Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

It was past 4:30 when he left. My bank was open until six on Friday, but I didn’t want to take the time to go all the way uptown before driving out to Brooklyn. The bank could wait until Monday. I like to get to my assignments a couple of hours in advance whenever it’s feasible.

It took me nearly an hour to drive out to Flatbush. I stopped at a crowded restaurant where I wouldn’t be noticed for dinner, which killed another hour. On the way out of the restaurant I bought a newspaper.

I parked on Underwood, just around the corner from the Grandview Apartments, and walked the rest of the way. Again I took the fire stairs, and was lucky enough not to meet anyone in the third-floor hall.

It was just 6:30 when I let myself into apartment 3-C. I left the door unlocked.

I threw my topcoat and hat on the bed in the bedroom, but kept on my thin leather gloves. Removing the silenced automatic from the dresser drawer, I carried it into the front room.

I didn’t have to rearrange any furniture, because the sofa was facing the front door. I switched on a bridge lamp and adjusted it so that it hit the door like a spotlight; then I turned off the overhead light: The sofa was still sufficiently illuminated so that I could have read the paper I had brought if I had been in the mood; but anyone entering by the door was going to have to shade his eyes against the bridge lamp to see me clearly.

I sat on the sofa with the gun lying alongside of me and the newspaper folded in my lap and waited.

Time dragged by. I am very patient, though. Waiting is part of my job.

Exactly at 8:30 the doorbell rang. Picking up the gun, I unfolded the paper with my other hand and held it in front of me as though I were reading. It effectively concealed the gun from the view from the doorway.

“Come in,” I called.

The door opened and a man wearing a topcoat and hat entered. He squinted against the light in his face as he pushed the door closed behind him.

To my surprise it was Joey Thomas.

Letting the top half of the paper fold toward me on my lap, but still concealing the gun, I said, “What the devil are you doing here?”

Joey moved farther into the room, out of the glare of the bridge lamp, and gazed at, me with equal surprise. “I might ask you the same thing. Since when did you hook up with Kuznicki?”

I got it the instant he mentioned the name Kuznicki. The moment I realized it was Joey who had come into the apartment, I assumed that for some unknown reason he had followed me here; but now I realized that he fitted the description of my subject exactly.

Anton Kuznicki was a runner for Gyp Fallon. Therefore, the winning bet the subject had been allowed to make had been arranged by bookie Fallon.

It might have amused me to realize that Gyp Fallon’s plans for Joey were identical with Joey’s plans for his wife—if I possessed that type of sense of humor. But I dislike complications. They turn clean jobs into messy ones.

I said, “You’d better sit down, Joey. We’ve got a problem.”

He gave me a puzzled look, then walked over to adjust the lampshade downward before taking an easy chair about four feet in front of the sofa. The moment he sat down he realized what the problem was, and his face suddenly drained of color.

“You just got it, huh?” I said.

He started to get up, but quickly sat down again when I pushed the newspaper aside and let him see the silenced gun.

Licking his lips, he said huskily, “I thought you were a square guy, Speck. They all told me you were a square guy.” He was beginning to babble.

“I am,” I said. “I didn’t know you were the subject until you walked in. It complicates things. I can’t hit one of my own clients.”

That seemed to make him feel better. After a prolonged silence during which his gaze never wavered from the gun he asked, “Who set me up?”

“I never know, but in this case I can guess. It seems pretty obvious that Gyp Fallon bought the hit. Kuznicki’s one of his runners. Apparently Gyp thinks more of your wife than you do—enough to want her a widow.”

“Why, that dirty rat,” he said indignantly.

“How much were you supposed to have won?” I asked curiously.

“Twelve hundred clams. The only good tip I was ever handed, and it turns out to be a phony! I wondered why the payoff had to be all the way out here, but for twelve hundred I would have driven clear to Albany.”

I said, “The problem is that Gyp went through regular channels. I can’t hit a client, yet I can’t back down on an assignment handed me by The Arranger. You see that, don’t you? It’s a hell of a problem.”

“Mind if I leave while you figure it out?” he asked, making a cautious move to rise.

I let the mouth of the silencer move back and forth. He quickly subsided in his chair. I creased my brow in thought and we sat in silence for some minutes.

Finally my expression cleared. Without lowering the gun, I unbuttoned my shirt with my left hand, reached inside, and loosened the buckle of my money belt. Drawing out the belt, I tossed it in Joey’s lap.

“Take all the money out of that, I said.

Puzzled, he opened the belt and drew out all the bills.

“Count it,” I instructed.

Placing the stack on one knee, he rapidly fingered through it. When he looked up he said, “Why, this is what I paid you this afternoon—sixty-five hundred bucks.”

“Uh-huh. Put it in your pocket—all of it.” He got it then, and he turned dead white. He held the money out at arm’s length toward me.

“No, Speck! We have a contract. I’m your client. You said so yourself!”

“How could you be?” I asked reasonably. “I’ve returned your money, just as I agreed I would if I didn’t go through with the assignment. So you’re no longer my client.”

The sound wasn’t any louder than the pop of a burst balloon.

My instructions had said it wasn’t necessary to clean up, which meant I could leave the body right there. I paused only long enough to clean up the spilled money, though.

While I’m scrupulously honest in my dealings with clients, I don’t see anything ethically wrong in stealing from a deceased non-client. Do you?

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine , October 1966.

When the employment office sent me down to the Miami Yacht Club to be interviewed by the owner of the Princess II, I had no idea she was tin heiress Peggy Matthews. I was told to ask for a Mrs. Arden Trader.

The Princess II was moored in the third slip. It was only about a thirty-five footer, but it was a sleek, sturdy-looking craft which appeared as though it could weather any kind of seas. No one was on deck or in the wheelhouse.

I climbed on deck, stuck my head down the single hatch behind the wheelhouse and yelled, “Anyone aboard?”

A feminine voice from below called. “Be right up.”

A moment later, a slim brunette of about twenty-five came up the ladder. She wore white Capris and a clinging white blouse that showed off a lithe, extremely feminine figure, thong sandals that exposed shapely feet with carmine toenails, and a white sailor hat. Her features were slightly irregular, her nose being a trifle aquiline and her chin line being a little short, but her face was so full of vitality and there was such an aura of femininity about her that she was beautiful, anyway. Lovely dark eyes, a suggestion of sensuality about her mouth, and a creamy suntan probably helped the general effect.

I recognized her at once from news photos I had seen. Only a few months before, on her birthday, she had come into full control of an estimated fortune of twenty million dollars, which had been left to her in trust until she was twenty-five by her widower father, tin magnate Abel Matthews. Matthews had been dead about ten years, but until Peggy’s last birthday the terms of the trust fund had required her to struggle along on the piddling sum of about a hundred thousand a year. Now she was one of the richest women in the world.