Stanley made a harrumphing sound and Josh returned his attention to the conversation in the other room. “No one knows more about statistics than me. For example, your little daily dates back to 1886 and currently has a subscription base of forty-six thousand, down twelve percent in the past eighteen months, a little greater than the national trend given this current sad economy. But I don’t need to tell you about your own statistics. You want to know about my book.”
“That would be nice,” the reporter said. “Can you give me an example of some of the statistics in your book?”
“My fictional city is New York City in disguise,” he admitted. “But most of my readers know that. So I used crime statistics from New York for an authentic feel. Last year there were eight hundred and thirty-six murders, two thousand eight hundred and one rapes, sixty-five thousand home and apartment burglaries, and—”
“—and your number cruncher finds patterns.”
“Oh, yes. There are even patterns to the crime statistics in this small town . . . though thankfully there’s not as much violence as in the cities. Statistics say it’s safer to live in smaller places, like this. Using double-locks and a security system helps, too.”
“And driving older model cars,” she added a little sarcastically.
Stanley seemed not to notice her tone. “Yes, it’s important to protect yourself from the statistics. For example, women in your age range—”
“Your lunch is getting cold, Stanley,” Josh called from the kitchen. “And I have to get going over to George Brenner’s. He’ll be hungry.” Josh felt only mildly bad that he’d tarried here so long. The rest of the meals in his car—despite their thermal wrapping—would be delivered lukewarm at best. “I need to be on my way.”
Stanley made a tsk-tsking sound. “Can you heat it up in the microwave?”
“Sure.”
“Are we done?” Stanley asked the reporter as he stood.
“I have enough material,” she answered politely. “Thank you for taking the time, Mr. Rossini—”
“Stanley. I like to be called Stanley.”
“Thank you, Stanley. I look forward to reading your book.”
“Statistics.”
Josh waited a while longer, so Stanley could finish the broccoli fettuccini. He carefully washed the Royal Copenhagen plate and put it back in the cabinet, wanting to make sure that it would still be intact when he came tomorrow to retrieve it.
Yes, Stanley would die tomorrow, Josh pronounced. He’d poison the Meals on Wheels, with something from his basement chemical box that would be fast-acting and practically nondetectable. At eighty-five, there wouldn’t be an autopsy on Stanley . . . there hadn’t been on any of Josh’s other deceased clients. Natural causes, the coroner always ruled. Geezers.
Josh felt sad, in a way, because all he would have left would be clients that smelled of cheap cigars and bargain-brand colognes, who wore old clothes slick-shiny-thin at the knees and elbows and a bit too baggy—shirts and pants that had an assortment of stinks and stains.
“See you tomorrow, Stanley,” Josh said, heading to the front door. While he waited patiently for the geezer to undo the chain and the double-locks, Josh glanced at the French Art Deco Macassar chair and the Norman Rockwell print. “See you tomorrow.”
As usual, Josh rang the bell and waited ten toe-taps. This time Stanley didn’t open the door. Josh rang the bell again and again, and considered going around back to see if maybe Stanley was in another room and making some noise so he couldn’t hear the doorbell. But Josh worried that he might trip some security alarm, and so he tried the bell one more time, and then he cautiously tried the door . . . it wasn’t locked.
Josh tentatively pushed it open and edged into the living room, half expecting to see Stanley flick his age-spotted hand to gesture toward the kitchen and to say, “Just set my lunch up on the table, Joshua, if you don’t mind.”
Josh had the tainted Meals on Wheels package in hand. He’d left the duffel bags and packing material in the van he’d parked out front; he intended to retrieve them after Stanley was dead.
“Stanley? Oh, Stanley?”
No answer.
“I’ve got your lunch! Hot ham and scalloped potatoes. Green beans, too. Applesauce.”
Josh padded through the living room and into the kitchen, sucking in a great breath when he saw Stanley slumped at the table, facedown next to an empty Royal Copenhagen plate.
