The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Mrs. Lominac didn’t feel the chill in the gray, unused part of her house as she slipped from her apartment, crossed the vaulted, spectral living-room, and floated up the long curving stairway with the silence of a little ghost.
Swallowed by the gloom of the upper hallway, she paused to listen. Then she slid along the wall until she came to the narrow stairs that led to the attic. She hardly stirred a mote of dust, going up. She pressed her ear against the small door. The twilight thickened. Then at last she heard the soft sound of a movement in the attic... a rustling... a brief cough.
She lowered her head to keyhole level and pressed her right eye to the aperture.
He had a light — a candle — but he was out of range. Mrs. Lominac waited, and her patience was rewarded when he came into her field of view. He sat down cross-legged on a pallet he’d fashioned for himself, and opened a book he’d borrowed from the dusty library downstairs.
Mrs. Lominac studied all that she could see of him through the constriction of the keyhole: the slender bone structure... the sensitive face under the long beard... the intentness of the hollow-socketed eyes as they strained to read in the candlelight.
Carefully, Mrs. Lominac inched her way back down.
Am I crazy? she asked herself. She really didn’t care about the answer.
On the main floor she went from room to room, turning on radiators that creaked and popped when the steam began seeping into them.
Returning to her apartment, she decided that yes, she was crazy. But perhaps in the right kind of way. At least it felt pretty nice, this craziness; this feeling that the old relic might still be of use, was still needed, still had a value.
When you’re all used up in one world, she thought, you’re mighty lucky, I guess, if you stumble on another. A strange new world to be explored... new talk... new ideas...
The last thing before she retired that night, Mrs. Lominac wrote the note. She taped it to the door of the grocery cabinet where the boy couldn’t miss it when he eased down later for his monastically simple meal of the night.
She stepped back and read the large block letters of her message over again: “The warmest of invitations is extended to you and the others as well. Please bring them. We’ll have a ball.”
Then Mrs. Lominac turned off the light and went to her bedroom. She sat in a boudoir chair in the darkness, waiting, listening impatiently, filled with the heavy excitement of a girl about to attend her first party.
The Delicate Victim
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1971.
Terry Bixby stopped the white convertible in the driveway of the imposing redwood rancher in Tanglewood Heights. Looking at the lovely home, he slumped behind the wheel. Thoughts of the future wrung a groan from him.
He wondered which would go first — the home, the car, the furniture. Everything was third-mortgaged and refinanced to the hilt. He wasn’t a magician, and without a monetary miracle, strangers were going to be enjoying their car and throwing those wonderful poolside parties.
Terry sensed movement beside the car and lifted his face from his hands. In her chic, polished cotton dress and sandals, glistening black hair casual about her tanned, lovely face, Miriam was the perfect image of the smart suburban homemaker.
The deep violet of her eyes went a shade darker as she watched the haggard way Terry got out of the car. “You didn’t get the loan,” she stated thinly.
“When I left the finance company,” Terry snapped back, “I couldn’t even get a drink in Chez Pierre. Seems our liquor bill is more than slightly overdue.”
“Too bad, darling,” Miriam’s words crackled brittle ice shards, “you had to pass up your afternoon cocktail!”
“Don’t ride me, Miriam! Not this evening.”
Of course not, you poor dear,” his wife said nastily. She folded her arms and tapped a toe. “But just what do you propose we do now?”
Terry took a heavy breath. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He looked longingly at the house, the landscaped lawn, the poolside furniture just visible beyond the rear corner. His handsome young face flickered with the look of a small boy who’s just learned there’s no Santa Claus. “All we wanted was to live decently.”
“On easy credit and too little income,” Miriam said, her practical, female side asserting itself. “You’ll have to get up the nerve to ask old man Hergeshimer for a raise, that’s all!”
Terry’s knees wobbled at the mere thought. “Not a chance. I’m hanging onto my job by the skin of my teeth as it is. I don’t want to remind my boss I even exist.” He threw a desperate glance around him. “We’ll not give it up! We’ll find a way, if I have to... to rob a bank or something.”
Miriam’s laugh was remotely amused. “Really, Terry. You, in the role of nerveless bank robber? Whit a quaint notion! Anyway, we have another little problem that just popped in.”
“Spare me.” Terry’s eyes implored heavenward. “I thought we had already cornered the market on problems. What is it now?”
“We have a house guest. A little lady who says she is your great-aunt Griselda.”
“Griselda? I haven’t any... Wait a minute, would her last name be Carruthers?”
“So she says,” Miriam said.
“I haven’t seen her since I was a kid.” Terry glanced at the house. “I vaguely remember her as a slick young woman who supplied the rest of the family with its secret gossip. I think she eventually took off for New York and the lure of footlights.”
“She finally landed in our house,” Miriam said. “She arrived by taxicab about two hours ago. Said she’d flown all the way from Caracas and was delighted to have the phone book turn up the name of her only surviving relative here in the city.”
“Caracas?”
“A city in Venezuela, darling.”
“I know where Caracas is!” Terry glared at the house. “Okay, we’ll give her a dinner, a roof for the night, and let her fly right out again.”
Great-aunt Griselda was a dainty and wonderfully preserved woman. Her hair was feathery frost about an oval-shaped face that still retained an echo of its once captivating, porcelain prettiness.
The reunion took place in the living-room, Griselda hugging Terry and stepping back to look at him with a gentle hint of warm and happy tears in her flashing blue eyes. “You turned out to be a truly handsome man, Terry! And with such a lovely wife. I’m so happy to know that life has been kind to you, with this charming little home and all.”
“It’s nice to see you, Aunt Griselda,” Terry lied beautifully, remembering that she was only going to be here for the night.
“Perhaps you’d like to freshen up,” Miriam suggested, “while I finish getting dinner together.”
“Don’t put yourself out, dear. Any morsel will do for me.”
She ate more than a morsel of everything Miriam produced on the table.
“Delicious, delightful!” Aunt Griselda remarked throughout the meal.
Terry lifted a dubious brow. The dinner of roast, potatoes, and asparagus had been the usual scorched and lumpy results of Miriam’s efforts in the kitchen ever since their one servant, a cook-maid, had given up trying to collect the arrears of her salary and walked out three weeks ago.
“The General,” Griselda said, giving her lips a last dainty touch of her napkin, “would have enjoyed the dinner. He did so like his spot of roast beef. Perhaps because was English, you know.”
“The General?” Terry looked up from the plate where he’d scooted food back and forth with the tip of his fork.