Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  He walked to the base of the cyclone fence that ringed the supply-yard enclosure, blended into the blackness there. Now, as he waited, he did not feel the chill of the wind. His thoughts insulated him—thoughts of Judith. She was vivid in his mind, as always: long dark hair, gentle brown eyes, high cheekbones, and slim sensuous body. How often did he dream of her? How often did he long to hold her in the warm silent hours of all the nights to come?

  "Soon now, Judith," he whispered in the cold silent hour of this night. "Soon . . ."

  He did not have to wait long. Habitually precise, Moore left the building at ten o'clock. Giroux tensed, his fingers moving over the surfaces of the gun, as he watched Moore walk to his car and begin to unlock it. Then, quickly, he stepped out and approached the other man.

  Moore heard him and glanced around in a jerky way, startled. Giroux stopped two paces away. "Hello, Frank," he said.

  Recognition smoothed the nervous frown on Moore's face. "Why—hello, Martin. You gave me a jolt, coming out of the darkness like that. What are you doing here at this hour?"

  "Waiting for you."

  "What on earth for?"

  "Because I'm going to kill you," Giroux said.

  Moore stared at him incredulously. "Kill me?"

  "That's right."

  "Hey, listen, that's not funny. Are you drunk?"

  Giroux took out the gun. "Not at all. I'm quite serious."

  "Martin, for God's sake, put that thing away." There was a mixture of fear and anger in Moore's voice now. "What's the matter with you? Why would you even think of killing me?"

  "For love," Giroux said.

  "For . . . what?"

  "Love. You're in the way, Frank; you stand between Judith and me. Does it all become clear now?"

  "You and Judith? No, I don't believe it. My wife loves me, she's devoted to me . . ."

  Giroux smiled faintly. "Have you ever wondered about the perfect murder, Frank? Whether there is such a thing? I have, often. And I believe there is, if it's properly planned and executed."

  "Judith would never be party to such a thing!"

  "Whether she would is irrelevant, isn't it?"

  "This is insane," Moore said. "You're insane, Giroux!"

  "Not at all. I'm merely in love. Of course, I do have my practical side as well. There's the hundred-thousand-dollar double-indemnity policy my company has on your life, which will take care of Judith's and my needs quite nicely once we're married. After a decent interval of mourning, naturally. We can't have the slightest suspicion cast on her good name or mine."

  "You can't do this," Moore said. "I won't let you do it." And he made a sudden jump forward, clawing at the gun.

  But his fear and his anger made him clumsy, and Giroux was able to sidestep with ease and then club him with the barrel. Moore fell moaning to the pavement. Giroux hit him again, even more sharply. Then he finished opening the car door, dragged the unconscious man onto the floor in back, and slid in under the wheel.

  As he drove out of Hopper Industrial Park, he was watchful for the night security patrol; still saw no sign of it. Observing the exact speed limit, he followed the route Moore always took home—a route that included a one-mile stretch through Old Mill Canyon. The canyon road was little used since the construction of a bypassing freeway, but Moore considered it a shortcut.

  At the top of the canyon road was a sharp curve with a bluff wall on the left and a wide shoulder edged by a guardrail on the right. Beyond the rail was a sheer two-hundred-foot drop into the canyon below. No cars were behind Giroux as he drove up to the crest. From there he could see for perhaps a quarter of a mile past the curve, and that part of the road also seemed empty.

  Giroux stopped the car a hundred feet from the shoulder. He took and held a long breath, then pressed down hard on the accelerator and twisted the wheel until the car was headed straight for the guardrail. While it was still on the road he braked sharply; the tires burned against the asphalt, providing the skid marks that would make Moore's death seem a tragic accident.

  He managed to fight the car to a stop ten feet from the guardrail. Rubbing sweat from his forehead, he reversed to the roadway, set the emergency brake, and got out to look both ways along the road. Still no headlights in either direction. He dragged Moore out of the rear, propped him behind the wheel, and wedged his foot against the accelerator pedal. The engine roared. Giroux grasped the release lever for the emergency brake, braced himself, jerked the brake off, and flung his body out of the way.

