He’d gone through his life doing whatever the crowd did. When they rode around in squad cars looking for drunks to roll, he’d done it. When they’d gone whoring, when they’d beaten up the homeless or the Mexicans or rousted the blacks for conglomerating on street corners, he’d done that, too. On his own, he didn’t know the first thing. He didn’t even know how to behave around his wife or his daughter.
He started the car. The old Pontiac still turned over on the first try. He had $125,000 in a briefcase in the trunk, and he was going to South America. He’d read it in a book. That was what people did when they wanted out-out of the country, out of the life. He was taking early retirement, a permanent vacation.
He’d just put the Pontiac in gear when the green Jaguar came screaming around the corner at the top of the hill, hopping the curb and narrowly missing the bus shelter on the corner. Marsh swerved across his lawn and plowed into the side of his wife’s Mercury. He lurched out of the car, waving something in his hands. Mickey reached over, fumbling in the glove box, digging under the cold cheeseburgers for the.38 he’d been carrying for twenty years, since he was a rookie on the force, the spare piece he’d carried for two decades without firing it. Once he’d thought about using it to plant on a suspect. Now, watching Marsh stumbling across the moonlit yard, hacking at the philodendron bushes as he tottered up the steps to his front door, Mickey only hoped it still worked.
The Bridge Partner by Peter S. Beagle
FROM Sleight of Hand
I WILL KILL YOU .
The words were not spoken aloud, but silently mouthed across the card table at Mattie Whalen by her new partner, whose last name she had not quite caught when they were introduced. Olivia Korhanen or Korhonen, it was, something like that. She was blond and fortyish-Mattie was bad with ages, but the woman had to be somewhere near her own-and had joined the Moss Harbor Bridge Group only a few weeks earlier. The members had chosen at the very beginning to call themselves a group rather than a club. As Eileen Berry, one of the two founders, along with Suzanne Grimes, had said at the time, “There’s an exclusivity thing about a club-a snobby, elitish sort of taste, if you know what I mean. A group just feels more democratic.” Everyone had agreed with Eileen, as people generally did.
Which accounted, Mattie thought, for the brisk acceptance of the woman now sitting across from her, despite her odd name and unclassifiably foreign air. Mattie could detect only the faintest accent in her voice, and if her clothes plainly did not come from the discount outlet in the local mall, neither were they so aggressively chic as to offend or threaten. She had clear, pleasant blue eyes, excellent teeth, the delicately tanned skin of a tennis player-as opposed to a leathery beach bunny or an orange-hued tanning bed veteran-and was pleasant to everyone in a gently impersonal manner. Her playing style showed not only skill but grace, which Mattie noticed perhaps more poignantly than any other member of the Bridge Group, since the best that could have been said for Mattie was that she mostly managed to keep track of the trumps and the tricks. Still, she knew grace when she saw it.
I will kill you.
It made no possible sense-she must surely have misread both the somewhat long, quizzical lips and the intention in the bright eyes. No one else seemed to have heard or noticed anything at all unusual, and she really hadn’t played the last hand as badly as all that. Granted, doubling Rosemarie’s bid could be considered a mistake, but people make mistakes, and she could have pulled it off if Olivia Korhonen, or whoever, had held more than the one single miserable trump to back her up. You don’t kill somebody for doubling, or even threaten to kill them. Mattie smiled earnestly at her partner, and studied her cards.
The rubber ended in total disaster, and Mattie apologized at some length to Olivia Korhonen afterward. “I’m not really a good player, I know that, but I’m not usually that awful, I promise. And now you’ll probably never want to play with me ever again, and I wouldn’t blame you.” Mattie had had a deal of practice at apologizing, over the years.
To her pleasant surprise, Olivia Korhonen patted her arm reassuringly and shook her head. “I enjoyed the game greatly, even though we lost. I have not played in a long time, and you will have to make allowances until I start to catch up. We’ll beat them next time, in spite of me.”
She patted Mattie again and turned elegantly away. But as she did so, the side of her mouth repeated, clearly but inaudibly-Mattie could not have been mistaken this time-“I will kill you.” Then the woman was gone, and Mattie sat down in the nearest folding chair.
Her friend Virginia Schlossberg hurried over with a cup of tea, asking anxiously, “Are you all right? What is it? You look absolutely ashen! ” She touched Mattie’s cheek, and almost recoiled. “And you’re freezing! Go home and get into bed, and call a doctor! I mean it-you go home right now!” Virginia was a kind woman, but excitable. She had been the same when Mattie and she were in dancing school together.
“I’m all right,” Mattie said. “I am, Ginny, honestly.” But her voice was shaking as much as her hands, and she made her escape from the Group as soon as she could trust her legs to support her. She was grateful on two counts: first, that no one sat next to her on the bus; and, secondly, that Don would most likely not be home yet from the golf course. She did not look forward to Don just now.
Rather than taking to her bed, despite Virginia’s advice, she made herself a healthy G &T and sat in the kitchen with the lights on, going over and over everything she knew of Olivia Korhonen. The woman was apparently single or widowed, like most of the members of the Moss Harbor Bridge Group, but judging by the reactions of the few men in the Group she gave no indication of being on the prowl. Seemingly unemployed, and rather young for retirement, still she lived in one of the pricey new condos just two blocks from the harbor. No Bridge Group member had yet seen her apartment except for Suzanne and Eileen, who reported back that it was smart and trendy, “without being too off-puttingly posh.” Eileen thought the paintings were originals, but Suzanne had her doubts.
What else, what else? She had looked up “Korhonen” on the Internet and found that it was a common Finnish name-not Jewish, as she had supposed. To her knowledge, she had never met a Finnish person in her life. Were they like Swedes? Danes, even? She had a couple of Danish acquaintances, a husband and wife named Olsen… no, they were nothing at all like the Korhonen woman; one could never imagine either Olsen saying I will kill you to so much as a cockroach, which, of course, they wouldn’t ever have in the house. But then, who would say such a thing to a near stranger? And over a silly card game? It made no sense, none of it made any sense. She mixed another G &T and was surprised to find herself wanting Don home.
Don’s day, it turned out, had been a bad one. Trounced on the course, beaten more badly in the rematch he had immediately demanded, he had consoled himself liberally in the clubhouse; and, as a consequence, was clearly not in any sort of mood to hear about a mumbled threat at a bridge game. On the whole, after sixteen years of marriage, Mattie liked Don more than she disliked him, but such distinctions were essentially meaningless at this stage of things. She rather appreciated his presence when she felt especially lonely and frightened, but a large, furry dog would have done as well; indeed, a dog would have been at once more comforting and more concerned for her comfort. Dogs wanted their masters to be happy-Don simply preferred her uncomplaining.