in bed. Her sheer nylon gown kept nothing hidden, but what it showed was nothing Frankie hadn’t seen before, and he was tired of it. He stood for a moment looking at her, wondering what would be the best way to do it. The direct way, he decided. The tough way. Get it over with, and to hell with it.

From the bed, Taffy said, “Hi, honey. You’re early tonight.”

Without answering, Frankie walked over to the closet and slammed back one of the sliding panels. He dragged a cowhide overnight bag off a shelf and carried it to the bed. Snapping the locks, he spread the bag open.

Taffy sat up straighter against her silk pillows, two small spots of color burning suddenly over her cheek bones. “What’s up, Frankie? You going someplace?”

He went to a chest of drawers, returned with pajamas and a clean shirt. “That ought to be obvious. As a matter of fact, I’m going to a hotel.”

“Why, Frankie? What’s the idea?”

He looked down at her, feeling the strong emotional drive. “The idea is that we’re through, baby. Finished. I’m moving out.”

Her breath whistled in a sharp sucking inhalation, and she swung out of bed in a fragile nylon mist. Her hands clutched at him.

“No, Frankie! Not like this. Not after all the luck I’ve brought you.”

He laughed brutally, remembering the old man. “It wasn’t you who brought me luck, baby. It was someone else. That’s something you’ll never know anything about.”

He turned, heading for the chest again, and she grabbed his arm, jerking. He spun with the force of the jerk, smashing his backhand across her mouth. She staggered off until the underside of her knees caught on the bed and held her steady. A bright drop of blood formed on her lower lip and dropped onto her chin. A whimper of pain crawled out of her throat.

“Why, Frankie? Just tell me why.”

He shrugged. “A guy grows. A guy goes on to something better. That’s just the way it is, baby.”

“It’s more than that. It’s a lot bigger than that. You think I’ve been two-timing you, Frankie?”

He repeated his brutal laugh. “Two-timing me? I’ll tell you something, baby. I wouldn’t give a damn if you were sleeping with every punk in town. That’s how much I care.” He paused, savoring sadism, finding it pleasant. “You want it straight, baby? It’s just that I’m sick of you. I’m sick to my guts with the sight of you. That clear enough?”

She came back to him, slowly, lifting her arms like a supplicant. He waited until she was close enough, then he hit her across the mouth again.

Turning his back, he returned to the chest and got the rest of the articles he needed. Just a few things. Enough for the night and tomorrow. In the morning he’d send someone around to clean things out.

At the bed, he tossed the stuff into the overnight bag and snapped it shut.

Over his shoulder, he said, “The rent’s paid to the end of the month. After that, you better look for another place to live.”

She didn’t respond, and remembering his tooth brush, he went into the bathroom for it. When he came out, she was standing there with a .38 in her hand. It was the same .38 he’d once considered killing himself with. That had been the old Frankie, of course.

Not the new Frankie. Death was no consideration in the life of the new Frankie.

“You rotten son of a bitch,” she said.

He laughed aloud and started for her, and he just couldn’t believe it when the slug slammed into his shoulder.

He looked down in amazement at the place where the crimson began to seep, and his incredulous eyes raised just in time to receive the second slug squarely between them.

And, like the night the old man died, it was funny. In the last split second of sight, it wasn’t Taffy standing there with the gun at all. It was the old man again.

The old man with a memory like an elephant.

The old man who always waited until it really hurt.

Insurance (The Long Wait)

Originally published in Menace, January 1955

He rented this shack down the beach, and he lived there over a year. Very few people paid any attention to him. He told the man who rented him the shack that he was a writer looking for seclusion, and the word got around. He’d grown a beard for the part, and he’d even bought a second-hand typewriter to substantiate it.

The first six months were easy, because he didn’t expect anything to happen then. Afterward, it kept getting harder. Tension mounted as the days passed, and he walked down the beach to the town to meet all ships from the States. When a year had elapsed, he began to think that Ella was never coming, and he lay on the beach during the days and in the shack at night, cursing himself for a fool for ever having believed that she would follow him according to their plan, and then she finally came. It was exactly one year, six weeks and three days from the time of his own arrival.

She came in from the ship and walked right past him on the pier. He could have reached out and touched her, and he wanted like hell to do it, but he didn’t. Her eyes flicked over him and away without any signs of recognition, and he turned and followed her up across the beach to the hotel. She was wearing a white sharkskin dress that fit her like a glove, and the bright light of the sun made a pale fire of her hair. He’d never been so glad to see anyone in his life. It’s hard to keep an image clear and focused in the mind, and even in so little time he’d forgotten how beautiful she was. His stomach was like a clenched fist all the way to the hotel.

In the lobby, she registered and went up in the elevator, and he crossed over into the bar and crawled onto a stool. He ordered a daiquiri and sat there sipping it, the taste and touch of the rum and citrus juices cold and tart on his tongue. During the past year, he hadn’t thought much about the murder itself, only about whether Ella would ever come or not, but now, waiting for her in the final minutes of his waiting, it came back into his mind in detail.

They had this place outside the city that Ella had inherited. It was really a farm, but they didn’t do any farming. Not Ella and him. They liked their green stuff to come faster and easier than you could get it out of the ground. They had a few grand, and they wondered how to make it grow, and finally they decided it would be a good thing to invest it in an insurance policy on a dead man. Double indemnity, of course. They paid for twenty-five and planned to collect fifty. On him. He was the dead man. The insurance outfit didn’t know that, of course. They had him examined, and the doctor signed a paper that said he was alive. Only Ella and he knew that he wasn’t. For practical purposes, that is.

He kept looking for a guy who would do. He wanted someone in a hurry, because there wasn’t any sense in sinking too much in premiums. Finally, the guy just stumbled into the setup and practically asked to be used. He was in the city when this guy came, and when he got back that evening, a cold evening in January, Ella met him out by the barn where he’d put the car.

“He’s here,” she said. “A young guy on the tramp. He asked for food and he wants to sleep in the barn. About your height and weight and age. He’s perfect.”

“How about his teeth?”

“No work on them at all. Just like yours. I told him you were in town to the dentist, and he said he’d been lucky. Said he’d never been to a dentist in his life.”

“Neither have I. You’re smart, honey. Beautiful and smart. Where is this guy?”

“In the kitchen eating.”

“Okay. I’ll go look at him.”

She moved in against him, and the breath of her whisper was hot on his face. “Tonight, Steve. Make it tonight.”

They lost time, the way they always lost time when she came at him like that, but after a while he went up to the house and into the kitchen where the young drifter was sitting.

Like Ella said, he was perfect. Steve told him it was okay to sleep in the barn, and when he’d finished eating, he took him down there. Inside the barn, in the darkness, it was easy to slip a leather strap around the drifter’s neck, but it was a lot harder to hang on when the guy understood what he’d walked into. He threshed like a maniac and tried to twist around to get at Steve with his hands, but he couldn’t keep it up long with the strap cutting into his throat, and pretty soon he was dead.

Steve improvised some braces and managed to prop the body upright in the opening of the stall where Reuben was kept. Reuben was a horse, a vicious devil, a fine killer. Steve went into the adjoining stall and, reaching over the partition, rammed him brutally in the flank with the handle of a fork. The horse lashed out with his hind legs, and one hoof caught the body of the drifter in the chest. The body was hurtled all the way across the central aisle of the barn. It smashed against the planking on the other side and bounced half way back before it hit the ground. Steve left it lying there and returned to the house.

Ella was waiting in the kitchen. She had a bag already packed and sitting on the linoleum by the door. Her cheeks were hot, and her eyes were bright with excitement. She looked as if she were burning up inside with a high fever. It made her more beautiful than ever. God, she was beautiful.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s done.”

“You’d better get away, Steve. You’d better start the fire and leave.”

He took her by the shoulders and let his hands slip in upon her throat. “Don’t forget to come, honey. And just don’t forget to come.”

“I’ll come, Steve. You know I’ll come. Just as soon as everything’s settled.”

“Sure, honey, I know. But it’ll be a long time. A long, long time. Can’t you tell a guy good-by?”

So they said good-by in a way he thought would last him through all the time of waiting, and then he took the bag she’d packed for him and went back down to the barn. He scattered some kerosene around, putting quite a bit on the drifter’s body, and then lit a lantern. He smashed the lantern on the planking where the body had struck and let it fall. Flames leaped up like spits of hell. He went out to the back side of the barn and ran with long, regular strides down the cowpath to the pasture. Behind him, he could hear old Reuben raising hell, could hear the crashing of his hooves against the stall.

He ran through the pasture to the creek, and, walking then, he followed the creek a couple of miles to a three-lane highway. He caught a ride on a pickup truck into the city, and next day he caught a bus to another city, and not long after that he caught a boat to another country, and so here he was, one year, six weeks and three days later, sitting in a bar with a daiquiri in his hands and Ella upstairs and the long wait almost over.

In about half an hour, she came. He could see her enter the room behind him, growing larger in the mirror, and she crawled onto a stool with one empty between them. She ordered a daiquiri of her own, and he watched her from the corners of his eyes, all the details once more sharp and clear that had been blurred by waiting too long on a beach, the sleepy eyes and red, sulky mouth, the body that even touching hardly made credible, the long twin sheens of nylon crossed at the knees. He thought of the way they’d said good-by, and he began to think that it was time to say hello, and as he sat there thinking about it, his pulse accelerated, and his heart knocked painfully at his ribs.

After a while, a guy angling for a pickup, he turned on his stool and said, “May I buy you a drink?”

She glanced at him and smiled a little and shrugged her shoulders. “Why not?”

He shifted over onto the intervening empty and told the bartender

two more daiquiris. Understanding that business was going forward, the

bartender supplied them quickly and faded. He was a good bartender. A guy sensitive to a situation.

“It’s been a long time,” Steve said softly. “I thought you were never coming.”

“I almost missed you on the pier, darling. The beard makes you look older.”

“How did it go?”

“There was a hassle. An investigation. They thought it was funny, a guy walking in behind a vicious horse like that. They paid off, though. Double. Fifty grand.”

“Where’s the money?”

“Upstairs, darling. Hidden in my baggage in a way it could never be noticed. Up there waiting for us, like we’ve been waiting for each other. When the three of us get together, that’s when we start living.”

“That’s now, baby. There’s you and me and the money and nothing left between us.”

She lifted the daiquiri to her lips and her eyes to the mirror, and it was then he got the feel of something wrong. An unease in her manner, an uncertainty in her voice. A last remnant of left-over fear.

“I’m worried,” she said. “I’m worried to hell.”

“What’s the matter?”

She lowered her glass to the bar and sat looking down into it, twisting it slowly by the stem between the scarlet tips of her fingers. “A man. He came down on the boat with me. I’m positive he’s an insurance dick.”

“You mean he’s following you?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think he’s a dick?”

“I saw him once before. I’m sure he’s the one. There was another dick out to the farm on the investigation. Later, in town, I happened to see him with this guy who came down on the boat. They were having some beers in a bar. I followed them when they left, and they went to the offices of the insurance company. I know damn well he’s a dick, Steve. I’ll swear he’s the same guy.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Look in the mirror, you can see for yourself. He’s at a table behind us. Tall. Black hair. Wearing a white suit.”

Steve lifted his eyes and sorted the dick out. He was concentrating on his drink, something in a tall glass with a peel curled over the edge, but Steve had the strange feeling that he was a guy trying too hard not to look at someone he wanted like hell to look at. A handsome guy. A tall, smooth, easy-to-look-at guy. Inside, Steve felt shrunken and icy cold, deadly with the pointed, purposeful deadliness of someone who’s waited too long.

“He shouldn’t have followed you,” he said. “He never should have come.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll have to kill him, of course. I’ll kill him fast, and we’ll move out of here.”

“No!” Her whisper possessed a desperate urgency. “No, Steve!”

“Why not? We killed once. This time it’ll be easier.”

“That’s just the point. Each time it’ll be easier. We can’t go on killing forever.”

“Who said forever? Just twice. After this one, nobody’ll ever find us.”

“Look, Steve. There’s another way. A better way. Give me a chance to convince you.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Just as soon as I can get to you after dark.”

He thought about the two of them on the dark beach after so long a time, and again his pulse was an acute and throbbing pain. “Can you shake the dick?”

“Leave it to me.”

“Okay. I’ve got a shack down the beach. There’s an outcropping of rock, jutting into the sea. The shack’s the first one beyond it.”

“I’ll be there, darling. Wait for me. Wait just a little bit longer.”

“Okay. For you and the money. Don’t forget to bring it with you.”

“I’ll bring it.”

He slipped off the stool and smiled at her like a guy who’d invested a drink in a project he intended to finish later. Without looking at the black-haired man in the white suit, he went out of the bar and the hotel and back down the beach beyond the outcropping of rock to the shack. He lay on his back in the sand with one arm bent up over his eyes to reinforce the thin, inadequate defense of his lids against the glaring white light, and all the tension that had mounted within him during the past half year seemed to dissolve and disappear, leaving his body relaxed and his mind functioning with a kind of dispassionate clarity. He lay without moving for a long time, until at last he became aware of a sudden chill in the air, and he opened his eyes to see the sun plunging into the sea. Almost before he could get up and go into the shack, the black, obliterating night had fallen with incredible suddenness and silence.

Inside the shack, he lit an oil lamp, turning the wick low. From his bag under the cot he slept on, he got a .38 revolver. He slipped the revolver under his belt, beneath the loose tail of his shirt, and sat down on the cot to wait some more. From his position, he could look through the open door of the shack and down across the beach at an angle to the mass of rock lapped by the sea. Once, after about half an hour, he got up and found a bottle and took a long pull from the neck. Then he resumed his seat on the cot and didn’t move again until, such a long time later that he’d become unable even to estimate the time, he saw Ella coming up across the sand from the rocks in the first light of the moon.

