Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

Then and there I decided, oh, let him keep the picture. Who am I to deprive this neat old artist of his precious picture? Who really cares about an old painting anyhow? Most dumb people don’t even take the time to look. So, what with everything, we were talking away over a fine dinner. He had opened the curtains that covered the painting and, man, after a while I felt like I was back in Venice eating and drinking and being merry and he was yabbering about that egg tempera technique and I was feeling like an idiot. Me and my fantasies. Maybe the picture was a copy. Who cares?

Then, after we’d burped for a while and he’d put the dishes in the tiny sink, he said, sort of grandly, “And now, lad, for the egg tempera process.”

He cleared the table of the rest of the stuff and brought out all the paint and the eggs and a hunk of wood with gesso on it. Then he started to tell me all about it and pretty soon I was all involved messing with the paint and leaning over the table with the kerosene lamp in the middle of it. He was kind of pussyfooting around in back of me while I got more and more into what I was doing.

Suddenly the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I glanced at the kerosene light and saw, so help me granny, his reflection. His lips were peeled back, and the glints from that stiletto were just too much. I jumped aside, pushing the table over, and everything fell off with a big crash and the old kerosene just went spoosh

and everything was on fire. By now he was screaming — the flames had got to the Calagria — and suddenly he turned into a devil and I was running out the door and he was after me. With that and the old shack burning up like crazy, I thought goofily, oh, man, there goes the beautiful picture.

I headed out toward the open field and then I saw this open well, so I zigged a bit and zapped around it and there he was on the other side holding that knife and by now I didn’t know what I was doing. I was plain mad, so I thought, well, dammit, he tried to get me, so I’ll get him

because he’s dangerous. I grabbed a stick lying on the ground and we had a duel right there, round and round that open well. Then he let fly with the stiletto. I ducked, and whiz, down came my stick on his skull and he went flat and hit his head on the side of the well. I knelt down and saw that poor old Lawrence Weber Weeves was as dead as could be. I started crying. Then I heard the volunteer firemen coming, so after scrabbling around in the weeds, I found the stiletto and tossed it in the well.

I sort of went into shock for a while. Finally I told everybody we were having dinner when the lamp got knocked over and we ran outside and he tripped over the well.

After that I kind of kept to myself. I think I cried for a month or two. Then one night I bought myself some French bread, salami, and wine, sat down at my table, and had a sort of memorial dinner for him.

A couple of weeks later I found a reproduction of the Calagria at the bookshop. I framed it and it’s on my wall. Man, I really get lost in that thing, like I was there!

Sometimes I even feel like I’m one of the people in the picture — or maybe old Calagria himself. I’ve been working with egg tempera and I’m doing a copy of the Venice Street Scene, or the Venice Canal Scene, actually. It’s got everything — women haggling about the price of fish; orange rinds floating in the canal; dandies swaggering; clothes blowing on lines strung from one building to another; tarts with bleached hair and scandalously low necklines strutting beside the water; gondolas being propelled by muscular gondoliers. The true Venice. The Venice then. I sometimes get back there, back where I should have been in the first place. I was born in the wrong century.

In by Ten, Dead by Five or, Murder at the Dry Cleaners

by Michele Stone Kilmer

The glare of neon lights pulsed through the grimy window like a psychedelic hangover, splashing color all over the steel, Formica, and linoleum interior. This was the dry cleaners: by day, a haunt for workers and the occasional customer. But, at night, after the people left and the lights went out, it was a different world. Then it was my world. The name’s Macintosh. I’m a trenchcoat.

It was raining hard the night the skirt came looking for me. I’d been lifting a few with Tommy the Tweed over at the spot-cleaning bar when she slid in like a bar of wet soap. In this neighborhood you see a lot of skirts but not like this one — long and slim, hot red with a deep slit that could unravel your seams. Unlike the rags you usually see around here, she had class. She smelled of money. One hundred percent silk — definitely not my type.

“Mr. Macintosh?” she asked in a voice that slid like satin off an ironing board.

“That’s me, sister,” I agreed. “What can I do for you?”