100 Malicious Little Mysteries

by Isaac Asimov

  “But what did you do about it? Is there a cure?”

  “That was my first question, too. My doc was a little baffled by the whole thing, but luckily he remembered the name of a man who made a study of the disease. A Dr. Hess, on the third floor of the Birch Building. We shot right down there and saw him, and he was very comforting. He said they might not have been able to do anything ten, twelve years ago, but now they had drugs that could do the trick. I was so relieved I almost cried.”

  “Boy! No wonder you look so beat. That was quite an experience.”

  “It sure was,” Spiro said, downing the rest of his drink.

  They left the restaurant at two, and Spiro said good-bye to O’Connor on the corner of Fifty-eighth and Madison. Then he stepped into a cab and gave the driver the address of the Birch Building.

  He was there in ten minutes. In the lobby, he stopped at a newsstand and bought a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, and entered the elevator. “Three,” he told the operator.

  The corridor was bustling with people settling back into the afternoon work routine. He lounged near the elevator for another ten minutes, and the hallways emptied.

  At 2:30, O’Connor stepped off the elevator, looked up and down the hall, and then headed left.

  Spiro called out: “O’Connor!”

  O’Connor whirled, looked bewildered, and then walked up to his friend.

  “I just wanted to be sure,” said Spiro, “you son of a bitch.” Then he drew back his fist and drove it into O’Connor’s cheek. O’Connor yelped and fell sprawling to the marble tiles. Spiro, feeling better than he had in a long time, pressed the Down button.

  Two Small Vials

  by Elsin Ann Graffam

  He awoke at 6:55, five minutes before the alarm was to sound. Turning on his side, he gazed with dispassionate interest at the woman who lay sleeping beside him.

  Such a cow, he thought, When he thought of who he could be sleeping next to—

  Sighing, he sat on the edge of the bed and pushed the alarm button in.

  “Is it seven already?” Joanne asked sleepily. “I’ll get breakfast. Hotcakes O.K., honey?”

  “Sure,” he said, not looking at his wife.

  Her banal chatter at breakfast was almost suffocating.

  “And this woman who won the jackpot was rich, from Great Oaks — can you imagine! How come poor people never win?”

  Cow, he thought, rising. “I’d better get going,” he said, slipping on his topcoat.

  The ride to work was pleasant. Peaceful, after a breakfast with Joanne.

  He tuned in his favorite FM station and drove slowly, thinking of Chris. Chris, with her long golden hair, her youthful figure, her blue eyes.

  “You’ll get over her. Bill,” Joanne had said a hundred times, humoring him, forgiving him. The placid, long-suffering wife. Cow! he thought.

  He turned the car into the immense parking lot of the Willsin Chemical Plant and parked at the spot marked MR. REED.

  It was nice, he thought, to be only twenty-seven years old and a production manager with his own private parking spot. Willsin Chemical Plant was relatively new, but growing fast. Maybe in five years, ten at the most, it would be rated Triple-A, Dun & Bradstreet.

  He’d had the best — college, good connections, looks, ambition; everything but the right wife.

  He could never have his colleagues and their wives to dinner. They’d sit down to one of Joanne’s insipid dinners — tuna casserole, say. She’d open her mouth and say, “And this woman who won the jackpot was rich, from Great Oaks — can you imagine!”

  Wincing, he locked the car and headed for his office at the front of the plant.

  I could have bought her off, he thought. I could have given her money and seen her through an abortion. But not Mr. Nice. I marry her.

  And she loses the baby. And I’m stuck. With a cow! A —

  “Good morning, Mr. Reed.”

  “Morning, Susan,” he said to the bookkeeper.

  “We’re getting a rush of orders for that new explosive. Harper Construction Company, Mideast Construction, Fallstaff.” She flipped through a stack of orders.

  “Well, it’s good, cheap, does the job.”

  “And you have to use so little of it,” she said.

  Suddenly he felt light-headed. He sat down.

  “Is something the matter?” she asked.

  “No. I just thought of something, that’s all.”

