Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 11/01/10 Read online

  “You’re crazy. I saw ’im—”

  “He was in love with you, the poor bastard, and he wanted to protect you. When that gun went off, he wasn’t the one holding it, you were. But he did the time for the crime so you wouldn’t have to. Didn’t he?”

  “Nobody asked him to!” She leapt to her feet, suddenly teary eyed and livid. “Nobody ever asked that fool for nothin’!” She glared down at Stills’s body, her contempt for him too far gone to conceal a moment longer. “But he was always hangin’ around, buyin’ me stuff and treatin’ me special, like I was his damn woman or somethin’.” She looked at me and Jolly, smiled as if we were both as great a fool as Stills. “But I wasn’t never his woman! His or nobody else’s, and I ain’t ever gonna be!”

  She started to chuckle, but it died in her throat. Jolly and I said nothing, just stared at her in awe, and a siren building in the distance became the only sound in the room.

  “I was only tryin’ to help ’im that night,” Innes said, winding down again. “They dropped the gun and I picked it up. If I hadn’t shot that man . . .”

  She waited for one of us to say something, but neither of us did.

  “Why the hell’re you lookin’ at me like that?”

  Jolly and I kept our thoughts to ourselves.

  “So Stills never did mean the girl no harm?” Howard Gaines asked, putting the last of his dominoes back in their box. He and I, Del and Lilly were the only ones left standing at the Deuce.

  “Until that night? No. I don’t think he ever did,” I said.

  “Damn. Then why’d she tell you—”

  “She was hopin’ G would kill the fool for her,” Lilly said, further demonstrating her own capacity for detection. “That’s why she was always tellin’ ’im how dangerous Stills was, and how only somebody with a gun could stop ’im from hurtin’ her, and all that.” She turned to me. “Ain’t that right?”

  I nodded.

  “She wanted to be rid of the boy that bad?” Howard asked.

  “She would have made the argument she had no choice. She eventually produced letters he’d written her from prison, expressing his undiminished love for her, and his intent to be with her again the minute he was released. It’s for sure he still felt that way the day Jolly and I went to see him at his motel.”

  “He was whipped,” Del said. “Just like Ollie. It didn’t matter that she didn’t want him. The man was in love.”

  “Or at least he was until the night he died,” I said.

  “How do you mean?” Howard asked.

  “The story Innes told the police was that Stills broke into her place in a rage. He was furious that’s she’d hired Jolly and me to scare him off, and if she hadn’t put those three bullets in him, he would have done something very similar to her.”

  “And you all believed that?” Lilly asked.

  “The district attorney did. Me?” I shrugged and slid off my stool, my enthusiasm for the tale wearing thin. “I’m not so sure.”

  “Come on, cuz,” Del said. “Don’t leave ’em hangin’ like that. Tell ’em the rest of it.”

  “The rest of it?” Howard asked.

  I looked around the empty room, caught in a trap of my own making, and said, “Stills’s P.O. came to see me again a few days after he died. He said the letters Stills wrote Innes from prison didn’t contain a single threat against her, and the cops never found any signs of forced entry at her crib. To him, that could only mean two things: She let Stills in herself that night and shot him in cold blood.”

  “And?” Howard asked.

  “And she finally hit the man she was really aiming at eight years before.”

  I went to the Deuce’s door and drove my tired ass home.

  Copyright © 2010 Gar Anthony Haywood

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  Fiction

  SHELL GAME

  NEIL SCHOFIELD

  Art by Tim Foley

  I was sitting in the office, with my feet up on the open desk drawer, the large bottom one where the whisky lived and had its being. I had a glass of J&B in front of me on the desk, but what I was doing mostly was musing by the light of the desk lamp, and considering the hard drive I had taken out of the computer. It was around half past midnight. Behind me, the rain was beating hard on the windows, and in front of me, through the glass office door, past the logo of murray investigations, the building was dark. Of course, the logo only said “Murray Investigations” on the outside. From in here, it said something coarse in Martian.

  I was musing, and sipping the whisky, but, at the same time, I was whistling “Skylark.” That’s called multitasking. I’m quite proud of being able to whistle “Skylark,” because it has a middle eight with some chord changes which can keep even the most experienced of whistlers—among whom I modestly count myself—awake of nights. I imagine Hoagy Carmichael finishing the tune off and saying to himself, “Okay, whistlers of the world, pick the bones out of that.”

  In the middle of all this musing and sipping and whistling, the door opened. Now that was odd because there was no one in the building. The landings were dark; the offices had all been empty as far as I could see when I had come up to the fourth floor. But the door opened anyway.

  And in she came. Walking in through the lobby and into the office as cool as you please. Which was pretty cool. I muffled a curse at myself for having left the outer door unlocked. I muffled the curse; I don’t like to offend, especially on first acquaintance.

  She didn’t look like someone I’d want to offend. She was around twenty, medium sized and blonde, a figure carved out of all our dreams, with a beautiful face, huge violet eyes, and a straight mouth that, while it was voluptuous enough, told you clearly that she didn’t put up with no nonsense from nobody.

