Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

My head was throbbing pretty badly by that hour, but otherwise, with this information in hand, I felt all right. It was only ten thirty-five by the clock on the wall, which meant that we — Ginny and I — were over eleven hours ahead on the time by which I’d told Sammons that the case would be wrapped up. The only difficulty remaining was that the aforementioned clock hung over a doorway, and in that doorway stood Barb Becker with a small automatic pistol in her hand.

“Get away from my desk!” she said in a harsh, unnatural voice. I felt Ginny give a start beside me. “Get up! Get away from my desk!”

We stood together and edged slowly between various pieces of furniture toward the opposite side of the room. I attempted to shield Ginny from the gun by turning away from Barb Becker while Ginny walked backwards, facing me. For a second or two we were close together, close enough for Ginny to reach into my coat pocket and pull out the target pistol. “Hold off,” I whispered, then turned around, keeping Ginny behind me. “You’re too late,” I said.

“Shut up,” the woman replied. She walked in a jerky motion to the desk and stared down at the open files spread across it. “What right have you — you think you’re so smart, don’t you? You and your ugly face! I can’t stand to look at you!” She threw down a set of keys and flopped like a stick puppet into the chair but managed to keep the pistol pointed toward us. With her free hand she pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her coat pocket, extracted a cigarette, put it between her lips, and lit it.

“Who’s with you?” she said, after two deep inhalations. “Let me see her.” She waved the gun barrel from side to side.

I grabbed Ginny’s hand holding the target pistol and clenched it behind my thigh as she stepped to my side. “This is my wife Ginny,” I said. And then, just to try it out, I said, “And this, Ginny, is Barb Becker, wanted on suspicion of the attempted murder of Judy Pilske.”

“No, I’m not!” she shouted. Her face became even more distraught than it had been. “No, I’m not! That was my precious little lamebrain lover, Mike!”

“You’ve got the gun,” I said.

“I took it from him — can’t you see that? Then maybe you’re not so smart! He’s around here someplace tonight — pretty little Mikey — hauling garbage. I hope I never see him again!”

“He talked you into this?”

“Yes, yes, yes! Mike and his uncle, who else? He was going to make a killing, and no one would ever know. Then he’d go straight — straight to Hell — and we’d get married. God!”

When she stood up, I let go of Ginny’s hand and said, “Let me have the gun, Barb.”

“No! I’m going to shoot you down — you big smart-ass! And then that little dumb-ass, Mike.” She gestured wildly and then started to shake.

I said, “But the gun’s empty, Barb. You can’t shoot anyone with it.” That was the clue I’d been looking for in the restroom the previous night and hadn’t found. I stepped forward slowly with my hand held out, while she stared at me with an expression of intense loathing.

Then Ginny said, “Miss Becker, please give the pistol to my husband, or I’ll be forced to shoot it out of your hand.” As Ginny moved two paces over and assumed the stance of a marksman, Barb’s eyes turned reflexively in response. That was when I grabbed her hand quickly and yanked the pistol from it, then popped out the empty clip and held it up for Ginny to see.

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” Barb Becker cried.

Even with my head throbbing, I managed to block her sudden rush toward the door.

Part V

“Well, the truth is, sometimes these things look more complicated than they are.”

The date was December twenty-third of that same year, and I was seated in a small, private visitors’ lounge at Northwest Hospital, along with Ginny, Frank Malin, Jim Sammons, Mr. and Mrs. Stan Pilske, and their daughter Judy — still on one intravenous feed, still weak enough to be in a wheelchair, but mending fast and strong enough, according to her physician, to hear the whole story. Strong enough also, I hoped, to see me without a relapse: the stitches I wore across my forehead made me look even more than usual like a Halloween freak.

“The thing really began last July,” I said, “when a man named Mike Corcoran, only I’m going to call him Mike Cooksey, got out of prison. He’d done three years straight time — not the kind of guy the parole board goes for — but when he got out he headed right for Barb Becker’s door.”

“Barb?” Judy said. “Not my Barb Becker!”

Jim Sammons was sitting beside her, strangely enough, and he said, “Yes, Judy, I’m afraid it was.”

She started to cry. He took her hand and offered his handkerchief in what I took to be a very ecumenical spirit. “Go on,” she said. “I can stand it. That’s the worst you can tell me. She’s my best employee — my friend. How...?”