Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  She thought about it, and the greed came back into her eyes. "Ten million dollars," she said. And nothing more.

  The following afternoon I was sitting in the parlor of our small house near one of the city's shopping centers. I sometimes have occasion to work on Saturday afternoons—I am an accountant at Hardiman and Waycroft—but this was not one of them.

  I put down the travel magazine I had been reading and said to Margo, who was crocheting, "I've been thinking, dear. It might be a good idea for us to take a drive upstate tomorrow."

  She looked up. "What for?"

  "Well, to look at the property we bought," I said. "I think I'd like to see our investment first-hand."

  "It's just timberland. You saw that in those aerial and ground photos Mr. Truax showed us."

  "I'd still like a close-up look. I think I'll call Truax, see if he'll join us. He told me he works a full day on Saturdays." I went to the phone and dialed Truax's number. And a recorded voice answered, saying, "We're sorry, the number you've reached is no longer in service." Frowning, I tried the number again, with the same results.

  "What's the matter, Robert?"

  "His phone has been disconnected."

  "Disconnected? I don't understand."

  "Neither do I."

  I called the company that handles the renting and leasing of offices in the Wainwright Building; I happened to know which one it was because Hardiman and Waycroft is their accounting firm. I got through to a man I knew slightly named Corday, identified myself, and then told him that I had been trying to reach a Mr. Dalton Truax who occupied an office in the Wainwright Building.

  "Not any longer," Corday said.

  "What?"

  "Mr. Truax vacated this morning. I spoke with him personally, as a matter of fact. He was apologetic that he would have to vacate after only one month, but business pressures and lack of funds made it necessary."

  "Only one month? But . . . but he told me he'd been there for years!"

  "No, only one month. Is something wrong, Mr. London?"

  "No, I . . . no."

  I hung up quickly and turned to face Margo. She was livid. "I should have known something like this would happen," she said. "I should have known he was a crook!"

  "Maybe he isn't," I said in stunned tones. "Maybe it's some sort of misunderstanding . . ."

  "No it isn't. He stole my seventy-five thousand dollars! And it's your fault, Robert, all your fault!"

  "But . . ."

  "No buts! Get your hat and coat—we're going to the police!"

  I had been just about to suggest the same thing.

  The bunco-squad detective was named Helwig. He listened to our story with a mixture of sympathy and mild reproach in his eyes, and then he did some checking through police channels.

  "There's no such person as Dalton Truax," he told us then. "Which means that there's no Consolidated Development Corporation, no undeveloped parcel of land upstate, no crooked official in the State Highway Department, and no secret freeway project. I'm afraid you're the victims of an elaborate con game."

  Neither Margo nor I had anything to say. I could feel her eyes boring into me, but I refused to look at her.

  "You're not the first and you won't be the last," Helwig said, "if that's any consolation. Land speculation, particularly the shady variety, is one of the con man's stocks in trade. Everybody wants to get rich quick, and it's said there's a little larceny in us all. The con artist counts on that; it's what makes any swindle work."

  I said miserably, "But how did he know about my wife's inheritance? How could he have known we had seventy-five thousand dollars in cash?"

  "You'd be amazed at the number of ways he might have found out. And at the lengths a con man will go to set up a mark, especially when the score is a big one."

  "Have you any idea who he is?" Margo asked. "Or where to find him?"

  "No, Mrs. London, I'm sorry. His description and his M.O.—his method of operation—are unfamiliar to us."

  "Are you saying you may never recover my money?"

  "We'll do what we can," Helwig said. "I'll be frank with you, though: the prospects aren't good. Seventy-five thousand dollars is a large price to pay for a lesson in honesty and common sense, I know, but . . . well, you may end up having to pay it."

  Margo and I rode home in a frigid silence. When we arrived I said I was going for a walk, that I needed to be alone for a while, and left the house. For a block I shuffled along with head down and shoulders slumped, in case she was looking out the window. Once I turned the corner, however, I straightened my back and began to walk quite jauntily.

  P.T. Barnum was right, I was thinking. There is a sucker born every minute!

