She turned suddenly and faced him. “Look at me. I’m soft, aren’t I? I’m lots of fun in the right time and place, aren’t I? Just a soft, generous girl? If you got that idea, you’re crazy. I want you all right, darling, I want you like hell, but I want you with a million bucks, and I wouldn’t have you for keeps any other way. Now forget about my guts, darling. And forget about my caring a damn what anyone thinks or says.”
He went over to her then, and she was soft, as he had known perfectly well she was, and she wras also hard, hard as a diamond beneath the softness, and he had really known that perfectly well, too. Not that he cared. He preferred it that way. It only made him want her more, because he was, after all, just the kind of man who would want a woman like that.
They used up an hour, and when he was ready to leave, he said, “I mentioned your name in the note. That means someone will probably be here on his way to me. When he comes, whoever he is, tell him I’m at the Ambassador, and I’ll be there waiting for him. Open trail leading nowhere, that’s the strategy, darling.”
“When do you think they’ll find her?”
“It’s our maid’s day off, so possibly not until morning. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all set up for them, whenever it is.”
She touched the tip of a finger to her lips and his. “Okay. Whoever it is and whenever it is, I’ll send him on.”
He left her with that and went back to the Ambassador, and it was about nine hours later when he heard her voice again. The next time was on the telephone, and he was just thinking about going down to the dining room for some dinner when the bell rang.
He lifted the instrument and said hello, and she said, “He was here, darling. He just left.”
“Already? Who found her? How did it happen?”
“I didn’t ask. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to sound too curious about things like that.”
“All right. I’ll wait for him here.”
He hung up and waited, and it was only a short time before the desk rang up to tell him that there was a man from the police to see him. He told the desk to send the man up, and he waited the last couple of minutes in the open doorway to the hall.
The cop was a thin, middle-aged man with shoulders stooped almost to the point of deformity, and this seemed to make his arms hang down farther than normal, which gave him, in that one respect, a rather simian appearance. He took off his hat politely and spoke with a tired voice.
“Mr. Bruce?”
“Yes. Are you the policeman?”
“That’s right. Name’s Benson.”
“Come in, please. I’ve been wondering what on earth you could want with me.”
Benson walked into the room and turned as Charles closed the door.
“I’m afraid it’s bad news. Your wife, Mr. Bruce. She’s dead.”
“Dead!” Charles gave a passable impression of shock. “She was all right this morning when I left. That is, I assume she was. As a matter of fact, she was still sleeping, and I didn’t disturb her.”
“Maybe you disturbed her a hell of a lot more than you thought, Mr. Bruce. Anyhow, she’s dead.”
Charles ran fingers through his hair and worked his features into a simulation of concern. “See here, Mr. Benson ...”
“Sergeant.”
“All right. Sergeant. The point is. I may be somewhat responsible if Wanda’s done anything...”
“We found the note.”
“I see. Well...”
Benson cut across his words with a gusty sigh and said with quiet bitterness, “Look, Mr. Bruce. I’m not the one to explain it to. I’m just a guy running an errand. There’s a big-shot lieutenant down at Headquarters wants to talk with you. He’s the one, so if you’ll just come along.”
“Very well. I suppose there are certain formalities in these matters.”
“That’s right, Mr. Bruce. Formalities.”
It was a short ride to Headquarters. The traffic was heavy, but Benson threaded the police car through it expertly, and they were there quickly. They found the lieutenant in a small room sparsely furnished with essential items, and he was a younger man than Benson, although he ranked him, and this might have been a reason for Benson’s tired and quiet bitterness. The lieutenant’s name turned out to be Tomlinson. He had a hard square face and competent square hands, and his brain was fairly effective, too. Next to being a lieutenant, he was proudest of knowing about things like predicate nominatives and how to use them. He studied books at home.
He introduced himself. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Bruce. I’m Lieutenant Tomlinson of Homicide.” Homicide, he said. So it had come to that so soon. After the initial shock, Charles wasn’t especially concerned, however. He imagined, thinking about it, that probably all suicides were at least perfunctorily investigated by Homicide.
