Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 23, No. 12, December 1978
Dear Reader:
Travel is broadening, we are told, but travel can be dangerous as well. And half of the stories in this issue have a foreign setting as backdrop for chilling tales of intrigue and murder. London’s airport is the scene for a tense, dramatic encounter in William Bankier’s “The Dream of Hopeless White,” while just across the Irish Sea some unsavory characters try to thwart another man’s dream in “All You Need Is Luck” by Jean Darling. In “A Grave on the Indragiri” by Alvin S. Fick, a private detective’s investigation of a man’s mysterious death leads him first to a Sumatra rubber plantation and finally to a quiet garden in Holland. “Three Weeks in a Spanish Town” prove to be a bit more exotic than Edward D. Hoch’s hero and heroine expected, and a young Kyoto police inspector solves a puzzling crime among the shadows of a Buddhist temple in “Inspector Saito’s Small Satori” by Seiko Legru.
And to prove that not all the American criminals have left the country, Stephen Wasylyk, Jerry Jacobson, Ron Goulart, Jack Ritchie, and John Lutz provide stories about some of our domestic villains.
Good reading.
Alfred Hitchcock
The Dream of Hopeless White
by William Bankier
Knowing it was the miserable dream happening again did not make it any less humiliating for Danny White. He had climbed into the ring and his seconds were tugging the arms of his satin robe backward off his shoulders. The arena was silent.
It was when the robe came away and he was seen to be dressed in pajamas that the crowd began to laugh. Then Danny was alone in his corner and the bell rang. His opponent was upon him before he could turn, raining blows on his shoulders and the back of his head. Danny covered up, peering past bent arms in striped flannel, and saw the referee joining in the attack, aiming punches at his ribs’ and kidneys.
It was so unfair he began to weep. Tears spattered the leather gloves as he pressed them to his face and he sank to his knees on the canvas. And now the people in the arena began their slow, echoing chant. “Hope-less White... Hope-less White...”
Danny arrived late at the breakfast table, having been called twice. He looked imposing in his dark-blue security-guard uniform. Barbara was feeding cereal into Janice, who was waving a fist from her highchair perch. Danny was carrying yesterday’s newspaper. He set it down and picked up the kettle.
“I can make you eggs in a minute,” Barbara said.
“I only want coffee.” He spooned brown powder into a mug and drowned it with water well off the boil, then sat down sideways at the end of the table and shook out the tabloid. He stared at the picture of a handsome black man in boxing gear holding his arms above his head. A shorter man with a pale face and a grey crewcut stood beside him. The heading announced, HANNEFORD HARPER LEAVES LONDON TODAY.
Barbara White glanced at her husband. “No wonder you dream, reading that stuff before you go to sleep.”
“I have to keep up with things.”
Barbara let a moment go by while she used the spoon to clear the baby’s chin. “We should all try to do that,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Stuck at home,” she said with forced serenity. “Things happen and I don’t even know.”
Danny wondered how she had heard. “I wish I knew what you’re talking about.”
“I just wondered if there’s anything new in car rentals.”
Danny managed to assume a tone of injured innocence. “Monika and I had one drink. It was all aboveboard — Trevor was with us.”
“And if Trevor’s wife hadn’t mentioned it I still wouldn’t know.”
The heavyweight champion looked carefree in his photograph. But then he always did. Was Hanneford Harper besieged by trouble like ordinary people? “If this arrangement is bothering you,” Danny said, “you can always make another one.”
“You’d like that.” Barbara was carefully calm. “Me and the wee one back in Glasgow and you by yourself in London.”
“You had lots of friends there. They’d be glad to see you.”
“Yes. Young mothers with infants are greatly in demand.”
The doorbell buzzed. Danny glanced at his watch and called, “It’s open.” Trevor Malloy and his wife Carla entered the kitchen through the narrow hallway from the side door.
“Let’s move it, Battler,” Malloy said. “Traffic is bad this morning. Fog on the motorway.”
Danny stood up. He drank half of his mug of tepid coffee without tasting it. “Hello, Carla my love,” he said. “Anything to report this morning?”
She passed him off with a menacing smile and marched to the highchair. “Hello, baby. How is baby?”
Danny showed the newspaper to Trevor. “Look who’s passing through Heathrow today. Harper.”
“I saw it on the news.”
“Maybe I’ll get to meet him.”
“If you’re good, I’ll get you his autograph on a bar mat. Come on.”
The men went out and Carla said, “I don’t envy you, love.”
“I told him what you told me. He says I can leave any time I want.”
“Do it. For a while, anyway.”
Trevor Malloy drove the car through heavy traffic toward the airport. Beside him, Danny White sat erect, his arms folded across his chest. “Did you see Harper’s fight against the German?”
“No. Carla wanted to watch something on the other channel.”
“It was a lousy fight anyway.”
“I heard.”
Danny frowned. “It burns me to see him fighting these pushovers.” “You still want a taste.”
“I’ve always wanted a taste.”
“It’s your own fault you never got it. When you came out of the amateurs, you were the best in Britain. Everybody said you were better than Bugner at the same stage.”
“I’m better than Bugner the best day he ever had.”
“Well, it was your decision.” Malloy changed lanes. “I was only the trainer.”
“It’s the system that’s wrong,” said Danny, taking up his old complaint. “All those years in the amateurs, learning to be a fighter. You turn pro and what do they want? They want you to spend more years hammering a succession of nobodys. Each one of them taking something out of you.” His voice was rising. “Fight anybody, fight in an alley, they’ll pay to see it. But I only wanted one fight. A chance at the champion.”
“A lot of blokes want that chance,” Malloy said.
“I could beat him, Trev. Just me and Hanneford Harper in the right ring at the right time. I could take him. I know I could.”
“You know it, but nobody else knows it.”
“I can dream.”
Traffic was slowing under poor conditions. Trevor looked out gloomily at white fields. “That fog is getting serious.” He whistled tunelessly between his teeth, tapping his wedding ring on the steering wheel. “You buying Monika a drink this evening?”
Danny thought of the pretty girl behind the car-rental counter on the lower concourse. “Do you think it’ll be all right with Carla?”
“Sorry about that.”
“You should be.”
In a secluded corner of the airport lounge, the Heavyweight Champion of the World leaned forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees and his boyish face inches from the window. He was surrounded by his trainers, a dozen hangers-on and an attractive girl in tailored denim and a cute flat cap dead-center on her modified Afro hairdo.
“Would you look at that fog,” Hanneford Harper said. “Man, it came down out of nowhere.”
“Can we go back to the hotel?” the girl asked, expecting to be refused. “Can’t do a damn thing here.”
“You be careful, Mary-Jo,” Harper said, “or I’ll get those reporters to tell my wife on you.”
“I’ll tell her myself. I like that girl.”
“I’m gonna have the airplane make a detour over Montreal and drop you back where I found you.”
A short man with a grey crewcut approached on the trot and balanced himself in front of Harper’s chair. His dapper suit was all knife-edges. “Relax, everybody,” he said. “They say hang around. This is a freak situation and it could clear up any time.”
The group moaned. Harper said, “This is a Freak City. I’m not kidding, Axel. I got a feeling we’re
“You spook me when you start up with your premonitions,” Mary-Jo said.
“I’m only saying how I feel.”
Axel Steele pointed to the glass doors and a corridor beyond. “I made arrangements for us to eat before they open the dining room to the public.”
Harper got up in one easy movement. “They got any raw meat, Axel? For Mary-Jo here?”
The retinue laughed as they stirred themselves and moved toward the doors. Axel Steele held a door open for Harper, who stood back to let the girl through ahead of him. Then he followed. Another set of glass doors several feet away made the area into a small anteroom before the rest of the corridor leading to the restaurant. In this space a thin young man was waiting. He was black, nicely dressed in a new raincoat, a pink shirt collar and pale tie showing beneath his chin. He drew a pistol from his coat pocket and aimed it at the champion.
Harper put his hands up automatically the way he had done in childhood games on the back streets of Chicago. “Hey now,” he said.
Axel Steele dropped his arm and the door swung shut, leaving Harper and Mary-Jo alone on the other side with the gunman. “Nobody move,” Steele said.
“You betrayed the people, Harper,” the young man said. “You sold out. You’ve got to go.”
“Wait a minute,” Harper said. “You’ve got it wrong.”
Danny White appeared, moving along the corridor behind the young man’s back. He took in the situation at a glance, advanced quickly, flung open the glass door, and before the man could change his aim Danny lifted the gun with his left hand and drove a right jab to the jaw. It had the sound of a perfectly timed punch. The gunman fell against the wall, unconscious.
Now everybody was talking, crowding into the enclosed space. More guards arrived and took away the would-be assassin. Hanneford Harper got hold of Danny White’s arm. “Hey, you’re beautiful. I like those moves.”
“That’s what we get paid for,” Danny said, face to face with the champion, feeling the effect of his size.
“You don’t get paid enough.” Harper was gleeful as a child. “Hey, Axel, did you see this guy go to work? Wham, bam, it was lights out!”
The public address cut in and a bland voice announced that fog conditions had not improved and that all take-offs were postponed until at least 1600 hours.
Mary-Jo swore. “That’s over five hours to kill.”
“Don’t say kill, baby,” Harper said. “I told you I’ve got a feeling about this place.”
The fighter’s manager gnawed at his lower lip. Then he said, “Hell with this. I’m calling the Starways Motel down the road. They know me. I’ll get us a few rooms, we can relax, have some drinks.”
“Now you’re talking,” Mary-Jo said.
“And my friend Sudden Death is the guest of honor. O.K.?” Harper beamed at Danny. “Can you come over?”
“I can get off during the afternoon. Yeah, I’ll come over.”
“Good.” Then Harper said, “Hey, I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Danny. Danny White.”
Axel Steele looked up. “The name rings a bell,” he said thoughtfully. “Did you ever do any fighting?”
“I used to box a little.”
“You’re a fighter,” Harper said. “That explains the jab.”
Around midday, Danny walked by the bar in the main passenger lounge. Trevor Malloy, in his red waiter’s jacket, was unloading dirty glasses from a tray. He saw his friend approaching and said, “I thought you’d be up in the supervisor’s office getting your medal.”
“You heard?” Danny’s euphoria was rising.
“Everybody’s talking about it. You must have moved fast.”
“I was lucky.”
“I think you were a bloody fool. They don’t pay you to be a cowboy. You’re supposed to collar pickpockets.”
“They’re having a party at the Starways this afternoon. Harper asked me over.”
“Drinking with the champ. That can’t be bad.”
“Not just drinking with him.”
“Sorry?”
“Something else is going to happen.”
Malloy was scanning the sparsely populated lounge for orders. “Give us a call when you get back to earth,” he said.
Danny White found a telephone kiosk and dialed his home number. Barbara answered. She told him she’d been at the shops with Carla and had something to ask him. Would he mind if she disappeared for a while?
“Disappear where?”
“Devon. Carla’s mother is going into hospital and she’s going home for a couple of weeks. She says Janice and I can come along.”
“If it’s what you want, go ahead.”
“Thanks very much. Typical.”
“I can’t beg you to stay.”
“Why not? You could have said, ‘Please don’t go, Barbara. I’ll be lonely without you and Janice.’ ” After a long silence on the line, Barbara said, “Hello?”
“Have you been listening to the radio?”
“No, I just got back.”
“I expect you’ll hear my name on the news.”
Barbara was alarmed. “What happened?”
Danny told her about the encounter, saving Harper’s life, and about the afternoon party he had been invited to attend. “I was in the right place at the right time.”
The party was moderately off the ground when Danny arrived at the motel in mid-afternoon. Hanneford Harper was sitting with Mary-Jo and Axel Steele, listening to the manager, his eyes half closed. But he spotted Danny the moment he entered the suite and rose to meet him. “Hey, here’s my main man. Come on in, Danny. What are you drinking?”
“Just a beer, thanks.”
“Mary-Jo, get Danny a beer.” Harper put an arm around Danny’s shoulders. One black, the other blond, the two heavyweights were nearly of a size. “I can’t think of anything else. That cat had me
Danny said, “I’ll think of something.” He looked Harper in the eyes and they both laughed.
Axel Steele was watching Danny with a sour expression on his face. “I know something about you, kid. But I can’t remember it.”
“I told you, I used to box.”
“But I know all the pros. How come your name rings a bell but I can’t put a record with it?”
“I fought mostly as an amateur.”
“Hey, Axel,” Harper said, “cut out the quiz.”
“Can’t I settle my mind? There’s something about this guy.”
The party continued with everybody becoming nicely drunk except Danny, who nursed his original beer. He talked with Mary-Jo and learned she was a Canadian who had met the champ in a Montreal show bar where she was a dancer. She was several drinks ahead of him, and warned Danny that Axel Steele hated him for hitting it off so fast with Harper.
“All I did was help the man, and he’s grateful to me,” Danny said.
“It’s more than that. The way Hanneford looks at you. His arm around you all the time. You’re some kind of charm that’s walked into his life, and Steele can’t get that down his throat.”
Somebody found music on the radio and a couple began to dance. Axel Steele snapped an order to have the volume lowered. Then he narrowed his eyes at Danny. “The pieces just fell into place — Danny White.”
“Axel,” Harper said, “you sound like a man with a toothache.”
“Danny White. Won everything there was in the amateurs. They said when you turned pro there was going to be a New White Hope.”
Harper was pleased. “Is that true, Danny? Were you that good?”
“Wait,” Steele said. “He turned pro and they put him in against that tough South American. Not ranked, but very strong. And he cleaned your clock. Took you apart for six rounds until your corner stopped it. You never fought again.”
“Is he right, Danny?” Harper asked.
“Sure he’s right. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“After only one pro fight?”
“It was big news here.” Danny had learned to face the humiliation at the time, but he’d been out of sight for almost three years. He felt the familiar sting around the eyes but he pressed on. “They had fun with my name. The reporters stopped referring to me as The New White Hope and started calling me Hopeless White.”
Hanneford Harper turned his back on his manager and stood close to Danny. “Why did you quit?” he asked.
“No guts,” Steele said. “As soon as he got in with the men, no guts.”
“Shut up, Axel. He must have had a reason.”
“There was a reason,” Danny said. “Nobody has ever understood it.”
“Try me.”
Danny glanced at the hostile face of Axel Steele, at Mary-Jo as she sipped her drink, then back to Hanneford Harper s honest eyes watching him intensely. “I was twenty-two years old,” he said. “I was at my peak. I could box and hit, I had the instinct, and I wasn’t damaged.”
Harper said wistfully, “I know what you mean.”
“Then that first pro fight. The guy was a mixer, and he had nothing to lose. But I could have beaten him.”
Axel said, “Then why didn’t you?”
“Because to beat him I’d have had to open up to him, leave part of myself with him. It sounds crazy but I didn’t want him. I didn’t care about him.”
Harper was nodding. “He’s right. That’s what you have to do.”
“After the South American, there would have been another, and then another. Years of wearing myself down on all those guys wouldn’t have made me a better fighter. It would have used me up. So I made up my mind right then — if I couldn’t fight the champion, the hell with it.”
“Craziest thing I ever heard,” Axel Steele said.
There was a puzzled silence. Danny White said, “But I’ve always dreamed of having my chance.”
Harper’s laugh startled everybody. “Man, I knew you had something on your mind. I read you as soon as you walked in here.”
Danny smiled at him. “How about it, Champ? Do I get my fight?”
“That’s nonsense,” Axel said. “You aren’t even rated. Anyway, we’re matched with Alvarez in June and then we’re going to Japan.”
Danny said, “I mean right now. Today.”
The dancer nearest the radio bent down and switched it off. Everybody looked at Steele except Harper, whose grin kept widening. “How about this guy,” he said. “Isn’t he beautiful? He’s promoting himself a fight with Hanneford Harper!”
“There’s no way you’re going to mix with this guy,” Steele said. “Maybe sustain a cut that postpones the June fight. Forget it.”
Harper’s exuberant grin turned into a ghost of a smile. He said, “We won’t forget it unless I decide to forget it.” He looked hard at Axel Steele, who lowered his eyes. “Danny White saved my life this morning. I owe him something. Right, Danny?”
“That’s right, Champ,” Danny said. “You owe me.”
Trevor Malloy came in response to Danny’s phone call. He arrived out of breath at the small gymnasium the Starways Motel had installed to go with their sauna. Mats had been arranged on the floor and both heavyweights were outfitted in boxing gear. “Thanks for coming over, Trev,” Danny said. He did not have much voice.
“To see Danny White against Hanneford Harper,” Malloy said, “I’d crawl stark naked in the dead of winter on my hands and knees across a field of broken glass.”
Harper and Axel Steele crossed the mats. Harper said, “Any objection if Axel acts as referee? We gotta have somebody.”
“I don’t mind.”
“White, if you damage my fighter so he can’t keep our June date,” Steele said, “I’ll slap a suit on you in court.”
“I’m not going to damage him,” Danny said. “I’m going to knock him out.”
Harper’s massive grin flashed like a searchlight. “Listen to old Danny. He’s not afraid of anybody!”
The fighters went to their corners and the watchers took up places around the gymnasium walls. Malloy knelt beside Danny’s chair. “Box him in the early round,” he began. “Keep him off with the left...”
“Trev, old buddy,” Danny interrupted, “you don’t have to tell me what to do. I’ve been getting ready for this day all my life.”
“But that’s Harper. He’s the champion.”
“And I can beat him. I knew it when I quit three years ago and I know it now. The right ring at the right time.”
Malloy was almost able to believe it. “O.K., Danny, I’m with you. Go get him.”
