Kickback and Other Stories

By Peter Sellers

In settings as diverse as a struggling advertising agency, a book store, and a large computer company, the protagonists in Kickback and Other Stories find duplicity, betrayal, and sudden violence. As so often in life, there are no heroes, and it's often hard to tell who is the greater villain. A four-time nominee for the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story, and winner of the 2001 Ellery Queen Readers' Award, Sellers' stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Down & Out Magazine and numerous anthologies. "Closing Doors", which appears in this collection and originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, recently was awarded the 2020 Arthur Ellis Best Crime Short Story Award. Don Hutchison, acclaimed author of Great Pulp Heroes, said of Peter Sellers' stories: "A typical Sellers story there is usually one bad decision made, and on that hangs the plot—as well as the perpetrator."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mosaic Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771614269

Book preview

Dummy

Introduction

I AM FORTUNATE THAT MOSAIC PRESS IS HAPPY to put out books like this that are about as thick as cocktail napkins. I don’t write much. It’s a lot of work, it requires focus, and I can usually think of something more amusing to occupy my time. Editing my work is more fun, but in order to edit I have to write. So it’s a bit of a conundrum.

I spent decades as a writer in the ad business where a lack of focus didn’t matter much. I could knock out a perfectly serviceable ad in fifteen or twenty minutes, walk around the office for awhile, sit back down and edit my copy, then go get a coffee, annoy some co-workers, and go home, taking some good money with me. For allowing me to be able to do that for as long as I did, I’d like to thank Paul McClimond, who was my creative partner for 25 years. Paul helped keep me together, and probably kept me from being fired more times than I care to think about. He will laugh when he reads Closing Doors. I hope so, anyway.

Speaking of that, although all these stories are entirely fictional and bear no relationship whatsoever to any persons living or dead, I want to thank everybody who has done or said the things that gave me the inspiration for the contents of this book. I really did watch a man cut a hole in a wall and install an electrical outlet with no wiring attached to try to fool real estate agents.

Particular thanks are due to Jake Doherty, Therese Greenwood, Janet Hutchings, Linda Landrigan, and Rick Ollerman. In order, they represent the Osprey Summer Reading Series, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and Down & Out: The Magazine. Among them, they were kind enough to publish six of the eight stories in this book. The other two stories have not been published before now.

Since 1987, I’ve done a lot of books with Howard Aster and Mosaic Press, and I believe that all except for this one were delivered on time. I more than made up for that obsessive punctuality this time around. Thanks to Howard and Matt Goody for their patience and tremendous support over the decades.

Finally, thanks to Leslie Watts, for helping me to understand which words to leave out and why.

The Cooler

(Originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, May/June 2018)

THERE WAS A TAPPING BENEATH MY FEET, and I knew that Rich was under the floor again. This was one of his two tricks. The other was walking around the computer room on his hands. He was a lean guy and could do this at considerable length with no problem, though when he righted himself his eyes always looked odd, bloodshot, and slightly crazed.

The first time I heard him tapping it took me a while to figure out what was going on. I thought a comupter was going amok. It was only when one of the floor tiles started to dislodge itself that I realized that someone was under the raised floor. I moved the tile out of the way, and Rich climbed out.

Took you long enough, he said, dusting himself off. I could’ve died down there, and they wouldn’t have found me for days.

Never happen, Rich, I said. Someone would hear you laughing. He laughed at that, as I’d known he would. Rich laughed at almost everything. He laughed so much that I sometimes wished that he would stop, if only for fifteen minutes. Overall, though, he was fun to work with and, for all the hilarity, he was conscientious and did a good job.

The floor was raised because of the cooling system. The computer room in which I worked for those summers back in the mid-seventies contained three mainframes. Today your phone has more power than those monsters did, but back then they were cutting edge. They were so big, and the CPUs ran so hot, that each computer had its own air conditioning unit.

There was so much cold air being created that everything in the room sat on a raised floor made up of two-foot square tiles. The cold air passed under the raised floor. All the cables linking the various computers, printers, disk and tape drives ran along there as well, keeping them neatly out of the way.

The rumour was that the heat of a CPU was so intense that you could cook a can of soup in it. Rich did bring a can of soup to work one day to test the theory, but we were thwarted by the lack of a can opener. The story may have been apocryphal anyway. But we were able to prove repeatedly that the air conditioners were so effective that you could bring in a case of beer, put it under the floor, and it’d be ice cold by the time we got off work. It worked so well, and we used it so often, that Rich and I took to calling it The Cooler.

