AHMM, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Mira was standing in front of her desk when I came into her office. She'd changed outfits sometime during the day. She was wearing a long-sleeved flowered dress now, mostly beige in color. It wasn't until I'd closed the door and turned back to her that I saw Belle sitting behind the desk.

  Belle Navilone, Mira's grandmother, the one person Mira didn't want to find out about the blackmail.

  "Guess you didn't expect to see me,” Belle smiled up at me.

  "Where you're concerned, Belle, I'm never surprised.” It hadn't been anything I'd ever thought of, but once I'd said it I knew it was true.

  She nodded, not a hair out of place on her silver-gray coiffure. Rings sparkled from every finger as she beckoned me closer. “I presume those are the pictures and the blackmail money. You did get all of the pictures, I hope?"

  I looked at Mira, but she wouldn't look at me. She backed up as I got closer, sitting in one of the chairs in front of the desk.

  "Mira?” I said, waiting for a reply, but she kept looking at the floor. She seemed to be shrinking somewhat, her shoulder drawing in, head bowed, like a small child looking for someplace to hide.

  "Mira?” I repeated. “What was all the bs you told me this morning?"

  "Most of it was true,” she finally said, barely above a whisper. “You caught me off guard. I didn't know what to tell you and what not to."

  "You did good enough,” Belle said. “Let's get on with it. Did you get the money and the pictures, Trevor, or didn't you?"

  "I got them,” I said, putting the bags on the desk.

  She nodded with a smile this time. She could've been a hundred and twelve, but she could pass for someone in her late fifties. Her makeup was done impeccably and with an even hand; there were just a few crows’ feet giving away a hint of age.

  "I'd be careful with this one,” I said, indicating the smaller of the two bags. “It's got the ashes of the photos in there. You might want to scatter them out in the desert someplace just to make sure. The money's in the other one. I'd take care there too. I'm sure some of the bills have got blood on them. It would be wise to get rid of them."

  "I hope you didn't have to put yourself in harm's way."

  "No, Belle,” I said, sitting in the chair across from Mira. “It was just legwork."

  I explained my day to them then. There was no reason to hold anything back.

  Belle listened silently, with a few more nods and another smile or two, until I was finished. “So, essentially they all killed each other?"

  "I'd say that's what happened."

  "And Rimmey came after you thinking you'd gotten away with the money?"

  "It looks that way. He probably got a look at this guy Bill's car. We're both black, drove similar cars."

  "Any chance the police can come back on you for anything?"

  "Could be. But I've played dumb before."

  "You're a good man, Trevor. Be sure to send me a bill for your time. You can list it as miscellaneous surveys."

  "I'll do that,” I said, standing, took a step, and then stopped. There were a few things I had to be sure of. “So, whom did they send the blackmail photos to?"

  "To Mira,” Belle answered, only hesitating a moment. “She didn't want to, but she was wise enough to bring them to me. Embarrassed as all hell, and about to piss her little panties just like she is now."

  "Grandmother,” Mira protested, then went back into her shell.

  "Just what did you tell Rimmey to do?"

  "Mira's just about the only family I've got left,” Belle said, a slight vein growing at the side of her neck. “Those bastards attacked my family. Nobody attacks my family and gets away with it. I told him to see to it that it doesn't happen again.” She'd gotten louder as she practically spat the words, her mouth in an evil curl. But then she relaxed and the vein faded. “Let's say he took me more literally than I intended, and leave it at that. Personally, I think everything worked out for the best.” She stood up. “We're finished here, aren't we, Trevor? Don't forget to get that bill to me."

  You can't be with Belle Navilone fifteen minutes without coming away thinking about her. She was all in my head as I pulled out of the Helping Hand Money Mart's parking lot. Her husband had been the connected guy, who'd blown his brains out when the Feds started putting the screws to him. No jail time for him. He'd settle things on his own terms. Up yours Johnny-law tough.