  The car hurtled forward. An edge of the open driver's door slapped against his hip, knocking him down, but he wasn't hurt. He rolled over in time to see the car crash through the guardrail, seem to hang in space for a moment amid a shower of splinters, and plunge downward. The thunderous rending of metal filled the night as the machine bounced and rolled into the canyon.

  Giroux gained his feet, went to the edge. There was no fire, but he could make out the mangled wreckage far below. He said softly, "I'm sorry, Frank. It's not that I hated you, or even disliked you. It's just that you were in the way."

  Then, keeping to the side of the road, he began the long three-mile trek home.

  At six the following evening, Giroux stepped up onto the front porch of the Moore house. He rang the bell, waited with damp palms and constricted chest for Judith to answer.

  There were steps inside, the door opened—and at the sight of her his love swelled inside him until it was almost like physical pain.

  "Hello, Judith," he said gravely. "I just heard about Frank, and of course I came right over."

  Her grief-swollen mouth trembled. "Thank you, Martin. It was such a terrible accident, so . . . so sudden. I guess you know how devoted Frank and I were to each other; I feel lost and terribly alone without him."

  "You're not alone," Giroux told her, and silently added the words my love. "It's true that we've never been anything but casual neighbors, Judith, but I want you to know that there isn't anything I wouldn't do for you. Not anything I wouldn't do . . ."

  UNCHAINED

  The woods were dark and wet and cold after the recent rain. The old man could feel the chill and dampness against his face, against the whole of his left hand—but nowhere else. Except for that left hand, resting on the arm of his wheelchair, he was completely paralyzed from the neck down.

  He did not know these woods, though he had lived at the edge of them for eighteen years. His spinster daughters, Madeline and Caroline, never took him there. But he had sat many times on the enclosed back porch of their house, looking out at the unbroken line of green and brown, thinking of what lay within, and wishing he could go there. Alone. That was the important thing: alone.

  The opportunity had finally come.

  Today, as on every Thursday afternoon, Madeline had left at two o'clock to do the week's shopping and Caroline had gone off to her Literary Society meeting; but on this Thursday, the remainder of the ritual had been broken. Mrs. Gregor, who always arrived promptly at two-thirty to care for him until his daughters returned at five, had not come.

  He didn't know why she failed to show up, and he didn't care; he was merely thankful that she hadn't, and that he had been able to talk Caroline into leaving on faith that Mrs. Gregor would come. It had been eighteen years since the accident, when the drunken salesman had run Martha and him down as they were crossing a rain-slick street, killing her instantly and permanently damaging his spine. Eighteen years, and at long last he was alone. No one in the next room, listening; no one in the house popping in to see if he needed anything, to bother him with unwanted chatter. Alone!

  Getting out of the house had not been easy. All the doors were open leading to the rear porch, beyond which a ramp had been installed in place of the back stairs; but the screen door that gave access to the ramp was closed with an eye hook—a barrier, a wall, a simple screen door that he could not open.

  Still, he had managed it. The wheelchair was motorized, with a control panel on the left arm. By using his thumb on
the forward and reverse buttons and hooking his ring finger around the steering mechanism, he could take himself from room to room, propel himself along sidewalks when Madeline and Caroline took him out for one of his periodic airings. (They hadn't wanted to let him have the motorized chair—though they were well-meaning, they thought of him as a helpless child—but he had pleaded and demanded and refused to eat until finally they had given in.)

  At a distance of ten feet, he had pressed down on the forward button and sent the chair rushing into the screen door. Seven times he had done that, before the eye hook finally popped loose and the door fluttered open. Then he was down the ramp and moving slowly across the rear yard toward the woods.

  Now he was deep among the tall trees—he wasn't sure exactly how far he had come or how long it had taken him—and the only sounds were the occasional cry of a bird, the hum of the wheelchair's motor, the liquid whisper of the tires tracking through wet leaf mold. Ahead was a brushy deadfall, which a man with legs could have penetrated but the wheelchair could not. He turned laterally along it, found the remnants of an old path at its end, and maneuvered his way into a large, grassy glade.

