Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 11/01/10 Read online

  “That’s the kind you need to watch out for,” said Renata. “It’s not safe.”

  Now he was angry. In fact, he felt a rage boiling inside that was worse than what he felt walking out of his building, a jobless and unwanted professional, carrying his pathetic box of belongings like a kindergartener on the last day of school. Useless. How dare she imply he was dangerous. He was a soccer coach. This woman, a crummy bartender in a crap bar was telling this slut to watch out for him? For him? As if he might hurt her, as if he had a buried rage that would do something like rape her. Or worse, one of those monsters who would methodically slice her into pieces. Is that what she meant?

  He grabbed Eileen’s arm. “Don’t listen to her. I’m a nice guy. Just a sad guy who got laid off today. No job. So what am I gonna do except have a few drinks?”

  She stroked his arm. “That’s right, hon. Booze is good for soothing the beast.”

  “In some men, it releases the buried beast,” said Renata.

  God, he wanted to smack that woman.

  Eileen was off her stool. She swallowed the last of her drink, the red liquid poured between her lips, the celery leaves brushed her cheek, leaving a wet spot that he could see even in the gloomy light. The skin on her arms jiggled slightly as she shook her glass, resettling the ice at the bottom to prevent it from dropping onto her face. She was older than he’d thought. That loose skin, shaking like a thick towel in the wind, made him slightly less certain of where he was headed. Lin’s arms didn’t jiggle like that. Forty years old and she still looked pretty good. If it wasn’t for that razor blade tongue. Are you networking, David? How long do you think it will take?

  He was immobilized. It was a doorway into a new, unknown world. A woman who was obviously offering herself to him, even if he had to pay, which wasn’t completely clear. He’d never paid before. And maybe he wouldn’t have to. She was small. He was a big guy. She could demand money up front, but he could easily manipulate her out of that. She didn’t look quite that savvy, looked like she was on some kind of cusp, just like him, having lived a certain life, things went wrong, and now she had to sell herself. It wasn’t quite clear if that was the deal. Maybe she thought she could get something from him. Or maybe she just wanted him. Saw a good-looking guy, younger than she was, not like the other scum that usually hung out at this place, and she wanted him. Things weren’t always about money, maybe she just needed the ego boost.

  “I’m telling you, Eileen. You’re making a mistake.”

  Damn her. Who did she think she was? David’s hand tightened around the glass. He lifted it as if to take a final swallow and saw it was empty. He raised his arm and hurled the glass at the mirror. It cracked and the shot glass thudded onto the shelf, rattled against some bottles, but didn’t knock them over. Where was the enormous, crashing, shattering storm of glass he’d expected? A spider mark on the mirror, a minor impact. Like his life. All that effort, his good throwing arm, an arm that had thrown thousands of baseballs, felt limp and as waggly as the skin under Eileen’s arm. Renata plucked a cell phone out of her pocket and pressed a single number for speed dial. She growled into the phone, “I need your help.”

  “Why’d you call him?” Eileen was crying, blue streaks ran down her face.

  Before he could blink, Renata, pocketed the phone, reached under the bar and pulled out a knife, much bigger than the one she’d used to slice limes. David stumbled and sat down hard on the floor. He wondered what the next humiliation would be. Possibly Eileen would try to help him up, making him feel like the old man he suddenly realized he was. The ache in his tailbone raced up his spine. The floor was cold. He pushed on the palms of his hands and raised himself into an awkward crab-like position, his butt off the floor and his hands and feet supporting his torso like a bridge.

  “Stay down,” said Renata.

  “I’ll pay for the mirror.”

  Eileen scurried to his side and ran her fingers through his hair.

  “Get away from him. Are you stupid?”

  “I thought I had him under control.”

  “You always think that, until you get sucked in with too many free drinks.”

  David closed his eyes.

  “Quit rubbing his head. Get control of him.”

  Eileen grabbed his shirt collar, and he opened his eyes. She held a gun in her opposite hand. She was still crying and it wasn’t clear that her eyes were focused on him.

