My Short Stories:
Something in Martin’s Basement
It’s 3am in the darkened all-night Stardust Bijou theater. Time when the popcorn is well past soggy, the soda is quite flat, and the motionless people in the front row have stayed long past their bedtime. The projector starts, sounding like a lonely werewolf howling at the waning moon, and the images, flickering across the screen, start to come alive.
Something in Martin’s Basement
by J.M. Cozzoli
Friday 10:30am, July 8th, 1940
Ancilla Scott was typing as fast as she could. I was dictating as slow as possible. We still were not meeting anywhere near the middle so the letter was taking a lot longer than I had planned. I sipped my coffee and thought of various ways I would like to take her pretty blond head and chop it off. Then again, maybe it would be more satisfying if I took the red scarf she wore around her pale neck and strangled her with it. No. Too much effort and I liked her as a person, just not as my secretary; and trying to get her corpse down the Chrysler Building’s elevators would be a nightmare. I had enough of those to deal with already: nightmares, not corpses.
“Why don’t we take a break?” I recommended. She sighed with relief.
“I’ll file these, then,” she smiled in that soft, raspy, voice of hers that made me think she was a heavy smoker, but I never saw her light up. She grabbed the folders on her desk, got up with determination, and then walked over to the filing cabinet. I usually refiled the folders after she left for the day, otherwise I would never find anything. As she opened the top drawer I imagined I could just push her head in and slam the drawer shut real hard a few times. I shrugged and retreated from the outer office to my own desk. I read in the pulps that private investigators sat at their desks with their feet propped up, waiting for clients. At least I could do that. I could also watch Ancilla through the tinted glass, in the outer office, at her desk, imagining she was a real secretary.
The sound of the door from the hallway opening was followed by Ancilla saying hello. She walked Captain Raphael Ligotti of the NYPD into my office. …