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

by Linda Landrigan

  “I never guessed,” says Kim, who doesn’t have unconcern but would like to acquire it. “What if he shows up? What if he comes to visit Joey’s grave?”

  Maureen’s face changes then, and her eyes get dark and hard as if all the grief and anger within are set to come flooding out. “He never comes to the grave. Never, the bastard. He wanted cremation. He wanted to forget.” There’s a pause. “Joe believes in moving on, in getting on with his life.” The words are dipped in acid, coated in bile as thick as chocolate. Kim imagines each syllable being lowered into some internal vat and coming up dripping. “He thinks I’m crazy,” Maureen says. “Crazy in general, crazy because of Joey, crazy about the grave.”

  Kim protests Maureen isn’t crazy. Though she is unusual in a wonderful way.

  “He’d like to see me in therapy, which would give him leverage, you see, leverage for the divorce. Or, maybe, if I’m in therapy, he’ll fight the divorce and try to get me into treatment. That’s what Joe would really like. He’d like me in a little clinic somewhere, and then he’d have his hands on the business, on everything. He’s always sniffing around and saving ammunition for the divorce.”

  Maureen always talks about the divorce as a kind of object, as a real thing, though it doesn’t exist yet; no papers have been filed. But Maureen sees life as a series of separate events and things: the accident, the divorce, the meeting, the grave. She’s not like Kim, for whom life slides from one thing to another so that working for Joe Gleb somehow leads to this thing with his wife.

  “I could maybe be something for the divorce,” remarks Kim.

  Maureen puts her arm around her. “So you could,” she says. “But he never comes here. Never, ever. He couldn’t face Joey’s death, and he thinks I’m crazy because I can’t forget. He thinks he can spend his way back to happiness; he thinks he can gamble and forget. Well, not with my money he can’t. I can’t forget, and I’ll see that he won’t, either.”

  Kim is uncomfortable with all this talk about Maureen’s husband, especially since he’s Joe Gleb and someone she knows. She’s just as glad when Maureen asks, “How did you find out?” Her voice is casual, but there’s interest underneath.

  Kim explains about Joe’s visit, about the snaps in the car. “He wants Chris to do a job for him.”

  Maureen’s eyes register the fact of the snaps, a kind of visual snarl, then, “What kind of job?”

  “I don’t know. He hasn’t come back again.”

  “Best find out,” says Maureen.

  BUT KIM DOESN’T worry about the job. She thinks some hot merchandise that Joe wants Chris to haul for him like cigarettes up from the South, where there’s less tax. Or else a little damage to one of the lower volume convenience stores for the insurance money. Maybe just to hang around looking ferocious and unpredictable when Joe expects bad company. Those are the sorts of things Chris is good at, so she’s surprised when he comes into the kitchenette one night and starts to clean a gun. Not a shotgun or a rifle, like what everyone has in their neighborhood, but a stubby black thing with a textured grip.

  “Get your eyes back in your head,” he says.

  Kim shrugs. Since meeting Maureen, she doesn’t get all nervous and upset about Chris anymore. Kim’s figuring to stay out of his way until she manages to be rid of him, so she doesn’t ask nosy questions, she doesn’t bother him when he’s drinking or when he’s picked up some good stuff. She puts her check on the table and fixes dinner, which makes her, far as Chris is concerned, a together chick. He’s starting to tell her so, to let her know that this is for keeps, that she shouldn’t think of leaving him.

  He twirls the cylinder and takes out a roll of hundred-dollar bills to impress her. “I’ve got a job worth doing,” he says. “And I’ll need you to drive the truck.”

  Kim looks at the money and then at him. “What do we have to do, kill somebody?”

  She’s joking, but Chris kinda nods his head. “We’re going to kidnap somebody and hold him for ransom.” He says this like guns and kidnapping and ransom’s all part of their normal routine. Then he laughs. “And the best part is he’s going to cooperate with us all the way.”

  “Who is?”

  Chris doesn’t tell her. He pretends he’s said enough already, but Kim can guess, and when she tells Maureen the next day, Maureen can, too.

  “That dumb bastard,” she says.