He stood up to meet her, and regret twisted within him like a sharp knife that there would be no time to say hello as they had said good-by. She came in through the door and into his arms, and the weight of her body against his pressed the .38 into his flesh until it felt like a belly cramp.

She felt the steel in her own flesh and arched back in his arms. “A gun, Steve? Why?”

He released her with one arm and took the gun out of his belt. He lifted it. “For you, honey. For you and your black-haired lover.”

The hot blood drained out of her face, and the smoke cleared from her eyes on a bitter wind of fear. She put a palm flat against his chest and tried to push away, but he held her trapped tightly against him with one arm.

“What’s the matter with you, Steve? You gone crazy?”

He laughed softly. “Maybe a guy who waits too long develops a lot of peculiar twists you could call crazy. One thing, he gets sensitive. He develops what the skull-shrinkers call ideas of reference. Everything seems to point at him. Everything has significance. Most of all, he doesn’t believe in coincidence.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Steve. I swear to God.”

“Don’t you, honey? I’m talking about your phony insurance dick. I’m talking about your just happening to see him in town. About your just happening to tail him right to the insurance company’s offices. About how he just happens to be a tall, sleek guy. Just the kind of guy you’d like to buy with a hunk of fifty grand. But more than anything else, I’m talking about how you don’t want me to kill him. Don’t you remember me, honey? I’m the guy who killed for you once before. I’m the guy who remembers how you could hardly wait until I got the job done. Since when have you become so sensitive?”

“You are crazy, Steve!” She leaned against him again, letting her lips brush his in the formation of her words. “I’m here, aren’t I? Why would I have come, if I’d wanted to double-cross you? All I had wanted to do was stay away.”

He laughed again, feeling the soft, wet stirring of her lips, the stronger stirring inside of an almost sickening desire to believe her. “Why? I’ll tell you why, honey. Because you’re a gal who wouldn’t want to spend the rest of her life expecting someone she didn’t want to see. Because you knew damn well I’d come back eventually and find you. The only way to prevent that was to come down here to kill me. You and lover-boy.”

A violent tremor shook her flesh, and she beat his chest softly with a clenched fist. “No, Steve. It isn’t that way. For God’s sake, you’ve got to believe me! Would I have brought the money? Would I have brought it just the way you told me to?”

“Where is it? I told you to bring it here.”

“It’s in a belt around my waist, Steve. Fifty thousand-dollar bills, minus two for expenses. Let me go, I’ll show you.”

He released her and stepped back. “All right. Show me.”

She lifted her skirt and removed the belt. It was thin, flat, made of water-proof silk. She handed it to him, and he unzipped it and counted the forty-eight crisp pieces of paper. He stuffed the belt and the paper into the front of his shirt, tucking the loose tail into his trousers. Color had returned to her face in bright spots high on the cheek bones. Her breasts rose high and fell and rose again. Her tongue slipped out to dampen her dry lips.

“Now do you believe me? Now can you show a gal how you missed her?”

She came to him, but he held her off by the shoulders, shaking his head. “A guy who’s waited as long as I have can wait a little longer. This time we’ll do it together, honey. Down by the rocks.”

She shrugged angrily, the color burning hotter on her cheeks, and turned away and out the door into the sand. He followed, the gun held loosely at his side. Steps apart, they crossed the beach in thin moonlight and vanished into the cast shadow of the outcropping. Waiting there in darkness that had acquired a penetrating chill, the ancient rock towering above him, he could dimly see her, could smell her, could hear the heavy whisper of her breath pass in and out between her lips, and he prayed to whatever dark gods listen to prayers of ones like him that the black-haired man in the white suit would not come.

But he did. And soon. He came swiftly and silently down the beach, and his gun was already in his hand. When he came abreast, about five yards inland, Steve lifted his .38 and fired. The sound crashed against the rock and was thrown out across the sand at the man who had stopped suddenly, erect, to twist slowly in the direction of his death. The .38 crashed and jumped a second time, and the man stepped back, swayed, and sank to his hands and knees. He remained in that position for a moment, head hanging, and then very slowly, with tremendous effort, he lifted his head until his face was faintly visible in the moonlight, and his voice, distorted by anguish, carried clearly across the sand to the rocks.

“Ella,” he said. “Help me, Ella, for Christ’s sake...”

His elbows collapsed, and he lay down soundlessly in the sand, and it was at that moment, exposed by his words, that Ella took a deadly toy from between her breasts and shot Steve in the belly. She shot him three times and ran. He stood frozen in a kind of terrible shock, the .38 fallen to the sand and his arms outspread and his fingers clawing for support at the rock behind him. Watching her run and fall sprawling and rise to run again, he slipped down against the rock, dimly aware of jagged edges tearing at his flesh. He sat for a few seconds in the sand, his chin resting on his chest, then he fell over sideways and lay still.

He lay there and felt the red life run out of him in three thin streams, but he would not die. He was conscious all the time of the silk belt and the crisp paper inside his shirt. With a final deadly tenacity given to him by the certainty of death, he thought only of the money that would bring her back, and he would not die.

He closed his eyes to rest their heavy lids and almost never opened them again, almost missed her coming after all.

But then, prompted by a whisper of sand or a scent or a touch, he forced them open to see her bending over between him and the moon. She moved in a thick swimming mist of darkening red, and he reached up swiftly into the mist with a desperate expenditure of his remaining strength to jerk her down upon his body.

He was never aware of her scream or her frantic threshing and was even denied the last slight satisfaction of feeling the frail bones of her throat break beneath his thumbs.

May I Come In?

Originally published in Manhunt, January 1955

The night was hot and humid. I lay in my room on a sheet sodden with the seepage from my pores, and suspended above me in the dark like a design in ectoplasm was the face of the man named Marilla, and the hate within me stirred and flowed and seeped with the sweat from my pores, and the color of my hate was yellow.

I got off the bed and walked on bare feet across the warm floor to the window, but there was no air moving at the window or outside the window, and the adherent heat had saturated my flesh and soaked through my eyes into the cavity of my skull to lie like a thick, smothering fog over the contours of my brain. I could hear, across the narrow interval that separated houses, the whirr of blades beating the air, and because my eyes were like cat’s eyes, I could see behind the blades into the black, gasping room, and it was the bedroom of Mrs. Willkins, and she was lying nude on her bed under the contrived breeze, and her body was gross and ugly with flesh loose on its bones, and I hated her, just as I hated the ectoplasmic face of the man named Marilla, with all the force of my yellow hate.

Turning away from the window, I found in the darkness a pint of gin on a chest and poured two fingers into a tumbler. I sat on the edge of the bed and drank the gin and then lay down again, and the face of Marilla was still suspended above me, and in a moment the face of Freda was there too, and I began to think deliberately about Marilla and Freda, and the reason I hated Marilla.

I stood with Freda in front of the shining glass window, and she pointed out the coat to me on the arrogant blonde dummy. I could see Freda’s reflected face in the glass from my angle of vision, and her lips were slightly open in excitement and desire, and I felt happy and a little sad at the same time to see her that way, because it wasn’t, after all, much of a coat, not mink or ermine or any kind of fur at all, but just a plain cloth coat that was a kind of pink color and looked like it would be as soft as down to the touch.

“It’s beautiful,” Freda said. “It’s, oh, so beautiful,” and I said, “You like it? You like to have it?” and she said, “Oh, yes,” in a kind of expiring, incredulous whisper that was like the expression of a child who just can’t believe the wonderful thing that’s about to happen.

We went into the store and up to the floor where the coats were sold, and Freda tried on the coat, turning around and around in front of the mirror and stroking the cloth as if it were a kitten and making a soft little purring sound as if she were the kitten she was stroking. I teased her a little, saying that, well, it was rather expensive and would raise hell with the budget, but I knew all the time that I was going to buy it for her, because she wanted it so much and because it made her look even more beautiful than before, and after a while I went up to the credit department and made arrangements for monthly payments, because I didn’t have the price. When I came back down, she was still standing in front of the mirror in the coat, and I said, “You going to wear it?” and she said, “Oh, yes, I’m going to wear it and sleep in it and never take it off,” and I kept remembering afterward that it wasn’t after all, so much of a coat, not fur or anything, but just pink cloth.

We went down in the elevator, and she clung to my arm and kissed me over and over with her eyes, and I thought it was the best buy I’d ever made and cheap at the price, even if I had had to arrange monthly payments. We went out onto the street through the revolving door, walking close together in the same section of the door because Freda wouldn’t let loose of my arm, and the street was bright and soft and cool with the cool, bright softness of April, and it was just the kind of day and street for a new pink coat. We walked down the street toward the drug store on the corner, and I was thinking that I’d take Freda into the store for some of the peppermint ice cream with chunks of stick peppermint in it that she liked so much, and it occurred to me that the ice cream was just about the color of the pink coat, and then there were a couple of explosions inside the drug store, and after a second or two a woman began to scream in a high, ragged voice that went on and on, and the door of the store flew open, and a man ran out with a gun in his hand, and the man was Marilla, the man they were later to call a psychopathic killer.

He ran toward us along the sidewalk waving the gun, and he ran with a queer, lurching gait, as if he were crippled, or one leg were shorter than the other, and as he ran he made a sound that was something like a whimper and something like a cry. Between us and him was a kid carrying a shoe shine box, and the kid stopped and stood stiffly with the box hanging at his side, and then the gun in Marilla’s hand began to explode again, and the kid set the box down on the sidewalk and fell over sideways across it. I stood looking at the kid, and I realized suddenly that Freda had let go of my arm, and I turned to see if she was still there, but she wasn’t, and I couldn’t see her anywhere. Marilla ran past me, and I could see directly into his big eyes that were like black puddles of liquid terror, and he pointed the gun at my face and pulled the trigger, and I could hear the dull click of the hammer on a dead shell. I could have tackled him and brought him down, but I didn’t, because just then I saw that Freda was lying on the sidewalk like the kid up ahead, but in a different position, on her back with the new coat spread open around her like something that had been put there in advance for her to lie on. I knelt down beside her on the sidewalk and lifted her head and began to say her name, and at first I thought she’d fainted, but then I saw the small black hole that was about three inches in a straight line below the hollow of her throat, and I knew that she was dead.

They caught Marilla in a blind alley. He was sitting in a corner with his knees drawn up and his head resting on his knees, and he was whimpering and crying, and his voice would rise now and then to a thin scream of terror, and the men who found him first almost beat him to death before the police came and took him away. Right after that, the next day or so, they began to say he was crazy, that he was just a crazy kid only twenty years old, and the psychiatrists had big words for the kind of craziness it was supposed to be, but I knew that nothing they could say would do him any good at all, because he had killed a man and a woman in the drug store and the shoe shine kid on the street, and above all he had killed Freda in her new pink coat.

They asked him why he had killed all those people, and they didn’t even make any distinction between Freda and the others, and he said he hadn’t hated any of them or anything like that, hadn’t even wanted to kill them at all, but had killed them anyhow because he’d been told time and again to do it and finally had to do as he was told. They asked him who had told him to kill the people, just any people, and he said it was a thin little man with a pointed nose and a pointed chin who wore yellow pointed shoes. The man had appeared in all sorts of odd places and told him to go out and kill some people.

It was part of the big lie, of course, that ridiculous part about the man coming and telling him to kill some people, it was part of the plan to keep him from paying for killing Freda, and anyone could see right through it, it was so transparent. You can buy some psychiatrist to verify something like that any time you’ve got the price, and I knew they’d hang him in spite of what any psychiatrist said, because God wanted him to hang just as much as I did, God and I hated him equally for what he’d done to Freda right when she was so happy.

I waited for them to try him, and finally they did, and I went and sat in the court room every day to watch him and to feel the yellow hate like pus inside me. He sat at the long table with the lawyers who defended him, and he always sat with his head bowed and his hands folded on top of the table in a posture of prayer, but once in a while he would look up briefly into the crowd, and the light of terror and inner cowering were there in his great liquid eyes, and I felt a fierce exaltation that he was suffering, and that the suffering he now felt was only the beginning of the suffering he would feel before he was through. He looked very small in the chair by the big table, hardly larger than a child, with narrow shoulders slumped forward and a slender neck supporting a head that was too big for his body, and the head looking even bigger than it really was because of the thick black shining curls that covered it. I kept watching him sit there like he was praying, and I kept thinking that he could pray all he wanted to, but God wouldn’t hear him, and that he could plead and lie and try all the tricks he could think of, but no one would believe him or pity him or do anything to help him, no one at all.

They put him on the stand at last to tell about the man who had come to tell him to kill, and he described the man again, just as he had to the psychiatrists, his pointed nose and pointed chin and yellow pointed shoes, and he spoke in a very soft voice that could barely be heard but contained all the time, somehow, the threat of rising abruptly to a shrill scream. It was all put on, part of the plan, but he was very clever, a great actor, and he told how the man had appeared the first time while he was standing on a bridge looking down at the water, and had sat down beside him another time in a movie theater, and had met him another time while he was walking along a path in the town park, and had then begun coming to his room late at night to knock softly on the door. No one was supposed to believe that the little man had actually come to him in those ways, or in any way at all, but everyone was supposed to believe that it had happened in his mind, that the little man was an hallucination of insanity, but I knew it hadn’t happened that way either, that the man hadn’t even appeared in Marilla’s mind, and that it was all a story made up to get him out of it. I knew they’d hang him, and I tried to feel within myself the way he’d feel while he was waiting, and walking out to the scaffold, and standing there in the last instant with the black hood over his head and the rope around his neck.

But in the end they didn’t hang him at all.