  David grabbed the toe poking out of her sandal and twisted. She cried out and he reached up and grabbed the gun. Renata raced to the end of the bar and out onto the main floor, straight at him, the knife clenched in her fist. He lifted the gun and fired. Renata was immobile for half an instant as a dark, moist spot grew at the center of her shirt. Then she collapsed on the floor.

  David scrambled to his feet. He went behind the bar and grabbed the empty shot glass he’d thrown. He and Eileen hurried out the door. The sunlight sliced into his eyes. Tears spilled over his lower eyelids. Eileen gripped his bicep and tugged him across the parking lot. There were only two cars. A dirty white compact American car and his.

  He leaned against his Porsche. This was it. Get in and drive home to face the rest of his life, jobless and humiliated, frightened of the repercussions. Or go wherever Eileen planned to take him. Blood pumped furiously through his veins, pushing as if it couldn’t quite make its way where it was headed. He closed his eyes and saw a vast network of vessels and arteries on the backs of his eyelids. The ache in his tailbone had seeped into his lower back.

  “You don’t want me, do you.”

  “I do, but . . .”

  “You’d better leave.”

  She leaned forward, nearly falling off her platform shoes, and kissed his throat.

  She walked to her car, teetering slightly. She looked across the roof of the sagging car. “I don’t know your name.”

  “David.”

  “Be good, David.” She didn’t open the car door. She looked into his eyes, not even squinting from the sunlight. Possibly thirty seconds passed before she tugged on the handle of the car. It opened with a creaking sound. She climbed inside.

  David unlocked his car and lowered himself into the seat. He revved the engine, backed out of the parking spot, turned the wheel sharply, and went down the apron. The left rear wheel bounced over the curb. When he started the day, just a few hours ago, he never thought he’d be unemployed, much less running from a woman he’d shot. Now he had to hope his prints were lost among hundreds of others on the bar, in the men’s room. He turned toward the freeway. The sun hit the windshield and he lowered his visor to keep it out of his eyes. He couldn’t seem to find his sunglasses. At the on-ramp, he saw the traffic was light, and he threaded his way on without easing up on the gas.

  Copyright © 2010 Cathryn Grant

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  Fiction

  THE LAMB WAS SURE TO GO

  GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD

  Ollie Brown finally got tired of chasing Jetta Brown’s tail. Jetta was Ollie’s wife, a fine and tart little thing who liked to wear dresses that made her teardrop body look like a shrink-wrapped party invite, and her man-mountain husband had been trying to force the idea of monogamy upon her ever since I’d known the pair, which was going on eleven years.

  The night I heard the news, I was off my stool and headed for the door of the Deuce, passing Howard Gaines just as he was dropping a cold thirty on my cousin Del, winning another game of dominoes from a man who was both younger and far less inebriated than he. In an effort to blunt Del’s humiliation with casual conversation, Howard mentioned offhandedly that Ollie had jumped in front of a Metro Rail train three days before on Flower and Eleventh, leaving Jetta a widow with little in the way of a body to center a funeral around.

  I stopped in my tracks. “He killed himself?”

  Howard’s gray head bobbed up and down. “He left a note. Said he couldn’t take Jetta’s games no more, an
d he loved her too much to leave her. And we all know the fool sure as hell couldn’t kill her, so . . .”

  “Kill her? That man couldn’t touch a hair on that woman’s head, didn’t matter how bad she treated him,” Del said.

  And that was the God’s honest truth. Anyone who made a habit of drinking at the Deuce became familiar with the pair’s routine eventually: Jetta sniffing every pants leg in the house until she found something stiff and willing inside, and Ollie losing his mind and temper in response, pitting his rage and giant hands against all but Jetta herself. That was the one line he could never bring himself to cross.

  I shook my head at the shame of it all and sat back down at the bar.

