The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

“You twist my words against me.” Julia spoke and then was still. If she was shocked or greatly concerned, she didn’t show it. After a while she sighed. “What do you want, Cora Rogan? Surely you realize that it would be extremely difficult to establish anything against me after so long a time.”

  “It’s hard to tell.” Cora reflected and shrugged. “Who knows what would happen if it were all to be revived? At the worst, ruin. At the best, a great deal of unpleasantness. Especially, it seems to me, for the charming little girl I met on my way to the house. Did I tell you that we played a game of jacks?” Julia Morrow rose abruptly and moved a few steps away. She stood for a minute staring across the sunlit yard to a row of Russian olive trees at the rear, silvery-green in the light, and then she turned and came back to the table; but did not sit down again.

  Cora smiled secretively.

  “Why have you waited so long?” Julia Morrow said.

  “I am not an avaricious person,” Cora said. “Until recently I lived well and had no need. Now I’m in need.”

  “Tell me what you want”

  “What do I want?” Cora spoke dreamily, like a child with an impossible wish. “I think, more than anything else, I should like to return to Europe and live the rest of my life there. I know of a small villa in the south of France where I could live quite cheaply. For one who is clever in making the best of things, fifty thousand dollars should be quite sufficient for me—for a long, long time.”

  “For the rest of one’s life, I should think.”

  “Yes. For the rest of one’s life.” Julia Morrow sat down. She closed her eyes, apparently tired, but her face was composed.

  “Are you sure I can’t offer you some tea before you go?” she said.

  “Quite sure.” It was Cora Rogan’s time to stand. “I’ve intruded long enough.”

  “Are you staying nearby?”

  “At the hotel in town.”

  “How uncomfortable for you. The accommodations are deplorable, I understand, but of course there are very few guests in such a small place. You probably won’t want to stay long.”

  “I hope to leave tomorrow afternoon. I’m expecting a small package before then.”

  “I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.”

  “You’re very kind and thank you again for seeing me.”

  Cora left without looking back; but she did not go, as she had come, through the house. She walked around the outside along a walk bordering beds of bright flowers, and so past the fountain and around the concrete curve to the white birch and the little girl.

  “Did you see Mother?”

  “Yes. We had a nice talk.”

  “Did she give you something for your charity?”

  “She’s thinking about it. I’m sure she will.”

  “I’m glad. Would you like to play another game of jacks?”

  “No, thank you. I really must go.”

  “All right. I guess I had better go back to the house now, anyway. Goodbye.”

  Cora watched her go up the walk alone. For a few yards she walked sedately, and then she broke suddenly into the gait that seems peculiar to small girls—something between a trot and a skip, or perhaps a little of both by turns.

  Standing under the white birch and staring after her, Cora had suddenly so intense and terrible a sense of loss and loneliness that she cried softly aloud, unaware, in anguish. In that instant the small villa in the south of France was a far and empty place of exile, and she envied the vulnerable woman she had just left on the terrace—the woman who had saved something, as Cora had not, from the sterile years.

  The girl had gone away and left her jacks in a little pile on the grass beside the walk. Bending down, Cora picked up the small metal pieces and dropped them into a pocket of her linen jacket.

  She would keep them, she thought, as a memento of this day—and all the spent days before.

  BONUS BOY

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1963.

  His name was Steve Miklos, although that wasn’t the name on the register downstairs. He had signed the register with the false name at three o’clock that morning, and now, after sleeping for ten hours, he was playing solitaire on a small table by a window of his room overlooking the street. Every once in a while, he would look away from the cards and down into the street, which was one side of a square in a small town. The street was white and burning hot with summer sunlight.

  He had taken the deck of cards from one of the two bags he had carried upstairs at three o’clock. It was on a chair beside the bed now, spread open to make available the items in it, which were merely some clothing and some toilet articles. The other bag, much smaller, was on the floor beside the bed, closed and locked. Inside it was one hundred thousand dollars in bills.

  He kept looking at intervals down into the street because he was waiting for someone. He had arranged to meet someone here today, a woman, but the time was indefinite, and there was no reason to expect that he would just happen to be looking into the street at the time when she appeared, if she appeared there at all.

  His reasons for arriving at three o’clock in the morning in this small town and registering under a false name in this small hotel were related to the money in the small bag, and to the woman for whom he was waiting. Last night he had taken the money from another man’s safe, and the woman he was waiting for was another man’s wife. The money and the woman had belonged to the same man, and the man was powerful and dangerous.

