Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

I stomped down hard on the front rung of his chair, bringing him upright all at once. “I’m a friend of Soto’s. I got a message for Cadillac Jack. You going to tell me if he’s here, or would you rather be selling kindling out of this dump tomorrow?”

“Okay. Okay. He’s over there, table twelve.” I looked to where he was pointing, and as I did, a thin, sallow man in a leather jacket looked up at us. When he saw the houseman pointing, he threw down his cuestick and bolted through the side door. It was a mistake. The door opened onto a blind alley that ran between Smiley’s and an A&P.

I went out the front door on the run, stepping to one side of the alley. “You’re all done, Rugg. Give it up.” I let the safety off on the Sig. “Rugg!”

The passageway was suddenly filled with the sound of thunder. Rugg was gunning his motorcycle down the alleyway toward the street, firing a handgun wildly as he came. I dropped to one knee, aimed carefully, and shot him once through the tinted insectoid visor of his helmet. The slug catapulted him off the back of the machine. I rolled out of the way as the bike careened out the alley and skidded across the street in a shower of sparks, coming to rest with its chromed front fork welded firmly under a tan Toyota.

Rugg was dead. A MAC-10 lay on the pavement beside him. People were gathering on the sidewalk as I sat down to wait for the cops.

Two weeks later I was sitting in the Rudder and wrestling with some chicken that was still fighting for its life. The door opened and Alfred Windle came in out of the snow.

“Well, Windle. What brings you here? On a diet?”

“Progress report, Mr. Stubblefield,” he said, all business as usual.

“Proceed,” I said, abandoning the battle on my plate.

“Archie came home from the hospital today. There will be a rather nasty scar, and I’m afraid he will walk with a limp from now on. His hip was damaged, but the doctors say he was very lucky indeed not to have received the full burst of the blast. It could have been much worse.” He swallowed some coffee. “And what about you? Have you had your hearing yet?”

“Yeah. Case closed.” The cops had traced Rugg to his apartment by means of a rent receipt in his wallet. The apartment was a virtual bunker: flags, right-wing literature, and an arsenal that included handguns, a couple of assault rifles, and a Street Sweeper.

When questioned, the landlady admitted lending her typewriter to Rugg on several occasions, and it proved to be the machine on which the threat had been typed. Finally, they were able to place Rugg in Chandler’s house through a couple of fingerprints he had left on the door handle of the den.

Olivera was not happy with me, but under the circumstances he couldn’t really try to pull my license.

Floyd appeared from the back to pour a cup of coffee.

“Afternoon, Charles. Like some coffee?”

“Just the cup, Floyd. I can use it to beat this roadrunner on my plate into submission.”

“That’s what I like about you, Charles,” he said, heading for the kitchen. “Nothing.”

Some things never change.

Variations on a Scheme by Jack Ritchie

It seemed natural that my first question should be, “How old are you?”

Pomfret beamed. “I’ll be seventy-two in July.”

I regarded him sternly. “Surely that makes you old enough to realize that murder solves nothing.”

He gave the matter thought. “That’s an extreme generalization and doesn’t hold water. Anyway, I’m ready to make a statement. I shot Andrew Fergusson. It was practically an accident. The gun had a hair trigger and I didn’t know it.”

I indicated the revolver on the desk. “You are referring to this weapon?”

He nodded. “It belongs to Mr. Fergusson. Or did when he was alive. It was in the desk drawer and I was just looking it over when he came into the study and surprised me. Somehow I pulled the trigger and the damn thing went off. It was just one of those things.”

I shook my head sadly. “So you were engaged in robbing your employer?”

“You might say that. Mr. Fergusson, his nephew Rudolph, his niece Henrietta, and that lawyer, Quinlan, were playing bridge in the drawing room like they do almost every night. So I sneaked back here to the study where I knew that he kept some cash in his desk drawer. I thought I’d take that and a few other things and then leave one of the french windows open so it would look like a burglar had broken in.”

My partner Ralph had been taking notes. “You were Fergusson’s gardener?”

Pomfret nodded. “For the last three months.”

Ralph looked up. “Three months? Where did you work before?”

“I was head inmate gardener at the state prison. I served over fifty years.”

I indicated some disbelief. “Fifty years?”