“Easy,” she said. “Almost too easy. First I took home an armload of books on everything pertaining to psychology and boned up on all phases of it. Also, I made a point of reading the books constantly whenever Hugh was home. Then I started making up things to tell him. I told him about a fictitious bridge game in which I knew in advance every card that would be played. Then I made up something about a friend not joining another friend and me for lunch after I predicted she wouldn’t. That was the same night I had you call at nine on the dot and ask if Jimmy had come in yet. I had predicted that the phone would ring and that it would be a wrong number. I think that call shook Hugh up a little. The second time I had you call — that was when I chatted on about Sheila and her daughter’s expected baby — well, Sheila had called that afternoon with the information that her daughter had just been taken to the hospital.”
“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “I just listened and marveled. You should have been an actress.”
“There was some luck involved also,” she admitted. “I wrote a letter to myself from someone who never existed, someone I supposedly hadn’t seen in ages, and then predicted the letter would arrive in the mail and what it would say. It was sheer luck that Hugh was home when the letter came, otherwise I would have had to wait until he came home to open the letter, and that wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.”
He broke out in a big laugh. “You didn’t really need to hire a P.I., Nellie, my girl.”
“Oh yes, I did. You were the one who found out who the woman was, where she lived, and all the vital information. All I had was a suspicion that he was seeing another woman. Also, getting into her two suites was a stroke of genius. I couldn’t have done that. Knowing what her places looked like was really what did the trick.”
“Simple,” he said. “All I had to do was tip the room-service guy into letting me wheel in the trolley.”
They were both quiet as the waitress returned with their orders. Then he said, “I’ll miss our little sessions. Do you think we could see each other now and then?”
She was thoughtful for a minute. “Not right away. I’m going to do some traveling for a month or two. I always wanted to go to Paris for shopping, but Hugh was too busy to get away and too tight to let me go. Also, I thought a cruise would be nice, maybe to somewhere like Alaska. But after that…” She gave him her one-hundred-watt smile. “Yes, Ivan, I think we should keep in touch.”
He sipped his coffee, looking at her over the rim of the cup. “I’m not sure but what you really are psychic. How did you know your husband was going to rush out to the balcony and fall and kill himself when I went in there with a stocking over my head and a gun in my hand? All I said was what you told me to: “This is my territory, you don’t belong here.”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought he might have a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. It never occurred to me he’d try to get away.”
“But I never would have shot him, or the woman. Murder’s not my thing. What made him panic like that?”
She gave a little shrug, then laughed. “It must have been the power of suggestion.”
Donald E. Westlake
Take It Away
from Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine
“Nice night for a stakeout.”
Well, that startled me, let me tell you. I looked around and saw I was no longer the last person on line. Behind me now was a goofy-looking guy more or less my age (thirty-four) and height (six feet) but maybe just a bit thinner than me (190 pounds). He wore eyeglasses with thick black frames and a dark-blue baseball cap turned around backward, with bunches of carroty-red hair sticking out under it on the sides and back.
He was bucktoothed and grinning, and he wore a gold-and-purple high school athletic jacket with the letter X hugely on it in Day-Glo white edged in purple and gold. It was open a bit at the top, to show a bright lime green polo shirt underneath.
His trousers were plain black chinos, which made for a change, and on his feet were a pair of those high tech sneakers complete with inserts and gores and extra straps and triangles of black leather here and there that look as though they were constructed to specifications for NASA. In his left hand he held an X-Men comic book folded open to the middle of a story. He was not, in other words, anybody on the crew, or even like anybody on the crew. So what was this about a stakeout? Who was this guy?
Time to employ my interrogation techniques, which meant I should come at him indirectly, not asking “Who are you?” but saying “What was that again?”
He blinked happily behind his glasses and pointed with his free hand. “A stakeout,” he said, cheerful as could be.
I looked where he pointed, at the side wall of this Burger Whopper, where it was my turn tonight to get food for the crew, and I saw the poster there advertising this month’s special in all twenty-seven hundred Burger Whoppers all across the United States and Canada, which was for their Special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, made with U.S. government-inspected steak guaranteed to be a full quarter-inch thick.
I blinked at this poster, with its glossy color photo of the special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, and beside me the goofy guy said, “A steak out, right? A great night to come out and get one of those steak sandwiches and take it home and not worry about cooking or anything like that because, who knows, the electricity could go off at any second.”
Well, that was true. The weather had been miserable the last few days, hoveringjust around the freezing point, with rain at times and sleet at times, and at the moment — 9:20 P.M. (2120 hours) on a Wednesday — outside the picture windows of the Burger Whopper, there was a thick, misty fog, wet to the touch, kind of streaked and dirty, that looked mostly like an airport hotel’s laundry on the rinse cycle.
Not a good night for a stakeout — not my kind of stakeout. All the guys on the crew had been complaining and griping on our walkie-talkies, sitting in our cars on this endless surveillance, getting nowhere, expecting nothing, except maybe we’d all have the flu when this was finally over.
“See what I mean?” the goofy guy said, and grinned his bucktoothed grin at me again and gestured at that poster like the magician’s girl assistant gesturing at the elephant. See the elephant?
“Right,” I said, and I felt a sudden quick surge of relief. If our operation had been compromised, after all this time and energy and effort, particularly given my own spotty record, I don’t know what I would have done. But at least it wouldn’t have been my fault.
Well, it hadn’t happened, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. My smile was probably as broad and goofy as the other guy’s when I said, “I see it, I see it. A steak out on a night like this — I get you.”
“I’m living alone since my wife left me,” he explained, probably feeling we were buddies since my smile was as moronic as his. “So mostly I just open a can of soup or something. But weather like this, living alone, the fog out there, everything cold, you just kinda feel like you owe yourself a treat, know what I mean?”
Mostly, I was just astonished that this guy had ever had a wife, though not surprised she’d left him. I’ve never been married myself, never been that fortunate, my life being pretty much tied up with the Bureau, but I could imagine what it must be like to have been married, and then she walks out, and now you’re not married anymore. And what now? It would be like if I screwed up real bad, much worse than usual, and the Bureau dropped me, and I wouldn’t have the Bureau to go to anymore — I’d probably come out on foggy nights for a steak sandwich myself and talk to strangers in the line at the Burger Whopper.