  Steve Miklos, playing solitaire and looking at intervals down into the street, was neither. He wasn’t even very intelligent, as intelligence is measured. He was, however, very handsome, and women usually liked him in excess of discretion. As if to reassure himself that this was true, that he was handsome and frequently desired by women, he got up suddenly from the table by the window and went into the bathroom. He snapped on the light above the lavatory and inspected himself in the mirror with what seemed narcissistic absorption, but as a matter of fact, he accepted his good looks with no more than lethargic satisfaction and a kind of undirected gratitude. He was not inordinately vain, and valued his appearance only for the advantages it gave him. Removing a comb from the hip pocket of his trousers, he began to draw it through his black hair, which was thick and lustrous and curly. The curls, released from the teeth of the comb, sprang crisply into soft coils. After a minute or two, he replaced the comb in the hip pocket and returned to the table beside the window. Gathering the cards, still lying in the precise arrangement of his last defeat, he began to shuffle them swiftly with a skill that suggested professional intimacy; and this was indeed the case, for he had worked, among other things, as a dealer of blackjack.

  Holding the deck in his left hand, prepared to lay out another game, he paused to look down into the street, and he continued to sit very still in that position, suddenly fixed, the cards cupped neatly in his left hand and the right poised above them, for a bus had pulled up to the curb in front of the hotel, which also served as a depot, and a woman was descending from the bus. He could see, as she descended, a flash of nylon knees below a short skirt. She took a couple of steps along the side of the bus and stood waiting with a kind of arrogant grace that was apparent, even from the sharp angle of his vision from above, while the driver got her luggage from a compartment, matched cases, and put it out on the sidewalk. After he had closed the compartment, the driver picked up the bags and carried them into the hotel, the woman following two or three paces behind. She walked with the same grace with which she had stood waiting, breasts high and long legs scissoring, and she gave the effect of an expensive woman, which was what she was. She was an expensive and well-kept woman, the wife of a rich man, the woman Steve Miklos was waiting for.

  He had risen and leaned toward the window as she walked behind the bus driver toward the hotel ent
rance, to sharpen his angle of vision and keep her in sight for seconds longer, and he was aware of a rising excitement within him. This was unusual and slightly disturbing, for he was usually rather brutally phlegmatic in his response to women, although he disguised it, and his intensity with this one, who was different from all the others who had been and would be, made him feel naked and vulnerable. He had a strong compulsion to go downstairs immediately to meet her, but this was contrary to their plans, which had been carefully made, and so he sank back onto the chair, acutely conscious of the hard beating of his heart.

  She would take a room, paying for a day in advance, as he had paid for two. She would give as a reason, as he had, that she planned to leave very early in the morning of the next day and did not wish to be delayed by paying when she left. In her room, after an interval, she would call the desk and ask to be connected with the room of Stephen Miklos, using, of course, the name that Stephen Miklos had used. The disclosure of a room number, his or hers, would then bring them together, here or there.

  In the meanwhile, there were the long, last minutes of waiting to be endured and survived. Getting up again from the chair, he lit a cigarette and went over and lay down across the bed on his back, drawling on the cigarette and blowing smoke upward in long plumes. The smoke rose and thinned and disintegrated against the faded ceiling. Waiting for her to call, in order to relieve the tedium of time, he began to review deliberately the way they had come from where they had been to where they now were.

  Her name was Hannah Archer, and she was married to a man named Hugo Archer, who was a man with many interests in many places about which certain authorities had more curiosity than knowledge. One of his local places, a minor interest, was a combination restaurant and casino. You could eat fine food on the first floor to the muted sounds of a string ensemble that played routinely the music of such composers as Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml and Jerome Kern, and was capable of playing something else upon request. On the second floor was the casino, and it was here that Steve Miklos worked. It was here, at least, that he was seen each night, although the character and purpose of his work were never clearly defined. He merely moved among the guests, being charming and decorative in a white tie, especially to the guests on the distaff side, and extra especially, among those, to Hannah Archer, who was entitled to preferred treatment by virtue of being, not a guest, but Mr. Big’s wife. Hannah had spent many nights in the casino, for she loved the quiet crowd, richly dressed, and the subtle suspense that was part of the quality of games of chance. If she began spending even more nights there after the sudden appearance of Steve, Hugo Archer seemed not to notice, or if he noticed, not to mind. This could have been a result of Hannah’s discretion, of course, for even after she began seeing Steve alone and away from the casino, she managed to sustain with him in company an overt attitude that was never more than the kind of sophisticated flirtation that she engaged in harmlessly with a dozen others.

  Even when they were alone, her discretion, although considerably qualified, was not abandoned, and she was clearly not inclined to commit herself in passion to some-thing she would regret in satiety. There was far too much to lose, and Hugo Archer was always a threat. Squat and ugly in a strangely alluring way, he was richer than anyone knew, and he wielded immense power in a shadowy world without appreciable inhibitions. He commanded, Steve knew, a small army of dedicated men who would do for him at a word whatever he wanted done but no longer wanted to do for himself, having acquired a certain position. He was not a man, in brief, to betray. He could, when it suited him, forget a friend or a favor, but he never forgot an enemy or an offense.

