Борден Дил - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 1, No. 12, December 1956

A deep, offkey male voice was humming an old song of the twenties — Ukulele Lady — in the kitchen. It was Major Farwell, a genial, disabled World War I flier, who spent his time commuting between the hotel and Veterans’ hospitals. Lurline dried her eyes. She didn’t feel like exchanging pleasantries with the Major. But she didn’t feel like going back to the room to face her mother — not just yet.

“... Ukelele Lady lika you,” came from the kitchen, the final syllable punctuated by a dull splatting sound. Lurline moved to the open kitchen door and looked in. Major Farwell, grizzled and stout, wore his familiar blue hospital robe and slippers. He lifted his arm, as Lurline watched, to deliver a resounding thwack to a piece of meat with the flat of a cleaver. He saw Lurline and paused, saying, “Hope I’m not disturbing you, m’dear, but I’ve been looking forward to cube steak for breakfast tomorrow, and the confounded butcher didn’t do the job right.” He delivered another blow with the heavy meat cleaver.

Lurline stood nursing her anguish while the major finished preparing the steak, put it in the icebox and returned the cleaver to its hook above the long sink.

“There!” he said, moving toward the door. “That should do it.” He winked at Lurline, as he winked at all women, and added with an intoxicated air, “My, you’re looking mighty pretty tonight, Miss Lurline. If you don’t look out, you’ll become as big a threat to us men as your mother.”

Lurline moved aside to let the major pass. She said nothing, because she could not speak — the Major’s remark, coming on top of the scene with her mother, made her physically ill. She watched the Major go to his room, then took a deep breath and marched back to her own door, opened it and went inside.

“Mother,” she said. “I want you to know I’m going out with...” Her voice trailed off as she saw what Martha was doing. “You’re tearing my hat!”

Mrs. Martha Cassidy did not reply. She went right on completing the demolition of the little hat with its wisp of veil.

Lurline stood and watched as she had watched the Major prepare his steak. Suddenly she turned and left the room. She went to the kitchen, took down the cleaver, returned to the room and hit her mother with it, hard, on the side of the head. Martha made an odd little grunting noise as she went down on her hands and knees. Lurline hit her again with the flat of the cleaver, knocking her mother over on her side. Then she brought it down hard, pounding Martha’s head into the carpet, like the Major pounding the steak flat to the block.

She stood there, breathing a little hard, looking down at her mother. Her mother was dead — one whole side of her skull was soft and squishy. Her left eye had been sprung loose from its socket by the force of the blows and hung, dangling like a pendulum. There was very little blood, for which Lurline was grateful. She didn’t think she could have stood it, if it had been messy.

Her first thought was, Well, I’ve done it. I’ve really gone and done it! It were almost as if she had been thinking of killing Martha all along. But, actually, she couldn’t remember ever having had the impulse before. Her second thought was, I suppose I’d better do something about cleaning this up, though her mother had always protected her from anything that might possibly have been considered menial. She looked at the clock and discovered she still had fifteen minutes before her date with Jonathan.

She decided to put Martha down the kitchen incinerator. Unless she was awfully unlucky, there was small chance of anyone seeing her. The two girls that shared a room at the other end of the hall were never in after six, and Major Farwell had had liquor on his breath, as usual, when he passed her on his way from the kitchen. So he’d be safe in his room. That left only old Mrs. Paskman, with a room next to the girls. It must have been Mrs. Paskman who had been in the bathroom earlier.

Lurline went out and checked, found that the old woman had returned to her room. She went back and got her hands under Martha’s shoulders and began pulling her toward the door. It was awkward, but not as difficult as Lurline had feared it would be. Martha weighed less than a hundred pounds. And though she was small, and the incinerator system an old-fashioned one with a large opening, on each floor, it was a tight squeeze.

Lurline got the cleaver next and hung it in place and then hurried to the bathroom to wash.

The phone in the room was ringing when she emerged, and Lurline had to run to answer it. She hoped the hotel people hadn’t discovered Martha’s body so soon. For a moment she hesitated, her hand stopped in mid-air before the instrument. If she answered, and it was the hotel, it would ruin her date with Jonathan. She could think of nothing worse. As she paused, unable to decide, it rang once again, peremptorily. Thirty-three years of obedience had its way. She picked up the receiver, said hello.

It was Jonathan. He said, in his rather flat, Midwestern voice, “Miss Cassidy? I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t be able to keep our date tonight. You see a friend of mine has gotten sick, and I’ve got to stay with him. So I’ll have to ask for a raincheck. I hope I haven’t caused you any trouble, Miss Cassidy.”

Before she put down the phone, Lurline managed to say, “No... no trouble at all.”

Brandishing a mallet whilst sitting beside a baby carriage or caressing a bottle marked “Poison” as I stir Grandmother s nocturnal chocolate has not won for me a reputation as a sentimentalist — though I hasten to add these acts were committed to the celluloid of television.

Nevertheless, sentiment is an endearing quality. Freddie had sentiment. He’d go to any length to keep from degrading Maddy, or humiliating her...

Freddie Foley had this soft spot for Maddy Dakin. A soft spot as big as a silver dollar right in the middle of the old ticker. A lot of girls a guy would go for in a big way for one or more of various reasons, like they were really stacked or looked classy in their clothes or were good workers in close, lots of reasons like those, but it was different with Maddy. There just didn’t seem to be anything special about Maddy at all. Oh, not that she was a goon or had anything actually wrong with her, and as a matter of fact she was sort of small and neat and pretty enough in a conservative way, but it was just that she didn’t have anything special.

Maybe it was because she got next to Freddie young. A guy remembers what happened to him young. He remembers it and builds it up in his mind as being a hell of a lot more than it really was, and he gets to be a sucker for it. Like Freddie. He remembered how he used to take Maddy to these crummy high school football games, and she’d let him feel her knee under the blanket, and how she looked all moist and excited and just too damn happy in her cheezy little voil formal the night of the senior dance when they were graduating — which he’d thought a thousand times he’d never make and damn near hadn’t — and most of all he remembered the summer night soon afterward when he’d borrowed a jalopie from a buddy and had driven her out to this place along the river where people parked and the cops didn’t bother you about it.

He’d thought she might be sort of scared and reluctant and have to be coaxed and all, but it didn’t turn out that way, to his surprise, and as a matter of fact she was pretty fierce and aggressive, as if she were afraid he’d change his mind and chicken out at the last minute, and afterward she cried about it. She didn’t cry because she was scared or sorry or anything like that, and as far as he could understand it she seemed to be crying because she was happy in the same way she’d been happy at the dance in the cheezy voil, only more so. She huddled against him in the front seat of the jalopie, crying and crying in this terribly quiet way with the tears rolling down her cheeks and getting into her voice, and she said, “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Freddie, don’t ever leave me. You ever leave me, Freddie, I’ll die, I’ll simply die, and I swear to Jesus I will.”