CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Crowds of bloodthirsty revelers down below jeered at him, catcalled, threw epithets into the sky to rain down on his head. Out of the forest rose a cacophony of monstrous growls lusting for his downfall. Dragons puffed flame, lizards with impossible teeth hissed into the sky. In the city the teeming people rushed through the streets demanding his death, killing one another to get to him.

  He had a coughing fit, and it almost finished him. Blood gushed from his mouth to soak his shirt front. He lifted his gaze and could see he was not far from the window, his window, the one that could protect him from the inhumane rabble below.

  He climbed some more, gravity pulling on his shoulders like iron manhole covers were dangling from the crooks of his arms. His legs were heavy, cumbersome pillars, unwieldy and freakish in their size and weight. His legs stiffened and then buckled. He hung suspended against the wall for a moment, and then he lost his grip, his fingernails tearing away as he fell back, the scars in the palms of his hands blossoming into blisters filled with clear fluid.

  He dropped like an anchor, his arms and legs spread for flying. His body plummeted to just above the clutching hands of the murderous crowd awaiting him, and then, miraculously, all his weight disappeared and he floated heavenward out of his enemies' reach.

  At the palace window he caught the sill, sighing with happiness at this unearthly deliverance. He pulled his broken, destroyed, leaking body into safety. He tumbled over the window ledge onto the floor of his most secret place.

  Home. Safe. Free.

  He felt a presence nearby. He turned his head. To his surprise this time, for the first time ever, he was not alone in the castle. When he raised his eyes, he saw the old witch standing with her arms outstretched to receive him. She was no longer a parchment and bone skeleton. She was full-bodied and brimming with pink, radiant health. She smiled benevolently, her forgiving eyes crinkling around the edges. She had been waiting for him all this time. Wishing for him to join her. Had he but known this. Had she but told him he was not truly alone here.

  He came to his knees. He struggled to his feet. He, too, held out his arms to enfold her. His eyes closed, and her lush fat warmth smothered him in a rich, consuming embrace.

  He had been intent on killing Carla. He understood now why.

  He loved her, really loved her, just as he had loved this foster mother who had tried so hard to save him. He had just hated himself so much he couldn't admit to love. He understood that too as if it were a secret only now revealed to him. He wished he could live life over again and right all those wicked wrongs, all those insane urges, bring back all those innocent victims.

  The old woman whispered in his ear, "It's done and you're here now."

  He looked around the castle walls, felt the comfort they gave him and he knew this place would last until the end of all time. He was exactly where he was meant to be and he didn't feel sick anymore. He knew he would never be sick again.

  THE END

  A PRETTY KILLER BOY

  by

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  First published in INVITATION TO MURDER as "A Pretty Boy," Edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg, 1991

  Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

  I never should have gotten involved with a pretty boy--especially one who could commit murder. Not all of them will end up doing that, but you just never know.

  Grandma had married a pretty boy much to her distress. He was vain, she said years after his death. So vain about his clothes and his tortoise shell comb set, so vain, she said in her creaky old woman's voice, that when he came down with pneumonia he wouldn't let her call a doctor for it was improper anyone should see him disheveled and incontinent in the cherry four-poster bed. Being pretty, Grandma concluded, had killed my grandfather before his time.

  But I didn't think about these admonitions when I met Bobby. There are some experiences in life that defy common sense and the validity of good advice.

  It was the winter of 1967 and I had come to Louisville by way Atlanta where no one wanted to hire a nineteen-year-old college dropout.

  They didn't much want to hire me in Louisville either so I took a job selling candy behind the counter at Stewart's Department Store. The boyfriend who had come to Atlanta to drive me to Louisville, where he attended television repair school, worked in the mail room of Stewart's. I figured he could stand it, I could stand it.

  It was Christmas season and he was busy wrapping gifts and mailing them worldwide. I was busy eating all the chocolates I could stuff into my mouth when the other sales girls weren't looking.

  Swiping candy kept my appetite abated and stretched my paycheck considerably.

  I was content with my job until Christmas Eve. Customers flocked to the counters ordering last minute gifts of filberts, pounds of pistachios wrapped in red foil, boxes of fancy mints and divinity and bridge mix chocolates. I hadn't a moment to filch a lemon drop, my feet hurt, it had begun to snow hard and my walk home to an apartment on Chestnut Street promised to be a miserable cold one.

  As if all this were not punishment enough for my sins of minor theft, Jerry, the boyfriend working in the mail room, wandered up to the counter during this mad rush and handed me a small black felt ring box.

  "Marry me," he said.

  Just that. No preamble, no romance, just marry me.

  "I'm busy, Jerry. Please."

  "Open it. This isn't a joke, I promise."

  "Miss, could you wait on me? I'd like two pounds of walnut fudge and a pound and a half of the pecan. Could you wrap it?"

  I gave the fudge-hog in the mink a look insuring she wait another minute. Beyond that and I'd hear from her was the look she returned. After all it was Christmas and her time was more valuable than mine.

  "I can't accept it. You know that, Jerry." I pushed the little box back across the shiny glass counter top. "I'm busy, I have to go."

