Рон Гуларт - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

“Damned if I know, Jack. But my guru used to say Mutatis mutandis whenever we had a done deal.”

“Hildegarde. She’s...?”

“She’s,” said Tzu.

The Cessna hopscotched up the eighty-second meridian, her compass bracketing zero like a coursing hound as Jack flat-hatted the Gulf for the first eighty miles.

Jack squinted at the salt spray on the Plexiglass windscreen and saw himself through the misty scrim of years. He remembered his mother saying, “His hair is so fine — like silk,” and guests would smile and nod. Upon which Jack would do the only thing any human could do. He would try to grow more, finer hair right there at that very instant, feeling that if what he already had brought him such distinction, more of that same cash crop would corner the market in adulation. And he had been trying to please and feel good ever since, but had wised up to the fact that hair no longer did it for him.

“Money,” said Jack as he clipped a mangrove and goosed the Cessna up to thirty-five hundred over the looming scrubby land. “Money answereth all things,” assured Ecclesiastes.

Naples and Fort Myers sliding past the left wing. Look out for the Air Force boys from MacDill on their low-level runs. They still do that? Hell of a thing to mess up now. Off to the right, who but a farmer would name a town Frostproof? Time to find the strip and start down. There. Dead ahead. Thoughtfully provided by the tony Chalet Suzanne for its ritzy clientele. Now power down, and straight in on the skimpy strip. Windsock limp, ignoring little puffs from the north. Big orange sun cutting the horizon under the left wing like a slice of orange on an old-fashioned. Back, back on the wheel. This old tail-dragger keeps you honest; stall it in. Men from the boys.

Jack greased it on and taxied over to the faithful, waiting Tzu.

“Don’t tell me yet,” yelled Jack as he killed the engine.

Tzu helped Jack put the plane to bed, chocks and tiedowns. Then they strode in silence across the lawn and basket-weave brick patio to the Chalet Suzanne, Jack a step ahead.

“No, not the bar,” said Jack.

A wrought-iron glass-topped table overlooked the pond from an alcove. No big-eared bartender. The waitress brought the scotch and left.

“Tell me.”

“Damndest thing,” said Tzu.

“How?”

“She bought it this morning. From the Bok Tower.”

“Jesus, that’s a big first step!”

“Two hundred feet, at last count.”

“She flew farther than Orville Wright at Kill Devil.”

“And without the usual mechanical aids,” said Tzu.

“Why would she do a thing like that?”

“She thought she could make it.”

“Come on!”

“On the wings of a small spineless cactus, native to the Rio Grande valley.”

“Peyote!”

“The magic buttons of Chihuahua,” said Tzu.

“Then she was happy?”

“All smiles.”

“I’m glad. I liked Hildegarde.”

“Bystanders report she chanted, ‘Om Shanti’ all the way down.”

“Just twice, I’m guessing, in three seconds.”

“Not, however, slowly and reverently as I taught her.”

“You’ll live it down.”

“She landed on a roseate spoonbill, just missing the moat that might have saved her. But her copilot survived.”

“Copilot?”

“Hildegarde clutched her shih tzu puppy right up to touchdown.”

“Any landing you walk away from is a good landing.”

“The shih tzu made a good landing — on Hildegarde.”

“So did you, Tzu.”

“But I never laid a glove on her!”

“Nevertheless...”

“I wasn’t even there.”

“No matter.” Jack was already feeling his oats. Several million oats. “It happened on your watch. Even with an assist from the Hemlock Society, you’ll still get yours.”

“Thanks.”

“Read any good wills lately?” muttered Jack as the waitress brought refills to the quietly smiling couple.

The twelve-year-old-scotch drinkers drank twelve-hour-old toasts.

“To the quick,” said Jack.

“And the dead,” said Tzu.

Attorney Hamilton Bostwick cleared his throat. With his sense of the dramatic, that could have been an all-day job. Since attorneys are officers of the court, so was he now of Polk County Surrogate, no less for being in his own sunny, wood-paneled office with Jack and several legal cronies. He then spoke in that plummy, back-of-the-throat, button-down voice you often hear in travelogues describing glacier-trapped woolly mammoths.

“ ‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither.’ ”

“Amen,” said Jack. Leave it to old Bostwick to class things up with a little King Lear in a regimental striped tie.

A common housefly droned comfortingly about the pleasant room practicing touch-and-go landings on various of the personnel, and Jack flew with it, musing what to do with his loot.

... a little pied-a-terre in Monaco, the Cote d’Azur and all that... so central... so tax-free... hobnob with the Grimaldis... ski lodge a must... not Aspen — passe... perhaps Whitefish, Montana... the old Chet Huntley ranch... And, hey, for the theater and museums in New York, a bachelor pad at Central Park West not too far from Lincoln Center... can be small, but must be chic... maybe the Dakota if you can live with the Lennon thing... First off, get your ass out of that dump over the candy store... move into Hildegarde’s old place, spruce it up, a pool, tennis courts...

“Hildegarde was sadly ill,” said Attorney Hamilton Bostwick.

“How sadly?” said Jack.

“Terminal.”

“News to me,” said Jack.

“News to her.”

“When did she know?” Jack felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Most hominids do not keep in day-to-day touch with their erectile napes.

“The day she saw Doc Forbush,” said Attorney Hamilton Bostwick.

“And that was?”

“The same day last week she visited me in this office,” Attorney Hamilton Bostwick waved a fond proprietary hand at the corpus juris lining his walls, “and dictated this will.”

Jack smoothed the back of his neck with his left hand.

“ ‘I, Hildegarde Beauregarde, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, and considering the uncertainty of this life...’ ”

Attorney Hamilton Bostwick garrumphed at “uncertainty.”

Jack liked the sound of “disposing.”

“ ‘... do make, publish, and declare this to be my last will and testament as follows, hereby revoking all other former wills by me at any time made.’ ”

Jack went into free fall at “revoking.” This was no codicil. This was a whole new ball game!

“Long story short...” wheezed Attorney Hamilton Bostwick.

That’s a first, thought Jack.

“... Hildegarde left almost everything to a charity...”

Jack closed his eyes just in time to catch the world premiere of coming attractions on the wide screen of his retinas. A life flashed before him — not his own, but that of Hildegarde’s favorite, St. Francis of Assisi. But surely Jack would star! “Roll the credits.” No joy. A sympathetic cameo role of an impoverished brother monk. “Coming soon to a theater near you.”

“... a group doing business as The Irving Foundation...”

A.k.a. Judas Iscariot, thought Jack. There goes the Côte d’Azur and ski lodge.

“... still trying to reach them in North Carolina...”

Even the roof over my head, much less the Dakota pad, thought Jack. There has to be something...

Attorney Hamilton Bostwick garrumphed and fiddled and jabbed one last item with his glasses.

“I will paraphrase Hildegarde’s final instructions to me. They concern her step-grand-son whom she was always at great pains to refer to as ‘Dear Jack.’ ”