  “Hell of a thing, ain’t it? Lovin’ a woman that much?” Howard said. “Me, I couldn’t do it. Throw myself in front of a damn train just ’cause my wife don’t know how to keep her drawers on.”

  “Shoot, you don’t know what you could do,” Lilly Tennell sneered. The barkeep had ambled over to our end of the bar to regale us with the magnificence of her opinion, and none of us was going to tell her it wasn’t appreciated. Lilly was bigger than any two male patrons in the house combined, and she had less patience for disagreement than a black bear with its foot in a trap. “Let the right girl come along and open your nose, see if you ain’t turnin’ flips and doin’ cartwheels at the snap of her little finger!”

  The big woman snapped two of her own meaty fingers and laughed, eyes rolling up toward the ceiling.

  “Hate to say it, but girlfriend’s right,” Del said. “I’ve been there myself. We all have.”

  “So what?” Howard asked, unconvinced. “Just ’cause a man’s crazy in love don’t mean he’s gotta let a woman treat ’im like a damn dog. She don’t wanna do you right, show you the proper respect—”

  “Walk away,” Del said.

  “That’s right. Walk the hell off. Shoot, you ain’t a man if you can’t do that.”

  Lilly chuckled, grandly amused by Howard and Del’s unified front of imperial maleness, and turned—as I knew she inevitably would—in my direction. “You’re awful quiet there, hotshot. What do you got to say about it?”

  “Me?” I produced a casual shrug. “I guess I say it all depends upon the woman. A man feels one deep enough, there isn’t anything she can do to make him leave.”

  “Oh.” Del nodded his head with recognition, a small smile growing larger on his face. “I bet I know who you’re talking about.”

  “Who?” Howard asked.

  “A client G had once. She said this fool—”

  I silenced him with a shake of my head, but Lilly caught the gesture and jumped on it like a cat pawing a mouse.

  “Uh-uh. To hell with that. Finish what you was sayin’,” she told Del.

  “It’s a private matter, Lilly,” I said, “and it’s not worth talking about.”

  “You let me an’ Howard be the judges of that.” The big woman behind the flaming red mouth and dirty apron slapped a fresh glass down in front of me, set a bottle of Wild Turkey alongside it, and said, “Let’s hear it.”

  It’s not a story I care much to reflect upon, let alone regale friends with, but confession is supposed to be good for the soul, so I told it.

  My soul has always needed all the help it can get.

  I remember that it happened during one of those extended lulls in my business that turn my every waking thought to loan sharks and debt consolidation. A stranger and I were sitting out front at the barbershop, watching Mickey Moore shave the stubble from Hobie London’s jawline as we all played the dozens at the expense of Condoleezza Rice, when a sister I’d never seen before stepped through the door and sheepishly asked for me.

  “I’m lookin’ for Aaron Gunner?”

  She was a reed-thin, middle-aged black woman who hadn’t been the knockout she was dressed up to be for a long time, and like most of my would-be clients, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t come to the wrong address.

  “That’s him right there,” Mickey said, pointing his scissors in my direction before I could identify myself.

  “Aaron Gunner, the private investigator?” She glanced around the barbershop as if it were an apparition that had suddenly sprung up all around her.

  “My office is in the back,” I said, rising to my feet. “Come on in, Ms. . . . ?”

  She didn’t give me her name, but she followed my lead through the beaded curtain filling an open doorway that separates Mickey’s workspace from mine. The sight of my office confused her even further because there’s nothing more to it than a desk, two chairs, and a couch, but I took little offense. The sight of it often sets my own head reeling.

  I coaxed her into a chair and took my own seat behind the desk, then asked for her name again.

  “Innes. Deirdre Innes,” she said.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Innes?”

  “I thought you’d have a real office. This is nice, but—”

  I could have told her it was the best a brother in my profession working out of his own Central Los Angeles neighborhood could do, but I exchanged that explanation for the shorter, less cynical version. “The rent’s cheap, and Mickey does my head twice a month for free. How I can help you, Ms. Innes?”

