Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 6, June 1999

The daughter went inside and closed the door. For long moments the mother and I just stood there. I could not help wondering if they were giving up on him in there, if I had been too late, with all my banging around and rookie mistakes. What Virginia was thinking was anyone’s guess. Presently she asked with the usual abruptness, “Well, are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what, ma’am?”

“What he was doing up there. How he got in this fix.”

“Well, before the crash, he’d been to see his priest.”

“Confessing all?” Virginia asked, trying to sound hard and cynical and not quite succeeding.

“Don’t know about that,” I answered easily. “I do know about some of the other things he did while he was with Father Dave. If you’re ready to hear.”

She stared at me. “Well?”

I looked at her. Ready or not, I thought, here it comes. “Well, from Father Dave’s office he called his lady friend in Georgia and told her it was over. He called his boss to tell him he’d be making restitution for the money he stole. He called Detective Shanahan to tell him he was turning himself in. He called Shyla to tell her everything was getting fixed.” Virginia’s expression did not change. I thought my words were just bouncing off her, bouncing off the armor of her preconceived notions. “I know these things for a fact.”

“And then,” she said, “he took off from there, headed for the airport. He was blowing town. He did all that stuff to throw everyone off the scent—”

“That’s one way to connect the dots,” I cut in. “But there’s another way.”

She was looking at me intently now. “Yes?”

“Number one, if he were headed for the airport, he’d have turned west. Instead, he kept going south. You know where he was bound for, Virginia. You know it in your heart.”

“Where?” she asked, voice small.

“To your house. To see you. My guess is, to beg for your forgiveness.”

Just then came Shyla’s voice from inside the exam room: “Yes!”

Virginia blinked. Her throat worked She cupped her mouth with a hand that trembled I reached for the doorknob and opened the door. With a last glance at me, Virginia dashed through, and the door eased shut again.

Suddenly alone, I stared at the closed door. Reached out for the knob again, hesitated, let my hand drop. Under these circumstances the last thing they needed was me hanging around. I had never felt so suddenly useless. For a moment the unfairness of it blazed in my mind. Over already? Where was the applause, the admiration, the atta-boys? Where were the simple thank-yous, for heaven’s sake?

But this too I remembered from the old days. The better the job you’ve done for a client, the less you exist for them when the job is over. Once they’re out of the woods, clients make haste to forget how desperate they were for your help. It’s just human nature.

But that was okay, I thought as I headed for the exit. I had, after all, promises to keep and better things to do. Such as go home and change out of my wet clothes and then pick up the girl of my dreams from her daycare.

Lin Po and Dragon’s Blood

by B. H. Schrier

Toward evening the rain chilled to sleet and the crazy cobbled streets glazed with ice, too slippery for riding a bicycle. Lin Po’s thighs were soaked. Water ran down his neck as he pushed the handlebars, threading his way through stalled traffic in the wintry darkness. He heard the impatient piping of an ambulance approaching.

Around the next turn he came upon a frantic scene. At a construction site a heavy steel scaffold had fallen, blocking the street. There was one officer on duty, a woman from Traffic Control. He parked his bike and took charge, diverting traffic around the jammed intersection, making room for the ambulance.

Three persons were carried off in it. When a team arrived from the local precinct, Lin looked for the construction boss, who labored with his crew to disassemble the wreckage and clear the street.

Lin Po was off duty, but he felt it his duty to ask a question or two. “What was the cause of this, in your opinion?”

The boss, and Lin Po did not ask his name, snarled, “It is enough just clearing the accursed street. Who has time to look for excuses?” His hard hat dripped little icicles, and he did not stop his labors but helped two other men lift a section of scaffolding into a heavy truck.

Rebuffed, Lin Po went to the base of the scaffold, where it was obvious the incident had begun. The pipe scaffold had fallen four stories in a crazy twisted shape. With his flashlight Lin Po examined each joint that had separated and the mud nearby.

The scaffold was made with heavy steel pipes assembled with steel pins, the pins held in place by “keeper” rings. There were eight places where the pipes had come apart, and those eight sockets were empty of pins. Look as he might, Lin found no place where the pins had fallen to the mud. The eight pins had disappeared or never existed.