  It had all gone beautifully. Margo hadn't suspected a thing, and still didn't. Truax—or rather, Arthur Byrnes—had played his part to perfection, winning her confidence with his disarming and sincere manner. Of course, as a part-time actor in another city's local theater, a man I had met through a casual acquaintance, Byrnes was used to playing affably trustworthy roles. And I was paying him five thousand dollars to ensure a flawless performance.

  I smiled. A retirement home in Suncrest Acres indeed! Such was not for Robert London. Not with the wide world filled with exotic ports of call, and not with seventy thousand tax-free dollars.

  After a suitable period of time, during which I would be making circumspect arrangements, I would one day disappear.

  Certainly I expected Margo to realize the truth after I was gone, but would she be able to convince Helwig? A mild-mannered husband plotting an elaborate swindle of his wife with an unknown party, and capping it off with a report to the police?

  Well, I rather thought Helwig would be inclined to view that theory as the vindictive fabrication of a woman deserted in middle age. But even if she did manage to convince him, what could the police do? A man can't be extradited for stealing from his wife, not without proof, and not from Brazil in any case.

  They say Rio is a beautiful city, full of alluring and tractable women. It wouldn't be long before I found out for myself if that were true.

  I was whistling when I reached the shopping center. On the mall I entered a public telephone booth and rang the number of Arthur Byrnes's rooming house. I would keep the seventy thousand in a safe deposit box in a cross-town bank, I thought, until the time came to—

  A woman's voice answered and I asked to speak to Mr. Byrnes.

  "Mr. Byrnes?" the woman said. "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Byrnes turned in his key last evening. You see, he came into a sizable inheritance quite suddenly and left for South America first thing this morning."

  MRS. RAKUBIAN

  Three days after she murdered him with a hatchet and put his body down the dry well, Mrs. Rakubian's husband showed up alive and kicking on the front porch.

  It was a hot day and Mrs. Rakubian had been in the kitchen mixing some lemonade. She mixed it tart, real tart, because Charlie always liked it sweet and made her put too much sugar in it. That was one of the reasons she'd killed him—one of three or four hundred. It wasn't the one that made her pick up the hatchet, though. That one was him blowing his nose on the front of his bib overalls. When he done that again, even after she warned him, she went and got the hatchet and give him half a dozen licks and that was that. Except for fetching the wheelbarrow and carting him off to the dry well, but that was one chore she hadn't minded at all.

  Things had been mighty peaceful ever since. So peaceful that she'd taken to humming a little ditty to herself while she worked. She was humming it when she carried the tart lemonade out to the front porch. But she stopped humming it when she saw Charlie sitting there in the shade of the cottonwood tree, wiping his sweaty face with his handkerchief.

  "Morning, Maude," he said. "Made some fresh lemonade, I see."

  Mrs. Rakubian stared at him goggle-eyed for a few seconds. There wasn't a mark on him, not a mark!

  "Something wrong, Maude?"

  Mrs. Rakubian didn't answer. She put t
he lemonade down on the porch table, went into the house, took the varmint gun off the rack, walked back out to the porch, and let Charlie have it with both barrels. Then she fetched the wheelbarrow and trundled what was left of him to the dry well.

  "You stay dead this time, Charlie Rakubian," she said after she'd dumped him again. "Thirty years of you haunting me alive was bad enough. Don't you dare keep coming back to haunt me dead too. This time you stay put."

  But Charlie didn't stay put. He was back again the next morning, all smiley and chipper, like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth and the hatchet and varmint gun hadn't durned near taken his head off twice.

  Mrs. Rakubian was ready for him, though. She'd decided not to take any chances and it was a good thing she had. She didn't let him say a word this time. As soon as she saw him, she took Papa's old Frontier Colt out from under her apron and shot him right between the eyes.

  "Now I'm not going to tell you again, Charlie," she said when she got him to the well. "Don't come bothering me no more. You're dead three times now and you'd better start acting like it."

  She had a day and a half of peace before the sheriff's car drove in through the farm gate and stopped right in front of where she was sitting under the cottonwood tree drinking tart lemonade. The driver's door opened and Charlie got out.