They let him out of it.

They said he wasn’t guilty because he wasn’t in his right mind and wasn’t responsible for his acts, and they sent him off somewhere to a place with cool white rooms and a cool green lawn and doctors to look after him and nurses to wait on him.

I thought a lot about the twelve people on the jury who let him out of it, and I began to hate them the same as Marilla, and I wished they were all dead, dead as Freda, but the more I thought about them the more they seemed like all other people, and after a long time I realized it was because they really were like all other people on earth. Freda was dead, and no one cared, all the people on earth had said it was all right because of a ridiculous story about a little man with a pointed nose and a pointed chin and yellow pointed shoes who had told a man named Marilla to kill her. Always I saw the face of Marilla and the face of Freda, and they seemed to get mixed up with other faces that I’d never seen before, and I wondered if I was insane myself, but I wasn’t, of course, any more than Marilla was.

And now I lay in my room in the hot and humid night, and across the interval between houses, behind the futile beating of blades, Mrs. Willkins’ gross body stirred in her black and gasping room.

And there was something else. Something new.

A man was walking the dark and airless streets of town beneath layers of lifeless leaves.

He walked with mincing steps, and he was far away in the beginning, when I first saw him, and I lay on my bed in my room and followed his progress with cat’s eyes through light and shadow across the pattern of the town. At times he was swallowed completely by darkness, and then no eyes could see him but mine, but the people who stirred in wakefulness in the houses he passed could hear the echo of his mincing steps, and he moved with surety of purpose and a pace that never varied through the silent, dappled streets until he came at last to the corner above my house and down the street to the house itself. Without moving from my bed, I could see him standing on the sidewalk below with his face lifted into the milky light of the moon, and then he came up across the porch into the house and up the stairs into the hall and stood outside my door.

I waited in the hot stillness, and after a while he knocked softly, and I got up in the dark, and my hand, swinging out, struck the tumbler on the table by the bed and knocked it to the floor with a sound of brittle thunder that rocked the room. I waited until the reverberations had diminished and died and the soft knock was repeated, and then I crossed to the door and opened it.

The warm fog inside my skull pressed closely on my brain, and though my head didn’t ache exactly, it felt very light and queer. The man in the hall looked at me and bowed in a peculiar, old-fashioned way from the waist and smiled politely.

“Excuse me for disturbing you at this hour,” he said, “but I must talk with you about a number of people. About Mrs. Willkins first of all, I think. May I come in?”

He was a little man with a long pointed nose and a pointed chin. He wore yellow pointed shoes.

I saw Marilla from my window. He was walking in the yard below with the same man in white who comes now and then to my room, and he sat for a while on a bench under a tree, and I could see him quite clearly. The queer thing is, there was no hate, no longer any hate, and I’m thinking that perhaps I will be allowed to walk in the yard soon, and that Marilla and I may meet and sit together under the tree and talk about these things that happened. It will be pleasant to talk with someone who knows and understands....

Homicide and Gentlemen

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 1961

Lieutenant Joseph Marcus walked past the ninth hole, par-four, with a fine official disregard of the green. It wasn’t quite disregard, however, for there was in his performance a degree of deliberate malice that expressed itself by a digging-in of the heels and a scuffing of the toes. Lieutenant Marcus, who had been a poor boy and was still a poor man, felt an unreasonable animus for the game of golf and a modest contempt, in spite of certain famous devotees, for the folk who played it. He was by nature gentle and tolerant, though, and he was faintly ashamed of his feeling and its expression of petty vandalism.

With Sergeant Bobo Fuller at his side, although a half step to the rear, he descended from the green on a gentle slope and moved rapidly across clipped grass toward a place where the ground dipped suddenly to form a rather steep bank. Sergeant Fuller, whose name was really something besides Bobo that almost everyone had forgotten, did not lag the half step because he found it impossible to stay abreast. Neither did he lag as a pretty deference to rank. Sergeant Fuller did not give a damn about rank, to tell the truth. He didn’t give a damn about Lieutenant Marcus either, and that was why he maintained the half step interval. He considered Marcus a self-made snob who read books and put on airs, and the interval was subtle evidence of a dislike of which the sergeant was rather proud and the lieutenant was vaguely aware.

Going over the lip of the bank, Marcus dug in his heels again, this time with the perfectly valid purpose of retarding his descent. At the bottom he was on level ground that again tilted, after a bit, into a gentle slope. Fifty yards ahead was a small lake glittering in the morning sunlight. Between Marcus and the lake, somewhat nearer to him and almost in the shade of a distinguished and gnarled oak, was a group composed of four men and a boy. The boy was holding, in one hand, a fishing rod with a spinning reel attached; in the other, a small green tackle box. Two of the four men were uniformed policemen who had been dispatched from police headquarters to maintain the status quo for Marcus, who had not been on hand at the time, and a third was, as it turned out, a caretaker who had walked into a diversion on his way to work across the course. The fourth man was lying on his face on the grass, his head pointed in the direction of the bank behind Marcus, and Fuller, and he was, Marcus had been assured, dead. That was, in fact, why Marcus and Fuller were there. They were there because the man on the grass was dead in a manner and place considered suspicious by public authorities hired to consider such things, which included Marcus, who also secretly considered the whole development something of an imposition.

Speaking to the pair of policemen, with the air of abstraction that had contributed to his reputation for snobbishness, he knelt beside the body to make an examination that he felt certain would yield nothing of any particular significance. This pessimistic approach was natural to him, and he was always surprised when things turned out better than he had hoped or expected. Well, the man was dead, of course. He had been shot, Apparently in the heart, by what appeared to have been a small caliber gun. From the condition of the body, he judged that the shooting had occurred not many hours earlier, for rigor mortis was not advanced. These things were always hedged about by qualifications, however, and it was doubtful that the so-called estimate of the coroner, who was presumably on the way, would be much closer to the truth than Marcus’s guess. Sometime between was the way Marcus expressed it somewhat bitterly to himself. Between midnight, say, and dawn.

Still with the irrational feeling of being imposed upon, Marcus made other observations and guesses. Age, thirty to thirty-five. Height, about five-eleven. Weight, give or take ten pounds on either side of one-seventy. Hair, light brown and crew cut. Eyes, open and blind and blue. White shirt, blood stained. Narrow tie, striped with two shades of brown, and summer worsted trousers, also brown. Brown socks, brown shoes. Lying on the grass, about five paces away, a jacket to match the pants. In the right side pocket of the pants, coins amounting to the sum of one dollar and twenty-three cents. Also a tiny gold pen knife. In the left hip pocket, buttoned in, a wallet. In the wallet, besides eighteen dollars in bills, several identifying items, including a driver’s license and a membership card in Blue Cross-Blue Shield. Well, Marcus thought, they won’t have to pay off on this one. According to both the license and the membership card, the dead man was someone named Alexander Gray. With all items officially appropriated and in his own jacket pocket, Marcus walked over to the brown jacket on the grass and found nothing in it. Nothing at all.

“Who found the body?” he asked of whoever wanted to answer.

“The kid found him,” one of the policemen said.

Marcus turned to the boy, about twelve from the looks of him, who still held the rod and reel and tackle box as if he feared that they, too, might be appropriated. Marcus had no such intention, of course, but he wished he could borrow them and spend the day using them instead of doing what he had to do. Marcus liked kids, but he seldom showed it. It was his misfortune that he seldom showed anything, and much of the little he did show was a kind of characteristic distortion of what he actually thought and felt.

“What’s your name, sonny?” he said.

“William Peyton Hausler,” the boy said.

It was obvious that he was stating his name fully in an attempt to secure a status, however limited by his minority, that would establish his innocence and insure the respectful treatment to which he was entitled.

“You live around here?”

“On the street over there, the other side of the golf course.” He gestured with the hand holding the rod and reel to indicate the direction.

“Looks like you’re going fishing.”

“Yes, sir. In the lake.”

“You fish here often?”

“Pretty often. The manager of the club said it was all right.”

“It doesn’t look like much of a lake. Any fish in it?”

“It’s stocked. Crappie and bass, mostly. Club members fish in it. I’m not a member — my dad isn’t — but the manager said it was all right for me to fish.”

“What time was it when you found the body?”

“I don’t know exactly. It hadn’t been light long. About six-thirty, I guess. I wanted to get to the lake early because the fish bite better then.”

“That’s what I hear. Early morning and late evening. What’d you do when you found the body?”

“Nothing much. I walked up close to it, and I spoke a couple of times to see if there’d be any answer, but there wasn’t, and I was pretty scared because I could tell something was wrong, and just then Mr. Tompkins came along.”

“You touch anything at all?”

“No, sir. Not a thing.”

“Who’s Mr. Tompkins?”

“This is him. He’s one of the caretakers.”

“Okay. Thanks, sonny. You better go and see if you can still catch some fish.”

The boy went on down the gentle slope to the little lake, and Marcus turned to Tompkins, who was a leathery-looking man who appeared to be in his sixties. He was dressed in faded twill pants and a blue work shirt of heavy material like the ones that Marcus had worn with roomy bib overalls as a kid.

“Is that right?” Marcus said. “What the kid told me?”

“I guess so. Far as I know. When I got here, he was just standing and staring at the body. He looked scared.”

“No wonder. Kids don’t find a body every day. What’d you do?”

“I looked at the body, not touching it, and I could see a little blood where it had seeped out in the grass. I told the kid to stay and watch things while I hustled up to the Club House to call the police.”

“The Club House open that early in the morning?”

“No. There’s a phone booth on the back terrace. I happened to have a dime.”

“Lucky you did. I usually don’t. After you called the police, did you come back here and wait?”

“That’s right. Just came back and waited with the kid and didn’t bother anything.”

“Good. You did just right. I don’t suppose you know this guy?”

“The dead man, you mean? I never saw him before.”

“All right. You might as well go on to work.” Marcus turned away to a uniform. “You go up to the Club House and bring the manager down here. You can tell him what’s happened if he’s curious.”

The caretaker and the policeman went off in different directions, one toward the Club House and the other, presumably, toward whatever building sheltered the equipment for taking care, and Marcus began to prowl slowly the area around the body. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just anything he could find, and he found nothing. No significant marks in the clipped grass growing from hard earth. No small item conveniently dropped that might later point to a place or person. Not even, he thought bitterly, a lousy cigarette butt.

The brown jacket bothered him. Why the hell had the dead man taken it off? Before he was dead, of course. And why had he left it lying on the ground five yards or so from where he had walked to be killed? Unless he had been moved after being killed, which didn’t seem probable. And why, for that matter, had he been here on the golf course at all? A golf course did not seem to Marcus to be a likely place to be in the hours between midnight and dawn, sometime between, but then a golf course did not seem to Marcus a likely place to be at any time whatever, unless you came, like the kid, to fish in a lake or to lie on the grass under a tree and wish that you were something besides what you had become.

Fuller, watching Marcus, was tempted to ask him what he was looking for, but he resisted the temptation. Anyhow, quite correctly, he guessed that Marcus didn’t know himself, and he was determined to avoid giving, in front of the uniform, the impression of a dumb cop appealing to his superior for enlightenment. Marcus was already, in Fuller’s opinion, sufficiently overrated at headquarters. As it turned out, after a few minutes, the appeal went the other way, but it was no triumph for Fuller, after all, for it only forced him to admit what he had hoped to conceal.

“Any ideas, Fuller?” Marcus said.

“Not yet,” Fuller said. “I’ve been trying to figure it.”

“So have I, but I haven’t had any luck, and I doubt if I ever do. As I see it, a guy who got himself shot on a golf course must have been crazy, and crazy people make the worst kind of murder victims from a cop’s point of view because it’s almost impossible to figure logically why they did what they did that got them killed.”

Sure, Fuller thought. Read me a lecture about it, you topnotch snob. The Psychology of Nuts by Dr. Joseph Marcus.

He was saved from making a reply by the return of the other uniform and a small man in Bermuda shorts and heavy ribbed stockings that reached almost to his knees. Marcus approved of the shorts, for he was always one for keeping comfortable, but he was damned if he could understand why anyone would deliberately qualify the effect of the shorts by wearing the stockings. Which was, however, he conceded, none of his business.

“You the manager of this club?” Marcus said.

“Yes,” the small man said. “Paul Iverson.”

“I’m Lieutenant Joseph Marcus, Mr. Iverson. We’ve got a body here.”

“Yes, yes. I know. The officer told me.”

“He was shot.”

“It’s incredible. I can hardly believe it.”

“It looks like someone took advantage of the privacy of your golf course to commit a murder.”

Iverson’s expression, although indicating shock and a shade of nausea, was primarily one of resentment. Among the activities of the club, he palpably felt, one expected and accepted certain indiscretions and transgressions of the peccadillo type, but murder was neither expected nor acceptable and ought to cause someone to lose his membership.

“Are you certain that it’s murder?” he said. “Perhaps he killed himself.”

“With his finger, maybe?”

“Oh, I see. There’s no gun.”

“Right. No gun. Besides, there’s no powder marks on his shirt. He was shot from a distance.”

“Do you think it could have been an accident of some sort?”

“It could have been, but I don’t think so.”

“Well, it’s a terrible thing. Simply terrible. I can’t understand it at all.”

“You’re luckier than me. You don’t have to understand it. All you have to do is see if you recognize the body.”

Iverson hesitated, then walked over to the body and looked intently for a moment into blind blue eyes. When he straightened and turned back to Marcus, the shade of nausea in his face had deepened, but there was also a new element of relief, as if the worst, which had been anticipated, had not developed.

“I don’t know him,” he said. “I can assure you that he was not a member of this club.”

“Well, that’s all right,” Marcus said with an unworthy feeling of spite. “Maybe the murderer is.”