“Put the food out for him, on the plate, nicely arranged.” It was the female reporter. She’d come up behind Josh, so quiet he hadn’t heard, leaned in the doorway, and leveled a pearl-handled antique pistol at his chest. He’d seen the pistol in a display case on Stanley’s desk in the den. “Do it now.”
Josh did as he was told, his fingers brushing Stanley’s face; the geezer was still a little warm, hadn’t been dead all that long.
“I don’t understand,” Josh said. “What is—”
“Going on?” she asked. Her head bobbed, reminding Josh of a vulture this time. “Isn’t it obvious? I helped Stanley become one of his statistics . . . victim of a burglar. Crimes against the elderly are soaring, you know. His book even hinted at that. He told me yesterday that in Statistics a number cruncher discovers a burglary ring and later tracks a serial killer. I figure he didn’t realize it, but he was writing about you and his own demise. You do have your own little burglary ring running, Joshua, and you are something of a serial killer.”
Josh stepped back from the table and looked around for a weapon. She waved the gun. He wondered if it worked.
“So you’re a thief, like me, not a reporter,” he said. “A con artist. You conned Stanley into thinking you were interviewing him.”
She smiled evilly. “I am a reporter, and I did interview Stanley. The article is running in tomorrow’s edition. It’ll go above the fold, right over his obit, which I’ll volunteer to write, too. I am a very good reporter, an investigative one. Been following the statistics myself, the deaths of elderly people in this town . . . the ones dying after eating a Meals on Wheels–delivered lunch. And then I ran across the deliveryman who sells antiques on eBay under the handle GeezerGod.”
Josh paled, his gaze darting between Stanley and the gun. Were there bullets in it? “But . . . but . . .”
“So here’s how it will play out. The housekeeper will arrive later this afternoon to find Stanley poisoned at this table, having finally joined those precious statistics he thought were chasing him. And you’ll be dead on the floor . . . Stanley apparently had just enough energy to shoot you before he succumbed. Easy to believe, given the statistics on home invasions and crimes against old people.”
“But . . . but . . . why?” Josh’s mind whirled. Should he rush her? Should he offer her a percentage? Was she really going to shoot? Would the gun fire? Should he—
“I don’t care about the knickknacks, I care about the manuscripts Stanley Rossini collected. I learned about his collection by accident from researching him in the newspaper morgue. He collected signed, antique manuscripts worth thousands upon thousands upon thousands. And now they’re mine. All of those precious, priceless manuscripts . . . along with a half-finished novel about Alfonso before he made detective. All of them out in my car, waiting for me to sell them and start a new life far from here.”
Josh took a step toward her, trembling fingers reaching for the gun.
She fired and watched him fall.
“You’re just one more of Stanley’s statistics,” she said, firing again.
She’d hit him twice in the chest, below his heart. He felt the blood spill down his shirt, and he tried to hold it in with his fingers. Josh fought for air and stared up at her, seeing her wipe the prints off the gun and press it into Stanley’s age-spotted hand.
“And I’m just filthy rich.”
Say good-bye, if you will, to Stanley Rossini and Joshua, men who embraced numbers and percentages, two disparate souls who were poisoned by the statistics they fed on . . . in the
Twilight Zone.
THE MYSTERY
OF HISTORY
Lee Lawless
Consider the mysteries of the human heart . . . a place where time knows no bounds, where more knowledge only leads to more questions, and where the spiraling strands of existence intertwine in a fine web that captures both fate and chance. A place quite commonplace in . . . the Twilight Zone.
The bar did not seem to fit in anywhere. It had the usual local-dive trappings—a half-dozen smoke-stained televisions high on the wall, two pool tables lit by funnel-shaded lights, and a beer-stained, pockmarked dartboard in the corner. Mounted on dark walls, a sun-bleached longhorn skull and a massively antlered moose head glared portentously at one and all. A pair of 1960s blue-striped downhill racing skis hung crossed on the front of the upstairs balcony alongside a set of crisscrossed poles. Both were strewn with lacy bras suspended in a silky swoop a few feet above the stage. Against the far wall, the Internet jukebox was decked out with the chrome and glowing tubes of some ancient machine harrowed out of jukebox hell.
