Richard M. Ellis:

To be on the safe side, Edgar Remmick got there early. He crouched on the fire escape in the rain and windswept early evening darkness, breathing rather heavily after the three-floor climb up from the alley.

After a moment he turned to the window. It was unlocked. Even though this fact saved him the bother of jimmying it open, Remmick sighed with a touch of exasperation. Considering the value of some of the items within the dark apartment beyond the window and the sleaziness of the neighborhood, one would think that Patty Blake would at least lock her bedroom window.

But not Patty.

Remmick twitched aside the drapes and peered into the warm, perfumed blackness. He did not intend to enter if he could avoid it. Almost at once he saw that there was no need. A faint, ghostly yellow glow hung in the darkness some distance from where he stood outside the window. The glow would be the specially treated light-switch plate just to the right of the apartment's front door. Since he could see it, he knew the bedroom door was open, and also the door at the far end of the short hallway opening into the livingroom.

Remmick knelt on the wet iron of the fire escape. He took from his trench coat pocket the long-barrelled .22 caliber pistol he had purchased a few days before, and from another pocket the silencer that he had picked up at an obscure pawnshop in the city's skid row district. He clamped the silencer onto the muzzle of the pistol. Then, resting his left forearm on the windowsill, he laid the barrel of the pistol across it.

Sometime within the next quarter-hour or so, the apartment door would open. Patty Blake would be silhouetted there for a moment — long enough — against the bright light of the third-floor corridor behind her. She would have no more chance than a clay pigeon at a shooting gallery.

Remmick waited, with the rain pelting down from the black sky and the blustery wind rattling the lids of garbage cans in the black canyon of the alley behind him; with the cloying scent of Patty Blake's perfume in his nostrils. The perfume had once been as erotically exciting to him as the girl who wore it in such lavish quantities. But no more.

He waited, and thought about his wife Stella. It was for Stella that he was here. Dear, sweet, patient Stella. How could he ever have been such a fool? To risk loosing Stella — his lifelong love — for something as transitory and meaningless as a furtive affair with a shallow-brained blonde half his age; Patty Blake, a gum-chewing, wide-eyed, big breasted creature, whose only possible purpose in life was to afford momentary pleasure to middle-aged business executives with more money than common sense. Remmick had no doubt that he was far from the first of his breed to pay little Patty's bills.

But he would be the last.

The nerve of her — the unmitigated nerve. After all he had done for her — the gifts, the regular weekly bundle of cash — and she showed her gratitude by threatening blackmail when he had made it clear a few nights ago that the affair was ended.

It had never occurred to Remmick that she might make trouble. Even now the memory set his heart to pounding and his gloved hands trembling with rage.

The infantile smile on her pouting red lips, the flutter of her eyelashes, and the cold words: "Uh uh, lover. I want you around, you know? Everything just like it is. Or else I'm afraid I'd have to go see your old lady — what's her name. I'd hate to do it, but..."

But she would do it; of that Remmick was now sure.

The very day following that night, Remmick had gone home from his office to find Stella lying across the bed in her bedroom, her eyes swollen from weeping. She had received an anonymous, obscene call — and the voice spouting the filth had been a young women's voice.

For some time before that, Remmick had been uneasily aware that Stella suspected things in spite of all his precautions to protect her from knowledge of his occasional peccadilloes. Yet her suspicions were one thing, and the distinct possibility of having it thrown in her face by Patty Blake was quite another.

That Remmick could not, and would not allow.

He was left with a choice of unpleasant courses of action. To him the least unpleasant was murder, though he hardly thought of disposing of Patty Blake in those terms. Ridding himself of a nuisance was more like it.

At first he thought of poison. He even managed to obtain a lethal dose of cyanide, encased in a thick gelatin capsule. But how to administer the poison was something else. Patty was, naturally enough, on her guard.

No, poison was not satisfactory; there were too many possibilities for error. And Remmick did not intend to make any errors, anymore than he allowed errors from himself or his employees in his business office.

He thought of other ways, but all contained flaws.

Then he read in the newspapers, to which he had turned for inspiration, that a part of the city was having the latest in a long series of unprovoked sniper attacks on women. This particular sniper, armed with a .22, had the habit of firing through windows at women who had neglected to draw their window sashes at night... and the part of the city affected was not far removed from the apartment building wherein he had established Patty Blake.

