Sam hesitated for several long seconds, then shrugged. “No point beating a dead horse, I guess,” he said. He took out the money, except for six hundred in his inside jacket pocket, and set it on the coffee table next to the ashtray. “I guess you were smarter than I gave you credit for, Helen,” he said.
Helen looked at the money without moving to pick it up. “Why did you do it, Sam?”
Sam shrugged again. “What can I say?” he said. “I needed the money. I wish it was different. But the opportunity was there and I just couldn’t pass it up.”
Helen looked past him. “Like that night in the bar,” she said, “when that little man tried to pick me up.” Her face began to work. “Damn you,” she cried. “That’s all I ever was to you, wasn’t I? An opportunity.”
Sam thrust out his hands defensively. “No,” he said. “No, I—”
But her finger had already tightened around the trigger and the sharp crack of the automatic cut him off before he could finish.
The Music from Downstairs
by John Lutz
Whoever he was, Lorna, he blew a beautiful trumpet. Like Gabriel.
I know what you and the people at the church must think of me, and, believe it or not, that’s the worst part. I know most of all what you must think, and sometimes at night I just wish I could die and be rid of the shame.
But it mustn’t be in God’s plan for me to die yet.
The apartment over Nat’s Club was all I could afford. I’d never have moved into a place like that unless I was sure I’d find a job, and that I’d be able to move before sending for you.
But there isn’t much demand here in the city for a man who spent twenty years working in a coal mine. I guess, what with the mine being closed for six months now, Haleville is in pretty rough shape. We were wise to decide to move, but it was one of those things that didn’t happen to work out, especially for you and the kids. Believe me, that’s who I’m thinking of most.
Not being a drinker, I never set foot in Nat’s Club. The entrance to my upstairs apartment was in back, and after a glance or two at the flashing red neon sign over the door, I never paid any attention to what went on there.
Except for late at night, when the trumpet player went into his solo.
Some people might have called the police and complained about the noise. But from the first the music soothed me. Those clear notes would come drifting up through the bare wood floors and fill the dark bedroom with a peacefulness I could almost touch. It was like the sad-sweet core of life, set to music. I’d lie there for hours thinking about you and the kids, and how it would be when I found a job and sent for you. I was glad then that the mine had closed. I always hated working underground.
Every night those gold rising notes would carry me off somewhere until I slept, making all the walking I’d done that day, all the useless job interviews and applications, seem not to matter.
After a while, the trumpet music somehow-stayed with me through the days. It got so I could almost turn it off and on, like an imaginary radio that played the same lonely notes over and over.
Did I tell you the trumpet music was lonely? It wasn’t a song you could name. It was the same every night but not the same. “Improvisation,” I found out they, call it. That’s music that’s supposed to come from the soul, and whoever played the trumpet must have had a soul like mine.
Lorna, I missed you. I swear that’s what caused it. I was lonely, and one night there was this Doris Rollins at the bus stop, and we talked. It began innocently. It’s important to me that you know that.
She never had what happened in mind any more than I did. She told me all about her family, and I told her all about you and Billy and Jill. I could sense she was lonely too, and we became friends.
About that time the trumpet music changed. Or maybe it was me that changed. The same full rich notes would drift up at night, but now there was something more forlorn in them. Not that the music wasn’t more beautiful than before — more beautiful than we even heard in church, Lorna — but now it was sad and kind of yearning-like.
The music was playing when Doris phoned me. It was eleven o’clock at night and she was crying. Her husband had beat her, she said. She needed a friend, Lorna. She came to me, and I became more than a friend. I didn’t dream you’d ever find out, much less that things would turn out this way.
She came to me often after that, in the early hours of the morning, before she went to work. That first night she’d gone back to her husband — she said she always did, that she had no choice, for the kids’ sake. I guess that’s what life’s all about, Lorna, finding out we don’t have the choices we thought we had. Now I’m down to no choices at all.
I was stretched out on my back on the bed with my eyes closed, listening to the music from downstairs, when I heard the door buzzer. It was past eleven-thirty, so I was surprised to see Doris at the door. She started to cry as soon as she looked at me.
Naturally I thought her husband had beat her up again, but that wasn’t it. I helped her cross the room and sit down in the worn-out armchair. She told me she was pregnant.
I was stunned, Lorna. But even standing there with the wind almost knocked out of me by the news, I got to thinking. She was a married woman, and the odds were good that her husband was the father.
But she told me her husband couldn’t be the father, that he’d had some sort of sickness that had left him sterile. And besides, he hadn’t slept with her in months. It was his sickness that caused him to beat her.
She said she’d told him about us, that she’d had to. And that now I had to tell you.
It was strange what happened then. All I could think about was my loneliness for you, and I felt first a great sadness, then a hate and anger for Doris — a rage. I don’t remember picking up the ashtray and hitting her on the head with it. They didn’t believe that in court, but it’s true.
They didn’t believe much of what I said in court. Not after I told them about the trumpet music and they told me that Nat’s Club had been closed for two months before Doris died.
Now I’ll spend the rest of my life in a cell like this one, and I guess I deserve to. They say I’m a menace, even to myself. That’s why they’ve taken everything away from me that might be used as a weapon. At least they think they have.
And if it was lonely in that apartment over the club, it’s more lonely here. And monotonous. It s sameness that can drive a man really crazy. Like day after day in the mines.
The only thing to occupy my mind here is the drummer in the cell below. I figure he must be a professional drummer, because he has a perfect sense of rhythm.
He beats on the walls constantly. It helps.
I know you have to leave, Lorna, but before you go, will you move a little closer to the bars? So I can reach you.
Murphy’s Day
by Ernest Savage
I could hear Henry Taylor breathing in my ear through the receiver, and he could probably hear me breathing in his.
“Twenty thousand,” he had said, “isn’t a hell of a lot of ransom to ask in this day and age,” and I’d agreed with him. Now we were thinking about it, each in his own way.
I’d taken his call at ten-thirty in my apartment. He was at his office and had just finished a conversation with the kidnapper of his wife, Bella. A man had just told him he could have her back for $20,000 and I think it bruised his pride. Twenty thousand dollars is what you pay for a car, not a wife. I would have put him in the hundred-thousand-dollar ransom class, minimum; and he would put himself higher than that, I thought. He had the inflamed ego of all self-made zillionaires.