“She actually asked you to kill Chrissie?”
“No, but she said Chrissie was a problem and that we had to find a solution. I thought…” A quaver crept into her voice. “I thought that if I did this, then maybe Abigail would help me. Show me how to do my hair and fingernails. Help me be pretty.” A pause. “I’ve always wanted to be pretty.”
She swallowed. “So after Chrissie came back from seeing her stepfather, we took some brownies over. Abigail and Susan left. I told Chrissie I had to talk to her. I thought it would be easy, you know, to get her to open the window… and then come up behind her. But she turned around. I had to do something. The nail file was there.”
She drew a deep breath. “And then, when I told Abigail, she said she didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. She said…” Her voice dropped. “She said I was crazy.”
Lee and I exchanged glances.
“But why didn’t you ask Chrissie to give you a makeover?”
“She refused to. She said I was lucky… lucky to be ugly. Can you imagine?” Angry tears sparkled in her eyes. “That’s when I did it. I pushed her… pushed her out the window, so I wouldn’t have to see her pretty face anymore.”
The image of Chrissie’s face, crushed and contorted by agony but still lovely as she lay broken on the sidewalk, came to mind. The sound of her last breath whispered in my ear. Then came another voice, soft and malevolent.
Such a lucky, pretty girl –
Yeah, dead lucky.
THAT NIGHT, AT McKinley’s, Lee said, “The memories, they’re coming back, aren’t they?”
I nodded. My mother’s screams, the police, the social workers, the decision not to prosecute her for letting her husband do what he did and the judge’s decision to set me free – it was all there.
“But it’s okay,” I said. “No need to worry.”
“No?”
My image in the mirror returned my gaze. I smiled, it smiled back, and it hit me that this was no ghost but a reflection of the living.
“My mother always told me I was lucky. For once, she was right. I am lucky. I survived.”
Friday Night Luck by Edward D. Hoch
It happened on a Friday, which had always been a bad day for Will Blackstone. Ever since college, he’d had a habit of relaxing at week’s end with a few drinks or a joint. It had lost him a pretty good job and more than one girlfriend. Sadie Murray was finally interested enough to stick by him, and it was she who got him the job at Techno-Bio, a firm whose specialty was cleaning up the remains at particularly messy crime scenes.
He liked the work, and it brought him into contact with a number of city detectives. One night over coffee, after a double-suicide cleanup, a detective named Tim Press told him he’d make a good cop. “I passed the exam once but didn’t make the cut,” Will told him.
“Why don’t you volunteer a few hours with the police auxiliary?” Press suggested. “We got two men in our squad started out as auxiliary cops. It looks good on your record, gives you an in.”
It sounded worth a try. Soon Will was putting in ten hours a week as an auxiliary, wearing a basic uniform and badge that were impressive even if they didn’t quite look like the real thing. Santos, head of the clean-up crew, kidded him about it. “You big Dick Tracy guy now!”
“Hardly! They’ve got me on park patrol. Last weekend I stopped some kids from throwing stones at the ducks.”
He’d been on the auxiliary force for three months, working Friday evenings and weekends in addition to his regular job. Sadie was pleased that he’d stuck with it and that he was thinking again about taking the police department exam. “You passed it last time, Will,” she told him. “And you’ve done well with the auxiliary. That should help.”
It would have helped, if it hadn’t been for that damned Friday. It was toward the end of the summer, on one of those rainy August weekends that seem to tell you autumn is just around the corner. No one came to the park on evenings like this. Sitting in his car, he’d found a half-smoked joint in his jacket pocket and decided to finish it. He’d just lit up when his supervisor came by.
Will tried to palm the joint, but its odor lingered in the car. “What’s that I smell, Blackstone?” the supervisor asked. He was a grizzly old man named Cranston who went by the rule book.
“I… I guess I – ”
“Are you smoking pot while on duty?”
“I had maybe one puff.”
“That’s one too many. You know the rules. Finish your shift tonight and then turn in your badge. You’re finished with the auxiliaries.”
“Yes, sir.” He flicked the butt out the car window into a puddle.
WILL DIDN’T TELL Sadie about the incident right away. He just said he was off for the weekend because they were overstaffed. He simply didn’t go in the next day and didn’t turn in the silver badge he’d come to admire. He kept it in his pocket when he went to work on Monday, half-thinking Cranston would be on the phone at any moment, demanding its return. But the police auxiliary was a volunteer organization and more loosely managed than the Force itself. The week passed without his hearing a thing.
That Saturday night he told Sadie Murray he’d quit the police auxiliary. “Why?” she asked. “I thought you wanted to get on the Force someday.”
“I did, I still do. But there are other ways to go about it. This way wasn’t getting me anywhere, and it was keeping us apart on weekends.”
“Your career is the important thing right now, Will. You don’t want to spend your life scraping brains off wallpaper.”
He was sorry he’d told her about some of Techno-Bio’s messier jobs. “I won’t be there forever,” he promised.
But the following Monday he was back again, working with Santos and the rest of the crew on an uptown apartment where an elderly woman and all her cats had passed away without notice several weeks earlier. Usually the routine was about the same. They entered the home or apartment dressed in biohazard suits until they could establish the extent of the cleanup. With luck, it might be confined to a tile bathroom, where the job was relatively easy.
The next few days passed uneventfully. The police auxiliary still hadn’t asked for their badge back, and the cleanups were messy but manageable. It was on another Friday – that damned day! – when the crew reached a Chestnut Street loft and found a nightmare of blood and guts covering the walls and floor.
“What happened here?” Santos asked the detective in charge. It was Sergeant Rafferty, and they all knew him.
“A mess is what happened, and we still haven’t straightened it all out,” Rafferty told them. “We had one body, a known drug dealer named Hashid, shot several times. But there’s a large quantity of blood from a second person whose body wasn’t found, as much as two or three quarts. The medical examiner doubts he could have left this loft alive after losing half the blood in his body.”
After he’d gone and the crew got to work, Santos said, “It is too much blood here. I feel death.”
“He could have had a friend who carried him away,” Will suggested.
“No elevator. Steep stairs and no blood on them. Why bother if he’s dead or dying?”
“His identity may implicate others.”
“Ha! Dick Tracy!” They’d been working most of the day on the loft, scrubbing and spraying, when Sergeant Rafferty returned, this time with the loft’s owner, Carlos Palmeto, a stocky man of about fifty who’d recently made a name for himself by converting a couple of loft buildings into upscale apartments for the gentry. His pale features were not particularly Hispanic, despite his name. As he walked through the areas they’d already scrubbed, running his fingers over some surfaces like an inspector general, Will felt that he was more interested in welcoming his next tenant than in mourning the past one. “Hashid was a loser from the start,” he told the detective. “More money than brains. I should have figured there were drugs involved.”