  It was peaceful there, serene. The old man smiled faintly, remembering another glade in another wood decades earlier:

  Martha sitting beside him, and the touch of her lips, and the softness of her hair. Then the smile faded, blotted out by another memory—the still-vivid image of the night on the rain-slick street. He blanked his mind again. He had become quite adept at blanking his mind the past eighteen years.

  The old man rolled across the glade. Through the trees on the far side he could see the dull gray reflection of water. He changed direction, moving diagonally to where the ground sloped upward and the undergrowth was thinner. There he found himself at the edge of a steep, twenty-foot embankment, looking down into a small vale that contained an even smaller pond. Three wild ducks floated placidly in the pond's center, like a child's toys in an oversized wading pool. Patterns of leaves and water lilies rimmed its edges.

  He sat watching the ducks. One of them lifted up, spreading wings that slapped and rippled the surface, and soared away into the overcast sky. Free, he thought. No chains on him. Free.

  He lowered his chin to his chest, sighing softly. When he raised his head again a few seconds later, he noticed movement far down to his left, in the trees close to the pond. A young man and a young woman came into view, hands clasped, moving along the shore in his direction.

  Lovers, the old man thought—and then realized with sudden alarm that the girl was struggling, trying to free herself of the young man's grip. The youth kept moving forward, half-dragging her now. In the forest hush the old man could hear her voice, shrill and frightened: "Please, please, let me go. I won't tell anyone about you, I swear I won't!"

  The youth swung around, caught her shoulder with his free hand, and shook her roughly. "Shut up! You hear me? Keep your mouth shut!"

  "Don't hurt me, please don't hurt me—"

  He slapped her openhanded, with enough force that the sound of it reverberated like a pistol shot. "I'll hurt you plenty if you don't keep that mouth of yours shut."

  Watching, the old man felt an almost forgotten rage well up inside him. His right hand gripped the wheelchair's arm. If I had legs! he thought impotently. If I could walk and use my body! He craned his head forward and shouted, "You, down there! Leave that girl alone!"

  Both their heads jerked around and they stared upward, locating him. The girl cried, "Help, help!" not realizing he was in a wheelchair. The old man strained futilely in the contraption, like someone straining against unbreakable bonds.

  In a frenzy the youth released the girl and then hit her with a closed fist. She fell and lay still. He fumbled under the jacket he wore, and the metal of a handgun flashed in his right hand. Brandishing the weapon, he ran to the embankment.

  The old man did not touch the chair's control panel. He sat with his lips pulled in against his teeth, eyes bright and hard as they followed the youth's struggles up the rocky, root-tangled slope. As he came closer, the old man saw that he was in his early twenties, tall and bony, with a wild tangle of reddish hair—and knew then that the youth was Rusty Jaynes, one of two young thugs who had gone on a brutal crime spree in the area. The other fugitive had been captured by state police two days before. The old man knew all this because one of the few hollow pleasures he had left was television.

  Jaynes, panting, reached the top of the embankment and stood five feet from the old man, pointing a snub-nosed revolver at him. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket before he said, "A cripple, a damned old cripple in a wheelchair. You got some moxie, grandpa, yelling at me that way."

  "Let the girl go, Jaynes," the old man said.

  "So you know who I am. Well, that's just too bad for you."

  "Let the girl go," the old man said again. "Take me as your hostage—that's what you've got her for, isn't it?"

  Jaynes laughed shrilly. "Man, you're something else. I'm gonna push you in that chair? A hostage in a wheelchair?"

  "Then shoot me now and have done with it."

  "If that's the way you want it, grandpa—"

  The old man pressed down hard on the wheelchair's forward control button. The chair rolled ahead so abruptly that Jaynes was startled into momentary inaction. At the last second he tried to dodge, squeezing the revolver's trigger at the same time. An echoing roar hammered in the old man's ears; the bullet sang past his head. And then the chair's raised metal footrest struck the youth on one shin and pitched him off balance, sent him toppling backward down the embankment.