He sat down and said, “Sergeant Benson tells me my wife is dead, Lieutenant, but that’s all 1 know. I wish you would be kind enough to explain.”
“Certainly, Mr. Bruce. I’ll explain some things to you, and you can explain some to me. That’s why you’re here. Your wife apparently committed suicide.”
Charles sagged a little in his chair, doing it quite effectively. He was silent for a moment, staring at the floor, before he spoke again.
“I was afraid of that, with the police concerned and all.”
“Was that the only reason you were afraid of it? Because the police were concerned?”
“No. Sergeant Benson has told me that you found my note, so you must be aware of my grounds for fear. I may say in defense, however, that I never really thought she’d do it.”
“Do what?”
Charles let his eyebrows rise in a brief expression of cold surprise. “Why, kill herself because I left her, of course.”
“You think she did that?”
“It certainly seems very obvious.”
Lieutenant Tomlinson shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so.” He kept on shaking his head, and his face seemed suddenly much older. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think she killed herself at all. I think she was killed. Possibly by you, Mr. Bruce.”
The sudden violent constriction in his chest was a kind of pain that Charles had never known. It was as though a powerful centripetal force had closed in upon his heart, and he wanted to cry out with the pain, but nothing of what he felt showed in his face. Not the least indication of it. There was nothing in his face but icy and arrogant disdain.
“You’re insane,” he said.
“Perhaps.” Tomlinson turned side-wise and said, “Mr. Creely.”
That was the first instant that Charles was aware of a fourth person in the room. The man called Creely stood up from his chair against a wall and came forward. He was about the same height as Charles but much thinner, with narrow shoulders, and he must have been twenty years older. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit that was obviously expensive, and he used the cane in his right hand, leaning upon it heavily, as if it were utilitarian. His face was deeply lined, beginning to sag a little from its frame.
Tomlinson said, “Mr. Creely’s the one who found your wife.”
Charles stood to face Creely. “How could that be so? I believe I know all my wife’s friends, and this man is a stranger. If she was dead in the apartment, who let him in?”
“No one let me in, Mr. Bruce.” Creely’s voice was dry and precise. “I let myself in. With this.”
He extended a hand, palm up, and lying in the palm was a key. Charles lifted incredulous eyes from the key to Creely’s face, and he experienced a feeling that might have been terror when he saw the steady, virulent hatred in the man’s eyes. It’s always a shock to see hatred in the eyes of a stranger.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Don’t you?” Creely’s laugh was an arid whisper. “Surely a man like you has no difficulty in understanding the significance of a key to a lady’s apartment. I used it discreetly, Mr. Bruce. Only on those occasions — rather frequent, I must say—when you were
using the one you have to another 1ady’s apartment.”
Tomlinson cut back in, speaking slowly in a kind of cadence timed by the shaking of his head, “Your wife was apparently having an affair, Mr. Bruce, just as you were. Mr. Creely has been able to establish pretty definitely that he and your wife planned marriage. It seems she intended to tell you within a few days.” He stopped talking, but his head kept right on shaking, and after a moment his voice picked up the tempo again. “So you see, Mr. Bruce, it isn’t likely your wife would have killed herself because you’d left her. It isn’t likely she’d have cared at all.”
That was the wholly incredible thing. The thing that had never seriously crossed his mind. That she wouldn’t care. Most of all, that she had planned to leave him—him!—for a gray, sagging, crippled specimen like Creely. And in the final phase of his destruction, with the terrible realization that the police would pin it on him since they knew Wanda was not a suicide, it was the cruel cut to his vanity that hurt him most. It actually drove him a little mad.
It took both Tomlinson and Benson to pull him off Creely.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND, by James Michael Ullman
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1964.
