Everyone was strangely quiet tonight. They watched the movie, and Cora thought, with satisfaction, each of them seemed to tuck away its message into some remote corner of the brain.
The final reel was barely over when Conrad came striding in, his impressive face ruddy-cheeked and glowing from the fresh air, his eyes twinkling with malice.
“Well, well,” he said, looking around the room, “hiding away from life as usual, I see. Why don’t you people get out and do a little living, like me?”
“Because living costs money,” Lillian Boone said tartly.
Conrad smiled. “You were all rich, once. If you had guarded your investments, as I did, you’d all be living on Easy Street.”
He is insufferable, Cora thought. He hasn’t paid a penny of board, either. I’ll throw him out.
Yet she knew she wouldn’t. She felt strongly that, if she were to make such a move, he would manage to disrupt her little way of life. His tiny veiled threats had become much more frequent since she’d faced him with his blackmailing.
On Friday, Conrad kept to his room, and when he came down to breakfast on Saturday, his face was an odd grey color.
“No, no,” he said angrily to the maid, when she served his eggs. “Just bring me some tea and toast.”
No one asked after his health, and he stayed in his room the rest of the day. In the evening, to Cora’s surprise, he went into the projection room with the others, to watch the Saturday night movies. He rejected popcorn scornfully, but sat erectly in his seat, watching his dashing, much younger self, as he swept across the small screen. She had an odd little feeling that he was afraid to be alone tonight, that he wanted to be near human beings.
The music on the tape recorder tinkled on, and the former actors and actresses sat enthralled, each of them lost, quite obviously, in dreams of past glory.
Cora, sitting two seats away from Conrad, heard a small gasp. She looked over and saw his well-manicured hand clutching at his breast pocket, his eyes pleading with her.
Lillian Boone, in the row ahead, turned around to look at Conrad. She half rose from her seat, then her eyes met Cora’s, and she turned away again, back to the film.
Cora leaned over to Casper Cuthbert, who sat near the tape recorder. “Turn up the music,” she ordered. “This is the exciting part.”
Which of them turned to look at Conrad, gasping for breath, clutching at air? Cora would never know, she didn’t want to know. Sitting erectly, tidily, as she always sat, she watched the screen.
When the film had ended, and the music was switched off, Cora heard a little scream from Sally Jones Carstairs.
“Conrad is ill! Look at him!”
There was general alarm then, and confusion, and Cora trotted off to the telephone to call an ambulance. It was, however, much too late. Conrad Dillingham had died from a heart attack.
The police lieutenant who came, as a matter of routine, to check on sudden death, was very kind, very considerate of the elderly inmates of Mon Repos.
“Did any of you know that Mr. Dillingham had a heart condition?” he asked.
“He did have a mild attack the day he moved in here,” said Cora. “But I didn’t think it was as serious as it must have been. He went out a great deal and seemed in good health, although I suppose he must have been ill. Conrad was always a bit foolhardy.”
The old people sat and rocked gently.
Lt. Denton wrote busily. “Well,” he said philosophically, “he had a full life, anyway, and a pretty long one.”
He snapped his notebook shut. “Funny, he was married and divorced a couple of times, years ago, yet he didn’t leave any survivors. Too bad. They say one of the big studios is about to pay a fortune for the rights to his life story. It’ll go to the state or some distant cousin, I suppose.”
After he had left, Cora went upstairs and unlocked the big cedar chest in which she kept the most cherished mementoes of her days of glory. She took out the document at which she had not looked in many years — her marriage license.
At first she had kept it a secret because it had been an unpopular thing for a feminine star to marry; later because she had hated her husband, and had been ashamed of the brief marriage. She had wanted only to forget it.
It’s really too bad, she thought regretfully, that I can’t admit I was still Conrad’s legal wife, and claim the money from his life story. Mon Repos wouldn’t need board money to keep going then. If my dear friends couldn’t pay, it wouldn’t matter. But then, I suppose I should be thankful Conrad didn’t admit that I was his third wife, and try to get half of Mon Repos from me. He threatened it, but he didn’t have a chance to do it.
She ripped the marriage license into tiny pieces and burned them in the empty fireplace. Then she went into the bathroom and washed her hands carefully with soap and water.
It really wouldn’t do, she knew, to give the police a reason to suspect that Conrad’s demise had been a matter of... well, certainly not commission. Call it omission, she thought placidly, remembering that old silent film, “Murder Has Many Faces”.
Stiff Competition
by Frank Sisk
It’s common knowledge among entrepreneurs that one hand washes the other. Some enterprising business men even join hands, merge, to better serve their customers.
A man wearing an old tweed cap and a sleeveless cardigan slowly ascended the six stone steps that led from the basement apartment of the brownstone house. Under the streetlight he stopped a moment to examine what he held in his hands. He shook his head and blinked his eyes as if trying to dispel the effects of alcohol. His right hand held a crumpled five-dollar bill; his left, a car key. He stuffed the bill into the pocket of his denim pants and, mumbling to himself, walked none too steadily toward a green Volkswagen parked at the curb.
Harral Street was muffled in that twilight quietness which often follows a hot day in the city. Through open windows floated the faint jangle of radio music intermixing with dramatic inflections of television dialogue. From the nearest corner, where Harral joined Columbus Avenue, came the hum of traffic and occasionally the strident sound of a horn.
The man in the cardigan opened the door on the curb side of the Volkswagen without using the key and then slid clumsily over to the driver’s seat. It took him nearly a minute to find the ignition lock and insert the key. It took him another minute to find the light switch. All the while he muttered to himself.
When he finally got the headlights on and the motor going he noticed randomly, with his foot lifting to the clutch, that the car door toward the curb was still open. A weary hiss of disgust escaped his lips and he started to lean across the seat. His outreaching hand was still two feet from the handle when a report like the crack of a bullwhip snapped at the quiet night.
At the same instant a spasm seemed to seize the reaching man’s body, twisting it backward and sidewise. A gasp popped softly from between his lips and his right hand at last encountered the handle of the open door, clutching it convulsively. For several seconds he remained in this half-reclining position, his bloodshot eyes wide open in dumb contemplation.
A buxom woman appeared hesitantly part way up the basement steps of the brownstone.
The man in the Volkswagen didn’t see her but now he was trying to speak or shout. All he managed was a dry whisper.
“...a backfire or somepin,” the buxom woman was saying to somebody invisible behind and below her. “Hey, but that’s kind of funny. The wagon’s still here and...”
The man in the car, using the door as a crutch, was getting out. It required a great effort to pull himself erect. The tweed cap sat askew on his bony head and beads of sweat were forming on his pale brow. The left side of the gray cardigan, near the waist, was stained a mottled brown.