Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense

by Linda Landrigan

  I stood slowly, lowered my gun, and put it in my belt clip. I looked at Bill. Sweat beaded his forehead and the back of his hands as he answered my look. Then he holstered his gun, too, and stood up.

  God, I thought, if you shoot now, Kuan Cheng, shoot me, because I couldn’t live with the guilt. Kuan Cheng didn’t shoot anybody. He didn’t put his gun down, either. He didn’t move, just stood, paralyzed by indecision and disbelief.

  “Kuan Cheng?” Jill’s voice was clearer, though soft. “It was for your mother. I wanted her to like me.”

  Kuan Cheng laughed a short wild laugh. “My mother? That’s ridiculous. What makes you think my mother will like you if you speak Mandarin?”

  Jill said. “Because she said so.”

  My blood froze. No one spoke. There was silence everywhere.

  Jill hurried on, trying to reach him. “That day at her apartment? She said if I learned to speak her language I’d be showing the proper respect. Then she’d accept me as a daughter-in-law. I mean, she never said she’d like me, but I thought it was a beginning. I wanted it to be as right as I could make it.” In the dusk a tear glistened on her cheek.

  “My mother said that?” Kuan Cheng whispered.

  “Yes. She even found Chyi-Jou to teach me. We started that week.”

  “My god,” I said low, unbelieving. I looked at Bill. Anger shone in his eyes; his jaw was tight. He knew, too. I said it anyway. “We were set up.”

  He nodded.

  In the darkness of Jill Moore’s apartment, Kuan Cheng lowered his gun.

  We stopped the bleeding from Chyi-Jou Kwong’s shoulder, called an ambulance, and concocted a story. Kuan Cheng had bought the gun for Jill, for protection. Neither of them knew how to use it, and it went off. Bill and I were on our way there, just for a visit, because I’m an old friend of Kuan Cheng’s. We heard the shot and assumed there was trouble, thus the scene in the hallway.

  We pulled it off, though it was sort of a pain, Bill and me at the 6th Precinct for an hour answering the same questions separately until the cops gave up. Kuan Cheng was arrested for gun possession, but Chyi-Jou Kwong wasn’t badly hurt and Kuan Cheng was a model of upwardly mobile Asian youth. A good lawyer would be able to wiggle him out of anything serious. I was mad enough to let him figure his own way out of spending the night in jail, but Bill pointed out that it was our licenses on the line if Kuan Cheng, in his perilous emotional state, blew the story.

  So I called Mrs. Lee and told her where he was and what had happened, and suggested she send him a lawyer fast.

  “How’d she take it?” Bill asked as we left the police station. Tenth Street was carpeted with fallen leaves; streetlights shone gently on brick row-houses. It all seemed lovely and peaceful, but I was cold. And I knew that behind those cozy facades lurked legions of mothers gleefully plotting to double-cross their sons.

  “She wailed. She yelled. She called him a stupid boy. She said it was all the white witch’s fault. Then she said it was all my fault. Then I hung up on her.”

  “Without telling her where to get off?”

  “Well,” I admitted, “I told her a little bit where to get off. Because it won’t get around and embarrass my mother. From now on, I guarantee Mrs. Lee will pretend she never heard of me.”

  We stopped at a corner to let a car drift past.

  “How did you know?” Bill asked. “That he was teaching her Mandarin.”

  “The book he dropped on his toe. It was the same one she was translating Mandarin from at the library. She’s not taking any Mandarin courses, so I guessed he was her tutor. But I never guessed Mrs. Lee had set us all up.”

  Bill said nothing, just lit a cigarette and let me go on, thinking sad thoughts out loud. “The thing is,” I said, “I can’t believe a mother would do that. Do you know what she said, when I called her on it?”

  “Tell me.”

  “‘Mother know best for son. White witch bad wife, undutiful daughter-in-law.’ That was all she cared about—that Jill Moore wasn’t the daughter-in-law of her dreams. What kind of mother is that?”

  “Human,” Bill said. “Flawed. Too desperate to see past herself.”

  “Desperate?” I snorted.

