Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994
- Автор: Bashover Albert, Crawford Dan
- Год: 1994
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN: 0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994». Краткое содержание книги:
Of course I got angry. Had I not obligingly cooked supper despite the echo of bullets zipping around my kitchen? Wasn’t it likely someone was hurt? A moment of sorrow was in order, if not for me, at least for the target. Instead he ate with fine appetite and used my cheerless mood to justify going home before nine o’clock. I opened a bottle of wine to celebrate the fact that I was fond of Gary but not in love with him.
I had no more information until the eleven o’clock news when my austere building was laid before the viewing public complete with flashing police cars and ambulance. It was the lead story.
Diamond merchant pays unexpected visit to girlfriend. Finds her with publishing executive. Kills both, then self.
Pictures of the deceased filled the screen. Two handsome men, one lovely woman. I recognized her.
We had occasionally crossed paths in the elevator and at the produce counter on Saturday mornings. Generally speaking, we were the same age, size, and coloring. Our carts contained the same vegetables, and our business suits could be exchanged with neither of us noticing. It was our very similarity that had caused me to wonder, sometimes with envy, at our differences. While I am grateful for the wink of traffic lights, she had spurned car horns and swiveling heads as only a beautiful woman who is used to them can do.
There is no denying she deserved the attention. Her skin glistened like a baby’s, her hair gleamed like silk. Her eyes sparkled like opals, and she moved with the grace of a ballet dancer. In short, she had the allure I possessed only in dreams. Her boyfriends, as would be expected, were a parade of rich and exciting men, while mine — Gary, the insurance salesman, was typical — stood in a short, polyester-clad line of famished suitors. As her picture faded I was filled with pity.
Life goes on. The scene of the crime was for rent. The lease Gary held on his place downtown was ending, and its renewal would mean an increase. When he saw the Vacancy sign on my building, he reasoned he might get a bargain on rooms in which a double murder and a suicide had been committed. I took him to the ground floor rental office to meet my manager, a personable, balding, roly-poly man named Mr. Gillespie. He handed Gary a typewritten sheet of paper.
“All it says is you’ve been informed of the crimes. Management doesn’t want anybody moving in without signing. Later on the tenant could say we concealed pertinent information and stop paying the rent. There’s all kinds, believe me.”
I read it over Gary’s shoulder. The wording puzzled me.
“It says ‘three incidents of violent death.’ Don’t you mean one incident? Three deaths in one incident?”
He looked surprised.
“No. Three different incidents. Didn’t you hear about them?”
Privacy is costly. I should have befriended the gossips.
“If it’s your policy for tenants to learn such things by chance, how come you’re informing Gary and didn’t inform me when I rented my place?” I asked.
“Because you didn’t rent that apartment. We don’t have everybody sign. We’d scare away the whole population.”
“Do you mean to say they all occurred in that particular unit?”
“Right. And I’m glad you haven’t heard. It means we’ve managed to keep the apartment number a private matter. Those reporters would turn a coincidence into a mystical event.”
I’m not especially superstitious, but three violent episodes in a single apartment struck me as mystical, too. I thought Gary agreed.
“That bad, eh? What’s been happening up there?”
Mr. Gillespie sighed. Evidently the story bored him.
“The first was five years ago. Young lady fell into the alley. Nobody else was there, and she wasn’t the type to stand on a ledge washing windows, so they ruled it a suicide. The next tenant poisoned a bottle of whisky at his birthday party. Killed himself and three of his friends. Then there was this last, of course. At least this time the tenant didn’t do it.”
I had been calculating rapidly. Eight people in five years had come to an untimely end.
“Gary, I don’t like the sound of this.”
“Believe in ghosts, do you?” He grinned, showing a slightly crooked set of teeth. Glancing slyly at the manager he added: “I bet she’s not the only one. How many have turned it down?”
Mr. Gillespie smiled knowingly, and they spent a few minutes haggling. Finally Gary was promised a reduction of two hundred a month, and we were given the key to take a look.
The apartment was three stories above mine on the same side, but all they had in common was the layout. Every appliance in the kitchen looked new, and so did everything in the bath. Even the ceiling fixtures had been replaced. The most noticeable difference was the brightness. The added height afforded a clear view well over the top of the building next door, the one that dimmed all my windows. The rooms were freshly painted, the carpet shampooed — probably all done to quell the morbid fears of apartment hunters, though none of it diminished mine. The living room had a mirrored wall that was startlingly beautiful, reflecting a panoramic sweep of skyscrapers visible through the picture window opposite.
“Wow,” said Gary.
“Wow is right,” I shot back. “Wow — one plunge, four poisonings, and three bullet holes.” I wasn’t in love with Gary; neither did I long to witness him hurtling past my window minus a bungee cord or writhing in agony as he frothed at the mouth. He ignored me.
“Look at this mirror,” he said. “It must weigh a ton. The pieces are screwed in, which says they were too heavy to be glued. That means they put up plywood first. And see the frame? The beams were cut to butt against the edge instead of overlapping, and then they were sanded and stained and varnished. The carpentry alone is worth a small fortune.”
The mirror’s beauty interested me more than the cost of its installation, and I went to take a closer look. It was made of separate tiles, each piece about ten inches square and beveled. The glass was smoky, not clear, and there were narrow veins of gold wiggling through it like jagged scores of precious metal in a dark, underground mine. I laughed when I saw Gary’s reflection in a pose of vanity run preening fingers through his light brown hair. He looked unusually handsome, as if all irregularity of feature, all flaws had been erased. I glanced at myself and was surprised to see I had lost the seven pounds I’d been trying to drop for months. Besides trimming my figure, it had sharpened the angles of my face, and I almost looked like a model. Then I noticed that my hair looked glossier, too. A shiver ran through me. I had not looked like that less than an hour before. My senses sharpened with fear as if footsteps thumped behind me on a dark, empty street. I tore my eyes away.
“Gary, let’s get out of here.”
“I’m taking it,” he said.
Back downstairs I asked Mr. Gillespie if the mirrored wall had been recently constructed.
“Nope. The young lady put it in, the one who jumped. She imported it from India or Burma or someplace. It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”
“Everything looks so new. Did you renovate because of all the deaths?”
He eyed me sternly. “You shouldn’t be so superstitious. All we did was paint. The young lady put in the mirror, then every tenant after her didn’t know what to do with their money and got permission to modernize something. First it was the bathroom, I think. Then the kitchen. Come to remember, we did replace the carpeting. We had to, after the poisonings. We couldn’t get the stains out.”
“But the mirror has been there since the first death?”
“We left it there, sure. Is something wrong with it?”
If I’d said I felt menaced by it, he would have thought I was mad. I opted to sound quality-minded.