Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006
- Автор: Бетанкур Джон Грегори, Jr. William J. Carroll,
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
His hands shook and he craved a cigarette so badly he could taste it. He knew it would destroy his career, but he thought only a soothing smoke could blot out the horrible splat! and erase the smell of that sickening cherry disinfectant.
After six more sleepless nights, Mort gave in. He drove to an all-night convenience store and found the same brand he’d smoked at sixteen: Lucky Strikes. It was three A.M. He went outside and lit up on his back porch. As he breathed in the first smoke, he felt the nicotine course through him and got a buzz he hadn’t felt in years. A pleasant buzz, better than coffee, more soothing. Yet he felt more alive at the same time. It was just the jolt his system needed. He watched the white smoke curl upward to the stars, and smelled only burning tobacco and cool night air. The vile odor of cherries was gone.
Of course, he could never smoke again. He knew that. He finished his cigarette and buried the butt in the garden. Then he washed his pajamas and showered and scrubbed his teeth until the cigarette smell was gone. Finally, exhausted, he fell into a dreamless sleep.
At breakfast, he craved another cigarette with his morning paper. He read a story that said Patricia’s husband Decameron had hired Jasper J. Cowell as his attorney. Cowell said his client was innocent and he would prove it.
Mort was afraid. Cowell had a reputation for twisting facts and confusing witnesses so that his guilty clients went free. Poor Patricia would never receive justice and neither would Mort. Patricia’s death had shattered his nerves, upset his delicate tasting apparatus, and ruined any enjoyment of cherries forever.
Mort worried that Patricia’s husband would escape punishment, as so many wealthy wife killers had before him. The cigarette craving grew worse. At lunch, he went to La Jeunesse, to treat himself to a civilized French meal. But alas, the day’s special was duck breast in cherry sauce, and the restaurant was permeated with the fowl odor. Mort left and had a bland turkey sandwich from the coffee shop in his office building. He still wanted a cigarette. He wanted it at one thirty and at three and at six and ten that night. He didn’t give in to his craving until three o’clock in the morning.
As he puffed on the cigarette in his garden, Mort promised himself he’d never smoke at the office.
He kept that promise one week.
It was Mr. Percardian Senior who caught Mort on the third-floor landing of the fire stairs, blowing smoke out the window.
“I am sorry,” Mr. Percardian said. “I know that you have been under a strain recently. But you know the rules. Smoking destroys the taste buds. Even one cigarette is enough to ruin them forever, and from the yellow stains on your teeth and fingers, this is not your first cigarette. When I noticed them, I suspected as much, and followed you. I must let you go.”
Mort left the office where he’d worked for more than seventeen years, engulfed in shame and rage. He was no longer a coffee taster and he could never be one again. Mr. Percardian would see to that. Mort had loved his job. He was not one more cog in the great mercantile machine of New York, but a big wheel in his world. Now he was a jobless nobody. His beautiful young wife Jasmine, used to the little luxuries he could provide, would leave him when he didn’t have any money.
But she did not.
“Don’t worry, baby,” she said. “I know you’re disappointed, but now you can work for my brother’s dotcom company. You’ll make a ton of money, even more than you did as a coffee taster. And I can wear perfume again.”
Mort went to work for his brother-in-law, a grinning dipwad who called him Buddy, just like he called everyone else, because he couldn’t remember names. Mort made more money than he had as a coffee taster. But he was unhappy. He hated this meaningless work. He couldn’t even drink the office coffee. Dipwad bought it in bulk from an office supply company. It tasted like warm mulch.
Mort missed the prestige of his old job. Decameron the wife-murderer had a lot to answer for. He’d killed Mort’s career. He’d murdered Mort’s sleep. Mort was awakened by that fatal splat! at least once a night. Then he’d sit up the rest of the night smoking.
Mort followed the approaching murder trial in the papers. Decameron’s lawyer was using every possible delaying tactic and dirty trick, but the prosecuting attorney promised that the wife killer would get life in prison.
Good. Maybe then Mort would once more sleep easy. Maybe he would get through a day without sneaking around for a cigarette like a teenager. Mort couldn’t smoke in his dipwad brother-in-law’s office, because it was bad for the computers. He sneaked smokes around the Dumpster with half a dozen other nicotine renegades, his sensitive nose assaulted by the stench of garbage, until the healing cigarette smoke blotted out the odor.
Mort returned home each night to find his wife drenched in jasmine scent. The bathroom reeked of jasmine soap, lotion, and bubble bath, and his delicate nostrils itched in protest. But Jasmine refused to give up her perfume, no matter how many blue boxes from Tiffany’s Mort brought her.
“It was one thing to give up perfume for your job, Mort. But now you want me to give it up because you’re so sensitive. Well, I’m sensitive too.” Jasmine looked mean when she said that. He didn’t remember giving her that tennis bracelet on her shapely arm.
“Where did you get that...” he started to say “bracelet,” but then realized she might tell him, and changed his sentence to “scratch on your arm?”
“From my kitten, Puss-Puss.” She opened the garage door and out strutted a white hairball with malicious blue eyes. “Puss-Puss is a gift from a friend.”
The only thing that Mort hated more than perfume was cats. Jasmine had never had one before. The litterbox odor permeated the house, even if Jasmine did keep it in the basement. But Mort was afraid to ask who the cat-giving friend was. Jasmine might tell him. In fact, she seemed to be daring him to ask.
Mort began adding scotch to his nightly smokes. The booze blotted out the olfactory assaults caused by his wife’s perfume and her cat. After a few drinks, he didn’t even mind the tumbleweeds of cat hair drifting around the house.
He started taking a scotch bottle to work to get him through the boredom of his dotcom days. He couldn’t seem to negotiate the garage very well lately, and that caused a couple of little dents his bottle-green Rover, but he thought it only improved it. A tough vehicle was supposed to have a few dents.
When Jasmine complained, he bought her a red ragtop Eclipse. He did not buy her the crystal pendant that she hung on the ragtop’s rearview mirror and he didn’t ask where she got it. He was certain she was seeing someone else. He wondered when his marriage would be over.
It ended the night he accidentally ran over Puss-Puss in the driveway.
“I’m sorry, Jasmine, I didn’t see the cat,” he said, as she cried over the crushed body.
“No,” she spat back. “You saw two. You’ve been drinking for months. I can’t take it any more.”
The next day, when he came home from his dull dotcom job, his wife left him, or rather, she asked him to leave her. His bags were packed and waiting in the garage. The locks were changed on all the doors. He got a good lawyer. She had a better one.
Jasmine got the house, the ragtop, and a staggering amount of alimony. He couldn’t possibly pay it, especially after his dipwad ex-brother-in-law fired him. He didn’t care. Jasmine would leave him alone if there was no money. He found out she’d moved in with a car dealer — the same one who sold Mort her red Eclipse.
Mort traded in the bottle-green Range Rover for a 1978 Torino whose main color was Bondo gray, got a cheap apartment and a job delivering pizzas. Not even gourmet pizzas, but junk food made from frozen dough, canned tomato sauce, and cheese that melted like napalm. The smell revolted his twitching taste buds, but he ate the pizzas anyway. They were about all he could afford. That and scotch and smokes.