Alfred Hitchcock’s A Hangman’s Dozen
- Автор: Артур Роберт, Брэдбери Рэй Дуглас
- Год: 1962
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Publishing
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s A Hangman’s Dozen». Краткое содержание книги:
“George!” she said in a shocked voice. “How can you say that?”
He ignored her.
I said, “Another development was that Marks had been dead three days at the time you were supposed to have your fight.”
This managed to surprise him. “Three days?” he said without understanding. “How could that be?”
“Why don’t you ask your wife?”
He turned to stare at Helen Cooper, who raised her chin and refused to meet his gaze.
“He’d been lying there dead for three days?” he asked slowly.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
The woman screamed at me, “You’re lying!”
Cooper put his hands to his ears and walked halfway across the room to sink into a chair. His wife stared after him, then shifted her gaze back to me when he looked at her.
In a tense, but lower-toned voice she said, “Why do you think he had been dead three days?”
I said, “The coroner’s physician says so.”
“He made a mistake.”
“Hardly,” I said. “Marks’s body lay in your house all that time. Don’t try to make us believe you didn’t notice it.”
Nervously she worked her hands together, trying to think of a way out. “I just had the day wrong, is all. George killed him on Friday. In all the excitement, I just—”
Her voice trailed off, when we both unbelievingly shook our heads.
I said, “Why don’t you save time by telling us about it, lady?”
She looked hopelessly from one to the other of us. Finally she said in a whisper, “I didn’t mean to do it. Honest I didn’t.”
We waited.
“It was spur-of-the-moment. When he said—” Her voice failed.
“When he said what?” I prompted.
Drearily, all hope now gone, she said, “He told me he was going back to her.”
“His wife?” Sam asked.
“Yes. That plain little nothing. After all we’d been to each other, he said I was just an interlude. He said he loved her.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“I guess I went mad. The tongs were there and I picked them up. I — afterward I didn’t know what to do. I... I hid him in the closet the first night, until I could think of a way to get rid of him.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Then I was afraid — afraid there’d be an odor. So I put him in the bathtub. I went out and bought cracked ice. Brought it home a bag at a time. I poured it over him.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “Then an idea came to me — a way out. I knew George would come home eventually. Dead drunk. He wouldn’t know what was going on.”
I looked across at George Cooper. He was listening attentively, but he still didn’t seem very disturbed. I thought I detected a faint note of triumph in his expression.
“You knew all along that she did it,” I accused him.
He shook his head, winced again at the motion. “Only suspected. Sergeant, I didn’t know.”
“Then why’d you confess? Why didn’t you just tell us your suspicion?”
“You have to remember I was drunk at the time and not thinking too clearly. All I knew was if Helen lied to me about her and Marks, she could also lie about my having killed him. I don’t know how to investigate murders. I figured the police would, so if I got them involved, maybe the truth would come out. It didn’t occur to me until after I’d confessed that if my wife was innocent, I’d be in a real jam. But by then, of course, it was too late.”
“You were just thinking of yourself!” she screamed at him. “You just wanted to get rid of me!”
An agonized expression crossed his face. Clapping his hands to his ears, he stared at her.
“You’re beginning to get the idea,” he said.
The October Game
Ray Bradbury
The stories they wouldn’t let me do on TV would fill a book — which, incidentally, has been published and bears the fairly apt title ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: STORIES THEY WOULDN’T LET ME DO ON TV. Are you able to guess why the tale which follows was considered too strong for TV viewers? I most assuredly can.
He put the gun back into the bureau drawer and shut the drawer.
No, not that way. Louise wouldn’t suffer that way. She would be dead and it would be over and she wouldn’t suffer. It was very important that this thing have, above all, duration. Duration through imagination. How to prolong the suffering? How, first of all, to bring it about? Well.
The man standing before the bedroom mirror carefully fitted his cuff links together. He paused long enough to hear the children run by swiftly on the street below, outside this warm two-story house; like so many gray mice the children, like so many leaves.
By the sound of the children you knew the calendar day. By their screams you knew what evening it was. You knew it was very late in the year. October. The last day of October, with white bone masks and cut pumpkins and the smell of dropped candle fat.
No. Things hadn’t been right for some time. October didn’t help any. If anything it made things worse. He adjusted his black bow-tie. If this were spring, he nodded slowly, quietly, emotionlessly at his image in the mirror, then there might be a chance. But tonight all the world was burning down into ruin. There was no green of spring, none of the freshness, none of the promise.
There was a soft running in the hall. “That’s Marion,” he told himself. “My little one. All eight quiet years of her. Never a word. Just her luminous gray eyes and her wondering little mouth.” His daughter had been in and out all evening, trying on various masks, asking him which was most terrifying, most horrible. They had both finally decided on the skeleton mask. It was “just awful!” It would “scare the beans” from people!
Again he caught the long look of thought and deliberation he gave himself in the mirror. He had never liked October. Ever since he first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother’s house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring.
But it was different tonight. There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.
There would be no spring.
He had been crying quietly all evening. It did not show, not a vestige of it, on his face. It was all somewhere hidden, but it wouldn’t stop.
A rich syrupy smell of candy filled the bustling house. Louise had laid out apples in new skins of caramel, there were vast bowls of punch fresh mixed, stringed apples in each door, scooped, vented pumpkins peering triangularly from each cold window. There was a waiting water tub in the center of the living room, waiting, with a sack of apples nearby, for bobbing to begin. All that was needed was the catalyst, the inpouring of children, to start the apples bobbing, the stringed apples to penduluming in the crowded doors, the candy to vanish, the halls to echo with fright or delight, it was all the same.
Now, the house was silent with preparation. And just a little more than that.
Louise had managed to be in every other room save the room he was in today. It was her very fine way of intimating, Oh look, Mich, see how busy I am! So busy that when you walk into a room I’m in there’s always something I need to do in another room! Just see how I dash about!
For a while he had played a little game with her, a nasty childish game. When she was in the kitchen then he came to the kitchen, saying, “I need a glass of water.” After a moment, he standing, drinking water, she like a crystal witch over the caramel brew bubbling like a prehistoric mudpot on the stove, she said, “Oh, I must light the window pumpkins!” and she rushed to the living room to make the pumpkins smile with light. He came after her, smiling, “I must get my pipe.” “Oh, the cider!” she had cried, running to the dining room. “I’ll check the cider,” he had said. But when he tried following she ran to the bathroom and locked the door.