The narrow lane appeared greasy under the yellow, hazy streetlights and a steady drizzle of rain as a hunched-up figure picked his way along the side, avoiding the puddles of dirty, opaque water.
The pavements on either side were under repair for several weeks, so the culverts were open to the sky and a death trap! The street remained inaccessible to hapless pedestrians except for plywood boards that served as make-shift bridges from closed doors over the drain.
Once over this temporary crossing, folks were compelled to walk the edge of the lane, mercifully devoid of traffic at this late hour. Even more merciful was the length of this creepy pathway. It ran no more than four hundred metres from start to end, serving only as a back lane to the main street running parallel to it. That broad duct of commerce had been elevated to the esteemed position of a ‘one-way’ due to the sheer flow of traffic during business hours.
The figure picked its way along, avoiding the puddles. Still, an observer would have commented that it wasn’t much use, for in circumventing one little body of water, the man inadvertently stepped into another.
He swore under his hat. Pulling his coat collars around his neck, he repeatedly jerked his head from left to right, looking for something or someone. His face was plump; rosy nasolabial folds bulged right down to marionette lines, giving off the impression of an aged dog.
He wasn’t old – fifty-five could never be considered old unless the judgement belonged to one no more than fifteen. The thin, stiff lips, downturned and almost scowling, glistened with the moisture from the rain; one would have thought that this man here was a mean customer, except that the black eyes, watery, uncertain and searching, rolling about over the puffy, pink bags suggested an alcoholic.
Seth Parrish was indeed one, although tonight, despite being soaking wet, he was ‘dried out’ and alert. Knowing that he needed his wits about him on this nocturnal mission, he had stoutly abstained. He was looking for an address; the paper he had scribbled it on was long since flung away because it had turned soggy, and his handwriting had smudged. But he remembered it the same way an alcoholic remembers where he hides his stash.
With a scowl, he recalled his cantankerous sister watching him with small, black, beady eyes as he donned his coat and hat and set out earlier that evening. She was much older than him, retired and contented with her single life.
“Forsythe,” she had called, shoving a slip of paper into his hand. “This fell from your pocket. Thought it was money, but it turned out to be trash, like you, Forsythe!”
Her eyes gleamed in their sockets when she repeated the full name that he hated so much. Seth froze, ground his teeth and turned around.
“Don’t call me that,” he snarled, snatching the paper from her.
That was the address he now hunted for.
“The old witch,” he muttered through clenched jaws. “The old miserly witch! The sooner she…”
He plodded into a puddle and swore as a body of ditch water, about the volume of his shoe, splattered across his face.
“Aaagh!” he cried and rubbed his eyes, grimacing and spitting a few grains of mud from his mouth. At least he had by-hearted the address, he thought. He looked around on either side of him. Beyond the yawning culverts, the black windows, barred and gauzed, shone uncertain rectangles of dull light onto the greasy road.
A wonky vinyl of ancient music scratched through one. A child bawled through another. Silence floated from yet another, and a husband swore at his wife from one more.
Seth stumbled on, still looking up at door numbers and wiping his face under the onslaught of the rain. Then, when he came to the end of the lane, he turned around, perplexed. Had he missed his destination? He walked back the way he came, now scanning the row of gloomy doors and windows on the other side.
The rain came down heavier, and he could hear the water rushing like an angry monster in the open ditch, spewing towards a larger storm drain and from thereon to a morass twenty-five miles away. He shuddered. Besides, without a drop of drink in him, he began to feel the effects of withdrawal. Why did it appear that faces were watching him from the gauzed windows? As if shadows were creeping in those mysterious hovels, swaying to wonky music and whispering to him? He shook his head to clear it and commanded himself to focus.
The sound of rain clattered like dancing skeletons on a rooftop ahead. It pelted off the greasy puddles on the lane like miniature water explosions and hissed like a furious serpent seeking freedom in the trench. Down, his feet sloshed in their shoes, and he grimaced.
That’s when he heard the sound.
