Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

“Helluva friend you are. Come in here, spout nonsense to get me more confused than I already am, then take off in lustful pursuit of the most attractive widow in the county.”

“Lustful pursuit? It will be my first date in two years.”

He grinned. “Motivation doesn’t change because you’re a slow mover.”

When the entree grows cold and the wine grows warm because the conversation is so interesting, you have to figure the parties are compatible, but before dessert arrived, Norma was well on her way to Preferring to Have Stayed Home and Watched Lousy Television.

Halfway through the meal, my brain began trying to tell me something, behaving like Dr. Frankenstein’s lab; liquids gurgling, sparks crackling, lights flashing.

I couldn’t have concentrated on pleasant conversation even if Sigourney Weaver had been seated across from me.

Norma’s eyes had moved from the Caribbean to the Arctic, telling me this budding romance was one step from being administered the coup de grace. She dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “I hope the ers, ahs, and how about thats have nothing to do with me.”

Since I had no idea what my brain was trying to tell me, I could only mumble something about Woody and Alfie Moser.

“It seems to me that a man who abuses a woman ought to be shot.”

“I’m not sure Alfie could be classified as abusive.”

“Naturally. You’re a man.”

I’d heard that before, of course, but she delivered the line with the viciousness of a karate chop. I don’t talk well at all when stunned.

One message my brain had gotten through was “go look at the scene at night, dummy,” so after I dropped her off, I drove back to the hill. A line of trash containers and bags had joined Mrs. Guidron’s twenty year collection of old utility bills at the curb to await the morning pickup.

Big problem these days — trash. Time was when all our back yards had a perforated fire barrel, primarily for burning leaves but also very handy for disposing of anything combustible — like old utility bills. Environmentalists had killed that.

The lab in my mind was still gurgling, flashing, snapping, and crackling.

On the night Alfie had died, the trash trucks would have already been through. Anything you wanted to get rid of since then would have to await tomorrow’s pickup after which it would disappear forever in a landfill. Bodies had been known to disappear into landfills.

I looked at the forlorn, halffull trash bag on Marji’s curb and at the heavy container on Mrs. Guidron’s.

Boom! The lab exploded. Twenty years of old utility bills? Which could have been discarded at any time. Why now? Possibly to help conceal something in a container only half-filled because she would normally generate only as much trash as another single person like Marji? I’d always told Woody that if I wanted to get rid of something, I’d wrap it well, bury it deep in a trash bag, and be reasonably sure it would never be seen again, which couldn’t be said for dropping it in a river or burying it somewhere.

I left the car, lifted the lid, and queasily slipped my hand into the dark interior. If I was wrong, my only reward would probably be some heretofore unknown disease that would send the entire country into another spasm of health hysteria.

My fingers worked their way through dry sheets of paper — among other wet and slimy things I dreaded even to speculate about — until they felt a plastic bag holding something soft and yielding. I pulled it out and kneaded it. Beneath the softness was something very hard. Like metal. And although its wrapping prevented sharp definition, it felt suspiciously like a gun.

I sat on the curb under the soft yellow light of the street lamp, holding it in both hands and looking at the church across the way. Behind me, I knew she was watching. Impossible for anyone to sleep until that empty trash container hit the sidewalk the next morning.

The gun was an old Luger wrapped in a white sweater and a dark blue skirt. The labels said they could only have come out of Maison de Jeanine — the mandatory local chic shoppe for the elite.

She’d looked at them in Woody’s big hands and smiled. No, she didn’t want her lawyer present. Nothing he could do for her.

The two families were always very close, she said softly, lives intertwined in a kinship as close as blood. The others scattered, she and Marji were the only two left here, so she felt she had to look out for her.

Her living room was so huge that the polished furniture faded into the shadows. The grand piano in the corner was probably worth more than some of the houses farther down the hill. There were framed photos everywhere of solemn people, laughing people; studio portraits and snapshots, many yellow with age. I had the feeling that all were still somewhere in the house.