Gus climbed from the car and strolled up the walk. He was heavy set and fairly tall, his square face frozen in a permanent sneer. He rang the bell. A young woman gazed through the screen door. Gus said, “I wanna see Stan. I’m an old friend. A real old friend.”
Hesitantly, the woman held the door open. Gus stepped into a living room where two small boys wrestled before a blaring television set. Elsewhere in the house, an infant squalled. The woman hurried to the kitchen and Stan came out. Slight, lean, and in his mid-thirties, Stan wore old clothes stained with black dirt; a garden tool jutted from a hip pocket.
Gus lit a cigar. “Hi, kid. Remember me?”
“Gus? I’ll be darned, it’s good to see you,” Stan said, not meaning it at all. Nervously he glanced at the kitchen, where his wife soothed the infant. “Things are a mess here. Let’s talk in the rec room.” They went downstairs and Stan added, “How are you? I’ve been out of touch.”
“I know.” Gus eased into a wicker chair. “The other guys forgot you. If they saw you today, they wouldn’t recognize you. But I kept track.” Gus flicked ashes to the floor. “After Korea, you made college with the GI Bill. Then you married a nice girl and moved to the suburbs, strictly legit. You always was smart, Stan. Smart enough not to be arrested, even though you brainstormed all them two-bit burglaries the guys on our block used to pull.”
“That was a long time ago. With me, things are different now.”
“I’ll bet. And I think it’s swell, how you work for J. Newton Laverage, the biggest stockbroker in town. That’s why I’m here. I got a financial problem, and I remembered my old buddy Stan, hobnobbing with the big shots, sitting there with all the inside dope. Maybe Stan can help.”
Stan smiled. “I’ll try. But you have an inflated idea of my importance. I’m just one of several dozen registered representatives in the firm. J. Newton Laverage hardly knows I exist. As for inside information, all I know is what I read in the Wall Street Journal.”
“Sure. Not that I believe you. But anyhow, you remember Nick?”
“Of course.” Uncomfortable, Stan licked his lips, which had gone very dry. “In the old days, he fenced the stuff we stole, and now he’s a very big man. He gets a cut from every racket in the city.”
“That’s Nick. Well, I’m into him for a lotta dough. A deal went sour, and you know Nick. If you can’t pay, he gets rough. At the moment, I can’t pay.”
“Gus, if you want to borrow money, I’m afraid...”
“Naw, I wouldn’t ask for that much. But the last few years, Nick and some of the other big boys have been plungers in the stock market. Nick especially. He has a lot of cash, and he likes to invest it.”
“I see. But how does that concern me?”
“It’s simple. I figure if I give Nick a tip on a stock that’s sure to go up, he’ll cancel the debt I owe him. He could lay so much money on that stock that his profit would be four or five times my debt. And he’d be real grateful, because he’s always complainin’ how whenever he buys a stock, it goes down. It’s hurtin’ his pride.”
Stan lit a cigarette and tried to keep his voice calm. “Gus, I hate to discourage you, but it can’t be done. I could give you the names of thirty or forty stocks likely to go up, but I couldn’t guarantee any of them would. Not even J. Newton Laverage could do that. The price of a stock is determined by a complex set of factors...”
“Stan boy,” Gus leaned forward, smugly sure of his logic. It had taken Gus a long time to reach this conclusion, but once formed in Gus’ mind, any conclusion was irrevocable. “Let’s level. You’re a born schemer. Every kid on the block knew that. And a schemer like you wouldn’t waste time in Laverage’s office unless you got a sure thing in the market now and then. All you brokers hear about sure things, it’s common knowledge. But don’t worry, I won’t tell Nick who gave me the tip. You’re my secret. Just tell me why the stock will go up. Nick don’t buy no stock without some reason, even if they all do go down.”
“You’re asking the impossible...”
