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
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The lawyer stopped as a steward knocked and put his head around my door to tell me that the signing off was about to begin. As the door closed again, the lawyer continued. “Next morning, Brentford got the superintendent to bring up his trunk from the basement. He called out to his wife to bring him a dollar for the superintendent, and then, remarking that his wife must have gone into the bathroom, he got the dollar himself. He told the superintendent he was leaving on a business trip in a day or two, and his wife might go down to Atlantic City for a few days while he was gone. When the mother came back from her cruise and couldn’t get any answers to her phone calls to the apartment or the cottage, she called Art Metal Crafts. Then she called the New York Police Department. That’s where you were expected to come in.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“The police were told by the elevator operator that the Brentfords had returned around the usual time from their last weekend at the cottage, and by the superintendent about the trunk. None of the other tenants had seen Mrs. Brentford since her return, but then she usually kept to the apartment when on a binge. The police found nothing unusual about the apartment, and coat and dress hangers strewn about made it appear that she may have gone off to Atlantic City in a hurry. The car was still parked. It looked as if she had left by train or bus. The police were inclined to suspect she’d gone by trunk somewhere.
“One of the detectives went back to the apartment house, thinking that Mrs. Brentford may have walked out of it after all, and hoping to find or hear something to indicate that she had. Meanwhile, her mother had come east to take charge of the Brentfords’ affairs. She told the detective she didn’t believe her daughter had gone to Atlantic City. Those empty dress hangers were to fool the police. He’d poisoned her and stuffed her into the trunk. Why, that brute of a son-in-law had made her daughter park the car on that Sunday evening, tired though she was and with a splitting headache, instead of doing it himself as he nearly always did.
“That remark led the detective to question the elevator operator again. The man said he hadn’t actually seen Mrs. Brentford come into the building. He’d figured she’d come in while he was up at one of the other floors. Next day the two detectives went to the cottage, accompanied by state police officers. They found the body buried under the garage.”
I stared at the lawyer, dumbstruck for the moment. “Then what was in the trunk?”
He smiled. “Actually, clothing and some canned goods, with a few heavy catalogs for extra weight. That’s where the missing dresses went. The trunk was a red herring, to divert suspicion from the cottage by making it appear that she’d been killed in the apartment and her body smuggled away in the trunk. The scheme failed on a chance remark by the mother, but it could easily have failed in some other way. It was a long-shot gamble, but the best Brentford could conceive, given the circumstances. Still, there’s a bare chance it might have succeeded. Brentford firmly believes it would have, if you hadn’t failed him.”
I was bewildered. “In what way?”
“He had planned on getting the room steward to help him throw the trunk overboard, but after the voyage had begun, he saw that the ship would get back to New York around the time his mother-in-law returned from Hawaii and started inquiries about her daughter. So if someone showed up with word of what had happened to the trunk, the police would be convinced that his wife’s body was inside, or at least he hoped so. He chose you because you had a good reason for calling on Avelardi without delay. He can’t understand why you didn’t behave like the upright citizen he judged you to be.”
The irony of the answer to that moved me to a moment of grim humor: by choosing to act as a true friend, I’d unwittingly done him a disservice. Then I felt a little sad that he hadn’t rated me very high as a genuine friend.
“He asked me,” the lawyer added, “to offer you his sincere apologies for so shamefully misusing your friendship, but it was a matter of expediency, and he’s sure you’ll understand. He also asked me to tell you something which seemed to amuse him. He said, ‘Tell good old doc he makes a better doctor than an accessory after the fact.’ ”
Satisfaction
by Virginia Long
The name is the game, dear reader, and may you find ‘satisfaction.’
He was the most beautiful animal I’d ever seen. He was white — not the cold, colorless white of an albino, but a rich, vanilla-ice-cream white that nourished your eyes while you stared; and your soul, too, if you loved dogs as I do.
My spirits hit a new low as I looked at my dog-show program and reread the name: Kileyken’s Nemesis, Best of Breed, Best in Show. I could never swing the deal now. With an across-the-board winner like Nemesis and all the publicity about it, Kiley Kennels was beyond my reach.
For three years, ever since I retired from the Air Force, I’d been dropping by to see Mrs. Kiley at least once a month, mostly just to talk and to see the German shepherds, but also to renew my offer to buy the kennels from her. If I ever had a real, honest-to-goodness, technicolor dream, owning those kennels was it.
Mrs. Kiley was getting on — sixty-five or seventy, I’d guess. She was a little woman, not frail but short and sturdy. Her white hair fluffed out around her head like a tired halo, and her face itself was ordinary except maybe for an odd look around her eyes. It was a sort of wary, waiting look that I couldn’t figure out. I remember when I first started stopping by the kennels to look at the dogs, sometimes I’d feel those eyes following me while I wandered along the pens, and my scalp would begin to prickle; but after three or four visits and some conversation, the feeling disappeared and we got to be pretty good friends — at least as good friends as you can be with someone who never uses two words where one will do, and never smiles at you or anyone else. I actually began to like the old girl. There was a dedicated, no-help-needed air about her I admired.
It was hard to figure why she worked so hard. She ran the whole thing single-handedly as far as I could see. I had the impression she didn’t need the money, and I couldn’t see that she had any particular love for the animals, but she did seem to have a sort of grim determination to develop one special dog — a white German shepherd that would outclass anything in its field.
In three years of looking over each new litter, I’d been positive at least three times that she’d done it, but she wasn’t satisfied. One had beige tipping on the hair around its ears, another had a fringe of brown on its tail, and the other had dark ridges above its eyes. It had to be perfect for Mrs. Kiley and, looking at Nemesis now, I could see that she’d finally brought it off. He was perfect in every way — full-bodied, strong, bright-eyed and weighing in at a good eighty pounds. He made every other dog in the show look like a dog.
I didn’t go by to congratulate Mrs. Kiley. Her gain was my loss, you might say, and I knew I couldn’t afford to boost my offer any higher than I already had over the past year. Not that I’m such a poor loser, but I just thought it might be easier to be a good loser tomorrow.
That’s why I was so surprised to get a telephone call from her, first thing the next morning. I’d slept late after an evening of moderate sorrow-drowning, and I was still half asleep when the phone rang. I fumbled past my untasted coffee and somehow or other got the receiver to my ear right side up.