An excellent agency, jealous of its prime reputation, at last sent over three applicants for the old lady to interview. She chose Mrs. Hardesty to take Everly’s place. She was middle aged, with a strong frame of central European heritage somewhere in her genes. She was quietly pleasant company, dependable, the kind the old lady decided she could get on well with. She had been in domestic service for fifteen years, since the death of her husband. Her previous employers had moved to the cold of Canada, offering Mrs. Hardesty the chance to continue with them.
“I’m glad you preferred the warmth of Florida,” the little old lady said the day she and Mrs. Hardesty returned to the condominium.
She showed Mrs. Hardesty through the apartment, and within the hour they were smoothly settled in, Mrs. Hardesty back in her own quarters, the old lady sitting stiffly on the edge of a chair in the living room, as if aware of-the silence and sudden emptiness of this place where it had all happened.
She got up slowly and slipped without a whisper of a sound into her own bedroom. She stood very still, holding the edge of the door. Then she closed and moved with gossamer lightness across the room.
She sank to her knees beside the hope chest. A breath trembled on her lips. She moved her hand to stroke the ornate carving of the lid lovingly. Once it had fitted snugly. Now, like herself, it was warped and old, a relic of the past. Lucky that the warpage in the lid let a little air in. Otherwise, she might have smothered.
She lifted the lid and looked at the cedar-lined depths of the chest. A smile stole across her lips. A thrill of anticipation raced through her.
In a series of graceful movements, the little old lady rose, stepped inside the chest, sank down, arranged herself like an infant wriggling to comfort in its crib. Then she slowly lowered the lid on herself with her extended arm, watching while the light disappeared. The darkness inside the chest touched her nostrils with the faint fragrance of old cedar.
She closed her eyes and waited, eager hope pulsing through her. Would it work? Could the lovely miracle happen a second time? Did she have to have a break in the head for it to happen?
Then it began happening. A rosy light spilled from the further horizon. The light grew in strength until it was all about her. She was nineteen, the center of attention at a gay party. An orchestra was playing a Straus Waltz, and there he was, hurrying toward, her as if none of the other vital and happy people existed. He was standing beside her, dark-haired, craggy-faced, broad in the shoulders. His eyes were worshipping her, and her whole being felt like a flower. Life was flawless, just beginning, without end.
He was taking her hand. The strength of his arm encircled her waist. He led her into the Waltz, and she closed her eyes, surrendering to the joy of it all.
On and on they danced, in a waltz that would never cease…
THE HOLDUP
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1979.
Percy Kittridge, finance director of Memorial to Mercy Hospital, frowned in sharp distaste as the old woman appeared in his office. Percy was a neat, precise man of little finicky gestures, and the woman was a horrible old wretch. In a seedy greatcoat that hung almost to her ankles, she was like a mass of pillows lumpishly piled together. Her face was a study in wrinkles and tiny wens. Beneath an old straw hat decorated with imitation flowers, her hair dripped like Spanish moss on an ancient tree.
One moment Percy was rocked back behind his desk, looking out the window and comfortably chatting on the phone, the next he was swinging his chair around to hang up the telephone and there stood the old lady.
“How did you get in here unannounced?” Percy demanded in his rather high, impatient voice.
The old woman pointed to the tattered scarf wrapped about her throat. She was wearing cheap cotton gloves—probably, Percy thought, to hide leprous hands.
“Just walked in,” she said in a raspy whisper, “when no one in the outer office was paying attention. No trick to it.”
“Well, I’m a busy man. What do you want?”
The old woman’s right hand was in the side pocket of her bedraggled outer coat. She lifted the hand. It was gripping a deadly looking automatic.
“I want all the money out of the hospital safe,” she crackled.
Percy gasped, on the edge of a sudden faint. His thin lips quivered in a fruitless effort to speak. His bright eyes were parallaxed on the gun.
“Be a nice, sensible li’l fella,” the crone instructed, “and you can tell your wife about this at dinner tonight Otherwise, you’re on a DOA all full of bullet holes when they cart you over to the emergency room a few seconds from now.”
