"EB - Edward L. Ferman - The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23rd EditionUC - SS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

He replied, "They quickly become deaf and so have no need to speak. Indeed, few work more than a year. They are prized as wives, for they never nag their husbands."
I looked at the girl, an exact double of my lost love. Beautiful and quiet. What more could a man ask!
—Janet E. Pear son
Tom Reamy wrote four stories for F&SF: Twilla," "Insects in Amber," "San Diego LJghtfoot Sue" (a Nebula award winner), and the gripping story you are about to read. He also wrote a novel, Blind Voices. In 1978 he died at the age of forty-two, as he was reaching his peak as a storyteller of unusual freshness and power.
The Detweiler Boy
by TOM REAMY
The room had been cleaned with pine-oH disinfectant and smeHed like a public toilet. Harry Spinner was on the floor behind the bed, scrunched down between it and the wall. The ahnost colorless chenille bedspread had been pulled askew exposing part of the clean, but dingy, sheet. All I could see of Harry was one leg poking over the edge of the bed. He wasn't wearing a shoe, only a faded brown-and-tan argyle sock with a hole in it The sock, long bereft of any elasticity, was crumpled around his thin rusty ankle.
I closed the door quietly behind me and walked around the end of the bed so I could see all of him. He was huddled on his back with his elbows propped up by the wall and the bed. His throat had been cut. The blood hadn't spread very far. Most of it had been soaked up by the threadbare carpet under the bed. I looked around the grubby little room but didn't find anything. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of forced entry—but then, my BankAmericard hadn't left any signs either. The window was open, letting in the muffled roar of traffic on the Boulevard. I stuck my head out and looked, but it was three stories straight down to the neon-lit marquee of the movie house.
It had been nearly two hours since Harry called me. "Bertram, my
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boy, Tve nm across something very peculiar. I don't really know what to make of it."
I had put away the report I was writing on Lucas McGowan's hyperactive wife. (She had a definite predilection for gas-pump jockeys, car-wash boys, and parking-lot attendants. 1 guess it had something to do with the Age of the Automobile.) I propped my feet on my desk and leaned back until the old swivel chair groaned a protest
"What did you find this time, Harry? A nest of international spies or an invasion from Mars?" I guess Harry Spinner wasn't much use to anyone, not even himself, but I liked him. He'd helped me in a couple of cases, nosing around in places only the Harry Spinners of the world can nose around hi unnoticed. I was beginning to get the idea he was trying to play Doctor Watson to my Sherlock Holmes.
"Don't tease me, Bertram. There's a boy here in the hotel. I saw something I don't think he wanted me to see. It's extremely odd."
Harry was also the only person in the world, except my mother, who called me Bertram. "What did you see?"
*Td rather not talk about it over the phone. Can you come over?"
Harry saw too many old private-eye movies on the late show. "It'll be a while. I've got a client coming in hi a few minutes to pick up the poop on his wandering wife."
"Bertram, you shouldn't waste your rime and talent on divorce cases."
"It pays the bills, Harry. Besides, there aren't enough Maltese falcons to go around."
By the time I filled Lucas McGowan in on all the details (I got the impression he was less concerned with his wife's infidelity than with her taste; that it wouldn't have been so bad if she'd been shacking up with movie stars or international playboys), collected my fee, and grabbed a Thursday special at Colonel Sanders, almost two hours had passed. Harry hadn't answered my knock, and so I let myself ia with a credit card.
Birdie Pawlowicz was a fat, slovenly old broad somewhere between forty and two hundred. She was blind in her right eye and wore a black felt patch over it. She claimed she had lost the eye in a fight with a Creole whore over a riverboat gambler. I believed her. She ran the Brewster Hotel the way Florence Nightingale must have run that stinking army hospital in the Crimea. Her tenants were the
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losers habitating that rotting section of the Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. She bossed them, cursed them, loved them, and took care of them. And they loved her back. (Once, a couple of years ago, a young black buck thought an old fat lady with one eye would be easy pickings. The cops found him three days later, two blocks away, under some rubbish in an alley where he'd hidden. He had a broken arm, two cracked ribs, a busted nose, a few missing teeth, and was stone-dead from internal hemorrhaging.)
The Brewster ran heavily in the red, but Birdie didn't mind. She had quite a bit of property in Westwood which ran very, very heavily in the black. She gave me an obscene leer as I approached the desk, but her good eye twinkled.
"Hello, lover!" she brayed hi a voice like a cracked boiler. 'Tve lowered my price to a quarter. Are you interested?" She saw my face and her expression shifted from lewd to wary. "What's wrong, Bert?"
"Harry Spinner. You'd better get the cops, Birdie. Somebody killed him."
She looked at me, not saying anything, her face slowly collapsing into an infinitely weary resignation. Then she turned and telephoned the police.
Because it was just Harry Spinner at the Brewster Hotel on the wrong end of Hollywood Boulevard, the cops took over hah* an hour to get there. While we waited I told Birdie everything I knew, about the phone call and what I'd found.
"He must have been talking about the Detwefler boy," she said, frowning. "Harry's been kinda friendly with him, felt sorry for him, I guess."
"What's his room? I'd like to talk to him."
"He checked out"
"When?"
"Just before you came down."
"Damn!"
She bit her lip. "I don't think the Detweiler boy killed him."
"Why?"
"I just don't think he could. He's such a gentle boy."
"Oh, Birdie," I groaned, "you know there's no such thing as a killer type. Almost anyone will loll with a good enough reason."
"I know," she sighed, "but I still can't believe it" She tapped her
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scarlet fingernails on the dolled Formica desk top. "How long had Harry been dead?"
He had phoned me about ten after five. I had found the body at seven. "Awhile," I said. "The blood was mostly dry."
"Before six-thirty?"
"Probably."
She sighed again, but this time with relief. "The Detweiler boy was down here with me until six-thirty. He'd been here since about four-fifteen. We were playing gin. He was having one of his spells and wanted company."