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  Women’s Wiles

  A Mystery Writers of America Classic Anthology

  L. Fred Ayvazian

  Stanley Cohen

  Dorothy A. Collins

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Richard Deming

  Susan Dunlap

  Stanley Ellin

  Joyce Harrington

  Morris Hershman

  Kathleen Hershey

  Edward D. Hoch

  Margaret Millar

  Richard A. Moore

  Josh Pachter

  Joan Richter

  Frank Sisk

  Lawrence Treat

  Cornell Woolrich

  James Yaffe

  Edited by

  Michele Slung

  Mystery Writers of America

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or ate used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  WOMEN’S WILES

  Copyright © 1979 by Mystery Writers of America.

  A Mystery Writers of America Presents: MWA Classics Book published by arrangement with the authors

  Cover art image by Oleg Gekman

  Cover design by David Allan Kerber

  Editorial and layout by Stonehenge Editorial

  * * *

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Mystery Writers of America Presents: MWA Classics edition / December 2017

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ rights is appreciated.

  Mystery Writers of America gratefully acknowledges the permission granted to reproduce the copyrighted material in this book.

  Every effort has been made to locate the copyright holders or their heirs and assigns and to obtain their permission for the use of copyrighted material, and MWA would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  For information contact: Mystery Writers of America, 1140 Broadway, Suite 1507, New York, NY 10001

  Contents

  Foreword by Michele Slung

  Introduction by Michele Slung

  Acknowledgments

  The Two Sisters by Joyce Harrington

  Second Chance by Edward D. Hoch

  The Greek Refrain by Frank Sisk

  Mom Knows Best by James Yaffe

  The Candle Flame by Lawrence Treat

  The Kitchen Floor by Dorothy A. Collins

  The Girlfriend by Morris Hershman

  Double Jeopardy by Susan Dunlap

  You Can’t Be a Little Girl All Your Life by Stanley Ellin

  Mrs. Norris Observes by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Invitation to a Murder by Josh Pachter

  The Ransom of Retta Chiefman by Stanley Cohen

  Medicine Woman by Richard Deming

  The People Across the Canyon by Margaret Millar

  The Cost of Respectability by Kathleen Hershey

  A Matter of Pride by Richard A. Moore

  The Raconteur by L. Fred Ayvazian

  The Prisoner of Zemu Island by Joan Richter

  The Book That Squealed by Cornell Woolrich

  Afterword

  Foreword

  Back in 1979, the Mystery Writers of America did the just-starting-out anthologist me—I’d published my first book, Crime on Her Mind: Fifteen Stories of Female Sleuths from the Victorian Era to the Forties, only four years earlier—the honor of asking if I’d edit their annual collection, its theme being “women.” What came out of that request is the book which you’re now looking at, one I hope will keep you entertained...while guessing its contents’ nineteen outcomes.

  To edit collections of stories I regard as an absorbing, challenging treasure hunt, and for all of my now-long career, what I’ve chosen to say is that I “read for a living.” It’s been a complete joy. Yet there’s a—to me—amusing anecdote I’d like to tell here, that I think bears on the notion of distaff mayhem and murder, and my own history with same.

  Almost twenty years after I’d put together Women’s Wiles—and with quite a few more books under my editorial belt by then—the Book-of-the-Month Club came to me, wanting to know if I’d take charge of assembling a Main Selection they hoped to do, containing crime stories written over the previous century by celebrated non-genre writers. The well-praised volume I wound up with included two dozen tales by authors ranging from Trollope to Thurber, Alice Walker to Evelyn Waugh, and García Márquez to A. A. Milne. Its title was Murder & Other Acts of Literature.

  Fine, you may think. However, the problem for me was that it wasn’t the title I’d devised, merely the subtitle. What I’d wanted to call the anthology was Out, Damned Spot! Murder & Other Acts of Literature. But the powers-that-be then at BOMC resisted, and I believe it was simply because they feared would-be readers wouldn’t get it.

  The reason it occurs to me, at this moment, to mention that long-ago tussle—which I lost—is simply to have the chance to restore to Lady Macbeth her position as the patron saint of women’s wiles, their dastardly deeds and their often dark fates. I claim no originality. Many, many others, certainly, have done this, I know.

  It’s my turn now, is all.

  Finally.

  —Michele Slung

  Introduction

  When I was a young girl, I was unable to work up any enthusiasm for earnest biographies that told me how Madame Curie discovered radium or how Jane Addams founded Hull House. Instead, I spent much of my time figuring out how to be Nancy Drew. Sadly, roadsters were already collector’s items, but I did have two friends who never argued about taking the subordinate roles, and so off we would go, looking for whispering statues, hidden passages, lost wills, and buried treasure. (Corpses, the hard currency of adult detective fiction, did not yet play a part in my make-believe.)