  “Selfish. Diabolical. Manipulative. A classic Chinese mother.”

  “Is your mother like that?”

  “Of course not! Just because she doesn’t like you—”

  “Will it help if I learn Cantonese?”

  I stopped, looked at him, and laughed. Then I hugged him.

  When we started forward again, the night wasn’t as cold and the houses weren’t as hostile.

  “Maybe it’s not that I don’t understand white people,” I said. “Maybe I don’t understand anybody.”

  “Who does?”

  “You do. Here’s this woman who sets up her own son, and he almost kills a whole bunch of people including us, and you just say, ‘She’s human.’”

  “That doesn’t mean I understand her. Just that I know not to expect too much.”

  “Maybe nobody understands anybody.” That thought made me cold again.

  Bill took my hand. “Come on.” We turned up a quiet street. “There’s a cafe with a fireplace where they play Vivaldi. I’ll buy you a hot apple cider.”

  I didn’t have to say anything, because he was reading my mind.

  JAN BURKE

  THE MUSE

  February 1995

  AUTHOR OF THE popular Irene Kelly mysteries, Jan Burke published her first short story in AHMM; her first Irene Kelly short story, “A Fine Set of Teeth,” also had its first general publication in AHMM in October 1998 (after an earlier limited edition). “The Muse,” with its integral and cleverly deployed Hitchcock references, was a natural for AHMM.

  The jet black pantyhose were calling to him. The feet of the pantyhose, to be precise. He knew he shouldn’t look. Knew it would only encourage her. But he folded the edge of the newspaper down, giving in that much.

  “Bee-yoll,” her voice was childlike, crooning. Her puppeteer voice.

  “I’m not in the mood for this, Ellie,” Bill said.

  “Oh, Beeeeee-yoll.”

  Her hands were all he could see of her, and not really much of her hands. The makeshift pantyhose puppets were “looking” at each other.

  “He’s very angry with you,” the right hand admonished the left.

  “No, he’s not,” the left answered, then they both looked at Bill.

  “I’m not angry,” Bill said to the hands, giving in a little more. Addressing the puppets now. “Not really angry. Just tired.”

  “Quit distracting him. He’s on an important deadline, and he has writer’s block,” the right said.

  “He never has writer’s block,” the left replied. “He’s upset about Mir.”

  “The prospect of a visit from Miriam is an unpleasant one,” he agreed.

  Ellie’s head emerged above the edge of the breakfast table. He saw that she had cut the crotch out of the pantyhose, and was wearing them over her head.

  “You are the strangest woman I know,” he said, causing her to smile. Ellie considered this a grand endearment. Bill knew that.

  Her head tilted a little to one side, as if studying him for a portrait. “It’s fine now. Not even my evil twin can stop you.”

  “She is your younger sister, not your twin,” he said, but she was leaving the table, pulling the pantyhose off.

  Ellie was right, as always. Not about the twin business, of course, but about the novel he was working on. He got up from the table feeling invigorated and went straight to the computer. He had a new slant on a passage he had considered unworkable until a moment ago. This was the effect she had on him. Ellie was his Muse.

  He had known she would be from the moment he first saw her. Seven years ago, well past three o’clock in the morning on a hot summer’s night, at a gas station on Westwood Boulevard. Bill supposed he would forget his own name before he forgot that night.

  He had been uneasy, at l
oose ends. It wasn’t insomnia: it’s only insomnia when you’re trying to sleep. He had been trying to write. It was his best-kept secret then, his writing. None of his professors at UCLA, who knew him as a recent graduate in mechanical engineering, would have ever guessed it. Well-written papers and a flair for creative problem-solving didn’t make him stand out as more than a good student. His friends, although from varied backgrounds and majors, held the same prejudices as the few women he had dated: they assumed that engineers were unlikely to read novels, let alone write them. His father, who expected him to come to work for the family company in September, was also unaware of Bill’s literary aspirations.

  In those days Bill thought that was for the best. If he was going to fail, he preferred not to advertise it. And while he had faith in the basic idea for his novel, he had to admit it wasn’t working out. Frustrated when he stalled in that place in the manuscript where he had stalled no fewer than ten times before—where the boy ought to get the girl back again—he stood up and stretched. He needed some fresh air, he decided. At least, the freshest he could find in LA.