He tossed aside the newspaper and then, moments later, picked it up again to check the weather forecast. It called for clear weather for the next day, with a chance for rain in the days after that.

Today the rain had come; rain and wind, and now darkness, to cover his movements along the half deserted streets, down the alley and up the slippery iron fire escape.

He waited, rather enjoying his discomfort, for it was in a good cause. He was in a way atoning for his foolish actions in the past, and he would make it up to Stella in other ways.

He murmured into the whine of the wind, " I've learned my lesson, darling. From now on, it's you — and only you."

Perhaps he could take Stella on a long trip, a sort of second honeymoon. Why not?

Suddenly a slash of yellow light in the darkness beyond jerked him back to the present and the business at hand. The apartment's front door was opening.

He had not expected Patty quite so soon. He knew that she always had dinner at a restaurant downtown, always arriving home within minutes of eight o'clock. She was a little early.

So much the better.

He squeezed one eye shut, with the other sighted along the barrel of his gun, now faintly visible in the light from the doorway. There she was, hesitating on the threshold, her raincoated figure blackly silhouetted against the light, raising one arm now to fumble for the switch in the apartment.

Remmick fired. The .22 made no more noise than a clap of the hands. The woman jerked back, throwing up her arms. He fired again and again into the black figure which slowly sagged to its knees, then sprawled forward, motionless.

Aiming carefully, Remmick put two more slugs into the body. Not that they were needed; he was an excellent shot, and he was confident that his first bullet would have done the job...

It was eight thirty and the rain was lessening when he turned his car into the driveway beside his suburban home. He noticed with some surprise that his wife's car was not in its usual space in the double garage.

Probably she had driven over to the shopping center for something or other.

Remmick sat in his car for a moment, checking back on his movements. After stripping down the gun to its component parts, he had tossed it into the river that ran not far from his homeward route.

There was nothing to connect him to the death of Patty Blake; nothing to show that he had even known the girl. He had taken care to keep their relationship a secret, even to the point of surreptitiously wiping away any fingerprints he might have left on objects he had touched during his clandestine visits to her place. Of course, that had been done with only normal prudence — not with any idea that he might one day murder the creature. But the end results were the same: no possible connection between Edgar Remmick and Patty Blake.

He was humming cheerfully as he left his car and entered his house. Almost the first thing he saw was the note propped on the little table in the living-room, the table where Stella habitually placed the day's mail.

The note was in Stella's writing. He was still humming under his breath as he picked it up and began to read the message from her.

Then words, phrases, leaped up from the scribbled page: Sorry, but can't take any more ... I know all about Miss Blake ... followed you ... I must face her ... have it out with her ... I found the key ...

Remmick made a whinnying, groaning sound, remembering that he had taken the key to Patty's apartment off his ring that morning and tucked the key under a pile of socks in his bureau.

... the key, and am going now to see her. If she is not in, I will enter the apartment and wait for her ... must settle this ... I love you too much, Edgar, to lose you without a fight...

The note fell from Remmick's suddenly numb hands, and drifted slowly to the carpet.

"No," he whispered; then shouted, "No! It couldn't have been! It couldn't!"

And yet, hadn't the woman's figure in the doorway been just a shade too tall, a shade too narrow for Patty Blake? There had been something about it — something that even as he had fired had impressed him vaguely as being wrong. He had forgotten the impression, but now it loomed larger and larger in his seething thoughts.

He had killed his wife, Stella.

It was as simple, and as deadly final, as that.

In a daze he walked through the empty rooms of the empty house. He paused only once, long enough to take the capsule of cyanide from its hiding place in his den; from there he returned to the livingroom. He reread the last part of Stella's note through tear-dimmed eyes. He swallowed the capsule. It would take a few moments for the gelatin coating to dissolve in his stomach. Then the end would be mercifully swift.

Now — now — there was no possibility of error. None.

He waited, breathing loudly in the stillness, reading I love you ... Edgar ... I love you ...

There was the sound of a key in the door. Stella walked into the room, her hair glistening with drops of moisture, her coat damp from the rain. She saw him and stopped short.

"Oh. I — I was hoping I'd get home before you. In time to destroy that note." She sighed. "I didn't go, Edgar. I lost my courage at the last moment, and ... Edgar? Is something wrong? Are you ill?"

He was.

From Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine