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

Baxter Wood was waiting for him, standing as a shadow beside a wrought-iron veranda table.

“I guess we made it, Mr. Wood.” Eddie felt that he was one big goosepimple of anticipation and excitement. He could hardly keep his voice from breaking into a delirious falsetto. “Had some trouble with one fellow, a butcher, but I carried the ball without a stumble.”

“So you did, and I’m grateful.” A note of real feeling was in Wood’s voice. He thrust out a manila envelope. “Count it, if you like. It’s all there. Twenty-five thousand in hundred and fifty dollar bills.”

Eddie took the money with the feeling that he was swooning. Wood threw a meaty arm about his shoulders and walked Eddie to the edge of the veranda.

“Don’t’ ever feel that we did anything wrong, young fellow. Remember that you gave my son — and me — a fresh chance. I’ve bought into some mining interests in Mexico, and I’ve had it out with Richie. He’s going down there and make a man of himself, work in the earth, learn to sweat a little and eat plain, gut-sticking grub. Appreciate a cot in a mining camp when he flops after a day’s honest labor.”

Wood dropped his hand and looked out into the darkness. “Yes, young fellow, it should make a man of my son, this final chance for him to be a man.”

“I’m glad to have had a part in it, Mr. Wood,” Eddie said, anxious only to be away, paying off that bloodsucking loan shark Fleschetti, then blasting off to Joella.

“Good night, m’boy.”

“So long, Mr. Wood.”

Eddie nudged the speed laws as he drove back to his apartment. He left the Toyota in the no-parking strip in front of the scabby brick building. He would be inside just long enough for a change of shirts and a phone call to Joella.

He took the steps to the second floor two at a time, keyed open his door, clicked on the bed-sitting room light. Whistling merrily, he rummaged through the chest of drawers, finding a pink broadcloth in its laundry plastic.

He turned, heading toward the bath with the fresh shirt in his hands. Halfway across the room, he caught a movement out of the side of his vision. He stopped suddenly, with knees almost buckling.

Richie Wood was standing in the dark kitchenette doorway, as big, tough, and twice as mean looking as his father.

Heart pounding at the sudden sight of the intruder, Eddie clutched the back of a chair and swallowed the dryness in his throat. “Why... what...” he stammered. “How’d you get in here?”

“Simple,” Richie said, taking a couple of grizzly bear steps into the bed-sitting room. “Good old dad told me about our juror to spare me strain during the trial. I looked you up in the phone book, climbed the fire escape, and broke the kitchen window. Then I waited, figuring you wouldn’t be long in dashing in after the payoff.”

Eddie backed a step, feeling an acid sweat eat suddenly across his face.

“Wh-what do you want?” he asked thickly, guessing already from Richie’s presence, Richie’s eyes, Richie’s deadly determined manner what Richie wanted.

“The last thing I want is that deal the old fool has hatched for me in Mexico,” Richie said. “Man, I’d blow my mind down there with those peons and time clocks and holes in the ground.”

Eddie hugged the manila envelope stuffed under his belt. “No! You can’t have it! It’s my money!”

“Yeah?” Richie said, inexorably closing in. “Who you squawking to? The fuzz? Man, how you going to report a theft you don’t dare explain?”

Richie snapped his fingers. “Hand it over, punk. Have a heart. The old man has cut off my allowance, bought that one way ticket to Mexico, told the foreman down there to treat me just like the hired help. So make like a love-child, man. Return the Wood lettuce, to me. By the time I get through jetting off and having a twenty-five thousand dollar ball the old man will wish he’d never heard of mines in Mexico.”

Richie’s hand was reaching. Eddie lunged back. Richie lunged forward. The bleat from Eddie’s lips was cut in half by the impact of Richie’s fist.

Eddie slammed against the wall. Almost beyond feeling, he sensed that Richie had grabbed him by the neck and was banging his head against the dirty plaster. Then Richie, the room, the panic all vanished.

The apartment was filled with a deep-space silence when Eddie began to live again. The process was a torment. The pain in his head squeezed a thin moan through his lips. He was crumpled with his face against the musty-smelling carpet. He felt as if he was being put back together with a welder’s torch. Even more painful was the knowledge that Richie Wood and the twenty-five thousand were long gone.

He dragged himself up and slumped on the couch, two big tears filling his eyes. He knew he was going to have to make dull, dumb Clara feel lovely and adored for a long time.

He dredged up the strength to reach for the phone and dial Clara’s number. She must have been sitting on her phone. She answered instantly.

He took a breath and gave it all he had, the Bailey special sockeroo, an intimate huskiness: “Baby, these last days have been endless without you.”

“Me too, Eddie. Please hurry to me, Eddie. I’ve picked a wedding dress and—”

“Easy, Kitten,” he smothered a groan. “We got to talk this thing over. I mean, something has come up. My deal fell through, and aunt Hilgred, she had to have emergency surgery.”

“The poor dear!”

“She had nobody else to turn to, Kitten. I had to do what I could.”

“Of course you did, Eddie.”

“So I wired a loan from a character named Fleschetti who sends out shivs to do his collecting. And I love you too much, baby, to have you see me if I was ugly. Like, with all my teeth missing or an ear lopped off.

Originally appeared in The Executioner Mystery Magazine , August 1975.

Turning the continental onto the white-graveled driveway of Aunt Crabby’s estate, Eddie Crabtree listened to the chit-chat in the back seat between his aunt and Dr. Picard. Each innocent word distilled another drop of venom in Eddie’s reservoir of bitterness.

He choked back a monstrous case of heartburn as he tooled the heavy car through spangles of bright sunlight filtering through the elm-shaded lane. Today, he hated mother nature along with everything else. As if by special arrangement, a lovelier spring day couldn’t have been imagined for Aunt Crabby’s homecoming from the hospital. The first subtle taste of summer was in the air. The sky was a misty blue. Quickened and freshly green, the very earth shared with Aunt Crabby a bursting of new life, renewal. The death rattle of falling leaves was past, for Aunt Crabby as well as the trees.

The glistening, steel-gray car wended around the terraced front lawns and gardens. Ahead loomed the imposing, two-story, brick neo-colonial home that Aunt Crabby’s husband, deceased, had left as a reflection of himself. Its quiet, fortress-like solidity was relieved by the touch of ivy growing on the walls. The servants, five in number, had noted the car’s approach and were lining up on the veranda beside the front door to welcome Aunt Crabby home.

Aunt Crabby was holding her breath as she leaned forward for her first look after all these long weeks. “Home...” she murmured from just behind Eddie’s right ear. “I can’t wait to get inside and caress every stick of furniture!”

“You’re not eighteen, my dear,” Dr. Picard grumped, “even if you do have the heart of an eighteen-year-old. You follow my orders, now. No overdoing it.”

“I certainly don’t feel my forty-nine. But I don’t want a shaggy old bear of a heart surgeon growling at me,” Aunt Crabby giggled happily.