by Unknown
“You’ve had more than a touch of over-work,” John said. “I warned you, Loren. Now I’m going to send you off on a vacation.”
So Celeste can have a clear field. That’s her game. It must be her game.
“No—!” Loren protested. “Not now! Not at a time like this!”
John’s face became very grave. He sat down on the edge of the bed, still wearing his topcoat—his brief case and newspaper in his hand. These he placed on the bed beside her.
“You’ve heard, then,” he said. “Loren, there’s no reason to be upset. It isn’t as if she meant anything to me—or had meant anything to me for years. In fact—” There were times when John’s mouth hardened and became almost cruel. “—I’d be a liar if I pretended to be sorry.”
The newspaper had fallen open on the bed. While she was still trying to understand John, Loren’s glance dropped and was held by the photograph of a familiar face. Celeste. She drew the paper closer until she could read the story. Celeste had been in an auto accident upstate. Celeste was dead.
Celeste was dead. It was horrible to feel so happy; and impossible not to. The pressure was gone. Her diabolical scheme would never materialize. Within a few days, Loren was herself again.
Three weeks later, John flew to San Francisco. Loren worked late, as usual, retired, and slept soundly—until four o’clock in the morning when the telephone rang.
The serenade continued.
• • •
A siren was sobbing somewhere in the street below. The sound brought Loren through time back to the immediate. She snuffed out her cigarette in a now cluttered tray, and her eyes found the clock again. Three forty-five. The sound of the siren faded; but now she sat upright, her heart pounding. Why was she afraid? She had been methodical and efficient and decisive. That was the important thing—decisive.
“The thing to remember about business, Miss Donell, is that an executive must learn to make decisions and stand by them. You may be right, you may be wrong—but make the decision!”
That had been John Banion instructing his new secretary—eager, ambitious, and—why not face it—already in love with her boss. It had taken six years for him to recognize that love and turn to her when he finally discovered what everyone else had known about Celeste all along; and in the meantime, Loren had learned to be decisive.
Decisive. The first four o’clock call after Celeste’s death removed all doubts. It was Ted; and it was her move. But where was Ted? It would have been easy enough to trace Celeste; but Ted was another matter. She didn’t want to use a private investigator and leave a trail that could be traced. The solution to her problem came from an unexpected source: Katy.
“Mrs. Banion, do you recall asking about the man who was with the former Mrs. Banion when she came to the office just before Christmas?”
It was two weeks after Celeste’s death. Loren didn’t look up from her desk; she mustn’t betray her excitement.
“What about him?” she asked casually.
“It’s a peculiar coincidence; but I had to run an errand for Mr. Banion across town yesterday, and I saw the man. He was going into a small hotel—The Lancer. I think he must live there. He had a bundle under his arm that looked like laundry.”
“You’re very observant,” Loren said dryly.
“You did ask—”
Loren looked up, smiling.
“Ancient history,” she said, “but thanks anyway. You’re a diligent girl.”
Loren wasn’t so casual later when she drove to the Lancer Hotel, parked across the street and watched the entrance until she saw Ted come out. It was a shabby hotel in a shabby neighborhood; Celeste hadn’t, obviously, contributed much to Ted’s economic security. This wasn’t a condition Ted could long endure. She watched him walk from the hotel to a bowling alley at the end of the block, and then went into a drug store phone booth to verify his registration at the hotel. That done, she went to work.
The first thing to be done was to obtain a recording of a piano solo of Ted’s theme. This, for a small fee, was easily accomplished. For a somewhat larger fee, she then obtained a small wire recorder of a type that could be carried in a handbag or a coat pocket. At home, she transferred the record onto the tape, adding a personal touch at the conclusion, “We can reach an understanding if you will meet me behind the bowling alley at 2 A.M.”
She destroyed the record and put the wire recorder away until John’s next business trip. On the first Thursday in March, he took the night plane to Chicago. As soon as she knew he was leaving, Loren did two things: she recorded two hours of correspondence on the dictating machine in her bedroom, and reserved two tickets at a playhouse.
