100 Malicious Little Mysteries

by Isaac Asimov

  He buttoned his coat slowly. “And where will you be at eleven, Mr. Williams?”

  “At my club, probably playing cards with five or six friends. They will no doubt commiserate with me when I receive word that my wife has been... shot?”

  “It all depends on the circumstances and the opportunity.” He smiled thinly. “Did you ever love her?”

  I picked up a jade figurine and examined it. “I was extremely fond of this piece when I first bought it. Now it bores me. I will replace it with another.”

  When he was gone there was just enough time to take the glass to a detective agency before I went on to the club.

  Not the glass in the safe, of course. It held nothing but my own fingerprints.

  I took the one that Mr. Smith left on the cocktail table when he departed.

  The prints of Mr. Smith’s fingers developed quite clearly.

  Out of Order

  by Carl Henry Rathjen

  The kid got it in the back at seven-thirty that evening.

  He’d answered the service station’s inside phone, listened, then covered the mouthpiece and said to Jim Daly, “Duck! It’s The Sniper. I’m going to call his bluff.”

  “Don’t,” Jim had warned, feeling exposed with glass on four sides of the office.

  But the kid ran out to call the police from the phone booth near the driveway. A customer, driving in, made him swerve, slipping on a glob of grease. So there was no telling whether the slug got him before or after he began twisting down. No telling from which direction it came. And no sound of a shot either.

  Jim Daly, with hair as black as the grease on big knuckles he kept rubbing into a palm, told all that to Whitehead, the squat, blond detective who came in the second police car while the ambulance guys were covering the kid with a canvas.

  “So that’s an out for you, I suppose,” Daly added.

  This was the seventh such robbery of a service station. Somebody phoned and said, “You’re covered with a gun, every move. Put a clip or rubber band on the bills from the till. Drop them over the wall behind the air hose, then go on with your work. Don’t get nosey or call the police. You’ll be covered every moment.” Seven of them, and the police, as usual, said they were working on it. Now the kid was dead. The first killing.

  Whitehead’s square face got a little white, then he spoke quietly. “Seeing anybody killed is hard to take, but was he something special to you?”

  Jim Daly looked toward the canvas, a hub for a ring of morbid stares being held out of the station by uniformed police.

  “He tried to hold me up once,” said Daly. “I talked him out of it and gave him a job.”

  Whitehead stared. “Instead of calling us.”

  “All he needed was a break,” snapped Daly.

  “That’s all we need too,” Whitehead murmured. His partner, a thin man with razor-sharp gaze, said nothing.

  “In other words,” Daly charged, “you haven’t done a damn thing. Now a good kid’s dead, murdered. He never had a chance.”

  Whitehead seemed to sort words before he spoke. “You’d know better than I would how many service stations there are in the metropolitan area. Close to a couple thousand, isn’t it?”

  “All right,” said Daly. “You can’t stake out every one of them. But you guys are supposed to know how to run down these killers.”

  “It takes time,” Whitehead began.

  “I can’t get away with that in my business,” Daly declared. “I’m expected to trouble-shoot a customer’s car in five minutes.”

  Whitehead nodded, staring around at apartments across the avenue, store windows facing the sidestreet with a slice of night sky showing in the alley.

  “And the customer,” he said with a slight smile, “expects it because he thinks it’s easy, doesn’t know the problems of your job. That works two ways, Daly. If you were a policeman, you’d know.”

  “I tried to know once.” Daly pressed his lips.

  Whitehead faced him curiously.

  “Why’d they turn you down?”

  Daly answered defiantly, staring at a fist making his thumbnail white as the blood squeezed back. “I did time once when I was a kid.”

  Whitehead studied him. “That’s why you gave this one a break.”

  Daly nodded. “That’s why I’m sore, damn sore. A guy sees he’s made a mistake and more than makes up for it. Then someone louses it up for him, and you hand me the usual hogwash alibi. Save it for somebody else. I’ll find who got him.”

  “Take it easy,” Whitehead began.

  “That’s the trouble. I have, waiting for you to do something.”

