Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 4, April 1972
- Автор: Breese Edward Y., Бриттен Уильям
- Год: 1972
- Язык: английский
- Год: H.S.D. Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 4, April 1972». Краткое содержание книги:
There, in the park, Monkey began waving his long arms and running around the old woman, screeching like a crazy animal. Mrs. Scrant stopped and stood frozen. Eddie ran on, determined that, for once in his life, he would fight.
Just as he reached the edge of the park, he saw the old woman’s hand moving. Something glinted as though the moon or a star had been caught in reflection.
Monkey suddenly straightened as though coming to attention, then collapsed to the walk like a rag doll.
The old woman stood looking down at the fallen youth as though dazed now, with her eyes very large. Then she scurried on, obviously in fright, moving much faster than Eddie ever thought she could.
He ran to the sprawled figure of Monkey, who was lying on his back with his eyes open but seeing nothing. Eddie stared down at the moonlit bone handle of a knife protruding from Monkey’s bleeding chest. It had been driven in so hard that a piece of the handle, which had probably been cracked, had come loose and was now on the sidewalk beside the fallen youth.
Eddie stared at the knife handle for several seconds. Then he reached down, jerked the knife out of Monkey’s chest, and ran into the darkness.
When the detective and uniformed officer escorted Eddie into a small squad room, Piggo, who was sitting on a straight wooden chair, suddenly rose and moved toward him with fury in his small eyes. The detective and the uniformed officer stepped ahead of Eddie and threw Piggo back into his chair.
“Stay there now!” the detective said. He was older than the uniformed officer, and heavier, with a meaner eye.
“He lied!” Piggo shouted, pointing at Eddie.
“Keep your voice down!” the detective ordered. Then he took the knife from his pocket and placed it on a table beside the chair where Piggo was sitting. “Yours?” he asked Piggo.
“No!”
“Fingerprints don’t lie.”
“I tell you he came into the club room and handed that thing to me and said I could have it. He wiped it with his handkerchief when he was giving it to me and said he wanted it real nice and clean! Just for me! I’m telling you!” Piggo got up and started for Eddie again, but again they threw him back in the chair.
Then the detective reached into his pocket once more, drew out a small piece of bone and fitted it to the broken handle of the knife. “This was beside the body. So why did you do it?”
“I didn’t!” Piggo roared in outrage.
“Eddie?” the detective said. “Would you know?”
“Maybe.”
“Why?”
“Piggo was afraid Monkey would take the presidency away from him. They had a real mean argument earlier, in the club room. I heard it. So I guess Piggo decided to wait for him in the park and then stabbed him the way he did.”
“Lies!” Piggo cried.
“Is it his knife, Eddie?”
“He’s had it a long time,” Eddie said easily, without hesitating.
The detective nodded. “You can go now, Eddie.”
Some time later, Eddie stood inside Mrs. Scrant’s shop where she had instructed him to go when they were done with him at the precinct station. She’d opened up just for him, and now she was making a banana split on a paper dish. There were two bananas, five kinds of ice cream, that many kinds of topping, and whipped cream and cherries. She finally handed it to him, saying, “There you are, Eddie.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Eddie said.
“You come back tomorrow, and we’ll see what we can do then, too. You come back every day, Eddie.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Eddie said.
They stared at each other for a moment, eyes reflecting knowledge and understanding. Then Eddie said, “Good night, Mrs. Scrant.”
Mrs. Scrant said, “Good night, Eddie.”
Eddie walked out of the shop into the night, eating the banana split, his eyes hard as diamonds, hard as granite.
The Star Salesman
by Edward Y. Breese
Too much proficiency may get you places — though not always where you planned.
When Sam Burger kicked a panel out of the front door of Phil Smith’s house he broke two of the small bones in his right foot. It was unfortunate, because the door wasn’t locked. By that time, however, Sam was past caring.
He hobbled into the livingroom, took aim at Phil’s heart and pulled the trigger of his shiny new revolver. It failed to fire. He tried again with the same result. He had forgotten to load the gun.
Sam turned around then and ran for his car, only to discover he’d locked himself out, with the key still in the ignition. When the police, summoned by neighbors, finally showed up he was sitting on the curb sobbing into his silk handkerchief while Phil and his wife fussed over him with cold water and aspirin. He went downtown without any resistance and without saying a word.
Phil was just as puzzled by the whole affair as anyone else. “I can’t understand it,” he told the detectives when they questioned him. “That was my boss, Mr. Samuel Burger. I can’t imagine what he was so angry about. I’m one of his star salesmen. He said so himself. In only two days with his firm I’ve made the biggest sale in its history.”
That was all Phil could say and it certainly didn’t explain Sam’s attempt to murder him. Nothing about the case made sense. Phil hadn’t made an enemy in all of his forty-eight years. He was small and slight and soft-spoken and polite; not in the least the type to make enemies. He hadn’t had a fight in thirty years; he’d lost that one.
Even when the plant where he’d worked for twenty-five years had been sold and he’d lost his job, Phil had stayed cheerful and uncomplaining. Despite the strain this put him under, no one had ever heard a resentful word from him. He was a model husband and helpmate.
The incident baffled the police and neighbors. This is not the sort of man who’s normally in danger of being murdered or having his door kicked down.
Sam knew the answers, of course, but Sam wasn’t talking. He wept for a while and then he paced the cell and swore under his breath. He repeated the word “hoodoo” several times and then he wept some more. He wouldn’t or couldn’t stop weeping and cursing long enough to answer questions. None of this helped the authorities.
If the truth were only known, this was the first time in more than twenty years that Sam Burger had been at a loss for words. If ever there were a wordmaster, Sam was it. Words were his living, his profession, his pride and his joy. He used words to create for himself as a surgeon uses a scalpel or a sculptor a chisel. They were at once his delight and his stock-in-trade.
Unlike Phil Smith, Sam was neither a loyal employee nor a respectable family man. He loved other men’s wives and his own business, and the only thing on earth that could command his loyalty was cash money in large amounts. He called it by pet endearments like “government lettuce” and “green velvet” and pursued it with truly fanatic love.
As a result, and also unlike Phil, Sam always wore two-hundred-dollar silk suits and thirty-dollar silk neckties and a two-carat, moderately flawed diamond on his right hand. His breath normally smelled of cheap sour-mash bourbon and expensive cigars, and the sight of a blue uniform triggered a nervous tic under his left eye. However, he never lacked for words.
In the normal course of events fellows like Sam can be pretty impressive to the Phils of this world. When they’d met three days before, Sam had made a fine picture of efficiency and prosperity behind the oversized desk in his rented office.
“Well, well, Phil,” he’d said heartily. “So you feel you could be a salesman?” He paused to let the odor of a two-dollar cigar fill the room. “That’s fine, Phil. Just fine. I’m sure you can do it. You have the look of a born salesman to me and I’m seldom wrong about that. Yes, indeed. I can put you right to work.”