Katy begged off from the theatre.
“I’d love to, Mrs. Banion, but it’s the wrong night. You see, I have a friend—”
“Then hang on to him,” Loren said. “A good man’s hard to find. I’ll ask someone else.”
An out-of-town customer had nothing to do for the evening. Anyone was acceptable as long as she had a companion. She drove to the theatre in her own car. During the first intermission, she excused herself and went to a telephone booth in the lobby. She took the wire recorder from her bag, dialed Ted’s hotel, and waited for his voice. As soon as he answered, she switched on the recorder and held it to the mouth-piece. When the recording was concluded, she hung up the telephone, replaced the recorder in her bag, and returned to her place in the theatre.
It was twelve-thirty, when Loren returned to her apartment the the first time. She left her car parked in the street, as she frequently did after the garage attendant had gone off duty. It was safe. Every hour on the hour, Officer Hanlon made his rounds. She wanted the car to be seen. In the lobby, she met other theatre and party-going tenants returning home, and rode up in the elevator with them. She went directly to her room and put the wire recorder away in the drawer of the work table in her bedroom, transferring the gun to her handbag in its place. Then she set up the dictating machine, opened the bedroom windows enough to make certain the words would be heard on the deck below and waited until exactly one o’clock before turning on the machine. It was time to go.
She went down in the service elevator and left the building through the alley—unseen. She didn’t take the car. She walked a distance and caught a cab, took the cab to within six blocks of Ted’s hotel and walked the rest of the way. At two o’clock, she was waiting in the shadows behind the bowling alley. Ted was only a few minutes late. He advanced close enough for her to see the surprised recognition in his eyes before she fired. A strike in the bowling alley covered the shots. Ted fell and didn’t move again. When she was certain that he was dead, Loren walked away—not hurriedly, but at a normal pace. The streets were almost empty at this hour, but within a few blocks she found a cab, rode to within six blocks of her apartment, and walked the rest of the way. The service entrance was locked, but the front lobby was empty.
It was exactly ten minutes before three when Loren returned to her apartment . . .
. . . The sound of the siren faded away, but not the pounding of Loren’s heart. It was as if she had been in a kind of sleep-walker’s trance, and now she became horribly aware of the fact that she was a murderess. The horror didn’t lie in the fact that Ted was dead—she cared no more for that than John had cared about Celeste’s death. It was something else. Fear—but what could go wrong? She’d been at the theatre, with an escort, when the hotel switchboard had handled Ted’s call. She’d left her windows open so Cherry Morgan could hear her voice. She left her car on the street, and come up in the elevator with friends. She’d destroyed the record—the wire recorder. Loren was out of bed in an instant. She ripped open the table drawer, opened the recorder, and pulled free the wire. She wiped it clean on the skirts of her negligee. No evidence. There was no way to connect her with the body the police would find behind a bowling alley in a shabby neighborhood across town; but
there must be no evidence. The wire was clean. What else? Katy had told her where to find Ted; but she didn’t even know his name. John—? No matter what Celeste might have told John, he would never connect her with Ted’s murder.
But the gun. She should have gotten rid of the gun. She snatched it out of the handbag and began to look about for a hiding place. The echo of the police siren was still in her ears, and reason wouldn’t still it. The gun was the one damning piece of evidence. She stood with it in her hands, turning about, directionlessly—and the doorbell rang.
When Loren went to the door, it was with a gun in her hands and doom in her mind. Just in time, she remembered to stuff the weapon under a cushion of the divan, and then go on to open the door. Officer Hanlon stood in the lighted hall looking all of nine feet tall.
“Mrs. Banion,” he said, “I’m sure sorry to disturb you at this hour, but there was no one on duty downstairs.”
She couldn’t speak a word. Not one.
“I didn’t know where to leave this.”
He held up a set of keys, dangling them before her eyes. It was some seconds before she recognized them.
