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  Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

  July/August 2005

  Vol. 50 No. 7 & 8

  Dell Magazines

  New York

  Edition Copyright © 2005

  by Dell Magazines,

  a division of Crosstown Publications

  All rights reserved worldwide.

  All stories in Alfred Hitchcock's

  Mystery Magazine are fiction.

  Any similarities are coincidental.

  Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

  ISSN 0002-5224 published monthly except for double-issues of January/February and July/August.

  CONTENTS

  Editor's Notes: Double Issue, Double Trouble!

  The Houseboat by James T. Shannon

  The Bully by J. M. Gregson

  Pinning the Rap by O'Neil De Noux

  Crooked Lake by Rob Kantner

  The Wall by Rhys Bowen

  Tattersby and the Old Curiosity Shed by Neil Schofield

  Informing the Mole by Arthur Porges

  The Pullman Case by John M. Floyd

  Pit and the Pendulum by John Gregory Betancourt

  In the Fire by Peter Sellers

  Death at the Port by Marianne Wilski Strong

  A Jar of Bean Paste by Martin Limón

  Coughing John by Russel D. McLean

  A Long Sad Song for My Fair Lady by DeLoris Stanton Forbes

  The Mysterious Photograph

  The Story That Won

  Reel Crime

  Booked & Printed

  * * * *

  Linda Landrigan: Editor

  Jonas Eno-Van Fleet: Assistant Editor

  Willie Garcia: Technical Assistant

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

  Meghan Lembo Assistant Art Director

  Abigail Browning: Sub-Rights & Mktg

  Scott Lais: Contracts & Permissions

  Peter Kanter: Publisher & President

  Bruce Sherbow: VP of Sales & Mktg

  Sue Kendrioski: VP of Production

  Julia McEvoy: Print Advertising Sales

  Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

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  Editor's Notes: Double Issue, Double Trouble!

  This month's fourteen stories include not only a few by authors new to these pages, but also two that launch new series.

  We first welcome J. M. Gregson, a former college professor in the U.K., who draws on his days in academe for his story “The Bully.” Now a full time writer, Mr. Gregson weaves his passion for golf into much of his fiction, especially his Lambert and Hook series featuring two Oxford policemen who share his love of the sport. Severn House in England has recently published Dusty Death, the ninth book in Gregson's Inspector Peach series set in the more industrial Lancashire. He has also published a Holmes pastiche, Sherlock Holmes and the Frightened Golfer (1999), as well as books on literature and golf.

  Canadian author Peter Sellers ("In the Fire") last appeared in AHMM in 1991. In the meantime, he has published short fiction in, among other places, our sister magazine, EQMM, winning its 2001 Readers Award, and in his collection of short stories, Whistling Past the Graveyard, published by Mosaic Press in 1999. Welcome back!

  We also welcome John Gregory Betancourt to the magazine. Mr. Betancourt is president and publisher of Wildside Press in Pennsylvania, which he started in 1989 with his wife and which now has more than 3,000 titles in print. Already known to readers of science fiction and fantasy, Mr. Betancourt makes his mystery debut with “Pit and the Pendulum,” introducing a new sleuth, the nervous, broken, brilliant Peter “Pit” Geller. You'll find more Pit stories in these pages in the near future.

  Also debuting this month is “retired” Detective-Inspector Harry Tattersby in “Tattersby and the Old Curiosity Shed” by Neil Schofield. Tattersby will soon have the calm of his retirement interrupted once again in further stories here.

  Martin Limón's stories set in American-occupied Seoul in the seventies, featuring U.S. Army C.I.D. agents Ernie Bascom and George Sueño, have always been popular with our readers. Sharing the same milieu, scrappy survivor Kimiko gets a series of her own in her second outing in “A Jar of Bean Paste.” Her first appearance was in “A Crust of Rice’ (January/February 2005).

  In addition to all that, we have some terrific and off-beat stories by Rhys Bowen, James T. Shannon, O'Neil De Noux, and more! So, settle in for an evening or two of your favorite authors, and favorites to be.

  —Linda Landrigan

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Houseboat by James T. Shannon

  The houseboat was everything Jasper had promised, although since he's been in advertising for almost thirty years, it helps to take Jasper's description with a strong dose of caution. But this time he was spot-on. The houseboat had a full kitchen, fireplace in the living room, and an eight-person hot tub on the second-level sundeck. At sixty-five feet long, the boat provided more than enough staterooms for four men.

  The setting was perfect too. The lake in mid Maine would have been the cover shot if our firm did brochures for the state tourism bureau. Best of all, since it was early June and school was still in session, we had the huge lake pretty much to ourselves. An occasional trout broke the surface after hapless insects, and an occasional loon came gliding by looking for a hapless trout. Geese and ducks bobbed on the placid waters, and the boat's full-sized fridge was bursting with steaks, chops, micro-brewed beer, and Jasper's Belvedere vodka.

  It wasn't the kind of setting where you'd expect something bad to take place, but I was pretty sure that's exactly what was going to happen.

