Stanley didn’t rush. This was a thing that needed consideration. To knock off a tough guy like this Svengali, this Big Boy Hogan, this killer-mobster and get away with it, would require thought. He waited for days. He spent hours every day with Iris, checking on Big Boy and his habits, figuring how, where and when. He’d have to get him alone, that was sure.
Then he saw Big Boy Hogan for the first time. Iris gave him the address and he hung around, watching them come out together. Big Boy was big, all right, with a rocky, red face. Ordinarily he would have scared Stanley, but it made a difference who was the hunter — and he was confident.
Putting it all together, Stanley figured his play. He was a dip, he was used to operating in crowds, and it was in a crowd that Big Boy could be most alone and least dangerous — and Iris said that Big Boy liked to go to the races.
Iris gave him the tip-off.
The sky was bright blue over the track, small white clouds chasing each other like horses. The stands were filled with the race crowds, bright and dull in dress, fancy and plain; the colors and hues of the clothes made mosaics, faces were calm, anxious, laughing, excited, morose. There were field glasses, the flutter of form sheets and women’s hair. The continuous mob sound rose and fell, from a steady drone to fevered roars when closely-packed horses pounded to a finish.
Stanley was hardly conscious of this around him. His eyes and soul were focused on the backs of Iris and Big Boy Hogan, aisles below. He was waiting for the right time.
He hadn’t wanted Iris to come along with Big Boy. She wouldn’t stay away. She had to watch.
It was after the fourth race that Stanley felt his signal. He saw that Big Boy had won a bet and was heading across the grounds toward the booths to collect, leaving Iris in the stands. Stanley sauntered down, unconcerned.
He met Big Boy coming back with the mob. Big Boy was looking comfortable, race money in his pocket, pretty girl waiting, great day for the horses, nothing about death in his mind. Big Boy was swaggering in checkered jacket crossed by field-glass straps, tawny trousers, cleaving his way, haughty and mighty.
Stanley was wearing dark glasses and a charcoal jacket, in case of blood. At the last moment, Stanley put away the glasses; let it be eye to eye.
Big Boy’s eyes touched Stanley without a bump, moved past like he was a pebble. Stanley floated in. His hands were like eels again, losing substance in the special way of a dip, slipping inside Big Boy’s dappled jacket. Their eyes met this time, and in that split instant Stanley saw that the eyes were human, soft, and he almost wavered; but in that same instant he knew that eyes were only jelly and behind the jelly could live a louse. The sudden anxiety to kill hit Stanley. The knife had slid from sleeve to hand; he was a dip who was putting now, not taking. “Iris,” Stanley said.
He put the knife into Big Boy three times, rapidly. Big Boy might be tough, but his flesh was butter to the knife. Stanley saw the glaze start in the eyes. The knife was back in his sleeve and he was disengaged, past, and moving away. There had hardly been a pause.
Stanley wove within the mob until he was only a distant dot in the pattern. He knew that behind him Big Boy was collapsing, falling. A knot was forming around the body, but murder would not be suspected, at first; a stroke, a heart attack, a sickness, rather. Only when someone discovered the blood would they know... and by then Stanley would be traveling.
Driving away in his car, he looked at his sleeve; a small stain, hard to see, but inside it felt sticky. Stanley began to feel sick. Later, he threw jacket and knife into a sewer.
That night, Iris came to him.
She was like a dark, tender pool. Her face was meek, admiring. “He’s dead,” she said.
“I knew it when he started to die.”
“It was lovely,” Iris said.
He didn’t answer.
“I’m free. His whammy is dead.”
“That’s good,” Stanley said.
“Stanley—”
He hit her. He had never hit a woman before. She reeled away and fell, hand to her cheek.
“Damn you,” Stanley said. “You made me kill. I never wanted to kill. I’m not the same, now.”
She came crawling back. She embraced his knees, lifting her head, tamed, entreating. “He deserved killing,” she purled. “I’m yours now, Stanley, not his. I’ll work for you, I’ll wait on you. Just tell me, I’ll do; show me the hoop, I’ll jump. You’re the new owner, Stanley. I feel a new whammy, and you got it on me.”
Stanley looked at her. There was a flash in his mind. A curtain parted, briefly. There was the double-talk of the shrink — and it was not double-talk. There was Big Boy Hogan, the Svengali, who’d been no Svengali. There were faceless dead men, dead the way Big Boy was dead, for the same reason. There was, in shadows — the shadows of the nearing future — another dead man. It was himself.
The whammy had never been on Iris. It had been on Big Boy, it had been on others, it was now on him.
The curtain closed.
Stanley looked at the beautiful girl, now his. He kissed her... tenderly.
The Man Who Came Back
by Edward D. Hoch
A late husband should always be armed with an infallible alibi.
New York is a sweatbox in August, and Paul Conrad often wondered why the city didn’t simply shut down for the month as Paris did. This August seemed especially bad, with daily temperatures above ninety, and it was no wonder that he thought often of his sister with her cottage on Fire Island. He thought of her, and then went back to his drawing board to work on the winter ad campaigns.
He’d been working nights all month, if only because the office was air-conditioned. After work there was nothing awaiting him but a hot and lonely bachelor’s apartment, with a bar or a movie as the only likely alternatives. He was between girls at the moment, much to his sister’s displeasure. She felt that any man of should be bringing up a family. Helen, two years younger and already on her second husband, had three children from her first marriage, with another on the way.
This night, alone in the agency art department, he was hunched over his drawing board when the telephone rang.
“Paul Conrad?”
“Speaking.”
“Paul, I took a chance on catching you there, when nobody answered at the apartment.”
“Who’s this?” The voice was familiar, and yet some barrier of his mind kept him from identifying it.
“Ralph,” the voice answered.
Ralph. He sat down hard, clutching the telephone as if it might suddenly fly away. “Ralph Jennings?” he whispered, though now he recognized the voice and knew the impossible was true. “You’re alive!”
“I have to see you, Paul. Tonight.”
“Where are you?”
“The Manhattan Manor Motel. It’s over on the west side, near the river.”
“I’ll find it. Are you using your own name?”
“Sure.” He hesitated a moment on the other end of the line and then added, “Paul... don’t tell Helen. Not yet.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
He hung up and sat staring at the phone for several minutes. Ralph Jennings, his sister’s first husband, had returned from a watery grave after five years. The only trouble was, Helen now had another husband.
No, he wouldn’t tell Helen.
The motel room was neat and modem, an impersonal room, but Paul Conrad barely noticed it as he faced the man he’d never expected to see again.
“What happened?” he asked, though he wanted to ask why. Why did you disappear, why did you come back now, why did you call me? Why?