  KIM’S MAIN THOUGHT is to clear the area, and she thinks Maureen may agree, given her own past history. “Chris is crazy,” Kim tells her. “He’ll be crazier with a gun.” Kim sees Florida or maybe even California, somewhere warm with sand and palms and big hotels looking glassy-eyed at white beaches. But of course they can’t do that. Kim knows without asking that they can’t leave the grave, Joey, remembrance.

  “You could dump Chris,” Maureen says. This is the other alternative, their other fantasy. “You could get an apartment. I’d help you. You could get a really nice apartment.”

  “He’d come after me,” Kim says. “And there’s the divorce.”

  “Yes,” says Maureen with this funny smile. “There’s the divorce.”

  “I DON’T SEE what you need the gun for,” Kim tells Chris. “Not if he’s cooperating.”

  “Don’t be dumb. It’s got to look realistic.”

  “A knife would do,” Kim says. It’s in her mind that the gun is a bad idea, that Chris is too impulsive to be trusted, that he will screw up in some spectacular way.

  “There might be trouble,” he says. “You get less trouble with a gun.”

  “They’ll question me,” says Kim. “They’ll question everyone who works at the stores. They’ll figure an inside job.”

  “We get the money and we’re out of here.” Chris sounds so decisive and confident that, despite her indifference, Kim feels her heart clench. She foresees separation and despair; she sees the truck, the highway, exile from real life.

  “All you got to do is to drop me off,” he says so enthusiastically she understands that he is enjoying this, the excitement and importance of it. “I take him and his car. He calls the wife. She gets the money and drops it off. We’re all home free.”

  “Where do you leave the car?” asks Kim. “Where do you leave him?”

  “Maybe here. You’re at work. You don’t have to know nothing.”

  “I take the truck for the first time ever to work, someone’s going to notice.”

  He doesn’t like that. He looks like he might want to make an issue of it, make her agree to what’s a purely dumb idea. But he surprises her. “Maybe you start driving the truck to work,” he says. “I’m thinking of getting a bike, anyway. I saw this Harley I’d like, and I can afford it.” He picks his head up like she’s going to give him an argument.

  “All right,” she says, thinking maybe he’ll get a bike and break his damn neck. “I’ll start taking the truck. But Joe’ll want me working the night shift if I have a ride.”

  “What do you care when you work?”

  Kim hesitates, feeling how events can slide one way or the other, life’s a teeterboard, and you can slip off either end. “I don’t want to be there alone at night. Joe comes by. I gotta watch him, he’s always …”

  “See you don’t give him any reason,” Chris says. “But if he tries anything, I’ll break his face.”

  CHRYSANTHEMUM SEASON. Maureen has two big pots in the back of her car and four smaller ones. The big ones are the size of bushel baskets and have mauve flowers. The smaller ones have white flowers and should stand the winter, Maureen says. Kim helps her pull out the begonias though they’re still pretty, pretty enough so she regrets not being able to take them home. She’s getting an appreciation for flowers and sees how the begonias would brighten up the trailer. She thinks about having them on the kitchenette table so she could look at flowers instead of at Chris all the time.

  Maureen digs in the new plants, and Kim brings some water from the faucet down the dirt track.

  “So you’re driving to work now,” s
ays Maureen.

  “Chris has this bike he bought.”

  “Used?” Maureen asks, like she’s really interested in Chris and his purchases.

  “New,” says Kim. And Maureen stops tidying up around the plants and looks at her.

  “New.” Maureen doesn’t say anything else, so an idea Kim had put aside comes crashing back: mega cash for a phony kidnapping. Maureen frowns and shakes her head. She’s quiet all through lunch, thinking this over, and when she finally speaks, she says, “Would Chris shoot somebody? In cold blood, would he shoot someone?”

  Kim doesn’t like to say she has no idea, but she doesn’t, though she’s lived with Chris for two years. “Why do you ask that?” she says. “What do you mean?”

  “I can raise maybe fifty thousand,” Maureen says. “In an absolute emergency, life and death; with bridge loans, twice that much. Subtract a new Harley-Davidson and probably money afterward, and how much is left?”

  “Chris wouldn’t know that,” says Kim, but she’s already hoping maybe they’ve been wrong. Maybe Chris has another job, maybe Joe Gleb isn’t involved at all.