  She hugged her purse close to her stomach, gathering nerve, and said, “I need a bodyguard. A man I know’s gonna kill me.” Her eyes were starting to tear up.

  “What man is this?”

  “His name’s Samuel Stills. I seen ’im kill a man outside a bar eight years ago, and I had to say so in court. He told me then, they ever let ’im out, I was good as dead.”

  “And he’s out now?”

  “Girl I know in Corrections says he’s scheduled for release this Wednesday.”

  I started jotting down some notes. “This man he killed. He was a friend of yours?”

  “A friend?” Innes shook her head. “He was just somebody asked me to dance that night.” Her eyes lit up with anger as she added, “So Samuel followed ’im out back and shot ’im dead afterwards.”

  “Samuel was your boyfriend?”

  “Hell no. That’s what he always liked to think he was, but it wasn’t never like that between us.”

  I continued my note taking, examining my prospective client more closely as I did so. She was afraid of Stills, to be sure, yet her contempt for him seemed strangely dismissive, as if he wasn’t worth all the trouble she was going through to seek protection from him. The contradiction bothered me enough to make me wonder how badly I wanted her business, even as desperate as my circumstances were.

  “Eight years is a long time,” I said. “How do you know Stills even remembers you?”

  “Because I know Samuel Stills.” My questions were frustrating her now. “Look, Mr. Gunner, I went to the police, and they said they couldn’t help me. They said Samuel had to threaten me over the phone or somethin’ ’fore they could even bring ’im in for questionin’. So I come to you, ’cause somebody told me personal security is part of your business. Now if that ain’t right—”

  “It’s right, sure. But—”

  “All I want you to do is follow me around for a while. Keep an eye out for Samuel, and let me know if you see ’im. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Yes, and I’d be happy to. But it’s not going to be cheap. The kind of surveillance you’re talking about involves a lot of man hours, and can get rather expensive. How much money were you thinking about spending?”

  “I got two hundred dollars.”

  She said it with a straight face because it wasn’t meant to be a joke, but I found myself wanting to laugh out loud nonetheless.

  “What?” she asked, keen enough to have sensed that my mood had suddenly changed for the worse.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you, Ms. Innes. But thanks for stopping by.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? I’m tellin’ you the man’s gonna kill me!”


  “I’m sure you’re mistaken. After eight years inside, you’re probably the last thing on Stills’s mind. If I were you, I’d go home and forget about him, just as he’s almost certainly forgotten about you.”

  “No! I need your help, and I ain’t got nobody else I can turn to!”

  I stood up to encourage her to do likewise, said, “I wish I could do more for you, but I can’t. For two hundred dollars, the most I could do is roll by the crib once, maybe twice a day for a week, just to make sure you’re okay.”

  “That ain’t enough!”

  She was pushing me now, and I was in no mood to be forgiving about it. “Look. You come in here talking about Stills like he’s a homicidal maniac, then offer me two lousy bills to stand between him and you. I may be crazy, sister, but I’m not that crazy. Now, I can walk you to the door, or you can find your own way out, but either way, you’re leaving ’cause this conversation is over.”

  She finally leapt to her own feet, quaking with rage, and stormed out, throwing a full-bodied epithet behind her in farewell.

  As soon as she was gone, I sat down again, feeling like a prize ass, yet cheered by the almost certain knowledge that I would not be left to wallow in my self-deprecation for long.

  “That was kinda cold, wasn’t it?” Mickey asked, dropping in on me right on cue.

  “Nobody asked you back here, old man. And I believe you’ve still got somebody in your chair.”

  He kept right on coming as if I hadn’t spoken, clippers still in his hand, said, “Lady’s in trouble. Ain’t her fault she ain’t got a dime to get herself out of it.”

  “I’m all done, Mick, working for the next thing closest to free. It’s bull.”

  “It is what it is. What you gonna do, move the business out to Brentwood?”

  “There is no business. That’s the problem in a nutshell.”