A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women

by Elizabeth George

  “This gives it a better flavor,” he said, and, peeling off one note from the top wad, he lit it and offered me the flame. I had guessed what was coming, so I didn’t show my surprise. If Louise could keep a poker face, so could I. I watched the banknote burn out, and then he took another and lit that.

  Having failed to move us, he started to talk. He spoke quite normally about the restaurant business—how hard times were and what a lot of work it meant getting up at dawn to go to the market with the chef and how customers liked to keep one up late at night, talking and dawdling as if there was never going to be a tomorrow. It was all directed at Louise, rubbing it in, holding her nose down to exactly what he was doing. But she remained perfectly impassive, her eyes dark like lead, her mouth hard.

  When that failed, he got more personal. He said he remembered us both when we were girls and how work and worry had changed us. I was nettled, but not too upset, for it soon became quite obvious that he did not remember me at all. With Louise it was different: he remembered her—every detail—and with something added.

  “Your hair was like gold,” he said, “and your eyes were blue as glass and you had a little soft wide mouth which was so gay. Where is it now, eh? Here.” He patted the money, the old brute. “All here, Louise. I am a psychologist, I see these things. And what is it worth to me? Nothing. Exactly nothing.”

  He was turning me cold. I stared at him fascinated and saw him suddenly take up a whole package of money and fluff it out

  until it looked like a lettuce. Louise neither blinked nor spoke. She sat looking at him as if he was nothing, a passerby in the street. No one at all. I’d turned my head to glance at her and missed seeing him strike another match—so when he lit the crisp leaves it took me completely off guard.

  “Look out!” I said involuntarily. “Mind what you’re doing!”

  He laughed like a wicked child, triumphant and delighted. “What about you, Louise? What do you say?”

  She continued to look bored and they sat there facing one another squarely. Meantime, of course, the money was blazing.

  The whole thing meant nothing to me; perhaps that is why it was my control which snapped.

  Anyway, I knocked the cash out of his hand. With a sudden movement I sent the whole hundred notes flying out of his grasp. All over the place they went—on the floor, the table, everywhere. The room was alight with blazing banknotes.

  He went after them like a lunatic—you wouldn’t have thought a man that fat could have moved so fast.

  It was the one that laddered my stocking which gave the game away. A spark burned the nylon and as I felt it, I looked down and snatched the charred note, holding it up to the light. We all saw the flaw in it at the same moment. The ink had run and there was a great streak through the middle, like the veining in a marble slab.

  There was a long silence and the first sound came not from us but from the service door. It opened and the new waiter, looking quite different now that he’d changed his coat for one with a policeman’s badge on it, came down the room followed by Inspector Cumberland.

  They went up to Adelbert and the younger, heavier man put a hand on his shoulder. Cumberland ignored everything but the money. He stamped out the smoldering flames and gathered up the remains and the four untouched wads on the table. Then he smiled briefly.

  “Got you, Adelbert. With it on you. We’ve been wondering who was passing slush in this street and when it came to our ears that someone was burning cash we thought we ought to look into it.”

  I was still only half comprehending and I held out the note we’d been staring at.

  “There’s something wrong with this one,” I said stupidly.

  He took it from me and grunted.

  “There’s something wrong with all these, my dear. Miss Frosné’s money is safe in his pocket where you saw him put it. These are some of the gang’s failures. Every maker of counterfeit money has them—as a rule they never leave the printing room. This one in particular is a shocker. I wonder he risked it even for burning. You didn’t like wasting it, I suppose, Adelbert. What a careful soul you are.”

  “How did you find out?” Louise looked from them to me.

  Cumberland saved me.

  “A policeman, too, Madam,” he said, laughing, “can be a psychologist.”

  A Nice Place to Stay

  NEDRA TYRE

  Nedra (pronounced NEE-dra) Tyre (1912-90), a native of Georgia, was the author of a half-dozen mystery novels between 1952 and 1971 and about forty short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other publications. A specialist in small-town Southern backgrounds, she won critical acclaim in her lifetime but, in part because of her small output, is largely overlooked in most reference sources on the genre. Her first and best-known novel, the Atlanta-based Mouse in Eternity (1952), drew on her own background as a social worker and anticipated the later trend toward regionalism in American mysteries.