  “Good evening,” I said. Civility costs nothing, as my mother used to say. Far too often, in fact.

  She stopped halfway to the desk.

  “I saw your light on,” she said, “and I thought I’d try the door on the off chance.”

  “Well, it’s my night for the off chance,” I said. “What seems to be the problem?” I’d heard people say that, usually doctors, but then what do they know of doctors who only doctors know?

  I was assuming she had a problem—what else would she have wandering around the empty floors of the Avalon Commercial Centre at midnight?

  “May I sit down?” she said, with a graceful, hesitant gesture at the empty client chair in front of the desk.

  I replied with an equally graceful wave that said, as clearly as I could make it: Park it, sister. I would have pushed my snap-brim fedora back on my head with a nonchalant thumb, but as luck would have it, I wasn’t wearing one. Which goes to show it’s better to have one and not need it, than not to have one and need it.

  She sat down and crossed her legs. Those legs had been made for crossing, but being the man I am, I averted my gaze. She pulled down her skirt so, appropriately, I unaverted my gaze.

  “I might need some help,” she said.

  “Who among us doesn’t?” I said, just to keep things moving along briskly. She answered this with an irritated shake of her head that set all that blonde hair swirling. She could have been testing for a shampoo commercial.

  “How did you get in?” I asked. You see what I’m doing there? Causing a diversion, in case there was something coming here I wasn’t going to like. “There’s a code on the main door.”

  “I waited until somebody came out, and then I slipped in before the door could close.” she said.

  Nice one, Mildred. Low-maintenance offices mean low-maintenance security. There was a two-man security round at two in the morning, but that was all.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s start at the start. What’s your name and what’s your game?” I was quite proud of that.

  “Brenda,” she said, “Brenda Mulvaney. But I don’t really have a game. That’s the real problem.”

  “Hmm.” I
said. Just like that, without even having to think about it. I surprise myself sometimes, and I’m hard to surprise, let me tell you.

  “All right, Brenda,” I said, “what’s up?”

  “I have a problem with someone who has an office in this building. I’ve been trying to get in touch with him for weeks. There’s never any answer when I call. I’ve been coming and going for days. The office never seems to be open. So, I thought I’d try—”

  “A midnight raid. A dawn swoop. A strike at the soft underbelly.” I finished for her.

  She nodded. She really was a number. There are men in this vicious old world who’d kill for a nod like that and that flash of violet eyes. But I am made of sterner stuff. That’s what I get paid for. When I get paid.

  “Okay,” I said, “who is this Jasper?”

  “Jasper?” she said, her brows crinkling. I was asking myself the same question: Jasper? Where had I dragged that up from? And I couldn’t swear that my brows weren’t crinkling in sympathy, although normally, I exert an iron control over my brows.

  “Jackie Harris,” she said.

  “Class. And what sort of game is Jackie Harris running?”

  “He has a modeling agency. You come along and if you’re the right type, he sends you to a photographer. You get studio shots.”

  “And armed with these photographs, for which no doubt you had to pay, he guarantees to find you work as a model or your money back.” It wasn’t hard to guess the rest. “You didn’t get any work, and you didn’t get your money back.”

  She nodded miserably.

  “Two hundred and fifty pounds. It may not sound like a lot, but it took me a long time to get it together.”

  It seemed to be my turn to nod, so I did. Now she pulled a handkerchief out of her bag, and dabbed at her eyes and nose.

  “I’ve been ringing every day, but he’s never there, there’s always an answering machine.”

  “Of course there is. He’s filtering. And when you come in person, there’s no one there, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  It looked as though I were on top of the game.

  “It’s a scam, Brenda, a con trick. The photographs cost them a couple of pounds at most, and he never had any contacts. You never had a chance. Have you tried the photographer?”

  “It’s the same thing. He has a studio in some sort of converted warehouse down in Chelsea, but he never seems to be there. At least there’s no answer when you ring the auto-porter at the main door.”

  There was a pause. Well that’s all right. Pausing never hurts.

  “So,” I said eventually, “what can I do?”

  “I saw the light on here, so I came up to ask if anyone knew anything about Mr. Harris. Then I saw that you were investigators, so I thought I’d try. I thought—perhaps—you might help me to find out something about him.”

  I thought about that for a bit.

  “I don’t have any money with me,” she said, just to round things off, “but I’d be willing to pay you for an hour’s work. If you would.”

  I didn’t tell her what my hourly fee was. She didn’t deserve that.

  “Okay.” I said. “Where does this Harris hang out?”

  “He’s down on the third floor,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, getting to my feet, “let’s go and have a look, shall we?”

  “Now?” she said. “Right now?”

  “There’s no time like the present,” I told her, in my best stern professional voice, “that’s one of our axioms.”

  She got up gracefully, too, not scrambling out of her chair like some girls do. And of course, I held the door open for her. She was that sort of girl.

  We went down the staircase. There was little light, mainly coming from the emergency exit lighting. Brenda clung onto the railing and took her time on the stairs.