  And so that was the way things had been before becoming as they now were, and they had begun to change, to become different from before, suddenly yesterday afternoon, only twenty-four hours ago. They had been then, yesterday, in Hannah’s home, which was a place he had rarely been, and he was there at this time only because Hugo Archer was away on one of the mysterious business trips that sometimes took him out into his shadowy world. Hannah was lying propped on her elbows on the floor. She was wearing a white jersey blouse and a pair of tight black velvet pants, her legs bent back above her thighs from the knees and her heels dangling above her lovely stern. She looked beautiful and at least ten years younger than she was, which was thirty-five. Balanced precariously in the thick pile of off-white carpeting a few inches from her nose was a tall glass filled with ice and vodka and orange juice. A long, transparent plastic straw was leaning against the glass on the inside, and every once in a while, Hannah, without ever touching the glass with her hands, would stretch a little forward and suck briefly on the straw. Doing this now, she smiled lazily at Steve, who was sitting on a soft white leather ottoman and watching her with candid desire in brown eyes that looked black in passion and anger.

  “Darling,” she said, “if only you weren’t so dreadfully poor.”

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I know it’s depressing.”

  “It’s just that it would be so wonderful if you weren’t.”

  “Everyone can’t be as rich as Hugo.”

  “That’s true. Hardly anyone can be as rich as Hugo, but it is hardly necessary. Not for you, darling. With you as a bonus, I’d be willing to settle for less.”

  “How much less?”

  “It could be a great deal less and still be enough. There is no advantage in having far more money than one can spend.”

  “I’m happy to know that you’re prepared to be reasonable.”

  “Darling, I am almost entirely free from avarice. All I require is enough to supply the simple necessities.”

  “Did you say necessities or luxuries?”

  “Darling, for me they are the same thing.”

  “Well, let’s get down to specifications. How much, would you say, would be enough to supply the simple necessities for a person who is almost entirely free from avarice? Name a figure.”

  “Make me an offer.”

  “Would one hundred G’s be enough?”

  “I should think that would do very well for quite a while. Do you happen to have that much?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. Darling, you mustn’t imagine that you can trick me or anything like that. I’m very shrewd in such matters.”

  “Perhaps I could get it, however.”

  “You mustn’t indulge in fantasies, either, darling. It’s hard on the mind.”

  “I could get it tonight. By nine o’clock, say. One hundred thousand in large bills.”

  “That’s the way I like it. Large bills is absolutely the nicest way that money comes. Darling, you are so charming when you dream. So small-boyish. If you will come down here beside me, I think I would like to kiss you.”

  He came down beside her, as directed, and they kissed each other, as it turned out. It did not turn out, however, to be the kind of kiss a woman gives a small boy, nor on the other hand the kind a small boy gives a woman. It was too long and too ardent. When it was over, she rolled back onto her tummy and sucked again on the clear plastic straw and looked at him sidewise from smoky eyes.

  “If only you really could,” she said.

  “I can.”

  “No, no. You mustn’t torment yourself and me with delusions, darling. You are charming and lovable and exciting, but you are simply not the type to acquire that much money tonight or any other night or ever at all.”

  “If I can get the money tonight, will you go away with me before Hugo gets back?”

  “Permanently?”

  “Yes.”

  “Certainly, darling.

  “Then you had better be prepared to go, because I know just where it is, and I’ll get it.”

  She had been watching him closely sidewise all the while, and now she rolled over suddenly and sat up, hugging her knees in her arms and staring at him inten
tly over them. In her eyes, behind the smoke, there was a new glitter of excitement.

  “I do believe you’re serious.”

  “You’d better believe it. I’ll simply take it.”

  “Steal it?”

  “Yes, if you want to put it that way.”

  “Darling, there is no good in speaking in euphemisms. We may as well be candid.”

  “Would you object to spending stolen money?”

  “Not at all. I would only object if you were caught stealing it.”

  “I won’t be caught.”

  “Where is all this money? Just lying somewhere waiting for you to pick it up?”

  “That’s right. Just lying there waiting.”

  “Waiting where?”

  “In Hugo’s safe at the casino.”

  “Steal from Hugo! Darling, are you insane?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “He would certainly have you killed. Me, too.”

  “He would have to find us first.”

  “I must confess that I didn’t dream you could have the nerve. Perhaps you won’t, when it comes down to it.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “How do you know the money is in the safe? Did you see it?”

  “Hugo told me. You know he likes me. Sometimes he invites me into his office for a cigarette and a drink of private stock. The night before he left town, I was in there, and he had this package, just a brown paper package tied with heavy twine, lying on his desk. He was in an expansive mood, a little tight, and he asked me if I knew what was in the package, and I said no, and he said one hundred thousand dollars in large bills. Then he said, as a joke, that I had better watch over things closely while he was gone, because he was leaving the package in the office safe until he returned from wherever he was going.”

  “That’s a lot of money for someone just to leave in an office safe. Even Hugo. Is it his personal money?”