Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

“Go see Hugo Bradford,” she insisted. “He’s on the police force. Maybe he’ll know what has to be done.”

“It’s late at night to be disturbing neighbors.”

“Please,” she said in a choked voice.

Roy glanced angrily at his wife, noticing how much her figure had run to fat. The once lovely bosom had started to sag, the legs had become much thicker, and nobody could have called her face a youthful one any longer.

He shrugged and strode over to the phone.

She said quickly, “Hugo only lives across the street, Roy. I don’t want the whole town to know about this.”

Glumly he nodded. She wouldn’t quit pestering him, he knew. He had been married to her for twelve years.

“I’ll be all right here,” Edie said. “And please go out the back way so he won’t see you.”

“I’m going out the front way. It’s my house and I can do that much if I—”

She said hoarsely, “My medicine, Roy. I need my medicine.”

“You always do need it when I want to do one thing and you want me to do another.”

But he brought it all the same, along with a teaspoon and a half-filled water glass. Edie swallowed an orange pill from the bottle and settled back.

He went to the closet and put on his coat, jacket, and fur-lined gloves. He was still muttering about a heart condition being used by some patients to get their own way as he walked out the back door. Wind made his skin tingle.

Roy’s jaw jutted out when he passed in front of the man called Gray, having changed his route on purpose; Gray didn’t look to the right or left. The Bradford doorbell was answered by Hugo Bradford himself, who invited Roy to the living room for a drink. Bradford was a tall, muscular man who’d been decorated for bravery during the Korean war and was now a police sergeant.

“I can guess why you’re here,” Bradford said, “and I advise you and your wife to take no notice of the man and help smash his racket.”

“Racket?”

“Gray has established himself as sort of a harbinger of doom. What he now does is determine who in town is sick and phones the head of the house at work, if at all possible, and asks for two thousand dollars to stay away. You’d be surprised how many people pay up.”

“Well, he’s varying his method with us,” Roy said promptly. “He just appeared and that’s all.”

“Maybe you’ll get a phone call tomorrow, when your wife is more thoroughly scared,” Bradford said. “I’ll call the boys to take him away, but it’ll bring you some publicity, heaven knows. And he’ll only come back when he gets out of jail.

“There’s really nothing that can be done. No one wants to testify against him. We only heard about his real racket by accident. One of his victims has a nephew who’s a stenographer at the courthouse.”

“You’d better have him taken away,” Roy decided. “For Edie’s sake. She really does have a heart condition, you know.”

“Okay,” Bradford said. “We’ll try to scare him out of town, but it won’t work with anybody like that guy, you know. He’ll come back and take up his stand where he left it.”

“I’m tired of being pushed around by him or by — well, never mind. Good night, Hugo. Give my best to Miranda and the kids.”

Roy was muttering under his breath when he left Bradford’s house. He wondered if it would settle Edie’s mind to tell her the truth. Probably not. She had decided on what she wanted and was too stubborn about having anything but her way.

Roy walked to the curb till he was directly in front of the man Gray. It only took a minute. As he passed by he said: “You wasted those phone calls you made to me, buddy, so do the worst to my wife that you can. The very worst.”

Roy Worth remembered to wipe the smile off his face as he let himself into his house.

I first met Rosemary when I joined the editorial staff of Neptune Books, last summer. The job was my big chance, because prior to that time my editing experience had been confined mostly to the pulps and a chain of true crime magazines. For me, Neptune Books was a dream come true — a job with an unlimited future in a fast-growing phase of the publishing industry.

I suppose everyone is familiar with Neptune Books, those dollar ninety-five reprints with a picture of a smiling King Neptune as their trademark. They say in the business that the reason Neptune is always smiling is that he’s just seen the latest sales figures. And if it’s true, he has plenty of reason to smile.

For in three short years Neptune Books have risen to the top of the field. Their sales are beyond belief, and even their own officers shake their heads in pleased amazement as the money pours in.

The cause of it all, as everyone in the publishing business knows, is Rosemary. At twenty-eight, she is already the brains behind Neptune’s smile. The simple fact is that she is a mathematical genius, not just in the usual sense, but in a very unusual sense.

My first meeting with her came, as I’ve said, the day I started work at Neptune. She was in her tiny office, where she spent most of her time, poring over a list of sales figures from cities all over the country.

She looked up when I entered with Mason, the vice president of Neptune, and as soon as I saw her I knew that the stories about her had not exaggerated.

Sphinxlike, with a somewhat bony face, she was nevertheless attractive — especially when she came out from behind those horn-rimmed eyeglasses. She had the look, the sound, the manner of power. And I sensed then that she was a very unusual woman.

This intuition increased as the weeks went by, and I became one of Rosemary’s few good friends. Whenever I could snatch an hour, I’d sit there in her office, discussing new titles we were planning to reprint and listening to her unfailingly brilliant advice. I was even beginning to feel a romantic inclination toward her, but she never indicated any such feelings toward me. I kept my own emotions in check.

But it was in the distribution end of our business that she proved her devotion and fantastic skill. Neptune handled all its own distribution, which meant shipping books to several hundred wholesalers scattered throughout the country. Rosemary had risen to the post of Circulation Manager, a rare job for a young woman and perhaps the most important position in the whole company.

She would sit at her desk for hours, scrabbling over calculations, and then come up tired but triumphant with the solution. “Increase Salt Lake City’s draw to 5,000 on this title,” she’d order. Or, “Transfer a thousand Westerns from Dallas to Kansas City.” I’d look at her in amazement, and sometimes I’d think she was over-reaching herself, but they always did what she said — and Neptune kept smiling on all those covers.

When I’d ask her about some fantastic bit of luck by which she’d transferred the right books to the right place at the right time, she’d simply sigh and say: “Oh, I heard they were having a convention out there, and figured they could use another thousand of that title.”

After the first few months I got used to this wizardry, and like the others I stopped asking her. I just read books and helped decide which ones to reprint, and watched the money roll in.

There was only one thing about the job that was unpleasant. And that was Mason, the vice president. The real owner of Neptune Books was some midwest Croesus, whom no one ever saw; for all practical purposes, Mason was the big boss.

We were on the third floor of an ancient building on West 47th Street, and space was at a minimum. Not that the place wasn’t big enough to start with; but with billing machines, bookkeepers, files, and the other necessities of distribution taking up so much room, we didn’t have an awful lot of floor left for the executive end. Mason had solved his problem by erecting a partition ten feet square and declaring that the space inside the wall was his private office. He was a big, overbearing boor about a lot of little things, and he kept getting under my skin.