Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

“Edgar, call my office and tell them to send a car and a couple of uniforms,” puffed Captain LeStreet. “I don’t know how you did it, Edgar, but you certainly came through this time.”

Stony-faced, Edgar reached for the phone with his right hand and his meerschaum with his left. He would need a little calming nicotine before he would be able to explain things to the captain.

The smell of the meerschaum’s smoke was killing LeStreet, but he couldn’t help but smile at Edgar, who was sitting in his office across the desk from him. The local newspaper had proclaimed LeStreet a hero for catching the Bloomingsax shooter so quickly, and Dottie had promised him a celebration sauerbraten for dinner that night. The only thing that could make life better was for Edgar’s next case to take him to New Zealand.

“I knew immediately, of course, that Snodgrass was not a woman,” explained Edgar. “It was a simple matter of deduction. No real redheaded woman would wear an orange dress and carry a brown purse. The colors are all wrong.” He watched the smoke from his meerschaum curl lazily upward from his pipe, only to get caught and ripped apart in the slowly revolving fan blades above the captain’s desk. “Now, the gender of the other party, Edwina Lamore, is another matter. Edwina claimed to be so femininely upset at what happened in my office that she asked, in fact insisted, that Thaddeus accompany her and Foo-Foo home. That was the chance I was waiting for. As they left I whispered to Thaddeus to check out Edwina Lamore’s apartment thoroughly, and not to return until he knew for sure that she was what she pretended to be.”

A buzz from the intercom on the captain’s deck preceded a nasal announcement that a Mr. Thaddeus Dinsmore would like to see the captain and Mr. Snavely. The captain asked the secretary to let him in.

“Well, Thaddeus,” said Edgar as the young man entered, “I hope you did a more thorough job this time.”

Thaddeus blushed and looked at the floor. “I did my best, Mr. Snavely.”

“And you are now convinced that Edwina Lamore is indeed a woman?”

“She sure is,” said Thaddeus.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well, I had to stay all night to do it, but as you suggested, I checked absolutely everything.”

“Very good, young man. You are still young and inexperienced, of course, but I must admit that you now seem to understand that thoroughness is essential in our business. Stick with it, Thaddeus. With a little more maturity you might make a good detective. By the way, do I imagine it, or is your face clearing up a bit?”

Blood Stripe

by William J. Carroll, Jr

The snowman was watching Mount Hood as if waiting for the dawn, with his head tipped slightly forward and leaning a little to the right, and as I jogged past the lookout point and the bench on which the snowman was sitting, I remember thinking that it must have taken a bit of work because the general anatomical detail — the size, shape, and attitudes of the head, trunk, and limbs — was unusually good.

Kids, I thought, but older ones. Clever ones. Maybe an artist among them.

Like Sandy.

Who did watercolors and played the violin and even wrote poetry...

Never mind!

I jogged on past the lookout, puffing steam, and determinedly put my thoughts back on keeping my pace steady.

I was moving downhill in semidarkness, a mile already from the cabin with another easy mile to the ranger station on the other side of Mount Fear. Then it was back and uphill all the way. I’d made the same run three days in a row and knew that finishing depended on my pacing myself on the downhill leg. I wanted to finish, so I shortened my stride and watched the road ahead, feeling pretty good just then, barely straining, wanting a cigarette but knowing I could do without... I’d quit a month ago.

Not for any of the usual, common-sense reasons people have for quitting, but I did quit and was past the edgy, craving stage and into a more relaxed, wouldn’t-a-cigarette-go-good-right-now phase that I could handle with my eyes closed. I just kept going, watching my street-light shadow emerge, lengthen, and disappear under my feet, then reappear, lengthen, and...

I wondered what Sandy was doing.

With her girlfriends down on the California Baja — she’d still be in bed, probably, dreaming young dreams, thinking nothing of me...

Never mind!

I pounded on, listening and watching for traffic as I ran because the narrow mountain road had just been plowed and the waist-high drifts on either side had made the road even narrower.

It was 0620 when I made the ranger station, where I turned around and started back up the way I’d come, the real punishment of my run ahead of me, asking myself every step of the way just what the hell I thought I was doing.