Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

Tonight was a special night for Midnight. It was Susan’s turn. She was the neighborhood femme fatale feline who, several years back, seemed to indicate to frenzied Midnight that the outlook was favorable. But when the poor sap made his move, Susan scathingly rejected him. (“Ha, I might have known. You’re just like all the rest, you animal.”) It was different now. Midnight, who hadn’t meowed since that fateful day in 1994 was the cat’s meow with Susan.

As Clara got up from the dressing table, quite pleased with her appearance, she suddenly thought of something. You know, it was kinda scary the ways things worked out, made you wonder if a higher authority wasn’t pulling the strings.

Then Midnight — dreaming happily — uttered his uncatlike sound. Clara smiled. Use your common sense, woman. Why in heaven’s name would a higher authority waste time here in rundown little Hillsdale, worrying about a dumb animal swallowing a crazy thingamajig, when things like El Niño is raising hell all over the world?

Things just happen. Life’s more harum-scarum than nice and tidy; always has been, always will be. Aristotle couldn’t have said it any better.

The Saga of Tommy Brokenbridge by Dan A. Sproul

When a hurricane forms out in the Atlantic, the whole East Coast gets nervous. Hurricanes always appear headed directly for Florida when they start out. So the people in Florida from the Keys up to about Vero Beach get especially frantic.

This hurricane was still out there almost five hundred miles away, heading right toward Miami. It already had a name: Buford. Alphonsina, who had preceded Buford two weeks earlier, had spun off to the north and died out. But all Buford was doing was growing stronger and getting closer.

As you might imagine, nobody in the Miami area was happy about Buford — nobody except Tommy Brokenbridge.

Brokenbridge was not Tommy’s real name. Tommy played the horses and the numbers. And he played them a lot. When he’d worked at the Bridge Hotel, to his bookmaker he was Tommy Bridge. When he quit the Bridge Hotel, his bookmaker changed Tommy’s name to Tommy Brokenbridge. Just one of the ways bookies have of keeping track of their customers.

Later Tommy started working at one of the beach hotels. But forever after, he was Tommy Brokenbridge. I don’t think I ever heard his real last name.

Tommy was happy about Buford because of the numbers, which I’ll get to in a minute.

My name is Joe Standard. I run Standard Investigations. You’ll have a problem finding Standard Investigations in Dun & Bradstreet because most of my clientele don’t provide the type of high profile cases needed to build the reputation and bottom line requisite to be listed by such a venerable firm. That is not to say that all of my clientele are lowlife scum, but I get a high percentage.

The problem is, I work cheap. I have to. With most of the people who come to me, it’s chicken or feathers. None of them are flush very often. And when they are, they don’t seem to stay that way long.

It all works out because I’ve got a low overhead operation. I have a small office in the back of the Sunbelt Realty Company. There’s a cot in my office just under my big blowup photograph of the illustrious Seattle Slew galloping to glory in his Preakness victory. The cot cuts down on the need for an expensive apartment. And, only two doors down, they put a shower in the can for me. Sunbelt Realty collects only minimal office rent. The place is located in a dangerous part of Miami — my being there helps to keep out the riffraff. So it kind of works out for everybody. But let me get back to Tommy.

I mentioned that Tommy was a gambler. He played the numbers every day — mostly the Cuban bolita. It paid out better than the Florida lottery, but he played that, too, and jai alai and the horses.

Tommy was not a handicapper in the real sense of the word. He just generated numbers: license plates, house numbers, street numbers, Social Security numbers, any numbers that struck his fancy — but most of all, hurricane tracking numbers. When Hurricane Andrew descended on the people of Miami and Homestead, Tommy tracked it all the way in. He hammered the Cuban bolita and also managed to hit five Cash Three’s, three Play Fours, and two Fantasy Fives in the Florida lottery, eight trifectas at Miami jai alai, and an untold number of exactas and trifectas at Calder Race Course. Before Andrew destroyed Homestead, Florida, Tommy had won over one hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars. He bet the longitude and latitude numbers that were being reported on the hour after he plotted them on his hurricane map.

Tommy claims he could have made a million if all the action hadn’t shut down when the hurricane hit. He managed to hold onto the money for over a year before he went bust and had to go back to work as a waiter at the New Horizons Restaurant just down from my office.