The polished maple bar itself spanned the room. Behind it stood a dazzling array of bottles, their backlights illuminating the liquor with an ethereal glow. Large mirrors to the rear of the bottles magnified the bar’s luminosity. Various lighting devices—ranging from candles to ancient oil lamps to futuristic cylinders roiling with brilliantly lit lava—completed the mood. Two separate rows of ten beer taps were at each end of the behemoth bar. Photographs of the neighborhood and a collection of New York City–themed visual art adorned the walls. Local patrons had contributed these artworks, and they were the only indication that this was a New York City pub.
Otherwise the bar would not have looked out of the ordinary anyplace else.
“Can we bring it back to the here and now for a second?” the smirking young female bartender yelled down the bar at a prim college girl who was reading a thick book. “Beatrice, there are live men from this century here. You and Al Hamilton need to split up.”
Beatrice Baxter, the studious history major who spent most Monday nights sitting silently immersed in a book at the end of the bar, gave the bartender the finger without looking up.
The girl did have other entertainment options besides her tome. Old-style mind games—made of twisted steel rings to untwine and wooden Peg-Boards to negotiate—festooned the forty-foot bar, while nearby a beautiful imported foosball table featured two teams of painted foosball-kicking Irishmen, who were mounted and manipulated on swivel rods and looked like soccer players. Big Buck Hunter and NYPD Shootout! arcade consoles flanked each restroom. Then there was the artwork on the walls to look at, including the old rock ’n’ roll posters and photos framed by thousands of shellacked pennies . . . the photos taken at long-ago shows in other long-forgotten New York bars. If anyone had the skill, they could have hammered out tunes on the black upright piano stage-left.
Tonight, however, the joint was unsettlingly empty.
When no one was on stage, the place always felt empty. It was a Monday, and the bar could only presently afford bands on the weekends, and only when the bands drew enough fans. In short, business was slow. None of this was lost on the bartender, a fetching twentysomething with an intricate sleeve of tattoos on her left arm, dark skinny jeans, and a tight black T-shirt that read TROOLEY’S TOURIST TAVERN.
As she poured a beer for Beatrice Baxter, the librarian major, she noted fleetingly that her love life was as empty as the bar. God, she was bored, and Library Girl was sure as hell not about to liven things up. Beatrice spent most Monday nights—including football season Monday nights—silently immersed in a book at the end of the bar, hair wound into a loose pencil-stabbed bun, reading glasses locked on the page, her long, slender legs crossed under a modest plaid tweed skirt. Her pale cashmere button-up sweater was probably the most demure garment any woman had worn in the bar since it had opened.
“You gonna do a few straight shots and stop sulking?” the bartender asked amiably.
Beatrice looked up. “I’m not sulking, I’m studying. You’re sulking, Reli.” She pronounced the bartender’s name as “Really.” They both took a good long gaze around the nearly empty bar. A few construction guys were shooting pool in the back over a pitcher of cheap beer. “Not that you don’t have anything to sulk about here.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Reli trailed off. Trooley’s Tourist Tavern had been a downtown watering-hole staple for over a century, slinging martini-and-beer breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and power meetings to local Wall Street hotshots who wanted to pretend they were slumming. With the economy nose-diving, many were slumming for real and no longer drank there. Some of the Freedom Tower construction workers—along with a few locals and music fans—would hang out but only if a band was playing. The Pussycat Pleasure Palace strip joint around the corner had recently sucked up most of them.
“Let’s do a shot,” Reli decided, “before this library turns into a morgue.” She poured two four-ounce rock-glass shots of Jack Daniels and belted hers back. Beatrice sipped hers politely.
“Would you rather have the place full of creeps,” Beatrice asked, “who sit around with one drink and try and act cool? Or who dress like bohemians and try to talk like poli-sci professors?”