“I—uh—this doesn’t make sense,” Percy managed. “People steal drugs from hospitals, not money.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” the nightmare image said. “You have just one more tick of the clock to move it.”
Percy flinched back from his desk, tottering to his feet. “Hospitals do most of their business in paper,” he said, struggling for courage. “Medicare and Medicaid checks, checks from insurance companies and patients. Wouldn’t it be better to rob some other—”
“Can’t rob but one place at a time,” the old woman croaked. “And I’m here now. You do plenty of cash business. Everybody don’t pay by check. And there’s the cash flow from your cafeteria, snack bar, gift shop, parking lot, florist concession. I’m sure the safe is stuffed with more than enough for the likes of me.” The muzzle of the gun inched up. “Your time has run out, fella.”
Kittridge jumped. “Be careful with that thing! I’m hurrying. I’m hurrying!”
The horrid old woman used her free hand to pull a shopping bag from under her coat. “Put the money in this. I want it all, including the silver. The checks you can keep.”
A few minutes later, she was shuffling across one of the broad parking lots adjacent to the huge medical complex and Mr. Kittridge was on the floor of the anteroom next to his office, slumped beside the empty vault, a lump on his crown from a tap of the gun barrel.
The old woman paused beside a pickup truck with a camper cover. There were acres of cars but few people on the parking lot. Satisfied that she was unnoticed, the old woman disappeared.
Under the camper cover the crone worked quickly. And, stripping off the thickly padded coat, gloves, hat, wig, and rubberoid face mask, she was transformed into a nice-looking young man, dark-haired and clean-cut, in jeans and a knitted shirt He stuffed the accoutrements of his disguise into a foot locker. He would burn the items a little later, in a place even more private than the camper.
Snapping open the stuffed shopping bag, he dipped his hands into the money. He’d estimated it as the finance director had taken it from the safe—twenty thousand at least. Not an earth-shaking haul, but a nice return on the execution of a carefully structured plan.
Slightly short of breath, the young man fashioned a stack of bills from the bag—twenties, fifties, and hundreds. He stuffed the roll into the pocket of his jeans, then he added the bulky shopping bag to the contents of the foot locker and closed and locked it. Slipping into the driver’s seat, he drove the camper carefully from the parking lot to the drive-in window of a nearby branch bank, where he deposited the money from his jeans pocket. Tucking the deposit slip into his wallet, he smiled a good afternoon to the teller and drove back to the hospital. The automatic barricade at the parking lot swung up, admitting the camper as the young man dropped quarters into the parking-fee slot. The camper wended about and finally slipped into a vacant space reasonably close to the main hospital building.
* * * *
When the young man walked into the business office, he felt the residue of excitement. Employees had vacated desks and frosted-glass cubicles, clustering at the water cooler to exchange strained murmurs. A middle-aged woman spotted him and came over to the counter.
“It’s been quite an afternoon,” she said. “We had a robbery.”
“No!”
“Yes. An old woman, wou
ld you believe it? She walked into Mr. Kittridge’s office and forced him to open the vault at gunpoint, then cracked him on the head and disappeared. Mr. Kittridge sounded the alarm when he regained consciousness. He gave the police a full description, but I don’t know—you know how it is these days. So many unsolved crimes. But an old woman—would you believe it?” The young man commiserated with a shake of his head.
The cashier drew a steadying breath. “But that’s our problem, isn’t it? What can I do for you?”
“I came to take my wife home,” the young man said. “The doctor said she could leave as soon as I settle the bill. So I guess we can say goodbye and thanks for everything. It’s been a long five weeks.”
“And after five weeks,” the cashier said in sympathy, “quite a bill.”
“No sweat,” the young man said. “My private hospitalization plan should be adequate. But I’ll need to borrow a pen to write the check.”
A WAY WITH A WILL
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 1981.
