Fletcher Flora: The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“Well, that’s a fast answer. I can see you’re a lawyer, all right. What was it about?”

“Why he wanted to see me? I don’t know. He was dead when I got here.”

“Sure. DOA. He never put out any hints earlier?”

“None whatever,” I replied.

“Okay. What’s your address?”

I told him, and he wrote it down in a little book. He wrote it very slowly, in tiny characters, with the stub of a pencil. He read it back, and I said it was right, and he put the book and the pencil in the breast pocket of his coat.

“You can go now’,” he said. “Later we’ll want you to make a formal statement and sign it. By that time, I may have thought of something else to ask you.”

I said all right and good-night and went out through the living room. The guy who’d come in with Dunn was sitting on the sofa with his feet up. Everyone else was gone, and some of those who’d come and gone had taken Bruce Caldwell with them. I went out into the hall and down in the elevator and outside.

A police car was standing by the curb. A cool wind was blowing down the deep canyon of the street, and I could see, looking up beyond the faint flush of city lights, the cold and distant stars.

I’d parked my car on a side street.

I walked down to the corner and around it and stopped in the shadow of the building. I stood quietly for a moment with my shoulders braced against brick, then I moved to the corner of the building and looked back at the police car. There was one guy in it, in the driver’s seat, and he had his head down on the steering wheel.

Moving swiftly, I crossed over to the trash can and reached in and got the gun and walked back down the side street to my car. At home, I drove the car into the basement garage and shoved the gun tip on one of the hot air ducts that ran overhead from the furnace. Later I’d dispose of it permanently. Upstairs in the dark kitchen, I found a bottle of rye in a cabinet and took a long pull from the bottle. The whisky burned in my throat and flared like phosphorus in my stomach. I waited in the darkness, gagging, until the heat had subsided to a diffusive warmth, and then I went through the living room to the front hall and upstairs to the bedroom.

Meg was asleep on her side in her twin bed. If she was not asleep, she pretended that she was. Moonlight slanted through the half-shut slats of the blinds and flowed along the contour of her rounded hip. I found pajamas in a drawer of my chest and undressed beside my bed. Lying on my back, I looked up at the ceiling and thought about everything that had happened. There was nothing, even then, that I wanted changed. And that was good, at least, because it was far too late for change, even if I’d wanted it.

I didn’t sleep. I was still lying on my back, in the position I had first taken, when the electric alarm went off beside Meg’s bed. It was the first time I’d ever known her to set the alarm.

I lay silently with my eyes half open and watched her silence the alarm and swing out of bed. She went over to the bathroom door and snapped on the light inside, and I could see against it, through the sheer stuff of her nightgown, the lithe loveliness of her body. She closed the door behind her, and the shower began running in its stall. Alter about five minutes, she came back into the bedroom and turned on the small lights on both sides of her dressing table mirror. Sitting on the bench before the mirror, turned a little to the side so that I was looking at her profile, she began to paint her nails. The sheer robe that had replaced her gown fell open across her thighs from its narrow belt, and she crossed her knees, resting each hand palm down on the upper knee as she painted the nails with the little brush that was fastened to the stopper of the bottle. She worked very slowly and carefully. She didn’t look in my direction at all.

When the paint on her nails was dry, she turned on the bench and began to brush her hair with long, even strokes. She brushed the hair until it shone like white gold in the light. When she lifted the brush to the crown of her head to start the long sweep down the fall of her hair, I could see clearly in the glass the firm protrusion of her breasts against the thin robe.

The stroking done, she lay the brush down on the glass top of the table and picked up a thin gold tube of lip rouge. She applied the scarlet stuff to her lips in a bright smear, leaning forward to look into the mirror, smoothing it with the tip of a little finger and tucking her lips in together to give it the shape of her mouth. Standing, she loosened the robe and let it drift down in a thin cloud over the bench behind her.

Naked, she padded across the room to the closet, gathering clothing. Carrying the garments, she came back to her bed and began to dress. In a couple of frail black wisps, she sat on the side of the bed and smoothed nylon onto her long legs, holding each leg in turn out stiffly with the toes pointed, bending far forward from the hips to draw her hands up slowly from the ankle along calf and thigh. Standing again, she lowered a soft black dress over her head. The dress was slashed low in front, a narrow V between her breasts, and was like lacquer on her hips. In high-heeled sandals, she returned to the mirror and repaired her hair, looking at herself with quiet appraisal in the glass. Then she turned and went out of the room.

She still hadn’t looked at me. Not even briefly.

I kept on lying there in bed, and pretty soon the good smell of coffee came up the stairs and into the room, and for just a second it was a morning like any other morning, with the paper to read and a trip to the office around nine. I lifted my arms back and above my head, stretching, feeling the muscles pull tight along the length of my body. I showered and dressed and went down.

Meg was in the breakfast room. She was standing at the wide window overlooking the back lawn, and I saw that she was holding a cup of coffee in her hands. I went up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders, but she was still as stiff as wood, and the chill of her flesh came through her dress into my fingers.

“There’s coffee on the sideboard,” she said.

“Thanks.”

I went over and poured coffee into a cup. I carried the cup over to the table and sat down. Meg still stood at the window with her back to me, looking out into the bright sunshine of the morning. The steam from my coffee ascended into my nostrils. It was a good smell. It was a smell a man might miss if he were never to know it again.

“You said bourbon,” Meg said. “You said his bourbon wasn’t dry on the carpet.”

I looked down into the black liquid with the steam rising lazily from its surface. “Bourbon’s a word, honey. You see a man taking a drink, you say, ‘Look at that man drinking bourbon.’ It stands for anything.”

She shook her head. “No. You say highball, or cocktail, or just drink. You don’t say bourbon, or rye, or scotch, unless you know for sure it’s bourbon, or rye, or scotch. That’s why you said bourbon, Hank, because you knew it was bourbon. Because you saw him mix it and even had one with him out of the glass that was sitting on the little table at the end of the sofa. That was the first time you were there, Hank. The time you killed him.”

She stood waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say, because there was no use in confessing something she already knew, and there was no use lying when a lie would do no good. After a while, she said quietly, “I’ve been wondering why you came back. I think it must have been because you saw me arrive and didn’t want me to get into trouble. I think it was because you love me very much. I think that’s why you stayed and called the police, too. Because you love me, I mean. Because you thought I wouldn’t think you’d killed him if you did a thing like that. It was an awful chance to take.”