“At least they’d spend some creepy money,” the bartender replied.
“I still say you should have a poetry slam,” the college kid said, putting down her book and looking Reli in the eye.
“I’m not going to put on some hippy-poetry-folk-coffeehouse-acoustic-contest thing. I’m not that desperate. This isn’t the Village. This is Tribeca—this district has more money than goddamn countries. I just gotta get it in here.”
As she said this, a tall man entered the bar, removing an archaic homburg from his head. He hung a long, black leather Gestapo-looking trench coat on a bar chair near the entrance, unbuttoned a dark olive suit jacket and sat down. He had long sideburns, an imperial goatee, and a pointed mustache.
“What’s your very best whiskey?” the man asked.
“A hipster,” Beatrice whispered.
Reli nodded her agreement, but nonetheless treated the customer to her best booze-slinging smile. After topping off the two rock glasses, she brought him a very vintage Jameson’s. Absorbed in her book, Beatrice didn’t even notice. She still had a lot of work left on her master’s thesis on American history.
Returning to Beatrice, Reli tossed her tip on the bar. “Think Al Hamilton would have liked this in his central bank?” she asked Beatrice, who stared incredulously at the shiny gold coin in front of her. “That guy just tipped me with this. It’s like he just walked out of another century.”
Beatrice examined the coin. It was a fairly heavy chunk of gold emblazoned with a picture of a mountain, the words PIKE’S PEAK on one side, and $2.50 DENVER 1860 on the other.
Beatrice shrugged and returned to her book.
“Hey, you are sulking,” the bartender said.
“Greg broke up with me,” Beatrice finally said, “so he could have more time to write his opera, and then my fighting fish, Kurosawa, died.”
The bartender scoffed. “Eh, forget Greg. I never liked him. What kind of guy writes operas?” She paused and, raising her whiskey glass briefly en route to a sip, added, “I’m sorry about Kurosawa, though.”
“Thanks.”
“You should move on to some more modern musicians. Or how about a jazz guy? That’s classic, I could introduce you to some really cool jazz guys.”
“No, I shouldn’t be dragging anyone else into my boring life right now. I should buckle down and finish my boring thesis.”
“You’ve got to know when to be boring and when not to. Be boring at home all you want. But don’t be boring at my bar. It makes us look bad. A book about Alexander Hamilton? Read something interesting, or talk to someone. Go blast off a few rounds on Big Buck Hunter or something. You’re wasting a whole social experience here.”
“I’m talking to you.”
“Every
body talks to me. I’m better than a shrink, a scientist, a newscaster, and three priests—from three different religions, all rolled into one.”
“Why only three priests?”
The ladies stared at Dapper Doubloon Dude at the end of the bar.
He repeated the question in the same deep, commanding voice.
“Why only three religions’ priests? There’s hundreds of religions out there. I daresay you’re worth at least ten organized religions’ priests, a cadre of shamans, even a deity or two.”
Reli smiled broadly, first at Dapper Doubloon Dude, then Beatrice. “What’s your name?” she asked the stranger.
He strode the length of the bar to where they were sitting before offering his hand to the ladies and replying, “My name is Devin MacCleary. Pleased to meet you.”
“Madame Aurelia Trooley,” the bartender said with overabundant flourish. “People call me ‘Reli.’ ”
“I’m Beatrice Baxter,” Beatrice said, trying really hard not to sound meek. Up close, MacCleary was not a creep. His dark olive jacket and matching well-tailored pants did not look tacky, like some secondhand-shop bargain find. The color even matched his curious eyes. His black boots gleamed and his accoutrements—a pocket watch, two unobtrusively elegant rings, and a big bright belt buckle—all appeared to be silver. His dark brown hair was stylishly pomaded. He smelled faintly of fine leather.
Up close, Beatrice concluded that his sideburns, imperial goatee, and mustache looked surprisingly handsome on his striking face.
More Stories from the Twilight Zone Page 19