Steele stood at the center of the rectangle of mats. “All right,” he said, “let’s get this farce over with. Three-minute rounds. Gabe will time it and sound the gong. Everything else is up to me. And when I say this fight is over, damn it, it’s over.”
Somebody struck a metal tray with an empty bottle. There was silence in the crowded room except for the whisper of the boxers’ shoes on the mats. Danny went on the attack immediately. His boxing skill was apparent and he put it to good use, feinting and jabbing, scoring frequently with sharp punches to his opponent’s head and body. Harper acknowledged the better shots with a grin. Danny remained deadly serious. The round ended with Danny White ahead on points had anybody been scoring.
Malloy was exuberant, towelling his fighter, giving him a drink. “Hey, you look great. Keep it up.”
“I can beat him, Trev. I know it.”
In Harper’s corner, Axel Steele leaned in and said, “Don’t you carry him. Hear me? The longer you carry him, the more chances he’ll cut you.”
“I’m not carrying him,” Harper said calmly. “He’s a boxer. He knows what he’s doing.”
“You’re a boxer too. Turn it on and finish him. Fast.”
Harper glanced at his trainer. “Should I do that?”
The trainer, a man in his sixties, looked almost sad. “The boy wants to fight the champ,” he said. “You ain’t being fair to him unless you show him what it is.”
The makeshift gong sounded and the fighters moved out to face each other. It was a different Hanneford Harper now. He was coiled more tightly and his punches began to appear in combinations so fast that Danny could not block them all. His head snapped back and blood appeared on his upper lip. Danny fought back but his jabs seemed half speed now that Harper was doing his best.
Halfway through the round, Harper landed a heavy right to the stomach. Danny’s guard slipped and a lightning-fast combination — left, left, right, left — poured in on his unprotected head, the last punch dropping him to his knees.
There was a roar from the watchers as Danny got up fast, too fast, and moved in with a furious counterattack, most of which was absorbed by Harper’s arms and gloves. The champion’s blows continued to land and Danny’s left eye began to close.
With half a minute left, Harper crossed a perfectly timed right that stretched Danny White on his back. He rolled over and got to his feet at the count of eight.
Axel Steele screamed at Malloy over the roar of the spectators. “You got a towel there? Throw it in!”
Malloy had the towel raised, but Danny forced his way past Steele and ran at Harper, who found it easy to put in a right and a left that stopped his man rigid and dropped him again to one knee.
Axel Steele raised his arms as the gong sounded. “That’s all. The fight is over. If it ever started.”
As the Harper camp cheered, Hanneford helped Malloy guide Danny back to his chair. “Why are we stopping?” Danny said.
“It’s over, Danny. You gotta forget about it,” Harper said.
“I can do better than that. I’m better than you saw...”
“It’s in your mind, man, you have to realize that.” Harper’s voice was almost shy. “I don’t want to put you down, Danny, but you were easy. You’re rusty after your lay-off but even so, I can tell. On your best day you couldn’t hurt me.”
Danny felt anger and humiliation and a frightening sense of impotence.
“I wanted to do you a favor,” Harper said. “Some favor.”
Axel Steele had removed his shiny necktie and now he was putting it back on, adjusting the knot fastidiously. “Leave him,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Trevor Malloy was attending to Danny’s bruised face as the crowd moved slowly out of the gymnasium, chattering with excitement. Mary-Jo was under Harper’s arm. She cast an uncertain glance back at Danny, then turned away. Axel Steele came back with some money in his hand. “Here, go and get drunk.”
“Stuff your money,” Malloy said.
“You were a disgrace to boxing,” Steele said, “and you’re still a disgrace. You never paid your dues. Now you try to cash in on a fluke friendship with the champ. You freeload a fight to feed your own pride.”
“Get lost, Steele.”
“Hopeless White.” The manager laughed. “Man, did they ever give you the right name.”
As Steele walked away Trevor Malloy said, “Forget it, Danny. He’s why you got out of boxing.”
The manager was back, tossing the money so the bills fluttered around the two men, landing on them and on the floor. “Go on, take the money — you earned it! You gave me a story I can tell for the rest of my life!”
Barbara White was surprised to see her husband back so early. Then she saw his battered face. “What happened?”
“Nothing. Stay there. I have to go out again.”
She had half risen from the kitchen table. Now she sank back again over her knitting, her open magazine, and her cup of tea. “You’ve been fighting. Are you drunk?”
“I’m very sober.” Danny headed for the bedroom.
“Where’s Trevor? Carla called before. He didn’t come home.”
“Trev is out getting loaded,” Danny called. He was opening the drawer in his bedside table, finding the automatic pistol, slipping it into his coat pocket. “He came into some money.”
When he came back into the kitchen, Barbara said, “I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.”
“I have to go out again. Trev let me have the car. There’s something I have to do.”
“Can’t it be done tomorrow?”
“No. A plane is leaving. I have to see a man.”
“Let me do something about that bruise on your face.”
“The bruise will get better by itself.” Danny put a hand on Barbara’s arm. He felt the muscular movement as she kept on knitting, needles clicking, something getting done. “It’s the least of my worries.”
He bent to kiss her cheek through a curtain of hair and when he went to the door and turned she was looking at him, the needles at rest. “Listen, that trip to Devon with Carla. You and Janice. That’s a good idea. I’ll miss you like hell, but go anyway.”
She heard the door slam behind him, followed by the mechanical roar of Trevor’s old banger starting up and driving away, and then Barbara was left with the most loving words he had ever spoken to her. I’ll miss you like hell, but go anyway.
This time it looked as if the champion and his party were finally going to get on an airplane. Fog conditions had improved slowly and at last their flight had been called. They were moving toward the departure area when Hanneford Harper said, “Hey, here comes Danny!”
Danny approached across the concourse at a near run. He ignored Harper, calling to the manager, “Steele! I want to talk to you!”
Axel Steele grinned. “Hello, Hopeless. You look like you walked into a truck.”
“Stand still,” Danny said. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
“Wrong. I gotta tell the boys at
Danny took his hand from his pocket, showing them the gun. Hanneford Harper stepped between Danny and Axel Steele, his hands raised, his voice firm. “Danny, don’t make a stupid—”
The gun fired once and Harper fell. There was shouting and running. Harper’s trainer took the gun effortlessly from where it was hanging in Danny’s hand.
Axel Steele was livid. “He shot the champ! He’s a crazy person!” he screamed.
Harper’s head was resting on Mary-Jo’s knees. His eyes were wide open. “Danny, where are you? I can’t see you.”
Danny crouched beside him. “Here I am.”
“I knew I’d never get out of this place. Didn’t I tell you, Mary-Jo?”
“Shut up. We’re taking you home.”
“No. I’m not going anywhere now.” Harper turned toward Danny, not seeing him. “Axel is right. You are crazy.”
“I wasn’t trying to hit you. I was after him.”
“I know. And I was trying to do what you did this morning. We’re a couple of heroes.”
“Shut up,” Mary-Jo scolded gently. “Save your strength.”
“Hey, look at me,” he said. “I’m retiring undefeated.” He closed his eyes.
The airport security police took Danny White into custody as the airplane took off for New York without Hanneford Harper and his entourage. Danny was kept in an inside office while they waited for somebody from Scotland Yard to come and start the official investigation. The guard watching him was a friend and he tried to make conversation. But Danny was beyond communication. He was, in fact, reliving in his mind the first round, in which he had done quite well. And it was not happening in a motel gymnasium. It was taking place at Wembley Stadium on a summer night with 60,000 people loudly and solidly behind him. He knew it was only a dream, but it was the one he wanted and it was more than most men ever achieved.
Danny White was smiling as they drove him to London in the car with the flashing lights.
Why the Funnies Museum Never Opened
by Ron Goulart
It was probably the weather that got us onto the topic of death and violence.
The day was grey and rainy, and the Saugatuck River looked murky. Ty Banner had switched to rum but that didn’t keep him from now and then shivering and grumbling about how damp it felt inside the Inkwell Restaurant.
Zarley suggested it was only an allergic reaction. He’d started seeing an allergist about a month earlier and tended to connect most emotional and physical problems with allergens.
“Why are you guys so gloomy?” inquired Hollins as he strolled over to join us for lunch. “Myself, I’m deliriously happy.”
“Probably an allergic reaction,” suggested Zarley.
“Nope. It’s all the fan mail I’m getting.” Hollins took a seat at the large round table, glanced at the choppy river beyond the view window, and lit one of his black cigars. “All of a sudden people love
We’re all of us professional cartoonists of one kind or another. When Hollins mentioned his rising popularity, we all leaned toward him. “Probably cranks,” suggested Heinz.
“Nope, these are all sincere devotees,” Hollins assured us. “They dote on my panel, demand originals to treasure.”
“Ha, that’s it,” said Banner, lifting up his rum. “There’s a whole flock of weirdos out there who do nothing but write to you begging for original drawings. Then they haul ’em to those comics conventions they’re always holding at sleazy hotels and sell ’em for fantastic prices.”
“Not your stuff,” said Zarley. “I saw a price list someplace and a
Banner blinked. “Fifteen dollars?”
“It was a Sunday page too.”
“I’m worth more than that. Don’t they know I won the National Cartoonist Society Award three years in a row back in the Sixties?”
“Collectors are goofy,” said Heinz. “Even my
“Twenty-five dollars?” Banner scowled. “They pay twenty-five bucks for that simple bigfoot stuff of yours, and think my meticulously rendered and beautiful work is worth only fifteen?”
“Collectors are goofy,” Heinz repeated.
Hollins said, “I wonder how much interest there really is in collecting originals.”
“Apparently not all that much,” I put in. “The Funnies Museum that was going to open in New Canaan isn’t. They were going to display hundreds of original cartoons and strips from the 1890s to the present, but—”
“He got arrested,” said Banner. “The guy who ran the setup. That’s why the museum didn’t open.”
Heinz gave one of his knowing chuckles. “No, that’s not the real reason,” he said. “Not the complete reason anyway.”
Puffing on his cigar, Hollins said, “You know Errol Bojack, the guy who was supposed to be the curator?”
“Sure, I know Bojack,” said Heinz. “I also knew Rollo Meech and Corky Tollhouse. I know all about the ghosts of the Fairfield Sisters as well.” He paused, pouring more ale into his glass.
“There are ghosts in this?” asked Banner.
“Ghosts, murder, jealousy, greed,” amplified Heinz. “Almost like a Dr. Judge continuity.”
“You guys sure are needling me today,” Banner complained. “I don’t mind a bit of good-natured professional jealousy, but I—”
“How about Bojack and the Funnies Museum?” interrupted Zarley. “What’s the real story, Heinie?”
Heinz took a long appreciative swallow of his beer. “It’s sort of a gloomy story.”
“Tell us then. This is a good day for it,” urged Zarley.
What started it (Heinz told us) was Rollo Meech and a peculiar desire of his. Rollo lusted after original comic art — strips, panels, cartoons. Some of you probably knew him. He had lunch here at the Inkwell a couple of times and was certain to turn up at any cartoonist’s funeral. He was a tall chunky guy in his late twenties, with curly hair and a big fannish smile. He had a face that looked as though he ought to be saying “Golly!” and “Gee whiz!” He was a hard core comics nut, and wanted to be a cartoonist himself but never got any further than a job as art director for
The reason you saw Rollo, with his lovable grin and his Gee Whiz! face, at so many funerals and wakes was because of his passion. If a cartoonist died, Rollo was on the doorstep offering to buy up all the deceased’s leftover drawings. While some widows booted Rollo out, others needed the dough and they sold him their husbands’ work and whatever other originals they’d managed to accumulate. Rollo had almost a vulture’s sense of impending death. You kick off, slump over your board, the pen slips from your fingers, and before it hits the floor Rollo is ringing the bell, offering your wife a deal.
He must have had family money — his pop owned three or four bowling alleys in New Jersey — because he managed to buy up most of the originals he wanted. But not all. The one item he wanted more than anything was an original political cartoon by an artist named Harry Clemens.
“Who?” asked Zarley.
“Harry Clemens,” repeated Heinz. “He was a major political cartoonist with Hearst early in the century.”
“He won the Pulitzer, didn’t he?” Banner signaled the waiter to bring him another rum.
“No, Clemens was always a shade too unsavory for them.”
“A boozer?” asked Zarley.
“That was one of his vices,” said Heinz. “Anyway, during a particularly severe spell of goofiness, Harry Clemens burned up every blessed original of his he could lay his hands on. He made a bonfire in the courtyard of his Greenwich village studio. There happened to be a blizzard going on and shortly thereafter he died of the aftereffects of exposure.”
Banner set down his fresh drink. “That’s a rotten way to kick off.”
“I see what’s coming,” said Zarley. “There was, someplace, one undestroyed Harry Clemens original and Rollo Meech had to have it.”
“Exactly,” said Heinz. “A single Harry Clemens original, an immense thing showing Columbia holding her torch of liberty aloft, turned up sometime in the 1940s among the effects of an old Hearst editor. It sold for a hundred dollars at the time and continued from collector to collector until eventually it was worth five thousand dollars. By that time it was in Juke Tollhouse’s collection. You all knew poor Juke and his stunning wife, Corky. He died young, poor Juke.”
“This is getting damn depressing,” remarked Banner. “I remember when Juke died. He fell off the bar car on the 6:05 to Westport three years ago. Depressing.”
“Let him get on to the good part,” said Zarley. “To where Rollo Meech tries to persuade Corky into selling him the only known Harry Clemens.”
Rollo Meech was more subtle than to try to seduce Corky (Heinz resumed). He offered to buy the whole of Juke’s collection, which was quite large. You remember all those dreary displays Juke used to stage at the Comic Artists Club in Manhattan — Fifty Years of Funnies, the American Graphic Humor Tradition. Even though Rollo usually didn’t wait for the body to cool before he dashed over to make an offer on the originals, he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d resort to romance to gain what he was after. Money, cheating, lying, cajoling, yes, but Rollo would never permit himself to pretend affection for the widow — even a pretty and relatively young widow like Corky Tollhouse.
Errol Bojack, on the other hand, had no such scruples. He’d long had the dream of opening a museum to house
I happened to be at her house down on the Sound the day Rollo came after Juke’s collection. You know I’m handy with tools, so I’d promised to fix some cabinet doors for Corky. Being always thirteen weeks ahead on my deadlines, unlike most of you chumps, I can afford the time to do favors for my friends.
Rollo paid his call at noon, the only time he could sneak away from the
“Juke was a genius,” Rollo was saying, smiling one of his most ingratiating smiles, his eyes wide with admiration. “America lost a great graphic panelologist when he passed on, Corky.”
“Juke was O.K.,” Corky replied. Something, I noticed, was bothering her.
By thrusting my head a bit more into the hallway, I spotted the problem. A pair of man’s shorts was partially visible under the flowered sofa Rollo was anxiously sitting on. Since Juke had been dead nearly four months at this point, it seemed unlikely Corky was that bad a housekeeper. Furthermore, the shorts had some kind of Indian pattern on them, exactly the sort of thing a guy who ran a bunch of quick curry joints might go in for.
“To own Juke’s collection, including of course so many wonderful drawings of his own,” Rollo said, “is truly, Corky, going to be a real honor. As I often told Juke before he was unexpectedly taken from our—”
“It wasn’t all that unexpected.” Corky twirled a lock of lovely blonde hair. “He’d almost fallen off the darn train three times before. And he was always falling off bar stools. That’s how he did that to his leg Christmas before last.”
“The man admittedly had flaws, Corky. Still, his work on
“Rollo,” Corky blurted out, “I’ve already sold the collection.”
His smile fell off. “Huh?”
“I sold all the originals.”
“
“All.”
Agitated, Rollo rose up, his heel catching on the protruding pair of shorts. He slipped and sat down again, one foot in the air with the Eastern-design underwear dangling from his shoe. “Gee whiz!” he said, and you could almost see the light bulb blossoming over his curly head. “It was Errol Bojack! My old nemesis, the man who beat me to the Rasmussen collection. The turkey who flew to Mentor, Ohio, and wooed an eighty-seven-year-old granny, planting insincere kisses on her raddled old cheeks so he could carry off the late General Hapgood’s priceless collection of
Corky reached out and removed the shorts from Rollo’s foot. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said. “Since you were so fond of Juke, maybe you’d like to buy his pipe collection.”
“Stuff his pipe collection!”
Unsmiling and red-faced, Rollo slammed out.
Because of my abilities as a handyman, Errol Bojack invited me over to look around the Fairfield Sisters’ mansion soon after he finally signed the lease on the place. He didn’t appear quite as dapper as usual and I figured he’d been courting too many widows.
“Hey!” he said suddenly while he was showing me through the main living room. He gazed up at the high ceiling.
“What is it?”
He managed a faint smile. “Oh, I thought I heard something.”
“You’ve been living in this place, haven’t you?”
He gave the ceiling another worried look. “Well, as a matter of fact, Heinie, yes, I have. There’s so much work that—”
“I’d be glad to help you.”
“Oh, no. I can do it myself. All I need from you is advice,” he said nervously. “About the plumbing in particular.”
“Old houses are usually weak in that department.”
“Should old pipes howl?”
“Howl?”
“Wail, scream, cry out like an old lady being murdered? Like two old ladies being strangled actually.”
I stared at his pale handsome face. “Come on, Errol, you’re not trying to tell me you’ve been hearing ghosts?”
“Of course not. I’m telling you I hear noisy pipes.”
“I know the Fairfield Mansion used to have a reputation for being haunted, because of what happened to those old ladies years ago,” I said, moving to the drapery-covered windows. “I myself don’t believe in any of that stuff.”
