Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994
- Автор: Гуларт Рон, Hitchcock Geoffrey
- Год: 1994
- Язык: английский
- Год: Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994». Краткое содержание книги:
“Hoo, boy,” Ma said, “listen to it. Couple of bigshots. As if anybody’d recognize you. Except maybe the city zookeeper. He might think the weasel cage sprung a leak.”
“What I mean to say, Ma, these guys are dangerous.”
“Oh, so now they’re dangerous, are they? Something else you forgot to tell me. What am I supposed to do then, something starts to go wrong? Stagger around collecting open wounds? The hell with that. I want a stocking over my face, too.”
“How will a stocking protect you from wounds?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“Not really.”
“Better than a kick with a frozen boot.”
“Ma, you’re downstairs, you’re one of the customers, for all they know. No way they’re gonna connect you with me and George, are they?”
“If you mean will they know you’re my sons, I should hope not. You’re too big, dumb, an’ ugly to be sons of mine, any fool can see that.”
“Right, Ma, we’re too dumb an’ ugly, so I guess you got nothing to worry about.” That sour note twisting Zeke’s voice, like he wished he could toss her out of the car right there in the middle of the Midtown Bridge and save them all a lot of grief later on. “You sit downstairs long as you can, till, say, maybe a quarter past, when the waiters start putting the run to everybody, then you hide out in the ladies’ washroom while they chase the customers out.”
“Great. Somethin’ else I didn’t know. I gotta go hide in the can.”
“We forgot to mention it, that’s all.”
“What else did you forget to mention? Armed guards? How about Rottweiler dogs? What if they send Rottweiler dogs into the can after me, eh? Did you think about that, Mr. Frankenstein? Rottweiler dogs?”
“Ma. There ain’t gonna be no dogs, not even chihuahuas. An’ they never check the can out properly, it’s too much like work. Maybe they open the door an’ glance in, but you’re in a cubicle, ain’t you? All they see is your feet, so you only gotta stand on the toilet seat.”
“I see. You know all about it, don’t you? I guess you spend a lotta time in the ladies’ can. An’ what if a security guard, the one with the Rottweiler dogs, gets a nature urge an’ decides to come into the cubicle? You expect I’m gonna climb the goddamn wall, or just what?”
“Oh, man.” Zeke turned to George. “You wanna talk to her, bro?”
“That’s not going to happen, Ma,” George said.
“But what if it does?”
Ma could go on like this all night. George said to her:
“Let’s get back to the main point, Ma. The place quiets down, you go back out to the lobby and sit down in one of the big chairs in the shadows behind a gas pump. From there, if you have to, you can deke back into the washroom. And all you got to do if anybody comes in the street door, or if anybody still left in the club suddenly appears and starts upstairs, is go outside to the car and hit the horn a couple of times. The office window’s right above, so we’re bound to hear you, and we’ll know what’s going on and get out fast.”
“Say again?” Ma laughed. “You dopes wouldn’t know what was going on if Larry King was up there, live, to yell it in your ear.”
She kept laughing like that, bitterly, all the rest of the way to the club.
It was a couple of minutes to closing. Still some cars parked in the side lot next to the Gas Station, but Zeke said that was okay because a few customers in there would take some of the heat off of them. Ma laughed at that, but at least she didn’t say anything. They left the car in the street, just under the second floor windows, and then they went into the club.
The reception area was empty. Completely deserted. No hostess there to greet them at this late hour, just as Zeke had said.
Good old Zeke, standing there with his Quasimodo face hanging out.
“What’s the matter?” George asked.
Zeke was looking down at the door, thick fingers scraping in the beard stubble of his chin. “Hey, bro, lookit. No way we can doublelock this thing ourselves. You got to have a key.”
It was true. There was no simple latch mechanism, no button, no chain, nothing like that; the secondary lock installed on the door was a key-operated deadbolt. George wanted to turn around right there that minute and walk back out to the car and drive home. Like, jeez, not that it was any big deal, but the guy was supposed to have cased the joint, right? And doublelocking had been his own idea, and he hadn’t even had the presence of mind to check the hardware out. Man.
And there was no “closed” sign, either.
“I was positive there’d be a ‘closed’ sign,” Zeke said stupidly, “every kinda business has a ‘closed’ sign to hang out.”
“Every business except this one,” George muttered.
Then Ma chimed in, of course.
“An’ there ain’t no chair.”
This was also a fact. The big leather buckets were gone. So was the long leather bench that had sprawled along the wall. All that remained in the deserted room were the weatherbeaten gas pumps, the road signs, and license plates. Ma was getting really teed off now, screwing her face up into tight little wrinkled lines and cranking up her volume a couple of notches.
“You weasels said there’d be a chair for me to sit in! I’m lookin’ all around this place, an’ I don’t see no damn chair. I don’t see nothin’ even resembling a chair. I guess it’s an invisible chair, is that what it is? Do you weasels see any kind of a chair around here for me to sit in?”
Zeke spun around then and hissed at Ma like a steam valve, his face blue with anger and one big blunt finger pressed to his lips. Zeke worried someone in the next room would notice them, that Ma was going to pull one of her usual stunts and create a scene.
George was still working out the furniture thing — were they in the midst of redecorating the place, he wondered. Or maybe, what it was, had they sent the stuff in for recovering?
Ma was defiant.
“Chairs! You were jerking me around, weren’t you!”
George said gently: “Ma. Listen.” He pointed through the door that led into the club. “See the little table there by the wall, it’s not occupied? Look, it’s got flowers. You love flowers. Change of plan, Ma. You sit down at that table, you can see all the way out of the club and into this room, and keep an eye on the door from there. It’s just three, four yards farther away, that’s all.”
“Yeah? Thanks for figuring it out for me, Frankenstein. I could also grab a chair from that table, drag it out here and sit down on it right where I’m s’posed to, couldn’t I?”
Ma was still hollering. George tried to quiet her, whispering, “No, Ma. No, you couldn’t. See, rearranging the furniture, that’d attract attention, Ma. We don’t want to attract attention. Some waiter’d come along and put the arm on you.”
“Some waiter better not if he don’t wanna wait tables the rest of his life with a twelve pound brace from his prong to his prat.”
“Will you tone it down?” Zeke said, exasperated.
“It’s just we don’t want no one getting suspicious,” George told her.
“Suspicious? Hah! That’s a laugh.” Ma tossed her large head. “Couple of deadheads like you lurching around the place, you think nobody’ll get suspicious? Hah! Hah-hah!” Zeke towered over her, breathing.
“Ma! That’s it! Are you gonna shut up? Are you gonna — ahh!” He hobbled away. “Jesus, she kicked me, bro. My leg... oh, man... oh, Jesus...”
George got Ma to cooperate and to go in and sit down at the table in the restaurant after he dipped into his wallet and gave her the last twenty dollars he had so she could order a gin and an appetizer if the place was still serving, telling her no, he didn’t know if they served deep-fried onion loaf or not, she’d just have to find out for herself; and telling her, Don’t forget to go hide in the can later, Ma; and then leaving her there frowning around the room looking for a waiter to snarl at.