I was very fond of my Uncle Dudley Gillam. Not for any singular reason. He was my only blood relation, but that didn’t account entirely for my feeling. I’ve heard other people speak of their relatives with shuddering distaste, but my recollections of Uncle Dudley were pleasurable. He found joy in living; he was agreeable, kind, and thoughtful. He was an all-around likeable individual, and I liked him. That’s all there was to it And the regard was mutual. He never put it into words, but he left no doubt in my mind that I was at the top of his list of favorite people.
After he retired from the railroad we saw little of each other. He was an engineer until age forced him out of the big diesels. Not a strapping Casey Jones, but a wiry, tough little guy who ramrodded the long trains through the nights like a runty cowboy forking a dinosaur.
His years of motion had conditioned him to be restless. He was always on the go. He would wander down to Florida, up to big-game country in Wyoming, out to California. He would hit Vegas now and then for a splurge and, broke and hungover, amble down to Corpus Christi to dry out.
We always kept in touch. He pecked out letters on a portable typewriter with broken type and an always-grey ribbon, signing them with his bold flourish. The grammar was questionable but the details were colorful. When he wrote about the rupture of a radiator hose while he was driving across the Painted Desert you could hear the water sizzle.
He enjoyed sending picture postcards and wild greeting cards from various locales. On my birthday a zany card would enclose a twenty-dollar bill for the purpose of “oiling up a sweet patootie in a cozy bar, courtesy your Unc Dud.”
I always responded, jazzing up the details of my dreary bachelor existence as much as possible. Each Christmas I would try to send him something special—not expensive, necessarily, but something I had shopped carefully for. The kind of Wellington pipe he smoked or one of the baggy sweaters he favored.
Since he was a gregarious extrovert, it didn’t surprise me he was a soft touch. He always had a dollar for the panhandling wino with the seared eyes and burning throat. He never passed up a Salvation Army kettle or the poor box on his infrequent trips to church. And now and then some down-and-outer would hang onto his shirttails for a while. A busted madam, a kid just out of jail, or an itinerant worker stranded in Salinas. Or someone like Odus Calhoun, dubbed “Hardtimes” by Uncle Dudley.
“A born loser,” Uncle Dudley wrote. “One of those birds who gets all the frowns of fate—that’s Odus Calhoun. Worked hard all his life, paid his taxes, and never broke a law. And what did it get Hardtimes? Rat busted in Dallas where I met him, for one thing. Wife dead, and three kids grown up and scattered who’d rather forget him.
“If Hardtimes crosses a street, the drivers nearly run him down. A stray dog follows him home and the first time Hardtimes lets the mutt out the dog catcher is cruising by. The last jalopy he managed to buy turned out to be stolen. He cashed a welfare check and was robbed in sight of a police station. I reckon if Hardtimes inherited a gold mine an earthquake would dump the vein to the boiling center of the earth.”
From later letters I gathered that Hardtimes had settled into the role of handyman, cook, valet, friend, and confidant. “He more than earns his keep,” Uncle Dudley wrote, “and it’s nice to have a fellow critter around. He can’t play checkers worth a damn, so I finally know the joy of winning.”
It seemed to be a good arrangement. Uncle Dudley buffered Hardtimes Calhoun from the jaundiced eye of fate and at the same time escaped the loneliness of his wandering life.
But the fortunate circumstance was relatively short-lived. Three years ago Uncle Dudley wrote me the woeful news.
“Lost my pal. We was on the way to L.A. in my pickup with the camper cover. We stopped for the night at a campground near Yuma, and I couldn’t wake up Hardtimes the next morning. The county coroner said he died peaceful in his sleep from a worn-out heart. I gave him a decent funeral and searched his duffel without finding the addresses of any of his kids. They may never know how their poor old pappy met his end.”
He never referred to Hardtimes again and I respected his wish to leave a painful subject reverently closed.
* * * *
A new wrinkle in our correspondence was added a couple of years ago. Instead of a twenty, a hundred-dollar bill dropped from one of his offbeat greeting cards. “I put some money where the profit is,” he explained. “So simmer yourself a real high-class patootie this time.”
And my last birthday turned up a blank check signed by Uncle Dudley. “Don’t go wilder than a hog, nephew, but if you hanker to tootle around in a little sports car, do your shopping. Happy birthday, village cut-up.”