“Neither do I.” He sat in a faded loveseat, crossed his legs, uncrossed them. “Did you ever hear why the two old ladies were murdered?”
“Money, wasn’t it?”
“Gold. A fortune in gold coins, which these two miser spinsters had allegedly hidden someplace in this big old house. The killer never found the dough, nor did any of their heirs. Eventually they gave up looking and decided to get rid of the house.”
“In those days every spinster had a reputation for having cash hidden away.”
“Exactly, Heinie. It’s nothing more than folklore and superstition.” Clearing his throat, he smiled tentatively. “Could you take a look at the pipes?”
“Sure thing. I’ll start in the cellar—”
“No, not the cellar.”
“But that’s the first place—”
“I’m doing some repair work down there, a little digging. We can commence in the kitchen.”
“I don’t know if I—”
“The kitchen,” he reiterated. “You know, I’m planning to open the Funnies Museum in six weeks. There’s going to be a lot of work to do.” Grabbing me by the arm, he led me down a shadowy hallway toward the immense old kitchen. “I still have most of my originals stacked up on the second floor. I haven’t had a chance to sort out the last collection I bought.”
“That would be Corky’s?”
Errol let go of my arm. “It’s the Tollhouse collection, yes. Mrs. Tollhouse was kind enough to let me purchase it for the museum.”
“Corky’s a kind person.”
The kitchen was all white and had a musty smell as well as a population of cockroaches and other bugs who’d taken over while the mansion had stood empty.
“I don’t want the pipes screaming at the visitors when the museum is open,” said Errol, frowning at the darkest corner of the room. “Lots of school kids will be trooping through and they won’t want to hear howls of pain while they’re admiring the works of Caniff, Sickles, Kane, Herriman, Marcus, and— Do you see anybody standing in that corner over there?”
“No, it’s only a mop.”
“Ah, so it is. A mop. Well, we’ll have plenty of use for that.” His laugh was unconvincing.
“He sounds haunted,” said Zarley. “Are you implying a shrewd guy like Errol Bojack would let himself be spooked by that old mansion’s reputation?”
“I figure it was the ghost tales and his own guilt feelings about the things he’d done to people,” explained Heinz, shrugging. “You can never quite be certain what goes on inside somebody’s—”
“The plumbing,” said Zarley. “Did it really scream and howl?”
“I fiddled with the pipes. They did make a few odd gurgling sounds,” said Heinz, “but there wasn’t much I could do since he wouldn’t allow me in the cellar. I left him with a few general hints and never went back. For the rest of what I’m going to tell you I have to rely pretty much on guesswork. But I think I’m right about most of the important details.”
“Bojack was hunting for the gold coins,” I said.
Sure (resumed Heinz). My notion is that when he started tearing the Fairfield Sisters’ place apart to convert it into the Funnies Museum, Errol stumbled onto something that he took to be a clue as to where they buried their gold. During his first week there, I later found out, he did have three college boys who specialized in home repairs helping him get things set up. One afternoon he fired them all and by the time I visited him he was doing everything himself.
Actually nothing much got done and he started postponing the opening date. A couple of people who passed the mansion late at night reported seeing lights blazing in the cellar.
They did find, after everything was over, evidence of considerable digging down there.
For a guy who made his living from fast food, Errol was fairly imaginative. Living all alone in that spooky old mansion, digging in the murky cellar, he saw things. The sisters had been strangled in their beds and now Errol began to think he was catching glimpses of white-clad female figures lurking just at the edge of his vision. Most likely the lighting in the place, which was inadequate, was causing his eyes to fool him. But those glimpses somehow convinced him that the ghosts of the dead sisters were roaming the house, bent on protecting their treasure and keeping him from getting it.
Nobody was going to do that to Errol. He could always use more money — to build new Madam Curry joints, to buy more cartoon originals. He kept digging and searching, ignoring the ghosts as best he could.
Sometime about then he bought a pistol, a.32 revolver he carried in a belt holster. He wasn’t sleeping well, and began looking very lean and hollow-eyed.
Meanwhile Rollo Meech, as he pasted up the layouts for
This went on for a week, two weeks, a month. It continued, in fact, until Rollo read an item in the
“For crying out loud, the Harry Clemens is going to sit there and decay. The only Harry Clemens original known to exist, and probably nobody will ever see it again.”
Rollo desperately wanted to see it and possess it. Nights, he began to drive over to the vicinity of the Funnies Museum. He’d park in the woods and stalk up to the place like some sort of crazed commando in black turtleneck and pants — silent, intent, barely breathing.
Soon he discovered that Errol, alone in there, was spending nearly all his time in the cellar of the Fairfield Sisters’ mansion. From careful and discreet questioning of the few people, including myself, who’d actually been inside the museum, Rollo learned that almost all the drawings were stored on the second floor. He also learned that there was as yet no alarm system.
After watching five nights in a row, Rollo decided to move. He added a black ski mask to his dark outfit and sneaked up to the rear of the mansion. Climbing up a sturdy trellis, he let himself into the second-floor room that housed most of the drawings.
There were piles and piles of the damned things — politicals, comic-book pages, Sunday pages, illustrations — stacked in uneven mounds, gathering dust.
What Rollo intended to do was simple. He’d swipe a bundle of drawings so no one would guess the burglar had come specifically for the Harry Clemens. He found the huge drawing almost immediately. It had a simple black frame and stood nearly four feet high. They drew big in those days and Harry Clemens, whose problems included terrible eyesight, worked even larger than most of his contemporaries.
Rollo knew the importance of taking more than just this drawing to keep suspicion off himself, but his yearning for it made him decide to carry it back to his car alone first. Then he’d sneak back in and grab up a portion of the stack he’d found it in. He’d brought a few empty beer cans to leave behind so the job would look to the police like nothing more than juvenile vandalism.
The drawing was heavy, with the frame, glass, wooden backing, and all. Rollo found he couldn’t get it out the window and down the trellis with him. He’d have to, therefore, carry it down through the house and out the front door.
It won’t be all that tough, he told himself. Errol’s up to something in the cellar — he never comes up from there until the wee hours of the morning.
Going out the door of the upstairs room with the drawing face out in front of him, Rollo bumped into the door jamb. It only produced a tiny sound.
His heart beating fast, he halted and listened.
Except for a slight screaming from the plumbing, the old house remained silent.
Rollo waited a full minute longer before starting down the wide staircase. There were only two small wall lamps burning and everything had a pale-yellowish cast.
Errol Bojack, down in the cellar digging for gold, had heard the noise. “Those damn ghosts,” he murmured. “They’re not going to stop me.”
Yanking out his new pistol, he padded up the steps to the first floor.
Rollo had been right about Errol. The restaurant man hadn’t paid much attention to his latest acquisitions. Which is why he didn’t recognize the huge drawing of Columbia drifting downstairs toward him. In the dim light he mistook it for one of the Fairfield Sisters in her nightgown.
“It’s my gold now!” he shouted, putting five shots into the drawing. “You won’t keep me from getting it!”
Four of the five bullets penetrated Rollo, who managed to say, before he died, “Gosh dam it, you idiot, you’ve just ruined the only Harry Clemens in the world.”
A Grave on the Indragiri
by Alvin S. Fick
“Why bother after all this time? 1909, you say? Three years ago. I should think you’d be satisfied to let it lie.”
The man behind the dark oak desk seemed hesitant to answer. He passed a meaty red hand over his shaven skull.
Alex Pine looked at him through half-closed eyes, assessing the muscle beneath the middle-age fat. Colter’s huge hands with scarred knuckles and wedge-shaped fingers protruded from a conservative business suit. Here was a man of great strength, perhaps a product of the docks. Maybe those shoulders came from tossing forkfuls of hay and manure on a Sussex farm, or from early years in a peat bog.
With his toe Pine hooked a chair close to his own in front of the desk, crossed his ankles, and placed his feet on its red cushion. In other offices in other parts of London he would not have done that. The gesture was a simple one, not calculated insolence but intended to move the business at hand out of the drawing room into the alley, or at least into the carriage house.
Colter seemed unwilling to make the concession. He stared at Pine’s feet on the chair, a barely perceptible shrug of his massive shoulders rippling the dark material of his coat.
“Because I want to know, that’s all.” He aimed a forefinger at Pine. “Twenty pounds a day and expenses. Take it or leave it.”
Through the open window Alex Pine could hear the clop of hooves in the street below, the creak of wheels on ungreased axles a counterpoint to the rumble of lorries with hard rubber tires carrying freight to the docks down by the river. Now and then a freshet of breeze brought in the mingled odors of the shipping district.
“A thousand pounds at the finish if you bring me conclusive evidence that my brother was murdered.”
“Not for five thousand unless I’m satisfied with your answers to my questions,” Pine said. “I agree it seems a little odd that your brother Kevin would drop dead at thirty-eight when he seemed to be in prime health. But you being in the rubber business yourself know conditions in Sumatra are not conducive to long life.
“So what if his wife says it was a heart attack brought on by heat and overwork? What difference does it make if she is wrong and he was shoved into his grave by some little-known tropical disease? There aren’t any medical examiners a hundred miles up the Indragiri River-Why does it matter to you now? What’s over is over, and you say yourself neither his wife nor the company he worked for stood to gain anything by his death. Why push it?”
“If your brother—” Colter began.
“I haven’t a brother, and I still don’t understand why you delayed, but I acknowledge the point. Tell me more about your brother’s wife.”
“She’s a Dutch girl Kevin met while she was attending school here in England. At first I thought he was a bloody fool. He hadn’t a quid in his trousers when he met her, all his money having gone for the clothes of a dandy. He borrowed a great deal of money from me. He spent most of it on a diamond ring and wining and dining her.
“Not long after they were married, he stopped by to tell me he was going to be made overseer of a rubber plantation in Sumatra. Marie, his wife, has a father who is a member of the firm, Benskoten Rubber Company, which owns several plantations there. That’s the last time I saw him. He died at Benskoten’s Plantation Number Three.”
“Did you hear from him after he went there? Any letters?”
“Not a one, although his wife wrote to my wife a couple of times.”
“Then he never repaid the money he owed you?”
There was disgust in Colter’s negative grunt. “The closest I got was a wink on his wedding day — like a man who just had a long-odds winner at Ascot.”
“This would be expensive, Mr. Colter. There’s time involved in the travel as well as the investigation. And what if I find evidence that your brother died of natural causes?”
“In that case I will pay you two hundred pounds.”
Pine whistled softly. “You’re that anxious to prove it was murder? What makes you think I won’t fake some evidence for eight hundred pounds?”
“Because I checked thoroughly into your background before I asked you to come here, Mr. Pine. Your little investigations business comes highly recommended. Compared to such a reputation, the money is a paltry sum. Besides, I would not take kindly to being fleeced.”
He picked up a pencil from his desk and snapped it between thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, then turned in his chair and threw the pieces out the window.
“Thirty pounds a day,” Alex said. “Mogging about in the jungle is unhealthy — fever, tigers, and all that.”
Colter nodded reluctantly, then extended his hand across the desk. Surprise was evident in his lifted eyebrows when he felt the strength in the detective’s grip.
He summoned an ascetic-looking clerk in striped pants from the outer office and issued instructions in a low voice.
He turned to Pine. “I would like you to leave by the end of the week. Humes here will give you a draft on my bank for three hundred pounds, also an address in Singapore where you will be able to draw more money as needed. But I will expect reports regularly.”
“No.” Pine’s voice was flat, unarguable. “No reports until my work is finished. I’m going to be too busy to write letters home like a boy away at boarding school.”
Jason Colter came out from behind his desk. “I urge you to be discreet.”
Pine ran a hand through a thatch of hair the color of a rusty bucket.
“It has been my experience,” he said, “that blabbering about one’s business does little to further it.”
Papers, packing, and transportation arrangements took little time for Pine, since the packing was all he did himself. The rest was handled with her usual quiet efficiency by Jennifer Hemming in his Chelsea office beneath his living quarters.
“Oh, dear, Mr. Pine,” she said when he told her of the trip, “you’ll be gone so long.” She bent her grey head quickly over a desk drawer so he would not see the moisture glistening behind the silver-framed glasses, but the mothering in her voice was inescapable.
“Maybe not so long, Miss Hemming. I think this Colter fellow is angling in a pond that has no fish. And I’m hanged if I know why.”
She smiled up at him. “Oh, but you will find out.”
What could be better than having Jennifer Hemming as office factotum, proxy mother for the one he never knew? Nothing, aside from a wife.
Before he left on Friday, he rode many vehicles and stretched his long legs over what seemed to be half the streets of London. He spent some of the three hundred pounds’ advance money in pubs whose clientele preferred its darker recesses to the sunshine outside. He bought uncounted rounds of ale and stuffed pound notes into pockets of scruffy jackets, all the while adding information to his leatherbound pocket notebook. Some facts he learned in better restaurants from business acquaintances whose Regent Street clothes and distinguished looks were scarcely in keeping with the type of information they disclosed.
Now he knew why Jason Colter wanted proof that Marie Colter had murdered her husband. With that information, he would be able to blackmail her to extract vital favors from her father, favors that could ultimately lead to a virtual monopoly of England’s rubber-importing business. What had burned in those hungry little eyes was not a zeal for justice, but greed.
Pine was not surprised. Sometimes he did not like the flavor of his work, and this was one of the times. But if he backed off it would leave a void that Colter more than likely would fill with someone who might not share Pine’s scruples about manufactured evidence. And besides, the pay was good.
On the morning of his departure he stopped at a bookstall near Fleet Street where he bought a thick packet of old boys’ papers. He stood at the rail clutching the package beneath his arm as the
During the nearly two-day passage of the Suez, Pine sat on deck in the shade of an awning, alternately reading and watching the passing ships slide by, steel fish cleaving the desert that stretched away on both sides. He mixed little with the other passengers, spending some time rereading his notes. Folded into the notebook were two letters, both obtained from Mrs. Jason Colter. That had been a coup, but it would remain so only as long as she kept silent about it.
“Oh, I hope I am doing the right thing,” she had said when he visited her in London the day before he left. “If you don’t mention these letters to Jason, he won’t know. He knows I received them, but he never expressed the slightest interest in their contents. And in view of his intense feelings about his brother, I never said much other than to pass along the gossip Marie wrote.”
“Did you know your brother-in-law’s wife well?”
“Not terribly. I saw her several times just before the wedding, but almost immediately she and Kevin went to Holland to visit Nikolaas and Beatrice Berchem — her parents. But I like her. She is a lovely girl.”
She hesitated before going on, apparently satisfied that as long as she was surrendering the letters, and inasmuch as the conversation was to remain confidential, expression of her own intuitions could do no harm.
“I never liked Kevin, Mr. Pine. He had a charm and attractiveness that I can see would have overwhelmed poor Marie. But it seemed to me a veneer over something hard and cruel.”
Again she paused. “I don’t know why I’m saying this to a stranger, but I think hardness is the strongest bond Kevin and my husband had. Jason is the same way.”
“And I gather it was on that visit to the Berchems that Kevin Colter was appointed plantation manager.”
“Yes, the two of them left for Singapore without coming back here.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Colter, for letting me take these letters and for speaking freely. I’m sure you see it’s best that neither of us mention any of this to your husband.”
Mrs. Colter touched his sleeve.
“You couldn’t possibly think that Marie—” Her face was pale. “If I thought you would think such a thing I never—” Pine could see the trembling in her throat.
“Please, don’t torture yourself. It’s far from my mind, especially since I suspect it’s the one thought your husband cherishes.”
Singapore hadn’t changed much since Alex’s last time there four years before when an admiralty case had taken him through the city on his way to the naval base at Seletar near Johore Bahru. It came to him as he was paying the ricksha driver in front of the King’s Arms Hotel that that was in 1908, at about the same time Kevin and Marie Colter were on their way to Sumatra. Perhaps they had stopped here in this very hotel.
The manager of the Singapore office of Benskoten Rubber, Anders Van der Neer, was cool at first, then deferential, then confiding and friendly. Pine thought that if he stayed another ten minutes the man would become positively obsequious.
“That’s the story, Mr. Van der Neer. I’ve been seeing these ads in
The slowly revolving ceiling fan stirred Van der Neer’s thinning straw-colored hair. He dabbed with a handkerchief at the perspiration on his shiny round face.
“We’re so pleased you have selected Benskoten Rubber for consideration.” Van der Neer started to rub his hands together, then quickly changed the motion and pressed his fingertips together.
“But you understand that I will not make a heavy commitment until after I see the nature of your plantation operation.”
“Of course. You are an astute businessman, after all.”
“Then it’s settled? You will arrange a trip upriver to a plantation? I would prefer to visit one that has been operating three or four years, not less, and preferably not much more. That’s the perspective I want to see.”
“Certainly, Mr. Pine. Tomorrow at ten o’clock I will send over one of my most trusted associates to accompany you on the coastal steamer to Tambilahan. From there a company boat will take you up the Indragiri to Benskoten Three. I can’t think of a more representative plantation for you to see.”
Pine was reviewing his good fortune the next morning in his hotel room while packing a small bag when there was a knock on the door.
Kiri Sembawa, the Benskoten representative, was young, probably in his mid-twenties. His English was impeccable, with a hint of Oxford.
“I grew up in an English home here in Singapore,” he explained. “I was a combination house boy and gardener for the people who raised me. They sent me to England to be educated. Both of them died of fever five years ago.” The smile which had lighted his nut-brown face flickered out.
“A moment ago I was congratulating myself on my good luck in getting to see a Benskoten rubber plantation with no delay. Now I see this has been enhanced by having the best guide possible. I am most fortunate.” Pine shook Sembawa’s hand with warmth.
