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:
“Who’d notice?”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “All right. You go out alone. I’ll meet you at the alley entrance in a few minutes.”
He got out of the booth and went out through the hall past the fat man in the chair to the street. The air was astringent in his throat and lungs. His head cleared a little, and the revolution in his stomach subsided to a turgid unrest. Walking swiftly, he went down to the corner and back on the side street to the alley entrance. Three or four steps down the alley, he stopped and stood quietly, pressed against the damp brick of an old building.
Down the alley, a door opened and closed, projecting and extinguishing a weak swath of light. For a second, his ears caught faintly a wave of crazy reefer rhythms. High heels rapped briskly on brick, coming abreast, and pushing away from the wall, he hooked an arm. She spun around with a startled curse, the curse cutting off abruptly when she recognized him.
“You scared hell out of me, honey,” she said.
“Sorry. The car’s right down the street.”
They went down to the Olds and got in. Lowering the window beside her, she sat strangely upright in the seat, lifting her face with a kind of pathetic greediness into the rush of cold air, and as he drove, he thought he could see from the corners of his eyes a faint flush of color in her sallow cheeks. The Olds moved cautiously through narrow streets of predominate darkness, emerging finally into a brighter section where incandescents and neons repelled the shadows, passing after a short while into the avenues and broad boulevards tilted upward toward the high ground above the river.
On the suburban road at the crest of the rise, where the earth descended again to the lip of the bluff, he stopped the Olds. Twin shafts from the headlights sliced down through the darkness past the rail fence into emptiness. Then he leaned forward and extinguished the lights suddenly, and in the instant after extinction, before his eyes could adjust, the night was complete and impenetrable, a soft and tangible pressure that filled him with a momentary terror, as if it were he who was about to die.
She twisted toward him on the seat. “Why are we stopping here? I’m getting cold.”
There was no fear in her voice, no rising awareness of danger, but only a slight nasality, the hint of a petulant whine.
“Have you ever been up here before?” he said.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“I thought maybe you’d like the view. Look behind you.”
She twisted away in the opposite direction, looking back through the rear window. Behind and below them, the lights of the city were spread in wide display. She sat that way a long time, twisted in the seat to look back at the lights, and then she said, “It’s pretty. It’s been a long time since anyone bothered to show me anything pretty.”
“I thought you might like it,” he said.
And then, because it had to be then, because he could never bring himself to the point again, he reached out and took her by the throat from behind. She tried to twist around to face him, clawing at his hands and threshing her legs in a desperate diffusion of energy, but she was not strong, even in a struggle for life, and it was only a little while until she was dead.
Afterward, he proceeded quickly, according to plan. He removed a can of gasoline from the rear and soaked the interior of the car. He started the engine and pressed the accelerator down, wedging it with a piece of wood. With the high singing of many horses in his ears, he pulled the body over under the wheel, switched on the headlights, and dropped a lighted match on the upholstery. Finally, he pulled the automatic transmission lever into drive position and simultaneously released the hand brake, and the big car leaped away, careening. He stood and watched it crash through the fence at the edge of the bluff and catapult blazing into space. After a moment that seemed forever, he heard from below the crashing of steel and a detonation that was like a giant expulsion of air.
Slipping off the side of the road, he ran. Carrying the empty gasoline can, he ran at a tangent and downward through the dark toward the street below where his own car waited.
Chapter 7
The colored flags of the terrace were littered with dead leaves that had blown in on the wind. A pile of them had gathered in a corner against the adjacent walls of the house. There was no wrought-iron table there now, no gaily striped glass. The chaise longue was gone, and Etta was gone, because Etta was dead and buried in Kaw City, and there were more things gone and going than it paid to think about.
Someone knocked softly, and Peter turned away from the window and went over and opened the door. A man stood in the hall with his hat in his hands. He was short and fat, his belly lapping the waist band of his trousers. He had a round face splattered with freckles and a tiny, sucked-in mouth that looked like a deep dent in a batch of bread dough. He turned his hat around and around by the brim in stubby fingers. His name was Smalley, and he was a detective.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Roche,” he said. “May I see you for a minute?”
“Certainly.” Peter stepped back into the room. “Come in.”
Smalley came into the room and stood waiting, turning and turning his hat, while Peter closed the door and came back past him.
“Won’t you sit down?” Peter said.
Smalley shook his head. “Thanks. I’ll only be a minute.” He looked past Peter and out the window to the opposite wing of the house. His eyes were small and pale, red-rimmed and watery, and every once in a while he knuckled them as if they pained him. “I’ve been talking with your father,” he said.
“Has he finally accepted the fact that it was really Etta?”
“I think so.” Smalley knuckled his eyes, and let them drop to the floor. “I think I convinced him,” he said.
“You’re certain, then?”
“Yes. No possibility of a mistake now. The identification is complete.”
“How’s that?”
“We had her dentist check the teeth. Dr. Norton Foresman. You know him?”
Peter was aware suddenly that he’d drawn his breath and held it. He released it slowly on a long, fading whisper, and the room blurred and faded and slowly returned in a diminishing spiral of dizziness. “Yes,” he said. “I know him. Professionally, that is. I’ve been to him myself once or twice.”
“I see. Well, as I said, he made the identification positive. The insurance will be paid promptly now. I’ve just told your father, the senator, as much.”
“Then there’s no hope at all? That it might not have been Etta?”
“None whatever. I’m sorry.”
“Well, it’s not too great a shock to me. I’ve felt from the beginning that it couldn’t have been anyone else. I’m afraid the old man was holding out pretty grimly, though. How did he take it?”
Smalley turned and turned his hat and scuffed a toe against the rug. “That’s really what I stopped to speak to you about. On the surface, he took it calmly enough. And that’s the trouble. He took it too calmly. Not a normal kind of control, if you know what I mean. He’s withdrawn, drifting out of contact, and that’s a danger sign.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t like to mention this, to frighten you needlessly, perhaps, but I think under the circumstances that I’d better. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, Mr. Roche. I’ve watched it happen.” Smalley lifted his eyes to the light. Behind a thin film, they had a bright, blind look. “I’m thinking of suicide, Mr. Roche.”
“Suicide!”
“Yes. I know it must seem incredible to you. It always does, and maybe in this case it really is, but if you’re wise you’ll watch him for a while. Just keep him under observation.”
“I think you must be mistaken. The old man never struck me as the type who would go off the deep end. Not even over something like this.”