His rapidly expanding affluence naturally tickled my curiosity, but he volunteered no details of his financial dealings, and I courteously cramped the urge to pry. I satisfied myself with a guess that he’d hit a run of beginner’s luck in the stock market. His business hadn’t pinned him down. He was still here and there on the map like a flea on a short-haired pup.
The most recent letter from him said: “Writing from the mugginess of a New Orleans August. Going up to Asheville, North Carolina, for a breath of summer-resort air. Drop me a note at the Great Smokies Chilton, Suite Charnot.”
His plans offered me the chance to visit. I had vacation time coming, and the owner of the construction company where I worked had a Porsche he wanted delivered to his daughter, who was in an Atlanta college. With tin hat in hand I appeared in the boss’s office and explained my proposition. He went for the idea, handed me the keys to the car, slapped my shoulder, and counted out more than enough cash to cover the expenses of delivering the car.
From Atlanta to Asheville by air is a matter of minutes, and I arrived on a deliciously cool Smoky Mountain day after I’d delivered the Porsche. I rented a car and drove a modest four-lane expressway ten miles north, took an exit ramp, moved westerly in a snarl of city traffic, and at last was wending up a coolly shaded macadam road. Valleys, rolling mountains, and the scanty skyline of Asheville spread in the distance. A final turn and the Great Smokies Chilton swam into view.
It was a Swiss architect’s dream, worth a pursed-lip whistle. The huge main inn extended a warm invitation. Webbed from it were driveways winding to private chalets tucked into rolling, landscaped mountain greenery. People were sunning, swimming, and loafing at a crystalline lake scooped into the mountainside. At a long sweep of tennis courts, lazier players had knocked off to watch a smashing drive match between two lean, bronzed young giants. Beyond the courts I glimpsed a pair of horses and riders dipping into a steep mountain trail. I slowed for the passage of a golf cart as it chugged across the parking area with two elderly occupants, headed toward the green-velvet golf course that wandered across the plateau near the crest of the mountain.
A Mercedes SEL was gliding from a parking place near the canopied entrance to the inn and I slipped my rented car into the vacated slot.
I got out, gi
ving the surroundings an appreciative survey. A small plaque over the brass-studded door of the nearest private chalet caught my eye. AIN. I lifted my eyes to Ain’s next-door neighbor. The sedate plaque there announced: BRAUN.
I figured out that the third chalet was Charnot, Uncle Dudley’s domicile of the moment.
I was itching to know something about the late-in-life financial wizardry that afforded Uncle Dudley spots like this in which to take the mountain air. But even that was secondary to the thought of seeing him. I was a little giddy as I hurried along the driveway and the feeling wasn’t entirely due to the altitude.
I checked the plaque to make sure my guess was correct, and it was. I turned into the flower-bordered fieldstone walk bisecting the narrow lawn just as the door opened. It framed a blonde wearing a sleeveless white dress. She was young and tanned and so mistily lovely that I wavered to a halt, staring for a moment.
“Hi there,” I said. That was certainly original.
She said nothing, looking at me with eyes of cool green. I was sure she’d spotted me during my brief walk to Charnot and was about to tell me to get lost.
“I’m Jeremy Fisher,” I said. “I was looking for my uncle.”
“Jake-o!” she said with a sudden flash of a smile, using Uncle Dudley’s nickname for me. Her green eyes warmed. “I should have recognized you from the pictures Dudley has of you.” She reached out a hand. “Come in, Jeremy!”
I entered the cool of Charnot, where I got the impression of a well-heeled sportsman’s lodge. A large living room paneled in wormy chestnut was furnished with huge tweedy couches and club chairs, tables and a bar of natural oak, and a fireplace fit for five-foot logs. The ceiling was vaulted and beamed. A heavy oaken stairway led to a gallery overlooking the living room, where bedrooms were tucked under the rear portion of the expansive roof. “Nice, isn’t it?” she said.
“Very.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“I wouldn’t mind a wee Scotch.”
The Second Talmage Powell Crime Megapack Page 21