“Psst!” it said again, and his head snapped around. At a black door which now opened to an even darker interior, Seth saw her standing, a slim figure draped in red, the cherry light of a cigarette glowing at her fingers. A precarious board of plywood bridged the gap between the door and the road, and she stood upon it, unmindful of the raging flood of water in the drain below.
“You must be Jack Smith?” she asked, but there was a smirk in her voice.
Seth parted his thin lips to deny it but recalled he had given her the name on the phone. “That’s correct – are you Melody Lyons?”
She smiled, flicked the cigarette into the torrent and turned inside, bidding him enter the dark mystery of her abode.
Seth Parrish grimaced again. He didn’t like how the cigarette hissed dead and vanished all in a split second. Somehow, the hissing reminded him of his sister – her taunts, jibes, and insults – her boxes and boxes of cash, jewels, valuables, and his own craving to be rid of her.
Picking his way, he tested his weight on the plywood board, mindful that if he fell into the ditch, it was wide enough to sweep him away to an eternity of dirt.
“It’s taken heavier men,” Melody said from inside. “Come in and close the door. And please remove your shoes and socks,” she added authoritatively. “I can’t have the muck from the road dirtying my carpet.”
The room he entered was small and dark, devoid of furniture except a coat rack and a hat stand. He ignored both but removed his shoes and socks, placing the sodden articles in a corner. His heart picked up, and his mouth went dry. Melody Lyons was lovely, shapely and young. There had been girls like her years ago – not that he dated them, but his stealthy voyeurisms with a telescope gave him his kicks and much-desired release – until his sister caught him gaping into it, put two and two together and broke his instrument!
“You pervert!” she had cried.
He swore. Why did that old bat always come back to haunt him? Why did their father have to die, and did she have to get all his wealth? How could someone so old still live like she would never die? How?
Seth Parrish then stepped into a room tainted red and furnished with a thick carpet; it soothed his wet toes and shot a ripple of pleasure around his heels. The ceiling was high – in the centre twirled, desultorily, an ancient fan, very ornate and very ineffective, for though the rain pelted down, the night’s heat was oppressive. A red sofa stood against the wall and behind a tiny table, where a bottle and two glasses almost made him forget the girl. She now sat on the sofa, thighs one over the other, showing a length of smooth white skin where it vanished under the tight red dress.
Everything looked rosy – or was it the light in the room? Even her pretty hands, patting the couch, inviting him to sit and partake of the drink, appeared red.
He stumbled forward and sat down on the edge, glancing first at her legs and then at the bottle.
“I hope you didn’t have too much difficulty finding my place,” came the platitude as she offered him a cigarette. He declined. With a shrug, she lit up and blew a cloud of smoke to the ceiling. Seth could only marvel at the full crimson lips and the smudge of the cosmetic on the cigarette filter.
“No…no,” he lied with a scowl, not because he didn’t like the idea of lying. Lying was his area of expertise, for it is a skill honed and refined by most alcoholics. Only the memory of the grimy road with its many dark, oily puddles deepened the marionette lines and pronounced the frown. He longed for a drink.
Divining his thoughts, Melody, with the cigarette hanging at her lips, leaned forward, picked up the bottle and uncorked it.
“So,” she began. “How do you want to do this?”
“Slowly. Very slowly,” came his leery growl.
With the cigarette still wafting a thin coil of smoke to the crimson-tainted ceiling, Melody poured two drinks. Offering him a glass, she raised it to her lips and inhaled deeply but didn’t drink immediately.
The drink was too tempting for Seth Parrish. The aroma lifted off the surface like ambrosia wafting into his nostrils.
“I could have a drink to happier times,” he stated with a travesty of a smile. The folds under his nose bulged his cheeks like two florid lemons, and sharp little teeth shone in the warm light of the room. “I’m not a drinker, you know,” he lied, clearing his throat.
Melody’s eyes narrowed, and a look of loathing spanned her lovely face. Still, she shrugged casually and watched him raise the glass to his lips.
“To success!” he hooted. With a tilt of his big, balding head, he tossed down the alcohol in one gulp, and his eyes gleamed. Glancing at the bottle and the consenting tilt of her head, he poured himself another liberal shot.
