Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Moody got it out first. “ ‘I don’t see what I can do about it.’ ‘I don’t see what I can do about it’!” he mimicked ferociously. “Thanks! You’ve been a big help,” he said with ponderous sarcasm. “I don’t know what I would have done without you!” — and hung up.

He looked around at it, a resigned expression in his eyes that those energetic, enthusiastic irises seldom showed.

The pigeon had its neck craned at an acute angle, almost down to the stone sill, but still looking in at him from that oblique perspective, as if to say, “Was that about me? Did it have to do with me?”

He went over and jerked the window up. That didn’t even make it stir any more.

He turned and went back to his writing chair. He addressed the pigeon coldly from there. Aloud, but coldly, and with the condescension of the superior forms of life toward the inferior ones. “Look. You want to come in? Is that what it’s all about? You’re dying to come in? You won’t be happy till you do come in? Then for the love of Mike come in and get it over with, and let me get back to work! There’s a nice comfortable chair, there’s a nice plumpy sofa, there’s a nice wide bed-rail for a perch. The whole room is yours. Come in and have yourself a ball!”

Its head came up, from that sneaky way of regarding him under-wing. It contemplated the invitation. Then its twig-like little vermilion legs dipped and it threw him a derogatory chuck of the head, as if to say “That for you and your room!” — and unexpectedly took off, this time in a straight, unerring line of final departure.

His feet detonated in such a burst of choleric anger that the chair went over. He snatched up the wastebasket, rushed to the window, and swung it violently — without any hope, of course, of overtaking his already vanished target.

“Dirty damn squab!” he railed bitterly. “Come back here and I’ll—! Doing that to me, after I’m just about to get rolling! I hope you run into a high-tension wire headfirst. I hope you run into a hawk—”

His anger, however, settled as rapidly as a spent Seidlitz powder. He closed the window without violence. A smothered chuckle had already begun to sound in him on his way back to the chair, and he was grinning sheepishly as he reached it.

“Feuding with a pigeon yet,” he murmured deprecatingly to himself. “I’d better get a grip on myself.”

Another cigarette, two good hearty gulps of beer, and now, let’s see — where was I? The opening line. He stared up at the ceiling.

His fingers spread, poised, and then suddenly began to splatter all over the dark keyboard like heavy drops of rain.”

“For me?” the young woman said, staring unbelievably at the shifty-eyed man holding the package.

“You’re

One hand paused, then two of its fingers snapped, demanding inspiration. “Got to get a name for her,” he muttered. He stared fruitlessly at the ceiling for a moment, then glanced over at the window. The hand resumed.”

“You’re Pearl Dove, ain’t ya?”

“Why, yes, but I wasn’t expecting anything.”

(“Not too much dialogue,” Tartell always cautioned. “Get them moving, get them doing something. Dialogue leaves big blanks on the pages, and the reader doesn’t get as much reading for his money.”)

He thrust it at her, turned and disappeared as suddenly as he appeared...

Two “appeareds” in one line — too many. He triphammered the x-key eight times.

and disappeared as suddenly as he had showed up. She tried to call him back but he was no longer in sight. Somewhere out in the night the whine of an expensive car taking off came to her ears

He frowned, closed his eyes briefly, then began typing automatically again.

She looked at the package she had been left holding

He never bothered to consult what he had written so far — such fussy niceties were for smooth-paper writers and poets. In stories like the one he was writing, it was almost impossible to break the thread of the action, anyway. Just so long as he kept going, that was all that mattered. If there was an occasional gap, Tartell’s proofreaders would knit it together with a couple of words.

He drained the beer in the glass, refilled it, gazed dreamily at the ceiling. The wide, blank expanse of the ceiling gave his characters more room to move around in as his mind’s eye conjured them up.

“She has a boy friend who’s on the Homicide Squad,” he murmured confidentially. “Not really a boy friend, just sort of a brotherly protector.” (“Don’t give ’em sweethearts,” was Tartell’s constant admonishment, “just give ’em pals. You might want to kill the girl off, and if she’s already his sweetheart you can’t very well do that, or he loses face with the readers.”)

“She calls him up to tell him she has received a mysterious package. He tells her not to open it, he’ll be right over—” The rest was mechanical fingerwork. Fast and furious. The keys dipped and rose like a canopy of leaves shot through by an autumn wind.

The page jumped up out of the roller by itself, and he knew he’d struck off the last line there was room for. He pitched it aside to the floor without even glancing at it, slipped in a new sheet, all in one accustomed, fluid motion. Then, with the same almost unconscious ease, he reached down for a new bottle, uncapped it, and poured until a cream puff of a head burgeoned at the top of it.

They were at the business of opening the package now. He stalled for two lines, to give himself time to improvise what was going to be inside the package, which he hadn’t had an opportunity to do until now—

He stared down at it. Then his eyes narrowed and he nodded grimly.

“What do you make of it?” she breathed, clutching her throat .

Then he was smack up against it, and the improvisation had to be here and now. The keys coasted to a reluctant but full stop. There was almost smoke coming from them by now, or else it was from his ever-present cigarette riding the edge of the table, drifting the long way around by way of the machine.

There were always certain staples that were good for the contents of mysterious packages. Opium pellets — but that meant bringing in a Chinese villain, and the menace on the cover drawing certainly wasn’t Chinese—

He got up abruptly, swung his chair out away from the table, and shifted it farther over, directly under the phantom tableau on the ceiling that had come to a halt simultaneously with the keys — the way the figures on a motion picture screen freeze into immobility when something goes wrong with the projector.

He got up on the chair seat with both feet, craned his neck, peered intently and with complete sincerity. He was only about two feet away from the visualization on the ceiling. His little bit of fetishism, or idiosyncrasy, had worked for him before in similar stoppages, and it did now. He could see the inside of the package, he could see—

He jumped lithely down again, looped the chair back into place, speared avidly at the keys.

Uncut diamonds!

“Aren’t they beautiful?” she said, clutching her pulsing throat .

(Well, if there were too many clutches in there, Tartell’s hirelings could take one or two of them out. It was always hard to know what to have your female characters do with their hands. Clutching the throat and holding the heart were his own favorite standbys. The male characters could always be fingering a gun or swinging a punch at someone, but it wasn’t refined for women to do that in Startling Stories! )

“ Beautiful but hot,” he growled .

Her eyes widened. “How do you know?”

“They’re the Espinoza consignment, they’ve been missing for a week.” He unlimbered his gun. “This spells trouble for someone.”