“I believe you’ll find that he is not. I find it inconceivable that a member of this club should be involved in anything like this. It will create a dreadful fuss, I’m afraid, as it is. We may have some withdrawals.”

“Are you positive this man was not a member? His name was Alexander Gray.”

“I’m quite positive. Our membership is limited, rather exclusive, and I’m acquainted with all members. That’s why I’m convinced that none of them could be involved.”

“Even exclusive people can commit murder, Mr. Iverson. Possibly even exclusive people you happen to be acquainted with. Never mind, though. Thanks for coming down.”

Marcus turned away abruptly, and there was in his movement an implication of disdain that made Iverson flush and Sergeant Fuller curse softly under his breath. Aware that he had been dismissed, the manager went back across the course toward the Club House, only the roof of which was visible beyond the rise. Marcus went over and picked up the brown worsted jacket from the grass where he had dropped it after exploring the pockets.

“I wonder where the coroner is,” he said.

“He’ll be along,” Fuller said.

“Well, I won’t wait for him. You stay here and find out what he’s got to say. Nothing much, I suspect. Because he never does.”

Sergeant Fuller was curious about Marcus’s plans, but he was damned if he would give him the satisfaction of knowing it. He watched Marcus go off toward the Club House, where they’d left their car in the parking lot, and he cursed again under his breath, Marcus for what he was, and the coroner for not coming.

In the car, unaware that he had been cursed, or even that he had given cause for cursing, Marcus checked Alexander Gray’s driver’s license for an address. The street and number rang a faint bell, and he sat quietly for a minute, concentrating, trying to fit the location properly into a kind of mental map of the city. If his mental cartography was correct, which it was, Gray had lived not more than a mile from the entrance to this club. Probably somewhat less. Marcus looked at his watch and saw that it was two minutes after nine o’clock. Starting the car, he drove down a macadam drive and slipped into the traffic of a busy suburban street. He swung off after a while and was soon parked at the curb in front of a buff brick apartment building which displayed in large chrome numbers above the double front doors the address on the license.

Inside on the ground floor, he found the apartment of the building superintendent, who turned out to be, when he had opened his door in response to Marcus’s ring, a wispy little man with wispy gray hair and pince-nez clipped to the bridge of a surprisingly bold nose. Marcus introduced himself and received an introduction. The superintendent’s name was Mr. Everett Price.

“Is there an Alexander Gray living in the building?” Marcus asked.

“Yes.” Mr. Price removed the pince-nez, which were, of course attached to a black ribbon, and held them by the spring clip in his right hand. “He’s in three-o-six. He shares the apartment with Mr. Rufus Fleming.”

“Oh? Have Mr. Gray and Mr. Fleming shared the apartment long?”

“About two years, I think. Yes, two years this summer. Perfect gentlemen, both of them. Quiet and good-mannered. There is, in fact, something old-fashioned in their manners. Rather courtly, you know. It isn’t often, nowadays, that you find that quality in younger men.”

“I agree. It’s rare. Do you know if Mr. Fleming is in at the moment?”

“No, I don’t. It’s possible, however, this being Saturday. Mr. Fleming doesn’t work on Saturday.”

“I wish I didn’t. I believe I’ll just go up and speak with Mr. Fleming, if you don’t mind.”

Mr. Price looked confused. He scrubbed the lenses of the pince-nez with a clean white handkerchief and clipped them to his big nose again, peering at Marcus as if he had decided that some revision of his first judgment of him had become necessary.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I thought you wanted to see Mr. Gray.”

“I didn’t say that,” Marcus said. “I only asked if Mr. Gray lived here.”

“Yes. So you did. I made an assumption, I suppose. In any event, it’s quite likely that both gentlemen are in this morning.”

“I wonder if you would come up with me. Just in case neither of them is.”

Now Mr. Price looked startled. Possibly he had suddenly gathered from Marcus’s tone that Marcus was certainly going up in spite of anything, although willing to make a nice pretense of asking permission, and that the superintendent was damn well coming up with him, whether he was agreeable or not.

“What on earth for?” Mr. Price said.

“So that you can let me into the apartment, if that is necessary.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that without authorization from the tenants. It’s unthinkable.”

“Is it? I don’t believe so. You can try thinking about it on the way up. You may change your mind.”

“I’m reasonably certain that either Mr. Fleming or Mr. Gray will be in on a Saturday morning.”

“Mr. Fleming, maybe. Not Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray will never be in again. He’s dead. He has, it seems, been murdered.”

The pince-nez popped off Mr. Price’s nose and jerked and swung at the end of their ribbon. Marcus had a bleak vision of a trap sprung, a body hanging.

“What did you say?”

Marcus didn’t bother to repeat himself. He merely waited for the information to soak in and become tenable.

“This is dreadful,” Mr. Price said.

“So it is.”

“Why would anyone murder Mr. Gray? He was such a pleasant man.”

“Pleasant people are sometimes murdered. Usually by unpleasant people.”

“When did it happen? Where?”

“Never mind that now. You’ll know soon enough. Everyone will. Now I would like to go upstairs and see Mr. Fleming if he’s in, or look through the apartment if he’s not.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Price. “Yes, of course.”

They went up three floors and rang the bell of three-o-six. Mr. Fleming was either not in or not answering. The former was true, as Marcus learned immediately after Mr. Price had opened the door for him. The apartment consisted of a living room, a large bedroom with two beds, a bath and a small kitchen. No one was there. The beds were made and the kitchen was clean and the living room was orderly. Mr. Gray and Mr. Fleming had been tidy housekeepers. Mr. Fleming, so far as Marcus knew, still was.

“Did Fleming spend the night here?” he asked.

“I don’t know. He was here early, as Mr. Gray was, but he may have gone out again and not returned.”

“All right. Thanks. I won’t need you any longer. And don’t worry about the apartment. I’ll leave it in good order.”

Mr. Price didn’t look convinced, but he left. Marcus went into the bedroom and began to prowl. He opened drawers and looked into closets, but all he achieved was confirmation of the judgment he had already made — that Mr. Gray and Mr. Fleming were clean and orderly enough to please the most fastidious woman. In the living room, after poking into places and scanning the titles of books that struck him as being intolerably dull on the whole, he stopped before the mantel of a dummy fireplace to look at a picture. A photograph of a young woman. Inscribed. He took it down and read the inscription: For Rufe and Alex with all my love, Sandy. The double inscription implied a Platonic meaning at variance, it seemed to Marcus, with the totality of love. He scratched his head and examined Sandy’s face.

It was a lovely face. A wistful face. Shaped like a small, lean heart. Big eyes with sadness in them. Tenderness in them. Passion in them? Passion, at least, in the soft lips set in the merest of smiles. In spite of the suggested passion, however, there was — Marcus groped for the word — a kind of mysticism. He was falling, in an instant, half in love.

Putting the photograph back on the mantel, he turned away. Then he turned back. On the mantel, placed squarely below a reproduction of Daumier’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that hung on the wall above, was a sizable leather case. He removed the case and opened it. Inside, nested in plush, was a matched pair of .22 caliber target pistols. Both clean. Both lately oiled. Beautifully cared for. The purloined letter still makes its point, he thought. In his attention to drawers and closets, he had nearly overlooked the case in plain sight. Not, so far as he could see at the moment, that it would have made any particular difference if he had. Nevertheless, he appropriated the case and took it with him when he left. That was after he had returned once more to the bathroom and stood for a few minutes with an abstracted air before the open medicine cabinet above the lavatory.

Downstairs, he rang the superintendent’s bell again. Mr. Price, clearly relieved to see him on his way out, made a polite effort not to show it.

“Are you finished, Lieutenant?” he said.

“Yes. For the present, at least. I’m taking this with me. It’s a pair of matched target pistols. Was either Mr. Gray or Mr. Fleming an enthusiast for target shooting, do you know?”

“Both were, as a matter of fact. Sunday mornings, fair days, they have gone off regularly for matches. I believe they made small wagers. I do hope you will take good care of the pistols.”

“The best. I’ll give you a receipt for them if you want me to.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”

“Thanks. By the way, there’s a photograph on the mantel upstairs. A young lady. Blonde hair cut quite short. Very pretty face. It’s signed Sandy. Do you know her by any chance?”

“I’ve met her. Miss Sandra Shore. She was introduced to me in the hall one evening when I happened to encounter her with Mr. Gray and Mr. Fleming. Afterward, on several occasions, I exchanged a few words with her when she came to call.”

“Has she come here often?”

“Frequently. Many times, I suppose, when I didn’t see her. I’m sure that it was all quite proper. She was equally the friend of both gentlemen. They had been friends, she told me once, since childhood. It was quite a charming relationship.”

“I’m sure it was. Tell me, do you know Miss Shore’s address?”

“No, but it’s probably in the directory.”

“Would you mind checking it for me?”

“Not at all.”

Marcus was invited in, but he preferred to wait in the hall. After a few minutes Mr. Price returned with the address written down on a sheet from a memo pad. Engaging again in mental cartography, Marcus located the address in relation to where he was.

“One more question, if you don’t mind,” he said, “and I’ll run along. I assume both Mr. Gray and Mr. Fleming own automobiles?”

“Only one between them, which they both used. One might think that such an arrangement would lead to difficulties, but they apparently worked it out very well.”

“Mr. Gray and Mr. Fleming seem to have been extremely compatible. Share apartment. Share car. Share girl. Most commendable. Where is the car kept?”

“There’s a garage at the rear, just off the alley. Stall number five. The automobile, if you wish to know, is a Ford. I’m not sure of the model. Recent, however.”

“Thanks again. You’ve been most helpful.”

Marcus turned with his sometimes offensive abruptness and went out of the building and around to the garage. Stall number five was occupied by a 1960 Ford. Mr. Fleming, wherever he was, was obviously moving either by shank’s mare or in some other vehicle than his own. Marcus, in the one furnished by the department, drove to the address on the memo sheet, and this time it was unnecessary to disturb the superintendent, for there was a directory of tenants in the entrance hall that told him where to go, and he went.

The photographer who had taken Sandra Shore’s picture, he learned, was an artist. He had caught on paper precisely the elfin and haunting quality of her face. The sadness and tenderness and passion assembled in the lean heart. Now, in person, there was more, of course. A small and slender body exquisitely formed, suggesting its delights in a boyish white blouse and a narrow skirt. Marcus, in the hall, held his hat and offered up a short and silent paean.

“Yes?” Sandra Shore said.

“My name is Marcus,” Marcus said. “Lieutenant Joseph Marcus. Of the police. I wonder if I may speak with you for a few minutes?”

She surveyed him gravely, her head cocked a little to one side.

“Whatever for?”

“It will take only a few minutes. I’d appreciate it very much.”

“Well, if you are actually a policeman, you will certainly speak with me whether I am willing or not, so there isn’t really much use in asking my permission, is there?”

“It distresses me, but I must admit that you’re right. Thank you for clarifying the situation so nicely. May I come in?”

She nodded and closed the door after him, when he was across the threshold. Following her into the living room to a chair in which he sat, he admired her neat ankles and lovely legs. When she was in another chair across from him, the narrow skirt tucked primly beneath her knees, which showed, he continued to admire the legs for a moment, discreetly, but soon went back to her face, which was the best of her, after all, in spite of distractions.

“You don’t look like a policeman,” she said.

“Don’t I? I wouldn’t know. What is a policeman supposed to look like?”

“I’m not sure. Not like you, however. What do you wish to speak with me about?”

“Not what, really. Who. A young man named Alexander Gray.”

“Alex?” She managed to appear slightly incredulous without, somehow, disturbing the serenity of her expression. “What possible interest could the police have in Alex?”

“He’s dead. Murdered, apparently. Someone shot him sometime early this morning on the course of the Greenbrier Golf Club.”

She sat quite still, her only movement the folding of her hands in her lap. In her great, grave eyes there was a slight darkening, as if a light had been turned down.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“The truth is often ridiculous. Things don’t seem to make sense.”

“Alex isn’t even a member of the Greenbrier Golf Club.”

“Apparently you don’t have to be a member to be killed on the course.”

“I simply refuse to believe you. It’s cruel of you to come here and tell me such a lie.”

“It would be cruel if I did. And pointless.”

“I see what you mean. You would have no reason. Unless there’s a reason that I can’t understand. Is there?”

“No. None whatever. Surely you realize that.”

“I suppose I do. I suppose I must believe you after all.” She stood up suddenly and walked over to a window and stood there for a minute looking out, slim and erect against the glass, her pale hair catching afire from the slanting light. Then she returned, sitting again, tucking the skirt and folding her hands. “Poor Alex,” she said. “Poor little Alex.”

He hadn’t been so little. Average height, at least, but Marcus skipped it. Miss Sandra Shore was striking him as a remarkable young woman. There was genuine grief in her voice, in her darkened eyes, but her face was in repose, fixed as serenely in shock and grief as it had been in the photograph.

“You are very composed under the circumstances,” he said. “I’m relieved and thankful.”

“Perhaps I can’t quite accept it yet, in spite of knowing that it must be true.”

“Sometimes it takes a while for things to hit us hard. Do you feel like talking with me now?”

“What do you want to know?”

“You were a good friend of Alexander Gray’s. Is that true?”

“Yes, it’s true, but I can’t imagine how you know. Unless you’ve talked with Rufe. Have you?”

“Rufus Fleming? No. I’d like to talk with him, however. I don’t know where he is.”

“Have you been to the apartment? Alex and Rufe lived together, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve been there. Do you have any idea where Fleming could be?”

“Just out somewhere, I imagine. He’ll show up soon.”

“His car was in the garage.”

“Rufe often walks places. Quite long distances sometimes. He enjoys it.”

