100 Malicious Little Mysteries

by Isaac Asimov

  He gunned the T-bird out behind and passed the other car and was elated when it speeded up as he went around it. He could almost envision the other driver cursing him as he cut in sharply and pressed the accelerator down. There was no riding passenger in the other car. There was only the driver.

  A perfect mark. Oh, Heat that lives within me: Make this one of the good ones.

  Jamie made his turn when the distance was right. There was no car behind the mark and nothing in his own rear-view mirror. The heat began to build.

  He let the engine wind up until the speedometer read ninety, and he eased, right lane, then left lane.

  He saw dust puff from the rear tires of the other car and something inside him screamed: No! Don’t quit on me! The other car came on and Jamie smiled.

  At three hundred feet away he slid the T-bird into the left lane, dead at the other car, anticipating what would happen. The other driver would panic now, move out of the path of Jamie’s hurtling car. Then the variation. Jamie would follow, forcing the other driver away from the traveled road, onto the tricky shoulder.

  At this moment Jamie liked to see the oncoming driver’s face. He lifted his eyes, and the face he saw seemed vaguely familiar and smiling, but that was impossible. Savagely, with hate, Jamie floorboarded the T-bird.

  At fifty feet the other car cut sharply left and Jamie corrected happily, for this was as anticipated, but then the other car cut right again and there was no time to recover. The T-bird was caught slightly broadside. Jamie heard the thunder of the crash and fought the wheel and got the T-bird straightened as his wheels bounced on the shoulder, but one of the wheels hit a rut and he felt the T-bird going. He bent desperately into the seat, felt the top hit on the parched ground, heard the renewed tearing of metal and then it was a roll that seemed endless. The door came away beside him, but the belt held him firmly until all of the crazy, loud motion stopped and there was silence. Jamie reached then very quickly for the ignition, smelling the gasoline smell, breathing as hard as if he’d run a mile.

  He could see the other car out of his starred windshield. Its right front end was smashed. The driver had the door open and he was unhooking a complicated safety harness that ran from a roll bar in the car over his shoulders and waist. It was the harness that had given him the stiff look, Jamie calculated.

  Jamie unhooked his own seat belt, but the steering wheel was still in the way and his left leg was caught somewhere. He felt the beginning of pain, and the warmth of blood running down his injured leg brought a leaping panic.

  “Help,” he called.

  The other man came slowly up to the jumbled T-bird.

  “Hello, Jamie.”

  “I remember you,” Jamie said incredulously. “You’re Mr. Kelly.”

  “Can you make it out?” Mr. Kelly asked.

  Jamie shook his head. “It’s my leg.”

  Mr. Kelly’s eyes sparkled.

  Jamie looked at the other man, unable to read him, fighting away fear. “You like the game?”

  Mr. Kelly smiled. “Enough to learn to play it. I trained in sports cars and drove dirt track for awhile after my boy died and before I came after you.”

  “Maybe...”

  Mr. Kelly held up his hand. “If they put you away you’d be back.” He nodded. “There isn’t any way to break you, Jamie.”

  “We could play again,” Jamie said. “I’ve never had anyone before who could really play.” He searched within. “It was better than it’s ever been.” And it had been.

  “Not ever again, Jamie,” Mr. Kelly said gently.

  The fear came up in waves. “If you do anything they’ll find out somehow. You prosecuted me once. They’ll catch you.”

  “Not about us,” Mr. Kelly said. “You’ve changed your name too many times.”

  Jamie laughed and the fear went away and he was exultant with triumph. “My fingerprints haven’t changed. They took them then. They’ll take them again. They’ll use them and find out.”

  Mr. Kelly smiled a curious smile and sniffed at the gasoline fumes.

  “I thought about that, too.”

  He lit a match.

  When the screaming was all over, Mr. Kelly giggled.

