by Неизвестный
Welcoming the drink, I slid into the seat next to Ted and ordered a double scotch and water and, in a moment of reprisal, named Chivas Regal. Let him pick up the check. The drink was most helpful and immediately warmed me to the almost humorous situation in which I now found myself. By the end of the third drink we both found ourselves laughing about our cleverly disguised correspondence, how we both had revised our names to reflect our new “selves” and, oddly enough, how we both were interested in meeting someone new.
Ted, or Edward I should say, told me he’d been lonely. My disbelief must have been apparent because he hastened to fill me in on his life for the last year and a half.
“Patti, I mean Trish — you really look terrific, I barely recognized you — it hasn’t been easy,” he confided. “A lot of our neighbors were breaking up and the old party circuit just seemed to fall apart. George Hathaway, you remember George, moved in with me after Helen threw him out and we’ve been two bachelors, eating bar food and staying home most of the time.”
To say I found this hard to believe was an understatement but, after more than five years living with Ted, I knew Edward was telling me the truth.
“Wait until I get home and tell George what happened tonight,” he laughed in an odd deprecating way. “I told him I had a hot date with this gal I met last week. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I answered an ad.”
“You don’t have to tell him,” I said, trying to console. “Just tell him we had a terrific time.”
A crooked smile played at Edward’s terrific mouth. “Maybe I will. How about another drink?”
Feeling woozy, I glanced at my watch and seeing it was after ten o’clock, realized that, true to form, Ted wouldn’t spring for dinner and I’d better get myself home while I was still able. I murmured excuses and started to pull my purse towards me.
“Wait, I’ll drive you home,” Edward offered.
It was, at the moment, a good offer and one which I accepted. Waiting for him to settle the bill, which he did very slowly — as if to give me a chance to pitch in, fat chance — I touched up my new Brilliant Red lipstick. My reflection in the compact mirror told me that full cosmetics and a henna rinse were things I should really do more often — enough of this mouse brown haired lady.
The cool night air was welcome and sobering. Looking around the small lot I couldn’t find our, I mean Ted’s, white sedan. Guessing what I was looking for, Edward steered me to a brand new low and sleek shiny green two-seated sports car. An expensive looking sports car.
“It’s brand new,” he said. “What do you think?”
Flustered, I had to admit it was gorgeous. “I guess you can afford a car like this now, not being married and with a paying roommate,” I said.
“I traded in the sedan last year and only have three years to go on the payments,” he boasted. “It was expensive, but what the hell, I’m worth it.”
Ted, and it was Ted talking now, pushed me against his prize vehicle, bending me backwards over the low roof, with only a well placed knee saving me from being ground into the maxi-waxed hood.
“Listen, Trish, I was thinking,” he slurred in my ear as I maneuvered out from under him. “You’re looking real good now. Why don’t you move back in with me? We don’t even have to get married this time. We’re both looking for someone, right, and we’re used to each other. And there’s the car payments…”
I saw red. Three more years of car payments. Another year and a half still owed on the lawyers’ loan. Good old doormat Patti. I still don’t remember pulling the pin from my scarf and sticking it deep into his inner ear. I do remember saying something appropriate at the moment, that is, about sticking it in his ear and I also remember Ted falling at my feet — but we’d had a lot to drink. Come to think of it, there was a small drop of blood clinging to my stick pin when I wiped it clean on his suit.
When the police came late Sunday afternoon I had already washed the red out of my hair. Once a femme fatal might just be one time too many. I was sitting around reading a rather thick book — on about page 50 — dressed in comfortable jeans and sweat-shirt; I had my own scrubbed clean face back on.
The police lieutenant was sympathetic, having to tell me my ex-husband had been killed in the Gotham parking lot. At first I caught a hard glint in his eye, especially when he asked me where, and how, I spent my Saturday night.
Gesturing to my book, I apologized for being home, alone, reading. The glint in his eye almost gave off a spark at the thought, my worst fear closing in on me like heavy fog.
About to stammer something like a confession, I quickly shut my open mouth when I saw the tall, dark and handsome policeman close his notebook. His sardonic smile melted my heart when he told me he could hardly believe an attractive woman like myself had spent Saturday night at home alone. But his notebook was closed, so I put on the sultry smile I’d practiced on Marsha and blushed.
The best part was that when he looked at me, that glint was now taking on a different context. He asked me if I had any idea who Ted (as I referred to him, of course) had been with. The bartender described a knock-out redhead and Ted’s friend and roommate George gave her name as Trish. George said that Edward (as he referred to him, of course) had been dating her for a few weeks.
I was very sorry I couldn’t help him. Jean Paiva (1944–1989) had many careers: corporate communications, cable TV marketer, trade journalist, cofounder and editor of Crawdaddy magazine, and fantasy writer. NAL Onyx published two novels by Jean, The Lilith Factor and The Last Gamble. Only one short story was published during her tragically brief life, “Just Idle Chatter,” in Kathryn Ptacek’s Women of Darkness II, but she left nearly a dozen complete short stories behind, and this magazine is committed to printing them all. “Had she lived, she would have been one of the great dark fantasists,” Tanith Lee writes.
