Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 9, September 2006
- Автор: Биггл-младший Ллойд, Crenshaw Bill
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- ISBN: ISSN:0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 9, September 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
It didn’t take a detective to discover how Haney had come in the back way — through the broken fence of the building next door, across the back courtyard, and up the rear fire escape to break the hallway window.
“How’d he get in the apartment?” I asked Kaye as we sat in the hall at Charity Hospital the following morning, while Charley slept in the recovery ward. Dark circles around her eyes, she looked pale as she rocked Donna slowly. Thankfully, the baby was asleep.
“I heard scratching against the door and thought it was the cat, the black one that’s always around.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No. He just shoved past me and shot Charley. Then he stood there looking at me.”
A nurse came out of Charley’s room and said, “He’s awake now.”
I didn’t go in. I went back home to look up my landlord.
Charley Rudabaugh spent six days in the hospital. When I brought him home and walked him past my apartment door to the rear apartment, he balked until Kaye opened the door and smiled at him.
“What’s going on?”
Kaye pulled him in and I stood in the doorway, amazed at what she’d done with the place in a few days. It came furnished, but she’d brightened up the place, replacing the dark curtains with yellow ones. Donna, lying on her back in a playpen in the center of the living room, was trying to play with a rubber duck, slapping at it and gurgling.
It took Charley a good minute to take in the scene as Kaye eased up and hugged him.
“Here’s the deal,” I told them over coffee at their kitchen table. “The landlord gave us a break on the place. I’m fronting y’all the money. You don’t have to pay me back, but if you insist, you can, but get on your feet first.” I’d just put any money they gave me in a bank account for Donna’s education.
Then I explained about how it really wasn’t my money. It had been a gift, and I was sharing it. “Everyone needs help sometimes. And you two have had a bad time recently.”
I could see Charley was still confused but not Kaye, beaming at him, paying little if any attention to me. I thanked her for the coffee and stood up to leave. Charley’s eyes narrowed as he asked, “I understand what you say, but it’s just hard to figure you ain’t got some kinda motive. Everybody does.”
I started for the door, turned, and said, “Sometimes things are exactly as they appear to be.”
Kaye moved to her daughter and began humming that same song, repeating the line in French again, “le coeur a...”
“What is that?” I had to ask.
“It’s the reason you’re doing all this.” She smiled at me, looking like a schoolkid in her white shirt and jeans. “An old French saying that goes, ‘The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing’.” She smiled down at her baby.
It wasn’t until later, as I sat in my mother’s rocker looking out the open French doors of my apartment, out at the dark roofs of the Quarter with the moon beaming overhead, that I heard my mother’s voice back when she was young, a voice I haven’t heard for so long, as she sang, “le coeur a...”
Then it hit me.
The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing. Kaye hadn’t meant just me. It cut both ways. She’d also meant Haney, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck standing up.
Poor Dumb Mouths[1]
by Bill Crenshaw
“I tell you that which you yourselves do know,
Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me.”