  Nothing But Bad News

  by Henry Slesar

  Dillon whirled and shot the bully for the fifth time. Pauline clenched her teeth and said Miss, you bastard, but the marshal didn’t, his accuracy guaranteed by rerun inexorability. Arnold Summerly breathed a fifth sigh of relief, and Pauline said, “For God’s sake, Arnold, didn’t you know how it was going to turn out?” but Arnold was narcotized now by the commercial following the shoot-out.

  Pauline reached out to tune in the seven o’clock news, but Arnold’s hand beat her to the dial and spun it to the local channel; it was their own shoot-out, re-enacted every night.

  “Arnold, please!” Pauline said. “Let’s watch the news for once, just once. Anything could be happening. Greenland could have declared war on us. The world may be coming to an end. Anything!”

  “If it happens, we’ll hear about it,” Arnold said.

  “How? How? You never watch the news. You never read a paper. You care so little about the world, what difference would it make if it did come to an end?”

  “This beer is warm,” Arnold said. “You’ve been putting the beer in the refrigerator door again. How many times do I have to tell you to put the beer inside?” The screen divided itself into the shape of a heart, and Arnold forgot his pique. The prospect of Lucy in the twentieth year of her pregnancy erased all rancor.

  “You’re a vegetable,” Pauline said. “Do you know that, Arnold? You’re an office machine in the daytime and a vegetable at night. A head of lettuce sticking out of a shirt collar.”

  At least he had the decency to get angry.

  “All right! All right! You want to know why I don’t watch the news? Why I don’t read the paper? Because it’s all bad news. Nothing but bad news. That’s the reason so many people turn mean and rotten, they get to hear nothing but bad news from morning till night. There’s not one nice, decent, cheerful thing you ever hear about, not one thing you can feel good about. That’s why!”

  “It’s not true,” Pauline said. “Maybe it seems that way, but it isn’t.”

  “Yeah? Yeah? You want to bet? You want to bet, like, that new fur coat you want so bad? You want to bet that, Pauline, huh?”

  “What do you mean, bet?”

  “You heard me. Put your money where your big mouth is. You turn on the news, go ahead. And you hear one real good piece of news, you can quit saving for that fur coat, I’ll buy it for you. Tomorrow. You won’t have to wait another year, I’ll put it on your back right now!”

  The coat was an ebony mink. Pauline’s Holy Grail.

  “And if there isn’t any good news?”

  Arnold grinned.

  “You give me that money you been saving and we take the fishing trip.”

  Pauline hated fishing trips. So she hesitated.

  Arnold chuckled, both at her and at Lucy. Lucy thought the baby was coming. Desi was panicked. Pauline was simultaneously sickened at the thought of dead fish and exhilarated at the thought of mink.

  “All right,” she said. “OK, Arnold. Turn on the news.”

  Arnold gave Lucy a regretful smile and wrenched the dial.

  Jensen looked so grim that Pauline’s heart wrenched, too.

  “The prospect for a major conflict in the Middle East intensified tonight, after an Israeli commando raid into Lebanon followed a series of bombings in Tel Aviv that claimed ten lives...”

  Arnold sucked loudly on his beer bottle.

  “A new threat to the Vietnam truce was posed tonight as reports of a buildup...”

  Arnold burped and chuckled and chortled.

  “And now, here’s a film report on the fire that destroyed the ocean liner Marianna and cost the lives of thirty passengers and crewmen....”

  Arnold enjoyed the account of the disaster almost as much as I
Love Lucy.

  “The strike of longshoremen, now in its third week, may cripple the economy of the entire Eastern Seaboard, according to a new study...”

  Arnold basked in the blue light of the set.

  “Another charge of corruption in Government came today from a high-placed official in the Justice Department...”

  “After a week-long search, the mutilated body of seven-year-old Sharon Snyder was discovered in an abandoned tenement...”

  “A tax rise forecast by both Federal and state economists brutally slain in apartment-house elevator the highest increase in food prices in ten years accident total now five hundred but expected to rise as floods sweep tornadoes struck hurricane winds rising to thirteen children dead twenty injured as train strikes school bus and protesters arrested on steps of mugging victim dies as new strain of flu virus thousands homeless as assassin forecasts rain for holiday weekend...”

