Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

I had a small hand torch and I muffled its light in my handkerchief. I went to his study first. I found them in the first drawer of the desk I pulled back. It was the top right-hand one and unlocked, almost as though I was intended to find what was there. In a manilla folder were some sheets of paper covered with a hand-writing that seemed familiar. It wasn’t Parker’s. I read the top one:

I cannot go on any longer. My nerves have gone in the struggle. I had genius but because I was born a poor man it has been stillborn. Because one must eat, so much of my energies have been dissipated on hack work. Yet I know I could have reached the heights. I have had a generous patron but he cannot help me any longer...

I felt the back of my neck going cold and the hair stiffening. It was my writing! Or, rather, Parker’s imitation of it and a diabolically good one, too. And there was my “signature” — my bank would have paid on it.

On impulse I took one of the notes — all were phrased much the same, and in some my “handwriting” was better, if possible — and stole back to my cottage. I had no conscious reason in taking the forged note and its theft has undoubtedly made my death even more inevitable. Parker will not spare me now.

On the Monday another check was due from Parker. Instead I received an unctuous note regretting that he could no longer buy my paintings. I knew then that the blow would come swiftly. But from whence?

That was yesterday. I thought of going to the police, in my first moments of panic. Then I realised that in the eyes of the law a blackmailer is little better than a murderer, whatever his motives. If I went to the police I should never finish my great picture. I should spend years of cruel, frustration in jail that would erode my talent.

Since I made the decision I have worked frenziedly on my masterpiece. In it lies my immortality. A few hours and it will be finished.

The rat scampers in the ceiling. Today I posted a letter to my solicitor, to be opened after my death. It contains an account of all this and the forged note I stole from Parker. It is enough to hang him.

Disorderly by Barry N. Malzberg

In life she had been untidy. But the way she died seemed too neat to be real.

* * *

Henry Wilson came home at six to find his wife Flora lying quite dead on the sofa, an open bottle of barbiturates clenched in her left hand, a suicide note draped across her chest.

Carefully putting down his briefcase and washing his hands from knuckle to elbow, Henry straightened out the house, closed the window shades and then picked up the note and read it.

Dear Henry: I am sorry to do this but it is the only way for both of us. You have made your life intolerable and now you have done the same to me. I can no longer live in a house like a glass cage and I cannot leave because — and this is the truth — there is no other way of life for me. So I leave you and I hope that things will be better for you and for me. I hope too that you learn something. Your wife, Flora.

The note was typed and she had not signed it.

Henry looked at it and his wife’s body for a very long time; then he straightened out the house a bit, getting the furniture back in place and raising Flora’s corpse so that he could take some of the minute dust off the couch. He flicked the shades a few times, put the desk in order — Flora had left the typewriter uncovered — and then, when he was sure that everything was in place, he picked up the phone and called the police.

“My wife has killed herself,” he said. “I came home to find her on the couch. It was an overdose of (Sleeping pills. No, she’s dead; I checked her breathing. I live at sixteen West Street on the ground floor. My apartment has a white door. I just painted it last week.”

“Hold on,” said a competent voice, “and we’ll be right out.”

“She’s dead,” Henry repeated and hung up.