“There was a photograph of you in their apartment. A very good one. I noticed that it was inscribed to both Gray and Fleming. All your love. Were you an equally good friend to both?”

“Equally? That’s so hard to judge, isn’t it? I loved them both. I still love them both, even though Alex must be dead, since you say so.”

“Did they both love you?”

“Oh, yes. We all loved each other.”

“Isn’t that a rather unusual relationship to exist among two men and a woman?”

“I don’t think so. Perhaps it is. It has been that way for so long that it seems perfectly natural to me.”

“Didn’t it ever get complicated?”

“Well, it was difficult in certain ways. They both loved me and wanted to marry me, and I loved both of them, which was all right, and wanted to marry both of them, which was not, and that’s where the difficulty was.”

“I understand. Bigamy is no solution. Besides being illegal.”

“Yes. Anyhow, I couldn’t bear to marry one of them and not the other, for that would surely have meant giving up entirely the one I didn’t marry. If only I could have married one of them and kept the other one around as always, it would have been all right, but it wouldn’t have worked, I’m sure, for a husband is different from a friend, no matter how good and tolerant he may be, and will become possessive and insistent upon his rights and resentful of the attentions to his wife of another man.”

Marcus didn’t quite believe her. Not her words. He believed them, all right. He didn’t quite believe her. That she existed. That she was sitting this instant in the chair across from him with her knees together and her skirt tucked in. He was, in fact, more than a little confused by what seemed at once perfectly logical and utterly insane. That was it, he decided. It was logical, but nuts. There was not necessarily any contradiction in that.

“You said this relationship had existed for a long time,” he said. “How long?”

“Oh, years and years. Ages. Since we were very young.”

“You all knew each other then?”

“Isn’t that what I said? Went through school together and have remained close to each other since.”

“It’s strange, to say the least, that two men should remain such friends in such circumstances.”

“Well, they were very sweet and tolerant and understanding, and they kept thinking something could be worked out, but, as I said, there was no way to work it satisfactorily.”

“Now, however, the problem has resolved itself.”

“You mean, because Alex is dead, that there is nothing to keep me from marrying Rufe? That may be true, but I’ll have to think about it. It doesn’t seem quite fair to Alex. A kind of unfair advantage for Rufe, you know. I may be compelled by fairness to give him up also.”

Marcus slapped a knee sharply and stood up and walked around his chair and sat down again. He closed his eyes and opened them, and she was still there.

“There was a pair of target pistols in the apartment,” he said. “The superintendent told me they were bugs about target shooting. Is that so?”

“Oh, yes, and so am I. I have a pistol like the ones you saw. It all started when we were quite young. In the beginning, we used bb pistols. We lived in a small town, only a short walk into the country, and we used to go out together frequently, the three of us, and have matches. Would you like to see my pistol?”

“It would be kind of you to show it to me.”

“Not at all.”

She got up and went to a desk and returned in a minute with the pistol, which was, as she had said, apparently identical with the two he had appropriated. Clean, recently oiled. He took it and examined it and handed it back to her. She sat in her chair again, the pistol lying in her lap beneath her hands.

“Do you happen to have a photograph of Mr. Fleming?” he asked.

“Of Rufe? No. I’m sorry.”

“Not even a snapshot?”

“Not even that. It’s rather strange, isn’t it, when you come to think about it? Neither Alex nor Rufe were much for having their pictures taken.”

“Perhaps you could describe him to me.”

“Why?”

“Oh, just in case I happen to see him or something. It might save me some time and trouble.”

“Well, he’s quite tall. About six-three, I’d say. Rather thin, but quite strong. He has a long face with thick eyebrows that grow across the bridge of his nose and black hair that’s wiry and doesn’t stay brushed very well. His shoulders are somewhat stooped, and I keep telling him to pull them back, but it doesn’t do any good. I think he stoops deliberately to avoid appearing as tall as he is, especially when he’s with me. As you can see, I’m rather small.”

“Yes. I see.” Marcus stood up, holding his hat, and looked around the room. An open entrance to a small kitchen. A door closed upon what must be a bedroom. Off the bedroom, certainly, a bath. No different, basically, from the place shared by Gray and Fleming. “Tell me,” he said. “Can you think of anyone at all who might have wanted to kill Alexander Gray?”

“No. No one. Surely it must have been some kind of accident.”

“He was in no trouble that you knew of?”

“None. If Alex had any trouble, it must have been minor.”

“I see. Well, thank you very much, Miss Shore. If you see Mr. Fleming, please have him contact me at police headquarters.”

She followed him to the door and showed him out; the last thing he saw was her grave face and darkened eyes as the door closed between them. It was now well past time for lunch, and so he went on and had a steak sandwich at a small restaurant and went on from there to headquarters, where he read a brief report from the coroner as to the estimated time of Alexander Gray’s death, which estimate was, as Marcus had predicted, not much different from Marcus’s guess. The coroner thought that Gray had been killed by a .22 caliber bullet, but there had been no time as yet to recover it from the body, due to an accumulation of work, and an autopsy was promised as soon as possible.

Marcus carried the pair of matched pistols to ballistics and left them with instructions for tests, and then returned to his desk and began to clear up some paper work, including his own report of the Gray case. He tried three times without success, during the rest of the afternoon, to reach Fleming at his apartment, and he kept thinking that Fleming might call in, but he didn’t. Late in the afternoon, Fuller came in and reported on what had happened at the golf course after Marcus had left, but it didn’t amount to much.

Alone, Marcus rocked back in his chair and closed his eyes and tried to think. He thought mostly about Sandra Shore. He still had difficulty in convincing himself that she was real, and he wondered if she was truly so remarkably self-contained as she had appeared, or if she had only found it impossible to express more effectively her shock and surprise at news that was really no news at all. Had she in fact known that Alexander Gray was dead before Marcus had arrived to tell her so? Marcus wondered, but he didn’t know.

He sat there thinking for a long time, not really getting anywhere, and then he tried Fleming’s apartment again without any luck. He decided to go out and eat and go home, and that’s what he did. In his bachelor’s apartment, he read for a while and had three highballs, bourbon and branch, and listened, the last thing before going to bed, to a Toscanini recording of Beethoven’s Sixth. The next morning, which was the morning of Sunday, he got up early and drank two cups of coffee and went back to headquarters, and he was at his desk there when Fuller, reluctantly on duty, brought in a young man to see him. The young man, according to Fuller, had something to say about the Gray case, now public knowledge, that might or might not be significant. The young man’s name, said Fuller, was Herbert Richards.

“Sit down and tell me what you know,” Marcus said.

“Well,” said Herbert Richards, sitting, “I was driving out there yesterday morning on the street just east of the Golf Club where this guy was killed, and my old clunker quit running all of a sudden. I’ve been working on a construction job, and I was on my way to meet some of the crew at a place in town. We were going on together in one of the trucks, you see. Anyhow, my clunker quit, and I had to hurry terribly to make it on time, walking, and so I cut across the corner of the golf course, walking in a kind of gully that runs diagonally across the corner, and all of a sudden I heard shots.”

“Wait a minute,” Marcus said. “Did you say shots?”

“Yes, sir. Two of them. I read about the murder in the paper last night, and it said this guy was only shot once, so I wondered if I could have been mistaken, but I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure I’m not. They came so close together that they did sound almost like one shot, but I’m sure there were two.”

“What did you do when you heard the shots?”

“Nothing. Just kept on going down the gully.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that something might be wrong?”

“Why should it? I’ve heard lots of shots in my life, or sounds like shots. This is the first time it ever turned out to be someone getting murdered.”

Marcus conceded the validity of the point. Honest folk going about their business just didn’t jump to the conclusion of murder at every unusual sight or sound, even the sound of shots.

“What time was this?” he said.

“That’s mostly what I wanted to tell you. It was just daylight. Just after dawn. I know it’s important to know the time something like this happens, and that’s why I came down here.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“You think it may help?”

“I think so. Thanks. If you don’t have anything else to tell me, you can go now.”

Herbert Richards left, visibly pleased, and Marcus closed his eyes and thought for a moment about the scene of Alexander Gray’s murder. Opening them again, he looked for Fuller, who was waiting.

“Fuller,” he said, “you remember that high bank we went down about twenty yards or so from where Gray was lying? You take a couple of men and go out there and dig around in it and see if you can find a bullet.”

Fuller, who resented the assignment, betrayed his feelings. Marcus, who marked the resentment, did not.

“Who cares if one bullet missed?” Fuller said. “We got the one in Gray, soon as the coroner digs it out this morning, and that’s all we need. Besides, from the position of his body, Gray was facing the bank; the killer wasn’t. Any bullet that missed him would have gone in the opposite direction.”

“Go dig around anyhow,” Marcus said. “It doesn’t do any harm to be thorough.”

Fuller gone, Marcus assumed his favorite position for thinking, chair rocked back, eyes closed, fingers laced above his belly. He thought this time about several things in a rather fantastic pattern. He thought about Alexander Gray and Rufus Fleming and Sandra Shore in an emotional triangle so crazy that it could certainly have been sustained only by a trio who were themselves a little crazy. He thought about Alexander Gray lying on a golf course. He thought about a brown worsted jacket lying on the grass about five paces from Gray’s body. He thought about Herbert Richards, a construction worker in the act of trespassing, hearing two shots fired so closely together that they were barely distinguishable from one. He thought about a matched pair of target pistols placed in accidental symbolism below a reproduction of Daumier’s Don Quixote. He thought about a cabinet above a lavatory in which there was only one razor and one toothbrush.

I don’t believe it, he thought. By God, I simply don’t believe it.

After a while, he went to ballistics and got a report, but still lacked the specific comparison he needed, which waited upon the coroner. In his car, he drove slowly, with an odd feeling of reluctance, to Sandra Shore’s apartment building. He rang her bell and waited and was about to ring it again when she opened the door. Her eyes widened a little in the faintest expression of surprise, recovering almost immediately their grave, characteristic composure.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” she said. “Do you want to come in again?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“I do mind, rather, to tell the truth, but I suppose I must let you.”

“Thank you. I’ll try to be brief.”

They sat as they had yesterday, in the same chairs, and he was silent for a while, looking down at the hat in his hands and wondering how to begin. Then he looked up at Sandra Shore, at the grave eyes in the serene heart, and let his own eyes slip away and fix themselves deliberately on the door closed upon her bedroom.

“May I go into your bedroom, Miss Shore?” he said.

“No. Certainly not.” She sat very still, watching him until his eyes returned to her, and then her small breasts rose and fell slowly on a drawn breath and a sigh. “Well,” she said, “I see you have been as clever as I was afraid you would be, but I’m glad, really, quite glad, because he seems to be getting worse instead of better, and I have been afraid he would die in spite of everything I could do. It was impossible to get a doctor, you see, and so I took out the bullet myself, but he seems to be getting worse, as I said, and I’ve been wondering what I should do.”

“Did you also return the pistols to the apartment and pick up a razor and toothbrush while you were there?”

“Yes. How very clever you are! Alex and Rufe simply decided between them what they must finally do, the way to settle matters for good and all, and so they walked out there to the golf course together, which was the handiest place where it could be done, and it might have turned out all right for Rufe, although not for Alex, except that he got hit, too, in the shoulder, and that made everything much more difficult. He had to go somewhere, of course, and so he came here, and I helped him. He had the pistols, and I thought the best thing to do was to clean them and oil them and take them back to the apartment, and that’s what I did.”

“It was a mistake. Surely you know we can match the bullet in Alexander Gray with one of those pistols.”

“That’s true, isn’t it? I suppose I didn’t think of it at the time because I was upset and not thinking clearly about anything. It’s odd, isn’t it? I wanted so much to help Rufe, and I tried, but I guess I only did him harm instead.”

“The fools! The crazy fools!” Marcus spoke with low-key intensity, slapping a knee. “Why the hell couldn’t they have drawn high card for you or something?”

“Oh, no!” She stared at him with scorn, as if he had betrayed himself as a sordid sort of fellow with no discernible sense of honor. “Alex and Rufe would never have treated me so cheaply.”

“Excuse me,” he said bitterly. “I concede that you’ve done your best for Rufe, whom you love, but what about dear Alex, whom you loved equally and who is unfortunately dead as a rather irrational consequence?”

“If it had turned out the other way around,” she said, “I’d have done as much for Alex.”

“I see.” He stood up, his bitterness a taste on his tongue that he wanted to spit out on the floor. “I’ll call an ambulance, and then you and I can go downtown together.”

He was at his desk, doing nothing, when Fuller came in that afternoon.

“We dug all over that bank,” Fuller said, “and there’s no bullet in it.”

“That’s all right,” Marcus said. “I know where it is. Or, at least, was.”

“The hell you do! Maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me.”

“Not at all. It was in the shoulder of a fellow named Rufus Fleming. He and Gray had a duel out there yesterday morning. That’s how Gray got killed.”

“A duel!” Fuller’s eyes bulged, and he was so certain that Marcus had gone off the deep end that he felt safe in saying so. “You’re always talking about someone being nuts,” he said, “but in my opinion you’re the biggest nut of all.”

Marcus was not offended. He closed his eyes and smiled bleakly.

Well, he thought, it takes one to catch one.

IQ–184

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1962

Rena Holly was in the living room with the policeman when Charles Holly went downstairs to join them. Rena was sitting in a high-backed chair of polished walnut upholstered in dark red velvet. She was sitting there quietly, very erect, her knees together and her feet flat upon the floor and her hands folded in her lap. Her face was pale and still, perfectly composed, and she was even now, even in the violation of her grief by police procedure, so incredibly lovely that Charles felt in his heart the familiar sweet anguish that was his normal response to her. Only her eyes moved ever so slightly in his direction when he entered the room.