I’d got the computer room job from a guy whose lawns I was cutting. He was a wheel in the company and offered me work as a computer operator. I thought this was funny since I knew nothing about computers and, in my computer science class in high school, I’d had major trouble making any sense of Fortran IV. But the pay was a hundred and sixty bucks a week, which was powerful money for a student in those days. The year before, I’d worked in an office for two-ten an hour, making less than a grand for the entire summer. With this job I made that in six weeks, and I worked sixteen weeks in total. I was getting rich.

I was a bit nervous about the job at first, but when I look back on what I had to do, calling me a computer operator was flattering. We’d get messages on our consoles to put such and such a tape on such and such a tape drive or to mount a particular disk on a particular disk drive. The tapes were as big across as LPs, and the disks were the size of birthday cakes and weighed several pounds. They had plastic lids with handles that screwed down from the top. You pushed a button to open the drive, hoisted the disk in place with both hands, and unscrewed the lid. In order to take the disks, out you had to fasten the lid on first and then use the handle to haul it up.

Other than that we’d make sure the printers always had paper in them, and we’d remove the documents as they were printed and separate them into the appropriate cubbyholes for the programmers from the various departments upstairs. The programmers were called users, which struck me as unfortunate at the time, since it made them sound like a bunch of junkies. I had no idea what any of the users did or who their clients were. Many of them were banks, I believe, and investment companies. It didn’t matter, and I could not have cared less. The money was good and the work dead easy.

At the front of the computer room, there was a counter where the users came to pick up their printouts. The locked door that led into the computer room proper was to the left of the counter and could only be opened with a numeric code. The first time I met Jerry Prince he ignored the door and vaulted over the counter, landing about three feet from me. He wore jeans and a denim jacket. His hair was buzzed short, to hide how prematurely it was receding, long before such a hairstyle became fashionable. He had glasses, a bad complexion, and a big smile. Without a word, he took the box of paper I was holding and set it on the floor. He pulled a switchblade from his back pocket and snapped it open in front of my face. With four quick slices he cut the box open and lifted the lid, handing it to me with another smile. His eyes were glittery. I’m Jerry, he said. You’re the student. Then he walked away.

Jerry turned out to know a lot about cars. I called him at home once with a question about mine. He answered the phone and, instead of Hello he said, I’m sorry, the number you have just dialed is not in service. Then he hung up. I dialed him again and this time the phone simply rang and rang.

That Monday, I said to Jerry, I called you on Saturday and you answered the phone like a recorded message.

No. He shook his head. But then, after a pause, he said, Oh, I know. The phone company has used me in the past to record some of their messages. I guess you got one of those.

Then there was Julio from Uruguay. He had a drooping Zapata moustache, slightly goggle eyes, a constant grin, and a ring of keys attached to his belt. He looked like a friendly prison warder.

He gave me a lot of help when I started. His hands, which he waved enthusiastically when he talked, were the size of a gorilla’s but he typed remarkably quickly and was forever monitoring the console to check the status of jobs. Although we weren’t supposed to do this except in extreme cases, users would often call Julio and ask to get their listings moved up the print queue. Accordingly, Julio would move them to the top of the list, or knock them to the bottom, depending on whether he liked the user or not.

Julio’s sense of personal space was different from the rest of ours. As Jerry described it, He stands in your shirt pocket and yells at you.

There were two shifts in the computer room. The first was from eight-thirty in the morning to five-twelve in the afternoon: eight hours on the job and forty-two minutes for lunch. Teams of efficiency experts must have worked months to figure that one out.

The second was a shift was from four p.m. to midnight.

On the day shift, we split up for lunch so that the computer room was always staffed. Early was at 11:30, which made the afternoon too long. Late was at 12:30, by which time I was really hungry and the morning seemed to go on forever.

The company was located in an area surrounded by a river and ravine that had been converted into a series of large and meandering parks. There were no restaurants close by and, with forty-two minutes, there wasn’t time anyway. The company cafeteria was down a couple of long corridors from the computer room, and that’s where we went every day.

Most of us brought lunch and supplemented it with a cold drink, salad, or fries. Occasionally someone bought one of the hot meals or pre-made