The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
He dragged himself up and slumped on the couch, two big tears filling his eyes. He knew he was going to have to make dull, dumb Clara feel lovely and adored for a long time.
He dredged up the strength to reach for the phone and dial Clara’s number. She must have been sitting on her phone. She answered instantly.
He took a breath and gave it all he had, the Bailey special sockeroo, an intimate huskiness: “Baby, these last days have been endless without you.”
“Me too, Eddie. Please hurry to me, Eddie. I’ve picked a wedding dress and—”
“Easy, Kitten,” he smothered a groan. “We got to talk this thing over. I mean, something has come up. My deal fell through, and aunt Hilgred, she had to have emergency surgery.”
“The poor dear!”
“She had nobody else to turn to, Kitten. I had to do what I could.”
“Of course you did, Eddie.”
“So I wired a loan from a character named Fleschetti who sends out shivs to do his collecting. And I love you too much, baby, to have you see me if I was ugly. Like, with all my teeth missing or an ear lopped off.
A Change of Heart
Originally appeared in The Executioner Mystery Magazine, August 1975.
Turning the continental onto the white-graveled driveway of Aunt Crabby’s estate, Eddie Crabtree listened to the chit-chat in the back seat between his aunt and Dr. Picard. Each innocent word distilled another drop of venom in Eddie’s reservoir of bitterness.
He choked back a monstrous case of heartburn as he tooled the heavy car through spangles of bright sunlight filtering through the elm-shaded lane. Today, he hated mother nature along with everything else. As if by special arrangement, a lovelier spring day couldn’t have been imagined for Aunt Crabby’s homecoming from the hospital. The first subtle taste of summer was in the air. The sky was a misty blue. Quickened and freshly green, the very earth shared with Aunt Crabby a bursting of new life, renewal. The death rattle of falling leaves was past, for Aunt Crabby as well as the trees.
The glistening, steel-gray car wended around the terraced front lawns and gardens. Ahead loomed the imposing, two-story, brick neo-colonial home that Aunt Crabby’s husband, deceased, had left as a reflection of himself. Its quiet, fortress-like solidity was relieved by the touch of ivy growing on the walls. The servants, five in number, had noted the car’s approach and were lining up on the veranda beside the front door to welcome Aunt Crabby home.
Aunt Crabby was holding her breath as she leaned forward for her first look after all these long weeks. “Home...” she murmured from just behind Eddie’s right ear. “I can’t wait to get inside and caress every stick of furniture!”
“You’re not eighteen, my dear,” Dr. Picard grumped, “even if you do have the heart of an eighteen-year-old. You follow my orders, now. No overdoing it.”
“I certainly don’t feel my forty-nine. But I don’t want a shaggy old bear of a heart surgeon growling at me,” Aunt Crabby giggled happily.
Eddie stared hard through the windshield. Laughing? Aunt Crabby? It didn’t seem possible. He was dreadfully certain her new vitality would last another fifty years...
He stopped the car at the shallow front steps, which were flanked by a pair of stone lions. He jumped out and opened the rear door. His face a carefully-composed and long-practiced mask, he offered a tender hand to help Aunt Crabby from the car.
Her gaze lingered on his face. Her eyes were almost like those of a stranger, deeper, gentler, quieter than the eyes he remembered. “Thank you, dear,” she gave his hand a quick, motherly squeeze.
Dr. Picard bumbled out beside her. He permitted her to take the short walk up by herself, slowly and carefully, one step at a time while the servants strained with each of her movements.
She paused on the veranda to accept their welcome. Cook, gardener, maid, butler, the spare-boned registered nurse who had been assigned by Dr. Picard to live in for awhile.
“Welcome home, mum...
“It’s so good to have you back!...”
When all the murmured greetings were over, the servants sneaked bewildered glances at each other. The eyes of Mrs. Violetta Crabtree Harper had actually filled with tears of tenderness and gratitude!
Aunt Crabby led the way into the spacious foyer with its vaulted ceiling, gold-framed mirror, antique hat-rack and umbrella stand. Eddie was the last to enter, on dragging feet.
The servants scattered to their tasks. Dr. Picard gave Aunt Crabby a few moments to look about brightly and exclaim how good it was to be home. Then he ordered her into the chair-lift that had been installed at the graceful, curving stairway.
“Up we go, my dear,” he said. “You’ve had plenty of excitement for the first day. Don’t rush things. You’ve years and years to enjoy your home now.”
He was a big, slovenly looking man whose appearance belied his genius as a heart surgeon. It took the setting of an operating room the touch of a scalpel in his hand to transform him.
Aunt Crabby, Dr. Picard, and the skeletal nurse (Miss Mayberry was her name) disappeared in the upper reaches toward Aunt Crabby’s bedroom. Eddie slouched into the living room and flopped in a huge wingchair upholstered in dark green silk. The chair seemed to shrink his slender frame. Behind heavy black glasses, his face was sparrow-like, with a thin cap of brown hair plastered on a long, narrow skull.
He stared blindly. His scanty, wiry muscles twitched now and then, visible echoes of his churning thoughts.
Right up until today he’d fought the idea that Aunt Crabby would leave the hospital alive. Sure, heart transplants were no longer news. But it just hadn’t seemed possible to Eddie that Dr. Picard could tear the heart from the still-warm body of the Dutcher youth, jam it into Aunt Crabby’s bosom, and have the whole thing work out. Her tissues would reject the alien flesh; her kidneys would collapse; her lungs would fill with fluids and she’d drown in pneumonic juices. But her tissues, kidneys, and lungs had performed with the ease of a computer.
“She’s a lousy, sneaky cheat!” Eddie whispered, his voice quivering with savagery even as it cracked on a note of intense self-pity.
That was the sum and substance of it. For two long, insufferable years he’d played the role of dutiful nephew. Whipping boy. Slave, no less.
He’d leaped to obey her whims. He’d soothed away her fears of death when nightmares had brought her screaming to wakefulness at three in the morning. He’d borne her vituperations as she’d grown to hate those whose days weren’t numbered.
The seemingly certain and foreseeable goal had sustained Eddie. He’d stuck it out, even if the effort to stay in the compliant nephew character had cost him an ulcer. Each day she’d used up had brought him twenty-four hours closer to the moment when he could buy his dear, departed aunt the biggest funeral wreath in town.
He’d played the game honestly. Like the time when he was a kid with the Monopoly game in the neighborhood, skipping squares on the board.
When the sole surviving relative passes “Go” he collects two million dollars. Wasn’t that the rule?
But they had conspired, that horrible old man with the doctors degrees and Aunt Crabby. And they had reached into the “Chance” pile and sneaked out for Eddie a card that read: Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two million dollars...
A burning-knife sensation gathered force behind Eddie’s navel and shot through viscera to his spine. He gritted his teeth, labored out of the chair, and struggled upstairs to his room. He was in the bathroom, chasing a slug of Amphojel with a shot of Alka Seltzer, when timid knuckles rapped on his bedroom door.