A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

There was my black-haired lady, a little pale around the gills, eyes nearly popping out of her head. There was something funny about her which I couldn’t dope out at first. I took a second look and nearly keeled over. If I had, though, they wouldn’t have hung around waiting for me to revive, so I gave a long whistle instead and let it go at that. I gave her a shove with my knee to show her which direction to take. “Get started, you head the daisy-chain going downstairs.”

The chief was damn near bowled over when I brought them in to him. “So your Mrs. Drew wasn’t a myth after all and you finally found her,” he opened.

I knocked the black wig off her head with the back of my hand. “Mrs. Drew your eye. If you’re holding Fraser for killing his wife better turn him loose. This is her right here.” Her blond hair, clipped off short, stood up funny all over her head.

One of the boys who had used Fraser’s armpits as ashtrays spoke up. “Then what was that we saw in the bathtub—”

“That was Fraser’s sister, poor kid,” I said. “She left Pittsfield that day and hasn’t been seen since. Fraser didn’t know she was coming but this pair did — maybe they got her to come down some way — but she must have walked in unannounced and spoiled their big love scene. Drew hid in the closet until time to come out and do his stuff. Mrs. Fraser probably led up to it with a quarrel. She and the sister didn’t hate each other. Anyway, they had the frame all planned to pass off her body as his wife’s and let him fry for it. They dressed her in Mrs. F.’s kimona, dumped her in the tub and then proceeded to mutilate her face with the iron until even her supposed husband couldn’t recognize her any more. Then the real Mrs. Fraser put on the dead girl’s clothes and this black wig and beat it with her side-kick. As soon as Fraser had hit the ceiling at Sing Sing she would have married Drew, and then there would have been a Mrs. Drew all right to collect that ten-grand premium on her own life.”

I shoved all the evidence I had across the desk at him and went home.

“Supper’s ready,” the wife said. “Should I wait until you’ve had your bath?”

“Just open the windows,” I said. “You don’t catch me in that tub again until Nineteen Forty.”

Kiss of the Cobra

Mary’s old man, after six years of office-managing for a tire company in India, comes heading back with a brand-new wife. He breaks it to us in a telegram first and then makes a bee-line for the place we’ve taken up in the hills beyond San Bernardino. It seems he wants to show her to us.

My boss has been whiter than snow to me. I’m on leave of absence with pay, and that’s how we happen to be there.

When I had dragged myself in, a few weeks before, to report for duty after a tussle with the flu, I was down to 130, stripped, and saw spots in front of my eyes. He took one look at me and started swearing. “Get out of here!” he hollered. “Go ’way back someplace and sit down for six weeks. I’ll see that you get your checks. It gives me the shivers to look at you!” When I tried to thank him he reached for his inkwell, maybe just to sign some report, but I didn’t wait to find out.

So we hauled two centuries out of the bank, took the kid brother with us, and wound up in this dead-end up in the San Benny mountains. It hasn’t even electric lights, but it isn’t so bad at that. You can’t quite hear the caterpillars drop. So there we are now, the three of us, Mary and me and the kid brother, waiting for her old man to show up.

He drives up around eight in the evening, smack off the boat, in a car he’s hired down in L. A. He’s brought her with him. She gets out and comes up to the house on his arm, while the driver starts unloading half of Asia behind them. He comes in grinning all over and shakes hands with the three of us. “This is Veda,” he says.

“Where’d she ever get that name?” I think to myself.

She’s a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic — you can’t take your eyes off her. She’s dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesn’t walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece — undulates is the word.

She’s smoking a ten-inch Russian cigarette, and when I touch her hand the sensation I get is of something cold wriggling in my grasp — like an eel. I can’t help it, the skin on the back of my own hand crawls a little. I try to tell myself that anyone’s handshake would feel like that after a drive in the open on a raw, damp night like this. But I can tell Mary doesn’t like her either. She acts a little afraid of her without knowing why, and I have never known Mary to be afraid of anything in her life before. Mary keeps blinking her eyes rapidly, but she welcomes her just the same and takes her upstairs to show her her room. A peculiar odor of musk stays behind in the room after she’s gone.

I go out to the pantry and I find the kid brother helping himself to a stiff nip. “The rain is bringing things up out of the ground,” he mutters.