  You see, despite the boat and the setting, the four of us weren't exactly taking a five-day vacation. Three of us were the guests of Jasper Hobart, executive vice president of Maxim, Pauling & Charles, one of Boston's largest advertising agencies. Jasper had planned the houseboat adventure as a celebration of his latest enthusiasm, fly-fishing. We were invited along as a reward for all the overtime we had put into a campaign for a new light beer. But it wasn't really a vacation and it wasn't really a reward. We all shared the unspoken awareness that the trip was really Jasper's not-too-subtle approach to deciding who'd fill the firm's upcoming creative director's position.

  At least on this trip we were closer to Boston. Last year some of us had had to go golfing with Jasper at Hilton Head. Next year he'll probably take candidates on a safari in Kenya. As for the fly-fishing, it helped to understand that Jasper was enthusiastic the way a hummingbird is enthusiastic for some honeysuckle, just before it notices a particularly tender morning glory. Of course, in Jasper's case you have to be able to imagine a balding, overweight, domineering hummingbird.

  The three contestants for this year's mini version of Survivor were Martin Travers, Tom Akin, and me, Dave Williamson. I'm senior
copywriter at Maxim Pauling. In an industry with a higher turnover rate than you'd find at a church pancake breakfast, I've been with the firm for twelve years, ever since I graduated from Tufts, and objectively, I should be at least a five-to-one handicap favorite in this particular competition. But the other two contestants have their own game plans.

  Martin Travers is a thin, nervous art director, and you might expect someone in that position to be way over the top. But Martin's really more a computer nerd than an artist, comfortable with cybergraphics but not especially with people, and he's a little lost when it comes to ways to impress the boss. So he works at being a suck-up, although he's really bad at it. For this trip, for instance, Martin brought along a brand-new signature handcrafted bamboo fly rod that must have cost him two weeks’ salary. And if he ran true to form, he had spent at least the last month taking lessons. But this approach has built-in hazards. Last year Martin showed up for the Hilton Head expedition with a complete set of Ping golf clubs, a squeaky new leather bag, and lessons so recent you could see his lips moving in a mantra when addressing the ball as he repeated to himself whatever reminders the pro had given him. Jasper spent most of the trip needling him about that new equipment and his poor play, and Martin had to pretend it was all good-natured ribbing instead of the ass-kicking it really was.

  So I wasn't worried about Martin. Tom Akin, on the other hand, was a more serious threat. He had been a copywriter before he switched to accounts, where the bigger bucks were, and therefore he had some of the creative background necessary for the new job. In accounting, Tom had quickly become an account executive because he took a cutthroat approach to getting ahead. The sale was everything to Tom and to help his climb within the firm he had worked out a particularly perverse plan of attack. He made people in superior positions feel obligated to him. First, however, he set them up by discovering their weaknesses. Then he exploited them.

  He got his latest promotion, for instance, because he happened into a downtown Boston bar called Alexander's Feast and discovered Perry Billings, sales manager, sitting in a back booth near the pay phone sharing a martini and a kiss with a twenty-two-year-old B.U. grad student. Perry, of course, was married. And the student's name was George.

  Tom had nodded a raised-brow look of surprise at Perry, who immediately vaulted out of the booth to speak to him. At the phone Tom coolly explained to a perspiring Perry that he'd forgotten an important client call he had to make. Wouldn't you know it, his cell phone was dead. As in, that was why he happened to have stopped into Alexander's Feast, leaving unsaid the implication that though he knew the bar was gay, he was not. Perry didn't even dare to pretend that Tom hadn't seen what he had seen. Now he was just trying to figure out what Tom was going to do about it. The poorest kept secret at the office was that Harrison Pauling, whose name after all was etched just before the ampersand on the firm's glass doors, was notoriously anti-gay and was always trying to find ways to get rid of people he suspected of alternate lifestyles without being sued for discrimination. And Perry, the married father of three, couldn't even think of litigation, not without opening a particular closet door that Tom was sure he desperately wanted to keep closed.

  Perry, his voice croaking, said, “Uh, about what you just saw, Tom..."

  Tom replaced the pay phone receiver, especially since he had really only been dialing his own home number, put a hand on Perry's shoulder and said, “Don't worry about it. I've got no problem with people's choices."

  It was a subtle reminder to Perry that there was at least one firm founder who had some very firm problems with this particular option.

  After giving it a few seconds to sink in, Tom then added, “And I don't think a man's choices are anyone else's business. Consider my discretion a favor."

  All Perry could do was nod, tell Tom, “I never forget a favor,” and return to his booth and his grad student. Perry repaid the favor two weeks later when he recommended Tom for his current sales position.

  Tom, of course, had nothing to lose. If Perry had stiffed him (Tom's choice of words as he blathered an indiscreet proud-drunk account of his scheme to me late one night a few months ago), he could always go to George, the grad student he had hired for the occasion, and have him come in to put a little decision-making pressure on Perry.