  Tyre was living in Richmond, Virginia, when she told Contemporary Authors (volume 104, 1982), “I’ve worked in offices, been a social worker, library assistant, clerk in a book department, done copy in an advertising agency, and taught sociology. I’ve done everything and it seems to me I’ve never made even minimum wage. Life is real and life is earnest, but most of all, it’s ridiculous. Now I am a staff writer in an agency that gives financial assistance to desperately poor children in twenty-five countries.

  “For the last four years I have been totally deaf. It’s amazingly interesting to be deaf, although it’s awkward socially. Politically I am what would be called a liberal and religiously I am a protestant with a small p. Almost everything defeats me and everything amazes me.”

  Tyre’s social work background as well as the world view expressed above informs “A Nice Place to Stay,” with its deep understanding of the psychology of poverty.

  All my life I’ve wanted a nice place to stay. I don’t mean anything grand, just a small room with the walls freshly painted and a few neat pieces of furniture and a window to catch the sun so that two or three pot plants could grow. That’s what I’ve always dreamed of. I didn’t yearn for love or money or nice clothes, though I was a pretty enough girl and pretty clothes would have made me prettier—not that I mean to brag. Things fell on my shoulders when I was fifteen. That was when Mama took sick, and keeping house and looking after Papa and my two older brothers—and of course nursing Mama—became my responsibility. Not long after that Papa lost the farm and we moved to town. I don’t like to think of the house we lived in near the C & R railroad tracks, though I guess we were lucky to have a roof over our heads—it was the worst days of the Depression and a lot of people didn’t even have a roof, even one that leaked, plink, plonk; in a heavy rain there weren’t enough pots and pans and vegetable bowls to set around to catch all the water. Mama was the sick one but it was Papa who died first—living in town didn’t suit him. By then my brothers had married and Mama and I moved into two back rooms that looked onto an alley and everybody’s garbage cans and dump heaps. My brothers pitched in and gave me enough every month for Mama’s and my barest expenses even though their wives grumbled and complained. I tried to make Mama comfortable. I catered to her every whim and fancy. I loved her. All the same I had another reason to keep her alive as long as possible. While she breathed I knew I had a place to stay. I was terrified of what would happen to me when Mama died. I had no high school diploma and no experience at outside work and I knew my sisters-in-law wouldn’t take me in or let my brothers support me once Mama was gone.

  Then Mama drew her last breath with a smile of thanks on her face for what I had done.

  Sure enough, Norine and Thelma, my brothers’ wives, put their feet down. I was on my own from then on. So that scared feeling of wondering where I could lay my head took over in my mind and never left me.

  I had some respite when Mr. Williams, a widower twenty-four years older than me, asked me to marry him. I took my vows seriously. I meant to cherish him and I did. But
that house we lived in! Those walls couldn’t have been dirtier if they’d been smeared with soot and the plumbing was stubborn as a mule. My left foot stayed sore from having to kick the pipe underneath the kitchen sink to get the water to run through.

  Then Mr. Williams got sick and had to give up his shoe repair shop that he ran all by himself. He had a small savings account and a few of those twenty-five-dollar government bonds and drew some disability insurance until the policy ran out in something like six months.

  I did everything I could to make him comfortable and keep him cheerful. Though I did all the laundry I gave him clean sheets and clean pajamas every third day and I think it was by my will power alone that I made a begonia bloom in that dark back room Mr. Williams stayed in. I even pestered his two daughters and told them they ought to send their father some get-well cards and they did once or twice. Every now and then when there were a few pennies extra I’d buy cards and scrawl signatures nobody could have read and mailed them to Mr. Williams to make him think some of his former customers were remembering him and wishing him well.

