Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017
- Автор: Фузилли Джим, Харрис Шарлин
- Год: 2017
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017». Краткое содержание книги:
He had a new name too — a business name — which gave him clout.
He’d coined it using the diminutive of Robert and adding his middle name “Rapper” because it rhymed with Zapper. Now the words “Bob Rapper, Pest Zapper” were emblazoned on his van.
He liked it, it had a cool ring to it.
And yet still people spoke down to him!
“Name? Address?”
“Karen Mayhew, three Heath Drive. How soon can you come?”
Karen Mayhew. A name he had heard during roll call every single morning back at secondary school, fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago.
Karen Mayhew had been clever, but not as mouthy or as sassy as the rest of the popular crowd. She was a quiet girl. Pretty, but unaware of it. Shy.
While he had given up on some of the others who rebuffed him, he had persisted with Karen Mayhew.
Karen was lucky that Robert had been interested in her and continued to be so even after she left home. He had loitered outside her house when she had come back in the university holidays. If he didn’t give up, she would give in, he had figured. He had been as determined as some of the pests he now dealt with. And yet... it had got him nowhere!
Now, standing by his telephone in the small house he rented, Robert... Bob... remembered how he had, in the end, become enraged by Karen’s refusal to pay him proper attention. The last time he had rung her bell to ask her out he had offered to buy her a drink. And still she had shut the door in his face! He wasn’t going to leave after that. He remained outside her door, and when her cat slunk past him, he had stamped hard on its tail. If you can’t punish the person, punish something they love, he’d thought. The cat, instead of running away, had yowled, jumped up, stapled itself with its claws to his arm, then slithered to the pavement leaving red rivulets in his skin. He still had the scars. To add insult to injury, it also deposited a flea that had bitten him and driven him mad itching for days afterwards.
On the phone to Karen Mayhew now, years later, he realized their roles were, at last, reversed. Once he had thought he needed her. Now she was the one who needed him.
Once she had left him upset and rejected. Now she was the one in distress.
Bob took his time dealing with her call. He wasn’t going to rush to help Karen Mayhew after the way she had rejected him in his youth. It might have been years ago, but it felt like yesterday now he heard her wheedling, pleading voice.
“I’ll see if there’s a space in my diary next week,” he said casually.
“Next week? But I’m going crazy, I’m being bitten,” she bleated. “I have a dinner party at the weekend. I can’t invite friends to a flea-infested house. The things will jump all over them. They’re already driving me mad.”
It was the phrase “driving me mad” that sparked an idea in him.
Later that day Bob drew up in his van outside number 3 Heath Drive.
A very nice address.
Karen Mayhew had done well for herself.
Would she recognize him?
He had changed a lot since she’d last seen him. He had gone straight from lanky boy to maturity, missing out on the phase other men got stuck in — vainly working out and pathetically grooming their facial hair. Not that he hadn’t taken plenty of time to wash and shave and apply a good-smelling aftershave for today’s visit. His hair was receding, giving his forehead height, like the carapace of a cockroach. His eyes were large and wide and slightly protuberant, like those of a housefly. He looked more like a forty-five-year-old than someone in his early thirties. He was pleased with how he looked. Women liked mature men.
Bob rang Karen Mayhew’s shiny brass doorbell. The sweet scent of hyacinths drifted from her front garden. Winter jasmine crept up her latticed porch. She was the kind of woman who enabled things to flower even in midwinter, he thought.
“Bob Rapper,” he introduced himself when she opened the door. “Pest Zapper.”
She was still slim, blonder now than he remembered her. She barely looked at him — the kind of self-absorbed woman who doesn’t give you a second glance. She had no idea who he was! He was still nobody in her eyes!
She showed him around her house, bare polished floorboards and a kitchen overlooking a small but perfectly groomed back garden. A tidy house, nothing out of place. Uncluttered. Minimalist. Barely any soft furnishings. Not a great habitat for fleas.
“They are worst in the bathroom,” she said. “That’s where they seem to bite me, on my way to or from my bath.”
Bob took his time inspecting the house. He examined Karen’s bedroom with its double bed and silky Indian-looking cover. Everything spoke of privilege. Of success. And of taste. A free-standing bath in her small bathroom, spotlights, candles. Bottles of perfume.
At last he went back downstairs, where he found her making coffee in a shiny, chrome, top-of-the-range espresso machine.
“Well?” she said.
She didn’t offer him a cup.
“There are no fleas,” he said. “I’ve inspected thoroughly.”
“They hide,” she said. “They aren’t there all the time, but then, suddenly, they’re everywhere. It’s usually when I put the heating on. Their eggs lie dormant and then, when it gets warm, they hatch and start jumping.”
“That’s true.” Bob Rapper was irritated by the way she assumed superior knowledge about his subject. “But fleas leave marks, minuscule feces that I identify with my magnifying glass. I’ve checked and there’s absolutely nothing. Zero,” he added for emphasis. “Zilch.”
“That’s odd,” she said. “I’ve seen them. Would you spray the house anyway?”
“There’s nothing to spray,” he said, “but I’ll do it if you want. You’ll need to go out. It’s toxic stuff. Needs a few hours to work.”
When Bob got home that night he was satisfied. He had done a good day’s work.
The call, as he expected, came from Karen the following week.
“More fleas hatched,” she wailed, “they’re biting again. You’ll need to have another go with the treatment.”
Again Bob went to her house. Again he asked her to leave it while he sprayed.
She rang again the following week, begging him to treat the house once more. She swore she was still being bitten.
“I’m not being funny or anything,” Bob said as she opened the door to him for the third or fourth time, “but my treatment should have destroyed every last flea by now. That’s if there were any to start with.”
“Of course there were fleas to start with.”
“I can spray again. I can spray a hundred times, but it won’t make any difference because there’s nothing to spray. Never was.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Not to be disrespectful, but I’ve seen this before.”
She stared at him, mouth open in a silent question mark.
“The feeling that something’s biting you,” he went on. “The belief that there are insects crawling over or even under your skin. There’s a name for it — it’s one of them things — a syndrome.”
“You’re telling me I’m imagining the fleas.”
“Not telling you. Suggesting it. It’s a possibility.”
“What do I do?” Her voice had an edge of desperation to it. She was begging him to help.
He liked it this way round.
“You could see a doctor.”
“A doctor?”
“Yeah, sort of... maybe sort of a head doctor.”
She looked as though she might cry. It felt good.
“What... what do you think is wrong with me?” she asked.
“Delusional parasitosis. According to Google,” he said. “It’s like when someone gets obsessed that something’s biting them when there’s nothing there.”