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

“I won’t comment on your taste,” grumbled Gardner. “But the racket was entirely unreasonable. And unseasonable.” He sat back in his chair as pleased with his impromptu rhyme as if he’d just invented some particularly ingenious improvement on the wheel.

“Well, cheer up,” said Strode. “I’m thinking of buying a car one of these days, and if you’re lucky, I’ll move uptown.”

Gardner eyed him with a flicker of derision. “Pretty free with the cash all of a sudden, aren’t you?”

“When you’ve got it, you spend it.”

John T. Drebbel — Hans to his friends — cleared his throat portentously and cracked a knuckle or two before joining the conversation. “If the cash is flowing in as freely as that, Strode, you may have to open a bank account after all.” He nodded after he spoke, a habit of his, as if to underscore the aptness and correctness of his remarks. A pair of glasses with thick round lenses accentuated the froggish tendencies of his features.

“Not on your life,” said Strode. “My folks lost all they had back in the Depression by trusting banks.”

“We’ve heard that story a few times before,” Gardner reminded him. “And how, by the time you came along, they couldn’t afford to send you to school, and you were making your living selling chickens when you were nine.”

“Shoes. When I was thirteen. I’m not ashamed of that. I wouldn’t trade my work record with anybody at this table.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. I never had a disciplinary suspension in my life. Never even had a bad performance evaluation. And never any trouble with the police, either. More than I can say for some folks. And it’s all a matter of record.” He laid particular emphasis on the last word.

“But hardly public record,” asserted Drebbel, with something tentative and even interrogative in his tone.

Boyd Bland let his mashed potatoes get cold while following this exchange of thinly veiled hostilities. He seldom had much to say at the table, but he didn’t miss a word of what the others said.

“Records can get public in a hurry when there’s a reorganization, or a reduction in force,” said Strode. “The dead wood goes first.”

“Who’re you calling dead wood?” countered Gardner, his voice raised now in anger. “Getting pretty big for your britches, aren’t you?”

At this point Mrs. Helm saw fit to intervene. “Don’t let’s argue at the table, gentlemen,” she chided in a sharp tone that effectively put an end to the conversation. “It’s bad for your digestion, if you know what I mean.”

All of Mrs. Helm’s current boarders worked for the same company, a manufacturer of medium-priced traditional furniture whose factory was situated five minutes’ walk from the house. Since each of them worked in a different department, they didn’t ordinarily talk shop at the table.

That had changed since Frank Strode’s recent advancement, abrupt and unforeseen, to the position of personnel director. Over the years Strode had struggled steadily upward despite the lack of a formal education and a regrettable habit of often speaking out of turn and without due reflection.

When the sudden death of a supervisor had led to his promotion, the increase in salary, prestige, and power had gone to his head. Access to a roomful of confidential records gave him the whip hand over people with more education and skill than he, to whom he had been yielding and deferring for years. With Gardner and Drebbel, who had long ago fallen into the habit of baiting and bullying him, he had lately become condescending, demanding, and sarcastic.

After the six o’clock news when Gardner and Drebbel sat down to their nightly chess game the hostilities resumed. Strode turned on his favorite quiz program and pushed the volume up a couple of notches.

The chess players had no intention of standing for this distraction. “They make headphones for the benefit of the deaf,” shouted Gardner, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“And they show the questions on the screen,” added Drebbel with savage sarcasm, “for the benefit of those who can read.”

Strode turned from his program, his controlled manner giving no indication of the rage that churned within him. “And I guess people who can’t read push little statues around on a board, is that it, Hans?”

“Impudence is the first recourse of stunted minds,” announced Gardner, who had once been a high school teacher.

“You know what you can do with your big words,” snapped Strode, his voice rising suddenly to such unaccustomed loudness that Mrs. Helm came in from the kitchen to see what was the matter. She stood in the dining room doorway clutching a dish towel and regarding Strode with brows knitted in disapproval.

But Strode had gone too far to stop now.

“If you two don’t get off my back,” he went on darkly with an ominous tremor in his voice, “you’re going to wish you’d never laid eyes on me. I’ve got enough dirt on both of you to get you fired tomorrow morning. You might even be hearing from the police.”