Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017
- Автор: Фузилли Джим, Харрис Шарлин
- Год: 2017
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017». Краткое содержание книги:
Jo sat up in bed, listening. Dempsey was already upstairs. She had seen him go into Meg’s room and hop onto her bed.
The stairs creaked again. Someone moving carefully now.
Jo reached under the other pillow.
She had the hammer in her hand and was standing behind her bedroom door when it opened. She swung and heard a grunt and a curse.
She scrambled toward the lamp on her night table.
Caught in the pool of light, the hooded figure paused.
Seeing the ice pick in his gloved hand, Jo clutched her hammer tighter.
“Will?” she said. “It is you, isn’t it?”
He was silent for a long moment. Then he laughed.
“So Vivian was right. She was afraid you were on to us.”
“Vivian’s husband — the two of you killed him, didn’t you? Digitalis leaf?”
“Good guess. Tablets crumbled into his stew.”
Jo tried to slow her breathing. “And a few hours later the symptoms—”
“But there was no one to witness his distress but his loving wife. No way to prove it was anything but a heart attack.”
“Why Mildred? What did she know?”
“She came up the stairs from the basement with Howard’s jacket. She caught Vivian and me arguing.”
“About Sarah?”
“Vivian agreed with my clever plan to use sweet little Sarah as cover. Then when Sarah rejected me for her husband, my heart would be broken. Vivian and I would drift together, consoling each other. Even the difference in our ages—”
“But Vivian was afraid you were really falling for Sarah?”
“And started turning green-eyed. Unfortunately, Mildred popped up as Vivian was telling me that she was not going to let me throw her over.”
Jo said, “That would have gotten Mildred thinking.”
“I told her Vivian and I were rehearsing a scene from the play. She said, ‘Oh, my goodness, for a moment I thought...’ And then she excused herself and went back downstairs.”
“But you knew that when Mildred saw the entire play, she’d realize there was no scene like that.”
“She’d already told us that she wanted to watch the play sitting out in the audience.”
“So you panicked and decided to kill her.”
“No, I didn’t panic. I thought I might be able to fix it. I went after her and offered to take Howard’s jacket to him. But she started chattering while she was shoving Of Human Bondage into a drawer.” Will shook his head. “I could tell she was already imagining my naughty affair with Vivian.”
“And she might have begun to wonder about Vivian’s husband.”
“Like you have. So now you’re going to be the killer’s second victim.”
“Why don’t you take off that silly hood? I know who you are?”
“But I don’t want you to scratch my face. And if anyone sees me running away from your house—”
“Your disguise.”
He was walking toward her.
Jo yelled and charged, swinging her hammer. She felt the ice pick prick her shoulder, but she slammed against him. He stumbled off balance.
She was at the top of the stairs when he brought her down from behind. Her hammer spun out of her grasp.
The yowl sounded like a mountain lion. Will screamed, rearing up as he tried to fling Dempsey from his back.
In the moonlight, Jo scrambled up and grabbed the ivory bookend from the hall table. She brought it down on Will’s head.
He groaned and tumbled over.
She kicked the ice pick out of his reach. But he was out cold.
“We got him,” Jo told the cat, who was licking his fur. “We got him.”
The police officer Chief Gordon had stationed outside said he hadn’t seen Will come in through the back. He’d been trying to stay out of sight and then he’d heard something in the bushes.
Chief Gordon gave him an exasperated look and told him to get Will out of there.
Jo said she didn’t need to go to the hospital. Dempsey seemed to be okay too.
But it was almost dawn by the time the police left.
The telephone rang an hour or so later. Jo thought it might be Howard, who hadn’t been in on the plan but might have heard about Will’s arrest. She let the telephone ring.
She fed Dempsey his breakfast and made sure he was eating. Then she went upstairs and took a bath and dressed.
She sat down on the bed she had made. Meg was still smiling at her from her photograph.
“You’d appreciate the irony, Meg. I was almost killed by a pharmacist wearing a hood. He looked like he was auditioning for the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe I should have whispered my own secret in his ear. Told the bastard that if we were south of the Mason-Dixon line he wouldn’t have to worry about my testimony because my mother’s mother was colored.”
Jo tried to laugh, but it was a pretty poor effort.
She gave herself a shake. She was alive and well. And Dempsey had come out swinging when someone tried to hurt her.
“Sometime in the next year, he might even let me pet him,” she told Meg.
© 2017 by Frankie Y. Bailey
Rizzo's Monkey Store
by Lou Manfredo
Brooklyn cop Joe Rizzo has starred in three highly acclaimed novels, Rizzo’s Fire, Rizzo's War, and Rizzo's Daughter. In its review of the latter, Publisher’s Weekly said: “Manfredo, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Brooklyn criminal justice system, crafts gritty dialogue as authentic-sounding as a wiretap transcript.” Here is Rizzo in his latest case. We have another coming soon.
Sergeant Joe Rizzo climbed slowly from the unmarked police car, his eyes immediately drawn to the upscale coffee shop located diagonally across Brooklyn’s Sixty-fifth Street. After a moment, his partner, Detective First Grade Mark Ginsberg, appeared at his side.
“See that coffee joint, Mark?”
Ginsberg followed Rizzo’s gesture. “Yeah. I see it.”
“That used to be a kid-friendly luncheonette. I’d take my oldest daughter, Marie, there when she was like four, five, like that.”
“And?” Ginsberg asked, pulling on latex gloves as he spoke.
“It was The Boardwalk Cafe then, but Marie called it the monkey store. See, they had this ride inside. You’d put in a token, and it moved up and down and back and forth. It looked like a Jeep and had a big smiling plastic monkey in the passenger seat. Marie would sit at the wheel, steering, tooting the horn, and the monkey would made happy noises. She liked that more than the grilled cheese and malted she had afterwards for lunch.” Rizzo turned his eyes back to the coffee shop, and all he could envision was the festive, neon-splashed facade of that long-gone luncheonette.
“Marie’s starting her sophomore year at college in September. That monkey store, that was a long time ago.”
Ginsberg made final adjustments to his gloves, studying Rizzo’s profile with a detached gaze.
“Yeah, Joe,” he said. “Long time. But — who’m I gonna be working this homicide with, Sergeant Rizzo or Captain Kangaroo? Forget the monkey store — we got a fresh body in that alley behind the hardware store. How ’bout we go take a look?”
The alley was long and narrow, a bleak strip of cracked and dirty concrete wedged between a small hardware store and a laundromat. Heavy wooden doors with steel security curtains stood mid alley on each side directly opposite each other, one accessing the hardware store, the other the laundromat. The alley dead-ended into the doorless and windowless brick wall of a warehouse.