“Don’t be difficult, love.”
“If I’m your love, meet her at the door and tell her you’re with someone else.”
“I can’t do it that way. Harmony’s too sweet.”
“Don’t push me!” the woman said.
“You’ve got to go!”
“No, I don’t!”
There was the sound of another slap, only this time it was a sharper sound of flesh against flesh, hard. Someone fell.
The woman said, “You bastard!”
“Don’t call me names, love. Just get the hell out of here.”
“You’re going to have to throw me out.”
“Suit yourself.”
Harmony listened to Eric and the woman fighting. The sounds got louder, then diminished, as if they had moved from the living room to the kitchen. Both were yelling. Objects fell, maybe a lamp or a couple of lamps, with the sound of glass breaking. Harmony stood and moved to the door, trying to see through the crack.
“You bastard!” the woman said again.
“Put that down.”
There was the sound of the woman sucking in air and then pushing it out again. Something heavy fell. The woman shouted, “Oh, my God!”
Eric said, “Get help! Quick!” There was something wrong with his voice.
Harmony opened the door and moved cautiously into the living room. Beyond, in the kitchen, she could see the blonde woman, who was very pretty, standing over Eric. On the floor, with a large kitchen knife stuck in his abdomen, he was trying to get up. The woman was wiping blood from her hands onto her blouse. All the buttons on her blouse were undone.
“Help me!” Eric said. His voice was weaker.
The blonde turned and ran from the apartment. Beyond the closed door Harmony heard her high heels rapping sharply along the paved walk, then on the stairs and along the balcony that allowed entrance to the second-floor apartments. A door slammed. Harmony went to the kitchen and leaned over Eric, who had fallen back on his side.
“Harmony!” he said, seeing her. “Thank God you’re here! Call an ambulance, please!”
Harmony knelt beside him, but not within reach, careful to stay clear of the blood. His shirt and the top of his pants were soaked with it. It covered his hands and ran onto the floor. The look in his eyes was changing from intense pain and fear to a slowly growing cloudiness. As she watched his face turn grey, she thought of herself hiding in the study, listening to the soft laughter and the wine glasses clinking together. “Harmony,” she heard him saying, “I’ll get rid of her. I’ll come for you.” The woman had stood over him with the buttons of her blouse undone. Had that happened in the fight or had Eric unbuttoned her blouse on the sofa before he went to get the second glass of wine?
“Harmony,” he whispered.
She said, “I’m here, Eric.” She said it softly, almost tenderly, but she didn’t touch him.
She watched him until he closed his eyes and fell asleep. His breathing came hard, with long spaces between breaths. Then she got to her feet. Stepping carefully around the blood, she found the answering machine and ran it back to where her message to him began. She erased it, looked back once at Eric, and left, closing the door behind her, thinking not to lock it.
In the parking lot, she looked up at the apartments on the second floor over Eric’s. There were lights on in most of them, and she had no idea which one the blonde had run to. Was she trying to wash the blood off her hands and out of her blouse? The party across the courtyard was still going on.
The clock on her dresser read 1:46. She was surprised she had been gone so long. She changed again for bed, turned out the light, and looked out at the clear, dark sky full of stars.
She leaned over and dialed Eric’s number, listened to his recorded message, waited for the tone, then said, “This is Harmony. I wanted to tell you goodnight, Eric, and to say I’m sorry I missed you tonight. Call me again if you ever need me. Ta ta, Eric.” She said the “Ta ta” sadly.
Detectiverse
Case Clothed
by William C. Thomas
© 1988 by William C. Thomas.
Hugo Skillicorn and the Killing Machine
by Peter Turnbull
© 1988 by Peter Turnbull.
A nurse in a starched white smock stood in the corridor, which smelled of disinfectant. The tall windows allowed the interior of the hospital to flood with light and permitted an impressive view of the rooftops of Battlefield and Langside. Sussock saw an orange bus go down Battlefield Road, and away in the far, far distance the sun caught a window of a house, causing it to gleam penetratingly, like a diamond in a sea of granite and concrete.
“Mr. Sussock?” said the nurse. Sussock found her demure and genuinely respectful, not just of him as a cop but of him as a human being. She immediately brought out his sense of protectiveness. He nailed felons to protect citizens like this nurse...
Donoghue pulled reflectively on his pipe and thought that they should come here, all those people who thought of Glasgow as square mile upon square mile of tenements, of disused mine and railway workings, of cranes against a grey sky hovering over an oily river, of pale children playing in stinking streets. They should come here, he told himself, to this quarter of the city, to houses like this — large, stone built, with fifteen rooms and landscaped gardens. And it was the home of just one man and his wife, exactly as the other houses in the street in Maxwell Park were single-family units. Not for these houses the ignominy of being split into bedsits or sold off as conversion flats within the shell of the original building, which in Donoghue’s values was only better than demolition.
He watched a swallow curl and dive in pursuit of a flying insect and he thought, too, that people who imagined the weather north of the border to be all mist, rain, sleet, and snow should visit Scotland at this time of the year — high summer, just a week after the longest day but still in the brief “white nights” period when it never really got dark.
It was only because he was a policeman with twenty years’ experience and because he was a professional that he had been able to muster the detachment to walk out of that house, to enjoy the evening and the neighborhood. He was aware that police work affects every cop and that the effect isn’t noticed by the individual officer until it has arrived and is entrenched. He had first realized this twenty years earlier when he was still a fresh-faced cop, still in uniform. He had been obliged, along with colleagues and ambulance and fire-service crews, to attend yet another car smash. It had been a very bad one — one car had been crushed into a mass half its original size and inside were the mangled remains of five human beings, none older than himself. He had helped remove the bodies.