  And so he had restlessly made his way down to Westwood Boulevard, head down, his hands shoved down into his pockets, his long-legged gait taking him quickly past record stores and restaurants. He glanced up just to keep from running into parking meters and lampposts, glancing at but not really seeing the boutiques and movie theaters closed for the night. The gas station was closed, too, but the sight that greeted him there made him slow his stride.

  A lithe young woman was tugging on one of the water hoses most people use for filling radiators. She was using it to wash a gold Rolls-Royce.

  He came to a halt on the wide sidewalk, fascinated. She looked up over the hood, used the back of her hand to move her bowl-cut, thick dark hair away from her eyes. Big brown eyes.

  “Want to go for a ride?” she asked him.

  He nodded but didn’t move forward.

  “You’ll have to give up hesitating if you’re going to ride with me,” she said, opening the driver’s door. But Bill was distracted from this edict when he saw an elderly man sleeping on the front seat.

  “Wake up, Harry,” she said, gently nudging the old man, who came awake with a start. “We’re taking …” She looked over her shoulder. “I’m Ellie. What’s your name?”

  “William. William Gray.”

  She turned back to the old man. “We’re taking Bill here for a ride on Mulholland Drive. You can sleep in the back.”

  The old man reached for a cap, rubbed a gnarled hand over his face, and quickly transformed himself into a dignified chauffeur, moving to hold the passenger door open for Bill, waiting patiently as Bill finally moved toward the car. Harry gave a questioning look at Ellie, now behind the wheel.

  “No, you need your rest.”

  Harry nodded and climbed into the back, asleep again before Ellie had started the car.

  They had traveled Mulholland and beyond that night, climbing canyon roads that twisted and turned.

  She was a good driver, calm and assured, not crazy on the winding roads. At first he was afraid, wondering if he had made the biggest—and perhaps the final—mistake of his life. He started envisioning bold headlines: “Missing UCLA Student Found Dead,” or “Still No Suspects in Topanga Canyon Torture-Murder Case.” Perhaps he wouldn’t be missed much. Maybe he would only rate a small article on a back page, near a department store ad: “Boy Scout Troop Makes Grisly Discovery in Canyon.”

  “Either you just had a big fight with your girlfriend or you’re a writer,” she said, not taking her eyes off the road. “I’m betting you’re a writer.”

  He hesitated, then said, “I’m a writer. Or I want to be one. How did you guess?”

  “The time of day, the way you were walking. You looked frustrated, I suppose.”

  “Anyone can be frustrated. Why would you think I’m a writer?”

  She shrugged, then smiled a little. He waited, hoping she would answer, but she startled him by saying, “You’re also a bit of a romantic.”

  He laughed nervously. “That’s an odd thing to say.”

  “I am odd. But there’s nothing odd about knowing a romantic when you see one. At three—” she glanced at the clock on the dash. “At approximately three twenty-five in the morning, you agreed to get into a Rolls-Royce with a sleeping old man and a woman you had never met before.”

  “Perhaps I just needed an adventure.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps both. So, what’s your favorite movie of all time?”

  “Rear Window,” he said without hesitation.

  “Wonderful!” she said, laughing but still not taking her eyes from the road. “Whose work in it do you admire, Hitchcock’s or Woolrich’s?”

  He smiled. Many people knew that Hitchcock directed Rear Window. Fewer knew that it was written by Cornell Woolrich. “Both, really,” he answered. “I’m a fan of both. I’ve seen every Hitchcock film, with the exception of a few of the very early British ones.”

  Soon they were discussing Hitchcock and Woolrich, and Bill forgot all about Boy Scouts and headlines. She had seen most of the films he had seen, read more Woolrich.

  He eased back into the passenger seat, studying her. She didn’t make a move toward him, didn’t reach across the seat, didn’t even look at him much. Every so often, finding a vista she liked, Ellie would stop the car. The first time she stopped, Bill expected her to turn her attention to him. But she didn’t do more than glance at him. “Just look at it,” she said, gesturing to the carpet of city lights below. Soon he realized that was all she would ask of him—just to look at it.

