The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!
- Автор: Флора Флетчер
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- ISBN: 978-1479436668
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!». Краткое содержание книги:
“Hello. Ray. You’re a good boy to come so soon.”
Behind him, sitting in a chair with motionless rigidity that was the antithesis of her usual seductive grace, was Myra. Her face was stiff, drained of blood, and her eyes in the startling pallor were like burned-out cinders, her mouth like a crimson wound.
The wrong feeling intensified. Twisting at the hips, Ray could see Rhino by the door at his rear. He stood there indolently, shoulders braced against the wall, his right hand resting in the pocket of his coat.
The maid had advanced on Ray’s other side. Her stance, for a woman, was oddly erect, almost military, and it prompted in him a strange kind of disgust. It seemed, for some reason, a physical perversion.
“I always come soon,” he said carefully.
Dixie lifted his glass and sipped, looking at Ray over the rim. “Thanks. But I had better explain why I called you out tonight. Also why I’ve invited Rhino and Mitzie to attend this little conference. I’ve made use of them, you see and I believe in permitting the people I’ve used in an affair to see its finish. And then, too, it is good for personnel to be made aware of certain consequences.” He smiled gently. “You know what I am, Ray? I’m a foolish, fat little man with a beautiful wife, and that’s the trouble. Perhaps there is nothing quite so unfortunate as a man like me with a wife like Myra. Because he has no confidence, you see. He has no faith. It corrupts his personality. It makes him suspicious, and it degrades him. If he were like you, it would be different. If he were a tall and handsome guy, he wouldn’t be forced to measures a man should scorn.”
It was all clear then, of course.
Even before Dixie walked to a table and flipped a switch. Even before the sultry, vibrant voice whispered his damnation through the room: Ray, Ray...
Dixie flipped the switch again, cutting off Ray’s line, and he was suddenly a sick old man. The smooth skin seemed to darken and wither on his bones. “The machine was in a cabinet in the hall,” he said. “This was only one of the rooms it could have picked up. Mitzie’s very clever about operating it. For a dame, Mitzie’s clever about a lot of things.”
He lifted his glass and drained it greedily. “What would you do, Ray, if you were Dixie Cannon? What would you do to the guy who made your wife? As you said in the office today, it’s a matter of discipline. Some things you can’t let pass.”
It seemed to Ray at that moment, in retrospect, that the whole day had been pointed toward this bad end and he wondered dully how he had been so blind as to miss the signs of destiny — his own words to Myra about needing Dixie’s protection, the malignant threat of Prince Caleb Kirk, all the dark signs pointing. He tried to speak, but he found that he couldn’t. Bones and muscles functioned, permitting his mouth to open, but no sound would come from his throat.
“At first I thought I’d ruin your handsome face.” Dixie said. “I thought I’d let Rhino cut it up for me. But then l remembered something you said to Myra. Something on the tape there. ‘Who keeps me alive?’ you said. So now I’ve decided it will be best it we simply part company. From this moment, we are at liberty from each other. I will take steps to make it known that you are no longer my man and therefore no longer my concern. For example. I’ve already notified the men I’m presently dealing with — the Schultz twins. Prince Caleb Kirk. They were quite interested.”
Then there was an unexpected sharp sound of splintering glass and blood dripped brightly from Dixie’s soft fingers. His voice rose to a shrill, womanlike scream.
“Get out, you double-dealing son of a bitch! Get the hell out before I have Rhino cut you to shreds!”
Ray turned away with a bleak sense of loneliness that was more terrible than fear. For a moment his eyes sought the face of Myra, but there was nothing in it now but defeat and the shadow of terror, so he gave up and went past Rhino into the hall and out of the house. All the way hanging in disembodied suspension before him there was a second face. It was long and yellow, with a sour mouth, and hate-filled eyes, the symbol of his enemies.
Fair game. Open season on Ray Butler. He felt a frantic, irrational compulsion to start running, but all growth and structure on the surface of the earth around him seemed, of a sudden, to disintegrate and disappear leaving no place, no place at all, for a man to hide.
May I Come In?
Originally published in Manhunt, January 1955.
I saw Marilla today, and it all came back with the sight of him, all the details I’ve tried to remember and couldn’t — all the little, important details that meant so much, all about the night and what happened in the night and all things before and afterward...
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.