“Charles,” she said, “this is Lieutenant Casey of the police. He is inquiring about Richard’s death.”

Lieutenant Casey arose from the chair in which he had been sitting opposite Rena. He was a stocky man with broad shoulders and a deep chest and thin gray hair brushed neatly across his skull from a low side part. His face was deeply lined and weathered-looking, as if he spent much time in the wind and sun, and the hand he extended toward Charles had pads of callus on fingers and palm, although its touch was surprisingly gentle. He seemed awkward in his gray suit, which was actually of good cut and quality, and the impression he gave generally was one of regret, almost of apology, that he had been forced by his position to intrude.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” Charles said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“Sorry,” Casey said. “It’s a routine matter, of course. I regret that I’m compelled to disturb you at this time.”

“Not at all. We must tell you whatever is necessary.”

Charles sat down and placed his hands on his knees in an attitude of attention, while Casey resumed his place in the chair from which he had risen. “Please ask me anything you wish.”

“I think that Lieutenant Casey wishes you to tell him exactly how Richard died,” Rena said.

She spoke softly, with a kind of deficiency of inflection. Charles was aware of the terrible and almost terrifying quality of her composure, and he wondered if Casey was also aware of this. He doubted it. Her horror and grief were not apparent, although the latter could be assumed, and Casey was not familiar, as Charles was, with the wonderful complexity of her character.

“I’d be grateful if you would,” Casey said. “Just as it happened from the beginning, if you don’t mind.”

“Well.” Charles paused, seeming to gather his thoughts, but he knew, in fact, what he was going to say, and his mind was functioning, as it always did, with precision and clarity. “Richard was a guest in this house for the weekend. Perhaps Rena has told you that. In any event, he asked me this morning to take a walk with him. I did not wish to walk with him, and I told him so, but he asked me to humor him as a special favor. I did not really feel that I owed him a favor, special or otherwise, but he was so urgent that I agreed to go.”

“What was the reason for his urgency?”

“The answer to that would involve Rena. I’d rather that she answered, if she wants the question answered at all.”

“Oh?” Casey looked vaguely astonished and somewhat distressed that he had been led so quickly by his own question into an area of intimacy that he would have preferred to avoid. “Mrs. Holly?”

“Certainly, Lieutenant. As Charles has said, we must tell you whatever is necessary.” Rena’s hands moved, smoothing the skirt over her knees, and then sought and held each other again in her lap. “Richard was in love with me. And I with him. It was not an emotional attachment that either of us particularly wanted in the beginning, but it happened, and there was no help for it. We wanted to marry. I spoke with Charles about it and was, I thought, candid and reasonable. But it was an unfortunate effort on my part, I’m afraid. Charles was very angry. He refused even to discuss the matter. Then, of course, Richard wanted to approach him. I agreed rather reluctantly, and it was for that purpose specifically that I invited Richard here for the weekend. And that was why Richard urged Charles to take the walk with him.”

She stopped abruptly, resuming the perfect posture and expression of composure that speaking had barely disturbed, and Casey, after waiting a few seconds until it was clear that she was finished, turned back to Charles.

“That is true,” Charles said. “I suppose he felt that a brisk walk in the open air would be propitious to his purpose. The manly approach. Two gentlemen settling amicably between themselves a rather delicate matter. Richard was remarkably naive.” His voice took on the faintest color of irony, as if he were mildly amused in retrospect by something which had been irritating at the time. “I must confess, however, that I was not impressed. Richard’s effort to win me over was no more successful than Rena’s, although I listened courteously and gave him every chance. All this time, while he was talking, we were walking among the trees in the direction of the river, and we came out upon a high bluff just where the river bends. There is a wooden bench on the bluff there, for it’s a rather scenic spot, and we sat on the bench until he had quite finished what he wanted to say. Then I told him that my feelings were unchanged, and that I should never be reconciled to any kind of intimate relationship between him and Rena. It made me sick to think about it.”

He paused again, ordering details precisely and accurately in his mind, and Casey waited in silence for him to continue. Rena did not seem to have heard him at all, or even to be aware at the moment that he or Casey was in the room. She had been staring at her folded hands, but now she raised her eyes to a focus beyond the walls and perhaps beyond the time. If she had listened to anything, or was now waiting for anything, it was a private sound and a private expectation.

Now, Charles was thinking, / have come upon dangerous ground. Up to this point I have adhered strictly to the truth, because the truth served, but now it is time for the essential deviation, the necessary lie.

“Please go on,” Casey prompted.

“Richard was very angry with me,” Charles said. “As for me, I wanted only to leave him, to terminate an unpleasant episode as quickly as possible, and I stood up and walked away to the edge of the bluff. Richard followed me, still very angry, and began to shake me by the arm. I do not like to be touched, even without violence, and I tried to jerk away, but he held on to my arm firmly. I struggled, finally breaking free, and the action caused him to lose his balance. We were standing right at the edge of the bluff, much nearer than either of us, I think, quite realized in our emotional state, and, to put it simply and briefly, he fell over the edge. The bluff, as you know, is high and almost perpendicular at that place. At the foot, the bank of the river at the bend is wide and littered with great rocks. Richard fell among the rocks, where you found him, and was, I believe, killed instantly. He was certainly dead when I reached him, after finding a way down the bluff farther along. When I saw that he was falling, I tried to catch hold of him, but he was gone too quickly.”

And there it is done, and done well, he thought. The essential deviation. The necessary lie. So slight a deviation and so small a lie. The difference between holding and pushing. Between life and death. Between innocence and guilt. Casey believes me, certainly, but Rena doesn’t. Rena, lovely Rena, sits and says nothing and knows everything. She knows how Richard died, and why, but that is unimportant. What is important is that she submits to a deeper commitment than any she could have felt to Richard or feels now to justice. She is mine so long as she lives. She will never belong to anyone else.

“I see.” Casey slapped his knees suddenly with both hands, the sound startling in the still room. It even startled Casey, who had made it, and he clenched one of the hands and stared reproachfully at the big knuckles under taut and whitened skin. “You were wise to leave the body where it fell until we had seen it. You have been very helpful altogether, I must say. Thank you very much.”

“There is so little that one can do, really.” Charles stood up. “Now if I may be excused, I’d like to return to my room.”

“Of course. You’ve had a bad experience, I know. I appreciate your cooperation in such trying circumstances.”

Having been excused by Casey, Charles turned toward Rena. She seemed unaware of this, still abstracted, but after a few seconds she turned her head and stared at him with her dark expressive eyes which were now so carefully empty of all expression. She nodded without speaking, the merest motion of her head, and he turned and went out of the room into the hall. He stopped there, out of sight but not of sound, his head half-turned and tilted, as he stood and listened.

“There’s a clever young fellow,” Casey said in the room behind him.

“Yes,” Rena said.

“I must say, however, that I’d find him a bit disturbing after a while. He’d make me feel inferior. Besides, I confess that I’m always a bit shocked to hear a child call his mother by her Christian name. I suppose I’m hopelessly old-fashioned.”

“Charles is not really a child, Lieutenant, although he’s only twelve. He’s exceptional. His intelligence quotient, I am told, is one hundred eighty-four.”

It would have been natural if her voice had assumed a lilt of pride, but it did not. It still retained its odd deficiency of inflection. To Charles, who began moving silently away, it was a voice that had no choice of expression between a monotone and a scream.

The Seasons Come, the Seasons Go

Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1966

It’s April again. The frail fine blossoms of the crab apple tree shower to earth in the slightest stirring of the languid air, to lie like pastel snow among the clustered headstones of the Canning dead. Already the fruit is forming where the blossoms hung, and in a little while, after the swift passing of spring, toward the end of summer’s indolent amble, the small red apples will fall in turn, to lie where the blossoms lie. The seasons come, and the seasons go...

The nicest thing about Connie was that she was, so to speak, sort of in and out of the family at the same time. What I mean is, she wasn’t really a Canning at all, although she used the name for the lack of another.

As a matter of fact, she was someone Uncle Wish (a happy compromise for Aloysius) had picked up in Italy after the late great war and managed, by hook or crook, to appropriate and spirit home. She was, Uncle Wish had explained with tears in his voice, a homeless waif foraging among the rubble of an ancient world, her poor little body emaciated and filthy, her cute little nose chronically running.

Anyhow, Uncle Wish brought her home and left her with Grandfather, after which, having euphemistically borrowed a substantial sum of money, he was off again to some other place to see what else he could find.

Grandfather saw to it that Connie’s body was washed and her nose wiped. He believed, I think, that Uncle Wish’s bootleg adoption of Connie was a good sign. He took it as an indication that Uncle Wish was developing a sense of commitment to the serious problems of life.

Nothing, of course, could have been more absurd. Uncle Wish was simply a compassionate scoundrel who was always prepared to indulge his humanity if there was someone else at hand to pay the price over the long haul. Most of the girls he picked up in the places he went were well washed and well fed and, after Uncle Wish was finished with them, well paid. It should be said, moreover, that they were invariably older than Connie. And much less permanent. Uncle Wish may have been willing to be an absentee father, but he had absolutely no intention of becoming a husband, absent or present.

So, over the long haul, Grandfather paid for Uncle Wish’s grand gesture. But don’t shed any tears in your beer because of that. Having accumulated most of the money in an area approximately a hundred miles wide running roughly from Chicago to Denver, Grandfather was adequately equipped for it. And Connie blossomed in his tender care.

I saw her for the first time in the summer of 1949, when I made my annual visit to Grandfather’s country estate. He was a great family man, Grandfather was, and I was invited every summer for a visit of three months’ duration. The invitation was, in fact, by implication a command, and in view of the high price of disfavor I appeared faithfully near the first of every June, bearing the fulsome greetings of my father, Grandfather’s son and Uncle Wish’s brother; and I was mindful of my father’s fierce admonitions, delivered in private just before my departure, to for God’s sake be very careful not to say or do anything that would jeopardize our position in Grandfather’s will.

My father, you realize, was extremely sensitive about our position in Grandfather’s will, but I never blamed him for that. Inasmuch as he never earned a dime in his life, living quite richly on an allowance that Grandfather made him, it was perfectly understandable.

It was, as I said, nice to have Connie in and out of the family at the same time. Being in, she was, so to speak, handy; being out, she was, as it were, available. What I mean is, there were none of the messy complications and taboos ordinarily imposed on blood relationships.

That very first summer, in 1949, I was introduced to the advantages of our anomalous connection. While foraging among the rubble of an ancient civilization, it became quickly apparent, Connie had acquired a seamy sort of intelligence far beyond her years in matters that would have, if he had known it, set Grandfather’s few remaining hairs on end.

She was only ten at the time, and I was twelve, but in effect she was ages older. She was as old as Nero, and she spoke a language older than Latin. Her English was hardly more than a few key words and phrases, but the eyes and the hands have a vocabulary and a grammar of their own. She had much to teach me, and I must say that I was an apt pupil. I anticipated eagerly my annual pilgrimage to Grandfather’s house.

Cleaned up, Connie was a pretty little girl. Grown up, she was a beauty. She grew along lovely lines to intriguing dimensions, and when she reached the intriguing dimensions, she simply quit growing. As she mastered English she forgot Italian, but she never forgot her other ancient language.

She lived with Grandfather until she was ready for college, and after college she established herself in an apartment in Chicago, where she was, she claimed, working seriously at painting. I never visited her apartment and never saw any of her work, and I suspect that the reason I never saw any was that there never was any. As with me and Father and Mother and Uncle Wish — as with us all — Grandfather paid the freight over the long haul. But I was happy to learn, the first summer after her establishment in the Chicago apartment, that her command appearance at Grandfather’s was to run, for the most part, concurrently with my own.

In the summer of 1964 I was 27 and Connie was 25. Grandfather was 86. Father and Mother and Uncle Wish were dead. All dead. Father had died suddenly under Grandfather’s roof of what was diagnosed by Grandfather’s doctor, also an octogenarian, as a coronary. Mother, remaining in Grandfather’s house after Father’s death, had soon followed him to heaven as a result of an overdose of sleeping pills, which sad event was popularly supposed to have been incited by grief. I was present on both occasions, as was Connie, and I remember expressing to her a proper astonishment at discovering, on the first occasion, that Father had any heart at all, let alone a weak one, and, on the second, that Mother was capable of grief for anyone, let alone for Father.

But small matter. Every loss has its compensatory gain. Uncle Wish having previously come a fatal cropper in a distant land, from which his mortal remains were shipped home for burial, Connie and I were now the only heirs in Grandfather’s last will and testament. His estate, I believe, amounted to something like $70,000,000, which is, you must agree, a tidy sum.

And so, when I arrived at Grandfather’s house last June, there was Connie to meet me. As I tooled up the long drive from the road between tall and lithesome poplars, she came out of the house and across the veranda and down into the drive, and by the time I had brought my black Jag to a halt, she was in position to lean across the passenger bucket and give me a kiss. Contact, minimum. Effort, below standard.

“Hello, Buster,” she said. “Crawl out of that thing and get kissed properly.”

I crawled out and was kissed properly. Or improperly, depending on your point of view.

“Very stimulating,” I said. “I believe your technique has improved, if possible.”

“Do you think so? It’s sweet of you to say it.”

“No doubt you’ve been practicing. I must remember to call on you in that apartment of yours sometime.”

“No chance. The summer is sufficient, darling. I don’t believe I’d care for you in off seasons. You might become tiresome.”

“That’s true. There’s nothing to be gained from too much of a good thing. Where’s Grandfather?”

“He’s on his daily pilgrimage to the Happy Hunting Ground. He’s communing with Canning ghosts.”

“A dreary ritual, surely. It was, all in all, a dreary ritual even when the ghosts were alive and kicking. I refer especially to Father.”