  I didn't know if Tom had planned anything for Jasper, and that had been bothering me in the weeks before we were to head north. That creative director position opening in a month should, by rights, be mine. I had longevity and production, had tried to get ahead the old fashioned way, by earning it. Martin I could pretty much ignore. But Tom, with his creative background and his growing reputation in sales, was something else.

  I didn't get the promotion after the Hilton Head trip, and if Tom vaulted over me now, it would definitely be time to go looking somewhere else.

  On our first day out, Jasper cut the engine and tried fly-fishing off the boat. But after a while he declared he didn't like being so far above the water. He claimed it interfered with his loops, those repeat trial castings he was making, his line stretching into larger and larger ellipses so that on the final cast the fly at the end of the line would drop lightly onto the water as if it were an insect stopping there temporarily.

  Martin, compensating for last year's golf fiasco, had gone too far preparing this time. He looked better at what they were both doing, but only gradually realized what Tom and I had seen right away—if he was looking good, then Jasper, in his new addiction, was looking maybe not so good. I'll say this for Martin, though, he learned fast enough. I was on his side of the boat that first day when he got a bite. It looked like a rainbow trout as it broke the surface, but I couldn't be sure. It was sizeable, anyway, and immediately made a run away from us. Martin peeked over quickly to see if Jasper had noticed and, when he realized his boss was just concentrating on getting his line disentangled from the upper-deck fencing, Martin cut his losses by quickly cutting his line. He saw me watching him, but grinned and shrugged.

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  On the second day, Jasper had us beach the boat early in the afternoon so he could fish from the shore, being careful to be far enough from the trees to avoid any entanglements. Martin, who set about grimly fishing next to Jasper, realized the folly of his approach but was helpless to change it. He not only had to fish, which he didn't seem to enjoy much, he also had to do it badly. His loops got less and less loopy, the ellipses little more than parabolas and the fly sometimes hitting the ground behind him, sometimes dropping at his feet.

  Tom and I had it a lot easier. We watched the boss and looked inept without having to fake it when he handed one of us his rod and told us to give it a try.

  Jasper, after two hours of making these very nice loops that looked pretty good to me but not, apparently, to any of the trout in the lake, declared it time to have a few drinks. I was already ahead of him there, but just beer and just one. This was a trip where being careful to not lose might be the only way to win.

  The women showed up two hours after Jasper had cracked his first bottle of Belvedere. Tom, who was on the upper deck, spotted them through some binoculars he had brought along. We took turns tracking them as they turned their canoe in toward us. Though they both wore sweaters and faded jeans that seemed right for the lake, the sweaters didn't exactly hide the shapes beneath them and the jeans were worn down in just the right spots.

  We were all gathered on the lower deck as they pulled up and beached their canoe alongside us.

  "Hi there,” the one in front, with long auburn hair, called up to us. “We hate to bother you, but would you maybe have some food on board? We'd be happy to pay for it."

  "Don't worry about that, ladies,” Jasper said. “We have food to spare. What happened, you two come all the way out here and forget to bring something to eat?"

  "No,” she said with a warm laugh and a shake of her lovely head. “We've been on the lake for three days. We camped a few miles back yesterday and while we were hiking, something came and
raided our camp."

  "I think it was a bear,” the one in back with short, dark blond hair said. “But Sandy says it was probably just raccoons."

  "Well, we've got a full fridge,” Jasper said. “So you gals come on board, and we'll see what grub we can rustle up for you."

  Gals? Grub? Rustle up? This from a man born and raised in Boston, a man who'd barely know a moose from a mockingbird? But the gals kept smiling eagerly as they beached their canoe and came scrambling up our boarding ramp.

  "Just the four of you?” Sandy said to Jasper, accepting a vodka tonic. “On this big boat?"

  "Yep, just us,” Jasper said. “Doin’ a little fly-fishing, you know."

  Sandy and her friend, who introduced herself as Mavis, looked even more impressed, though it was hard to tell if they knew what he was talking about. Maybe they were just reacting to the drinks and the promise of grub being rustled up for them.

  Mavis was standing next to me. She smelled pretty fresh for what must have been her third day on the lake, but I suppose they could have hooked up some kind of sun-shower. No way they'd have bathed in the lake or one of the streams feeding it. Not in early June. Not in Maine.

  Jasper gave them the tour, and while Mavis was generally friendly with Martin, Tom, and me, Sandy had eyes only for the captain. Both women were especially impressed by the hot tub on the top deck.

  "Holds eight,” Jasper said, patting the edge of it as if he'd carved it from fake marble himself.

  "Wow! After a couple of days roughing it, that would be wonderful,” Sandy said, and I noticed a definite sparkle in her eyes, which were a deep green.

  "It certainly is relaxing,” Jasper said, although none of us had yet dipped so much as a toe into the swirling waters. “You ladies got suits with you? ‘Course, they're not absolutely mandatory. We could just wait below till you were done."

  He meant it too, because, though I've seen Jasper prance for ladies before, I've never seen him pounce at one of them.