  The Avalon was one of those places that used to be something else. I don’t what it was, a power station, maybe, or a factory. Whatever it had been, it wasn’t that anymore. Someone had had the bright idea of gutting it and making it into offices for small businesses. There were four floors, connected by staircases, and one small lift. There was a lot of red piping around: They seemed to have made all the handrails from a job lot of scaffolding poles and a pot of red paint. Perhaps they thought that gave the place a with-it artistic atmosphere suited to graphics and communications startups, of which the place seemed to have more than its fair share.

  Down on the third floor, we walked along the landing, until Brenda halted at a door two from the end. An ordinary office door, with frosted glass on which was written in gold lettering, Harris Modeling Agency. It appeared, like most of the offices in the place, to be a simple two-room setup. I looked at the offices on either side. Identical. On the right we had The Madison Music Company. And on the other on the far side, a corner office was where Blenheim Publishing lived. Ordinary, respectable struggling companies. Each of the three offices had an auto-porter mounted on the doorframe.

  We stood, Brenda and I, in front of the dark office door. She smelled good up close, did Brenda, but I averted my mind. I looked at her.

  “Do you want to have a look?” I said.

  “You mean . . . break in?” Her eyes were wide.

  “I’m not going to break anything,” I told her. “No need for gratuitous violence.” And I dug out the necessary.

  She stared at the little bunch of tools. “You’re going to pick the lock?”

  I winked at her. “Never was a lock that couldn’t be broke, little lady,” I said in my best raffish manner. It didn’t seem to raff Brenda though. Perhaps it would have gone down better if I’d worn a hat.

  The lock and I came to an agreement after thirty seconds top whack. I listened for a moment. The building was absolutely silent. There was a faint faraway buzz of traffic from the street, but that was all.

  I opened the door and, gallant as ever, waved her in. There was the same small lobby, and beyond that the main office. It took me a moment to find the light switch, but there was hardly any point because once I had flicked the switch, the lights were shining on absolutely nothing. The office was completely bare. A thirty-foot expanse of nothing whatever. As bare as the surprise and shock in Brenda’s eyes. Zero furniture, blank walls with the occasional square where a picture had formerly hung. And nothing else at all, except for the black night and the rain on the windows.

  “Business doesn’t seem to be too good,” I said, just to break the silence. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Stupid question, I know, but I felt the need to say something.

  “This is really strange,” she said, looking round. “No, this is the right office. That’s the same carpet.”

  The carpet was in fact the only thing in the place, a mock Persian, well worn through in places.

  Brenda looked at me.

  “Do you think this means he’s—”

  “Done a flit?” I finished for her. “Looks pretty much like it. Except . . .”

  “Except what?”

  Except. I wandered down to the far end of the office. The carpet seemed oddly more worn down here. I looked keenly around me. This, like all the other offices in the place, had evidently been designed by a flexible management catering for all sizes. On each side of the room was a door. I tried the one on the right.

  Brenda watched me.

  “But that must lead into the office next door.”

  “Good thinking, Brenda,” I said, as I entered into negotiations with the lock, which was a rather cursory security device, in any case. You would have been safer using Scotch tape to hold the door shut. Surprise, surprise, the office on the right was as empty as the one we had come into.

  “Business does seem to be bad, and it’s catching,” I said. “All right, let’s see just how bad it can get.”

  I locked the door and went across to the one on the left. It had the same rubbishy lock, which was well oiled for a door that really shouldn’t open that often.

 
We stepped inside.

  “Well, well,” I said, “things appear to be looking up in the music business.”

  The office was well furnished. In fact, it was well over furnished. There were two desks, and a lot of office chairs stacked on top of each other. There were also two large filing cabinets. Brenda was looking around her with a puzzled frown on her pretty face.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Something up?”

  “It’s just that I’m sure I recognize the desk.” She pointed to it. “Yes, I’m positive. It has that cigarette burn on the edge, just there.”

  She was right. At some time, a careless somebody had let their Silk Cut or Camel burn a nice neat black hole on the edge of the desk.

  “And I recognize this chair, as well,” she said, going to a chair sitting against the wall. It was upholstered in red moquette, rather worn in places. “I’m sure I sat in this chair when I came for the interview. What’s going on?”

  Again, I had the urge to push my hat back on my head. I was going to have to get myself a hat. This sort of repressed urge can lead to all sorts of psychological mayhem. Who were the great thumbers-back of hats? Robert Stack, Richard Widmark. Where would they have been without the raw material? An artist has to have something to work with.

  “One thing you might notice,” I said, “is that all of the furniture is on castors.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means it’s easy to move around.”

  There was another matching door in the wall opposite. I performed my by-now usual miracle. To give her her due, Brenda seemed to have got used to my miracle working. This time she barely watched me. She was trying to open a filing cabinet. She appeared to have got used to office-breaking very quickly. I like people who are adaptable.

  This door opened onto the fire stairwell. All right. Now we knew what we were dealing with. At least I did. Brenda was still hauling on the filing cabinet drawer like a Ukrainian athlete in an Olympic hammer-throwing event. Her face was red.

  “This was in there too,” she said, with difficulty.

  “Help you?” I said, and I did.