by Otto Penzler
No matter what was happening in her mind, it had made a wreck out of his own. He couldn’t concentrate on work, or even Sonja. All he could do was stare at Nelda when he was with her and wonder and wonder. And when he was away from her he wondered even more ...
He was going bat crazy He was obsessed with it, couldn’t get his mind on anything else. He had never believed in all that psychic stuff; it was a hoax, a ripoff, like fortunetellers at a county fair. There had to be some logical explanation for the things that had happened rather than the psychological mumbo jumbo that Nelda kept mouthing. Extrasensory perception, altered states of consciousness, precognition. Horse hockey!
Yet he couldn’t come up with anything that even partially explained how Nelda knew the phone was going to ring, that it would be a wrong number, or that the postman was going to deliver a letter from someone she hadn’t heard from in years, or how — and this was the really scary one — she could describe a hotel room she’d never been in and even see him sitting beside Sonja on the sofa.
Could she have followed him that night, peeped through the keyhole? Common sense said no, that he was becoming paranoid. Nevertheless, he began seeing Sonja at lunchtime on the days when he knew Nelda was either playing bridge or meeting someone for lunch.
For a while, maybe a week, nothing unusual happened — except that Nelda kept reading those damn books. She would sit in her chair by the fireplace, a book in her hands, and every so often she’d look up with a strange little smile on her face, as though she knew an amusing joke on him which he wasn’t privy to.
Then one night the phone thing happened again. He was watching the Bulls go down in inglorious defeat (what could they expect without Air Jordan?) and she was reading a book entitled Authentic Witchcraft. Witchcraft, for God’s sake! Wouldn’t you know?!
The phone rang and he reached for it, but she said, “Don’t bother, it’s for me. Sheila wants to tell me that our bridge game has been postponed until next week because her daughter’s just been taken to the hospital. The baby will be born tonight.”
He froze, his hand extended in midair, while she picked up the phone.
“Hello, Sheila,” she said at once. “Yes, as soon as the phone rang, I knew it was you. You’re going to the hospital to be with Linda, aren’t you? Uh-huh, just my ESP at work.” She gave a little laugh. “Give Linda my love. No, I can’t tell you if it will be a boy or a girl, but it will be perfect. Yes, see you next week. Bye.”
He turned the TV off. He couldn’t focus on the game anymore. All he could do was stare at Nelda, his mind going round and round like a carousel, round and round and round in the same dizzying circle, getting nowhere.
She was bending over the bed, shaking him. “Hugh, wake up. Wake up!It’s almost nine o’clock. You’ve overslept.”
He turned over and groaned, opened his eyes then closed them again. “Go away,” he mumbled.
‘You’re already late,” she persisted. “Get up.”
“I’m not going to the office today.”
“Are you sick?”
Instead of answering, he pulled the sheet up over his head. He was sick, yes. Sick of all the craziness that had taken over his life. He felt that last night had been the ultimate blow to what was left of his sanity. He wasn’t sure at this moment whether he could distinguish reality from fantasy anymore.
Yesterday he had decided that he was being overly cautious in seeing Sonja only during lunch, so after he left the office at five, he dropped in on her at the Cromley. It was nearly eight when he got home and Nelda met him at the door. “Hugh, the most peculiar thing ...” she began. “Maybe you can explain it for me.”
“What?” He was totally enervated and the last thing he wanted right now was conversation.
“When you didn’t get home at the usual time, I started worrying, and then suddenly, my mind went blank for a second or two, and after that I started seeing those still-life pictures again. I saw a hotel room, not the same one I saw before, but — and this is what’s peculiar — there were the same family pictures around the room that I saw in that other room where you had the meeting. And the same woman was there, that dark-haired woman, and ...”
He didn’t listen to any more. He started trembling and knew that if he didn’t get out of her sight at once, she would notice that he was having an acute attack of anxiety. He rushed upstairs, calling as he went, “I’ve already eaten, so don’t make any dinner for me.” He went straight to bed.
