100 Malicious Little Mysteries

by Isaac Asimov

  “What about me? You think you’re in trouble — what’s this kind of publicity going to do for me at the studio? Let alone with Lisa and that temper of hers.”

  Now his eyes seemed to be looking at Carla without seeing her. Watching the lines that fear was etching in his face, she said, “You’re scared. I don’t like to see a man scared. Oh, Alan! Think of something! We have to get away from here — from that...” She swallowed with difficulty and found her throat had become dry and nearly paralyzed, that it was difficult to speak.

  He shook his head and finished dressing in silence.

  “Alan, whoever was in this room before us must have killed that man, so why don’t you just go to the office and tell the — the manager the truth. Tell him what we found and—”

  “Good God!” He spoke with disgust. “Why do you think he’d believe me?”

  “Well, I don’t know — but he’d have the name of the person who checked into this room before we did, so—”

  “Names, hell! Probably as phony as the one I’ve used. Oh, why? Why did we have the stinking luck to find that stiff?”

  She shuddered and reached for her sweater. “Alan, I’m going home. I have to be there before Tom arrives. I... I’m leaving.”

  His face darkened quickly. “You just wait one damn minute,” he snapped. “You’re not going to walk out of here and leave me with this on my shoulders. You’re in this jam as much as I am, you know.”

  Her eyes widened with alarm. “But I can’t stay here!” she wailed.

  “Keep your voice down. These walls are thin. Someone will hear you.”

  Carla looked at the room around them as though it were a prison. Seeing Alan pace the floor like a caged animal, she croaked, “We’re trapped, that’s what. We’re trapped in this ugly place with that... that—”

  “Shut up. I’m trying to think of everything — of every angle.”

  “Like what?”

  He turned on her with narrowed eyes. “Well, suppose — just suppose Tom does know that you’ve been with someone, and—”

  “No! Don’t say that. I won’t listen. I just won’t!”

  “You’ll listen and you’ll listen good. How do you know you don’t talk in your sleep? How can you be sure that he hasn’t followed you here? Maybe he thought that... Look, suppose he came here and found that guy in this room and thought he was me — thought he was the one you’ve been meeting here.”

  “No! Oh, no!” She shook her head quickly.

  Again Alan paced the floor. Then he walked back into the bathroom, opened the shower door, grimaced and closed it again. “Jesus! That’s horrible! Whoever did that was goddamned mad — insane.” Now he stood still, frowning thoughtfully and hitting a fist against his open palm.

  A long, agonizing moment of silence followed before he walked back into the bedroom, took a deep breath and said, “There’s only one thing we can do. It’s a hell of a chance, but we’ve got to take it.”

  “Leave here?” she asked. “Just get into our cars and drive away?”

  “How can you be so stupid?” he said, spitting out the words. “The manager here would recognize us anytime, anywhere, because we’ve been here so often.”

  “But he doesn’t know your name.”

  “This,” he said, pointing to his face. “This he’d recognize, describe. Yours too. No doubt he’s taken a good look at you more than once. He could identify our cars, too. Did you ever think of that? He may have our license numbers.”

  She was trembling again. “I want to go home. I have to get out of here. I wish I’d never come here in the first place, I wish...”

  He dropped into a chair, closed his eyes and rested his chin on clenched, white-knuckled fists that looked like marble. Then he finally nodded. “Yes, all I know is to wait until dark, put that stiff in the trunk of my car, take him somewhere and dump him.”

  She caught her breath and then said, “You’re right. Yes — you do that. I’ll leave now, and after it gets dark, you—” She saw him cast her a long and thoughtful stare. “Don’t look at me like that, Alan. You make me feel guilty.”

  “Do I?”

  “Alan — I have to leave here. I can’t help it that soon Tom will be home, and that he’ll be worried about me. He’ll wonder where I am. He’ll call the neighbors and our friends. How can I ever explain where I’ve been? It’ll be late and dark and—”

  “Funny,” he said, “but suddenly I’m thinking about a rat leaving a sinking—”

  “What do you expect me to do?” she cried.