Later they sat together on packing cases as the company boat nudged inland against the current of the Indragiri. Pine smoked a disreputable-looking pipe, which helped some against the mosquitoes. Kiri Sembawa sat close enough to indicate the pipe fumes were preferable to the insects.
“Who is plantation manager at Benskoten Three?” Pine asked.
“A man named Keeling. He’s Dutch. He speaks a little English, but I can translate for you if you like.”
“I have a smattering of Dutch and German, but I will be grateful for any help you can give.” Pine tamped the pipe with the head of an iron spike that had been cut off an inch and a half down the shank.
“Who preceded him?” Pine watched the handsome brown face for any change in expression. There was none.
“A man named Kevin Colter, an Englishman.”
“Colter.” Pine stared off at the jungle crowding the water’s edge. “I know a family named Colter in London. Different family, probably. Still, the man I know is in some aspect of the rubber business, I think.”
“Mr. Colter was married to a Dutch woman.”
Pine turned slowly and his ice-blue eyes locked with Kiri Sembawa’s dark ones. “Surely not a woman named Marie?”
Surprise flickered across Sembawa’s face but it was gone in an instant.
“Yes, Marie,” he said. “It must be the same Colter.”
Pine’s pipe clattered to the deck and he leaned over to retrieve it. “What did you mean when you said he
“Mr. Colter is dead. He died nearly three years ago. His wife went back to Holland. Her father is one of the owners of Benskoten Rubber.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have believed it possible. That must be the brother of the Jason Colter I know. I seem to recall he mentioned a younger brother. He died, eh? He couldn’t have been over — what would you say?”
“I would guess mid- to late thirties. No more.”
“Was it an accident?”
“Heart attack.” Sembawa paused. “They say heart attack brought on by overwork, fever, the heat, all the things that kill men in a tropical climate.”
“I suppose it wasn’t easy to get a doctor to such a remote place to confirm the cause.”
It was a long time before Sembawa answered.
“No, there was no doctor.” Then after an even longer pause: “I don’t think he died from a heart attack.”
Alex Pine dropped his pipe again, only this time it was not a piece of stage business.
It crossed his mind that he was at a decision point in his investigation. By Anders Van der Neer’s assertion, this was a “most trusted employee.” Would a revelation of Pine’s true purpose result in a closing of channels to him? Was someone in Benskoten covering a murder? Or was Sembawa’s suspicion groundless? If he was right, weren’t chances good that this would lead where every instinct told him he did not want to go to find a killer, to Marie Colter?
He remembered the anguish in the letters back in the hotel safe in Singapore. Damn! He did not like where he was headed.
“I’m not an investor, Kiri.” It was the first time he had spoken Sembawa’s first name. “I’m a private detective. I have been misleading Benskoten Rubber and you. I don’t care that much about my duplicity where the company is concerned, but I apologize for doing it to you. Now, we can go back downriver on the next available boat if that’s what you want, if that’s what your loyalty to Benskoten tells you to do. Or we can work together to unravel this thing. I don’t know where it will lead. Helping me may cost you your job, although I promise to do everything I can to protect your interests. It’s up to you.”
The only sound above the hum of mosquitoes was the gurgle of water against the side of the boat and the chuffing of the small engine that powered it.
“I will help.” Kiri Sembawa spoke firmly. “I think we should try to find out what happened.” He hung his head. “What happened beyond what Mrs. Colter told me.”
“Good!” Pine thrust out his hand. “I’m relieved to be able to tell you what I know. I have been retained by Kevin Colter’s brother to investigate the circumstances of his death. Back in the safe at the hotel are two letters written by Marie Colter to her sister-in-law. From them it is quite clear that her life at Benskoten Three with Colter was pure hell. It’s not all spelled out, but obviously her husband was drinking heavily, and apparently he was consorting with women from the native quarters. He was beating the workers, and it seems to me that this, combined with the abominable conditions suffered by the laborers, was of even greater concern to her than her own health and safety.”
“Yes,” said Sembawa. “Some of this she told me during our one meeting before she left Singapore. How bad it really was I learned during my trips to the plantation in the months that followed.”
“Then there’s every chance he might have been killed by a native, or one of the imported laborers — a Javanese, a Chinese, anyone. There would have been many with a motive.”
“They were the only white people on the plantation. All of the
“Batak?” Pine knocked the ash from his pipe into the river. “I read somewhere that they are the mountain people — cannibals, perhaps. Is that so?”
“No doubt they used to be. I know they will only work for a Batak foreman. Independent, you might say.”
When they arrived at Benskoten Three it was still daylight. From the dock Pine could see the
“Some of what you smell comes from the drying sheds in the clearing behind those trees. Some of it comes from the bullock pens. And of course a lot of it is human. It helps keep the mosquitoes at a bearable level.”
Pine’s impression was one of unremitting squalor and he said so.
“Yes, it is bad. But it was much worse before Mrs. Colter. She did much while she was here. Once Mr. Van der Neer told me Mr. Colter returned some supplies — extra food and medicine, I think — that Mrs. Colter had ordered. He said Mr. Colter was trying to hold down expenses to show a good profit margin.”
Sembawa led the way upriver to a slight rise where the jungle had been cleared. There in a small fenced enclosure was a log cross. They stood a few moments in silence at Colter’s grave site.
They were walking back downriver toward the plantation manager’s cottage where they were to stay when Sembawa spoke again.
“Mrs. Colter gave me a rather large sum of money to be spent on screening, food, and medicine for the
Before they mounted the steps to the manager’s cottage Pine touched Sembawa’s arm.
“We are agreed that I am an investor?”
“An investor.” The response was soft, reflective in tone.
The manager, Keeling, was only as cordial as he had to be. He was short, thickset, and his hair was cropped close. He used little English. His Dutch was laden with low German derivatives. Pine was increasingly grateful for Sembawa’s presence since Keeling’s conversation was limited to an occasional grunt or belch between vast draughts of beer during supper. A bachelor, who arose before sunrise and lived only for the plantation work, he retired early after pointing out two cots on the screened porch.
Alex Pine sat on his cot and watched the most spectacular sunset he had ever seen.
During the following day it was not difficult to maintain the subterfuge of being a potential investor in Benskoten Rubber Company. Keeling ignored him. Pine was fascinated by his tour of the plantation, during which Sembawa pointed out a large stand of trees ruined by bark cancer — brown bast — from cutting too much and too deeply into the latex channel.
“That was done while Mr. Colter was in charge,” Sembawa said. “He was trying to increase production.”
They watched gangs of Chinese laborers clearing brush and trees for new plantings of
In the afternoon Pine asked to see the spot where Colter died.
“It was in one of the small cottages just north of the
Kiri led the way. “Here,” he said, “this one. It’s empty. Usually one or two are unused. Since Mr. Colter died here, none of the foremen will use it.” He opened the door on the screened porch for Pine.
“Everything is quite the same as it was three years ago?”
“Exactly. Nothing has changed. You might think someone would have taken the gin bottle from the table, but people are afraid to come into the building.”
“Birds have nested here.” Pine pointed to the droppings on the floor and at the shreds of rusted screen around the porch. “Where was Colter’s body found?”
“Here.” Sembawa placed a hand on the back of a bamboo armchair, frightening a small rodent, which scurried from beneath the half-rotten and moldy cushion.
Pine nodded, then strolled slowly around the room, brushing away cobwebs, seeing as much with the tips of his sensitive fingers as with his eyes. He sniffed at the empty gin bottle without touching it, knowing as he did that the move was futile. His hands slid down the legs of the small round table. He looked at the underside of it, then gave the chair the same careful scrutiny. Always he was touching, touching. He seemed to have forgotten his companion.
On the third circuit of the perimeter of the room his fingers touched something just above head height at the juncture of the screen-door frame and the wall. He stopped. He blew away a dusty shred of cobweb. A shaft of the late-afternoon sun shone on his hand as the long sinewy fingers worked at the small protrusion. And then he held out his hand to Sembawa. In his palm lay a small object with a sharp point. “That lump on the end is a pith air stop. It’s a dart. Poisoned, I would guess,” he said.
He walked to the opposite side of the porch where he looked down to the ground, then turned and sighted along his outstretched arm.
Kiri Sembawa was impassive. The smile Pine expected to see on his face did not materialize.
“I did not think you would find anything. I looked several times, but I missed seeing it.” Sembawa walked over to the door and stood looking past the
“You don’t seem pleased that I did.”
“I hoped you would not.” He turned. “Now I tell you something I prayed I would not have to tell you. I hoped you would go back to your man in London and say there is nothing, that his brother died like it was said — of a heart that failed from too much work, too much drink, too much heat, too much fever.” Sembawa paused, reluctant to continue.
“He died from being too much the kind of person he was,” Pine said. “That includes the things you said and a couple of others. It should surprise no one that a Batak he had beaten crept up to the cottage one dark night and popped him with a poisoned dart. There’s no lamp here but maybe the one on the table inside was lighted. That means the light would be dim here, accounting for him missing the first time on such short range.”
“I don’t think that happened.”
“Kiri, there’s no need to make trouble for any of your people here. Colter s dead. I know of no one who wished him back. Going out without an apparent mark on him from some kind of substance that stopped his heart seems better than he deserved.”
“I don’t think a Batak killed him, or a Sumatran, or a Javanese or Chinese. I think Mrs. Colter killed him.”
“Granted she had reason. I was half trying to find a way to determine if she slipped something into his drink. I think now there’s no need to pursue that line of thought.” Pine took his notebook from his pocket and inserted the dart between the leaves.
“Are you returning directly to London from here, to report to your Jason Colter?”
“No. I’m going to Holland first to see Mrs. Colter.”
“Then I must say what I must say and perhaps it will change your mind. But first I must apologize even as you did on the boat. I did not tell you everything. I saw Mrs. Colter just once, in a room in the same hotel where you are staying. Mr. Van der Neer sent me there to pick up the money I told you she gave me for supplies for the plantation. When she asked me into her suite I could see she had all her belongings in a corner of the room, ready to be taken to the ship for her return to Holland.” He seemed to lose his continuity of thought. After a while he said, “She was a lovely lady.”
“That’s all?” Pine said.
“Among her bags and boxes of things in the corner was a long tube. It was a blowgun.”
A lovely lady. Alex Pine agreed. In Mrs. Jason Colter’s living room he had seen a photograph of Kevin and Marie Colter. Marie’s was the bright-eyed, cream-skinned, blonde beauty of the Nordic. He remembered the firm stance of her figure, the hint of the kind of strength that will do what must be done, that endures.
Now he knew why Jason Colter had sent him here. The man surely had read those anguished letters, in spite of his wife assuming he had not. And it had taken him three years to get his business affairs to the point where he could take maximum advantage of his suspicions — suspicions that were uncannily correct.
On their way back down to the river both were silent. They stood a while on the dock watching two elderly men fishing. Small clusters of insects danced above the water in the rays of sunlight shafting through the trees. After a while they sat on pilings a little distance from the fishermen. Pine filled his pipe, holding the match a time before addressing it to the tobacco, his attention diverted by a strikingly attractive girl who had come down from the
She was dark and lissome, and as she leaned over to talk to the old man something on a chain around her neck swung out from between her breasts. It flashed in the sunlight.
“That is Kusu,” said Sembawa.
“She’s beautiful,” murmured Pine, firing another match with his thumbnail. When the girl walked past them, she smiled shyly at Kiri. Although she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, the full-bodied grace of womanhood was in her stride.
They watched until she disappeared into one of the huts in the
They left Benskoten Three just before noon on the following day and returned to Singapore.
It was several days before Pine could find passage to Holland. Singapore, with all its attractions, had begun to pall, and he missed London.
He had no plan for handling his meeting with Marie Colter. During the long sea trip he reread her letters with a growing feeling of intrusion. Referring to his notes did not improve his mood. When he began to dislike himself thoroughly, he put the matter out of his mind.
The brief letter he sent her the morning following his arrival in Rotterdam was carried by a messenger, who brought back an affirmative reply.
On the following morning Pine rented a bicycle and pedaled the six miles from Rotterdam to a pleasant brick home on the outskirts of Schiedam on the road to Vlaardingen. It was sunny and warm, and he enjoyed the exercise.
A maid answered his summons at the door. The bell control intrigued Pine with its brass chain and ring that hung down from a brass tube through the door jamb and activated a chime within. He regretted that the plump young woman in the pink apron chose to lead him around rather than through the house, thus depriving him of an opportunity to see the interior mechanics of the device.
Marie Colter was in a back arbor arranging flowers. She came out to meet him, her hand extended.
“Forgive me for meeting you here. Katje should have taken you into the house and called me.”
“No, no. It’s too lovely a day to be inside.” Pine returned the smile that lighted the woman’s face. The white of her even teeth against her tanned face, her blonde hair slightly askew and gently riffled by a breeze, moved Pine in a way he was not prepared for — in spite of having seen her picture.
“Shall we sit here?” She motioned toward a small bench beneath the arbor.
Pine sat. He had had weeks to prepare for this moment but now that it was upon him he felt like a tongue-tied schoolboy. He studied her face intently, in a manner unconsciously developed over eleven years of investigative work. “I don’t know why you carry matches for that pipe,” his friend Fletcher of Scotland Yard had once said to him. “You could ignite it with a burning glance.”
Marie Colter’s hazel eyes met his without flinching. In them he saw a pain that abided.
She helped him. “I know why you’re here,” she said.
“You do?” He waited. Then: “Of course, your sister-in-law. Do you mind telling me what she wrote to you?”
“She only said you were coming because Jason wanted you to ask me something about my husband’s death. I have told everything.” She bit her lip. “I told him in a letter that went with the report sent to him by the Benskoten Rubber Company. But what now, after nearly three years? Helen seemed nervous in her letter.”
Pine thrust his hands into his pockets searching for the familiar reassurance of his pipe. He had forgotten it. It was on the bedside table in the hotel in Rotterdam.
“I am frightened too.” Her voice was a whisper.
“Do you know I have been to Sumatra, to Benskoten Three?”
She tried to speak but could not get the words loose from the roof of her mouth. She shook her head no. “I feel that you know much.” She pressed her hands into her lap to keep them from trembling.
“I know much, but not all. I can guess at some. I’m here to try to learn what is hidden, not to judge you. I haven’t decided what to tell Jason. Before I left London I spent nearly three days learning things about him that would set his sainted mother spinning in her grave — if that’s where she is and if sainted is the word.”
“Do you think I murdered my husband?”
“I think there are things that might indicate you did — motivation, opportunity, perhaps even a witness.”
“I did kill him, but I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Kevin was so hard on those poor people. I could have stood nearly anything except the sadistic way he used the plantation workers.”
She clasped and unclasped her green-stained fingers. “We had a terrible argument one evening about my going into the
“I remembered the blowpipe and darts given to me by a Batak father whose fever-stricken son I had cared for and given medicine to. He had taught me to use the pipe, just as an amusement. I had become quite adept. I decided to go down to the empty cottage where Kevin met his women. I got the blowgun and some darts from a storage room off the kitchen.”
“The darts, Mrs. Colter. Tell me about the darts.”
“They had no poison on them — I swear they were harmless. The Batak man told me there was no danger without the poison. I crept up to the cottage. There was a lamp burning inside with enough light shining on the porch for me to see. He — there was a girl there, Kusu, a very young girl I knew from the
She held out her forefinger to show how she had enlarged a small hole in the screen and inserted the blowgun. “I don’t see how I could have missed, but I blew a second dart at him because I was sure the first missed. Then I ran.”
The two of them sat for a while, Pine listening to the birds in the trees at the back of the garden, Marie Colter hunched up and pale beneath her tan.
“I think that’s the one thing I miss most when I’m at sea,” Pine said, “the sound of birdsong. I didn’t realize it until just now.”
“I only wanted to frighten him,” she whispered.
“The darts and pipe — do you still have them?”
“No. I brought them home as a kind of souvenir, but they haunted me so that I burned them. But before I did I had a chemist in Rotterdam check the darts for poison. He said there wasn’t a trace. I think someone may have exchanged poisoned darts for the harmless ones I had.”
“And switched them again in the confusion afterward? Did anyone know where you kept them?”
“The houseboy, a gardener — both natives. My husband treated both of them worse than animals. But there were others. Kusu was not the first young girl from that family that he—”
Pine studied her face, now wet with the tears of released tension.
“For three years — you have been tormented by the idea that you killed your husband.”
“What difference is it really?” She looked up at him. “Nothing changes the fact that I killed him. Even knowing I did not intend to or want to doesn’t lessen it for me.”
“And what if I tell you that you did not kill him, hot even accidentally, that he died precisely the way you told the Benskoten office in Singapore and just the way you wrote to the Colters in London, that he died from drinking and fever and heat and wenching, that he did in fact die from a heart attack? It happens, even at his age.”
“Would to God I could believe that.”
“You can, Mrs. Colter, you can.” He put his hand on her arm. “I searched the porch of that cottage with great care. I found two darts stuck in the wall opposite where your husband was sitting. Both of your shots missed.”
Pine got up to leave. “Of course, I could be wrong,” he said. “It is possible that someone else came by after you ran back to the cottage and did what you failed to do — hit the target.”
“Then I did not kill him? You are certain?”
“Not a chance. Unless you haven’t told me the truth about how many darts you used.”
“Two!” She half shouted it. “Two only — and you found them! What can I say to thank you for lifting me up from this pit?”
“There is no need to. I am rewarded by the sight of the relief on your face.”
He declined to stay for lunch, but was ravenous by the time he had pedaled back to the hotel. While he ate, he wrote a carefully composed letter to Kiri Sembawa.