  Joanne glanced at the skillet clock on the kitchen wall. Five of ten. In a few minutes her TV programs would begin. She poured herself a glass of soda and padded to the living room to turn on the set. Drawing her fuzzy-slippered feet under her, she settled down.

  In seven hours Bill would be home. Maybe. The week before he’d come home late three nights in a row. How late, she hadn’t known; she’d been asleep. He no longer bothered to call to say he’d be working late. He simply wouldn’t show up. In frustration she’d eat her meal — and his. All fifty-five of her overweight pounds, she reflected, were his fault.

  She was willing to put up with his tomcatting. Someday he’d settle down and realize what a comfortable, homey place she’d created for him. Realize, more importantly, that he still loved her as he once had. He’d come to his senses. All she had to do was wait.

  The first show, Mister Dollar, was on. Leaning back, she immersed herself in the program.

  “You’re tense tonight, honey,” Chris said, drawing on her robe.

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “Poor Lumpkin.”

  “It’s just — a lot of pressure at work.”

  “Well, I’ve got my problems too.”

  “I know, I know.” Bill lit a cigarette. Sometimes she nagged him a little too much for comfort.

  “I mean, I don’t want to wait so long for my ship to come in that my pier collapses.”

  He smiled, despite his mood. “It won’t be much longer. One of these days Joanne’ll see the light and give me a divorce.”

  “And one of these days I’ll win the lottery.”

  “Oh, come on, Chris. Be patient. We still have each other, haven’t we?”

  “Sure,” she said. “How about a drink?”

  He nodded. His mind returned to the two small vials tucked into his jacket pocket. Getting them that afternoon had been absurdly simple. Now all he had to do was figure how to combine the two chemicals.

  The telephone rang.

  “Damn,” she said, going to answer it. “I’ll bet it’s Mother, again.”

  The alarm went off at 6:30. Quickly he reached over and silenced it. Joanne was still asleep, he saw, relieved. Easing himself out of bed, he tiptoed from the room and went down the carpeted stairs to the kitchen. The two vials were at the back of the cutlery drawer where he’d left them the night before.

  The beauty of the new explosive was not only that such a small amount was needed to do the job, as Susan had said, but that just the slightest vibration — like the ringing of the telephone — would set off the explosion. Apart, the two chemicals were inert. Combined, he guessed most of the downstairs would be blown to a powder. And Joanne with it.

  He knew that she sat down fatly on the sofa at ten in the morning to start watching her precious TV shows. The telephone was on the end table next to the sofa. At ten-fifteen he’d dial his home number. The vibration from the ring would be more than enough to do the job.

  For a moment he clasped his hands together to stop their trembling. Then, the phone cover removed, he placed a drop of dioxorb and one of riantrin on the bell.

  Did he hear her coming down the stairs? Holding his breath, he listened. No, it was just the thumping of his heart. Gently — gently — he replaced the cover of the telephone. There. It was—

  She’d been thinking about him and his “Be patient” all night, unable to sleep, more infuriated with each passing hour. He had been stringing her along for far too long. How was she supposed to explain her time to her mother, her sisters, her brother,
her friends?

  Well, an early call at home should let him know how serious she was! When her call finally got through. She raised her finger from the cradle button and dialed again.

  Sweet Remembrance

  by Betty Ren Wright

  “I blame those dreadful books for his death,” Miss Mackey told the sergeant. “Indirectly, of course, I’m liberal in my thinking, I assure you, but I do think that publishers have a responsibility. Have you seen the kind of trash being sold in every drugstore and supermarket at this very moment?”

  She didn’t look like a liberal. The sergeant watched her thin white hands, expert among the tea things, and felt nostalgia for an age he had never known. In the short hours of their acquaintance he had become very fond of Miss Mackey, and he could not understand why. Certainly she was nothing like his mother — his noisy, moody, cheerfully vulgar Ma — nor like any of his noisy, cheerful, vulgar sisters and aunts. Perhaps that was it, he decided, forgetting for a moment the dreary purpose of his visit in the pleasure of watching her pour tea into pearly cups. Perhaps he loved her because she was the other side of his moon, the unresolved, even unrecognized dream of what a female should be.