  “Nothing.”

  “But, Alan, you know I can’t wait any longer.”

  He watched her silently as she walked to the window, parted the Venetian blinds a little and looked through. “The sun’s going down,” she said. “In winter, you know it gets dark early. You won’t have long to wait.”

  “Thanks. That’s most encouraging.”

  “Alan, where will you — put him?” she asked in a tight little voice.

  “On your front porch. Where else?”

  “Oh, Alan! You can’t blame me. You can call Lisa and tell her you’ve been delayed, but I can’t. There’s no logical reason for me to be late. Tom would—”

  “Look,” he said, pointing a finger at her. “If I’m caught dumping that body...”

  “Dammit,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Testify for me if I get caught,” he told her. “That’s what you can do.”

  “But you didn’t kill that man, so they couldn’t... Could they?”

  “You think not? Carla, if I get caught dumping this body — or if his murder is traced to me — you’re going to have to come forward and swear that we arrived in this room at exactly the same time. Understand? I don’t want anybody to know that I got here before you did. Remember that.”

  “But then Tom will...” She stared at him while perspiration trickled down her forehead. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t believe that all this is happening to me. Alan, if you cared for me, you wouldn’t want me dragged into this horrible mess. You would try to protect me, keep my name out of it — if you loved me.”

  The air thickened with the heavy silence, and then he said, “Carla, whatever made you think that I did?”

  “Alan!”

  “For God’s sake, what does that matter now? What does anything matter but to get ourselves out of this jam? I mean — we’re in real trouble.”

  “It matters,” she said slowly.

  “Jesus! There’s a dead man in that shower. There’s no one to pin the blame on but us. Us! You and me!”

  Carla’s cheeks had turned from white to a fiery red, and her voice rose as she said, “I’m getting out of here. Alan, don’t call me. Don’t try to contact me — ever — in any way. I’ll never help you. You should have told me that you didn’t love me. Do you know what I hope? I hope you burn in hell!”

  She was gone, and he was staring at the door she had slammed behind her. He heard her start her car, kill the engine, start it again. He stood like a stone pillar as she drove away. Then he went outside, looked around swiftly and, seeing no one, opened the trunk of his car, pulled out a raincoat and hurried back into the motel room.

  He went directly to the shower, reached inside, and dragged out the lifeless form. Hastily he wrapped his coat around it as he said, “We’ve done it again, good old George. Now it’s back to the prop department for you.”

  Big Mouth

  by Robert Edmond Alter

  Hardesty had just got his eggs going well in the bacon fat with the three bacon strips crackling around them, when his old enamel-chipped coffee pot leaped off the rock and spilled itself, grounds and all, in the sand. Then he heard the flat whap of a rifle.

  He sprawled in the sand beside the bullet-drilled pot and raised his head. About a hundred yards up the slope, west of his camp, was a hardwood ridge. He figured a good rifleman could get a clear shot at him from there. He hunched up his knees, preparing to crawl
to his tent for his Winchester.

  The second slug hit the smoking frying pan and sent it into a spin. Hardesty ducked his head away from the spattering fat. His eggs went all to runny goo when they hit the ground, and for a moment the pool of hot fat continued to sizzle and spit in the sand. He looked around as his canteen jumped with a toomp and started to bleed a silvery guzzle of water through its bullet wound.

  Figured he missed me on that first shot, he thought. But a man don’t miss another man with a rifle three times running — not and hit a coffee pot and a frying pan and a canteen. Fella up there knows what he’s doing.

  Hardesty knew what he was doing, too. Nothing. He was pinned down proper and there was nothing he could do except stay that way and wait his turn.

  His enamel drinking cup was on his tin plate on top of the packing box he used as a table when he wasn’t using it for something else, and he watched the cup spin away as the hidden rifle whapped again. That was a good shot, he thought. A damn good shot.

  A tin of peaches, standing on the box next to the place where the cup had been, fell over with a moist thop. Next, a really sweet shot sent the tin plate skimming off in a crazy oblique, and finally a hole appeared in his dishwater-gray tent.