“Well, you know Grandfather. He’s very devoted to his little family, dead, or alive. Fortunately, I might add, for you and me.”

“True again. Darling, you have the most devastating knack of getting directly to the crux. I suppose I had better go up there and check in immediately.”

“I was about to suggest it. I’ll just go along for company, if you don’t mind.”

“I’d be delighted. Perhaps, along the way, we can trifle for a while in some leafy glade.”

“It’s entirely possible. I have no special preference for leafy glades, but I am, as you know, addicted to occasional trifling.”

Leaving the Jag in the drive, and my bag in the Jag, we went around the big Colonial house, past the garages in the rear, and so onto a path that ran up a gentle slope among maples and oaks and sycamores to the crest of the rise; then down again among more of the same into a hollow where, under the flowering crab apple tree Grandfather had gathered in a private plot the deceased members of the Canning clan.

There, side by side, or end to end, lay Grandmother and Uncle Wish and Father and Mother. There, in good time, Grandfather would also lie, a patriarch among them. There also was room reserved for me, and for Connie by my side. An unpleasant prospect, surely, but hopefully remote. What was pleasant and immediate was the fact that Connie and I were side by side and hand in hand, very much alive and with a prospect of trifling.

Unfortunately for the prospect, however, we met Grandfather on his way back. As we reached the crest of the rise, we could see him on the slope below us, ascending briskly among the trees. I must say candidly that Grandfather, for an octogenarian, was depressingly spry. He lifted his knees high when walking, and in fact his gait was a kind of prance that seemed about to break any second into a trot. Now, seeing us above him, he gave out with a shrill cackle of greeting and lifted an arm in salute. A soft warm breeze stirred the white fuzz on his head.

“Good to see you again, Buster,” he said, approaching. “Welcome home.”

“Thank you, Grandfather. You’re certainly looking fit.”

“Feel fit. Am fit. You were coming at once to say hello to your old Grandfather, hey? Good boy.”

“As you see, Connie and I came looking for you first thing.”

“Good girl, Connie. Considerate. I’ve been to visit my children. Pay them a visit every decent day. Just on my way back. Got a project in hand that I must get to work on. Work on it two hours every day, decent or not.”

“Is that so? What are you doing?”

“Writing a history of this county. Many fascinating things have happened here. Know many of them first-hand. Consulting sources for the rest.”

“It sounds like quite a project. How long do you think it will take to finish it?”

“Five years. Got it worked out on a schedule. Two hours a day for five years.”

“Five years!”

If my dismay was apparent in my voice, Grandfather didn’t seem to notice it. My exclamation was literally wrenched out of me, of course, and small wonder. After all, I mean, 5 and 86 are 91!

“That’s right,” he said. “Five years will see it done. Must keep at it, though. Must get at it now. You’ll excuse me, I hope.”

“We’ll walk back to the house with you.”

“Wouldn’t hear of it. Since you’ve come this far, you’ll want to go on and pay your respects to your father and mother. Connie will go with you.”

“Thanks, Grandfather. It’s very thoughtful of you.”

“Not at all, not at all. Make yourself at home, my boy, as usual. The place is yours. I’ll expect to have you here until September at least. You and Connie both.”

He pranced over the crest and out of sight down the far slope. I sighed and groped for Connie’s hand, which I had released to shake Grandfather’s.

“To tell the truth,” I said, “I am singularly uninterested in paying my respects to Father and Mother.”

“Grandfather expects it, and you mustn’t disappoint him.”

“Nevertheless, I find the idea uninviting.”

“Perhaps I can make things a little more interesting for you. When you stop to consider it, the Happy Hunting Ground is as nearly a leafy glade as any other spot we are likely to find.”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I am more interested already.”

The blossoms were gone — gone a month or more — and the crab apple tree was hung along the boughs with little red apples. The small headstones sought and achieved a neat and charming simplicity, enclosed and isolated from unkempt indigenous growth by iron pickets painted green. The grass within the enclosure had been clipped, and the mower was at rest with spade and hoe and rake and shears in the tool shed, also painted green, that stood aside from the assembled dead outside the iron pickets.

Sunshine filtered through apple leaves to fashion a random pattern of light and shade. Light lay lightly on Connie’s eyes, which were closed. Shade made a mystery of her lips, which were smiling.

“Do you know the trouble with Grandfather?” she said.

“I wasn’t aware that he had any,” I said.

“The trouble with Grandfather,” she said, “is that he won’t die.”

The warm air was filled, if one bothered to listen, with a thousand sleepy sounds. Among the leaves of the crab apple tree there was a flash of yellow wings.

“It’s true,” I said, “that he’s taking his time about it.”

“He’s absolutely interminable, that’s what. You heard what he said about the dreary book he’s writing about things that are surely of no consequence to anyone. Five years, he said.”

“I heard.”

“Do you think he can possibly live five years longer?”

“It’s my opinion that he can.”

“It’s positively obscene. Here are Uncle Wish and your mother and father, all dead and decently buried, and all years and years younger than Grandfather. Damn it, Buster, there ought to be some kind of decent order in dying.”

“Death is often disorderly. It’s peculiar that way.”

“It doesn’t seem fair for things to be so badly managed.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You must admit, my lovely waif, that you and I have profited from the disorder. A split two ways has obvious advantages over a split five ways.”

“It does, doesn’t it? I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Thinking is bad for you. As someone said about metaphysics, it befuddles you methodically.”

“Just the same, it was odd how your mother and father died.”

“Odd?”

“Well, how your father just up and died all at once of something that was diagnosed by a senile doctor as a heart condition. I never dreamed that there was anything wrong with his heart. Did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And then how your mother presumably committed suicide in her presumed grief. I never saw any evidence that your mother was inordinately fond of your father. Did you?”

“Not a shred.”

“I’ve also been thinking about something else that was odd.”

“What else?”

“You were here at the time of both deaths, darling. Don’t you think that’s odd?”

I raised myself on an elbow and looked at her. She lay on her back and did not move. Her eyes were still closed in the light. Her lips still smiled in the shade. The shade moved as the leaves that cast it moved.

“As odd,” I said, “as your own presence at those unhappy events.”

She laughed instantly in some strange, contained delight. Opening her eyes she sat up. Her laughter was more motion than sound, hardly louder than a whisper. In her voice, when she spoke, was a kind of mock wonder.

“Darling,” she said, “I do believe we suspect each other.”

“Impossible. One of us suspects; the other knows.”

“That’s so, isn’t it? You’re very logical, darling.”

“Logical enough to know that the quotient increases as the divisor decreases.”

“Of course. That’s elementary.”

“As you say, elementary. Even a child could see it. Even you.”

“Thank you. I’m really quite clever at arithmetic when you come right down to it. I understand clearly, for instance, that this all remains purely academic, a kind of textbook exercise, until the dividend is available for division.”

“In good time. Five years will pass in five years. Meanwhile, let us enjoy our summers.”

“I’m sick of our summers. At this instant, if I weren’t on orders and rations, I might be in Rio or Mexico City or some other exciting place.”

“If you were, I’d be desolate.”

“No, you wouldn’t, darling. You’re a summer habit. We’d make arrangements.”

“I’m reassured. However, you must admit that Grandfather, for all his irritating devotion and familial despotism, is exceedingly generous with his money. He has always cheerfully supported us all, and in the style to which we’ve become accustomed. Some fair day, after the detestable county history is finished, you and I shall have what he leaves behind.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“There’s nothing deceptive about Grandfather. He’s fanatically devoted to his family, even though they neither sow nor reap. You know that.”

“For all his generosity, however, he’s a strait-laced and sensitive old moralist in his way. Suppose we did something to offend him and got cut out of the will?”

“Don’t even think of such a horrible contingency. We must take care to avoid such a thing.”

“That’s easily said, but I know you, and you know me, and we both know that either of us could be found out anytime. All I can say is, it’s a good thing Grandfather doesn’t have access to our detailed case histories this minute.”

She lay down again on the neat green grass, and I lay down beside her. The grass, lately cut, smelled sweet and good. Closing my eyes, I listened to the thousand summer sounds. Beside me, Connie’s voice was drugged with drowsy dreams.

“It isn’t remarkable when a very old man dies,” she said.

“If he has seventy million dollars and dies in the company of his two remaining heirs,” I said, “it may attract remarkable notice.”

“Nonsense. One only needs to be clever and careful.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

While I was thinking, June passed. In July, the first two weeks of it, it was too hot to think. Then, the third week, we began to get thunderstorms every day, and the temperature became tolerable, and it actually began to seem as if it might be almost possible to reach a decision and to accomplish something exceptional.

I must admit that I greatly admired Connie during this trying period. She never pushed; she never nagged; she never even mentioned, not once, Grandfather’s distressing longevity. She left me strictly to my lonely thoughts regarding that critical matter, and it was only now and then that I caught her looking at me with a wary watchful expression in her ancient Florentine eyes. Otherwise, we played tennis, we lay in the sun, we took walks, we drank gin and tonic, we trifled when we chose. It was, all in all, a pleasant summer, although dull in spots.

Even the rains, when they came, were rather pleasant. They broke the heat and cleared the mind and stimulated the imagination. Some days of that third July week broke bright and clear, but always in the morning the thunderheads would begin to pile up in the southwest and in the afternoon they would come boiling over with the wind roaring and the thunder crashing and great jagged bolts of lightning splitting the sky.

Connie responded intensely to these gaudy displays of elemental pyrotechnics. She would stand or sit very erect, her nostrils flaring, her eyes dilated and shining, and I could see her small alert breasts rise and fall in a cadence of contained excitement. We always watched from the front veranda of the house. Sometimes the rain blew in and wet us down. That’s where we were one afternoon when the week had nearly passed, and the rains with the week. The clouds had just rolled over, and the deluge had stopped. The sun, breaking through scattered remnants, transformed the shadowed earth to an Eden of shimmering green and gold.

“Let’s take a walk,” Connie said.

“Now?” I said.

“Yes, now.”

“We’ll get our shoes wet.”

“We’ll take our shoes off.”

She was wearing loafers on bare feet, and she kicked the loafers off and went down off the veranda and across the yard. I took oft my tennis shoes and socks and followed. She was walking swiftly, and she was around the house and past the garages and onto the path beyond them before I caught up.

She took my hand and held it tightly, as if she were trying by the pressure to transmit a message, and we walked on up the slope and over the crest and down the slope on the other side. Skirting the Happy Hunting Ground, we walked on through thicker trees and denser growth until we came to the far side of the estate where a narrow creek ran between deep banks. Ordinarily, the creek bed carried little water, but the heavy rains had drained into it from the slopes, and now it was nearly full.

We walked along the creek until we reached a place where the banks were lower and the water spread and became shallower and rushed in a rapids over worn rocks. A chain of large stepping stones had been strung across the creekbed here, but now they were submerged, and the water boiled around them. We sat down together on the trunk of a fallen tree.

“How could we do it?” I said.

“It would be easy.” She picked up my thoughts as if there had been a pause of only minutes instead of weeks in our conversation. “He’s an old man. It’s time for him to die. Who would suspect?”

“It would have to be done just so. At best, it would be a terrible risk.”

“Hardly any risk at all. I have a plan.”

“I confess that I feel a certain reluctance, quite aside from the risk, to do Grandfather in. It’s true, however, that his unreasonable tenacity incites it.”

“There would be no pain, no violence. In the end, he wouldn’t even know. He would simply die in his sleep.”

“Neat enough, if it could be arranged. How could it?”

“Surely you have thought of it a hundred times yourself, Buster. You couldn’t have helped yourself.”

“The nightcap?”

“You see? I knew you’d thought of it.”

The reference was to an old habit and a minor family ritual. The old quack who had been Grandfather’s doctor for ages had recommended years ago that he take a nightcap of bourbon and water every night upon retiring. This was supposed to calm his nerves, pep up his circulation, and act upon him generally as a salubrious tonic. Grandfather was by no means addicted to the bottle, but his nightcap became a habit entrenched, and a minor ritual, as I said, developed around it.

I don’t know what adjustments were made when I was not in the house, but when I was there I was expected at Grandfather’s bedtime to make the highball and deliver it to him in his room, where I usually found him waiting on the edge of his bed in his nightgown. I made the highball in the kitchen from 100 proof stuff that he kept tucked away in the cabinet for his private consumption.

In the beginning, the highball had been a mild thing, mostly water; but it grew stronger as time passed, and currently it was quite the other way round, mostly bourbon in a water tumbler with one small ice cube and a quick pass under the tap. It was enough, indeed, to blow the top off an ordinary man’s head, but Grandfather had approached it slowly for a long time, and I suppose he had sort of immunized himself to it by small and regular increases of the dosage, as Mithridates is said to have done with poisons.

“The thought has crossed my mind,” I said. “As you remarked, it affords altogether such a beautiful opportunity that I could hardly fail being tempted.”

“Why have you never done it?”

“Poison is so treacherous. It has a way of getting found in the innards.”

“Only if there’s an autopsy.”

“Poison has a nasty way of leaving various signs that arouse suspicions and make autopsies inevitable.”

“Not always. Buster, you simply haven’t taken the trouble to inform yourself sufficiently, that’s all.”

“Perhaps you would care to inform me sufficiently now.”

“I’d be delighted. You simply lace his nightcap with chloral hydrate. In brief, you slip him a gigantic Mickey Finn. A large dose would be fatal, I assure you, and it would have definite advantages from our point of view. He would merely pass out and die without recovering consciousness, which would have the virtue of making him appear to have died in his sleep — surely not an uncommon occurrence with men so old. Moreover, besides being merciful, the drug disappears from the system quickly and is extremely difficult to detect.”