  “Now, about Mr. Higgins,” she said with endearing directness, after he had taken his first sip of tea. “He is a simply heartbreaking example of what I mean. If he didn’t read those books — if he didn’t think those thoughts! — I venture to say he would be alive at this moment.”

  The sergeant set his cup back on its saucer. “I don’t see—” he began gently, but she was quite ready to explain her theory.

  “He always had one of those dreadful books in his overalls pocket,” she said. “You know, the ones with the covers. He was always snatching a moment to read them — I’ve seen him — and all that nastiness aroused his prurient curiosity. Prurient curiosity, young man.” She passed him a plate of tiny cookies, which he refused. “Why else would he have been lurking behind my draperies?”

  “Robbery, perhaps,” the sergeant suggested, but Miss Mackey would have none of it.

  “Nonsense! As the janitor of this building he had keys to every apartment, and he knew that I go to my book club every Tuesday afternoon without fail, and buy my groceries every Friday morning, so he had plenty of opportunity to come in if he simply wanted to take something.” She shook her little white head decisively. “No, Sergeant, carnal appetite was his problem, and guilt was what did him in. When I saw him and screamed, he turned and climbed out of the window as though he had taken leave of his senses. He was the very picture of a guilt-ridden man.”

  It was one more delight that Miss Mackey saw nothing strange in Mr. Higgins choosing to spy on her instead of on one of the younger women who lived in the building, the sergeant decided. He put aside the tea regretfully. “Well, I won’t bother you any longer,” he said. “You’ve been very kind and helpful, and I’m sure you’re tired after your bad experience. Thank you for the tea.”

  She followed him to the door. “You are not at all the way one usually imagines a detective to be,” she said. “You’re very young. And you have a certain — grace.”

  The sergeant stiffened for a moment. How his parents would have roared at that, how his brothers and sisters would have jeered! Grace, he thought, and then decided he liked the sound of it as long as no one else had heard.

  Westerberg was waiting in the lobby. “Well?” he asked.

  “An elegant old lady.”

  “Who pushes janitors out of windows.”

  The sergeant led the way to the car, feeling very much on the defensive. “So a few people heard her scolding him for reading dirty books,” he said grumpily. “So this makes her a killer? She admits she spoke to him about it — for his own good. She thought she was doing her duty.”

  “She threatened him,” Westerberg said patiently. “He told people in the apartment about it, thought it was a joke. She told him he’d be punished if he kept up his sinful ways, that his evil thoughts were showing in his face. She sounds like a nut.”

  “She’s a nice old lady trying to set the world straight,” the sergeant told him. “Anybody who wants to magnify that into a criminal act is going to have his hands full.”

  He thought about Miss Mackey while he shaved, mentioned her guardedly to his date at dinner, and that night he dreamt he was fighting a duel under an oak tree that was festooned with Spanish moss.

  In the morning there was a report on his desk at the station, and Westerberg was waiting in the chair by the window, a cup of coffee in his hands. When he had finished reading the report, the sergeant sat for a long time staring at the crack that marred the brown-egg wall in front of him.

  “I was never as young as you are when I was as young as you are,” Westerberg said finally, when the coffee was gone and the silence had become too oppressive to be borne. “Do you want me to go get the old lady while you patch up your shattered illusions?”

  “Go get her!” the sergeant repeated sharply. “Why should you get her? You want to send her to the chair because this damn sheet says someone died in the last apartment she lived in, too?”

  “Not just someone.” Westerberg set the coffee cup on the windowsill, adjusting its position slightly to coincide with the stains already there. “A window-washer; a wholesome, clean-living fellow who supported a wife, a mother, a sister, and the sister’s two kids. Been washing windows for seventeen years, and there was never a complaint about him not minding his own business until Miss Mackey moved into the building. She reported him twice as a peeping torn — and the third time he was doing her windows he fell seven stories to the ground and broke his neck.”

