The strong taste of the cocoa along with the sugar would disguise the taste of the sleeping powders. Miss Dewey tested it with her tongue. Not much taste anyway.
“Would you like marshmallows in your cocoa?” Miss Dewey called out pleasantly to the woman.
“Marshmallows?” she replied uncertainly. “Well, I guess so. Might be fun.”
Miss Dewey was already weary of playing the pleasant host. She couldn’t go on like this forever, either. Smiling at people just to placate them? She shuddered involuntarily. The thought frightened her far more than what she was about to do. Besides, it was self-defense, really. One of them had to go, and if it went on like this, it would be she.
Miss Dewey carried the tray in carefully, remembering that the mug with the marshmallows belonged to that woman. She had wisely left her own mug plain. The woman drank the hot cocoa greedily and all too quickly. But that was a boon because it didn’t take long before the woman started getting sleepy. She hadn’t complained at all about the taste. It had been almost too easy.
“You look like you need to nap,” Miss Dewey suggested.
The woman blinked her eyes like an overfed toad. “I really am very tired. Maybe I could just take a catnap here,” she added, stretching out her legs and lying down. In her dark clothes she looked like a skinny black cat, except for all that peroxided hair sticking out.
Oh no you don’t, thought Miss Dewey. She pulled the woman to her feet and helped her to the door. “You’ll be much more comfortable upstairs in your own flat.” Miss Dewey opened the door slowly and peered out into the front hall. No one about. That was a spot of luck. With the woman’s arm draped over her shoulders, they made it up the stairs and through the unlocked door. The woman’s flat, not surprisingly, was extremely untidy, clothes dropped in the most unlikely places and opened tins of food lying around, collecting flies. Miss Dewey grimaced. Panting heavily, she dropped the woman on the shabby settee.
She wondered whether the dose had been enough to kill the woman. It hadn’t been a well thought-out plan, a crime of passion, really. She couldn’t be sure whether the woman would actually die, could she? And what if she didn’t? Then what? As she considered the possibilities, a significant, unattended detail struck her full force. If the woman died, which she must, Miss Dewey had decided, the police would want to know where the sleeping tablets had come from. They had to have come from somewhere. There would need to be an empty prescription bottle lying about, and Miss Dewey certainly couldn’t give her the one from her own flat, with her own incriminating name on it.
It was most unlikely that the woman had the same prescription as Miss Dewey, but she searched through the cabinets in the w.c. and the kitchen anyway. Predictably, there was nothing. The woman wasn’t on any medication at all. Miss Dewey felt a rising panic. She was desperate now, and it was certainly too late to turn back and reconsider her plan.
She glanced around the disorderly flat and eyed the gas stove in the connecting kitchen. Of course, she thought with relief. That would cover things up nicely. Death from asphyxiation would disguise the fact that the woman had previously been fed sleeping tablets. They wouldn’t even check, would they? The woman was clearly depressed; it would be easy to chalk it all up to suicide. Miss Dewey walked over to the stove and turned it on, leaving the oven door open wide. Before leaving, she checked to see if the windows were shut tight. They were. Then she checked to see if the woman was sound asleep. She was. Miss Dewey looked out into the corridor and saw that it was still deserted. She shut the door and hurried back down to her own flat, feeling lightfooted and understandably relieved. Her chest pain was gone; a considerable burden had been lifted.
Until Miss Dewey returned to her own flat, however, she hadn’t considered that the other tenants might eventually smell the gas fumes. She had to be out of the building, just in case. She went for a walk in the light drizzle, making an unlikely stop at a nearby museum, then checking in at the library. By the time she returned a few hours later, the woman upstairs had been discovered. An ambulance was parked out in front. She heard an officer say suicide to Mr. Trainor, and nothing we could do.
The next few weeks were positively blissful. Miss Dewey felt much better physically, and she had returned to her tidy, predictable life. She didn’t bother Mr. Trainor nearly as often, and he responded in kind by refusing to let the vacated flat upstairs to a couple of musicians (intent on practicing their loud instruments all night). Mr. Trainor had promised to find a quiet tenant, although it would have to be done soon because he was losing money. He could ill afford that.
Naturally, Mr. Trainor had some concerns about what had happened to the tenant upstairs. All that dreadful business with Miss Dewey and then the woman ends up dead? But he didn’t want any scandal (such things cost him dearly), and he certainly didn’t want any more trouble. It was a matter for the police, and they were satisfied. Besides, he had other, more pressing concerns. Such as how to schedule enough television and meals while still managing all the affairs at Waverly Mansions.
Miss Dewey, on the other hand, was basking in the glory of having gotten away with murder. If you wanted to call it that. Miss Dewey preferred not to. Instead, she saw it as taking care of an impossible situation. Self-defense, she reminded herself. It had been so frightening for her when everything was out of order. But now things were back to normal again. She thought she could go on like this forever.
Until one evening when she walked out of her flat and met up with the new tenant upstairs. Mr. Trainor had held to his promise and chosen a quiet person. The tenant hadn’t bothered Miss Dewey in the three weeks she’d been there. But tonight was different. Miss Dewey tried to avoid acknowledging her by not meeting her eyes, but the tenant would have none of it. She stood squarely in front of her, blocking the front door, so that Miss Dewey was forced to look up at a rather large young woman with pale skin scarred by ravaging bouts with acne.
The young woman spoke first, bitterly and in a frightfully loud voice. “You are Miss Dewey. I was friends with the former tenant upstairs. Such a pity she died like she did.”
Miss Dewey met the woman’s firm gaze fearfully.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Miss Dewey’s throat went dry as she shook her head. “You didn’t like me much, I’m afraid. I was one of your pupils in grammar school. Some of us have kept in touch through the years.” The woman sighed tiredly and tossed her head back so that the short, greasy black hair gleamed in the lamplight. “So many years ago, wasn’t it? But I haven’t forgotten it. I could never forget it.” The woman sniffed with disdain, as if Miss Dewey were some kind of rodent.
“Do you believe all that poppycock about suicide? I don’t, not for a minute. I’m sure you don’t, either.”
Miss Dewey’s heart fluttered. She saw a malicious, familiar gleam in the new tenant’s sharp eyes.
How to Win at Russian Roulette
by Ron Goulart
She resurfaced in his life at a few minutes after midnight on Halloween. Her right arm in a sling, barefooted, wearing an old terry cloth robe from a West Hollywood gym over a pair of peppermint striped pajamas that obviously weren’t hers, carrying her big black portfolio tucked up under her left arm, she appeared on the redwood porch of his cottage in Santa Rita Beach. The night smelled strongly of smoke, even though most of the fires that had been burning around Los Angeles that week had been put out. Her long blonde hair was tangled; her tan, freckled face had a smudge of soot across both prominent cheekbones.