Candy

“Jeff—” she said huskily.

I said: “No.”

“Jeff—”

“I’m not interested.”

“Of course you are.” Her voice was suddenly fierce, as if the world would end if I ceased to want her body. “You want me, Jeff. You want me!”

“I don’t. I did once but now I don’t.”

When she pouted at me she looked like a baby, a child denied an extra hypnotic hour in front of the television set or a second piece of candy. I had to remind myself that she was not a kid but a killer, not a baby but a bitch.

“Jeff,” she oozed, “what else can you do?”

I told her.

“I can kill you,” I said.

And I did

She was inches from me when my hands reached out for her throat. She did not draw back at once as she might have done. I think she refused to believe me, thought I was joking, assumed my hands were reaching to possess her rather than to destroy her.

She could not have been further from the truth.

My hands went around that neck and I squeezed her neck harder than I have ever squeezed anything in my life. It is not a simple matter to strangle another person with your bare hands. The books and television shows make it seem much easier than it really is. It is a tough proposition, even if you are a relatively strong guy and the person you are strangling is a woman.

There are all those cords and tendons and muscles in the human neck, and they get in your way. They were in mine, and if Candy had put up much of a fight she might have made things harder for me. But she did not put up any fight at all, did not try to scream or fight me off or anything. She just sat there, her eyes bewildered and her forehead wrinkled in a frown that was part disbelief and part sheer physical pain; just sat there with something approaching calm while I choked her to death.

She must have been dead long before my hands relaxed their grip. God knows how long I held onto that throat. I think I was afraid that if I let go too soon she would pick up another kitchen knife and wipe out half the human race.

She might well have.

But finally I was satisfied that she was dead. Quite satisfied, and very pleased with myself. Not joyous, not happy, but curiously elated with my performance.

I had performed a task which was not only difficult but essential.

For quite some time I remained in the room with Candy’s corpse. She was not beautiful in death. Perhaps no victim of strangulation could ever be beautiful—her tongue hung out of her mouth, her eyes bulged, her face was purplish and puffy.

But it was more than that. A good part of what passed for beauty in Candy was actually more akin to vivacity. She had been very much alive, desperately alive, alive with the verve and spirit of a jungle creature to whom civilization is a cumbersome affair.

Now, now that she was dead, this Life with a capital “L” was gone, and what remained was nothing but the right amount and variety of component parts which added up to Woman. The result could not be called beautiful by anyone but a true necrophile, an absolute worshipper of Death.

When I couldn’t stay in the room any longer I rummaged through her purse and took as much money as I felt I would need. I stuffed the wad of bills into my pocket and left the room, hanging a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob so that no errant chambermaid would stumble upon the body of the late and unlamented Candace Cain. I took the elevator to the main floor, wandered out through the lobby into the sunshine.

A pawnshop in a less-than-respectable section of town supplied a .38-calibre revolver and some bullets. I had to pay a good deal of money for the gun but I didn’t worry about the price.

My next stop was a typewriter sales and service shop a few blocks from the hotel. I bought a new typewriter—an extravagance, I admit—and paid cash for it.

From there I went to a stationery store and bought a ream of bond paper. With the gun and bullets in my pants pocket and the paper and typewriter in my arms I re-entered the hotel and elevated back to my floor. I opened the door of the room and it was as I had left it, which was hardly surprising. Death had not been kind to Candy. She looked worse than she had when I left her.

I placed the typewriter on the desk and pulled up the chair and sat in it.

I am sitting in it now.

I placed the revolver, loaded with a single bullet, on the desk by the side of the typewriter. I looked at it from time to time.

I am looking at it now.

I began typing, and I typed very fast and very long. The words came freely, almost too freely. There is still some of the ream of typewriter paper left, but quite a bit has been used already.

I strongly suspect, Officer, that this is the longest suicide note you have ever read.

THE END

A New Afterword by the Author

CANDY, PUBLISHED TOWARD the end of 1960, may have been Sheldon Lord’s last book for Midwood Tower. (It wasn’t the last book by Sheldon Lord—several ghostwriters produced a string of books for Beacon Books, and the last that Beacon printed was, in fact, one I wrote myself, a crime novel they called The Sex Shuffle, now available under my own name as Lucky at Cards. Nor was Candy the last book I wrote for Midwood; they published Jill Emerson’s first two ventures in lesbian fiction, Warm and Willing and Enough of Sorrow.)

If Candy was my final Sheldon Lord for Harry Shorten at Midwood, I suppose there must have been eight or ten before it. And that, it seemed to me, was enough labor in that particular vineyard. I’d welcomed the assignments and had a good enough time turning out soft-core erotica, but it wasn’t how I wanted to spend my writing life. It was very much my intention to write books that might be a source of satisfaction and even pride, and that was generically impossible in the field where Sheldon Lord had been making a name for himself.

I remember having read an article in which crime fiction writer Bill Gault talked about his own literary ambitions. Early on, he said, he’d wanted to become a second Ernest Hemingway, but over time he decided he was better off trying to become the best possible William Campbell Gault. While my earliest fantasies might have shown me as a second John O’Hara or James T. Farrell or John Steinbeck or Thomas Wolfe, I’d since lowered my sights, and becoming the best possible Lawrence Block seemed reasonable.

But I wasn’t entirely sure what that might mean, or how to get there. Mystery fiction, it seemed to me, was both respectable and attainable, and my inner self seemed to come up with ideas that lent themselves to the genre. My first sales were short stories to crime fiction magazines, and I’d sold a couple of crime novels to Gold Medal Books by the time I wrote Candy.

There were times when the two genres overlapped, at least in my house. Grifter’s Game started out as a book for Shorten; a couple of chapters in I decided it was cut out for better things and finished it accordingly. Knox Burger bought it at Gold Medal. And sometimes the reverse happened: Cinderella Sims was supposed to be a Gold Medal crime novel, but something went awry and I lost confidence in the book and finished it up for Bill Hamling’s Nightstand Books. ($20 Lust, they called it, by Andrew Shaw; it’s since been republished under my name and original title.)

This sort of migration, from crime to erotica or erotica to crime, isn’t all that remarkable. It was perfectly reasonable for crime novels to have sex in them, and it was a fairly standard ingredient in the paperback originals Gold Medal published. And crime was no stranger to the field of erotic fiction, serving the useful function of