  But it was episodes like the one back in Mira's office that always made me wonder just who had been the mob boss in the family.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Percy Spurlark Parker

  * * * *

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  MURDER: A USER'S GUIBE by Neil Schofield

  * * * *

  Hank Blaustein

  * * * *

  I have had some time to consider the question, and I have decided that it cannot have been a coincidence that almost the very week I decided to do away with Petunia, I found The Appliance on the Internet. Perhaps it was my unconscious mind working away as I wandered down that broad Highway. There is indeed a highway where most people travel in perfect safety, but pay attention: Stray once off that broad and familiar thoroughfare and you will also find yourself on side roads and country roads less well trodden. And there are paths and tracks, some of them weed grown, some of them stinking and muddy, smelly and grim, where bad things live. It was down at the bottom of one of these noisome side paths, far away from the comforting and homely thrum of the highway traffic, that I came upon The Appliance.

  In the rather clever moving illustration, a stylized person sat inside what amounted to a cage composed of wooden and metal beams. It was a complicated structure with many cross bracings and supporting struts that went from hither to yon. This stylized person (the gender was problematic), wearing a rather insipid smile, sporting gear, and little else, was sitting on a sliding seat, pedaling with its feet, turning a set of overhead hand cranks, which in turn lifted and lowered sets of weights in cages behind—and was into the bargain also having its stomach muscles massaged by a wide vibrating belt, operated by an electric motor, which also appeared to move the sliding seat back and forth. The first question that occurred to the casual observer was, which muscle groups was this person exercising? The answer appeared to be all of them and then some.

  My first thought was, golly, here's something that Petunia would give her triceps to have, then my handyman's eye spotted that it could be made to serve my purpose as well as, or as opposed to, Petunia's.

  Because Petunia was, is, keen on exercise. No, that is an understatement. She is fanatical about exercise. All her free time is filled with exercise, either alone or with the monstrous regiments of large, leaping, terrifying muscular women who form her entourage. She has explained to me that, given her large frame, exercise is vital if she is to prevent her muscle turning to fat. So, since our marriage our basement has become a sort of gymnasium; we have her weight machines, her rowing machine, and all manner of other arcane contraptions, the purposes of which are a closed book to me. But then much about Petunia is a closed book to me. To the dispassionate observer, I suppose, we might appear as the classic mismatch.

  When I first met Petunia, I was a bookkeeper with the water company, already in early middle age and unmarried. Petunia was a shelf-stacker in Sainsbury's. The very first time I laid eyes on her, hefting with nonchalant ease a box of two hundred fifty Twix bars from a pallet she was in the process of unloading, I was fascinated. I reached past her to take a Mars bar from the upper shelf (a Mars a day helps me work, rest, and play, I find). As I did so, I smelled her animal scent. She seemed to be surrounded by a miasma of vibrant glowing perspiration. The Mars bars were on a shelf a little beyond my reach, I being of compact build. Petunia, who is a foot taller than I, reached lithely up and plucked a Mars bar from the shelf and handed it to me.

  "There you are, Titch,” she said, “chew on that. Yo
u need building up, you do.” And in that moment I knew that I had to marry this woman. Why? many people have asked. Why did I, a slender, bookish, bespectacled retiring person, seek to bond myself with this Amazon? The heart has its reasons, I usually say, without adding that it was to avoid marrying my mother, which is what most men do, or so the authorities on the subject have it. Petunia was as far removed as anyone could be from my mother, that genteel, faded, wispy creature, with whom I had lived (to the secret and not so secret amusement of others), and who had faded and wisped away at the end, quitting this life, leaving no visible trace. I lived on in the family house, rattling around it like a pea in a drum. Petunia was far from anything I had previously known, I was lonely, I had never experienced a woman like her, and over the period of my admittedly timid courtship she seemed to develop a genuine fondness for me. And, against all expectations, we married.

  And now I wanted to kill her. Why? I have read many murder stories involving spouse killing, and most of the time the husband is a perfect swine, has a mistress, and is locked in a clearly unsuitable union, which, usually for financial reasons, he is unable to dissolve, save by bloody means. I could claim none of that. I had no mistress, in fact Petunia is the only woman I have ever really possessed. I could divorce her, but that would have been cruel, she would suffer dreadfully. No, in truth I had begun to think of Petunia simply as an unendurable burden of which I must disencumber myself. Life had become intolerable after a mere two years in her proximity: the smell of sweatsuits and socks, legwarmers, and other arcane items of athletic apparel; the sheer noisiness of living with this lumping creature forever in movement; and above all, the greedy physical demands that she made on me.

  "Come on, Titch,” she would say, throwing me onto the bed, which is another thing I hated, “a growing girl needs her greens.” Then she would rip off whatever clothing I happened to have on me. Those were the days when I wandered dazedly and blearily around the house, barely able to walk or speak and clothed in rags.

  There was not an ounce of malice in her, that I knew, and in her slow thinking, animal way she loved me. And perhaps that was the key: She was a large, embarrassing, slightly smelly animal who took up too much space, and that it was kinder to her simply to do away with her.

  I had spent a lot of time going through all the crime stories I could find in the library, trying to find some quick and, above all, easy way of killing Petunia. It couldn't involve hand-to-hand business with knife, pistol, or blunt instrument. A counterfeit burglary, for example, or an attack in a darkened park would have been suicidal: She would have disarmed me and half killed me before I had a chance to inflict even a flesh wound. I had considered and discarded car accidents (too chancy), and a fall onto an electrified railway line (she never took the Underground, but walked or cycled everywhere).

  I had abandoned crime fiction murder methods as useless, being unrealistic, fanciful, or just plain foolish and had turned to the Internet, the Great Library in the Sky. And there I found The Appliance. My first thought was, Oh there's an interesting thing for Petunia, and then my handyman's eye spotted that, with a little change here, a slight reengineering of that bar thing there, and with the help of the wiring of the powerful electric motor attached to it, The Appliance, as they titled it, could be the answer to my prayers. Some Assembly Needed, they said. Well, that was no problem, I was very good at Some Assembly. Witness the chair-lift I had installed for my mother.

  Very well, if you insist, I helped the man my mother inexplicably called in to reinstall it, and put up with some extremely uncalled-for remarks on my DIY skills into the bargain.

  However, The Appliance didn't look difficult at all. If the instructions were clear, any fool could do it.

  Fortuitously, some time before, Petunia had announced her intention of passing two weeks in the company of some of her girlfriends at Deauville, where they would be taking a course of Thalassothérapie. In other words, people would be spraying them with sea water from high-pressure hoses, smearing them with algae, plunging them into iodine baths. I have seen the pictures in the brochures. They were like windows into Hell.

  But those two Petunia-free weeks would be a godsend. I could spend them very profitably on The Appliance. Without telling Petunia, I arranged two weeks’ leave from the water company, with no questions asked and that very day, with beating heart, ordered an Appliance, through the good offices of the Internet, using our joint credit card.

  Obviously, I did this in Petunia's name, thinking ahead to the inevitable interview:

  "I had no idea she was ordering things on the Internet, Inspector. And especially not things of this nature. She must have assembled it herself. She was a competent woman and in superb condition as you can see from the—the remains."

  "Calm yourself, sir. Come along now, come along, do. Take my kerchief, sir, and dry those tears. Youngster (to the apple-cheeked constable gazing at me with wondering eyes), run along and fetch a cup of tea for this bereaved gentleman."

  Leaving day came and went in a great flurry of giant girlfriends, suitcases, and taxis. I waved them off at the door and wished them well of Deauville, which is full of French people, French plumbing, and, no doubt, French germs. Good luck to them, and to the French.