  Arnold was having a very good time.

  “Well, how about it, how about it?” he said. “How’s about the news, Mrs. Current Events, you enjoying the show? And how’s about that fishing trip, you going to throw up again, like you did the last time, when I bring home the catch?”

  “It’s still on,” Pauline said gratingly. “The news is still on, Arnold; will you at least let the man finish?”

  “Sure,” said Arnold, smiling.

  “And now,” said Jensen, not smiling, “repeating our first item, the state health authorities have issued an urgent warning concerning the danger of botulism in the canned mixed vegetables packed by Happy Lad Foods. Any can of Happy Lad mixed vegetables marked five-L-three is known to contain these deadly bacteria and should be destroyed immediately or returned to the place of purchase...”

  The credits were beginning to roll and Pauline couldn’t bear Arnold’s chuckling noises a moment longer. Tears blurred her path between living room and kitchen. In the center of the tiled floor, she fought a wave of nausea (smell of dead fish, nonsmell of mink), and then she went to the cupboard and looked through her canned-food inventory, searching the labels for a can of Happy Lad mixed vegetables, series 5L3. Suddenly, she realized that all the news wasn’t bad that night. She had one.

  The Quick and the Dead

  by Helen McCloy

  She was a remarkable woman. Basil Willing recognized that the moment he saw her.

  She opened the door of his beach cottage without knocking. Behind her a jagged streak of lightning split the night and vanished. Thunder roared above the steady drumming of the surf. An edge of white foam thrust its way up the sand; beyond, the ocean was a blackness — as void as if nothing were there, and never had been. Thunderstorms were rare in California, but when they came they were, like most things California, larger than life.

  She was like a storm herself, all darkness and suddenness, all flash and tumult. Basil remembered that the words hurricane and houri have the same root.

  “Sorry to bother you.” Her voice was rich, deep, warm. “My telephone is dead. May I use yours? I live next door.”

  “Of course. Over there by the stairway.”

  She wore a silk sheath, shrill yellow like a flame in the dimly lighted room. Her sandals were gilt; her only jewel was a big round brooch on one shoulder, bits of coral and turquoise pieced together to form the image of a Nepalese god. An artful woman to combine yellow-pink and yellow-blue with yellow.

  “Damn! Your phone is dead too! What am I going to do now?”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “I’m Moira Shiel.”

  “The singer? Max and Moira?”

  The team specialized in folk songs and satirical sketches. They were famous for their quickness in picking up each other’s cues when they ad-libbed, as they often did, even on television. Moira was the better actor; Max, the better musician — he had perfect pitch.

  She nodded. “I just had a phone call from the Santa Barbara police. Max’s father was found dead there an hour ago, at nine o’clock. He lived alone. A neighbor heard his dog barking and called the police. They said he had died of a heart attack about eight thirty.

  “They called me because they couldn’t locate Max. They had tried the studio in Burbank first, but the night staff said that Max had left there alone, in his car, at six, telling everyone that he was driving to Santa Barbara to have dinner with his father. The police had also tried to call Max’s house in Santa Cristina, a hundred miles south of Burbank, but there was no answer. His wife should have been there, but she wasn’t.

  “I don’t want Max to hear this news suddenly, on his car radio. He adored his father. The shock would prostrate him for weeks, perhaps months. I got the Santa Barbara police to promise they would not release the news until I found Max, but they can’t hold it back indefinitely. What shall I do? If your phone is also not working it means the line is down all along Malibu Beach. I may not be able to reach him for hours.”

  Basil glanced at his watch. “Ten after ten now. If he left Burbank at six, he should certainly be in Santa Barbara by this time. I suppose you could drive to Burbank, or to Los Angeles, and find a telephone that’s working and—”

  “I wouldn’t dare leave my house for so long. The line may be fixed at any moment. A call might come through from Max and I’d miss it.”