The ship from Rotterdam to London was well out into the channel chop, pointed toward the mouth of the Thames. Alex Pine stood alone at the lee rail watching the wind feather the tops of the waves into the white spoondrift. He felt inside his jacket for his notebook and took out a slip of paper that had the name and address of a Singapore laboratory printed at the top. He read it again.
The enclosed dart carries traces of a deadly poison used by the Batak people of Sumatra in the hunting of large mammals. It is as yet unnamed, nor has it been determined the plant from which it is extracted. A very small amount of the poison has a paralyzing effect on the heart muscles, and possibly other vital organs, including the brain.
He tore the paper into small pieces that the wind carried away. Then he opened the notebook and let a single innocent-looking dart flutter down to the water. He watched until a wave rolled over and engulfed it.
All You Need Is Luck
by Jean Darling
Coffins held aloft by low trestle tables lined three sides of the long narrow room. From atop their lids candles stretched tiny flames to force back the shadows pressing down from the high-raftered ceiling. Beneath the candles, strips of aluminum foil protected the varnished wood from being scarred by runnels of molten wax. In the center of the floor lay an oblong of green baize.
It was Friday night at Murphy’s Coffin Factory on a quay along the River Liffey and Peewee Slattery’s crap game was open for business.
A ten-pound note secured the use of the premises for the night, blinding the watchman to any clandestine traffic that might detour into the storeroom on the way home after the pubs were closed. But the comfort of a tax-free tenner wasn’t the sole reason the watchman allowed the property to be defiled. The old man, superstitious and slightly simple, lived in awe of the abnormal and Peewee Slattery was unusual to say the least.
His head was large and capped with a shock of auburn curls, his eyes were blue beneath a high intelligent brow; his mouth was wide, his smooth-shaven jaw firm. His arms were long and wiry, his hands well formed. His lean body, broad at the shoulders, tapered to narrow hips. Seated at a table, Patrick William Slattery was handsome enough to turn any girl’s head. But the moment he dropped off the chair onto the floor he was revealed to be a dwarf barely forty-seven inches in height.
But while stares and whispers followed the dwarf as he moved through the streets of Dublin, within the candlelit room Slattery was king. Men knelt on either side of the green baize supplicating him, the god of chance, to favor them with a fistful of bank notes to take home to the missus. Their shadows flickered on the walls, imps lengthening to thrust gleeful fingers into the murk above or plunging malevolently to earth, as they bet, prayed, and cursed as they watched their money inflate the pile growing on the green cloth at Peewee’s feet.
When their money dwindled and the betting grew slack, Slattery would roll up the baize cloth, closing play for the night. “Off yuz go to your homes so,” he’d say. “Be seein’ yuz next Friday, God willin’.” An added “Maybe next week your luck’ll change” would assure the return of most of the losers. And not all the men went away broke. There were always a few winners to advertise the weekly game at Murphy’s Coffin Factory. A few winners were good for business providing they didn’t win too much, an occurrence easily avoided by a prudent switch of the dice.
Between Fridays, Slattery stocked up on candles. He acquired them one at a time from this church and that until there were enough to bum a night away. It seemed fair that God’s candles should provide light for the dwarf’s crap game, that they should shine on these other losers as God’s light had shone on him. Stealthily, Peewee would sneak candles into pockets he himself had sewn into his jacket for the purpose. When at last the coat was stiff with cylinders of white wax, he would scuttle home on his short little legs, always keeping a weather eye out for Detective Sergeant Patrick O’Byrne. The burly plain-clothesman had a knack for materializing at awkward times. Peewee’s criminal activities had always been minor, but O’Byrne had never been too tall to overlook them.
He lived above the old cattle market in the center house of a row condemned to the bulldozer. Seven little brick houses that had the misfortune to lie in the path of the housing estates spreading across Dublin’s north side, wiping away the Georgian character from the outer city. Slattery realized he was as much a chattel of fate as were the little houses — but with a difference. He would be saved, they would not.
Alone behind the cement-blocked windows, the dwarf long ago had hollowed out a cavity in the living-room wall in which to keep his winnings. Banknotes, counted and banded into hundred-pound lots, were stacked behind a flap thick with countless generations of wallpaper. A broken chest of drawers sagged drunkenly against the improvised safe, hiding the triangular tear from view. Every Saturday morning his takings were stacked away with other bundles that were to be the deformed orphan’s key to a new existence in another part of the world.
Money would buy anything, of that he was certain. It would even wipe the disgust from a woman’s face. It would add the stature denied him by nature. Money would buy him a beautiful wife with whom to beget children, long-legged boys and girls to make his life worth living. Yes, money would buy anything, even a family and respect, neither of which had been a part of the dwarfs thirty-two years of life.
Saturday afternoons, when the chest of drawers had been set in place against the wall, Peewee would walk along the North Circular Road, his body pitching from one side to the other. At the Mater Hospital he’d turn down past Dorset Street, past the church and the. Garden of Remembrance into O’Connell Street, past the Carlton Theatre and the post office and over the bridge. Tick-tock, tick-tock, his body swayed from side to side as he skirted the pillared bulge of the Bank of Ireland and crossed to the bottom of Grafton Street.
Once there, he would stand for hours gazing at the colorful posters of faraway places on the travel-agency windows. Someday soon he would be sunning himself by the pool on a cruise ship or sprawled on a beach or eating in some exotic restaurant surrounded by a loving family. One night soon he’d roll up the baize, wish everyone “Safe home, please God,” and disappear as though he had never been. All you need is luck, he told himself.
How funny it would be to leave the old watchman with palm outstretched for the tenner that would never come; and what a relief to abandon the furtive, half drunk chancers, to leave them flat with no candlelit room in which to bet away their week’s wages. There they’d all be, grumbling in the cobbled laneway outside the locked high-raftered room, getting wet in the soft rain, while he, Patrick William Slattery, necklaced with flowers, would be washing down breadfruit with rum-laced coconut milk on some palm-studded island.
Sundays he spent at home poring over travel brochures, dreaming of long-legged women, tawny Polynesian maidens with silken skin and hibiscus blossoms in their hair. Lovely creatures who would wind their fingers in his auburn curls and press their soft lips against his as they greeted him fresh from a swim, sea water glistening on his sun-browned body.
It was on one such Sunday morning that the toughs came. The door slammed shut, heavy shoes scuffed noisily up the stairs, and the three were upon him before he could move. They were young, with crew-cuts, and they wore wide-bottomed trousers.
“Where’s the ready?” one with a black eye asked, pushing Peewee back down on the bed among the travel brochures.
“It’s in the bank,” Slattery answered quickly. Black-eye’s fist slammed his head against the wall.
“Now would yuz believe the little runt’s keepin’ his money in the bank same as a regular full-sized yoke that isn’t sawed off at the knees?” the tall one by the door said as he moved toward the bed. “No, little sawed-off yokes keep their ready close by.” As he came close, Slattery recognized him. He was the watchman’s nephew. Peewee had seen him several times when he’d come to hustle his uncle for money. Once or twice he had stood at the edge of the candlelight watching the play around the oblong of green baize.
“Will a fist in the face be refreshin’ your memory, Troll?” the nephew asked Peewee.
The dwarf wondered how they had found him. Nobody knew where he lived. He had taken care each Friday to walk home by a different route, at different times.
The nephew sank his fist in Peewee’s stomach. “Where’s the money, runt?” he asked, taking a drag on his cigarette and blowing the smoke into Peewee’s face. The dwarf coughed and clamped his lips shut. “O.K., Ferg, he’s yours,” the nephew told the third man, who moved his lit cigarette toward Slattery’s cheek while Black-eye pressed open a switchblade knife.
The blade slashed the laces on Peewee’s right shoe before it travelled up the short leg, slitting the cloth of the trousers from ankle to waist. Angry red circles marked the progress of Ferg’s cigarette upward along the dwarf s thigh. It wasn’t long before the bundles of pound notes were gone, the nephew and his two friends along with them.
The day was paling to dusk before Slattery rose, bathed the burns with cold water, and put on his other pair of pants. He had spent the afternoon figuring out ways to recover his lost fortune, then realized that money could be replaced but these creatures had shattered his dream. It was vengeance he wanted — vengeance, pure and simple.
The following Friday at the usual time, he arrived at the Coffin Factory with the roll of baize cloth underneath his arm. He gave the watchman his ten pounds and moved about preparing the storeroom for the night’s play as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He watched the old man carefully but the man was just as open, just as helpful as always. Slattery was relieved. Poor scrawny wisp, he’d been wronged by him, Slattery, just as Slattery had been wronged by the nephew — more fuel to feed the fire of vengeance, if such was needed.
As the weeks passed, Peewee kept to a schedule, rising early and falling exhausted into bed well after midnight. It would take time to save enough money again to build a life elsewhere, and each Saturday new bundles of notes joined the ones already beneath the loose floorboard in the kitchen. Oddly, he had no fear of being robbed again. He had seen the nephew and his mates wearing new clothes and driving cars paid for with his money. They wouldn’t rob him again — yet. As long as the first money lasted, they would leave him to get on with the saving up of a respectable sum — then they would strike.
At last the day came when he was as ready as he ever was going to be and the number of bundles beneath the floorboards had grown to seventy-nine. The night was warm and dry, with no slick wet surface underfoot to trip him up. It was time to put the first part of his plan into action. He made one final check in the mirror before setting out.
The next morning the late editions carried the story of a body found floating face down in the canal near the meat cannery. It had been identified as belonging to one Fergus McGonigle of Summerhill. Foul play was suspected.
A few weeks later, when the rain had gone somewhere else to fall and the packets of money had reached ninety, Slattery set out once again. This time it was Macker O’Boyle, the one Peewee thought of as Black-eye, who was found dead. The body had been found in Mountjoy Square by a drunk in the early hours of the morning. A switchblade was imbedded in the heart.
By now the newspapers had decided to link the two murders beneath the streamer headline: NEW RASH OF IRA BRUTALITY ASKS CARDAI. In the story following, a tall blond man was mentioned; the police hoped he would come forward to help in their investigations.
By the time the so-called IRA murders were shunted to the inside pages by a spate of pub bombings in the North, the devaluation of the Green Pound, and u Middle East hijacking, Slattery’s winnings had reached the exact sum the three toughs had appropriated. Once again the dwarf prepared to go out into the dry still night.
Later, in the small hours before dawn, Slattery returned to the safety of the little house condemned to the bulldozer. Closed into the firelit warmth, he undid his belt letting the long trousers fall to the floor. With relief he unbuckled the wooden legs it had taken so many months of pain to learn to use. But it had been worth it, he thought, recalling the fear-rounded eyes of the watchman’s nephew.
It had all been so simple, like plucking grapes from a stem. The nephew had enjoyed his stout in the same pub as his one-time companions as though he alone among the three was somehow immune to death. Slattery almost laughed out loud when the pub lights flickered “closing time” and the nephew drifted into the street with the other late drinkers. A few die-hards hovered in the locked entrance as though in hope the publican, realizing the error of his ways, would rush them out an extra pint. Others trailed off singly or in pairs. The nephew flipped a hand in farewell and headed toward the quays with Peewee following a discreet distance behind.
Slattery caught up with him when he paused to light a cigarette halfway along a shadowed laneway near the coffin factory. His hand shot out and encircled the turtle neck of the nephew’s sweater.
“Le’ go!” the young man croaked, clawing at the arm against his throat.
“Turn around,” Peewee said, loosening his grip. “But don’t try runnin’.” He poked the nephew with the iron bar he was carrying. As the nephew turned. Slattery took up the slack on the woollen collar.
“Sure, lad, look into my face,” he said. “Ah, so you know me now, do you? The runt? The troll?” It was a treat Slattery would remember all his life, watching recognition spread over the nasty face.
Yes, it had been worth It. Peewee thought, rubbing the weals where the leather of the harness had bitten deep into his flesh, thankful that he would never have to wear the apparatus again. “It’s burned you’ll be,” he said to the suit, size 42 long, as he folded it into the grate. Next came the legs with the cleverly hinged feet, the leather straps, the blond wig. He tucked lumps of peat under and around the lot, touched a flame to the firelighter, and waited for the flames to burn away his hate.
On Saturday morning, all cleaned and pressed, Patrick Slattery checked in at the Aer Lingus counter at Dublin Airport. He had a reservation on the noon flight to New York and on across America all the way to Hawaii, the Friendly Islands of his dreams. His only luggage was a small suitcase. The bundles of bank notes were stuffed into a special pouch fastened onto his shoulder beneath his shirt. It was safe enough. The Irish were always kind to the handicapped. He wouldn’t be searched.
A pretty Ground Hostess whisked Slattery past the bomb checkpoint untouched. When his flight was called, she carried his hag to the seat-reservation desk. Being a monster has its rewards, Peewee thought, moving with the line toward the smiling girl in green who was checking tickets and alloting seat numbers. There were only two people ahead of him when a heavy hand came down on his padded shoulder.
Oh, Cod, not now! Slattery prayed, going cold. Don’t make me go hack now! Questions raced through his mind. Could the nephew have lived to identify him? No one else would have recognized him as the tall blond man.
“Peewee Slattery,” a familiar voice said.
“You!” Peewee turned to face Detective Sergeant Patrick O’Byrne. And his heart almost stopped. He knew. It was the candles. God’s candles. Sure I’ll buy you a million candles, God, his mind screamed.
“Is it yourself, Peewee Slattery?” O’Byrne said, his hand still resting on the dwarfs overstaffed shoulder. “And where would you be goin’, you bein’ a wanted man and all?”
“To see me sister,” Peewee said, the falsehood clinging to his suddenly dry mouth. “To see me sister in New York.”
“Your sister in New York,” O’Byrne repeated. “You know, of course, there’s a complaint out on you. It’s of a minor nature, but all the same I’ll have to be takin’ you in.” Bloody hell, he thought, removing his hand from Peewee’s lumped-up shoulder, I didn’t realize the little yoke was hunchbacked too. “It shouldn’t delay your trip more than a day or two,” he said apologetically, “but you have some explanations to make to Father O’Shea at St. Michael’s and a few other members of the Dublin clergy before I can let you leave. They believe a little restitution is in order. I’ve had my eye out for you, more or less, for weeks.”
Gently he led Peewee from the head of the line.
All you need is luck, Peewee reminded himself. With a bit o’ luck I can still be on my way.
“Funny,” O’Byrne said, “I almost missed you. It was just by luck I spotted you out here. I wasn’t looking for you at all.”
The Return of Bridget
by Jack Ritchie
I had killed the woman. There was no doubt about that. If only she hadn’t tossed that damn can of peas at me.
I had entered the supermarket just before closing time and wheeled a cart down one of the aisles, randomly removing from the shelves an item here and an item there. I did not expect to take any of them with me when I departed.
At nine o’clock, the IN door of the supermarket had been locked and the twenty or so customers remaining in the store gradually finished their shopping and gravitated toward the checkout counters. I, however, continued to linger in the aisles.
Some fifteen minutes passed before a rather statuesque woman in her forties, wearing the red manager’s jacket, approached me.
“Sir,” she said, “it’s closing time.”
I glanced down the aisle. The remaining customers had departed and only a single gum-chewing cashier remained at her post, glaring significantly in my direction. The other cashier and store personnel had apparently departed, not being prone to linger past working hours.
I pushed my cart to the front of the store, noting through the show windows that the parking lot was now empty, except for my own vehicle.
I shoved the cart aside and produced my gun. I spoke to the red-jacketed woman. “You will kindly hand me all of your cash. At this time of night, I suspect that most of it is already in the store safe.”
There had been a freeze reaction while the two women adjusted to the fact that they were being held up.
The manageress’s eyes narrowed, and I could see she was about to go into action.
“Madam,” I said, “if I were you, I would not attempt—”
My warning was too late.
Her hand found a can on the shelf next to her and she flung it in my direction. It seemed to travel through the air at slow-motion pace and I distinctly remember that its label indicated that it contained peas.
The can struck me on the upper arm and my finger convulsively pulled the trigger of the gun. The manageress’s eyes indicated cosmic surprise and she slipped to the floor, irrevocably dead.
The cashier fainted.
I sighed, thrust the revolver back in my pocket, and walked out to my waiting car. Inside it, I sat for perhaps a minute before I turned the ignition key.
I drove to the harbor bridge. Traffic was light and I braked to a stop. Leaving the engine running, I went to the railing and heaved the gun out as far as I could. My false beard followed.
Then I returned to the car and drove until I was approximately two blocks from my apartment building. There I abandoned the automobile and walked the rest of the way.
In my fourth-floor apartment, I took off my coat, hat, and gloves. I could have used a stiff drink, but I settled for a glass of water.
I sat down. Well, what was done was done.
How efficient were the police? It didn’t really matter if anyone had succeeded in getting my license number since I had stolen the automobile, but had I been followed?
In the distance I heard the sound of a police siren. I listened, feeling resigned, but the patrol car passed my building and continued on its way.
I felt quite tired, very possibly an emotional reaction to the killing. I got into my pajamas and pulled down the Murphy bed.
I thought I might have some difficulty getting to sleep, but I dropped off immediately.
I woke to the sound of the neighborhood church bell striking two A.M. I lay there, my eyes closed, but I had the distinct feeling that I was not alone in the room. I opened my eyes.
She stood at the foot of the bed in her red jacket, her face coldly pale. I half expected to see a bullet hole and bloodstains, but I was spared that much.
Yes, I thought, I’m having a nightmare. It’s to be expected.
Her eyes fixed mine. “I am Bridget O’Keefe. You murdered me last night.” She peered a bit closer. “You
“I’m afraid so.”