  There was a sense of hesitation as he stared at the opening in the tent. Abruptly, the fore pole snapped in two and the forward section of the tent crumpled like a skirted old lady falling to her knees.

  Figured so, Hardesty thought. That lick he gave the tent flap was the first time he missed. Takes some shooter to pick off a tent pole at that distance.

  He craned his head to the left and looked down an alley of scrub at Shingles, his mule. If he goes to drill her, he thought, then I’ll kill him. Don’t care what it takes, I’ll get him.

  He started crawling towards the tent. He thought he had it figured now. It wasn’t a killing; it was a joke, western style. Most of the Indians and the gunslingers and all the rest of that lawless bunch were long gone now, but occasionally you still came across a rowdy who was a hangover from those old ripsnorting badmen days — one of that wild restless breed who hadn’t quite been able to make the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

  They, the restless ones, went drifting across the plains daydreaming about the Kid and Jesse and Earp and, in the monotony of their frustrated loneliness, a sort of simple-minded, outraged madness gripped them, and they figured the only way they could assuage the fury was by busting loose. That’s what the fella on the ridge was doing now, busting loose, giving himself a good laugh.

  Thing was, though, Hardesty wasn’t a joking man, had no sense of humor at all. He crawled up to his baggy tent as a bullet went phut in the sand right in his face, and he blinked and spat, and crawled on under the canvas and reached for his Winchester.

  But the game was over. He could hear the muted clack-clack of hooves moving off down the stony draw beyond the hardwood ridge. He went over there, anyway, just for a look around. Didn’t discover anything, though; no clue as to who had shot up his camp. The few U-shaped hoofprints in the sand told him nothing. And the prankster had had enough sense to gather up his empty cartridges.

  Hardesty went back to camp to change to his town trousers and shirt and jacket.

  He went to Stag, which he and all his isolated neighbors called “town.” But it wasn’t. It was simply a ramshackle landmark whose existence depended solely upon the needs of the men of the desert. It sold; it did not give. It did not have a church or any civic buildings or any homes. You either brought money to Stag or you stayed away. It had that much honesty.

  Hardesty went into the store which had the sign “Post Office” tacked on it and answered, “Um-hm,” when the storekeeper said, “Hello, Hard. How’s the pickings?”

  “Want a new coffee pot, pan, canteen, cup—”

  “Getting yourself a new outfit, hey? You must’ve struck a pocket out there,” the storekeeper said without a hope of an answer, because he knew Hardesty was an uncommunicative, if not inarticulate, man.

  “Tent pole, too,” Hardesty said, and he put down some money and turned on his heel and went through the open doorway into the adjoining saloon where four or five men were playing poker at a table.

  They said, “Hello, Hardesty,” and “Want to sit in?” and he nodded, saying, “Um-hm.”

  It was a quiet game, because that was the unintentional influence the tall, gaunt, mute, mildly angry, deliberate man had on people. He had very little to say during the game. Sometimes he said, “A card,” or “Check,” or “Call,” or “Raise.”

  The game shuffled and chipclicked through the coyote night and the black morning and the chill dawn, and then it broke up. Hardesty’s luck had been in. He pocketed nearly $200. He didn’t have anything to say about it.

  He went over to the little hotel and said, “Want a room,” saying nothing when the Mexican clerk said, “Joe tells me you got yourself a new outfit, Hard?” He went upstairs and gave himself a bath and a shave and went to bed.

  It was dusk when he returned to the saloon. He bought himself a steak and a bottle and, for about an hour, he sat off in a shadow-pooled corner by himself and worked on the bottle. He left the saloon without any visible alteration in his taciturn disposition.

  Hardesty hung around Stag for three days, nursing a few pints, playing a little poker. Then he paid off the hotel, collected his gear from the storekeeper, and he and Shingles went back to his claim.