  Daly pulled off his coveralls.

  But he was still in the station at midnight, though not open for business, when Whitehead drove in with his partner.

  “Got it solved, Daly?” he asked, neither sarcastic nor hopeful as he leaned against the desk, hands in the pockets of his topcoat.

  Daly poked a thick finger in a cigarette pack that looked as though it had been sat on. “It’s like tracking down a miss in a car. I’ve found out where it can’t be from.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Whitehead. He waited. Daly carefully straightened out a bent cigarette, then thumbnailed a wooden match. He waited too. Whitehead sighed, and smiled. “All right, I’ll tell you. We know where it couldn’t have come from too, but being police, we had to check it out anyway. The shot couldn’t have come from the apartments or stores. They’ve all been occupied a long time. No stick-up artist is going to have friends living in the vicinity of every place he plans to knock over. He wouldn’t be on a roof either. Couldn’t watch his victim at the phone. We know that from other jobs that have been pulled where he mentioned what the victim was doing while being warned.”

  Daly blew smoke toward the door. “You don’t have to be a cop to figure that out.”

  Whitehead looked at the No Smoking sign, glanced at the locked gasoline pumps, then got out his own cigarettes.

  “And it doesn’t take a police officer to figure it took two of them to pull these jobs. One to make the phone call, the other to watch from a dark parked car.”

  Daly took a long drag, then gestured with his thumb toward the side street. “My guess is the car was parked up there.”

  Whitehead’s partner shifted to peer in that direction, then turned to look where the kid’s body had been. Whitehead just leaned against the desk.

  “Police officers have one advantage over citizens who think we’re not doing our job. Take the chip off your shoulder and listen, Daly. We looked up records. When the kid tried to hold you up, it wasn’t the first job he’d pulled, nor the last.”

  Daly closed his eyes and took another long drag. “I wish you hadn’t told me.” He looked up suddenly. “You think he was in on these sniper jobs?”

  Whitehead nodded. “And he wanted a larger split. That’s why he was shot.”

  Daly frowned. “But they tried to hold me up.”

  “That’s what doesn’t fit,” said Whitehead. “They hit only stations doing a good business. We’ve checked on gasoline purchases with the wholesaler. You haven’t been doing so well here since the freeway pulled traffic away. A lot of nights it’s not even been worth staying open.”

  “It was a phony stick-up then,” Daly growled. “Just to get the kid.”

  “A phony, sure,” Whitehead agreed, “because we figure the kid was shot in the back, dying out there while he staggered, running to get away from you!”

  Daly straightened. Whitehead’s partner suddenly had a gun in his hand. Whitehead took his hands out of his pockets. One of them held handcuffs.

  “You overplayed it, Daly. Too positive we were going to be dumb cops. Too dumb to wonder what happened to the supposed customer who made the kid swerve so you couldn’t tell where the shot came from. Too dumb to thoroughly check everything out, records of all kinds, the possible and the impossible. We were even so dumb we tried the phone company, even though we figured the call couldn’t be
traced. It couldn’t, because the kid forgot to tell you — or didn’t have time to — that he’d reported earlier this evening the phone was out of order.”

  Daly expelled smoke. “What does that prove? I might have been confused by the shock of his being killed. I guess he took the call on the outside phone.”

  “The same as you were so confused,” Whitehead suggested, “you forgot to rub grease on your thumbnails when we arrived. So confused you told us yourself that we had killers, not just one man, to run down on these hold-ups. You also thought we were too dumb to have men watching you while you pretended to begin tracking down the kid’s killer. There’s a crew opening the sewer now to retrieve your silenced gun.”

  He put the cuffs on Daly and guided him toward the car.

  “You know,” he said, “it doesn’t bother us that people think we’re dumb. It takes time, but we find in the long run that we meet plenty who are dumber. You’ll have a lot in common with them, Daly... in prison.”