“What happened to your beard?”
“It was false.”
She accepted that. “Oliver Wilson,” she repeated, “you murdered me.”
“It was an accident, I assure you. When I entered your store I had no intention of shooting anyone.”
“Then why did you carry a loaded weapon?”
“A matter of psychology. If my gun were empty, I might have exhibited a lack of confidence in what I was doing.”
“The fact remains that I am dead and you are alive and lying there scot free. I want you to go to the police and confess your crime.”
I demurred. “At my age, I think I would have difficulty adjusting to prison life.”
She smiled tightly. “In that case, I intend to haunt you until you turn yourself in. I’ll be with you always, wherever you go, though you travel to the ends of the earth.”
“Madam,” I said, “I’m a very tired man and I need my rest. I am now retreating to deeper sleep and you will dissolve.”
I closed my eyes. After a while I peeked through slitted eyelids. She still stood there, thoughtful but uncertain.
I waited another five minutes before I looked again. This time she was gone.
I slept deeply until almost ten the next morning.
When I opened my eyes I saw Bridget O’Keefe on the couch at the foot of the bed, staring intently at the cover of a library book I had left on the footstool. I was a bit shaken. I was definitely not dreaming now. Was I hallucinating?
I watched her for a while and then said, “Why the devil are you staring at the cover of that book?”
“I’m not staring at the cover,” she replied without looking up. “I’m reading the book. I’m on page 112. Being ethereal, I can’t open books or turn pages, but I
I sighed. “I suppose you’ve come back to haunt me?”
“Let me finish this chapter first.”
I went to the bathroom and closed the door. She didn’t follow. After I washed, I returned and pushed the Murphy bed back into the wall.
Bridget finished her chapter and looked about the room. “I gather you’re not a very successful hold-up man, or why would you live in this miserable walk-up apartment?”
Her eyes seemed to focus on something beyond the room. “I deduce that you eat out a lot. There are no dirty dishes in the sink.”
Whether this was a dream or a hallucination, I thought I ought to make some effort to end it. “Madam, if I deprived your husband of your connubial companionship, I am deeply sorry. If I separated children from their mother, I am devastated. But I still have no intention of turning myself over to the police.”
“The only relative I have is my niece, Annie, in Cleveland,” she said. “I suppose you’re going out for breakfast now?”
I thought about it. “It’s much too late for breakfast. I’ll skip it.”
“You shouldn’t. A good breakfast starts the day.”
I began gathering together all the library books in my apartment. There were six of them, all mysteries. I put on my topcoat, hat, and gloves.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m returning these books to the library.”
She surveyed the books under my arm with her other-world vision. “I see you use scraps of paper as bookmarks.”
I shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“The bookmarks would indicate that you haven’t finished three of the books. So why are you taking them back to the library?”
“They’re overdue.”
“No, they aren’t. I distinctly see that they’re all due on the sixteenth. Today is the fourteenth.”
“Madam, I don’t believe in waiting until the very last moment. Besides, I’ve found these volumes extremely dull, and I’m not so compulsively obsessive that I must finish every book I begin.” I opened the door to the hall.
“I’ll be coining along,” Bridget said.
“It’s nippy out,” I told her “Hardly weather for anyone wearing a flimsy red jacket.”
“I don’t need to worry about weather any more,” she countered. “And nobody will be able to see or hear me but you, so you needn’t be embarrassed by my presence.”
As we walked to the neighborhood library, Bridget began a discourse on atonement for one’s sins, murder in particular.
At the library I returned the books and was about to leave when Bridget asked, “Aren’t you taking any books out? There are two shelves of new detective novels in the special section.”
“Madam,” I said, “I doubt very much if you would allow me the peace and quiet to read any one of them.”
The librarian at the desk looked up, her face startled, and I realized that as far as she was concerned, I had been talking loudly to myself.
I quickly left the building, Bridget following at my side. “I was talking about atonement for sins,” she said.
I sighed. “Must you?”
She nodded. “Since I’m no longer of the flesh I can’t choke people or push them down stairs or off cliffs. I have only one real weapon — my voice. And I intend to use it.”
“That’s not haunting, that’s nagging. I suppose you’re going to continue talking until the sound of your voice either drives me mad or to the police station?”
“That’s the general idea.”
The day being rather pleasant, and the prospect of returning to my dreary apartment unappealing, I decided on a long walk instead. I turned in the direction of one of the city parks, Bridget O’Keefe at my side, doing rather well on the subject of conscience and responsibility for one’s actions.
During the course of the morning and early afternoon, I learned that she was forty-five and had been an only child, so it had fallen upon her to take care of her aging parents. Her father died seven years ago and her mother soon after. She had been working for the same supermarket chain since she was eighteen and had spent twenty years operating a register at the checkout counter. It was boring but women had no opportunity for advancement in those days. However, she had been an assistant manager for seven years, and had just been promoted to manager on the night shift. The store was her responsibility from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m. six days a week.
The company had provided the red jacket, but it was tailored for a man so she had had to alter it. But she didn’t mind that too much because she liked to sew. And she’d been the manager just four months, which was why she had thrown the can of peas. She didn’t want it on her record that her store had been robbed while she still had an ounce of breath to defend it.
We got back to the apartment around two o’clock. I picked up an old newspaper and began ostentatiously reading.
Bridget was not deterred. She continued talking.
I looked up from the newspaper. “Suppose,” I said, “just
“They’d arrest you.”
“But they couldn’t prove that I killed you.”
“What proof do they need? You simply confess and that should be that.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t necessarily follow. After any killing in a city of this size, the police are usually plagued by individuals who are only too eager to confess to the crime, for various clinical reasons of their own. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if half a dozen people have already admitted to my crime, perhaps more convincingly than I could.”
She thought about that. “Well, Ellie could identify you. She was at the checkout counter.”
“I wore a beard.”
“How about taking your gun to the police? They could compare bullets, and that should nail it down.”
“Unfortunately, I flung the weapon into the harbor. At this moment it is in muck under perhaps sixty feet of water. I doubt very much whether it could be recovered.”
“But your fingerprints. They should be all over the things in your shopping cart and that ought to establish your presence at the scene of the crime.”
“I wore gloves.”
There was a silence of perhaps five minutes.
“I have it,” she said finally. “The police can give you a lie-detector test.”
“The findings of lie detectors are not accepted as evidence in this state.”
“Well, you can’t just sit there and give up so easily. You’ve got to think of something that will put you in jail.”
“Madam,” I said, “at this moment, I intend to do nothing more than take a nap.” I lay down on the couch and put the newspaper over my face.
“You’re not fooling me,” she said firmly. “You slept until ten this morning. You couldn’t possibly be ready for a nap.”
She resumed her oral vendetta, dwelling on the subject of perseverance over obstacles. However, she gradually glissandoed into the narrative of her trip to Yellowstone National Park the year before, claiming she had slides in her apartment to prove it.
Actually, her voice was rather soothing. I found myself nodding, and finally I dropped off to sleep behind the newspaper.
I don’t know how long I napped, but when I awakened I heard:
“Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action. The same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him.”
I removed the newspaper from my face.
Bridget sat in an easy chair, a faraway look in her eyes. “There is a natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude...”
“Bridget,” I said, “what the devil are you talking about?”
She smiled. “I’m filibustering.”
“Filibustering?”
“Yes. Like in Congress when there’s some bill a senator doesn’t want passed, so he gets up and talks and talks. He talks about the bill for as long as he can, but there’s only so much you can say on any subject. Still, he doesn’t want to give up the floor, so he begins to read things aloud — like his hometown newspaper, or a government bulletin, or
“And so you are filibustering because you have run out of original words?”
“From
“I don’t remember owning or borrowing the book.”
“It’s in the next apartment, being used to prop up the corner of a dresser.”
I lay there while she finished
At eight o’clock I sat up. “Well, Bridget, I’m going to hit the hay.”
She stopped reading. “This early?”
I went to the bathroom and got into my pajamas. When I returned, I pulled down the Murphy bed. “I’ve had a long day and I’m really quite tired. I should pop off to sleep immediately.”
She thought it over. “Well, perhaps you’re right. I’m beginning to get a little hoarse.”
I got into bed and closed my eyes. After five minutes I opened them. Bridget was gone. I waited another fifteen minutes, thinking she might return to check up on me, then I got up and dressed, put on my topcoat and hat, and left the apartment.
It was a long walk, but eventually I stood in the middle of the harbor bridge. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my last three pennies. What the devil could three pennies buy these days anyway? I tossed them over the railing.
I took off my hat. Why had I worn it anyway? It would only blow off. I wedged it into an interstice of the railing. Perhaps someone else could use it. I took off my topcoat, folded it neatly, and put it on the walk beside the hat.
I looked down into the blackness. I had always been a bit nervous about heights. I closed my eyes and was ready.
“Oliver,” Bridget said sharply, “put on your damn hat. And the topcoat too.”
We entered the supermarket at approximately twenty minutes to nine, and Bridget showed me a nook where I could hide. I remained concealed until nine-thirty, when Bridget informed me that the store was now closed and empty of all personnel.
She led me to the safe in the manager’s small office.
“I really should have done some research before I started haunting you,” she said. “I didn’t know that you were once nearly rich, but your financial adviser absconded to Costa Rica with all your money. Why didn’t you just get a job like ordinary people do?”
“At the age of fifty-three? Frankly, I’m unemployable, Bridget. I possess no marketable skills.”
“And your pride prevented you from accepting charity, so you decided to steal.”
“It was my first attempt,” I said. Bridget had provided me with the safe’s combination, and I now proceeded to open it. “I thought you were going to be my lookout.”
“I am,” Bridget said. “The nearest police car is parked three and a half blocks away. At this moment one of the officers is napping and the other is crunching an antacid tablet.”
I removed the packets of bills from the safe.
“You’d better fill a bag with groceries before you leave,” she advised. “I know your cupboard is bare. I should have known you were actually starving when you didn’t eat anything all day. And those library books. You were taking them back even though you hadn’t finished some of them because you wanted to put your affairs in order.”
When we left the store, I had the money and my groceries in a heavy brown paper bag.
“You might just as well move into my apartment,” Bridget said. “It’s sunny and cheerful. I don’t know how long it will take to settle my estate so you can move in officially, but in the meantime get the superintendent to let you see the apartment and I’ll show you where there’s an extra key you can palm.”
“Why would I want to palm the key?”
“Because until you move in permanently you’ll have to slip in every few days or so to water my plants. And you might as well empty the refrigerator. The food will spoil if it stays there too long. My niece Annie gets everything I have and I can’t change that, but I think she’ll jump at the chance to sell you my furniture if you make her a fair offer. And there are three poinsettias in the closet. They have to have a period of dormancy so you can get them to bloom on Christmas, and a dark closet is an ideal place to put them, but in thirty-two more days, take them out, put them in a sunny place, and give them a long drink of water. And dust gets on the leaves of my rubber plants, so take a damp cloth and...”
“Bridget,” I said. “For a little while — at least until I’ve eaten — would you please shut up?”
There was a two-second silence. “Yes, dear.”
I shrugged. Well, why not?
As it was, I would have forgotten about the poinsettias entirely if Bridget hadn’t been there to remind me.
Three Weeks in a Spanish Town
by Edward D. Hoch
“Three weeks in a Spanish town!” Edna had exclaimed when she saw the little classified ad in the back of the travel magazine. “Doesn’t that sound romantic?”
To her husband Arthur it had sounded downright primitive, especially after they wrote for details and received back a letter written in bad English explaining that the town in question was in a remote section of the country more than a hundred miles from Madrid or any other large city. “What’ll I do there for three weeks?” he groaned.
“Relax — that’s what!” By this time Edna Calkins had her heart set on the trip and nothing would dissuade her. “Get away from all the New York bustle and forget about the office for once.”
“We do that every summer in the Hamptons.”
“Arthur, in the Hamptons you see all the lawyers from the firm. We sit around drinking and discussing the business you left behind in the city. I want to do something different this summer.”
“Well,” he said, knowing he was beaten as soundly as any opposing counsel had ever beaten him in court, “I’ll admit their prices are reasonable for three weeks. I doubt if we could find anyplace else in Europe as inexpensive.”
“Then we can go?”
“Three weeks,” Arthur Calkins mused. “That’s a long time. The place probably doesn’t even have a tennis court.”
“Oh, damn!”
“All right, all right! We’ll go!”
It was a hot July afternoon when they arrived in Latigo, a quiet little town tucked away in a corner of the country where the local bus stopped only twice a week. Edna could see that Arthur was already regretting the trip as their rented car came to a stop before the only official-looking building on the main street.
“It’s siesta time,” he grumbled. “They’re probably all asleep.”
“No — there’s one!”
The man who appeared in the doorway was wearing a wrinkled white coat that didn’t button over his protruding stomach. His black moustache was flecked with grey and his eyes were tired. Perhaps, Edna thought, he had been sleeping, after all.
“No,” Edna informed him, leaning her head out the car window. “We’ve come to stay.”
“For three weeks,” Arthur added.
“Ah! You must be the Americans Mama Lopez is expecting. I am José Friega, the mayor of Latigo.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Edna responded, holding her hand out to shake his. “This is my husband, Arthur Calkins. I’m Edna.”
Mayor Friega bent to get a good look at Arthur. “You are a fine strong-looking man. You exercise, no?”
“I jog a bit.”
“Ah, well. Here in July it is too hot to jog. You get sunstroke.”
“Which way to Mama Lopez?” Edna asked a bit impatiently.
“Ah! Straight down the street to that gasoline station, then turn right. It is the fifth house.”
“Which side of the street?”
He smiled apologetically. “There are only houses on one side. We are not a large town.”
And in truth it wasn’t. The gas station, when they passed it, had only one pump and there was no attendant in sight. The road was narrow and rutted and, as Mayor Friega had said, there were houses on one side only. The other side was mostly barren, though there was one round fenced-in structure that could have been a ball park.
“Fifth house,” Arthur said. “Here it is.”
The house itself was quite nice, Edna was pleased to see. It was the best on the street, probably the best in the town — pink-painted stucco, with flowers growing in the front yard. She’d seen houses like it in Los Angeles, but had never imagined one halfway around the world in Spain. “Isn’t it lovely, Arthur?” she said.
“Yeah. Just like home.” He got the bags out of the trunk while Edna went up to the door.
It opened before she could knock and a slim dark-haired woman greeted her. “Welcome to my house. I am Mama Lopez.”
“Oh! I’m Edna Calkins. I guess you’re expecting us. That’s Arthur with the bags.”
“Come right in. My home is your home, for the length of your stay.”
Arthur had to admit grudgingly that their room was nice, with a lovely view of the mountains. After a delicious dinner served by Mama Lopez they learned a little about her and about the town. Her husband had died long ago, during the Civil War, when most of the young people left Latigo for good. She had stayed on because she was expecting a child, a girl who was now a woman of thirty-nine, and lived in Madrid.
“The children nowadays,” Mama Lopez complained. “They live together without marriage, they have no children. They have no religion, even! It is not like the old days.”
“Do you have a church here?” Edna asked, recalling that she had not seen one as they drove into town.
Mama Lopez shook her head. “It was bombed during the war. Many people took it as a sign that God had given up on Latigo. That was when many left. But I stayed, and Mayor Friega, and some others.”
“We met Señor Friega. How long has he been mayor?” Arthur asked.
“Who knows? No one bothers with elections here any more. He serves as long as the people do not tire of him.”
“It would seem a younger, more progressive mayor might breathe some new life into the town. You attracted us. You could bring in many more tourists if you had facilities for them.”
She shrugged helplessly. “I am an old woman, Señor. You tell the mayor this. Do not tell Mama Lopez.”
Later that night, as he and Edna lay in bed, Arthur wondered about this odd woman who was their hostess. “Do you think she dyes her hair?” he asked.
“What for, out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“She must be about sixty if she has a thirty-nine-year-old daughter. I can’t believe her hair hasn’t started turning grey.”
Edna turned over in bed. “People lead a simpler life here, Arthur.”
“I guess so,” he agreed.
The following morning Mayor Friega himself arrived to show them around the town. Their first stop was across the street, at the circular structure Edna had taken for a ball field.
“What is it?” she asked as they strolled out into the open space surrounded by a low grandstand.
“A bullring?” Arthur ventured.
Mayor Friega nodded sadly. “Once, long ago, there were bullfights here on Sunday afternoons, as there are throughout Spain. But then the people left and the matadors stopped coming. No one will perform for a town of fifty-eight people.”
“Fifty-eight? That’s your population?”
The mayor nodded. “It was sixty until last month, when the Rozeris brothers were arrested in Saragossa. Now they’re away for a year.”
“What did they do?” Edna asked.
“A drunken brawl. Someone was knifed. They’re good boys though. They should be back in a year.”
He drove them down the town’s meager streets, pointing out the place where the church had once stood, the site where a railroad station was to have been built, the corner where the twice-weekly bus stopped. After a time Arthur asked, “Aren’t there any side trips we can take away from here?”
“Certainly, Señor. There is a fiesta next week in a neighboring town. And we have one here ourselves on the last weekend of your stay.”
“A fiesta for fifty-eight people?”
The mayor shrugged. “A small remembrance of the old days.”
He introduced them to virtually every resident of Latigo that day, including Doctor Manuela, the physician, and a deeply tanned young woman named Rita who worked at the local store.
“Funny,” Edna remarked to Arthur later, “she doesn’t look Spanish.”
“Who, dear?”
“That woman Rita at the general store.”
“I don’t know how you could tell behind that tan.”
“She almost looks American.”