  While weighing and wrapping the fudge I glanced twice at where Jerry stood with his hands hanging at his sides staring at the jewel box. I hadn't meant to be so cold about it, but what did he expect? He knew I didn't love him; I didn't love anyone. Besides, he was a year younger than me and his parents would kill him if he got married. Just because I let him drive me from Atlanta to Louisville didn't mean we should spend our lives together. What was wrong with his head? And then proposing just before Christmas? In the store when it was rush hour? Ye gads.

  The day after Christmas I began looking for another job. Stewart's was too far to walk and too close to Jerry. Across the street from my apartment house stood Louisville General Hospital. The building was a solid piece of craftsmanship, the best looking architecture within four blocks. My apartment house, a sleaze bag resort for the poor and semi-stupid nineteen-year-old like myself, was a red brick dwarf compared to the soaring many-storied structure of Louisville General.

  If I found a job at the hospital I could come home for lunch, save a dollar or two. That was my main interest, saving money. I had big plans Jerry knew nothing about. I was headed for the golden west, for San Francisco and the famous Haight-Ashbury district where flower children danced through one long carnival night. I knew I was missing something, maybe even a part of history, and I just had to go there no matter what. But I could never get there if I didn't save traveling money and a stake to sustain me when I arrived.

  My first interview with the personnel director of Louisville General went poorly.

  "How old are you?" he asked, looking over the rims of his glasses.

  He had to be forty if he was a day. I could usually charm old farts.

  "Nineteen."

  "Where are your parents, your family?"

  "They live in upstate New York."

  "Why don't you live in upstate New York then?"

  "Why should I? I'm nineteen."

  "Hmmm." He pondered this winsome bit of logic a moment. "Aren't you afraid to live on your own."

  "No!" It was true; I wasn't afraid at all, of anything. If my imagination could have been meas
ured it was at about an inch and a half. If my fear quotient was taken, it was at a Two, tops--and the worst thing I feared was not getting a job that could pay my way to California. At that point in my short existence I had not run into horror or chaos. I didn't even yet know it existed.

  "Where do you live?"

  "Across the street. I have an apartment. I could be here anytime you needed me. It's quite convenient."

  He pushed the glasses up his nose and sniffed as if he could actually smell the stained linoleum covering of the apartment lobby floor, the dust coating the plastic potted plants, the mustiness of the worn red diamond-patterned hall runner. "Don't you think that's a dangerous place for a young girl to live alone?"

  "It's fine. It's cheap. No one bothers me. I play gin rummy with a couple down the hall." It didn't feel good being taken for a youngster who shouldn't be allowed on my own.

  "Umm hmmm. What do you know about hospital work?"

  I sat forward eagerly and put forth my most earnest face. "I don't know anything but I'm willing to learn. I thought I'd do well in the admitting department. I can type and file and do anything I'm trained to do. I know I don't have work experience, but I'm quick; I catch on fast."

  I paused when I saw a ghost of a smile creeping onto his lips. He was not taking me seriously and that was unfair. "Besides," I concluded, "I live right across the street and I can come work anytime you need me."

  I thought I'd convinced him despite the smug little smile, but finally he shook his head and said, "You shouldn't be in this city alone, a girl young as you. You've no experience..."

  I stood, realizing I had been dismissed. But I had not given up. I knew what I wanted--out of the candy department and away from Jerry's lovesick gaze--and I was determined to have this job. The director was vastly underestimating my ability to suffer patronizing attitudes. I could take it until the cows came home if that's what he wanted. He had not seen the last of me.

  I waited two days. In preparation I quit my job at Stewart's much to Jerry's chagrin. (What are you doing? How can you leave me this way?) I camped in the secretary's office until she let me see the personnel director a second time.

  "You again."

  "Oh yes. I'm free now. I quit my job and I can start here anytime you like." Audacious of me, but what the hell.

  He sighed, propped his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. "Young lady..."

  "I know I don't have any qualifications, but you won't find a more eager and able learner. I've had two years of college; I know how to learn."

  "We really don't..."

  "I'll take the scummiest job you have open. If you want, I'll make beds, scrub floors, clean toilets, anything. You have to give me a chance. And I live right across the street, I can..."

  "Come anytime we call. Yes, you've mentioned that."

  I smiled. I was honest and young and winning. How could I miss? Still it took two more trips into the director's office to convince him he couldn't do without my services in Louisville General. I imagine I simply wore the man down, but that is youth's prerogative. Older people cannot fly in the face of unabashed enthusiasm and energy. It tires them.

  I had not been working in the admitting department two weeks before I met the pretty boy. The admitting supervisor had me go into the wards to verify insurance information. Most of the patients had no insurance to verify. Seven out of every eight hour stint I spent interviewing welfare mothers with new babies. I don't know why the hospital thought these women had changed their ways, succumbed to middle-class values, and carried hospitalization now when most of them had been in these wards delivering babies only the year before. But I was not to question procedure. I was to ask my silly questions about income and insurance and write down the answers on a clipboard.

  In my second week on the job I entered the men's ward for the first time. A patient had come in the night before through emergency and I was to verify the insurance on him. My papers said he was twenty years old and he had been shot in the leg.