  The Handy Man

  by Marion M. Markham

  “I am so lucky to have a handy man like you living on the island,” Thelma Norburton cooed. Thelma always cooed when she wanted someone to do something for her. She cooed at Arthur frequently. It was cheaper than paying a repair man to fix her vacuum cleaner switch, or her television set, or her toilet valve.

  “I just don’t know what I’d do without you. Ever since poor Henry passed on I’ve been so lost. You don’t know how difficult it is to be a widow. Everyone tries to take advantage of me and cheat me.”

  Arthur heard only half of the cooing, as his head was under Thelma’s pink kitchen sink. It was the third time in a month that his head had been under Thelma Norburton’s kitchen sink. First it was a leak in the pipe leading to the dishwasher — then the garbage disposal jammed — now the diamond ring in the drain. Today he was under there longer than usual, and his back was aching badly. In addition, he had twice bumped his head against the garbage disposal unit.

  “Since you and Millie moved in next door my life has been so much easier. You can’t think how relieved I was. The house was empty for so long, while the will was being contested. And sometimes I saw strange lights at night. But, of course, the police never paid any attention to my calls. And then you moved in, and I felt so much safer.

  “I wasn’t scared to death that I’d be murdered in my bed after you came. And to find out that you can fix absolutely anything. I mean, I certainly am the luckiest widow in Florida. I told Millie that just yesterday. Millie, I said, I am absolutely the luckiest widow on the Gold Coast to have two of the cleverest people in south Florida for neighbors.”

  Arthur had heard all about that conversation from Millie before.

  “Now she wants you to re-upholster a bedroom chair for her,” Millie recounted. “And she’d like me to make new drapes to match. Is this what retirement is all about, Arthur? Making drapes for my neighbor? I made my own for years, and hung my own wallpaper, and re-covered our dining room chairs myself just so we could save enough money to retire. I don’t want to spend that retirement making Thelma Norburton’s drapes.

  “Tell her you won’t do it.”

  “Arthur, you know how she is. So forceful and pathetic at the same time. She can afford to have an interior designer make new drapes every month, but she still manages to make me feel guilty if I say no to her. I think it’s the neighborhood. We don’t belong with all these wealthy people. And Thelma knows how I feel and uses it to make me feel like a servant.”

  “You’re not Thelma’s servant. You’re my wonderful wife, and you belong here as much as she does. Two million is hardly poverty.”

  “But it shows — all the years I washed my own dishes and made my own clothes. It shows in my hands and the way my shoulders are bent. It shows, too, that you used to wind your own condensers — or whatever those things were you worked on every night when Alice was a baby and the business just starting.

  “It doesn’t show. We’re as good as anyone else on this island.”

  “Then why did Thelma ask you to put up a new shelf in her garage just two days after we moved in?”

  “I’ll speak to Thelma tomorrow and tell her you won’t make her drapes and I won’t re-cover her chair. I won’t have her making my wife feel like a servant.” He kissed her gently. “I promise you, I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

  Arthur tried to speak to Thelma the next morning. When he opened his mouth, Thelma cooed at him about how her diamond ring that dear Henry had given to her on their last Christmas together had gone down the kitchen drain, and would Arthur mind terribly getting it out for her?

  So Arthur lay on his back under the pink sink, while Thelma sat at the glass-topped wrought iron kitchen table — also pink. She sipped grasshoppers, never offering anything to Arthur, and cooed.

  “My goodness, Arthur. I never thought it would take this long to get a little old diamond ring out of a little old sink drain. I’m playing bridge at two. I mean, you fixed the washing machine in an hour, and you had to take it all apart. Remember how I bet you wouldn’t get it all back together again? But you did. You really are so marvellous with your hands. I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t do.

  “Does Millie appreciate you? Really appreciate you, I mean. If she ever gets tired of you, you just come right over here. You understand? Henry Bejaman Norburton may have inherited twenty million dollars. But he couldn’t hold a candle to you when it comes to electricity and plumbing. I really am the luckiest woman to have a strong, intelligent, clever man like you around.

  “Almost finished,” Arthur said, giving a last twist to the thin copper wire he was working with. He handed out the diamond ring that looked too small for Thelma’s pudgy fingers.