“That last point is particularly important. You are well informed, aren’t you, darling? I’m happy, I must say, that you aren’t devising a scheme for murdering me. Or are you?”

“Don’t be absurd, Buster. How could I dream for an instant of murdering someone I’ve been so friendly with? You must think I’m a perfect monster.”

“Haven’t you been friendly with Grandfather?”

“That’s different. Grandfather and I have hardly been friendly in the same way.”

“I should hope not. Returning to your plan, however, it seems to me that it would be difficult, as well as risky, to acquire a lethal dose of chloral hydrate.”

“You needn’t concern yourself with that. My contacts in Chicago are rather diversified, to say the least. I’m always getting interested in all sorts of odd people who have access to lots of things. I happen to have some chloral hydrate in my possession.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Never mind that. If you decide sensibly to put it in Grandfather’s nightcap, I’ll get it for you at once.”

“Your service is excellent, darling. I’ll have to give you that.”

“I try to be helpful.”

“Your plan, so far as I can see, is flawless. Simple and direct. No fancy complications.”

“Will you do it?”

“Maybe.”

“Tonight?”

“Maybe.”

“Darling, it would be so easy.”

“Damn it,” I said, “I’ve got mud between my toes.”

When the time came, it wasn’t. Easy, that is.

We were in the library, Grandfather and Connie and I. Grandfather was dozing in his chair. Connie was listening to muted jazz. I was playing solitaire. The library clock struck ten, and Grandfather stood up.

“I’ll say good night, children,” he said. “Buster, my boy, will you bring my nightcap?”

He pranced out. I looked at Connie, and Connie looked at me. Turning away, I went out to the kitchen and made Grandfather’s nightcap according to recipe. When I turned around, Connie was in the doorway watching me. We stood there looking at each other for a long minute. She was excited. She was filled with the strange, contained excitement she had felt on the veranda when the thunderheads rolled over.

“Now?” she said.

I didn’t answer. Carrying the nightcap, I went upstairs to Grandfather’s room.

When I came down, Connie had disappeared.

The next day there was another thunderstorm. It came early in the afternoon, just after lunch. Grandfather had withdrawn to the library to put in his daily labor on the county history, and I was on the veranda to watch the black roistering masses roll overhead to the deafening detonations of the thunder and the forked flashes of lightning and the great rush of wind-blown rain.

The storm, this day, was brief. Fifteen minutes after the rain began it was all over. I kept waiting for Connie to join me on the veranda, but she never did. Not, that is, while the storm lasted.

She came out afterward and down the steps into the yard. She was wearing a pair of white shorts and a white cotton blouse, and her feet were bare. She didn’t look at me or speak, and I went over to the steps and down into the yard after her.

“Where have you been?” I said.

“Upstairs in my room,” she said.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Poor boy. Waiting is a tedious business, isn’t it? One gets so sick of it after a while.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“Not at all. A little disappointed in you, perhaps. It is perfectly clear that nothing extraordinary can be expected of you.”

“You must give me a little more time, that’s all.”

“Take all the time you want. Take forever.”

She had turned to face me, and now she turned away again and started across the yard. I followed a few steps behind.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going for a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, thanks. I don’t care to have you.”

“Why not?”

“Life is dull enough around here at best. You’d only make it worse.”

“You never seemed to find me so dull before.”

“I thought you were better than nothing, darling. Now I’m not so sure.”

I stopped where I was and watched her go. She had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and long golden legs. For a moment, watching her, I had a hard and hurting sense of intolerable loss. Then I turned back to the house and went inside and upstairs to my room.

I opened my windows and lay down on the bed, and the cool wet air blew in across me. I could hear the dripping of rain and the chittering of birds and the rustling of leaves in what was left of the wind. After a while I sank into a strange sort of lassitude, a passive submission to fragmentary dreams between waking and sleeping, and then, some time later, I went to sleep soundly and slept through the afternoon, and when I woke it was after five o’clock. I washed my face and went downstairs and found Grandfather, after a brief search, standing behind the house looking off in the direction of the slope beyond the garages.

“There you are, Buster,” he said. “I’ve hardly set eyes on you all day long. Where have you been keeping yourself, my boy?”

“I went upstairs after lunch and fell asleep. I slept longer than I intended.”

“Where’s Connie?”

“She went for a walk right after the storm. Isn’t she back yet?”

“Can’t find her. Can’t find her anywhere.”

“Maybe she’s in her room.”

“Knocked. Got no answer.”

“Well, she wasn’t in a very good humor. Probably she’s off sitting somewhere until she recovers. She’ll be along in good time.”

“I walked to the cemetery. Didn’t see her along the way.”

“Perhaps she’s over by the creek.”

“I’m a bit concerned, my boy. Can’t deny it. She may have hurt herself. Sprained an ankle or something. May be out there waiting for help.”

“If it will make you feel better, Grandfather, I’ll go look for her.”

“Do that, my boy. Relieve your old grandfather’s anxiety.”

“All right. I’m sure I’ll be back with her shortly, if she doesn’t get back ahead of me.”

“Meanwhile, I’ll go in and change my shoes. Soaking wet. Hurry back, my boy.”

He turned toward the house, and I walked up the slope and over the crest and down into the hollow and past the cemetery and on through grass among the trees toward the creek. The sky had cleared, and the sun was out, and the light of the sun lanced through the trees. The earth was scrubbed and rinsed and sparkling clean. I could hear ahead of me the rushing sound of the swollen creek. My canvas shoes were soon soaked. At the creek’s bank I turned toward the rapids...

That was the last day of the thunderstorms. The next morning broke clear, and the clouds never formed, and every day thereafter for a long time was bright and dry.

It was like that over in the hollow, bright and dry and still in sunshine and shade, the day we buried Connie.

The funeral service was private. Only a handful of people were there. Grandfather and I were the only mourners, and after the sad and definitive ceremony was finished beside the grave, we walked back alone to the house. The house without Connie seemed vast and empty and filled with whispered echoes. I had not yet got used to her being gone, and I truly missed her, although I knew my loneliness wouldn’t last. Add to $35,000,000 an equal amount, and you have what may be called an antidote to lasting sorrow.

In the house I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and tried to think of certain things in order to avoid thinking of certain others. This was not very successful, and I began to wish that Connie were there to distract me, which was no more at most than half an ambivalence.

So I got up and went downstairs again after an hour or so, and there was Grandfather in the library with a visitor. The visitor was a short thin man with pale limp hair, a furrowed face, and a vaguely deferential manner. I had met him once before, which was once too often, and I knew him already as well as I ever wanted to. His name was Drake, and he was a captain of county detectives.

“There you are, my boy,” Grandfather said. “Come in, come in.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” I said.

“No intrusion. None at all. I was just about to send for you. In fact, Captain Drake wants to talk with you.”

“I don’t know why,” I said. “I’ve already told Captain Drake all I know.”

“I know you have, my boy. I know that well enough. He merely wants to clarify some points and get his report in order. Isn’t that so, Captain?”

“That’s so,” Drake said. “I’m sorry to intrude again on a day so sad as this one. Won’t you please come in and sit down, Mr. Canning? This will take only a few minutes.”

I went in and sat down on the edge of a chair.

“What do you want to know?” I said.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d go over your account again. Just one more time.”

“Why? I’ve already gone over it and over it.”

“I know. I’m sorry. If you will just indulge me, please.”

“Well, as I’ve said, it was the day of the last thunderstorm. When the storm was over, Connie went out for a walk. I offered to go along, but she didn’t want me to. I guess she just wanted to be alone. Anyhow, I went upstairs and took a nap. When I woke up, it was late, and Connie wasn’t back, and Grandfather was worried. So I went out to look for her.

“I walked to the creek and along the creek to the place we’ve always called the riffles. There the water spreads out and becomes shallow and flows through a lot of rocks. Stepping stones have been placed across the bed, and Connie was there in the water, face down, and her body had lodged between two of the stepping stones. She was barefooted, wearing shorts, and I suppose she’d tried to wade the creek. It wasn’t very deep there, even after all the rains, but the current was very swift, and it must have swept her feet out from under her. She struck her head on a boulder and drowned, that’s all. I can’t tell you any more.”

He was leaning forward in his chair in a posture of intent listening, but his eyes were abstracted, remote, and he seemed to be hearing, if he heard anything, some private voice subliminal to all but him. Aware after a moment that I had finished, he sighed and stirred.

“Quite so. The story as before. Well, it’s reasonable. It’s even possible. There’s only one thing that disturbs me.”

“What’s that?”

“She struck her head, you say, and she must have done so. But still it’s puzzling. There was only one contusion on her head, and it was high up, near the crown. It could have caused unconsciousness, certainly, but it’s difficult, all factors considered, to see how it could have been acquired in falling. It looks very much, in fact, as if she’d been struck deliberately by a rock in someone’s hand.”

He fell silent and seemed to be listening again to his private subliminal voice. Then he added, almost casually, “It would help if the blow had killed her — if she had been dead when she entered the water, I mean. But that’s no good. There was water in her lungs.”

“You’re distorting things,” I said. “You’ve got too much imagination.”

“I suppose you’re right. I’ve been told that it’s a fault of mine.” He turned abruptly to Grandfather. “The young lady who drowned was not your natural granddaughter, I understand. Would you mind telling me if she was one of your heirs?”

“She was. She was to share equally with my other heir.”

“And the other heir is young Mr. Canning here?”

“Naturally.”

“And now he will become your sole heir. Is that correct?”

Grandfather rose from his chair, and the white fuzz seemed to bristle on his head. The old boy, when he chose, could be as hard as diamond and as cold as ice.

“Captain,” he said, “I consider that question an intrusion on my personal affairs. It requires me to commit myself, and is therefore unwarranted. Moreover, sir, it is impertinent and offensive.”

Captain Drake sighed again and stood up. His vaguely deferential manner was suddenly more pronounced, but his voice remained, somehow, impersonal and invulnerable.

“Yes. Yes, of course. Sorry.” He crossed to the library door, his wilted cord suit hanging limply on his thin frame, and paused with his hand on the knob to look back at us. “I hope that young Mr. Canning is not planning to leave this house in the immediate future.”

“Buster will be my guest until September at least,” Grandfather said coldly.

“Let us hope so,” Drake said. “Let us earnestly hope so.”

There was a knock on my door, and immediately afterward, before I could answer, the door was pushed open and Grandfather entered the room carrying a tray with two glasses on it. The glasses were filled with dark amber liquid, and a small ice cube floated in each. I had been negligent, clearly, of what I thought of lightly as my $35,000,000 duty. Now, with luck, $70,000,000.

“Grandfather,” I said, “I’ve forgotten your nightcap. I’m sorry.”

“Think nothing of it, my boy. It has been a trying day for you, what with Drake’s impertinence on top of poor Connie’s funeral, and I’m more than happy to serve you for a change.”

“It’s very thoughtful of you.”

“Not at all, my boy, not at all. As you see, I’ve brought along my own nightcap. We shall have our drinks together tonight.”

“Thank you, Grandfather. I’ll enjoy that.”

I cleared a place on my bedside table, and Grandfather set the tray there. He picked up one of the glasses and handed it to me, keeping the other for himself.

“Grandfather,” I said, “I don’t like that detective. He worries me.”

“Drake? He’s a clever man, but he forgets his proper place. He is sometimes, as I said, impertinent.”

“Impertinence is a mild word for what was practically an accusation of murder.”

“Oh, he didn’t actually accuse you of murder, my boy. His suspicions have been aroused by a seeming incongruity in conjunction with what appears to be a powerful motive and ample opportunity. That’s all there is to it.”

“All! Isn’t that enough?”

“Don’t worry about it, my boy. I shall see that no harm comes to you. I shall care for you and keep you secure, just as I have always cared for the members of my family.”

Grandfather had pulled a chair near the bed, and now he sat down in the chair and sipped his nightcap. I sat on the edge of the bed and took a long drink of my own. It was, as its color indicated, very strong.

“I must say that you’ve made me feel better, Grandfather,” I said.

“Trust me, my boy. Trust your old Grandfather, just as all the others trusted me. Haven’t I brought them all home? Haven’t I given them all peace and lasting security? They were charming children, all charming children, but not one who was not helpless. Not one who didn’t need my constant loving care. The tragic end of your Uncle Wish convinced me finally of that. Could I leave the others to comparable ends or worse? Could I trust life to those who couldn’t even be trusted with a dollar? Could I go away, when my time comes to go, and leave them all behind to their own frail and futile devices? Well, they are all secure now. All secure in the hollow beyond the crest. All at rest beneath the flowering crab apple tree.”

Grandfather leaned forward and patted me on the knee, watching me closely with his inexhaustible loving kindness. I started to say something, but it was so much easier to say nothing at all.

“How do you feel, my boy? It will be over quickly, I promise you, as it was with dear little Connie, and soon you will be safe forever. Let Captain Drake think what he pleases. If he thinks, as he surely will, that in fear you took the easy way to evade him, what matter? He will quietly close his case on all the wrong assumptions, and we shall just as quietly have the last laugh. Leave it to me, my boy. Leave it all to your old Grandfather.”

He patted my knee again, tenderly, and I was dimly aware that my hands were empty and that I must have carelessly dropped my glass. I started to rise, but it was so much easier simply to lie down.

It’s April again. The frail pink blossoms of the crab apple tree shower to earth in the slightest stirring of the languid air, to lie like pastel snow among the clustered headstones of the Canning dead. Already the fruit is forming where the blossoms hung, and in a little while, after the swift passing of spring, toward the end of summer’s indolent amble, the small red apples will fall in turn, to lie where the blossoms lie.

The seasons come, and the seasons go...

But Grandfather, it seems, goes on forever.