  Hardesty was hunkered over his fire and he had his eggs going, with the bacon fat popping around them, when he heard the thup-thuppity-thup of a rider coming. He looked up and watched the distant man and mount for a moment, and reached behind him and picked up his Winchester and leaned it against a rock near his right hand. After that, he shifted his gaze from the eggs to the rider, until the man was near enough for Hardesty to recognize. Then he ignored him.

  It was Tope Jenkins, a young wrangler from over the ridge west of Hardesty’s claim. The cowpoke slowed his bay to a dainty step and let her pick her way into the camp. He smiled amiably at Hardesty.

  “Hidy, Hard. Coffee smells good.”

  “Um-hm.”

  “Hear you had some trouble last month, huh?” Tope said. “Stag folks tell me some joker shot up your camp for a laugh. Bet a quart it was one of them sheepmen south of the valley.”

  Hardesty had nothing to say. He lifted his crackling pan from the fire and set it on a flat rock. Then he removed his hat and placed it crown down on the sand and picked up his Winchester and levered the cartridges into the hat. He leaned the empty rifle against the rock again, picked up the hat and scooped all the shells out of the hat and put them in his jeans.

  Tope sat up there with his hands folded one on top of the other over the saddle horn, and watched him with a blank expression. Hardesty walked over to the bay and reached for Tope’s rifle with a smooth, seemingly unhurried movement; drew it from the boot and stepped back and began levering the shells into the sand.

  “Hey! What’re you doing?”

  Hardesty said nothing. He took the rifle by the barrel and raised it over his head and swung the stock against a rock. Then he pitched the barrel into the scrub.

  “You crazy coot! What the hell you—” Tope shut up as the tall, gaunt, mute, quietly angry man walked back to him, rubbing his work-grained palms on the sides of his jeans. All at once those hands flashed upward and outward and caught Tope by the belt and levered backward and to the left, hauling him clear of the saddle and dumping him head-and-shoulders into the sand.

  Hardesty slapped the nervously stepping bay with the flat of his hand, saying, “Git,” and the bay bolted out of their way, rearing its head and backrolling its off eye.

  Tope, outraged, spitting sand and wet curse words, got up on one knee and started accusing Hardesty of a vivid and varied list of vice.

  Hardesty hit him in the face and nearly somersaulted him into the fire. He went after the wrangler, getting him by the front of his corduroy jacket and hauli
ng him to his feet and planting a left deep in Tope’s wind, jack-knifing him, and then straightened him up with a right uppercut and followed that with a left-cross, and Tope went into the sand again.

  “You crazy old bastard! Why you poundin’ me? What I ever done to you?”

  “Because I never told nobody, damn you!” Hardesty cried, losing his temper at last. “You hear me, big mouth? I never told nobody!”

  The Weathered Board

  by Alvin S. Fick

  Why they dug their pit at the base of the little hill I don’t suppose we will ever know. Maybe it was because there was a scrub pine which provided a bit of shade, a rarity in this section of Wyoming range country where the land starts to rise in anticipation of making the mountains which divide the continent.

  Perhaps they were just riding along and stopped to rest the horses. Or they might have been arguing for days, and this spot of dry and seared plains with its greasewood and black sage happened to be where the talk erupted into something more deadly. The territories were not tranquil places.

  It could be they sat and smoked in the taciturn manner common to range hands, each hoping for a cooling of blood. But it was not to be. In the end they dug the pit in the loosest soil they could find, probably loosening it further with a piece of pointed rock and throwing the soil out with their hands. They both worked at it, shirts off and the sweat drying almost as soon as it surfaced on the skin. The wind blew little dust devils off the top of the pile of dirt beside the pit.

  The sun was low and the shadows were long when they finished. The horses, restless now and eager to move on, nickered and pulled at the reins looped around a branch of the pine.

  When the pit was chest-high in depth and oval in shape, they stopped digging. It is likely they climbed out to rest and smoke. When they got back in, they fought with knives, silently.

  Only one man crawled out. He slid back in twice on top of the other man, for he was grievously hurt. The smell of blood spooked one of the horses. With a wild tossing of head and rolling of eye it broke loose. The man watched the spurts of dust rise from each hoofbeat as the mount ran off.