  At one of these turnouts, she kicked off her shoes and rolled down a window, resting her bare feet on the sill. She drove barefooted the rest of the night.

  She asked him questions. He talked more that night than he had ever talked in his life. About his writing, his family, his childhood, his love of Woolrich stories and Hitchcock films and chocolate and on and on, even describing the furniture in his apartment.

  “And you?” he asked. “Where do you live?”

  “Somewhere in these hills. Perhaps I’ll take you there someday.”

  As many questions as she asked, and as few as she answered, somehow she still managed to make him feel that he was of vital interest to her. Not in the way some questioners might—scientists studying an insect—but as if she had cared about him from before the time she had met him. He was wondering at the trust he had placed in this stranger as dawn was coming up over the hills. She had parked the car on a ridge. Harry was snoring softly. “I’ll take you home,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I want to go home,” Bill answered, then quickly added, “Sorry, I don’t mean to be pushy. You’ve been a great listener. You’re probably tired and—”

  She reached over then and laid a finger to his lips. She shook her head, and he stopped talking, unsure of what she was saying no to.

  SHE TOOK HIM back to his apartment, leaving Harry asleep in the car.

  “Do you want to come in?” he asked on his doorstep.

  She shook her head, an impish smile on her lips. “I know exactly what it looks like—I’m sure you’ve described it perfectly. Besides, you’re very busy. You’ve got to get a little sleep, and then you’ll wake up and write your book. It’s going to be terrific, but no one will ever find that out until you write it.” She turned and skipped back to the car.

  “Will I see you again?” he called out.

  “Stop worrying,” she called back. “Write!”

  And he had. He slept about three hours, woke up feeling like he had slept ten, and wondering if he had dreamed the woman in the Rolls-Royce. But dream or no dream, he suddenly knew how to get around that problem in his story and went to work.

  Harry appeared a few hours later, a picnic basket in hand. “Miss Eleanor sends her regards, and provisions so that you need not interrupt your work.”

  “You can talk!” Bill exclaimed.

  “When necessary,” Har
ry said, and left.

  Bill searched through the basket and found an assortment of small sandwiches, a salad, a slice of chocolate cake, and several choices of beverages. He also found an old-fashioned calling card:

  Miss Eleanor Wingate

  On the back she had inscribed her phone number.

  “Delicious,” Bill said, holding it carefully as if it might skip away, disappear as quickly as she had.

  AND SO HE went back to writing. Bill saw little of Ellie during the weeks that followed their ride through the hills, but he called her often. If he found himself staring uselessly at the place where the wall behind his computer screen met the ceiling, unsure how to proceed, a brief chat with Ellie inspired him. They played a game with Hitchcock films and Woolrich stories.

  “A jaguar,” he would say.

  “Black Alibi,” she would answer. “A name scrawled on a window.”

  “Easy—The Lady Vanishes.”

  And his writer’s block would vanish as well.

  When Bill completed his manuscript, Harry took him and the manuscript to her house for the first time. Bill, trying (and failing) not to be overawed by the elegance that surrounded him, handed her the box of pages. She caressed the corners of the box, looking for a moment as if she might cry. But she said nothing, and set it gently aside without opening it. She held out her hand, and he took it. She led him upstairs.

  LATER, WAKING in the big bed, he found her watching him. “Did you read it?”

  “No,” she said, tracing a finger along his collarbone. “I don’t want any misunderstandings about why you’re here. It’s not because of what’s in that manuscript box.”

  He savored the implications of that for a moment before insecurities besieged him, “Maybe you’d hate it anyway.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  It was the last time they talked about the manuscript for three days. At the end of those three days, he mailed it to an agent, called his father to say he’d found other work, packed up his belongings, and moved in with Ellie.

  The agent called back, took him on as a client, and sold the book within a week. Bill was already at work on his second novel. The first one was a critically acclaimed but modest success. The second spent twenty-five weeks on the best-seller list. When Bill got his first royalty check, he asked Ellie to marry him.