“You left them in your car, Mrs. Banion. I noticed the window was down when I went past at one o’clock, but I didn’t think I could do anything about it without some way to turn on the ignition. It started to sprinkle a few minutes ago, so I stopped to see what I could do. I found these. You’re getting careless, Mrs. Banion.”
Loren saw her hand reach out and take the keys; it might have been detached from her body.
“Thank you,” she said. “Is that all?”
“That’s all, Mrs. Banion. Sorry to get you out of bed, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
Loren closed the door, then leaned against it—listening until she could hear Hanlon go down in the elevator. Only the keys? She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry. Most of all, she wanted John. She wanted to cling to him, to bury her head on his shoulder and be safe. The weeks of terror were over, and all Hanlon had wanted was to give her the keys! John was gone, but his room was next to hers. She ran to it, turned on the light, and went to the chair behind his desk. Soft, rich leather with the feel of John in it—the contour of his back, the worn places where he’d gripped the arm rests. And then Loren’s eyes fell on the desk. For a moment, she was afraid John had gone off without his ticket. The airline envelope was there. She looked inside. The ticket was gone. I’m becoming a neurotic woman who worries about everything, she thought. And then she noticed what was written on the envelope in the time of departure line: 8:00 A.M.
The sixth was Friday. 8:00 A.M. was in the morning. This morning—not Thursday night.
It had to be a mistake. The airline office was open all night. She dialed quickly.
“John Banion? . . . What flight did you say? No, there was no John Banion on the nine o’clock flight to Chicago . . . The eight o’clock this morning? . . . Yes. We have a reservation for John Banion . . . Who is this calling? . . . Oh, Mrs. Banion. Your husband flies with us frequently. He always takes the daytime flights. Always.”
Loren put the telephone back on John’s desk, and stood listening to the words of a story. It had begun with John’s fingers digging into her arms.
“I couldn’t stand being fooled again!” he’d said.
And then, on the day Celeste had come to see him—
“Loyalty,” John said. “It’s a word. Just a word.”
“Oh, no, John,” Loren whispered.
“I like to fly at night,” John said. “It’s smoother and I—”
“John, no—”
But it had to be John. He’d seen her face that day in Miami when Ted played an old melody. He’d gotten some story from Celeste—enough of a story to induce him to buy her silence, and immediately afterwards the calls had begun. And where was John when he didn’t take the night flights he was supposed to take? With a cold certainty, Loren knew. Men lived by patterns. He had turned to his secretary once, and now—hadn’t Katy been the one who had told her where to find Ted? Katy, who couldn’t go to the theatre because she was expecting a friend? Katy, that not so naive child who did listen at the boss’ door . . .
And Ted Lockard was dead. Loren remembered that when the telephone in her bedroom started ringing. She turned and walked slowly and obediently into her room. She picked up the telephone and listened to the music with an expressionless face. It was four o’clock. It was time for John’s serenade.
DOROTHY B. HUGHES
___________________
1904–1993
DOROTHY B. HUGHES, at the time of the publication of her debut suspense novel, The So Blue Marble in 1940, had worked as a journalist and published a book of poetry, Dark Certainty, nine years earlier. The crime genre gave Hughes her true voice, one mixing a terse, hard-bitten style with a deep understanding of her flawed protagonists, who struggle to stay true to themselves as larger criminal forces threaten to overwhelm them.
The eleven novels Hughes wrote and published from 1940 to 1947 include incomparable classic noirs like The Fallen Sparrow (1942), a spy thriller and keen study of post-traumatic stress in the midst of war; The Blackbirder (1943), featuring a heroine of the Resistance who shows her fear but never lets it define her; Dread Journey (1945), which uses its claustrophobic cross-country train setting to brilliant effect as it dissects the corrosive qualities of Hollywood; Ride the Pink Horse (1946), where a man’s revenge plans and sense of doom play out against the wide-open New Mexico plains; and her greatest masterpiece In a Lonely Place (1947), in which an army veteran’s Los Angeles serial murder spree turns would-be female victims into heroines, and is a masterful look at the psychopathic personality.