  Shot? Now wasn't that an interesting injury? It beat gallstones and the maternity ward all to hell.

  I wandered through the big open ward blushing at the whistles and hoots coming from the beds. Men of all ages sat up on their pillows, swiveled their bodies at my passing, and generally had a good time making me feel uncomfortable. "Bobby Tremain?" I called out above the din. "Where is Bobby Tremain?"

  "I'm right here," came a deep male voice behind me. "I'm Bobby."

  I turned and was at once awestruck by his beauty. Blond, curly haired, features chiseled fine and noble as the face of Jesus in the Pieta I had seen in the New York World's Fair. From what I could see beneath the sheet he also possessed the physique of Michelangelo's David. I must have appeared dumbfounded because Bobby cocked his beautiful head and said, "Well? Did you want me?"

  The way he said want me sent shivers running. Did I want him? Oh yes, I wanted him, absolutely, I wanted him clothed or unclothed, bedridden or healthy, in his hospital bed in full view of thirty men or alone on a deserted mountain top before the eyes of heaven. A terrible thing for him to ask, did I want him.

  I managed to move to his bedside. "Hi...I'm supposed to...uh...ask you some questions."

  "Ask away." He punched the pillow behind his neck. Overhead pulleys held his right leg in traction, the massive cast covering it from groin to toe. He winced when he moved and even his grimace was an appealing sight. For the first time in my life the maternal instinct flared. I wanted to mother and protect, take a stranger into my arms and soothe away the pain. That emotion should have alerted me. You don't mix mothering with sexual attraction. Not if you have two years college under your belt, something you'd think would make you immune to psychological transgression.

  "Oh, this?" he asked, noticing my stare. He lightly slapped the long white cast on his thigh. "It looks like I'll have to wear this for months. I guess I'd better get used to it."

  "Who shot you?" This was not on the questionnaire, but it was of the uppermost importance to me. I already felt my anger building at whoever committed the desecration of a perfectly Adonis-like creature.

  "Cop. Cop did it."

  "No."

  "Yep. But I guess I deserved it. I was running away!"

  "Why?"

  "I was scared."

  I nodded my head. Of course he had been scared, poor baby, who wouldn't be scared of a cop? Everyone trembled when confronted with people who carried guns. "What had you done?"

  He smiled, casting a silver net of shivers over me again. There was something menacing in his smile, though, just enough menace to make it fascinating, mesmerizing. "I didn't do anything," he said. "I swear it was all a mistake."

  To anyone else, to someone older and less naive, to someone more worldly wise and cynical, his words would have condemned him from the outset. Criminals always swear innocence. It's to be expected. But I was not fully mature or wise to the ways of the world. I was a girl on the lam from parental authority, heading for the hippie revolution that had bypassed middle America, and I believed when people spoke, they spoke the truth. What profit a lie? To a stranger? A girl come to verify insurance? What profit that?

  "You see I was driving with an expired license. A cop car pulled up behind me with his lights on and I panicked. He said later I was speeding, but I don't think I was. I knew, though, I'd get in trouble about the license so I did something dumb. I tried to get away."

  "You shouldn't have."

  "Don't I know it! It was the most moronic move in my life. I got it into my head that I'd outrun him and get home. I turned down streets and took a wrong turn somewhere and got lost."

  "You could have stopped."

  "Not by then. You don't know cops. You run from the bastards and you're in deep shit. Well, this wrong turn led to a dead-end. I did have to stop then. I was cut off. I got out of the car and in the glare of the headlights, I ran up a hill to a high fence. I was climbing over when he shot me." He shrugged as if to say that's life, you win a
few, you lose a lot, big damn deal, it happens all the time.

  My outrage boiled over. "Just for climbing on a fence? Didn't he say 'halt' first or anything?" They always said "halt" first in the movies.

  Bobby, having enlisted my sympathy, shook his head.

  "He just started shooting without even warning you first?" I was outraged.

  Bobby nodded, eyes shyly downcast.

  "Oh, you should get a lawyer and put that cop in jail. He had no right to shoot like that. He might have killed you." The thought of Bobby Tremain dying, hanging from a fence in the dark with bullet holes in his back made me sick with fury. How dare a trigger happy cop shoot down such a pretty boy just because he panicked over an expired driver's license. It was obscene. It was the establishment bulldozing down the youth of America. You couldn't do anything you believed in, you couldn't change the system, you couldn't save yourself and the future from the bloodsuckers. It was a travesty.

  It was also love. Now I had an inkling of what Jerry felt for me. I lived, breathed, dreamed Bobby Tremain. Every day at the hospital I used my ward-hopping privilege to look in on him. I brought him magazines and candy bars from the hospital gift shop. I plumped his pillow and held the water glass to his fine lips. I told him how I had never been farther west than Texas and how I yearned to see the Pacific ocean. How it was like a narcotic and I was a junkie, I just had to make it out West before I died from the cold sweats and the hot tremors. I wanted to see the hippies, I wanted to be a part of everything I was missing. There was a revolution going on and I wasn't a part of it. Yet.

  "How will you get there?" he asked.

  "I'm saving my money. I have a hundred and twenty dollars saved so far."