The trembling lasted a long time; it was as though he were having a hard chill. Finally it stopped and he took long, deep breaths. Something had to be done. Things couldn’t continue this way. He didn’t want to give up Sonja, but he couldn’t afford any scandal in his life right now (and Nelda would sure as hell divorce him if she found out) because Jim Beldon and Harry Nelms were both strong family men and absolute Puritans about practically everything. He’d have to stop seeing Sonja until after he made partner. Then he could relax a little and resume the relationship.
Nelda sat down on her bed and leaned toward his. “Hugh, I had the most peculiar dream last night.”
Kee-rist, please! He didn’t want to hear about her dream.
“You were in that room — the one I told you about with the pictures and the dark-haired woman — and all of a sudden a man came bursting in wearing a mask and with a gun in his hand. He said, ‘You don’t belong here, this is my territory,’ and he shot you right through the heart. Then he took the mask off and went to the dark-haired woman and said, ‘If I ever catch you fooling around again, I’ll kill you too.’ Then he kissed her and took her into a bedroom and ...”
He came out from under the cover. “Nelda, for God’s sake, have you lost your mind completely? That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”
“I thought so too,” she said calmly, smiling. “That’s why I told you about it, so we could both have a good laugh.”
Instead of laughing, he got out of bed and headed for the shower. “I’m going to work after all,” he said.
His first thought had been to go to Sonja at lunchtime to tell her he couldn’t see her again for a while, but then he decided he’d wait until the middle of the afternoon. He didn’t call ahead, just went at three o’clock. Sonja seemed only mildly surprised to see him. “Gee,
Hugh, I never know when to expect you anymore. You’ve gotten to be a real drop-in visitor.”
He was trying to think of some way to break it to her gently that he was going to have to drop out for a while. “Sonja, baby, look, I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve got to . ..”
At that moment the door to the hall was thrown open and a man came in quickly and closed the door behind him. Hugh’s first thought was, He’s not wearing a mask; that’s a stocking over his head. And then he saw the pistol in the man’s hand, and he began shaking. “No!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot. For God’s sake, don’t shoot.”
“You don’t belong here,” the man said. “This is my territory.”
He was going to be shot, killed. He had to get out. How? The man was between him and the door, and it would do no good to go to the bedroom because the man would follow. Sonja had backed against the far wall and was cringing there like a terrified animal. The hell with Sonja; her other lover wouldn’t shoot her. Nelda had said as much.
He remembered the fire escape just under the balcony. If he could make it to that before the man pulled the trigger . . . He ran to the balcony and was climbing over when he saw the man coming out on the balcony, the gun aimed at his head. “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot,” he cried, reaching for the fire escape.
His foot slipped on the first rung and he tried to catch hold of the balcony rail but missed. He fell fourteen stories, landing on the concrete beside the Cromley’s pint-sized swimming pool. The last sound he heard was Sonja’s scream ... or was it his own?
He was already sitting in the back booth when she arrived at The Tea Kettle. His name was Ivan. He was forty years old, had blond hair turning
gray which looked the color of pale sand, brown eyes, a mottled complexion which probably was a result of teenage acne, and he was tall and skinny as a telephone pole. He had been a private investigator until his license was revoked three years ago. Now he clerked part time in a furniture store and took on “special jobs” investigating whenever one turned up, which was infrequently.
She slid in the booth across from him and, without a word, took a long white envelope out of her pocketbook and slipped it across the table to him.
Without opening the envelope, he pocketed it. “Gee, Nelda, it was so much fun, I should be paying you.”
She knew this was a bit of fawning, not truth. ‘You’ll find a little bonus in there, along with your fee.”
“I wasn’t expecting that,” he said, obviously pleased.
“That last episode may have been a little hairy,” she said. ‘You deserve something extra.”
“I’d have settled for a few explanations from you about how you managed it all.” He looked at her admiringly.
