“I know so little about the making of pottery. I must read up on it.”
“You will find it interesting, I’m sure. The pieces are baked, for instance, in intense heat. Have you any idea of the temperature needed to produce a piece of biscuit ware?”
“Biscuit ware?”
“That is what the pottery is called after the initial baking, before glazing.”
“Oh. No, I must confess I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“An average temperature of 1,270 degrees.”
“Mercy!”
“Centigrade, that is.”
“Good heavens!”
“So, you see,” Clara finished humorously, “my lovely vase has been put through quite an ordeal. Don’t you agree it is worth it, though? It is too squat for most flowers, of course, but never mind. I shall keep it for something very special.”
Talk of such heat had prompted the Reverend Mr. Culling to think uneasily of Hell. He preferred talking of it to thinking of it, for silence increased its terrors, but it would hardly do as a topic for this polite conversation, which had continued, at any rate, long enough. He rose.
“Well, I must run along. I really must. I can’t tell you how relieved I am to find you taking things so well.”
“You mustn’t worry about me. I’ll survive, I assure you.”
They walked to the front door and said goodbye.
“I’m so glad you called,” said Clara. “Do come again soon.”
From the door, she watched him to his car at the curb, and then she turned and went back into the living room. At the table, she took up the package with an expression of annoyance. Really, Casper was simply too exasperating! It was well enough to be thrifty, but her dear brother was positively penurious. Not only was the package flimsy and insecurely tied, but it had been sent third class, just to save a few cents’ postage. Of course, one realized that postal employees rarely availed themselves of the right to open and inspect packages, but just suppose, in this instance, one had! It would have been embarrassing, to say the least.
She took the lovely vase from the mantel and set it on the table beside the package. Her annoyance dissolved in a feeling of delicious companionship. Opening the package, she began to pour its contents into the vase.
A LESSON IN RECIPROCITY
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1966.
In the yellow pages, Gaspar Vane was listed simply as a private investigator, leaving it up to any prospective client to discover for himself the precise nature of investigations undertaken. As a matter of fact, almost any kind that promised a fee was acceptable, but as things worked out, most of them were associated with the more sordid aspects of divorce. He was prepared to gather the evidence of grounds where grounds existed, and he was, for a premium, prepared to create it where it did not. He was not, in brief, a man to permit professional ethics to handicap his operations.
Gaspar suffered from baldness, which is a perfectly normal hazard of maturity, and he was fat. Altogether, considering a pocked face, loose lips, and ferrety little eyes, he was a physical composition of exceptional ugliness. What was not immediately apparent was the poetic range of his imagination. He spent much of his time in a private world in which miracles happened to Gaspar Vane, and it was this happy facility for fantasy that kept him in the practice of his rather unsavory trade.
In spite of the liberal policies that made it possible for him to take any kind of work that was offered, Gaspar’s practice did not flourish. He frequently had difficulty in paying the rent and satisfying his creature needs. He had no payroll to meet, having no employees. However, he did have an answering service that was essential to the little practice that he had, and he was forced at times into devious maneuvers to scratch up even the little that it cost. But he was stuck to his last, as the old saying goes, by a tenacious dream. He existed in the hope of a lode of luck. There would surely be one client who would turn out to be a jackpot.
He did not dream, however, when Hershell Fitch climbed the creaky stairs to his dingy office, that the jackpot was at hand. Hershell was a faded, depleted little man who had bleached to virtual anonymity in the shadow of a domineering wife, and it was under the orders of this wife, it developed, that he was seeking the services of Gaspar Vane. Anyhow, Hershell did not look like a jackpot, and he wasn’t one. The jackpot was Rudolph La Roche, and it was merely Hershell’s coincidental function to reveal him. Gaspar acknowledged Hershell’s introduction with a flabby smile and a greasy handshake.
“Sit down, Mr. Fitch,” Gaspar said. “How can I help you?”
Hershell sat in the one client’s chair and balanced his felt hat carefully on his knees.
“It isn’t exactly I,” Hershell said. “It’s actually my wife. I mean, it’s my wife who sent me here to see you.”
“In that case, how can I help your wife?”
“Well, we have these neighbors. La Roche is their name. Mr. and Mrs. Rudolph La Roche. It’s Mr. La Roche’s activities that she wants investigated.”
“Ah! That’s different. Quite different.” Gaspar leaned back and dry-washed his fat hands. “You suspect Mr. La Roche of something illicit?”
“Perhaps I’d better tell you about it.”
“I was about to suggest it.”
“Well, it’s this way.” Hershell’s fingers fiddled nervously with his hat, while he attempted to gather his harried thoughts. “The La Roches moved in next door nearly three years ago. Immediately they adopted this peculiar routine, and they’ve been in it ever since.”
“Routine? What’s peculiar about a routine? Most married people have a routine.”
“It’s not only the routine. It’s mostly that they act so mysterious about it. In the beginning, when Mrs. Fitch and Mrs. La Roche were on amiable terms, my wife tried to find out where Mr. La Roche went and what he did, but Mrs. La Roche was evasive. Finally she was quite rude about
