Locked Room Puzzles by Martin H. Greenberg (ed) & Bill Pronzini (ed)

Author:Martin H. Greenberg (ed) & Bill Pronzini (ed)
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: mystery, locked-room, anthology
Publisher: Academy
Published: 1991-01-10T07:00:00+00:00

The telephone was ringing when I let myself into my flat an hour later. I hustled into the bedroom, where I keep the thing, and hauled up the receiver and said hello.

"Hi," Kerry's voice said. "You sound out of breath."

"I just came in. You sound tired."

"I am. And the way it looks, I'm not going to get out of here until nine o'clock."

"How's the presentation going?"

"Pretty good. I'll probably have to work Saturday morning, but I should be finished by noon."

"We're still on for Saturday night, aren't we?"

"We are. What did you have in mind?"

"Well, I've been wondering—"

"Oh, damn," she said. "Can you hold on a minute? I'm being paged by the boss."

"Sure."

There was a clicking noise as she put me on hold. I shrugged out of my damp overcoat, tossed it on the floor and sat down on the rumpled bed. While I waited I occupied myself by visualizing Kerry in my mind. She was something to look at, all right. Not pretty in any classic sense, but strikingly attractive: coppery hair worn shoulder length; animated face marked with humor lines; generous mouth; greenish eyes that seemed to change color, like a chameleon, according to her moods. And a fine willowy body, with the kind of legs men stared at and most women envied.

I wondered again, as I had on several occasions, what she saw in me. I was fifty-three to her thirty-eight and not much to look at, but she thought I was pretty hot stuff all the same. Sexy, she'd said once. Which was all a crock, as far as I was concerned, but I loved her for feeling that way.

I did love her, that was the thing, even though we'd only known each other a couple of weeks. I'd met her during a pulp magazine convention, which she'd attended because both her parents—Ivan and Cybil Wade — were ex-pulp writers who had been well known in the forties, Ivan for his fantasy/horror stories in Weird Tales and Dime Mystery, Cybil for a hardboiled detective series under the male pseudonym of Samuel Leatherman. The pulp angle had been part of my attraction to her in the beginning, just as part of hers for me had been the fact that, as a result of her mother's writing, she'd always been intrigued by private detectives. So we'd struck up an immediate friendship, and had become lovers much sooner than I could have hoped for.

Meanwhile, things had been happening at the convention that culminated in murder, and I had found myself in an investigation that had almost got me killed.

When it was finished I had asked her to marry me, surprising myself as well as her. She hadn't said no; in fact, she'd said that she loved me, too, after her fashion. But she'd been married once, a bad marriage, and she just wasn't sure if she wanted to try it again. She needed more time to think things over, she said. And that was where things stood now.

Not for long, though, I hoped.

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