  “Then why don’t I take you home and drive to Los Angeles myself? I can give Max the message, if you’ll tell me the most likely numbers to call.”

  There was a fire already burning on the hearth in her living room. She stood before it turning the pages of a small black address book. “First, his home number. That’s one I always forget — I suppose, because I so rarely have occasion to use it.”

  “I always assumed you and Max were married,” said Basil.

  “Oh, no. He was married when we teamed up. Katie, his wife, is nice, but—”

  She stopped at the sound of a car on the road that runs above the beach houses at Malibu. In a few moments footfalls were noisy on the wooden steps that led down to her house. She ran to the front door.

  “Miss Shiel?” The man in the doorway was stocky and curt. The police. How could you always tell, even without the uniform?

  “I’m Carson Dawes, Lieutenant, Los Angeles Police.” He smiled at Basil. “Good evening, Dr. Willing. You probably don’t remember me, but I’ve been attending your lectures on forensic psychiatry at the University.”

  “Dr. Willing?” Moira whirled to look at Basil. “You’re a sort of policeman, too!”

  “Sort of. I’m really a psychiatrist.”

  “Sorry to trouble you. Miss Shiel,” Dawes went on. “But I couldn’t reach you by phone from Los Angeles, so I came out to the beach.”

  “My line is down. The storm.”

  “I’m looking for your partner, Max Weber, Do you know where he is?”

  “No, I was trying to reach him myself when the line went down. His father, Abraham Weber, died suddenly of a heart attack this evening in Santa Barbara.”

  “I know,” Dawes said. “When I called Mr. Weber’s number, trying to find Max, a Santa Barbara policeman answered the phone and told me all about it. They were trying to locate Max, too, he said. They had just talked to you and promised you they’d not release the news until he was found. That was when I tried to call you and discovered your line was down. The studio people in Burbank had told me Max was in Santa Barbara with his father. But he wasn’t. Interesting. If he had been, it would have given him an alibi.”

  “An alibi? For what?” asked Moira.

  “His wife, Katie, was murdered this evening.”

  “But who would want to kill poor Katie?”

  “Who but Max? They were on the verge of divorce — as you probably know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “The Santa Cristina police called us a little while ago and asked us to bring Max in for questioning. Under California community property law, Katie would get half of everything if there were a divorce. That seems to be very inconvenient for Max just now — as I understa
nd it, he wants to start his own recording company and needs all his capital. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that?”

  “Of course I knew. That’s business. We’re partners.”

  “Katie Weber was in the Santa Cristina house this evening, sitting beside a picture window. According to medical evidence it was about eight thirty when someone fired a shot through the window and killed her instantly. No one heard the shot. Her body was found by her housekeeper, who had left the house at eight, when Katie was still alive, and returned at nine to find her dead. Where was Max at eight thirty?”

  “I don’t know, but he would never kill Katie.”

  Dawes looked at her skeptically. “Tough luck for a murderer to have his only alibi-witness die a natural death while he’s committing murder and so blow his carefully planned alibi sky-high.”

  “How dare you assume that Max and his father would plan a cold-blooded murder together?”

  “Before Abraham Weber retired, he was a lawyer for the racketeers. He never committed a crime himself, but he was not exactly punctilious about the letter of the law. And he loved his son. The heart attack suggests that the old man knew what was going on tonight and the excitement was too much for him. If I’m right — if Max did plan to use his father as an alibi-witness — the Lord hath delivered him into our hands.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You asked the Santa Barbara police not to release the news of Weber’s death until Max was found, so Max cannot possibly know his father is dead. When we pick him up, he’ll undoubtedly claim he was in Santa Barbara with his father at eight thirty, the time of the murder, never suspecting that his father was already dead at eight thirty. That will prove that Max was not at his father’s house at all tonight. We’ll hardly have to question him. We can just sit back and let him talk himself into the gas chamber.”

  “That’s horrible!” cried Moira. “You’re setting a trap for him!”

  Again there was the sound of a car on the road above the beach. Moira was already at the door. Dawes drew her back, almost roughly.