Arthur shrugged. “Maybe she is, though she didn’t say more than a couple of words.”
They journeyed to a neighboring town the next day, and welcomed the brief change of scene. The countryside seemed greener and lusher away from Latigo. Edna would never admit it to Arthur but she was beginning to regret their decision to spend three weeks in this out-of-the-way corner of the world.
“This is such a religious country,” Arthur remarked. “Isn’t it odd there’s no priest in Latigo?”
Edna found herself defending the town once more, against her better judgment. “You heard what happened to the church. A priest wouldn’t live here without a church. They go to Mass in the next town on Sundays. I asked Mama Lopez.”
“Yeah, I suppose it’s like the bullfights. You can’t build a church for just fifty-eight people.”
In the days that followed, they spent most of their time just relaxing. That was what they’d come for, after all. Mama Lopez encouraged Arthur to putter around in her garden, and Edna busied herself with a thick new novel she’d brought from home. One day during the second week when they’d had all the relaxing they could stand, they took the long drive into Madrid for a few hours.
It was toward the end of that second week, when Edna had offered to do the shopping for Mama Lopez, that she struck up a conversation with the woman named Rita. After a few comments about the weather, which never changed, Edna said, “You know, you talk a bit like an American.”
The woman smiled. “I am an American. I thought you knew. Rita Quinn, from St. Paul. Don’t let the suntan fool you. It’s hard to live in Latigo without getting one.”
“But what are you doing here?”
“Living. Relaxing. I came here two years ago for a vacation with my husband. He was killed in an accident, and I just decided to stay.”
“Don’t you have any family back home?”
“No children. And no one I really care about. Latigo isn’t such a bad place to spend your life.”
“I’m finding it a bit boring after the first couple of weeks.”
“Oh, there are things to do. They’re wonderful people, really. Mayor Friega treats me like his own daughter.”
Dr. Manuela came in then and picked up a loaf of bread. “Good day, Mrs. Calkins. Are you enjoying your vacation?”
“Yes, very much. The weather is so perfect.”
“It never changes,” he said. “Not at this time of year.” He paid Rita for the bread. “I hope your husband is well?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“I only ask because you are alone. Sometimes visitors are affected by the water.”
“There’s been no problem so far.”
“Good! If one should develop, just call me. I’ll have him back on his feet in no time.”
It was odd, Edna thought, walking back to Mama Lopez’s house. Odd that the doctor expected some illness to befall Arthur and not her. Perhaps she just looked healthier — though even the mayor had commented on her husband’s good physical condition the day they arrived.
That evening they sat outside drinking beer and looking at the stars, and Edna felt at peace with herself for the first time in days. Perhaps Rita was right. Perhaps one could come to love this place after a while. Mama Lopez had told Arthur she would make him a suit of clothes as a farewell gift, which was certainly an unexpected kindness. He’d grumbled about it privately, expecting an ill-fitting white suit like the mayor’s, but he allowed himself to be measured for it. Edna watched it all and decided that even Arthur was beginning to like the people of Latigo.
When she saw Mayor Friega driving by the following afternoon she waved to him. He pulled over to the side of the road and called out, “You’re remembering our fiesta this weekend? It is the high point of the year in Latigo.”
“I’m remembering. It’s hard to believe we’ll be going back home next week. Once I adjusted to the tempo of life here, the days just flew by.”
He nodded understandingly. “There is always some adjustment necessary, wherever one lives.”
On Saturday morning Edna awoke to find the town’s main street festooned with gaily colored streamers. People were out and about earlier than usual, and the few shops that were usually open on Saturday had closed. “Isn’t it nice the fiesta is on our last weekend?” she remarked to Arthur.
He was doing push-ups on the bedroom floor. “I suppose so. It almost seems as if they planned it for us.”
“We’ve had all this for practically nothing!”
“I wouldn’t call the air fare nothing.”
“No, but I mean the rest of it. You’ve got to admit there’s no place on earth we could have stayed for three weeks as cheaply as this. And you’re getting a suit besides!”
“We haven’t seen it yet.”
“Grumble, grumble! That’s all you do any more. Remember how it was when we were first married?”
“I’m sorry,” he said with a sigh. “I guess I can make it through a few more days.”
“Admit it’s not as bad as you expected. Go on, admit it.”
He smiled for the first time in days. “All right. Anything to keep you happy.”
She glanced out the window. “There’s Rita Quinn. We really should spend some time with her this last weekend.”
“What for?”
“Well, simply because she’s a fellow American. I told you she lost her husband over here in an accident.”
“What sort of accident?”
“She didn’t say. An auto accident, I suppose.”
“I’ll admit she’s pretty cute.”
“Arthur!”
“Well, I can look, can’t I?”
They spent all that day at the fiesta, eating and drinking and even dancing a bit. Every one of the town’s residents had turned out for it, except Mama Lopez, who told them she had just a little more work to finish on Arthur’s suit.
It was early evening, on their way back home, when Arthur first complained of stomach pains. Edna remembered Dr. Manuela’s warning. “The water can be bad here,” she said.
“We’ve both been drinking it for two weeks.”
“But all the dancing and everything—”
“Damn! It’s awful!”
As soon as they reached Mama Lopez’s house Edna called Dr. Manuela on the town’s primitive telephone system. He came at once, carrying his familiar black bag. “I was lucky to catch you at home,” she said. “I thought you’d be at the fiesta with everyone else.”
He shook some pills into his hand. “There are always sick calls on fiesta night. Here, these will fix him up, but he needs a good solid night’s sleep. Mama Lopez — do you have a spare room where he could sleep?”
“Certainly!”
“But... is it that serious, Doctor?” Edna asked anxiously.
“It’s not serious at all,” he assured her. “But we take no chances.”
Arthur was put to bed in a room down the hall, and he was asleep before Edna left him. She didn’t much like it, but Dr. Manuela seemed to know what he was doing.
As Edna pulled the shade in her own room before retiring, she glanced out to see a large black van passing the house slowly. It was closed, with no markings, and she wondered where it had come from. She had never seen such a van in Latigo before. Someone from the next town, she supposed, who’d driven over for the fiesta.
It was strange sleeping alone, but she dropped off quickly. When she awakened she was startled at having slept so soundly. Her watch showed it was after nine.
When she came out of the bathroom she saw that Arthur’s room was empty. Mama Lopez was just going in to make the bed. “Your husband was up earlier,” she explained. “He is feeling better, but he went to Dr. Manuela for some further medication.”
“I see,” Edna said, but it puzzled her.
Before she had a chance to think about it, Mayor Friega arrived. In honor of the fiesta he was wearing a white suit that fit him somewhat better and he’d even managed to button it across his stomach. “I come to join you for breakfast,” he announced, “and then I will personally escort you to the afternoon’s festivities.”
“I’m sure Arthur will be back by then.”
“I have just seen him at Manuela’s. He is resting there and says he will join us later.”
“I should go to him.”
“No, no. He is fine.”
Edna peered out the front window and saw the black van parked in the lot across the street. Two young men stood nearby, as if guarding it.
She went in and sat down to breakfast with Mama Lopez and the mayor.
It was shortly after noon when she walked across the street between the two of them and joined the others in the grandstand. “Why have we come here?” she asked Mama Lopez.
“For the final event of the fiesta weekend.”
Suddenly Rita Quinn, the American, was at her side. It was as if they were her bodyguards, protecting her. She stared down at the ring in the center of the low grandstands and was surprised to see Dr. Manuela stride out to the middle of the ring and speak rapidly in Spanish, as if introducing someone.
Then she saw Arthur.
He came on from the side, dressed in a tight sequined suit that shimmered in the sunlight. Edna knew without asking that it was the suit Mama Lopez had made for him. He staggered slightly as Manuela left him alone in the center of the ring.
“What’s the matter with him?” Edna demanded, jumping to her feet. “What’s he doing out there?”
But the mayor’s firm hands were gripping her, pulling her back to her seat. “There is nothing to fear,” he said above the growing chant of the small crowd.
She looked on, unbelieving, as Manuela returned, carrying the traditional red cape and sword. Arthur accepted them and turned to gaze up at her for just a moment. His eyes were blurred as if by drink.
“He’s no bullfighter!” Edna screamed above the crowd. “What have you done to him?”
Mayor Friega kept his grip on her. “The doctor has administered certain drugs which diminish the sense of fear and inhibition. He is a strong man. He will do well.”
And then she saw the black van with its rear doors open, saw the raging bull released into the ring. “That bull will kill him!”
“No, no...”
“He has no training! He’s never done this!”
“The odds are still good. Last summer the man killed the bull.”
“Last summer...” The full horror of what was happening began to dawn on her. “And the summer before that?” she asked, remembering Rita Quinn’s husband. “What about the summer before that?”
But Rita was holding her down now too, and her cries went unheard against the roar of the crowd. The bull charged and Arthur stepped aside, barely dodging the deadly horns.
Mama Lopez said into her ear, “Don’t you understand? It’s the sport that is important here, not whether the man or the bull wins! It is the sport that brings back the old life to this poor town, once each year. Our men will no longer fight, so we must depend on outsiders like your husband.”
The bull charged again, barely missing Arthur’s thigh, and the crowd cheered once more. Arthur looked dazed. He was shaking his head, perhaps wondering what he was doing there. But even as Edna saw him weaken she knew it wouldn’t matter. This was what they had come here for, and Mama Lopez was right. It didn’t matter who won. The sport and the town were all that mattered to them.
And as the bull made its next deadly pass she was on her feet with the others.
Past Perfect
by John Lutz
“Let me treat you to a last round and tell you about Le Clair,” Strickland said, raising his eyebrows and waiting for an affirmative silence.
It was almost closing time, and we four regulars were the only customers in the bar. We’d been discussing the curious whims of fate at our usual corner table, watching Nevo the bartender wipe down the polished mahogany bar while the piano player softly and absently fingered the gleaming keys for his own amusement. We ordered.
When the drinks came, Strickland looked into his glass as if he’d spotted a fly, deciding where to begin. None of us really knew much about him. He’d just started coming to the inn a month ago, and he’d naturally fallen in with us. No one objected. He was a likable little fellow, fiftyish, quiet, and rumpled. The only distinctive thing about his appearance was his eyes, blue and deeply thoughtful.
It all happened over twenty-five years ago (Strickland began), shortly after I’d graduated from college. I met Le Clair at one of those pretentiously arty cocktail parties. He was a sculptor, though not a very successful one. The critics thought his work was too strict, too sterile. But I suppose that’s the only way it could have been, because Le Clair was a perfectionist.
I don’t mean he was one of those people who must have everything as near perfect as possible. That wasn’t enough. Le Clair was a perfectionist — in everything. His clothes were expensive and impeccably tailored, even on his limited budget. His moustache was trimmed so precisely it appeared painted on. He was perfect himself: small, evenly proportioned, with erect posture, a well-shaped head, and a dark, almost feminine face.
We became fairly close friends, considering. Not many people could put up with his obsession with detail; I couldn’t myself for any length of time.
Sometimes on long afternoons I’d read in his apartment while he pounded away in his adjoining studio, hammering his perfect soul onto stone. His apartment was furnished in a modem style, everything as precisely positioned as in a hospital room. In his antiseptic kitchen he did his own gourmet cooking. A meal at Le Clair’s was more delicious than a meal at the finest restaurant.
Today he’s considered a genius for that same uncompromising quality that used to attract critical scorn. And his work does contain genius, I suppose — but the kind that spirals inward and consumes its possessor.
It seemed unthinkable that a man like Le Clair could ever marry, but somehow I wasn’t surprised when he introduced Leona as his bride. She was, in appearance at least, the perfect woman. Tall and finely boned, she had the easy, graceful carriage and serene beauty of a queen. Possibly the rumor that she was descended from Rumanian royalty was true.
We had dinner together often, and Le Clair would dote on Leona and brag about her as if she were one of his own stone creations. When she left the table for some reason he’d look at me, his eyes aglow.
“See how the line of the jaw is at just the right angle to the neck,” he would say. “Exquisite! How perfect her posture is. Like a goddess!” And he would cut an exact piece from his steak.
They were happy enough for about a year, Le Clair dedicating himself to his sculpting, Leona looking beautiful for him. She was ideal for him in every way, catering to his excessive demands, encouraging him in his faultless art. It was obvious that she loved him, and increasingly obvious that she forced herself into a confining mold to please him.
Next to his work, she became the most important thing in his life. His sculpting was the foundation, Leona the centerpost of his illusion of perfection. He existed in his own world, breathed his own rarified atmosphere. It was a house of cards that seemed fated to collapse.
Yet it did not collapse.
“You’re an uncommonly lucky man, Le Clair,” I once told him.
“Yes,” he’d agreed, lighting a cigarette with his imported gold lighter that never failed, “but then I’m an uncommon man in all respects.”
Things continued to go smoothly until that summer night when Le Clair stepped through a doorway into reality.
It was midnight (Le Clair always went to bed precisely at eleven o’clock) when something made him wake. A slight noise perhaps, or the feeling that things weren’t quite right. He walked into the living room and saw a crack of light beneath the studio door. He crossed the room and threw the door open.
Leona was in the studio with another man.
They say Le Clair actually fainted from the shock. That Leona’s infidelity occurred in his studio made the wound all the more agonizing. For some time afterward Le Clair avoided everyone.
I’ll have to tell you the rest of the story as Leona told it to me from her hospital bed.
Le Clair forgave her, then hurled himself into his work as never before. The two of them lived like hermits in their apartment. They agreed never even to mention what had happened, agreed it would never happen again. Still, the memory of the incident ate away at Le Clair like drops of acid; it was the one imperfection in his life.
You have to understand, he had the unrestrained ego of the pure artist. He loved Leona as before; yet how could he love the only blemish on his otherwise spotless existence? It was a paradox that tore at his soul, and it came to dominate him. If that one element of his unshakable faith had crumbled, could not the rest? Perhaps the critics were right. What held up the remainder of his house of cards?
Le Clair’s taut mental state began to affect him physically. He seldom slept, and he became pale and thin. A love so delicately balanced as his could be tipped by the lightest touch toward hate.
One morning, while Leona was preparing breakfast, Le Clair broke. He sat at the kitchen table, his head buried in his slender arms, trembling and sobbing. Leona sat down beside him, trying to console him, trying desperately to calm him.
Suddenly, violently, he straightened and sniffed the air.
The bacon and eggs were burning!
They would be inedible!
Le Clair sprang from his chair, and his hand closed on the handle of the hot frying pan. Without hesitating he hurled the sizzling bacon grease into Leona’s face. Screaming in pain and disbelief, she tumbled backward in her chair. And Le Clair, too, screamed, a tortured cry for what could never be undone.
But it wasn’t the screams that brought the police. It was the shot that followed.
Leona wasn’t quite dead. They took her away in an ambulance.
Strickland stopped talking and looked over our shoulders. Then he smiled, a strangely luminescent smile that quickly faded.
“My wife,” he said. “I’ll have to leave.”
A woman stood just inside the door. She was tall and finely boned, with a natural beauty’s perfect proportion and graceful carriage. She wore an old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat pulled low to conceal most of her face. There was no doubt in our minds as to her identity.
I gripped Strickland’s arm as he rose to leave.
“What happened to Le Clair?” I asked.
In a softly modulated voice Strickland said, “That morning in his kitchen, he shot himself. One inch in front of the ear and at exactly the correct angle.”
Strickland and the tall woman walked out the door. They seemed perfectly happy together.
Nevo the bartender walked over with the bar towel tucked in his belt. “Mr. Strickland forgot to pay for that last round of drinks,” he said.
I found out later that Strickland’s wife was from Cleveland, possessed a homely but unscarred face and had never heard of Leona Le Clair.
Jigsaw Puzzle
by Stephen Wasylyk
Toper Kelly died on the main street of Fox River at three o’clock on a chilly October morning, his life finished by a hit-and-run driver.
Swashbuckling with Errol Flynn across the Spanish Main via early-morning television in his apartment above his souvenir shop, Merv Groves was brought back to reality by the sickening thud and the tinkling of broken glass. He rushed to the window too late to do much except call the Sheriff’s Office.
If Groves hadn’t heard the impact, the time of the accident might never have been established. On an October morning in Fox River, very few people were stirring. Most of the bars closed early. The summer visitors were long gone, the snow that would bring the skiers to the resorts was still far over the horizon, and hunting season was weeks away, so the only people in Fox River were the locals, whose activities at that hour, whatever they might be, were confined within four walls.
At seven I sat at my desk in the Sheriff’s Office and listened to Julio explain that all he could do was send Toper’s body to the hospital for examination by Dr. Blenheim and pick up the broken glass from the shattered headlight, which was the only physical evidence to be found. He stood at the window, his hands in his uniform pockets. He was wide-shouldered and black-haired, with a fierce black moustache and soft voice, and it didn’t take a sensitive man to realize Toper Kelly’s death affected him deeply.
Several years before, Toper Kelly had stepped off a Greyhound bus for a rest stop. Something about Fox River must have pleased him or he was tired of traveling, because he let the bus leave without him. He was a short thin man with a full beard, a great capacity for liquor, and a penchant for sleeping it off in the back seat of the nearest available car, thereby frightening many a resident or summer visitor who opened his car door in the morning to find a bearded gnome curled up inside.
As long as the temperatures were bearable, he earned a few dollars doing odd jobs, but once the really cold weather and snow came, his income touched zero long before the thermometer, a problem he solved by blatantly walking out of the supermarket with his pockets full of canned dog food, receiving as a result a ninety-day sentence for shoplifting. The judge and I had reached an understanding that he would never serve his time in county prison. He occupied an unlocked cell in the sheriff’s building and for three months was almost an
Julio turned from the window. “The bum should have stopped. All right, anyone can have an accident and Toper probably stepped in front of him, but he should have stopped.”
