AHMM, May 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Beemer reached behind him, brought out the Al Capone bat and banged it down on the table. “You got trouble with your legs, Jimmy,” he said, “you don't want trouble with your arms."

  "This is the second time you threatened me."

  "So you're lucky. You're gettin’ a second chance."

  Jimmy Sticks glared at each of them, then swore. He pushed the suitcase away, hauled himself to his feet, and grabbed his canes off the back of the chair.

  "Where are you going?” Beemer asked.

  "That suitcase is not worth the paper napkins you got stacked there behind the ketchup bottles."

  "How do you know that?"

  "How do I know? How do I know? You think I don't know what's supposed to be in this suitcase, what's in it now? You think I believe you'd let it go for a few grand if it was worth anything? You think I don't know Wiggy G. when I see him coming outta your place? Listen. I didn't get where I am today by letting guys like you walk all over me."

  He shoved off from the table and lurched away, banging his canes along the bar to the door.

  "I don't think I'll bother leaving a tip,” he called over his shoulder. “I don't think I like the service here."

  He went out.

  Nobody said anything. They looked at the money. It was Little D. J. who broke the silence.

  "Well,” he said, “maybe I was wrong. Maybe we shouldn't've opened up the case."

  Benny said, “Beem, you wanna pass me that bat?"

  "In a minute,” Beemer said, “after I'm through with it."

  Copyright © 2010 Jas. R. Petrin

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: SOMEWHERE ELSIE by Neil Schofield

  * * * *

  Edward Kinsella III

  * * * *

  So here we are in the sitting room and the first man says, “Do you want to answer the phone, Mrs. Wadsworth? We can wait.” He is standing just inside the door with the other man who is younger and foxy looking. They were both walking down the hall with me when the phone began to ring. Now the second man smiles briefly and says, “You never know, it might be important.” He's the one carrying the small briefcase. But they both have the same slatey, disinterested eyes.

  As I listen to the voice at the other end, I watch this pair wandering round the room. It's wonderfully light and airy in my sitting room. It has a high, high ceiling, and a lovely view through the enormous windows over Prince of Wales Drive and Battersea Park and it's the room I've always taken the greatest pride in. The furniture, the carpets, the paintings, even the fireplace, all carefully chosen by Howard and me—mainly me because, to be honest with you, H. has never taken much interest in furnishings. I've lavished affection on that room, it's always drawn sighing admiration from our friends, and here they are, strolling round it as though they were in some tavern. Or wherever these people go after work.

  I check my appearance in the mirror, with the phone in my hand. A little pale but not bad considering the circs.

  At the other end the phone is hung up, but I continue to chirrup meaningless responses. Meanwhile the gruesome twosome have seated themselves on the sofa, from where they regard me with patient interest. And I think about what I'm going to do now.

  The call, of course, was from Elsie. And now I'm chatting to the ether, thinking furiously, holding this useless telephone to my ear. I'm wondering why this all got started and what H. will say, and a dozen other equally useless thoughts hurtle round in my head, rebounding off the sides and making no sense.

  And of course, I know how it all got started; it started with Safia Melkash. As Marketing Director of a PLC (a public limited company, if you please), H. comes into contact with any amount of PR people and I reason it was just bad luck that a Safia Melkash happened to be waiting round one of the corners in his life. I also guess that there is a Safia Melkash waiting round the corner in the lives of many couples. It was a miracle that a Safia Melkash hadn't happened sooner. But he's always been so straight, so good and honest. Then she happened along and hit him like an Intercity Express.

  I have to say that I didn't begin to suspect gradually in the classic way. There was no lipstick on his collar, no hairs on his lapels, no unexplained restaurant bills, nothing like that. I suppose she must have run the affair as she had no doubt run many others. Checking his pockets for telltale details before he came home, brushing his shoulders, making sure he took a good shower. That's the sort she is. Careful. A planner.

  No it wasn't at all gradual. It was very sudden. It happened at the launch of a new product that H.'s company had decided to donate to a grateful world. In the afternoon, they had a launch conference with all their sales force, lots of singing, dancing, and general rabble-rousing. In the evening there was a Do, a cocktail party for the Directors (Wives With), then a Grand Dinner for the seigneurs and the peasants alike. And it was at the cocktail party that it happened. I was chatting to the senior vice president of the company's American sister company, a nice man who, from his accent, had been brought up somewhere in the outskirts of Margaret Mitchell. I looked across, during one of our halting exchanges, and saw H. in the middle of a crowd of adulatory minor executives: the Munchkins, he called them.

  And then I saw Melkash, that pulpy little dark-haired thing in an outfit far too evening for the occasion. Armani, if I was any judge, and I don't mean Emporio. She joined H.'s group, slithered in, turned her head adoringly upwards, and laughed as though she'd been a part of the joking from the start. How can H. stand her, I thought.

  And then. And then, she slapped H. on the bottom. It was a casual, matey, half-slap, half-stroke, half-squeeze, and the worst thing was that it didn't even make H. look round. It was clearly something he was used to. And he did something that made my heart explode in my breast. He simply felt round, took the hand that had slapped him, pressed it briefly for an instant and then let it go. Without even looking at her for a single second.

  Later, he had the infernal gall to introduce us. There was something about the way that they stood just a fraction too far apart, and the way they didn't quite look each other in the eye as we stood talking that was somehow practiced, as though they'd done this before. Oh, but I knew. I knew.

  That night, after we had returned home and H. had gone to bed, I sat in the sitting room. I wasn't jealous. Jealousy didn't even come into it. I've always felt that jealousy was such a stupid emotion. Stupid and non-productive. No, what I felt was a cold ball of fear in my stomach. And it was exactly the same solid, leaden ball of fear that I used to have when I heard Mum and Dad arguing.

  My poor Dad. He could never manage. He wasn't a spendthrift or a drunkard, but he just had such rotten ideas, ideas for businesses that didn't work because it was a rotten idea, or his partners were even more hapless than he, or they were cleverer and cheated him blind, or someone else had had the same idea first. And then inevitably there would be Trouble and something would have to go. Usually it was my school fees. I must have started at six private schools; completed two terms and then had to leave because the school fees were not forthcoming. Mum would explain to me very nicely that it was only temporary, and that I would go to an even nicer school when Things Improved.

  Maneuvers would be undertaken, we'd move to another house, always a slightly smaller one, a new business would be founded with great elan and optimism, and then they'd find another private school for me to go to. For a while. If we'd been permanently poor, I could have stood that. But this roller-coaster existence nearly drove me mad. And always the Trouble would start with that argument in the middle of the night, and me lying in bed with that cold, leaden lump of fear in my stomach. In fact from the age of thirteen, I always had that ball of fear; sometimes a tennis ball, sometimes the size of a football. It's no wonder that I grew up like I did, a big, stammering, stooping beanpole of a girl with no friends. Even when I signed my name, Philippa, the letters somehow managed to stoop despite all I could do to keep them upright.

  All in all, it was amazing
that I managed to leave school with any GCSEsat all. But I did. And I managed to get through a secretarial course, and then I managed to get a job as PA to a company director, and then I moved out and into a flat in West London with three other girls.

  Then I met Howard who was large, competent, beginning already to be successful, and most amazing of all, loving, and the miracle happened, everything began to be all right and the ball of fear dissolved.

  And now, there I was in the middle of the night and the fear was back. Something was happening to take everything away from me. All this. My flat, my lovely sitting room the sort my mother could have had if Dad hadn't been so hopeless. And Safia Melkash was taking it all away.

  One thing I did, before going to bed, was to look at H.'s key ring.

  Something that H. has always mocked me for, though gently, is my habit of labeling things. Clothes, books, everything, you name it, and you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to know whence this compulsion to label everything as mine. If it's marked, they can't take it away from you. And there it was on his key ring, an unmarked key. All the others had little sleeves with different colors, red for the main door, blue for the front door, green for the cellar door, and so on. But there this one was, a nasty, brown, slithery key: a front door key that didn't fit our front door.

  I didn't sleep.

  As luck would have it, the next day at the worst possible time, Elsie called round. As usual, it was like being visited by a badly dressed tropical storm. Looking at her you had the impression that she had woken up naked in an Oxfam shop and got dressed in the dark. She raced past me and down the hall. She was carrying a flat, untidily wrapped thing in her hands. She thrust it at me, peeled off her white summer gloves, and threw them on the sideboard.

  "Do yourself a favor, dearie,” she said. “Whack it up on the wall for a couple of weeks and Howard will end up buying it for you."

  It was a picture of course, a nice little nineteenth-century oil painting of the Thames at Chelsea.

  "You'll see,” she said, “he'll go for it. Bet you a fiver.” She rummaged in the huge satchel-like thing she always carried and took out her cigarettes. Gauloises, of course, what else? I sighed. Whenever Elsie paid me a visit, it took a good three days of air spray and furniture polish to rid the place of her.

  She looked around, jetting smoke. Her face creased up in pleasure. She really does have an extraordinary face. Sometimes I think she was born wizened, and she can even, in a certain light, look ugly. But I know several men who swear she's the most beautiful woman in London.

  "This is a lovely room, heart.” Then she shrugged off the peculiar cape thing that she was wearing, and sat down. “You do have good taste, Phil, I'll say that for you."

  And so I do, though where I got it from and how I had the time to acquire good taste during our nomadic family existence, God alone knows. And given that a good number of things in the room had come from her gallery, she wasn't paying me that much of a compliment.

  "Now, drinkingtons, dearie? It seems to be about that time."

  I sighed again. I had the idea that I was in for a long visit, and I was right. She had come to ask a favor.

  And now I must explain about Elsie, who is one of the best-kept secrets in the loosely knit group of females to which I sort of belong. To begin with, Elsie is not the name above her gallery in Bruton Street. But we've got so used to calling her that, it's official.

  In any group of people there is often someone like Elsie. In the musical world, I believe he or she is called a “fixer": the person who sorts out the little problems that occur from time to time in any badly organized society. Give you an example. Suppose that you, an intermittently happily married woman, take it into your head to have a little adventure with a clean young man of impeccable appearance and antecedents. Now, if you haven't done it before, you're a bit adrift. Where? When? And where am I supposed to be? Even if you're experienced in these things, it can be a bit of a poser. It's those little logistical problems that cause the heartaches. What you need is an unbreakable alibi. You need to be able to prove that you were in another place at the time.

  Hence Somewhere Elsie. Elsie will find you unassailable evidence of being elsewhere which you can produce, should the need arise—and of course everyone hopes it never will—including sworn witnesses of impeccable character and a venue so respectable as to be un-unbelievable. Plus (if, pushed to the last ditch, you absolutely need it) documentary evidence: ticket stubs, menus, concert programs, et cetera.

  Of course there is a price. Which is why so many sculptures and nice little oils find their way from Elsie's gallery into the lounges and living rooms of Fulham, Chelsea, and Kensington. And even further afield, up into Regent's Park and Camden Town. Because she casts a wide net, does Elsie. And it's a sort of Mutual Aid Society, if you see what I mean. Those alibi-ees who call upon her kind services often find themselves recruited later as alibi-ers. If there are such words. And they can't say no, can they? Given what Elsie knows about them. Or rather, suspects. Because she makes it a point never to ask why the alibi is needed. That would be going far too far.

  Another of Elsie's rules is that she never provides an alibi on your own doorstep, never within your own circle. That would be pushing your luck. And besides, the fact of having been somewhere unusual adds a sort of reverse verisimilitude. My friend Marion, who is not averse to the occasional little fling, had great success when put to the question by Freddy, with her all-night poker game with three Avon ladies at the Heathrow Skyline. You see? It's so bizarre you can't not believe it. She even had some chips left over to prove it and a check for seventy pounds drawn on a Warrington branch of Barclay's. Which she never cashed, of course.