Hughes’s writing pace trickled and then stopped completely for over a decade as she found that caring for infirm family members sapped her ability to write fiction, but her final novel, The Expendable Man (1963), brilliantly dissected the burgeoning Civil Rights movement and lingering racial prejudice with a single narrative twist. Hughes later published a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason novels, and remained a prolific reviewer of crime fiction for the likes of the Los Angeles Times and the Albuquerque Tribune, but she didn’t abandon fiction altogether, publishing original short fiction as late as 1991, two years before her death.
“Everybody Needs a Mink,” which first appeared in The Saint Mystery Magazine in 1965, at first seems a departure from the customary foreboding dread of Hughes’s best novels. Meg Tashman, a socialite living in a Westchester County town, cultivates an air of frivolity on a day trip to Manhattan as she shops for luxury goods at Randolph’s department store. Lurking beneath the surface, however, is pressing anxiety about living beyond one’s means, and playing the part of one class while feeling like a fraud. When Meg’s desire for the mink coat is unexpectedly and shockingly fulfilled, it’s just the first of a series of surprises for both Meg and the reader.
EVERYBODY NEEDS A MINK
___________________
ONE WAS dusty rose brocade, tranquil as an arras in a forsaken castle. One was a waterfall of gold, shimmering from a secret jungle cache. And there was, of course, the stiletto of black, cut to here and here—the practical one, as it would go everywhere—and she had the black evening slippers from last year, like new for they went out only to the New Year’s Eve and Mardi Gras dances at the club, and the annual office executive dinner at the Biltmore. With her pearls, single strand, good cultured, Christmas present two years ago from Tashi—black and pearls, always good.
She selected the gold. She’d dash down to Florida and pick up a copper tan before the Christmas party, or maybe Hawaii. Or a week in Arizona, quite chic. She could buy gold slippers and hunky gold jewelry. When you were selecting, you didn’t have to think practical, you could let yourself go.
And the only fun on a shopping tour to the city for underpants and sox and polo shirts for second-grad
er Ron, and two jumpers and calico blouses and sox for fourth-grader Stancia, in the before-school sale at Randolph’s—the only fun was in selecting. For when the Tashman ship came in, when the long-lost uncle in Australia left them his fortune, when in the someday, never-never land future, they became rich, astronomically rich. . . .
And now for a fur, because Meggy Tashman, that soignee young socialite of Larksville-nearly-on-the-Hudson, could hardly be expected to appear in a waterfall of gold with her old black velvet double duty raincoat and evening wrap. She moved the few steps from the French Room entrance arch to the Fur Salon entrance arch. And there it was. Like a precious jewel impaled on the arms of an emerald tree. The perfect mink. A deep brown, exquisitely matched, full-length mink.
She didn’t have to look further. This was it. Practical too. Something to cover the beat-up terry jump suit when she drove the children to school. Something to sling over the faded blues and Tash’s old shirt on the dash from the vacuum cleaner to the supermarket. Mink was so durable. A lifetime investment. So rich, so utter, utterly rich.
“Miss.” The voice came from the Louis XV chair near the mink. In the chair was a small, elderly man. Near him, smoothed into black crepe, towered one of those living store dummies who sold furs, hair and face lacquered in gold and red and lavender.
“Miss!” the voice said just a little louder. A stubby forefinger beckoned. The button eyes held in place by a network of weathered wrinkles seemed to be looking directly at Meg. The finger seemed to be beckoning to her.
She half-shifted her position in order to glance over her shoulder. There was no one behind her. She looked in at the man again. His hat bobbed; he was wearing his hat and overcoat.
“She’s just the right size,” he was saying to the saleslady. He gave a very small and very timid smile at Meg. “Would you mind modeling it, Miss?”
Meg advanced through the arch to the man and the mink.