  The sergeant slouched in his chair and thought of gallantry in the shade of a giant oak. “You can’t arrest a nice old lady for being around when two people died,” he said, “whether she happened to like them or not.”

  “Tell me one thing,” Westerberg said with irritating gentleness. “Did the nice old lady mention the window-washer to you? Did she tell you Mr. Higgins was the second man to leave her elegant presence in a great big hurry?”

  The sergeant looked at him with something close to hate. “No,” he said. “She didn’t happen to mention it. She probably assumed we’d look at it the same way she did — as a nasty coincidence.”

  “Good grief!” Westerberg said, but he didn’t go on with the discussion.

  They spent the rest of the day talking to residents of the apartment building. Most of them had known Mr. Higgins casually; none of them had thought there was anything odd about him, though they all agreed that he had been seen with lurid paperbacks in his hands and was always well-informed about, and eager to discuss, the latest sensational murder. Three residents reported having received anonymous letters in the last couple of months: a bachelor who had a painting of a nude delivered to his apartment; a model who had posed in a bikini for a slick magazine; and a young actress who had been accused in her letter of letting a man stay overnight in her apartment. Each of the letters had been a warning of punishment to come; none of them had been taken seriously. The recipients remembered that they were written on pale gray, tissue-thin paper in fine script.

  As he looked over his notes, the sergeant wondered why he found it impossible to believe anything bad of Miss Mackey. Who was to say, actually, that her righteous innocence did not become a twisted, perverted passion behind those bright blue eyes? His mind simply would not accept it. He moved angrily through the long day, and at the end of it he visited her again, wondering at his own sense of homecoming as he sat down in the parlor.

  Parlor, he thought. The word prompted a picture of plush and velour and china figurines; a Seth Thomas clock; books bound in muted leather, stillness tucked protectively around every object. Then he remembered that when he was twelve he had asked his seventh-grade teacher a question about Browning and, in an ecstasy of gratitude — how many seventh graders had ever asked her about Browning? — she had invited him to stop in at her home that evening and pick up a book.
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  The house was a treasure of towering gingerbread where she had lived first with her parents and then alone. The boy had entered into a dream when he stepped through its door. The crowded kitchen, center of life at home, had faded from his consciousness as if it had never been, and with it the bursts of laughter, the slaps, the curses, the tears that were the music he lived by. Dignity, dry wit, and, most of all, orderliness were what he found in the teacher’s old house, and he had gone back again and again making mental lists of subjects to ask about the next time as his eyes moved over the ceiling-high shelves of books.

  “You look tired. Sergeant.” There was a tiny crease of concern between Miss Mackey’s eyes. “I don’t think I’ll offer you tea this time. I have a better idea.” She crossed the room to a glass-doored cabinet and took from its glittering depths a crystal decanter and two glasses on a tray. The glass was like a small bubble in his hand; he held it gingerly and let the brandy restore him.

  “How is your case developing?” she asked as he settled back in his chair. “Have you learned what you needed to know about that unfortunate man?” She might have been asking about the weather, or his indigestion, or where he was going to go on his vacation.

  “Well,” he said, “it seems to be getting more complicated instead of less so. We’re beginning to wonder whether there’s some connection between Mr. Higgins’ death and another one that occurred some time ago.”

  She took a tiny sip from her glass. “I don’t understand.”

  “Your theory,” he told her, “may be the right one.”

  She leaned forward with a tiny smile of triumph. “Twisted thoughts,” she said. “Evil influences lead men to do things they would not otherwise do.”

  “Twisted thoughts,” the sergeant agreed. “Of the murderer, however, rather than the victims’. There’s someone living in this building. Miss Mackey, who is very mixed up indeed.”

  She watched alertly as he put down his glass and went to the window. “I hate to keep going over this,” he said, “but I have to be very sure of the facts.” He opened the window as far as it would go. “Now,” he said, “when you came into the room you saw Mr. Higgins standing there, partly hidden by the drapery. You had no idea till then that he was in the apartment.”