  Mrs. Rakubian was used to his tricks by now. She stared at him in disgust.

  "Maude," Charlie said, "I got some questions to ask you. Seems Ed Beemis, the mailman, and Lloyd Poole from the gas company have disappeared and they was both last seen out this way—

  She didn't let him finish. She yanked Papa's Colt out from under her apron and let fly at him. One bullet knocked him down but the others ones missed, which allowed him to crawl to safety behind the sheriff's car. Then durned if he didn't pull a gun of his own and start blasting away at her.

  Mrs. Rakubian flung herself into the house just in the nick of time. She locked the door behind her, reloaded Papa's Colt, and took the varmint gun down and made sure it was loaded too. Then she waited.

  For a time there wasn't much noise out in the yard. Then there was—a regular commotion. Cars, voices . . . why, you'd of thought it was the Fourth of July picnic out there. Pretty soon Charlie started yelling at her over some contraption that made his voice real loud, only she didn't pay much attention to what he was saying. Instead she yelled right back at him.

  "You Charlie, you go back into the well where you belong! Go on, git, and leave me be!"

  Charlie didn't git and leave her be—not that she'd expected he would, after all the times he'd come back from the dead to devil her. So she was ready for him again with Papa's Colt and the varmint gun when he busted down the door and come in after her.

  She thought she was ready, anyhow. In fact she wasn't, not with just six bullets and two loads of buckshot. Mrs. Rakubian took one look at what come piling through the door, screamed once, and swooned on the spot.

  It was Charlie, all right.

  But the sneaky old booger had brought a dozen other dead Charlies along with him.

  TOY

  It was Jackey who found the I toy, on a Saturday afternoon in mid-July.

  Mrs. Webster was in the kitchen when he came home with it. "Look at this, Mom," he said. "Isn't this neat?"

  She looked. It was an odd gray box, about the size of a cigar box; Jackey lifted its lid. Inside were a score or more of random-shaped pieces made out of the same funny-looking material as the box. It seemed to be some sort of slick, shiny plastic, only it didn't really look like plastic. Or feel like plastic when she ran her finger over the lid.

  "What is it, Jackey?"

  "I dunno. Some kind of model kit, I think."

  "Where did you get it?"

  "Found it, in the vacant lot by the Little League field. I was hunting lost balls. It was just lying there under a bunch of leaves and junk."

  "Well, someone must have lost it," Mrs. Webster said. "I suppose we'll have to put an ad in the Lost and Found."

  "Maybe nobody'll claim it," Jackey said. "I'm going to put it together, see what it is."

  "I don't think you should . . ."

  "Oh, come on, Mom. I won't use glue or anything. I just want to see what it is."

  "Well . . . all right. But don't break anything."

  "I don't think you can break this stuff," Jackey said. "I dropped the box on the way home, right on the sidewalk. It landed on its edge and didn't even get a scratch."

  He went upstairs with the toy. Mrs. Webster had no doubt that he would be able to fit the pieces of the model together; for a boy of twelve, he had a remarkable engineering aptitude.

  And he did fit the pieces together. It took him two hours.

  Mrs. Webster was out on the back porch, putting new liner on the pantry shelves, when she heard the first banging noise—low and muffled, from up in Jackey's room. A minute later there was another one, and a minute after that, a third. Then Jackey yelled for her to come up. The fourth bang, exactly a minute after the third, sent her straight to his room.

  The box and the assembled toy were sitting on Jackey's "workbench," the catchall table his father had built for him.

  What the toy most resembled, she thought, was a cannon; at least, there was a round barrel-like extremity with a hole in it, set at an upward angle to the model's squarish base. She was sure it was a cannon moments later, when it made the banging noise again and a round, gray, pea-sized projectile burst out of it and arced two thirds of the way across the room.

  "Neat, huh?" Jackey said. "I never saw one like this before."

  "Cannons," Mrs. Webster said, and shook her head. "I don't like that sort of toy. I don't like you playing with it."