  Jaynes made a screeching sound that cut off when his body jarred into the earth; the revolver popped loose and arced to one side. The old man managed to brake inches from the edge of the slope, in time to see Jaynes roll and slide down over the rough ground. The youth was trying desperately to check his momentum when his head cracked against an upthrust rock; then he went limp. Moments later his body came to a sprawled rest near the bottom. There was blood on the side of his head, blood at one corner of his mouth. He did not move.

  The old man reversed a few feet back from the edge. He sat stoically in the heavy silence, looking toward the girl. There was no way he could get down to her, nothing he could do except to wait. Long minutes passed, five or more, before she began to stir, and it was another two before she sat up and rubbed her jaw. She seemed dazed, disoriented.

  Some of the tenseness went out of the old man. He shouted, "Girl! Up here, girl!"

  He had to call out a second time before her head twisted around and she looked his way. Then she seemed to remember where she was, what had happened to her; she got jerkily to her feet, poised for flight.

  "It's all right," the old man told her. "He can't hurt you now. Look below me, on the slope—you can see him lying there."

  The girl located Jaynes, stared at his sprawled body for a few seconds before her gaze shifted upward again to the old man. Fear gave way to confusion, and finally to understanding and relief.

  "Get the police. I'll wait here. Hurry, now. Run!"

  She hesitated, as if she wanted to say something to him. Then she turned and ran swiftly along the edge of the pond, back into the trees where she and Jaynes had first appeared.

  Sitting there after she was gone, waiting, the old man wondered what the police would say when they arrived, if any of them would recognize his name. Probably not; eighteen years was a long time. The news people would make the connection, though: Ben Frazer, the crippled old man who had miraculously saved a young woman's life and brought about the capture of a dangerous felon, was the same Ben Frazer who had for thirty years been a lieutenant of detectives in the state capital—the officer they had called "Bulldog" because of his refusal to let go once he had his teeth into a case.

  Funny, but he hadn't thought of that bulldog business in a long time. All his life, until that night eighteen years ago, he had been tenacious; then the bulldog in him had simply
let go, given up. For almost two decades he had lived with a single purpose: to find a way to get out from under the watchful eyes of his two daughters, and then find a way to end what remained of his life. That was why he had come into these woods today; that was what he had been thinking of, sitting here watching the ducks. If it hadn't been for the appearance of Jaynes and the girl, he would have pressed down on the Forward button and sent himself over the edge. It would have been Bulldog Ben Frazer, not Rusty Jaynes, lying broken and bloody down there now.

  He thought of the girl, the look on her face just before she'd fled. And for the first time since Martha's death and his own paralysis, he felt as he once had. Useful to others and to himself. Tenacious. Unchained.

  A small smile curved the corners of his mouth. There would be no more thoughts of suicide, no more self-pity. He could wait now, in peace, because in a way he was already free . . .

  TIGER TIGER

  (With John Lutz)

  Kerry Maitland, who had been standing at the Fine Watches and Jewelry counter for the past five minutes, thought that this was one of the few times she was glad to be ignored. And glad to seem like just another browser taking up space. Because she wasn't browsing. Nor was she there to buy anything.

  The heavy-set woman on her left kept studying a velvet-lined tray full of 24-carat gold rings, all of them with expensive jeweled settings. The salesperson behind the counter kept studying the woman and trying not to look impatient. And Kerry, feigning interest in a modest cameo locket, kept covertly studying the pigeon's-blood ruby ring in the nearest corner of the tray. The ruby had been cut cabochon—in convex form and not faceted—and in its deep purplish-red depths you could see a six-rayed star. It was a very valuable stone.

  There was a good deal of milling about in the area, and a good deal of noise, too, as other customers began to besiege the salesperson with demands for attention. Finally, in self-defense, she let some sort of her impatience show through and asked the heavy-set woman to please make up her mind. A little snappishly, the woman said she was trying to do just that.