  “You still have time to make your bridge game.” He slid out from under the sink and began gathering up the wire cutters, voltage tester, and other tools.

  “I just don’t know how to thank you, Arthur. Would you like a glass of water?”

  “No, thanks, Thelma. It’s almost two, and Millie will wonder what’s become of me.”

  “Well, I do appreciate it. You really are the cleverest man. Is there anything you can’t do?”

  “Not once I set my mind to it, Thelma” he said proudly.

  Arthur felt real pride later that evening, when he saw the sudden eerie glow in the kitchen next door, and then total darkness. He’d never wired a garbage disposal before.

  Continuous feed disposal units were dangerous, he had always said, what with water running and women pushing things through the metal sink ring with wet hands. If ever the fuse on the unit didn’t cut off right, if something happened to short the motor and send an electric current up to that metal ring...

  Of course, it was probably a one-in-five-hundred-million chance — unless a handy man knew how to fix it just right.

  Nightmare

  by Elaine Slater

  One minute the sun was out, and the next it got all gray and dark. I saw lightning ’way far off in the direction we were going, but I couldn’t hear any thunder yet. A wind came up from nowhere and all the leaves on the bushes and trees did a belly-flop.

  I looked at Mom, but she was driving perfectly calmly as if nothing was happening. She looked too young to be my mother, and for a second I felt sorry for her, but then I hated her again.

  She was taking me to this summer vacation camp, and I didn’t want to go. Gripes, how I didn’t want to go! She’d showed me this brochure and it had a picture of the Director and all the campers posed outside of bunks with their Counsellors. The Director was a bald, beefy guy with a silver tooth, smiling something awful. The Counsellors were great big jerks in white ducks and open shirts. They all looked too damn proud of themselves.

  But the kids! I tell you it was the kids who tipped me off. There they were, standing in front of their bunks, their shorts hanging down, their shirts out, their hair practically growing over their eyes. And I’m telling you there was a look of such dumb misery
on their faces, it’d give anyone the shakes. One kid in particular — Bunk 9, I think he was — was practically screaming a warning at me out of that picture. “Stay away from here, kid,” he was saying, “this is Hell.”

  But my Mom was determined that I got to go to camp. And when Mom makes up her mind!

  I begged Dad. I said, “Just look at those faces in the brochure. You can tell it’s a crumby place.”

  My Dad has a fierce temper, but still he’s an easier mark than Mom. But this time all he said was, “Your Mother and I have talked about this and you must trust us to do what we think is right for you.”

  He couldn’t see those faces like I could, and I was ashamed to tell him the truth. I was scared. Gripes, I was scared!

  I tried everything. First I tried persuasion. I argued with them all the time. I told them it was no good sending me there because I wouldn’t stay. I told them they couldn’t make me go if I didn’t want to. Finally I got sent from the table so many times, I decided to go on a hunger strike. I had nothing to lose, I wasn’t getting much to eat anyway. But that didn’t last long.

  Next I ran away. I didn’t get far — my bike blew a tire. Then I tried to be as good as I knew how to be, so they’d want me around all summer. I must admit that worked the best. I helped Mom with everything, and when Dad came home I helped him wash the car and mow the lawn. I never even mentioned camp, but I could tell as the time grew closer that they were beginning to look at each other and then at me. They thought I wasn’t looking, but I sure was.

  Then the whole idea blew. We had a bang-up fight about my fingernails of all things! I don’t know what happened to me. I guess all that helping was getting on my nerves. Anyway, I started yelling and fighting, and boy, two days later I was packed into the car with Mom and was headed for camp.

  We’d just reached this rickety sign, “Happy Days Camp,” when I heard the first thunder rumbling in the distance. The storm was coming fast. A few drops hit the windshield as we bumped down this long dirt road, and I thought, “My God! She’s really going to do it. She’s going to leave me here” — and suddenly I knew as sure as shooting I was gonna die here. I was screaming inside, but my Mom was still perfectly calm, concentrating on this lousy dirt road.