“I couldn’t have done it without your help,” she told him. “Not just any P.I. would have suited. Did I tell you I interviewed three before someone recommended you?”
“I get most of my jobs word of mouth. What’ll you have?” he asked as a waitress stopped at the booth. “My treat today. Shall we celebrate?”
“I’ll just have a cup of tea and an English muffin,” she said. “They don’t have the wherewithal for celebrations here.”
He ordered coffee and a pastry and as soon as the waitress left said, “Now tell me how you did it with what little information I gave you.”
“Easy,” she said. “Almost too easy. First I took home an armload of books on everything pertaining to psychology and boned up on all phases of it. Also, I made a point of reading the books constantly whenever Hugh was home. Then I started making up things to tell him. I told him about a fictitious bridge game in which I knew in advance every card that would be played. Then I made up something about a friend not joining another friend and me for lunch after I predicted she wouldn’t. That was the same night I had you call at nine on the dot and ask if Jimmy had come in yet. I had predicted that the phone would ring and that it would be a wrong number. I think that call shook Hugh up a little. The second time 1 had you call — that was when I chatted on about Sheila and her daughter’s expected baby — well, Sheila had called that afternoon with the information that her daughter had just been taken to the hospital.”
“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “I just listened and marveled. You should have been an actress.”
“There was some luck involved also,” she admitted. “I wrote a letter to myself from someone who never existed, someone I supposedly hadn’t seen in ages, and then predicted the letter would arrive in the mail and what it would say. It was sheer luck that Hugh was home when the letter came, otherwise I would have had to wait until he came home to open the letter, and that wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.”
He broke out in a big laugh. “You didn’t really need to hire a P.I., Nellie, my girl.”
“Oh yes, I did. You were the one who found out who the woman was, where she lived, and all the vital information. All I had was a suspicion that he was seeing another woman. Also, getting into her two suites was a stroke of genius. I couldn’t have done that. Knowing what her places looked like was really what did the trick.”
“Simple,” he said. “All I had to do was tip the room-service guy into letting me wheel in the trolley.”
They were both quiet as the waitress returned with their orders. Then he said, “I’ll miss our little sessions. Do you think we could see each other now and then?”
She was thoughtful for a minute. “Not right away. I’m going to do some traveling for a month or two. I always wanted to go to Paris for shopping, but Hugh was too busy to get away and too tight to let me go. Also, I thought a cruise would be nice, maybe to somewhere like Alaska. But after that...” She gave him her one-hundred-watt smile. “Yes, Ivan, I think we should keep in touch.”
He sipped his coffee, looking at her over the rim of the cup. “I’m not sure but what you really are psychic. How did you know your husband was going to rush out to the balcony and fall and kill himself when I went in there with a stocking over my head and a gun in my hand? All I said was what you told me to: “This is my territory, you don’t belong here.”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought he might have a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. It never occurred to me he’d try to get away.” “But I never would have shot him, or the woman. Murder’s not my thing. What made him panic like that?”
She gave a little shrug, then laughed. “It must have been the power of suggestion.”
Take It Away
from Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine
“Nice night for a stakeout.”
Well, that startled me, let me tell you. I looked around and saw I was no longer the last person on line. Behind me now was a goofy-looking guy more or less my age (thirty-four) and height (six feet) but maybe just a bit thinner than me (190 pounds). He wore eyeglasses with thick black frames and a dark-blue baseball cap turned around backward, with bunches of carroty-red hair sticking out under it on the sides and back.
He was bucktoothed and grinning, and he wore a gold-and-pur-ple high school athletic jacket with the letter X hugely on it in Day-Glo white edged in purple and gold. It was open a bit at the top, to show a bright lime green polo shirt underneath.
His trousers were plain black chinos, which made for a change, and on his feet were a pair of those high tech sneakers complete with inserts and gores and extra straps and triangles of black leather here and there that look as though they were constructed to specifications for NASA. In his left hand he held an X Men comic book folded open to the middle of a story. He was not, in other words, anybody on the crew, or even like anybody on the crew. So what was this about a stakeout? Who was this guy?