  "I'm not. It sort of works by itself."

  "By itself?"

  "I don't even know where those cannonballs come from. I mean, I didn't put 'em in there."

  "What did you do, then?"

  "I didn't do anything except stick the pieces together the way I thought they ought to go. When I snapped the barrel on, something made a funny noise down inside the base. Next thing, it started shooting off those little balls."

  It shot off another one just then, and the projectile—slightly larger than the last one, Mrs. Webster thought—went a foot farther this time. An uneasiness formed in her. She didn't like the look of the model cannon or whatever it was. Toys like that . . . they shouldn't be put on the market.

  "You dismantle that thing right now," she said. "You hear me, Jackey? And be careful—it might be dangerous."

  She went downstairs. But the banging noise came again, and again after exactly one minute. Each seemed a little louder than the last. The second one brought her back to the foot of the stairs.

  "Jackey? I thought I told you to dismantle that thing." Bang! And there was a thud, a crash from inside Jackey's room.

  "What was that? What are you doing up there?"

  Silence. Jackey?"

  "Mom, you better come in here. Quick!"

  She hurried up the stairs. There was another bang just as she reached the door to Jackey's room, followed by the sound of glass breaking. She caught the knob, jerked the door open.

  She saw Jackey first, cowering back alongside the bed, his eyes wide and scared. Then she saw the far wall, opposite the workbench—the dents in the plasterboard, the jagged hole in the window, the projectiles on the floor ranging from pea-sized to apricot-sized. And then she saw the toy. Chills crawled over her; she caught her breath with an audible gasp.

  The model had grown. Before, less than five minutes ago, it had been no larger than a small model tank; now it was three times that size. It had subtly changed color, too, seemed to be glowing faintly now as if something deep inside it had caught fire. lackey, for God's sake!"

  "Mom, I couldn't get near it, I couldn't touch it. It's hot, Mom!"

  She didn't know what to do. She started toward Jackey, changed her mind confusedly and went to the workbench instead. She reached out to the toy, then jerked her hand
back. Hot—it gave off heat like a blast furnace.

  Oh my God, she thought, it's radioactive—

  Bang!

  A projectile almost as large as a baseball erupted from the toy's muzzle, smashed out the rest of the window and took part of the frame with it. Jackey yelled, "Mom!" but she still didn't know what to do. She stared at the thing in horror.

  It had grown again. Every time it went off it seemed to grow a little bigger.

  That's not a toy, that's some kind of weapon . . .

  Bang!

  A projectile just as large as a baseball this time. More of the window frame disappeared, leaving a gaping hole in the wall. From outside, Mrs. Webster could hear the Potters, their neighbors to the north, shouting in alarm. For some reason, hearing the Potters enabled her to act. She ran to where Jackey was crouched, caught hold of his arm, pulled him toward the door.

  On the workbench, the gray thing was the size of a portable TV set. She thought she could see it pulsing as she and Jackey stumbled out.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  On the street in front, she stood hugging Jackey against her. He was trying not to cry. "I didn't mean to do anything, Mom," he said. "I didn't mean it. I only wanted to see how it worked."

  Bang!

  Flames shot up from the rear of the house, from the back yard: the big oak tree there wore a mantle of fire. People were running along the street, crowding around her and Jackey, hurling frightened questions at them.

  "I don't know," she said. "I don't know!"

  And she was thinking: Where did it come from? How did it get here? Who would make a monstrous thing like that?

  Bang!

  Bang!

  BANG!

  The projectile that blew up the Potters' house was the size of a cantaloupe. The one a few minutes later that destroyed the gymnasium two blocks away was the size of a basketball. And the one a little while after that that leveled the industrial complex across town was the size of a boulder.

  The thing kept growing, kept on firing bigger and bigger projectiles. By six o'clock that night it had burst the walls of the Webster house, and most of the town and much of what lay within fifty miles north-by-northwest had been reduced to flaming wreckage. The National Guard was mobilizing, but there was nothing they could do except aid with mass evacuation proceedings; no one could get within two hundred yards of the weapon because of the radiation.