Thereafter, he was too busily engaged to permit the intrusion of fears, real or imaginative, or the grim indictment of his conscious. There were relatives to notify. There were arrangements to make with a local undertaker. There were insurance agents to see. There were callers to receive, expressions of condolence to acknowledge.
Later, there were relatives in the house, and at last, on the following Monday, the funeral itself. It was not until Monday evening that he was really left alone to assess his feelings.
Somehow, he did not feel as elated as the success of his venture warranted. Not even the vision of Caroline Hardy, now invoked, was enough to lift his spirits. Perhaps it was because he was so tired. Perhaps he would have to survive a period of adjustment — of convalescence, so to speak. Suddenly he was intensely eager for tomorrow to come. Suddenly he longed in anguished loneliness for the sweet-smelling sanctuary of his enchanted store.
The longing could not be denied. Leaving the house, he walked in darkness to the store and let himself in. A small night light was burning at the rear.
In the shadows, he found his apron and put it on and stood behind the counter as if he waited for a nocturnal customer. He stood there for a long time, and he was aware that it was not the same, that something was lacking, and then he realized that he could smell nothing.
The magic odor, recovered daily from the enchanted past, was dissipated, gone, lost forever in the acrid stench of chlorine and acid, and lost and gone with it were the thousand and one associations that had sweetened his days for all his years.
What have I done? he thought dully.
And standing alone in bleak sterility, he answered his own question.
I’m dead, he thought. I’ve killed myself.
The next afternoon, when Jimmy Cobb reported for work and found the store closed, he merely decided that Mr. Fleming was observing a brief period of mourning, and he went quietly away.
It was, in fact, two days before Mr. Fleming was widely missed, and still another day before authority could be prevailed upon to enter the store. Inasmuch as the neighbors had been incited by anxiety to grim expectations, no one was greatly surprised when Mr. Fleming was found dead in his cooler, a tight little death chamber. There was a tin pail on the floor of the cooler.
Beside the pail, empty, were a bottle that had contained bleach and a can that had contained toilet-bowl cleaner.
Mr. Fleming’s body, thanks to the low temperature in the cooler, was very well preserved.
It was considered both pitiable and romantic that Mr. Fleming, in his grief, had chosen to die deliberately by the same domestic devil’s brew that had killed his wife accidentally. But it must be remembered that Mr. Fleming, being a kind of poet, was given to poetic fancies.
The Happenstance Snatch
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1966.
Banty was all brains and no luck. That was his trouble. You kept thinking he was a guy on his way to somewhere, with all those brains under black curly hair, but he never did have the luck when he needed it. It makes no difference how smart or good-looking you are; you aren’t going to attain your objective if you don’t have a little luck here and there along the way.
You take the triplets Banty held in a stud game in Kansas City. Anyone would consider it the best kind of luck in the world to hold a hand like that in a game of stud, one in the hole and two showing, and anyone with any brains at all would back it up with his grandmother’s pension if necessary. But what seems like good luck one minute may turn out to be bad the next, and it’s just about as bad as luck can be, when you consider the consequences, to hold triplets when the guy across the table is holding a straight. About the only way you could make it worse would be to bet your triplets with money you didn’t have on the table, or anywhere else, and to have someone like Archie Flowers holding the straight. And Banty did. And Archie was.
I wasn’t there, but Banty told me about it. I hadn’t seen him around for a day or two, so I went up to his room to see if he was there, and there he was. He hadn’t shaved, and he’d been drinking. He’d have been drinking still, except that the bottle was empty and he didn’t have enough money to buy one that wasn’t.
“What’s the matter, Banty? You don’t look good.”
“Look, stupid,” he said, “don’t come up here telling me how I look.”
He called me stupid lots of times, and some of the times I didn’t like it, even though it was true, which I admit, but I never made a big thing of it because we had been pals for a long time, and I kept waiting around for him to start having the luck to go with his brains, and hoping that some of it, when he did, would rub off on me. Anyhow, I let it pass, not saying anything, and pretty soon he told me about the stud game and losing a bundle on the triplets.
“How much did you lose?” I asked.
“Three grand.”
“Where did you get three grand?”
“I didn’t have it,” he said, “and that’s what’s got me worried.”
“You mean you owe Archie Flowers three grand?”
“Minus about five hundred that was on the table.”
“That leaves twenty-five hundred.”
“You’re a real genius, Carny. You can do arithmetic problems in your head.”
“Well, I don’t blame you for being worried. How long did Archie give you to raise it?”
“I’ve got until morning, and morning’s coming too soon. You got any money?”
“Not that kind, Banty. You know that.”
“I don’t mean the kind it would take to pay off Archie. I mean enough to get me out of town.”
“Not enough to get you far enough.”
“How much is that?”
“Maybe a hundred. Maybe a little less.”
“That’s better than nothing. What I’ve got to do is get away and give this some thought, and you can’t think very clearly in the hospital with a broken head, not to mention other bones, and you can’t think at all, if bad comes to worse, on a slab in the morgue.”
“Where you planning to go?”
“I was thinking about going down to Uncle Oakley’s farm.”
“Who’s Uncle Oakley?”
“Not is. Was. He’s dead. He had this farm down in the hills, about a couple hundred miles south, and he left it to my cousin Theodore when he died, but Theodore doesn’t live on it and can’t sell it, because it’s nothing but a shack on forty acres of rock. So there it is with no one home, and it’s a place to go until I can think of a better place.”
“What I’d like to know is how you plan to raise twenty-five centuries on forty acres of rock.”
“Never mind. I’ll do the thinking, which is out of your line. Uncle Oakley’s farm is safe, if not productive, and that’s what’s important at the moment. My mind is made up to go there, and now’s the time for us to start.”
“Us? Did you say us?”
“Certainly I said us. Do you expect me to go off to the hills without even someone to play two-handed stud with? Besides, there will be a certain amount of work to do, and you may be useful.”
“Dammit, Banty, I don’t want to go down to Uncle Oakley’s farm.”
“The hell you don’t!”
“I don’t, and I won’t, and that’s all there is to it.”
“All right, Carny. We’ve been pals a long time, and I thought we’d be pals forever, but I guess I was wrong. If you won’t go, you won’t, and I won’t either, and I hope I never see you again. You get out of here and don’t come back, and don’t even bother coming to my funeral if Archie Flowers kills me tomorrow for not paying off the twenty-five hundred I owe him.”