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

“I’ll take my chances. Move over there next to your friend.”

I got off the chair and did as she said. The gun was very steady. She reached behind her with her left hand, pulled open the drawer next to the one that had held the gun, and took out a handful of the sort of heavy hemp cord that’s used for tying large parcels.

“Tie each other’s ankles with this.” She threw the loose cord toward us. It made it only halfway. She came across the room and kicked at it. She was now about five feet from us, and Joe did a foolhardy thing: he made a hard kick for the gun in her right hand. With nine women out of ten it might have worked, but she had the shot off before his foot struck her hand. I saw him go down as the gun flew back over her shoulder, landing next to the sofa. We both dived for it, but she had her hand on it before we reached it. I grabbed her wrist with both hands and put on all the pressure I could. Her grasp on the automatic loosened quickly, but not before we’d tumbled around a bit and she’d dug her teeth into my arm. Even after she dropped the gun she didn’t stop fighting, lashing out at me with her hands and feet and landing one very good kick into my left shin. Finally I had to bear-hug her from behind to protect myself. Joe was getting to his feet. “Where’d it hit you?” I asked.

“Shoulder. I’ll be all right.” He held his hand against the wound. His face showed that the slug hurt.

“Get your gun out,” I said. “I can’t hold her like this forever.”

“I thought maybe you were enjoying it,” Joe said and got his gun out.

As I’d expected, she wasn’t very cooperative downtown, but we gradually got the story. It was essentially as I’d surmised. If ever a man had helped to arrange his own murder it was Claude Wingfield. He had made the play for her, had proposed the ski vacation, and suggested all the precautions. He’d had some paranoid notion that his wife was having him followed for an expensive divorce action.

On the day of the murder, she had said she was tired and would stay at the lodge. He’d gone up the mountain himself, and she had then redyed her hair brunette, left the lodge, and found him on the slopes. The snowfall had been providential, but she would have shot him in a deserted spot in any case.

While she was coming out with it, Joe put a call through to Chief Hewitt to tell him his homicide was solved.

The next morning we were on Route 80 again. I drove because of Joe’s shoulder.

“When did you suspect it might be the brunette?” he asked.

“That night at the bar. Some murderers are like a person with a scab — they can’t leave it alone. She had to have a few words with the man who had found her victim. But my real suspicion started when the Losser lead didn’t pan out. That’s when I rethought everything and decided to check the municipal-scandal angle. The call to Mrs. Wingfield gave me the information that the man who’d committed suicide had a daughter about the right age. The trip to the Register’s photo files told me the daughter was our brunette from Colorado. Then it was just a question of checking the phone book.”

“Too bad you didn’t do this on your own beat,” Joe said.

“Maybe Chief Hewitt will put in a good word for us,” I said. “You know, in one respect this has a happy ending.”

“How?”

“Mrs. Wingfield gets to keep his money without having to keep her miserable excuse for a husband.”

The Cathedral Oven by Floyd Warneke

I’ve been eating at Jake Elkhorn’s Cathedral Barbecue ever since the day four years ago when I caught that first glorious whiff of smoldering hickory wafting across the swan pond. Jake’s hole in the wall was three blocks from the park, between a radio supply house and a discount carpet racket, but I could have found it at night, blindfolded in a blizzard, just by following my nose. Any true barbecue disciple could have done the same. Long slow smoking over a hickory fire is the hallmark of genuine barbecue. Some joints pile a few logs in the foyer, just for show, and think they can get away with smearing some doctored tomato juice on boiled beef bones, but the smell is the giveaway. If you live in New York or California, you don’t know what I’m talking about. You think you’re barbecuing ribs when you warm them over a shallow pile of charcoal briquettes in your back yard. That’s not barbecue. That’s sterilization.

I could have cried with joy when I walked into the Cathedral Barbecue for the first time. There was Jake behind the counter, a glowing fat man in a white apron and a squashed chef’s hat, surrounded by piles of black fragrant chicken splits, briskets of beef, and slabs of ribs piled literally shoulder high, still gleaming from the oven. And the oven! A brick shrine worthy of the generic description cathedral, with two big iron doors, one of which was open to reveal, through the smoke, slabs of ribs on racks and on hooks, briskets, even a huge turkey.