Эллери Куин - Blow Hot, Blow Cold

NANCY HOWELL — She wants to share her pitcher of gin-and-tonic, but discovers that one swallow does not make a summer

DAVID HOWELL — “Love thy neighbor” is the creed for surburban Shady Acres — David heartily subscribes to it, but his wife believes that good defenses make good neighbors

JACK RICHMOND, M.D. — This devastatingly handsome medico has a little blonde as well as a little black bag — and both are full of his secrets

VERA RICHMOND — The poor-mouse nurse who married the fabulous physician; his irregular hours don’t incense her so much as his irregular houris

LILA CONNOR — A potent tease from the top of her coif to her round heels

LARRY CONNOR — A latter-day Villon, Lila’s cuckolded fourth mate chooses a cool way out

MAE WALTERS — A battle ax no one wants to grind

STANLEY WALTERS — All tomcats are gray in the dark, but this clumsy clown wears striped pajamas

LT. AUGUSTUS MASTERS — A deceptive detective whose baggy rear view instills neither confidence in the innocent nor alarm in the guilty

CHIEF OF POLICE — As subtle as a freight train, this superannuated warrior should lay his pistol down

CORONER — Irascible but thorough, he considers examining one corpse in a night a good day’s work

RUTH BENTON — Instead of typing this sexy redhead as Connor’s secretary, Masters files her under “Mistress”

AGNES MORROW — An efficient nurse who has maintained her ethics for over forty years, but she cannot put the cap on murder

JAKE KIMBLE — An aging hawkshaw whose observations reveal how the murderer pulled a switch

LEWIS SHRILL — This nightclub operator is a scandalmonger who scavenges unsavory morsels

From where she sat at her kitchen table in Shady Acres Addition, Nancy Howell could see through the open window and across the low hedge into the backyard of the next-door house, owned and occupied by Larry and Lila Connor. The Connors had a flagstone terrace behind their house, and Nancy kept waiting and watching for Lila Connor to come out in her modified bikini and start sunning herself on the terrace. This afternoon Lila hadn’t come out so far, and it didn’t look as if she was going to. The reason was probably that it was just too hot. It was over a hundred degrees in the sun, and you had to be pretty careful about getting burned even if you were already toasty brown all over, as Nancy and Lila both were.

What Nancy had in mind to do if Lila appeared was to get into a modified bikini of her own and go over to join Lila on the Connor terrace. Not that Nancy really wanted to lie in the sun on this particular afternoon. What she had in mind was to get herself invited into Lila’s house. It was much too hot to lie in the sun for more than fifteen minutes or so; Lila would surely go inside again, and she would just as surely invite Nancy to go with her.

The point was, Lila’s house was air-conditioned and Nancy’s was not. Well, that wasn’t quite true; actually, the upstairs bedroom that Nancy shared with David had a window unit. But that wasn’t the same as central air-conditioning, with breezes flowing deliciously through all the furnace ducts and pouring through the vents into every room. It gave you a kind of exciting — really sensual — feeling (especially if all you had on was a bikini) to move from room to room in all that wonderful coolness. It seemed like such a waste for Lila to be over there alone while Nancy steamed under the hot breath of a mere window fan and perspiration seeped from her brown skin and trickled between her alert breasts.

Nancy felt a twitch of guilt. Not for envying Lila her air-conditioning, but because the envy implied a criticism of David that she certainly did not intend. David was her pleasure and pride. Nancy understood perfectly well that central air-conditioning could rarely be afforded by schoolteachers, of whom David was one, while by successful accountants, of whom Larry Connor was one, it rarely couldn’t, so to speak. Her love and loyalty were fiercely David’s, no question about that; but at the same time Nancy was compelled to admit to herself that Larry Connor was a pretty attractive guy, too, and was quite capable of arousing ideas in the head of a girl who might have drunk a couple of Martinis on an empty stomach. Mae Walters, who lived in the split-level across the alley on the other side of the block, didn’t like Larry and Lila very much; but Nancy liked them both, and so did David, even though they did not seem to be particularly happy and often said cruel things to each other in front of other people.

Nancy looked at her wrist watch, which David had given her for Christmas three years ago, before they were married. It was exactly three o’clock. You couldn’t depend on its being exactly three o’clock just because the watch said so, but you could at least depend on its being somewhere near it; anyhow, it was becoming apparent that Lila wasn’t coming out on her terrace to sun herself.

Nancy sighed and gave up hope. What she would do, she decided, was fix herself a tall, cold gin-and-tonic and go upstairs to the bedroom with the window unit. Maybe she would lie down and take a nap. Then, before she knew it, it would be five o’clock, and David would be home from high school, where he was working all day even though it was Saturday. (David was teaching corrective English in the summer session because they needed the extra money, and this was quite a sacrifice for him to make, because according to David nobody took corrective English but blockheads. He was often quite cross when he came home, and it required the most careful application of gin and tenderness in the right proportions to get him in a good humor again.)

Having decided what to do, Nancy rose and automatically tugged at her shorts, which had stuck to her thighs. She dropped ice cubes into a tall glass and filled the glass with gin and quinine water. Then she went out into the little hall and upstairs to the bedroom.

It was cool in the room, a sharp change from the rest of the house, and she became aware really for the first time how clammy her blouse and shorts were. She would simply have to take a shower; so she set the glass on a table beside the bed, got out of her shorts and blouse, and pattered to the bathroom. She lingered under a warm shower, then took a quick cold one, wriggling with pleasure under the needle-spray.

Back in the bedroom, Nancy inspected herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. She was pleased with what she saw. It was certainly not inferior to anything Lila Connor would have seen in the same circumstances... She thought, smiling, that the two lighter bands above and below looked positively obscene. It was a shame that there was nowhere to lie naked in the sun in privacy. It was a necessary concession to neighborhood opinion even to wear modified bikinis instead of extreme ones. Mae Walters, for example, did not approve of bikinis at all, especially when her Stanley was around; Mae had said more than once in the hearing of Nancy and Lila that she considered a clear white skin to be “much more attractive” than skin burned by the sun. Moreover, according to Mae, the sun dried out the natural oils and caused premature wrinkles. Nancy smiled again at her unwrinkled image.