“It better not be impossible.” Gus’ pig-like eyes glittered. “You never did go for rough stuff, did you? But for me, this is serious. So if you don’t gimme the name of a sure thing in two weeks, there’ll be plenty of rough stuff.” Gus arched his brow’s toward the ceiling. “You got a nice wife up there. Cute kids, a cozy home. All sorts of things could happen, y’know? The cops could never pin it on me. And if you went to the cops, you’d have to tell ’em about the old gang, and when J. Newton Laverage heard about it you’d lose your job. So think it over.”
* * * *
Gus still lived in the old neighborhood. Based on the first floor of an ancient apartment building, he collected tribute from every petty racket flourishing on eight slum blocks.
One September morning Gus wandered to a window, a beer in one hairy hand and a cigar in the other. Something about a slim figure hurrying down the narrow street caught his eye. Sure enough, it was Stan, dressed now in grey flannel suit, his sandy hair covered by a high-crowned, short-brimmed hat. Under his arm, Stan carried a large carton.
Gus was waiting at the door when Stan climbed the stairs. “You’re three days early,” Gus observed. He studied Stan and was pleased at what he saw. Stan had been pale and distraught when Gus left the house in the suburb. Now he appeared serene and confident, much like the Stan of old. “It didn’t take long to get the name of that stock after all, did it?”
Gus waved Stan to a dining room table. They took chairs and Stan said, “That part hasn’t changed. Neither I nor anyone else can just give you the name of a stock and guarantee its price will rise.”
“I warned you...”
“Hold on.” Stan began unwrapping the carton. “I’m going to give you something much better than a tip. Gus, I’m going to show you how to make the price of a stock go up.”
“Quit kidding.”
“It’s no joke. I won’t pretend the idea came to me out of the blue. Confidentially, I’ve been toying with a scheme like this for years. And I can’t claim I enjoyed your visit the other day. But I’ll admit, it took you to inspire me to work out the details. If I do say so, it’s a beautiful plan. I’m going to borrow to the hilt and cash in on this myself.”
“I didn’t think going legit would stop you from schemin’ completely. What’s in the box?”
“A tape recorder.”
“Hey...”
Stan set the recorder on the table. “Relax. I’m not going to make tapes. I’m going to play some, and then leave the machine here after I go. But first let me explain something. Most people buy and sell stocks merely by calling their broker on the telephone and placing the order.”
“I know. Nick does that all the time. He picks up the phone and says, ‘This is Nick. Ge
t me a hundred so-and-so,’ or ‘I want youse to dump my oil stock.’”
“Exactly. The broker recognizes a good customer’s voice and executes the order without question. And J. Newton Laverage’s customers include some very wealthy men. They don’t bother with small fry like me; they talk to Laverage personally. Some of them are so rich that just by buying enough of a stock, they can make the price rise instantly.”
“If that’s true, why don’t they do it every day?”
“The law of supply and demand. If there’s only one big buyer kicking the price up, the price will fall right back down as soon as he stops buying, and he’ll be stuck with the shares he bought at a higher price. I’ll explain it another way. A stock rises whenever more people want to buy it than want to sell it; it falls when more people want to sell than want to buy. For instance, suppose a customer calls J. Newton Laverage and asks him to buy a huge block of stock in a company where ordinarily, there’s very little trade; meaning ordinarily there are only few buyers or sellers. When Laverage places the order, the price will start up almost immediately. If the price was a dollar, there soon won’t be any sellers left willing to part with the stock for a dollar, and Laverage will have to bid more. When he runs out of sellers at two dollars, he’ll have to buy from people unprepared to sell until the price reaches three, and so on. Of course as the price keeps going higher, more and more sellers are attracted to the market, until ultimately more stock is offered for sale than Laverage wants to buy. When that happens, the price will start back down.”
“Okay. But what’s our angle?”
“Just this. The customer who calls Laverage with a big order is going to be you.”
Gus frowned. “Look, kid. I ain’t no actor. How can I fool Laverage into thinkin’ I’m a business tycoon?”
“You’ll understand after I play this tape. I’ve had a recorder hooked into Laverage’s private line all week. Listen.”
The Cutthroats and Criminals Megapack Page 9