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

Then there was the flat with no parking space, and the Merc kept next door. Not Roger Endaby’s, for he had been away on business, in his own, far more modest, personal transport. The vehicle registry computer at Swansea in Wales had identified Dennis Webb as the Mercedes’ owner.

Webb, so eager to learn more about anyone snooping near the yard next door — and his car — guilt would persuade him. Dennis Webb, the all-around athlete who had won a prize for judo...

A fairly low-paid, professional traveler with too high a lifestyle had to have a racket. Smuggling, no doubt. Put the same person near a suddenly-dead detective, and you were looking at a viable suspect.

“How’d she rumble you, Dennis?”

Webb laughed shakily and planted his palms on the side of the car. “She never did. It was me shooting my mouth off, stupid bastard.”

He sniffed childishly. “Oh, I can make money but my luck’s always been bloody rotten.”

Flinders came close to killing him then. The self pity was enraging.

Webb’s hands squeaked faintly on the metal. He pulled himself together. “She was hanging around too often. I did this long haul, stopover in Sydney, Australia, and she was still here when I got back.

“So I chatted her, like I did you. We even had a drink at that pub on the corner. She slung me a load of bull about her daughter being pregnant; reckoned she was trying to trace the bloke and he worked round here.

“Well, I followed her, she went to Caldwell Green nick. It was killing me. Anyway, I followed her back home that night, went in. Trying to talk a deal, cut her in if it wasn’t too late, if she kept her trap shut.”

His expression turned bitter. “She let me hang myself, then she said she’d been after Rog Endaby all the time, but I’d do for a bonus.

“I went for her, she ran, must’ve been crazy with fear. Broke the mirror on the wall for no reason. I clobbered her, made it look like an accident.”

Flinders exhaled slowly. “What’ve you been running in on those flights of yours?”

“Coke. Not much, not often, but you don’t have to and you still make a bomb. None this time — once bitten, twice shy.” Webb shivered again and added, with little hope, “Listen, we could go partners.”

“Maybe. Who d’you sell to?”

“Two or three blokes. I told you, I don’t bring that much. If you want the main man, there isn’t one.” Webb’s truthfulness was plain. “I just go round the clubs, two or three times a year.”

Flinders stepped back a pace. “That’s it, then.” The pistol came up. Just as he realized that he wasn’t going to squeeze the trigger, Dennis Webb screamed and flung himself sideways and dashed out of the yard.

Brakes yowled in agony, there was a hideous sound of impact and dragging. Dick Flinders put the revolver in his pocket and walked to the gate without showing himself. A truck was slewed across Consort Street at an angle, fender and grille damaged, windshield milky and collapsing onto the hood in countless grains. Dennis Webb’s body was in the gutter nearby. He wasn’t bleeding much. His head was against the curb at an impossible angle, suggesting that the neck was snapped.

“God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”

“Was it worth it?” Inspector Tuckey asked sourly when Detective Sergeant Flinders returned to duty, some days later. “The leave, was it all right?”

Flinders was expressionless. “I suppose I’ve had worse,” he said.

Change by Stephen Wasylyk

The man sprawled on the motel room bed had one of those softly rounded faces that never seem to age until they collapse one day into pouched eyes and sagging jowls, thin brown hair well on its way to disappearing completely. The trousers of the charcoal pinstripe were thrown on the chair over the neatly draped coat, leaving him in an open-collared white shirt with wine-colored tie pulled loose, white shorts, black silk socks, and black shoes.

The hole in the tie, centered like an obsidian tie tack, didn’t match up with the one in the bloodstained shirt.

Not long ago, Hoke Beckett would have stood there burning every detail into his memory banks. Now Nicholson took care of that with his video camera. And better. On tape, the room would remain forever exactly the way it was, every detail fresh whenever he wanted to look at it — in color, from every angle, panoramic and zoomed in and never blurred or distorted by what he might see afterward.

In the new-look Meridian County, that could be anything — so much of anything that it now took twelve detectives to chase it all down while he sat at a desk behind a door lettered CAPTAIN, shuffling papers like the bureaucrats in the county offices above him and giving advice, neither of which he felt born to do.

He stepped out of the room and unleashed Nicholson with a wave. Where once the forensic genius had done everything himself while happily humming Bach, even he had been forced to acquire assistants.