THE “GLORIA SCOTT” by Arthur Conan Doyle
“I have some papers here,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes as we sat one winter’s night on either side of the fire, “which I really think, Watson, that it would be worth your while to glance over. These are the documents in the extraordinary case of the Gloria Scott, and this is the message which struck Justice of the Peace Trevor dead with horror when he read it.”
He had picked from a drawer a little tarnished cylinder, and, undoing the tape, he handed me a short note scrawled upon a half-sheet of slate-grey paper.
The supply of game for London is going steadily up [it ran]. Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, has been now told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for preservation of your hen-pheasant’s life.
As I glanced up from reading this enigmatical message, I saw Holmes chuckling at the expression upon my face.
“You look a little bewildered,” said he.
“I cannot see how such a message as this could inspire horror. It seems to me to be rather grotesque than otherwise.”
“Very likely. Yet the fact remains that the reader, who was a fine, robust old man, was knocked clean down by it as if it had been the butt end of a pistol.”
“You arouse my curiosity,” said I. “But why did you say just now that there were very particular reasons why I should study this case?”
“Because it was the first in which I was ever engaged.”
I had often endeavoured to elicit from my companion what had first turned his mind in the direction of criminal research, but had never caught him before in a communicative humour. Now he sat forward in his armchair and spread out the documents upon his knees. Then he lit his pipe and sat for some time smoking and turning them over.
“You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?” he asked. “He was the only friend I made during the two years I was at college. I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed much with th
e men of my year. Bar fencing and boxing I had few athletic tastes, and then my line of study was quite distinct from that of the other fellows, so that we had no points of contact at all. Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only through the accident of his bull terrier freezing on to my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel.
“It was a prosaic way of forming a friendship, but it was effective. I was laid by the heels for ten days, and Trevor used to come in to inquire after me. At first it was only a minute’s chat but soon his visits lengthened, and before the end of the term we were close friends. He was a hearty, full-blooded fellow, full of spirits and energy, the very opposite to me in most respects, but we had some subjects in common, and it was a bond of union when I found that he was as friendless as I. Finally he invited me down to his father’s place at Donnithorpe, in Norfolk, and I accepted his hospitality for a month of the long vacation.
“Old Trevor was evidently a man of some wealth and consideration, a J. P., and a landed proprietor. Donnithorpe is a little hamlet just to the north of Langmere, in the country of the Broads. The house was an old-fashioned, widespread, oak-beamed brick building, with a fine lime-lined avenue leading up to it. There was excellent wild-duck shooting in the fens, remarkably good fishing, a small but select library, taken over, as I understood, from a former occupant, and a tolerable cook, so that he would be a fastidious man who could not put in a pleasant month there.
“Trevor senior was a widower, and my friend his only son. There had been a daughter, I heard, but she had died of diphtheria while on a visit to Birmingham. The father interested me extremely. He was a man of little culture, but with a considerable amount of rude strength, both physically and mentally. He knew hardly any books, but he had travelled far, had seen much of the world, and had remembered all that he had learned. In person he was a thick-set, burly man with a shock of grizzled hair, a brown, weather-beaten face, and blue eyes which were keen to the verge of fierceness. Yet he had a reputation for kindness and charity on the countryside, and was noted for the leniency of his sentences from the bench.
“One evening, shortly after my arrival, we were sitting over a glass of port after dinner, when young Trevor began to talk about those habits of observation and inference which I had already formed into a system, although I had not yet appreciated the part which they were to play in my life. The old man evidently thought that his son was exaggerating in his description of one or two trivial feats which I had performed.
“‘Come, now, Mr Holmes,’ said he, laughing good-humouredly. ‘I’m an excellent subject, if you can deduce anything from me.’
“‘I fear there is not very much,’ I answered. ‘I might suggest that you have gone about in fear of some personal attack within the last twelvemonth.’
“The laugh faded from his lips, and he stared at me in great surprise.
“‘Well, that’s true enough,’ said he. ‘You know, Victor,’ turning to his son, ‘when we broke up that poaching gang they swore to knife us, and Sir Edward Holly has actually been attacked. I’ve always been on my guard since then, though I have no idea how you know it.’
“‘You have a very handsome stick,’ I answered. ‘By the inscription I observed that you had not had it more than a year. But you have taken some pains to bore the head of it and pour melted lead into the hole so as to make it a formidable weapon. I argued that you would not take such precautions unless you had some danger to fear.’
“‘Anything else?’ he asked, smiling.
“‘You have boxed a good deal in your youth.’
“‘Right again. How did you know it? Is my nose knocked a little out of the straight?’
“‘No,’ said I. ‘It is your ears. They have the peculiar flattening and thickening which marks the boxing man.’
“‘Anything else?’
“‘You have done a good deal of digging by your callosities.’
“‘Made all my money at the gold fields.’
“‘You have been in New Zealand.’