  “Joe knows to the penny. He knows our money isn’t liquid.” Maureen has to explain this to Kim, how money can be liquid or not, how it can be tied up.

  “So why is he doing it? Why is he doing this thing with Chris?” Kim asks.

  “This is going to be Joe’s version of the divorce,” Maureen says. “I think he wants to get his hands on everything; I think he doesn’t care about the ransom at all.”

  “You have to tell the police,” Kim says.

  “And what would happen to you? They’d guess how I found out.”

  “I could leave,” Kim says. “I could get out of town.”

  “If that’s what you want,” says Maureen. “But I have a better idea.”

  CHRIS GOES OUT on the bike the next night, and soon as he clears the yard, Kim begins looking for the gun. She told Maureen “no problem,” but after she searches under the bed, the bedside table, Chris’s footlocker, the shelf above their coats, the medicine cabinet, even the cupboard by the door where they put canned goods, Kim starts getting nervous. Outside, she checks the truck over like a sniffer dog but can’t find a thing.

  Back inside, the phone rings.

  “Find it?” Maureen asks.

  “Not yet. I thought you didn’t want to call.”

  “I’m at the gas station. Would he keep it in the bike?”

  “He might. He’s got those carrier things. They probably lock.”

  “You’ll have to check,” says Maureen.

  So there’s Kim with bullets rattling in her jeans pocket and the whole trailer turned upside down when Chris roars into the yard.

  “Cleaning,” she says.

  “Don’t be crazy. We’ll be outa this dump soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” he says and laughs, as if he thinks he’s pretty funny.

  Within minutes, the phone rings again. Kim knows it’s Maureen, she just knows it is, but Chris picks it up, listens a minute, then swears and says he doesn’t have time for any damn opinion poll. Kim lets out her breath.

  After dinner, when she carries out the garbage, Kim tries the catches on the motorbike’s carriers. She tries again later on the excuse that she’s left a sweater in the truck, but what she finally has to do is to get up a half hour earlier than usual the next morning. Chris is still asleep when Kim gets the bike keys out of his pocket and goes outside barefoot, half frozen, and shaking with nerves to unlock the carrier. There’s the gun, black and ugly and serious looking.

  Kim thinks of Joey’s accident and freezes.

  In her mind she hears Maureen saying, “I always kept the gun locked up, always, always locked up, but Joe wanted it handy. ‘What good’s a gun you can’t get to,’ he’d say. Safety, that was his thing, but it wasn’t very safe for a little boy, was it?” Kim remembers how Maureen’s eyes went wild and dark, how she wept and said, “There were bits of bone on the wall, bits of bone.”

  So Kim is reluctant to touch the gun, though Maureen went over the whole process with her two, three times. Kim stands there dithering until there’s a sound—a car somewhere—and she breaks open the chamber revealing neat, shiny bullets with round brass ends. Out they come and in go the ones Maureen brought her. Close up the gun, wipe it, and put it back quick with the oily rag on top.

  The carrier latch snaps loud enough to stop Kim’s heart, but there’s nothing, no reaction, no door opening, no face at the window, and all she’s got left to do is to slide the keys back into Chris’s tumbled, greasy jeans and fix herself an early breakfast.

  TWO DAYS, THREE days, nothing happens. Kim’s beginning to think that maybe there’s another deal, that maybe Chris has pulled a fast one, that maybe they’ll be okay after all.

  Maureen wants to know if she’s sure she changed all the bullets, and when Kim says yes, Maureen tells her, “Wait and see.”

  But Kim’s still jumpy, wired with nerves, so Maureen says, “Don’t worry; we’ve defanged them.” Maureen seems pleased about that and confident. “There’s not a damn thing they can do to us now.”

  A YELLOW WASH from the neighbor’s security light and Chris shaking her shoulder. “Get up,” he says.

  “What is it? What time is it?” Kim’s thinking fire, flood, or a raccoon in the trailer.

  “Let’s go,” he says. “This is the day.”

  She gets up and dresses, her hands shaking though Chris has been defanged, though the gun is harmless, though no matter what Maureen does—calls the police or raises the cash—nobody gets hurt.

  The kitchenette clock reads five thirty A.M. “You’re way too early,” Kim says. “Joe won’t be at the store before seven thirty.”