  If I sat down to a game of Clue, I had to be Miss Scarlet or I would sulk. Having pleasant, fairly reasonable parents did not stop me from wondering what Lizzie Borden had done with those bloodstains, and my standards for conversation with male adolescents were based on the repartee sustained by William Powell and Myrna Loy. I found Busman’s Honeymoon every bit as erotic as Peyton Place, and I could never take a train ride without positioning myself near elderly ladies who seemed likely to vanish.

  To this day—thank goodness—I have not met up with a corpse. But I have been allowed to join the Mystery Writers of America, an organization that supports the dictum, “Crime doesn’t pay—enough.” With such a sinister conspiracy (of the imagination), who can tell what may happen? And please remember that, with this 33rd of the annual anthologies coming from the MWA, you’re holding in your hand a blunt instrument.

  Now, even though I’ve established the fact of my having crime on the mind, some of you still may ask, What’s a nice woman like you doing in a book like this? To say a few words about the liberating qualities of suspense: It’s not only that a loaded gun (or a vial of poison) is a great equalizer, or that woman’s intuition triumphs over brawn every time, or even that
the female of the species may be, as reputed, more deadly than the male, but simply that the mystery genre is an equal opportunity employer. For ever since the mystery story began to assume a definite shape in the nineteenth century, and ever since it started to fulfill the public’s distinct expectations, it has admitted women into all of its precincts.

  That women can be successful mystery writers goes without saying, and a number of notable American women authors have served over the years as president of the MWA. That women can be detectives is rather remarkable, considering that they sleuthed in early crime stories long before their real-life sisters were able to have active or interesting careers. (Almost from the beginning, there have been professional female investigators in the pages of fiction, as well as amateur ones.) That women can be victims does not make the genre an accomplice to sexist practices, for just as many male cadavers have set the mechanisms of whodunits into motion. The existence of the female villain proves that mystery writers have not oppressed their feminine characters with the restrictions of sugar-and- spice behavior. (After all, it was a woman—the woman, Irene Adler—who outsmarted Sherlock Holmes.)

  Certainly, mystery stories can be unreal or melodramatic— so can a lot of mainstream fiction—and the conflicts of a genre situation are resolved by mayhem more often than they are in everyday life. However, in this particular type of escape fiction, one can escape only so far from the potential for violence and the demands for justice that exist in the society around us. Each of the following stories, chosen with elements of woman-ness in mind, contain shadings of the violence/justice duality central to both fact and fiction. Not all are straight tales of homicide, or femicide; some are humorous, some fantastical, some philosophical, and some, for want of a better word, are educational.

  There is no longer a strictly designated distaff geography; a woman’s place can be behind a desk or behind bars. However, she will always have a home in the mystery story.

  * * *

  —Michele Slung

  Acknowledgments

  This anthology could not have been possible without the cooperation of Eleanor Sullivan, Constance DiRienzo, Bill Pronzini, Patricia McGerr, and Gene Stone of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

  The Two Sisters

  Joyce Harrington

  The sisters were inseparable.

  They lived together, in a suburban apartment where each had her separate room of equal size. They rode to work on a bus crowded with other suburban commuters, but they always found a seat together. They worked together, in a travel agency where together they plotted exotic tours for finicky travelers to places the sisters had never seen. Once a year they took a cut-rate cruise, together, to a sunny island where they drank rum drinks chunked with tropical fruit and lolled on the beach in outrageous bikinis. They hoped to find husbands.

  It wasn’t easy. The sisters had high standards. They vowed to each other that they would never accept second-best. But the best was elusive and hard to define. He must be handsome, of course, but where was the dividing line between handsome and not handsome? He must be rich, but how rich was rich enough? He must be kind, considerate, and intelligent.

  They agreed that a doctor would do nicely, and in a pinch a dentist, although there was something not quite pleasant about the thought of hands that probed anonymous mouths all day. Lawyers were in, and salesmen were out. Stockbrokers were ideal. University professors were undoubtedly nice, but poor.

  Engineers were acceptable, providing they were not vulgar. Artists and writers of any kind, however rich and handsome, were likely to be unstable. Best of all would be a young man, or rather two young men, of independent means who recognized the fragile beauty and sterling virtues of the two sisters.

  The sisters made the most of the miniature style of beauty they shared. They were equally small and identically slender, and possessed similar heart-shaped faces. Marjorie, the older by two years, accented her gamine quality by wearing her dark hair cropped short in springing curls, while Audrey allowed hers to swing in a dark curtain to her shoulders.