  Of course when Mr. Williams died his daughters were johnny-onthe-spot to see that they got their share of the little bit that

  tumbledown house brought. I didn’t begrudge them—I’m not one to argue with human nature.

  I hate to think about all those hardships I had after Mr. Williams died. The worst of it was finding somewhere to sleep; it all boiled down to having a place to stay. Because somehow you can manage not to starve. There are garbage cans to dip into—you’d be surprised how wasteful some people are and how much good food they throw away. Or if it was right after the garbage trucks had made their collections and the cans were empty I’d go into a supermarket and pick, say, at the cherries pretending I was selecting some to buy. I didn’t slip their best ones into my mouth. I’d take either those so ripe that they should have been thrown away or those that weren’t ripe enough and shouldn’t have been put out for people to buy. I might snitch a withered cabbage leaf or a few pieces of watercress or a few of those small round tomatoes about the size of hickory nuts—I never can remember their right name. I wouldn’t make a pig of myself, just eat enough to ease my hunger. So I managed. As I say, you don’t have to starve.

  The only work I could get hardly ever paid me anything beyond room and board. I wasn’t a practical nurse, though I knew how to take care of sick folks, and the people hiring me would say that since I didn’t have the training and qualifications I couldn’t expect much. All they really wanted was for someone to spend the night with Aunt Myrtle or Cousin Kate or Mama or Daddy; no actual duties were demanded of me, they said, and they really didn’t think my help was worth anything except meals and a place to sleep. The arrangements were pretty makeshift. Half the time I wouldn’t have a place to keep my things, not that I had any clothes to speak of, and sometimes I’d sleep on a cot in the hall outside the patient’s room or on some sort of contrived bed in the patient’s room.

  I cherished every one of those sick people, just as I had cherished Mama and Mr. Williams. I didn’t want them to die. I did everything I knew to let them know I was interested in their

  welfare—first for their sakes, and then for mine, so I wouldn’t have to go out and find another place to stay.

  Well, now, I’ve made out my case for the defense, a term I never thought I’d have to use personally, so now I’ll make out the case for the prosecution.

  I stole.

  I don’t like to say it, but I was a thief.

  I’m not light-fingered. I didn’t want a thing that belonged to anybody else. But there came a time when I felt forced to steal. I had to have some things. My shoes fell apart. I needed some stockings and underclothes. And when I’d ask a son or a daughter or a cousin or a niece for a little money for those necessities they acted as if I was trying to blackmail them. They reminded me that I wasn’t qualified as a practical nurse, that I might even get into trouble with the authorities if they found I was palming myself off as a practical nurse—which I wasn’t and they knew it. Anyway, they said that their terms were only bed and board.

  So I began to take things—small things that had been pushed into the backs of drawers or stored high on shelves in boxes—things that hadn’t been used or worn for years and probably would never be used again. I made my biggest haul at Mrs. Bick’s where there was an attic full of trunks stuffed with clothes and doodads from the twenties all the way back to the nineties—uniforms, ostrich fans, Spanish shawls, beaded bags. I sneaked out a few of these at a time and every so often sold them to a place called Way Out, Hippie Clothiers.

  I tried to work out the exact amount I got for selling something. Not, I know, that you can make up for theft. But, say, I got a dollar for a feather boa belonging to Mrs. Bick: well, then I’d come back and work at a job that the cleaning woman kept putting off, like waxing the hall upstairs or polishing the andirons or getting the linen closet in order.

  All the same I was stealing—not everywhere I stayed, not even in most places, but when I had to I stole. I admit it.

  But I didn’t steal that silver box.

  I was as innocent as a baby where that box was concerned. So when that policeman came toward me grabbing at the box I stepped aside, and maybe I even gave him the push that sent him to his death. He had no business acting like that when that box was mine, whatever Mrs. Crowe’s niece argued.

  Fifty thousand nieces couldn’t have made it not mine.

  Anyway, the policeman was dead and though I hadn’t wanted him dead I certainly hadn’t wished him well. And then I got to thinking: well, I didn’t steal Mrs. Crowe’s box but I had stolen other things and it was the mills of God grinding exceeding fine, as I once heard a preacher say, and I was being made to pay for the transgressions that had caught up with me.

