“What do you mean, bet?”
“You heard me. Put your money where your big mouth is. You turn on the news, go ahead. And you hear one real good piece of news, you can quit saving for that fur coat, I’ll buy it for you. Tomorrow. You won’t have to wait another year, I’ll put it on your back right now!”
The coat was an ebony mink. Pauline’s Holy Grail.
“And if there isn’t any good news?”
Arnold grinned.
“You give me that money you been saving and we take the fishing trip.”
Pauline hated fishing trips. So she hesitated.
Arnold chuckled, both at her and at Lucy. Lucy thought the baby was coming. Desi was panicked. Pauline was simultaneously sickened at the thought of dead fish and exhilarated at the thought of mink.
“All right,” she said. “OK, Arnold. Turn on the news.”
Arnold gave Lucy a regretful smile and wrenched the dial.
Jensen looked so grim that Pauline’s heart wrenched, too.
“The prospect for a major conflict in the Middle East intensified tonight, after an Israeli commando raid into Lebanon followed a series of bombings in Tel Aviv that claimed ten lives...”
Arnold sucked loudly on his beer bottle.
“A new threat to the Vietnam truce was posed tonight as reports of a buildup...”
Arnold burped and chuckled and chortled.
“And now, here’s a film report on the fire that destroyed the ocean liner Marianna and cost the lives of thirty passengers and crewmen....”
Arnold enjoyed the account of the disaster almost as much as I Love Lucy.
“The strike of longshoremen, now in its third week, may cripple the economy of the entire Eastern Seaboard, according to a new study...”
Arnold basked in the blue light of the set.
“Another charge of corruption in Government came today from a high-placed official in the Justice Department...”
“After a week-long search, the mutilated body of seven-year-old Sharon Snyder was discovered in an abandoned tenement...”
“A tax rise forecast by both Federal and state economists brutally slain in apartment-house elevator the highest increase in food prices in ten years accident total now five hundred but expected to rise as floods sweep tornadoes struck hurricane winds rising to thirteen children dead twenty injured as train strikes school bus and protesters arrested on steps of mugging victim dies as new strain of flu virus thousands homeless as assassin forecasts rain for holiday weekend...”
Arnold was having a very good time.
“Well, how about it, how about it?” he said. “How’s about the news, Mrs. Current Events, you enjoying the show? And how’s about that fishing trip, you going to throw up again, like you did the last time, when I bring home the catch?”
“It’s still on,” Pauline said gratingly. “The news is still on, Arnold; will you at least let the man finish?”
“Sure,” said Arnold, smiling.
“And now,” said Jensen, not smiling, “repeating our first item, the state health authorities have issued an urgent warning concerning the danger of botulism in the canned mixed vegetables packed by Happy Lad Foods. Any can of Happy Lad mixed vegetables marked five-L-three is known to contain these deadly bacteria and should be destroyed immediately or returned to the place of purchase...”
The credits were beginning to roll and Pauline couldn’t bear Arnold’s chuckling noises a moment longer. Tears blurred her path between living room and kitchen. In the center of the tiled floor, she fought a wave of nausea (smell of dead fish, nonsmell of mink), and then she went to the cupboard and looked through her canned-food inventory, searching the labels for a can of Happy Lad mixed vegetables, series 5L3. Suddenly, she realized that all the news wasn’t bad that night. She had one.
The Quick and the Dead
by Helen McCloy
She was a remarkable woman. Basil Willing recognized that the moment he saw her.
She opened the door of his beach cottage without knocking. Behind her a jagged streak of lightning split the night and vanished. Thunder roared above the steady drumming of the surf. An edge of white foam thrust its way up the sand; beyond, the ocean was a blackness — as void as if nothing were there, and never had been. Thunderstorms were rare in California, but when they came they were, like most things California, larger than life.
She was like a storm herself, all darkness and suddenness, all flash and tumult. Basil remembered that the words hurricane and houri have the same root.
“Sorry to bother you.” Her voice was rich, deep, warm. “My telephone is dead. May I use yours? I live next door.”
“Of course. Over there by the stairway.”
She wore a silk sheath, shrill yellow like a flame in the dimly lighted room. Her sandals were gilt; her only jewel was a big round brooch on one shoulder, bits of coral and turquoise pieced together to form the image of a Nepalese god. An artful woman to combine yellow-pink and yellow-blue with yellow.
“Damn! Your phone is dead too! What am I going to do now?”
“What’s the trouble?”
“I’m Moira Shiel.”
“The singer? Max and Moira?”
The team specialized in folk songs and satirical sketches. They were famous for their quickness in picking up each other’s cues when they ad-libbed, as they often did, even on television. Moira was the better actor; Max, the better musician — he had perfect pitch.
She nodded. “I just had a phone call from the Santa Barbara police. Max’s father was found dead there an hour ago, at nine o’clock. He lived alone. A neighbor heard his dog barking and called the police. They said he had died of a heart attack about eight thirty.
“They called me because they couldn’t locate Max. They had tried the studio in Burbank first, but the night staff said that Max had left there alone, in his car, at six, telling everyone that he was driving to Santa Barbara to have dinner with his father. The police had also tried to call Max’s house in Santa Cristina, a hundred miles south of Burbank, but there was no answer. His wife should have been there, but she wasn’t.
“I don’t want Max to hear this news suddenly, on his car radio. He adored his father. The shock would prostrate him for weeks, perhaps months. I got the Santa Barbara police to promise they would not release the news until I found Max, but they can’t hold it back indefinitely. What shall I do? If your phone is also not working it means the line is down all along Malibu Beach. I may not be able to reach him for hours.”
Basil glanced at his watch. “Ten after ten now. If he left Burbank at six, he should certainly be in Santa Barbara by this time. I suppose you could drive to Burbank, or to Los Angeles, and find a telephone that’s working and—”
“I wouldn’t dare leave my house for so long. The line may be fixed at any moment. A call might come through from Max and I’d miss it.”
“Then why don’t I take you home and drive to Los Angeles myself? I can give Max the message, if you’ll tell me the most likely numbers to call.”
There was a fire already burning on the hearth in her living room. She stood before it turning the pages of a small black address book. “First, his home number. That’s one I always forget — I suppose, because I so rarely have occasion to use it.”
“I always assumed you and Max were married,” said Basil.
“Oh, no. He was married when we teamed up. Katie, his wife, is nice, but—”
She stopped at the sound of a car on the road that runs above the beach houses at Malibu. In a few moments footfalls were noisy on the wooden steps that led down to her house. She ran to the front door.