  “Who said we were going to get him at the store?” Chris asks.

  “You said I just needed to drop you off. You said …”

  “Listen, I trust you,” Chris says with this awful, heavy certainty. “We’re in this together.”

  He puts his arm around her shoulder, and they go outside. She expects him to drive, but he motions her behind the wheel and gives her the keys.

  “I’ll tell you where to go,” he says. “Keep the lights off until we hit the road.”

  The sky’s beginning to gray, but Kim nearly hits the boulder at the driveway end and has to put on the low beams. It’s a relief to get onto the main road and have light. Chris sits beside her, giving orders without any real direction, until they reach a country road, all winding and stone walls. After a mile or so he has her pull in at a drive with fancy carriage lamps on either side.

  “Cut the lights,” he says. Kim has to wait a few seconds until she can see to ease the truck along the circular drive to a three-car garage. An attached breezeway with long windows and a glass door connects it to the house. Chris pulls on a ski mask and takes the gun out of his jacket pocket. “Keep the motor running,” he says.

  None of this is quite real to Kim, though she can feel her hands, which are freezing, and the clammy coldness of the shirt against her back and a stiffness in her feet. She’s really in need of sun and heat and someplace different, but the situation itself is like something on TV, like a film, a drama, a still picture in the tabloids: “Celebrity Home Invaded by Masked Intruder,” something like that.

  When Kim hears the tinkle of breaking glass, she wants to push on the horn and alert the house. She also wants to put the truck in reverse and get the hell out. Instead, she hangs on to the wheel with both hands and tells herself that everything will be all right: crazy at the moment, but without permanent damage. Kim’s still telling herself this when the shots start, one, then two, three, four, close together. She piles out of the truck, stumbles across the gravel drive, and races to the house, where lights are coming on and there’s this indescribably bad, scary atmosphere.

  “Chris,” she shouts and then, “Maureen! Joe!” Though that’s careless, not prudent, dangerous, as is
running down the hall toward the light, toward the master bedroom, toward Maureen, who, gun in hand, is shrugging her way into a bathrobe. Maureen has a rigid, unfamiliar expression on her face as if the darkness that used to live behind her eyes has come out into the light for good.

  “What’s happened?”

  Maureen recognizes her then, recognizes the voice, the face. “Don’t go in there,” she says, meaning the bedroom, where Kim can now see objects, bundles like, lying on the floor. Bundles she somehow knows are Chris and Joe. Kim starts to cry.

  “Don’t do that,” says Maureen, touching her shoulder like the old Maureen, the real Maureen, glimpsed for that second, then disappearing. “You don’t have time. Go down the field track to the highway and hitch a ride to work.”

  “I’ll be late,” wails Kim as if this is all that matters.

  “Tell them Chris went out early with the truck,” says Maureen. “You don’t have to know anything else. But get out of here. You’ve got to get out of here now.”

  KIM WALKS OUT the glass doors and takes a moment to see the palms and the crowded strip of sand at the edge of the water. Outside the hotel air conditioning it’s really too warm for her nice receptionist’s blazer, but green’s her best color, and it only takes a few minutes to run to the coffee shop, crowded with delivery guys and workers and other hotel staff on breaks. Kim returns greetings, friendly waves; she’s been around long enough to know people.

  Coffees, one with, one without, plus a bagel, a doughnut, extra sugar. Kim’s already collected her order when she checks the magazine rack and feels time stop for a moment: Princess Diana on the cover again, midnight blue silk, a jeweled necklace broad as your hand, eyes as blue as Maureen’s when she stood on the edge of the grave with all the mauve and white mums and handed over the envelope.

  “You’ll need,” Maureen said, “to get started.”

  Kim took it; there wasn’t anything else to do, not if she wanted to leave, to start again, to get away from scary bundles and awkward questions and Maureen’s wild eyes.

  “Maybe you’ll come back,” Maureen said.

  And though Kim said, “Maybe,” at the time, she knows she never can, she never will, because Maureen’s crazy; Joe Gleb was right about that. Just the same, standing in her green hotel blazer just across from the sand, Kim can’t help feeling grateful, and nostalgic, too, about the cemetery and picnics and real life.