  Surely I can make a little more sense out of what happened than that, though I never was exactly clear in my own mind about everything that happened.

  Mrs. Crowe was the most appreciative person I ever worked for. She was bedridden and could barely move. I don’t think the registered nurse on daytime duty considered it part of her job to massage Mrs. Crowe. So at night I would massage her, and that pleased and soothed her. She thanked me for every small thing I did—when I fluffed her pillow, when I’d put a few drops of perfume on her earlobes, when I’d straighten the wrinkled bedcovers.

  I had a little joke. I’d pretend I could tell fortunes and I’d take Mrs. Crowe’s hand and tell her she was going to have a wonderful day but she must beware of a handsome blond stranger—or some such foolishness that would make her laugh. She didn’t sleep well and it seemed to give her pleasure to talk to me most of the night about her childhood or her dead husband.

  She kept getting weaker and weaker and two nights before she died she said she wished she could do something for me but that when she became an invalid she had signed over everything to her niece. Anyway, Mrs. Crowe hoped I’d take her silver box. I thanked her. It pleased me that she liked me well enough to give me the box. I didn’t have any real use for it. It would have made

  a nice trinket box, but I didn’t have any trinkets. The box seemed to be Mrs. Crowe’s fondest possession. She kept it on the table beside her and her eyes lighted up every time she looked at it. She might have been a little girl first seeing a brand-new baby doll early on a Christmas morning.

  So when Mrs. Crowe died and the niece on whom I set eyes for the first time dismissed me, I gathered up what little I had and took the box and left. I didn’t go to Mrs. Crowe’s funeral. The paper said it was private and I wasn’t invited. Anyway, I wouldn’t have had anything suitable to wear.

  I still had a few dollars left over from those things I’d sold to the hippie place called Way Out, so I paid a week’s rent for a room that was the worst I’d ever stayed in.

  It was freezing cold and no heat came up to the third floor where I was. In that room with falling plaster and buckling floorboards and darting roaches, I sat wearing e
very stitch I owned, with a sleazy blanket and a faded quilt draped around me waiting for the heat to rise, when in swept Mrs. Crowe’s niece in a fur coat and a fur hat and shiny leather boots up to her knees. Her face was beet red from anger when she started telling me that she had traced me through a private detective and I was to give her back the heirloom I had stolen.

  Her statement made me forget the precious little bit I knew of the English language. I couldn’t say a word, and she kept on screaming that if I returned the box immediately no criminal charge would be made against me. Then I got back my voice and I said that box was mine and that Mrs. Crowe had wanted me to have it, and she asked if I had any proof or if there were any witnesses to the gift, and I told her that when I was given a present I said thank you, that I didn’t ask for proof and witnesses, and that nothing could make me part with Mrs. Crowe’s box.

  The niece stood there breathing hard, in and out, almost counting her breaths like somebody doing an exercise to get control of herself.

  “You’ll see,” she yelled, and then she left.

  The room was colder than ever and my teeth chattered.

  Not long afterward I heard heavy steps clumping up the stairway. I realized that the niece had carried out her threat and that the police were after me.

  I was panic-stricken. I chased around the room like a rat with a cat after it: Then I thought that if the police searched my room and couldn’t find the box it might give me time to decide what to do. I grabbed the box out of the top dresser drawer and scurried down the back hall. I snatched the back door open. I think what I intended to do was run down the back steps and hide the box somewhere, underneath a bush or maybe in a garbage can.

  Those back steps were steep and rose almost straight up for three stories and they were flimsy and covered with ice.

  I started down. My right foot slipped. The handrail saved me. I clung to it with one hand and to the silver box with the other hand and picked and chose my way across the patches of ice.

  When I was midway I heard my name shrieked. I looked around to see a big man leaping down the steps after me. I never saw such anger on a person’s face. Then he was directly behind me and reached out to snatch the box.