“You like your drink,” observed his host with a drawl. “It kills, Mr Parrish.”
“Then it’s mighty slow,” he chuckled, appearing unmindful of the name she had used.
“What methods do you employ?” he asked as the second drink went down enthusiastically. He poured a third round and inclined his head towards the bottle. “Good stuff. Excellent stuff.” Fired by the alcohol, he leaned forward and placed his hand suggestively on her thigh. “Do you do it yourself or have others in your employment? Not that I’m particular.” The drink appeared to loosen his tongue, and he rambled on. “I was never particular about anything, but yes…” he raised his hands, palms out. “As I said, it must be slow…and clandestine…sort of. I have a reputation to keep…you know what I mean?”
“Discretion is my second name, Mr Parrish.”
“Good, good.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Why?”
“Why do you want your sister dead?”
“Why wouldn’t I,” he asked truculently as the third drink went down his throat and to his head. “She’s old, and she’s rich. By rights, half the fortune she has is mine, but my father left it all to her.”
“Didn’t she also have a job with the Intelligence all her life and is now retired?”
“Exactly,” grated Seth Parrish. “And draws a fat pension too!”
“Hasn’t she earned it?”
“Not my inheritance. No!”
“Why did your father leave it all to her?”
“Because he was a bastard,” came the grinding reply.
“And do you work?”
“Work?” he asked, almost amazed that someone could ask him such a question. “Work? Yeah! I dabble in art…stuff. You could say I’m self-employed,” he added with an air of arrogance.
“Ah! One of the luckier ones, hmm?”
“Well,” he drew in a breath through his teeth and tried to play it cool, but he felt his heart pick up and a wave of nausea envelope him. “Well, I could do with a little dough to spend.”
“Your half of the inheritance?”
“Something like that… is it me, or is the room stuffy?”
Melody chuckled, laid her untouched drink on the table and rose, swaying her hips to the door. She peeped outside, surveyed the rain and raging culvert beneath her shoes and sauntered back to her seat.
“Well, Forsythe,” she said and sat beside him again. Despite his wobbly head and tight chest, he stared aghast at her.
“My name is…name is…” he had forgotten the name he had given her.
“Forsythe Parrish?” offered the woman.
“W..what? How?”
“You offered me a thousand for the hit,” she drawled and lit up another cigarette. “Your sister paid me double – in cash – but only on the condition that you wanted to go ahead with your sickening plan.”
“B-but how did she…?” In a flash, Seth Parrish recalled his sister giving him the address as he left the house. “My God!” he croaked. “She was on to me! She knew!”
“She was in the Intelligence, you bone-head!” came the arch reminder. Melody looked at her watch. “Won’t be long now, Forsythe.”
Seth gaped at her as realisation dawned. She hadn’t touched her drink. He had had at least three generous shots. Reflexively, he rose with a scream and tried to charge to the door, but even as he took a step, he swooned and collapsed, gasping as his chest knotted agonisingly.
“You bitch,” he gasped as his throat tightened and his tongue went thick. “What have you done to me?”
“Didn’t I tell you alcohol kills?” came her distant, silky voice. “Robin!” he scarcely heard her call as he writhed and gasped at her feet. “Robin!”
A giant of a man entered through a side door and grunted at the figure twitching in dying gasps on the carpet. “You know what to do. And don’t forget his shoes and socks.”
A second grunt confirmed that Robin understood his mistress. He waited till Seth Parrish went still and then cleaned his pockets of all papers. Lifting the form like a rag doll, the gargantuan man tossed it into the raging drain. In seconds, the torrent took the body away like a feather in a gale. Seth Parrish’s footwear followed soon after.
Melody Lyons only snuffed her cigarette and emptied the whiskey laced with sodium cyanide into the hissing tide. The empty bottle suffered the same fate, too. Then she shut her door and commented to her mute lackey:
“This is one hit that won’t keep me awake at night, Robin. Go to bed now.”
Seth Parrish’s corpse floated into the morass two weeks later, but its identity was anybody’s guess.