“‘Right again.’
“‘You have visited Japan.’
“‘Quite true.’
“‘And you have been most intimately associated with someone whose initials were J. A., and whom you afterwards were eager to entirely forget.’
“Mr. Trevor stood slowly up, fixed his large blue eyes upon me with a strange wild stare, and then pitched forward, with his face among the nutshells which strewed the cloth, in a dead faint.
“You can imagine, Watson, how shocked both his son and I were. His attack did not last long, however, for when we undid his collar and sprinkled the water from one of the finger-glasses over his face, he gave a gasp or two and sat up.
“‘Ah, boys,’ said he, forcing a smile, ‘I hope I haven’t frightened you. Strong as I look, there is a weak place in my heart, and it does not take much to knock me over. I don’t know how you manage this, Mr Holmes, but it seems to me that all the detectives of fact and of fancy would be children in your hands. That’s your line of life, sir, and you may take the word of a man who has seen something of the world.’
“And that recommendation, with the exaggerated estimate of my ability with which he prefaced it, was, if you will believe me, Watson, the very first thing which ever made me feel that a profession might be made out of what had up to that time been the merest hobby. At the moment, however, I was too much concerned at the sudden illness of my host to think of anything else.
“‘I hope that I have said nothing to pain you?’ said I.
“‘Well, you certainly touched upon rather a tender point.
Might I ask how you know, and how much you know?’ He spoke now in a half-jesting fashion, but a look of terror still lurked at the back of his eyes.
“‘It is simplicity itself,’ said I. ‘When you bared your arm to draw that fish into the boat I saw that J. A. had been tattooed in the bend of the elbow. The letters were still legible, but it was perfectly clear from their blurred appearance, and from the staining of the skin round them, that efforts had been made to obliterate them. It was obvious, then, that those initials had once been very familiar to you, and that you had afterwards wished to forget them.’
“‘What an eye you have!’ he cried with a sigh of relief. ‘It is just as you say. But we won’t talk of it. Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst. Come into the billiard-room and have a quiet cigar.’
“From that day, amid all his cordiality, there was always a touch of suspicion in Mr Trevor’s manner towards me. Even his son remarked it. ‘You’ve given the governor such a turn,’ said he, ‘that he’ll never be sure again of what you know and what you don’t know.’ He did not mean to show it, I am sure, but it was so strongly in his mind that it peeped out at every action. At last I became so convinced that I was causing him uneasiness that I drew my visit to a close. On the very day, however, before I left, an incident occurred which proved in the sequel to be of importance.
“We were sitting out upon the lawn on garden chairs, the three of us, basking in the sun and admiring the view across the Broads, when a maid came out to say that there was a man at the door who wanted to see Mr Trevor.
“‘What is his name?’ asked my host.
“‘He would not give any.’
“‘What does he want, then?’
“‘He says that you know him, and that he only wants a moment’s conversation.’
“‘Show him round here.’ An instant afterwards there appeared a little wizened fellow with a cringing manner and a shambling style of walking. He wore an open jacket, with a splotch of tar on the sleeve, a red-and-black check shirt, dungaree trousers, and heavy boots badly worn. His face was thin and brown and crafty, with a perpetual smile upon it, which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth, and his crinkled hands were half closed in a way that is distinctive of sailors. As he
came slouching across the lawn I heard Mr. Trevor make a sort of hiccoughing noise in his throat, and, jumping out of his chair, he ran into the house. He was back in a moment, and I smelt a strong reek of brandy as he passed me.
“‘Well, my man,’ said he. ‘What can I do for you?’
“The sailor stood looking at him with puckered eyes, and with the same loose-lipped smile upon his face.
‘You don’t know me?’ he asked.
‘Why, dear me, it is surely Hudson,’ said Mr Trevor in a tone of surprise.
‘Hudson it is, sir,’ said the seaman. ‘Why, it’s thirty year and more since I saw you last. Here you are in your house, and me still picking my salt meat out of the harness cask.’
‘Tut, you will find that I have not forgotten old times,’ cried Mr Trevor, and, walking towards the sailor, he said something in a low voice. ‘Go into the kitchen,’ he continued out loud, ‘and you will get food and drink. I have no doubt that I shall find you a situation.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the seaman, touching his forelock. ‘I’m just off a two-yearer in an eight-knot tramp, short-handed at that, and I wants a rest. I thought I’d get it either with Mr Beddoes or with you.’
“‘Ah!’ cried Mr Trevor. ‘You know where Mr Beddoes is?’
“‘Bless you, sir, I know where all my old friends are,’ said the fellow with a sinister smile, and he slouched off after the maid to the kitchen. Mr Trevor mumbled something to us about having been shipmate with the man when he was going back to the diggings, and then, leaving us on the lawn, he went indoors. An hour later, when we entered the house, we found him stretched dead drunk upon the dining-room sofa. The whole incident left a most ugly impression upon my mind, and I was not sorry next day to leave Donnithorpe behind me, for I felt that my presence must be a source of embarrassment to my friend.