Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

Daly closed his eyes and took another long drag. “I wish you hadn’t told me.” He looked up suddenly. “You think he was in on these sniper jobs?”

Whitehead nodded. “And he wanted a larger split. That’s why he was shot.”

Daly frowned. “But they tried to hold me up.”

“That’s what doesn’t fit,” said Whitehead. “They hit only stations doing a good business. We’ve checked on gasoline purchases with the wholesaler. You haven’t been doing so well here since the freeway pulled traffic away. A lot of nights it’s not even been worth staying open.”

“It was a phony stick-up then,” Daly growled. “Just to get the kid.”

“A phony, sure,” Whitehead agreed, “because we figure the kid was shot in the back, dying out there while he staggered, running to get away from you! ”

Daly straightened. Whitehead’s partner suddenly had a gun in his hand. Whitehead took his hands out of his pockets. One of them held handcuffs.

“You overplayed it, Daly. Too positive we were going to be dumb cops. Too dumb to wonder what happened to the supposed customer who made the kid swerve so you couldn’t tell where the shot came from. Too dumb to thoroughly check everything out, records of all kinds, the possible and the impossible. We were even so dumb we tried the phone company, even though we figured the call couldn’t be traced. It couldn’t, because the kid forgot to tell you — or didn’t have time to — that he’d reported earlier this evening the phone was out of order.”

Daly expelled smoke. “What does that prove? I might have been confused by the shock of his being killed. I guess he took the call on the outside phone.”

“The same as you were so confused,” Whitehead suggested, “you forgot to rub grease on your thumbnails when we arrived. So confused you told us yourself that we had killers, not just one man, to run down on these hold-ups. You also thought we were too dumb to have men watching you while you pretended to begin tracking down the kid’s killer. There’s a crew opening the sewer now to retrieve your silenced gun.”

He put the cuffs on Daly and guided him toward the car.

“You know,” he said, “it doesn’t bother us that people think we’re dumb. It takes time, but we find in the long run that we meet plenty who are dumber. You’ll have a lot in common with them, Daly... in prison.”

“I am so lucky to have a handy man like you living on the island,” Thelma Norburton cooed. Thelma always cooed when she wanted someone to do something for her. She cooed at Arthur frequently. It was cheaper than paying a repair man to fix her vacuum cleaner switch, or her television set, or her toilet valve.

“I just don’t know what I’d do without you. Ever since poor Henry passed on I’ve been so lost. You don’t know how difficult it is to be a widow. Everyone tries to take advantage of me and cheat me.”

Arthur heard only half of the cooing, as his head was under Thelma’s pink kitchen sink. It was the third time in a month that his head had been under Thelma Norburton’s kitchen sink. First it was a leak in the pipe leading to the dishwasher — then the garbage disposal jammed — now the diamond ring in the drain. Today he was under there longer than usual, and his back was aching badly. In addition, he had twice bumped his head against the garbage disposal unit.

“Since you and Millie moved in next door my life has been so much easier. You can’t think how relieved I was. The house was empty for so long, while the will was being contested. And sometimes I saw strange lights at night. But, of course, the police never paid any attention to my calls. And then you moved in, and I felt so much safer.

“I wasn’t scared to death that I’d be murdered in my bed after you came. And to find out that you can fix absolutely anything. I mean, I certainly am the luckiest widow in Florida. I told Millie that just yesterday. Millie, I said, I am absolutely the luckiest widow on the Gold Coast to have two of the cleverest people in south Florida for neighbors.”

Arthur had heard all about that conversation from Millie before.

“Now she wants you to re-upholster a bedroom chair for her,” Millie recounted. “And she’d like me to make new drapes to match. Is this what retirement is all about, Arthur? Making drapes for my neighbor? I made my own for years, and hung my own wallpaper, and re-covered our dining room chairs myself just so we could save enough money to retire. I don’t want to spend that retirement making Thelma Norburton’s drapes.

“Tell her you won’t do it.”

“Arthur, you know how she is. So forceful and pathetic at the same time. She can afford to have an interior designer make new drapes every month, but she still manages to make me feel guilty if I say no to her. I think it’s the neighborhood. We don’t belong with all these wealthy people. And Thelma knows how I feel and uses it to make me feel like a servant.”

“You’re not Thelma’s servant. You’re my wonderful wife, and you belong here as much as she does. Two million is hardly poverty.”

“But it shows — all the years I washed my own dishes and made my own clothes. It shows in my hands and the way my shoulders are bent. It shows, too, that you used to wind your own condensers — or whatever those things were you worked on every night when Alice was a baby and the business just starting.

“It doesn’t show. We’re as good as anyone else on this island.”

“Then why did Thelma ask you to put up a new shelf in her garage just two days after we moved in?”

“I’ll speak to Thelma tomorrow and tell her you won’t make her drapes and I won’t re-cover her chair. I won’t have her making my wife feel like a servant.” He kissed her gently. “I promise you, I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

Arthur tried to speak to Thelma the next morning. When he opened his mouth, Thelma cooed at him about how her diamond ring that dear Henry had given to her on their last Christmas together had gone down the kitchen drain, and would Arthur mind terribly getting it out for her?

So Arthur lay on his back under the pink sink, while Thelma sat at the glass-topped wrought iron kitchen table — also pink. She sipped grasshoppers, never offering anything to Arthur, and cooed.

“My goodness, Arthur. I never thought it would take this long to get a little old diamond ring out of a little old sink drain. I’m playing bridge at two. I mean, you fixed the washing machine in an hour, and you had to take it all apart. Remember how I bet you wouldn’t get it all back together again? But you did. You really are so marvellous with your hands. I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t do.

“Does Millie appreciate you? Really appreciate you, I mean. If she ever gets tired of you, you just come right over here. You understand? Henry Bejaman Norburton may have inherited twenty million dollars. But he couldn’t hold a candle to you when it comes to electricity and plumbing . I really am the luckiest woman to have a strong, intelligent, clever man like you around.

“Almost finished,” Arthur said, giving a last twist to the thin copper wire he was working with. He handed out the diamond ring that looked too small for Thelma’s pudgy fingers.