Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

Now he’s looking down. He’s seeing that pulse, steady and strong beating beside the Adam’s apple under his hand. He’s standing there holding the razor. It’s made of the finest steel, sharper than the sharpest knife. Is there a thread of racial memory deep within him of tribal raids, of the high elation of seeing an enemy fall, bleeding, on the edge of a sharp sword? How soft the flesh, how sharp the weapon.

He stands over the supine creature in the tilted-back chair. The razor comes toward the flesh. The pulse beats, throb, throb, throb...

The razor touches the flesh. This barber is master at that moment of life and death. The supine man is helpless. A twist of the wrist... a sudden pressure... death is only a fraction of an inch away.

Has he ever considered his power, this barber? Does the soft flesh and the helplessness of the supine man and the sharp glitter of the razor hold any kind of fascination for him?

He is tired. He has been on his feet all day. He has trimmed heads of every size and shape, massaged diseased scalps and healthy ones. He is tired of the whole mess. Yet at this moment, he is master of life and death and it gives him a lift.

What if he should choose this moment to snap?

Then he is finished. The chair tilts upright...

“Marty, your breakfast is going to be absolutely cold!”

“Yes, dear.”

I knotted my tie, slipped into my coat. I really had the shakes. I needed a drink, a bracer, but there was none in the house.

I overcame the urge to run from the nauseatingly healthful and beautiful breakfast of ham and eggs. I gagged a little food down.

“Really, Joyce,” I said, holding the edge of the table. “I don’t feel so good today. I think I ought to go back to bed.”

She pierced me with her eyes. “Marty,” she said quietly, “there’s not a thing wrong with you. You just keep trying to run from life itself, is all.”

I couldn’t explain. She’d never understand.

I dragged myself out of the house, got in the car. I had to sit there a minute. I was gasping; there was a pain in my head. My mouth was terribly dry. I needed a drink bad.

Backing out of the driveway, driving down the street, I tried to think of the business of the day ahead. But I didn’t want to think about it. I knew what it would be — the repetition of a million other days. All I could think about were the dreams and ambitions and plans I’d had a long time ago. It seemed that a different man had dreamed them, not Marty starting the day with a trip to a damn barber shop.

The parking lot was just ahead. My foot was shaking when I applied the brakes and drove into the lot.

I remembered to give the attendant a calm, pleasant good morning. Really, I wanted to tell him to go to the devil, because the lot was across the street from the barber shop.

Traffic was heavy, and I had to control a sudden urge to dash through it to reach the shop.

I got across the street all right, but just outside the shop. I found that my feet wouldn’t move.

This was ridiculous.

I needed a drink, all right.

I was suddenly dizzy and leaned against the building a moment for the dizziness to pass.

Then something snapped inside of me. It was like a little explosion at the base of my skull.

I could make it now. I straightened, walked inside the shop.

As I passed the long wall mirror I glimpsed my face. It didn’t look so tired right now. There was a small, secretive smile on my lips.

I said good morning and took off my coat. Then I donned my white coat and took my place beside the chair, the same spot where I’d stood for twenty endless years. Well, almost the same spot. In twenty years I’d advanced from sixth chair to second. Old man Routher was still ahead of me, at chair number one.

I was as much a fixture as the shoe shine stand in the rear of the shop. Nobody paid any attention to me. Nobody asked why I started working right away on my razor.

The answer was perfectly clear — to me. I wanted the razor very, very sharp for my first customer this morning...

Originally published in Manhunt , May 1957.

The girl sat alone in the curved leather booth of the bar. A half consumed glass of sherry was on the table before her. She made no move to touch it. She sat with her hands in her lap. She had sat this way, absolutely motionless, for the past ten minutes.

A man entered the bar. His brief first glance at the girl became a lingering one as he slowly passed her booth. In looking at her with appreciation, he joined the company of every man in the place. There was little talk. And not a moment passed that at least one man wasn’t glancing toward the girl who sat there, unmoving and alone.

She seemed unaware of the indefinable something she had brought into the bar. It wasn’t her beauty alone that attracted attention. She was small, but very shapely. Dressed in black. She wore her glossy blonde hair cut short, with a hint of curl at the ends, and casual bangs that accentuated the dreamy quality of her large dark eyes. Her smooth tanned complexion heightened further the hint of ageless mystery in her eyes.

Yet for all the enticement and sophistication of the girl there was a quality of terrible innocence about her. This quality reached out and made men at the bar feel more masculine than they had in a long time. It reached out and touched them, and some of them would therefore remember her before they went to sleep that night, or while answering absent-mindedly the question of a wife.

Her eyes stayed on the clock behind the bar. It was a pretentious clock, ringed with orange neon, its face illuminated by a pale orange glow. The hands indicated that the time was exactly nineteen minutes before twelve. The clock was ten minutes fast, an aid in getting the last, lingering customers out of the bar by legal closing time.

Twenty-nine minutes before midnight.

The girl’s lips parted; she had small, gleaming, even teeth. The pink tip of her tongue touched her lips briefly. She sipped the sherry at last.

Twenty-eight minutes.

The man who had just entered the bar continued to look at her over his shoulder while he walked to the bar and ordered a highball.

The bartender put the drink before him. The man raised his brows in a question, making it clear by a jerk of his head in the girl’s direction that he was asking about her. The bartender glanced toward the girl and shrugged.

The man tasted his drink, turned slowly, and stared boldly at the girl.

She was still watching the clock.

Twenty-seven minutes.

Holding his drink, the man moved across the short intervening distance until he was standing beside the booth. He was a tall, rangy man of about thirty, dark in coloring, nice looking without being handsome. He stood without speaking for a moment; then he said, “Hello.”

The girl looked at him. He took a quick breath as those luminous eyes of hers met his.

“What did you say?”

He smiled. “I said hello.”

“Oh — hello.”

“May I buy you a drink?”

“I have one,” she said quietly. It was neither a rebuff nor an invitation. She continued looking at him, studying him. He took a quick pull at his drink as if he were losing his poise.

“Are you waiting for someone?” he asked.

He was the center of attention now. Not open attention. Guarded glances. Nobody was drinking right now. The bartender was busy with his bar cloth, but the movement was strictly mechanical.

The man’s face reddened a little, as the girl took a long time in answering.

“Yes,” she said finally, “I am waiting for someone, I suppose.”

The invitation was there now, in her low voice, her eyes, but the man hesitated — as if there were something he failed to understand. For an instant, as he turned his back to the bar, he appeared sorry he had started the whole business.