  The Appliance arrived the next day, as promised. I was doing the washing up and taking the opportunity to organize the kitchen drawers. No one can accuse me of being a fussy man, but Petunia's habit of putting knives in the fork compartment of the cutlery drawer was something about which I had had occasion to speak to her more than once. I am surely not overstating the case when I say that that sort of thing, taken to its ultimate, can only end in chaos and anarchy and the breakdown of our social fabric. The same is true in our bedroom. A sock drawer, I have quietly and gently explained to Petunia several times, is by definition for socks, no? Otherwise it would be called something other than a Sock Drawer, no? But Petunia's so-called sock drawer is a travesty, packed with brassieres, knickers, leg warmers, and things with straps and buckles into whose functions I am far too fastidious to inquire—in short, everything but socks.

  I went to the door. There was a man there who wore a smart brown uniform, and behind him there was a matching truck.

  This man looked at the flowered pinafore that I had donned to avoid splashing my trousers and had forgotten to take off. He said, in a very truculent manner, “Mrs. Melchett, is it?"

  I bit back the sharp retort that came to me. “What is it?” I said shortly.

  "Packages for Mrs. Melchett."

  "Oh, great heavens,” I said with impatience, “what has she been and gawn and ordered now?” I was quite proud of this, establishing as it would at the inquest, my complete ignorance of Petunia's activities. The characterization was drawn from my role of Cruet the butler in a production of The Spouse Trap, that celebrated mystery play by Tabitha Crustie, which we had performed with some success at the Church Hall the winter before. My portrayal of Cruet had been singled out for special praise in the local press.

  The delivery man handed me a clipboard. I looked at the delivery note clipped to it. There were ten packages noted there. “All this?” I said, not having to feign surprise. The Appliance must be more sturdy than I thought.

  "I hope you're feeling strong, Mrs. Melchett,” said the delivery man, making far too much of what had been a feeble joke to begin with, “cos I can tell you that this lot weighs a mucking ton.” As he spoke, one package hurtled out of the back of the van and crashed to the ground. There seemed to be some large animal in there. So much for employing a courier service whose name is clearly pronounced “Oops!"

  It took me half an hour and cost me ten pounds to persuade the man and his assistant, or “mate,” as they apparently call them, who was a large, dim-witted youth and not a trained orangutan as I had feared, to transport the packages the paltry few yards into the hall. So much for the free market. But farther than that they would not go. Even the offer of a further five pounds would not incite them to des
cend into the basement. That, it seemed, was against all custom and practice. The fellow even invoked the Workman's Compensation Regulations, with which dread authority there was, it appeared, no arguing. So the packages remained in the hall.

  It took me the rest of the day to haul them down to the basement. They weighed, as the man had said and if I might stray briefly into the vernacular, which normally I abhor, a mucking ton.

  But at length, I had them all arrayed in size order. The heaviest, a wooden packing case, which had given me much grief and a nasty graze on my shin, contained, when I managed to pry it open with a hammer and chisel, the large electric motor, complete with cabling. After this, I went upstairs to have a cup of tea and a nice sit down. My head was throbbing, and I had a nasty little wavy pattern dancing in my left eye, usually the sign of an oncoming migraine, something that often afflicted me when Petunia had insisted on a particularly large helping of greens. I decided to prepare something to eat and have an early night. The morrow, I would begin.

  The following morning, my tea and toast, without Petunia there to immolate it, was perfect. There were no dabs of butter or smears of marmalade on the tablecloth as is normal when Petunia breaks her fast. And my tea was perfection. I am not in the least obsessive, my worst enemy could not say that, but when I take my tea in the morning the single lump of sugar that I allow myself must be upright in the very center of the cup as I pour on the tea. If not, the day is ruined.

  I went down to the basement to commence the Some Assembly. With the aid of a Stanley knife and a pair of shears, I soon had the elements of The Appliance arrayed on the concrete floor. There were a lot of them. Some were made of bright chrome, and some, uglier than the others, of black, surly iron. Yet others, and there were sixteen of them, were made of teak, tectonis grandis, unless I miss my guess, presumably from the forests of Java.