Time to employ my interrogation techniques, which meant I should come at him indirectly, not asking “Who are you?” but saying “What was that again?”
He blinked happily behind his glasses and pointed with his free hand. “A stakeout,” he said, cheerful as could be.
I looked where he pointed, at the side wall of this Burger Whopper, where it was my turn tonight to get food for the crew, and I saw the poster there advertising this month’s special in all twenty-seven hundred Burger Whoppers all across the United States and Canada, which was for their Special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, made with U.S. government-inspected steak guaranteed to be a full quarter-inch thick.
I blinked at this poster, with its glossy color photo of the special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, and beside me the goofy guy said, “A steak out, right? A great night to come out and get one of those steak sandwiches and take it home and not worry about cooking or anything like that because, who knows, the electricity could go off at any second.”
Well, that was true. The weather had been miserable the last few days, hoveringjust around the freezing point, with rain at times and sleet at times, and at the moment— 9:20 p.m. (2120 hours) on a Wednesday — outside the picture windows of the Burger Whopper, there was a thick, misty fog, wet to the touch, kind of streaked and dirty, that looked mostly like an airport hotel’s laundry on the rinse cycle.
Not a good night for a stakeout — not my kind of stakeout. All the guys on the crew had been complaining and griping on our walkie-talkies, sitting in our cars on this endless surveillance, getting nowhere, expecting nothing, except maybe we’d all have the flu when this was finally over. >
“See what I mean?” the goofy guy said, and grinned his bucktoothed grin at me again and gestured at that poster like the magician’s girl assistant gesturing at the elephant. See the elephant?
“Right,” I said, and I felt a sudden quick surge of relief. If our operation had been compromised, after all this time and energy and effort, particularly given my own spotty record, I don’t know what I
would have done. But at least it wouldn’t have been my fault.
Well, it hadn’t happened, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. My smile was probably as broad and goofy as the other guy’s when I said, “I see it, I see it. A steak out on a night like this — I get you.”
“I’m living alone since my wife left me,” he explained, probably feeling we were buddies since my smile was as moronic as his. “So mostly I just open a can of soup or something. But weather like this, living alone, the fog out there, everything cold, you just kinda feel like you owe yourself a treat, know what I mean?”
Mostly, I was just astonished that this guy had ever had a wife, though not surprised she’d left him. I’ve never been married myself, never been that fortunate, my life being pretty much tied up with the Bureau, but I could imagine what it must be like to have been married, and then she walks out, and now you’re not married anymore. And what now? It would be like if I screwed up real bad, much worse than usual, and the Bureau dropped me, and I wouldn’t have the Bureau to go to anymore — I’d probably come out on foggy nights for a steak sandwich myself and talk to strangers in the line at the Burger Whopper.
Not that I’m a total screwup — don’t get me wrong. If I were a total screwup, the Bureau would have terminated me (not with prejudice, just the old pink slip) a long time ago; the Bureau doesn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. But it’s true I have made a few errors along the way and had luck turn against me, and so on, which in fact was why I was on this stakeout detail in the first place.
All of us. The whole crew, the whole night shift, seven guys in seven cars blanketing three square blocks in the Meridian Hills section of Indianapolis. Or was it Ravenswood? How do I know? — I don’t know anything about Indianapolis. The Burger Whopper was a long drive from the stakeout site — that’s all I know.
And we seven guys, we’d gotten this assignment, with no possibility of glory or advancement, with nothing but boredom and dyspepsia (the Burger Whopper is not my first choice for food) and chills and aches and no doubt the flu before it’s over, because all seven of us had a few little dings and dents in our curricula vitae. Second-raters together, that’s what we had to think about, losing self-esteem by the minute as we each sat alone there in our cars in the darkness, waiting in vain for Francois Figuer to make his move.