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

I was glad not to be Tom McKell. If he hadn’t unknowingly encouraged the woman, if he had been that much more diligent in setting up the raid on the flat...

Once more he wrong-footed me, though. “The ironic part is, Ivy didn’t need to knock him off. That’s another thing the pathologist found out. Grange’s scars and bruises were spectacular, but the worst damage was internal; he wasn’t sulking, he was dying. Dr. Summerson said that even if we had raided the flat in time to stop Ivy, Grange’s chances of recovery were nil by then. When she smothered him, he was already on the way out.”

“Bit of a let-off for you,” I sniffed. Some of McKell’s previous remarks had stung.

“If you choose to regard it in that light.” No good at being stuffy, Tom McKell spread his hands. “I got there in the end. With some help from Tania Wark.”

And a reflective moment later he muttered, “Idleness was what destroyed her.”

“Tania Wark? What had she done?”

Inspector McKell blinked. “Nothing. I was talking about Ivy, she was the lazy one.

“They are lazy, more often than not, professional criminals. Unless lazy is the wrong label and it’s a matter of having a short attention span, same as those monkeys in The Jungle Book,

if you’re familiar with Kipling. The apes made great plans — and forgot ’em next moment. Crooks are like that: know the need for security, hence all the slang and thieves’ argot invented so they can chatter in code. But time and again they spoil themselves. Take a cab right to the front door, too idle to walk a block and leave the cabbie ignorant about their destination. Or rather than destroying all clues at a hideout, they pay somebody to do the donkey work, only it never gets done — that was the Great Train Robbers. It all comes down to laziness.

“Ivy was just the same. There was reason to try for painkillers at Mrs. Wark’s shop, admittedly. But she could have picked up the baby food somewhere else, either in Longdown or, better still, London. Then she might well have got away with it. Instead, painkillers plus baby food made Tania Wark put two and two together, guaranteeing that Ivy was doomed even before she killed the man.

“I asked her why she hadn’t done that, bought his special food from a big outlet. Didn’t say Tania had split on her, naturally; I led Ivy to believe a customer overheard the order, sneaked to us about it.

“And,” McKell challenged, “you’ll never guess her reply, not in a hundred years. Ivy looks at me as if I’m a simpleton, and goes, ‘Easy for you to say, use a bigger shop. But I was already in a chemist’s for the pills, so Ivor’s bloody baby food was right under my nose. Anyway, have you ever tried finding a parking space in Longdown shopping center on a weekday?’

“Though I don’t believe in gloating over clients,” said Inspector McKell, “Ivy tempts me sorely. So clever, discovering where her fancy man kept his loot, taking advantage of thieves falling out... and stupid as they come. She’s still in prison, and richly deserves it. But at least she never walked a step more than she had to, or risked a parking ticket — that must be a great consolation.”

The Wicked Stepcar

by Linda Evans

I read all the current books about blended families before I ever said yes to Donnie. I may have been past thirty, not a beauty, and well aware that single women in my town outnumbered single men by three to one, but I wasn’t about to commit to hell on earth just for a gold ring and a new last name. Donnie has two kids, and I mean has them. Lorene, his ex, ran off with a trucker from Wichita. Donnie said the last he saw of Lorene was her hanging out the window of a yellow eighteen-wheeler, yelling, “Bye, Donald. You keep the kids.”

The stepfamily books were a help, but I’d have fallen in love with Sherri and Little Donnie anyway. Those kids are sweet as they can be. Besides, I never wanted to actually physically birth kids, so Lorene had saved me the trouble and given me an instant made family. My cat Arthur got along fine with Donnie’s bloodhound Frisky, so things should have been perfect. But they weren’t.

It was my stepcar that was troubling my marriage. Every day Donnie drove to his construction job in an old Ford pickup. Pieces could have fallen off onto the road and Donnie wouldn’t mind so long as it got him to work and back. It was his car, a red ’57 Chevy he kept housed in the garage, that he babied like he’d birthed it himself. But that car rolled over my foot all by itself the first time I went near it. Donnie tried to claim he’d accidently left it in neutral. That didn’t make my foot feel any better. While I was still hopping around and whining, that Chevy squirted oil on my new pastel pants suit.

“You hateful car!” I moaned, slapping the hood. “Oil won’t wash out of polyester, I just know it won’t.”

Donnie leaped across a spare tire and grabbed a clean rag off his workbench. He gently polished the hood where I’d touched it while I tried to wring the oil out of my outfit.