Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990
Editor’s Notes
by Cathleen Jordan
Here we are again, as promised in recent issues of AHMM, with another special issue, bringing you virtually twice as much fiction as we do in our regular issues. And as before, it’s a mixture of new stories and ones from the past that we particularly enjoyed.
“And Down She Lay,” for instance, probably our all-time favorite from Jeffry Scott. “Storm Over Longvalley,” the first and somehow the sunniest, despite the troubles therein, in a fine collection by Jessica Callow. And “Variations on a Scheme,” surely one of Jack Ritchie’s most entertaining.
Which is not to say that the new stories aren’t right up there, too! Gary Alexander, who has been making a hit with his Superintendent Kiet novels, introduces us this time to Jakarta, with all the flavor of that part of the world. Arthur Porges goes farther yet, not only far away but long ago, with a surprising and fascinating tale. And Alec Ross takes us delightfully into the world of spies and small boys.
And, of course, that’s not all. Here is a grand total of seventeen stories, for your pleasure. We pass them along with the same.
By Night Disguised
by Donald Olson
With its chandeliers, blood-red carpeting, and ageless, dignified furnishings, the lobby of the Kerbridge Residential Hotel creates much the same effect as the East Side mortuary where Eric had worked as an attendant before taking the job of night clerk at the Kerbridge; a similar atmosphere as well, an impression of hushed, genteel regard for the amenities of the living as tastefully unobtrusive as those for the dead at the mortuary.
“Mostly old duffers, retired professionals,” Eric’s predecessor had explained. “You’ll rarely see a living soul between midnight and dawn — except Miss Beaujean.”
“Miss Beaujean?”
“Miss Leda Beaujean, a lady of the theater who’s been ‘resting’ for years. Or should I say nesting?” he’d added with a leer. Like Eric, this young man was also an aspiring actor who, failing to make any headway in New York, had decided to try his luck on the Coast. “You know what I mean, kid. Love-nesting. She has this mysterious gentleman friend who pays her rent and visits her twice a week. Once a week lately, which I think has Miss Leda worried — the reek of eau de cognac’s been growing stronger.”
From this Eric pictures a gabby showgirl type, all glitz and giggles, and is therefore quite unprepared for the reality when a couple of nights later the elevator doors open and a woman wearing what might easily pass for a garment of the bedchamber glides across the lobby to where Eric leans on the desk studying the script of an off-Broadway play for which he hopes to audition. A cloud of streaky blonde hair frames a squarish face which betrays its age in those areas of the jaw and neck where makeup, liberally applied elsewhere, cannot disguise the process. Yet something of the unsoiled innocence of childhood lingers in the melting softness of her smile as she reaches out and taps Eric’s wrist with a playful spanking gesture.
“You’re the new young man. And an actor, Jimmy told me. Welcome to the Kerbridge, darling. I’m Leda Beaujean, in 351.” The contralto voice, huskily intimate, breathes the faintest whiff of brandy across the desk. “Please don’t tell me the pharmacy hasn’t yet delivered an itsy-bitsy package for me.”
Eric smiles and reaches under the counter. “It came a few minutes ago.”
She takes it with another airy flick of her wrist. “Divine of the drugstore, isn’t it, to provide us with these sweet little nuggets of slumber.”
Eric politely inquires if she has trouble sleeping, trying to recall if he’s ever seen her face before, which isn’t likely, as Jimmy had said her career had never progressed beyond the fringes of the legitimate theater.
“Only recently,” she murmurs. “Not that I ever try to sleep before dawn.” Her luminous gray eyes range around the lobby with a cozily approving smile. “That’s what I adore about the Kerbridge. I can waltz down and while away the small hours quite as if I’m the lady of the manor and this my drawing room. While the gentlemen enjoy their brandy and cigars. Do you like brandy and cigars, darling?”
“My budget won’t let me, I’m afraid.”
“My friend likes brandy and cigars.” She drifts across the lobby, peers through the etched-glass doors beyond which the sounds of traffic are already muted. “Don’t you adore Manhattan when it snows?”
“Snow’s no novelty to me. I’m from Minnesota.”
She whirls gracefully. “I played summer stock in Minnesota back in the Dark Ages. Be nice to me and I’ll do my Blanche Dubois for you one of these nights. Have you done any Williams?”
“Only in class.”
Her searching gaze seems to weigh his potential as an actor. “Yes, I see you as Tom in Menagerie. Remember? ‘I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further, for time is the longest distance between two places.’ Give me that line, darling.”
Ruefully amused, Eric straightens, clears his throat, and speaks the words.
Miss Beaujean claps her hands. “Yes! Yes! You’ve got that quality. Oh, how I envy you, darling, just starting out. I’m resting, you know. The parts simply aren’t there any more. We have no Inge, no Williams. The contemporary theater is all—” she flutters her hands, searching for the word “—all vibration now. No resonance.”
Eric nods agreement, with no idea what she means by this. She crosses to a velvet-covered sofa between two columns, picks up a copy of the Times, gives it a restless glance, flings it down and moves toward the elevator, tossing Eric a smile over her shoulder. “Sweet dreams, darling. I must tell my friend about you when he returns from his trip. Mr. Swann is a V.I.P., you know, and I do not mean Very Important Person.”
With this enigmatic remark she vanishes behind the sliding doors. An even deeper silence settles upon the deserted lobby, as if the faintest noise from the world outside is muffled by the fat white butterfly flakes of snow that fall soundlessly against the windows.
“ ‘They told me to take the streetcar named Desire.’ ”
With this or some other line from one of her favorite dramatist’s plays Leda would appear after midnight, rescuing Eric from the dragging monotony of seemingly endless nights by doing bits and pieces of scenes from these plays. Leda’s southern accent was a shade too ripe, but her performance was flawless, at least to Eric’s still untutored ears; he could only assume that her career might have suffered from her limitations, of her being inescapably typecast in the lost lady roles of those mid-century plays of a certain character which she held in such high esteem. Infatuated as he was by the theater and its glittering promises, Eric could not believe anyone would give it up for love, and he was eager for his first glimpse of the mysterious gentleman friend for whom Leda had exchanged such an exciting life, for what seemed to him a narrow and confined existence. He wondered if she had any social life whatsoever, as she never went out while he was on duty and presumably slept away most of the daylight hours. “Our resident Garbo,” Jimmy had called her.
One night, when she seemed in too restless a mood to venture a Blanche or an Alma or a Mrs. Venable and drifted about the lobby in an especially pungent cloud of eau de cognac, Leda suddenly interrupted one of her rambling excursions into the past to cry, “But it’s all in my trunk of memories, darling. I say, do let’s sneak upstairs and I’ll show you. No one will know you’re playing hooky from the morgue.”