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:
And now I lay in my room in the hot and humid night, and across the interval between houses, behind the futile beating of blades, Mrs. Willkins’ gross body stirred in her black and gasping room.
And there was something else. Something new.
A man was walking the dark and airless streets of town beneath layers of lifeless leaves.
He walked with mincing steps, and he was far away in the beginning, when I first saw him, and I lay on my bed in my room and followed his progress with cat’s eyes through light and shadow across the pattern of the town. At times he was swallowed completely by darkness, and then no eyes could see him but mine, but the people who stirred in wakefulness in the houses he passed could hear the echo of his mincing steps, and he moved with surety of purpose and a pace that never varied through the silent, dappled streets until he came at last to the corner above my house and down the street to the house itself. Without moving from my bed, I could see him standing on the sidewalk below with his face lifted into the milky light of the moon, and then he came up across the porch into the house and up the stairs into the hall and stood outside my door.
I waited in the hot stillness, and after a while he knocked softly, and I got up in the dark, and my hand, swinging out, struck the tumbler on the table by the bed and knocked it to the floor with a sound of brittle thunder that rocked the room. I waited until the reverberations had diminished and died and the soft knock was repeated, and then I crossed to the door and opened it.
The warm fog inside my skull pressed closely on my brain, and though my head didn’t ache exactly, it felt very light and queer. The man in the hall looked at me and bowed in a peculiar, old-fashioned way from the waist and smiled politely.
“Excuse me for disturbing you at this hour,” he said, “but I must talk with you about a number of people. About Mrs. Willkins first of all, I think. May I come in?”
He was a little man with a long pointed nose and a pointed chin. He wore yellow pointed shoes.
I saw Marilla from, my window. He was walking in the yard below with the same man in white who comes now and then to my room, and he sat for a while on a bench under a tree, and I could see him quite clearly. The queer thing is, there was no hate, no longer any hate, and I’m thinking that perhaps I will be allowed to walk in the yard soon, and that Marilla and l may meet and sit together under the tree and talk about these things that happened. It will be pleasant to talk with someone who knows and understands...
Kill Me Tomorrow
Originally published in Manhunt, December 1955.
Chapter 1
Peter Roche first saw her the afternoon of the day before Christmas. When he got home, she was sitting in front of the fire in the library with Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She drew on the cigarette, drank from the glass, and exhaled a thin blue cloud of smoke. He learned that it was a characteristic trick of hers, that sequence — drag, drink, blow. She nodded a headful of mahogany curls and looked at him with eyes that seemed black in the room but turned out later in the light to match almost perfectly the color of her hair.
“You must be Peter,” she said.
Her voice was throaty, as warm and mellow as the Scotch that lubricated it, as soft and lazy as the blue smoke it rode on.
He gave her a twisted grin and said, “Why must I be Peter? Why can’t I be Paul?”
She shook her head, the mahogany curls dancing and shimmering. Firelight and shadows flickered across her face.
“I know you’re Peter because your father told me all about you. ‘Only son,’ he said. ‘Slim and handsome and clever as the devil and no damn good,’ he said. You’re twenty-eight. You flunked out of medical school four years ago, and you haven’t done anything constructive since. Last year it cost five grand to buy you out of an affair with a predatory blonde. To coin an expression, you’re a cad, sir. I think I’m going to like you very much.”
“Do you? That’s nice. I’m a guy who likes being liked by beautiful women. I also like to know their names. You see, the possibility of being sued or blackmailed by a woman whose name I don’t know is rather embarrassing. It’s a weakness in my social adjustment.”
She went through the smoke and Scotch sequence, her moist lips curling in a sly kind of smile. Beyond the drifting veil of smoke, her dark eyes glittered with malicious humor.
“My name is Harriet, and I’m usually called Etta, but you may call me Mother.”
He stood watching her, giving his adrenals time to slow down and resume normal production. She lay back in the rich brocade embrace of the big fireside chair with all the audacious presumption of a cowbird in the nest of a warbler. Although she didn’t move, she somehow gave the impression of stretching, of luxuriating sensuously in the flexing of flat muscles. A sheath of black wool was tailored to the contours of her body. His eyes descended nylon to wriggling toes. Her discarded shoes, a pair of thin soles with essential straps and incredible spikes, were half buried in shaggy white pile.
“I’m an extremely regressed adult,” he said. “I need a lot of mothering.”
“Maybe we can make a game of it.”
“Good. It ought to be more fun than canasta.”
She laughed. It was a soft and gauzy scrap of sound that seemed to ascend and fade and thin to nothing. It was as if she had blown out more smoke through the vapors of Scotch.
“I’m beginning to think I may get my kicks out of having a son. Such a convenient method, too. Ready made and ready for love. I’m really quite relieved. I though you might hate me.”
“So I might. I’ll let you know the exact state of my feelings when I learn what this is all about. Are you trying to tell me that you and Senator Big are married?”
“Senator Big? Is that what you call him? It has a disrespectful sound. Perhaps you’re not such an affectionate son, after all.”
“Affectionate with the Senator? You’d just as well try being affectionate with a party caucus.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t found him so unresponsive. Generally tender, I’d say, with brief interims of passion. Just enough to make things interesting.”
“With you, I admit, it would be easier. The Senator always had a fine eye.”
“Thank you.”
“Where is he now, by the way?”
“Upstairs lying down.”
He started where he’d stopped on his other tour of inspection, with her wriggling roes, and reversed his way back up nylon and black wool to her mahogany eyes. They were still glittering with malice, but he had a feeling that the malice was not integral, was only assumed as a temporary attitude until his own was determined.
“So you really are married,” he said softly. “You really hooked the old boy.”
“That’s a rather crude way to put it, but essentially correct.”
“Pardon my crudity. You married him, of course, because you love him as a noble servant of the people. All you want is to share the life of a great man.”
She laughed again, and this time it was a freer and fuller laugh, filled with the solid stuff of genuine amusement. “Well, let’s not go to the other extreme. After all, he’s only a State senator, not national, and I understand he’s served certain vested interests a hell of a lot better than he has the people. I’d say my position is somewhere around the middle.”