  Assiduously, they developed all the talents they calculated they would need when they at last became mistresses of fine houses, neighboring, of course, in the most exclusive suburb. They played golf and tennis, learned gourmet cooking, studied antiques and wine, took part in amateur theatricals, and spoke disparagingly of everyone they knew.

  Once, when Marjorie was being eagerly pursued by a young accountant and seemed on the point of capitulation, Audrey saved her by a few cutting words.

  “He’s nothing but a glorified bookkeeper. You might as well marry a computer. Computers never get rich. They only count other people’s money.”

  Marjorie, brought to her senses, quickly totted up the debits and credits and arrived at a minus balance. Her accounting suitor had sweaty palms and bowled on the company team. No, he would never do.

  Again, when Audrey was being showered with expensive gifts by a distinguished-looking although middle-aged pencil manufacturer, it was Marjorie who found out the awful truth.

  “He already has a wife.”

  “He’ll get a divorce, I’m sure he will,” Audrey asserted. “He’s very rich.”

  “Better make sure,” cautioned Marjorie.

  But although the pencil magnate proposed setting Audrey up in a luxurious apartment and promised undying love and a place in his will, he did not propose to divorce his wife and put Audrey in her place. Regretfully, Audrey wrote him off. She kept the mink jacket, the diamond wristwatch, and all the other tokens of his esteem.

  The years passed in double dates and disappointment. The shifting population of the suburban apartment complex seemed to grow younger and younger. The few friends they had made among the apartment dwellers had long since married and moved to neat suburban split-levels where they raised children, puppies, and tomatoes, and worried about the mortgage. A dreary life, the sisters agreed, and after a few years they stopped sending cards at Christmas.

  One summer, the sisters noticed they were no longer included in the splashing frolics in the apartment’s pool. They knew none of the playful young creatures who swam and ducked each other and shrieked with merriment in the bright chlorinated water. If they noticed the giggles and whispers that greeted their approach to the pool, they did not comment even to each other. Someone labeled their mailbox: The Weird Sisters.

  Audrey was furious and complained to the management.

  Marjorie shrugged and said, “At least they know some Shakespeare.”

  That was the summer Marjorie began pulling gray threads out of her gamine curls and Audrey took up needlepoint. It was that summer, too, that a whole month went by without a single date. The sisters did something they had never done before. They stopped at a cocktail lounge after work and sipped two whiskey sours apiece before boarding their suburban bus.

  They had never been in a bar unescorted and they felt conspicuous. They sat nervously at a tiny table in a dark corner and chattered over their drinks of the day’s happenings at the travel agency. But although they kept their eyes studiously averted from the crowd of noisy men at the bar and their mouths moved in a semblance of conversation, their ears remained attuned to the babble of the drinkers.

  When the bartender approached their table with two more drinks on a tray and said, “Compliments of the gentleman at the end,” the sisters turned startled to see a grinning florid face nodding on top of a pair of beefy shoulders in a loud plaid jacket. The sisters shook their heads primly, paid their bill, and left.

  But they returned the next day. And the next. Soon it became a habit with them to stop after work at one cocktail lounge or another. Faces became familiar and some even acquired names. Summer sweltered moistly into fall, and still no one called to take them out to dinner or even to a movie.

  “Everyone must be out of town,” said Audrey.

  Marjorie mulled over her address book, crossing off names of those who had proved unworthy, or had got married or moved to jobs in distant cities.
When she finished, she threw the little book in the wastebasket and lay on her bed and cried.

  In September, the Riverside Players began rehearsals for their fall season. The first play was to be The Royal Family, and the sisters attended tryouts. Audrey preferred to work backstage, and volunteered to do costumes. Marjorie was confident she would be asked to play one of the young women’s parts. The sisters were relieved that the long dull summer had ended and their evenings and weekends would now be filled.

  The director asked Marjorie to read the part of Fanny Cavendish, matriarch of the play’s theatrical clan.

  “But she’s seventy years old!” protested Marjorie.

  “There’s no one else who can do it,” said the director. “It’s a terrific role.”

  “But I’d really rather play Gwen or even Julie.”

  “Fanny’s the best part in the play. You’ll have a ball.”

  “I will not have a ball! Count me out.”

  Marjorie brooded for a week, while Audrey sketched page after page of luscious 1920s costumes. Marjorie glanced over the sketches without enthusiasm.

  “Who have they got to play Fanny?” Marjorie asked.

  “Nobody yet. What do you think of this gown? Plum satin with just a hint of a train. And this one? Champagne lace over an apricot underdress.”