  Then on another occasion, Jane Sundryman was able to come up with her day-return Seacat ticket from Newhaven to Dieppe, a duty-free bottle of Gordon's and a very smelly cheese. Elsie's gift is for detail.

  Anyway, what Elsie had come for was to ask me to . . . to bear witness for someone, never mind who. That was all right. I was quite happy to do it because she would be sure to give me a discount on the oil painting if we decided to buy it.

  But then, while Elsie was chattering on, her great frizz of orange hair flailing about as she talked, a nasty angry little idea came into my head in its entirety. It took me some time to break through the barrage of Elsie's conversation, but at last I managed it. It stopped her dead. She looked at me, with her gin and tonic halfway to her lips and said, “Are you sure about this, dearie?"

  Yes, I was. I wanted an alibi. I had even chosen a specific day and time. Half past eight, one week ahead. A Thursday, as it happens.

  "Well,” she said after a long pause. “I'd never have thought it."

  I shrugged. “That's the way it is.” I said.

  She considered me. She has a way of doing that, head on one side, eyes narrowed, like a disreputable old parrot. She said, “I like you. And I like Howard too. Are you seriously telling me you're going to deceive him?"

  I had to smile at the word “deceive” coming from her of all people.

  I nodded firmly. She said slowly, “Well, I'm not sure."

  I said, “Come on, Elsie. You've done it for heaps of people."

  "Yes,” she said, “but for the most part their husbands are rotten types, dearie. They deserve everything they get. And their wives deserve everything they can get too.” She lit another cigarette thoughtfully. “All right, I'll do it. But I'm not happy about it. Not happy at all. “

  I had the strange feeling that something had gone out of our relationship. When Elsie took against you, she really took against you. But I didn't care. It was done. And at least I was doing something, not just sitting around letting things happen to me.

  "Right, dearie. Lovely drinkie, but must dash. Where are my things? What did I have with me? Did I bring a bag? Doesn't matter."

  And Elsie left as she had arrived, like a hurricane, promising, though rather coolly, to phone me with details. It's strange. To look at th
is disorganized figure dashing about hither and thither, never at rest, you'd think that she couldn't organize anything to save her life. And just to make the point, she left taking my gloves with her and leaving hers behind. It wasn't the first time.

  I had perfect confidence in her. But then, after all, what was I really going to do? Administer a sharp lesson. Just a little warning, nothing more. Stay away from what's mine, you hear?

  The next part was easy and that was finding out where Safia Melkash lived. Trust her to flaunt it. She was in the directory, her name in full, inviting the attentions of the heavy-breathing brigade. You see the style of the woman?

  And just to be sure, that night, while H. was sleeping the sleep of the unjust, I opened his briefcase and took out his portable telephone and went through the memory. And there it was. S.M., the same number. And just to confirm his guilt, he'd added the word Bank. I nearly laughed out loud. “S.M. Bank” indeed. As if that would deceive a child. Men are such simpletons sometimes.

  I hadn't chosen the day at random, in fact. The following Thursday, I knew, because it had been in his diary for ages, H. was going to a marketing do, an awards ceremony. And I knew as sure as if he'd painted in red paint on the sitting room wall that Safia Melkash would be pouting at his side.

  Elsie didn't ring at the weekend, but I wasn't worried. You could always rely on Elsie, everyone knew that. But as Thursday approached and there was still no call to tell me where I was supposed to be on Thursday, I did have the tiniest worry ticking away inside me. The day dawned and H. left, taking his dinner suit with him, so that he could go straight to the do from the office.

  I tried ringing Elsie a time or two during the day, but no one knew where she was. That didn't surprise me. Unexplained absences were part and parcel of life with Elsie. So, I went ahead with The Plan. That foul, guilty Chubb key had been sitting snugly in my purse since three o'clock that morning.