“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “We’ll just have to find him and ask why he didn’t. You have the pieces from the smashed headlight. Blenheim will tell us if the clothes show any paint scrapings. The car will have to be repaired somewhere. There are only a half-dozen body shops near here where that could be done.” I glanced at my watch. “Get on the phone and alert them all. I’ll see if Blenheim has found anything that will help.”
Julio’s voice was careful. “I’d like to handle this one myself.”
The grey light of dawn coming through the window modeled his face into harsh planes and I realized Julio hadn’t smiled yet that morning. “I think not,” I said gently. “You weren’t the only one who liked Toper.”
While the operator paged Blenheim, I waited in his office, looking at the framed certificate on the wall whose Latin proclaimed him to be a graduate of one of the finer schools of medicine. Blenheim was no older than I was, but his dark hair already showed grey and I sometimes had the feeling that because of our jobs we were the two oldest men in Fox River.
He spread his thin hands when he entered. “What can I say, Gates? I’m sure you don’t want a list of the multiple injuries caused by the impact of an automobile on the human body. I don’t know how much longer Toper could have continued anyway. He was determined to drink himself into his grave.”
“Did you find anything I can use?” I asked.
He shook his head. “The impact wasn’t that great. Toper wasn’t young or in the best of condition. The car probably sustained little damage.”
“Did Toper carry anything that would tell us where he came from and if he had any relatives?”
“Not even a wallet with a picture. The only thing in his pockets was a hundred dollars. Where would Toper get that kind of money at this time of the year?”
“He could have done some work for someone. When he was sober, no one was handier.”
“Not only handy, but educated. He spoke at least three languages.” Blenheim sat at his desk and toyed with a pencil. “Toper wasn’t your average alcoholic. I always had the feeling he could walk away from the bottle whenever he chose.”
“You’re right,” I said. “He hated his annual ninety-day sentence, but even though he had every opportunity to walk out and into the nearest bar, he never stepped outside. He lived by his own rules.”
“I hate to see a man like that end in a paupers grave.”
“So do I,” I said. “That’s why I’d like you to tell Kirk Milford to give him a decent funeral and a regular burial plot, and send me the bill.”
“Half the bill to you,” said Blenheim. “The other half to me.” He smiled. “Of course, there is always the possibility Milford may not send a bill at all. He’s been in shock since his wife left him last week.”
“So I heard.” I zipped up my jacket. “You were the family doctor. Does your code of ethics preclude your telling me why she left?”
He shrugged. “Middle-age syndrome. She wanted to end the marriage and get out of Fox River.”
“Do me a favor,” I said. “You’re a medical expert and not a forensic specialist, but check out Toper’s clothing again before I send it to the State Police lab. Those people take their time and I’d like to settle this quickly.”
He nodded and I left.
On the radio, Julio told me the State Police wanted to see me about ten miles out of town on Highway 13. I pulled up behind the police cruiser parked on a curve about fifteen minutes later. Beyond the cruiser on the opposite shoulder of the road was a big station wagon, its right front caved in from flattening the row of guard posts like dominoes. Hennessey, one of the troopers recently transferred in from further south, came over as I stepped out.
“I found it at dawn,” he said. “There was no one in it, no one around. I ran a make on it. It belongs to Kirk Milford of Fox River. Do you know him?”
I thought of my conversation with Blenheim. “He’s one of the local funeral directors. He’s a little upset at the moment because his wife left him.”
“If he’d been going a little faster, he might have been one of his own customers.” He pointed. “It looks like he came down the hill and didn’t quite make it all the way around.”
“Some of the locals call this Four-Beer Curve,” I said. “Anything more than that under your belt and you end up in the field. I suppose that was Milford’s trouble. Take a good look at the roadbed. It’s the only curve in the county where the road slants away from the center rather than toward it.”
His hands on his hips, Hennessey sighted back along the curve. “I see what you mean. It ought to be fixed before someone gets killed.”
“We’ve tried. If we wanted a few million Federal dollars to build a divided high-speed highway through the center of town, we’d have no problem, but the state doesn’t have a few thousand to spend repaving this.”
He grinned. “That figures. Do you want to take care of it from here in? Since he’s not around, I guess he promoted himself a ride into town, unless he’s sleeping it off in the underbrush somewhere.”
“I’ll see if I can find him and get a tow truck out here if he hasn’t arranged for one.”
“Tell them to expect a bill for the guard rail,” Hennessey said. “Drowning your sorrows can be expensive.”
Milford’s Funeral Home was on the edge of town about six miles down the road, a long, low, red-brick building with a center entrance — four chapels in one wing and the mortuary and office in the other. A driveway led around to the rear where there was a spacious parking lot. In one corner of the lot was another red-brick building that Milford used to garage his hearse and the one limousine he kept on hand.
I went through the back door down a carpeted hallway, past a green-painted metal door labeled no admittance, poked my head into the open door of a walnut-paneled office, saw no one, and continued around to the front of the building. Milford was standing in the entrance lobby, his hands raised against the door frame, staring out into the street — a tired, dejected figure of a man. He was heavy set, middle-aged, of average height, with greying hair and a large nose that supported a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. His face was colorless except for the blue shadows beneath his eyes.
“Milford,” I said.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Hello, Gates.” He lowered his hands reluctantly and turned to me slowly. “Doctor Blenheim called about Toper Kelly. I’m really sorry to hear it. If you want him to have a proper funeral. I’ll be glad to cooperate. I knew him too. I gave him the job of keeping the hearse and limousine washed and polished last summer, but of course he was undependable. I had to let him go.”
“You among many others,” I said. “Toper never let a steady job interfere with his drinking. We found your station wagon out on Highway 13. How did it get there?”
“I’m sure you’ve already guessed. I had too much to drink at a bar down the road and lost control on the curve. I started walking. I walked the whole way. It sobered me up.”
“You walked six miles?”
He smiled. “I can jog five.”
“No one offered you a lift?”
“At four in the morning?”
“The State Police want the car out of there and they’re sending a bill for repairing the guard rail.”
He shrugged. “I intended to call Harry Orbis to tow the car in.”
“I’ll handle it if you like, but I really stopped to tell you that if you insist on drinking, stay home. All you ran into this time was a guard rail. Next time it could be a Toper Kelly.”
“Do you think I don’t know?” He lifted a hand and dropped it. “No need to worry. It was something I had to get out of my system. Running off the road last night was enough to bring me to my senses. You can’t appreciate how much of a shock it is, Gates, to have your wife of fifteen years have you called to the phone from a Chamber of Commerce meeting so she can tell you she’s leaving and won’t be back. I thought it was some sort of a joke, but when I got home she was gone, along with her clothes and her car.”
“Was the car registered in her name?”
“No, in mine. Why?”
“Then she can’t sell it. How much money did she have when she left?”
He straightened his glasses as if to see me more clearly, his eyes wide behind the lenses. “I have no idea. She had her own checking account and credit cards.”
“What can she do to earn a living?”
“She shouldn’t have any trouble getting a job. She practically ran the business here. She had a nice way with people, and she took care of the books, which left me free to take care of the undertaking part. All I needed was Sims, the handyman.” His voice became curious. “Why are you asking me these questions?”
“If you’d like to find her it shouldn’t be too difficult,” I said. “I’d be happy to help. Perhaps if you talked to her...”
He clasped his hands behind his back and took a few steps. “I’ve given that a lot of thought.” His shoulders squared. “I’m a proud man, Gates. I refuse to chase her or beg her to come home no matter how much I need her. I’m not at fault in this. She left of her own accord. Let her come back the same way. I’ll manage.”
“That’s your decision,” I said. I headed for the door. “I’ll tell Harry Orbis to bring your car in.”
“I’d appreciate that,” he said.
I drove a few blocks to Harry Orbis’ big service station, found him inside the office, and asked him to tow Milford’s station wagon to the local body shop.
“For a good customer like Milford, I’ll do it right now,” he said. “He’s given me all his business for years, and never questioned a bill. He’s a real nice guy.”
“Did you service his wife’s car?” I asked.
“I sure did. She was a fine lady. I’m sorry she’s gone.”
“She didn’t happen to stop by the evening she left, did she?”
“Not to my knowledge. Why?”
“I’m just asking. I thought she might have filled the tank and mentioned where she was headed. Milford has his back up and says he doesn’t want to know where she is, but I think if I located her he might be interested enough to show up with a dozen roses or something.”
He grinned. “I didn’t know you were a marriage counselor.”
“When you’re sheriff of this county, you’re a little bit of everything. Get the car before the State Police impound it.”
I drove back to the office. Julio was pacing back and forth, his hat on and his jacket zipped closed. “I was just about to start yelling for you over the radio. I got a call from Pat’s Body Shop up in Morgan. A young guy brought in a smashed headlight and a damaged grille. I told Pat to stall until one of us got there.”
“And you want it to be you.” I pointed to the door. “Go.”
After he had gone, I took the envelope that held the broken glass he had picked up at the scene and slid the pieces out onto my desk. Using the eraser at the end of a pencil, I began pushing them around, more or less fitting them together as if working a jigsaw puzzle. There were pieces missing that had been carried down the roadway or imbedded in Toper’s clothing, but it really didn’t matter. It was obvious the glass came from a rectangular headlight on one of the later-model cars.
I glanced at my watch. Julio was taking longer than he should for the run up to Morgan and back. I thought of Milford and his wife, wondering just exactly what he
I flipped open my telephone-number index, found the one I wanted, and dialed. When the operator answered, I said, “Mr. Zeller’s office.”
The secretary sounded nice enough to invite to lunch sight unseen, and if I knew Zeller that was no gamble at all. When she asked my name I said, “Tell Mr. Zeller the big bass he’s been after for two years with all of that expensive gear was caught by a kid with a fishing pole and a can of worms.”
She laughed. The phone clicked and Zeller’s deep voice came on. “I hope you’re lying, Gates, because if you’re not I’m selling that cabin of mine.”
“If I were, you’d never know. I’d import a couple of big ones just to keep you happy. You still have a few weeks before everything freezes over. Are you going to try?”
“I can’t get away. I intend to make it for a little skiing later — but you didn’t call to check on my vacation plans. What can I do for you?”
“Do you have access to the billing records of gasoline credit-card purchases for your oil company?”
“With a phone call. Why?”
“I’d like to do a man a favor. His wife left Fox River last week. I figure she has to be using one of your credit cards for gasoline. The charge slips will show the location of the stations.”
“That may be too recent for the records to have been processed but I’ll try. Give me the name and account number.”
“I don’t have the number. The name is Zoe Milford. The card is probably made out to Kirk Milford.”
“I have a meeting in fifteen minutes but my secretary will see what she can do and call you.”
“Fine,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to feel hurt, but I’d prefer talking to her anyway. She has a beautiful voice.”
“My wife keeps reminding me of that,” he said drily.
A gleaming red fastback rumbled past the window, followed by Julio’s four-wheel drive, and in a few minutes a young man with long blond hair came into the office with Julio close behind.
“This is Hugo Waller,” said Julio. “His car is outside. It has one broken headlight, a dented grille, and what looks to me like blood-stains on the lip of the fender.”
Waller folded his arms, his face impassive.
“I suppose he has an explanation for the broken headlight?” I asked.
“He claims someone backed into him in the parking lot of one of the roadhouses last night. I took him to several of them. Unfortunately, none seemed to be the right place.”
I looked at Waller. “Any witnesses?”
“No,” he said.
“Did you report it to your insurance company?”
“So they can raise my premium?”
“Why waste any more time?” asked Julio. “The State Police can analyze the blood.”
My eyes found Waller’s. “Remarkable what they can do,” I told him.
“Since we’re going to find out anyway, you might as well tell us what you hit. I’m sure it wasn’t Toper Kelly.”
Julio stared at me.
Waller sighed. “I never could figure out why I’ve always been so unlucky. We’re overhauling the ski lift up at the lodge for the winter. I was working up at the top and at the end of the day, I started down the road. You know that road?”
“I know the road,” I said.
“There are places where you can’t see what’s around the curve ahead,” said Waller. “It was almost dark and I was pushing it a little. I came around a curve and there was a young doe right in front of me. She froze. I tried to miss her but just caught her with the right side of my car. I broke her neck. I stood there wondering what to do. I know you’re supposed to report it to the District Game Protector, but I decided to keep the doe. She was small, so I put her in the trunk, figuring I’d get some venison out of it at least. I dressed her out when I got home and hung her up. She’s still there. You can go look. That’s all there was to it.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” demanded Julio.
“I already told you it would cost me a hundred and a half for the car. Now I’m on the hook for another two hundred for not reporting it and the doe will be confiscated!”
“You’re getting off easy,” I said. “Get that deer and take it to the game protector. We’ll call and tell him you’re coming. If you don’t show, you’ll find out what trouble really is.”
The moment the door closed behind Waller, Julio asked, “How did you know it wasn’t him?”
I pointed at the broken lens. “Waller is driving a car that has round headlights. This one is from a car with rectangular headlights. The glass couldn’t have come from his car.”
Julio spread his hands. “What now?”
“We keep looking. Run out to the hospital and see if Blenheim has come up with anything and collect Toper’s clothes so we can send them to the State Police lab.”
I leaned back and clasped my hands behind my neck, thinking of Toper Kelly and wondering what he was doing out at three in the morning. In all the years I’d known him, that wasn’t his style. He’d take on his quota early, crawl into a car somewhere, and pass out. And then there was the money in his pocket. A hundred dollars was probably more than he ever had since he hit Fox River.
I couldn’t see Toper wandering around on a chilly October morning when he had the money to buy a bottle and hole up somewhere in comfort.
I sat and waited while the sun rose higher and the day turned balmy. If I had the manpower, I could send someone out to track down Toper’s movements for the past few days, which wouldn’t be difficult. He had a way of floating in and out of view like a disembodied spirit, haunting the town and its environs. Almost everyone knew him and accepted him as part of the local scene.
The phone rang and the voice of Zeller s secretary was more interesting than it had been previously.
“I’ve gone as far as I can, Sheriff,” she said. “From what they tell me, no one named Zoe Milford has used our credit card in more than a week. The last record we have for her is about ten days ago for only five gallons. The only other charge slips we can track down have been signed by a Kirk Milford and all are from an Orbis service station right in your town. Of course, if the purchase was within the past two or three days it may not have come through yet. I asked our people to let me know if any did.”
“The next time I come to town you are entitled to one dinner complete with flowers, candlelight, and wine,” I said.
She laughed. “I’ll look forward to it.”
After I hung up, I tilted my chair back, folded my arms, and thought. I reached for the phone and dialed again. It took three calls before I found the bank where Milford kept his accounts and only a few minutes to determine Zoe Milford hadn’t closed her account, nor had any checks against it been processed in the past week. When I hung up the thought was fixed in my mind that a person cannot exist in today’s society without spending money, and unless Zoe Milford had enough with her to last until she had an income of her own there would be no reason why she hadn’t used her oil-company credit card or cashed at least one check.
Julio came in, Toper Kelly’s clothing in a plastic bag.
“Julio,” I said, “I suppose you realize we’re both stupid.”
He grinned. “I never had any doubt about myself, but I thought you were smart enough for both of us. What’s wrong?”
“There were two cars smashed last night. We’ve eliminated only one.”
His eyes widened briefly. “Milford? I thought there was no question about his accident.”
“Milford’s station wagon has rectangular headlights. So did the car that hit Toper Kelly. What do you think the odds are that three cars smashed headlights in one night in Fox River?”
“You think that Milford hit Toper, realized he had to account for that broken headlight, ran out to the curve, and wiped out the front of the car on the guard posts to conceal the damage?”
“It’s worth checking. Go over to the body shop. You know what to look for. If you find nothing, then the odds are wrong and we look for a third car.”
The radio crackled twenty minutes later. “It will take the State Police lab to confirm it,” said Julio, “but if there isn’t blood on that smashed fender along with white paint from the guard posts I’ll turn in my badge.”
“You wanted to handle it,” I said quietly. “Go get Milford.”
Milford sat alongside my desk, his face white, his tongue wetting his lips occasionally, and I sat and watched him and said nothing.
He spread his hands and said, “It was an accident, Gates, and I panicked. I was thinking of telling you about it when you came in this morning but I lost my nerve. I’m sorry.”
I just sat and looked at him.
His voice rose. “I told you it was an accident. You want to crucify me for accidentally killing a drunk who stumbled in front of my car?”
Julio’s chair creaked as he shifted. The sun had wanned the office and was gleaming on the polished tile floor. A fly, who should have been long dead, buzzed and bumped against one of the window panes.
Milford rose to his feet abruptly. “Look, Gates...”
“Sit down,” I said softly. I pushed my phone toward him. “You’d better call your attorney.”
He reached for the receiver. “I’ll do that. I’ll be out of here in an hour.”
“I think not,” I said. “Tell him the charge is murder.”
He froze, his eyes fixed on me. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“Have you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle, Milford? You start with a couple of pieces you’re sure of and you fit them together, like the broken glass and the blood on your car that say you killed Toper. But you don’t have a complete picture yet, so you begin trying other pieces, and after a time the picture starts to take shape because there’s only one way it can go together.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you I ran the man down. That’s all there is to it.”
“I think not,” I said again. “Toper was killed at three in the morning when he had a hundred dollars in his pocket. That wasn’t like Toper. He didn’t wander around when he drank so that people could stare at him. He had a sense of dignity that prevented that. He would get his bottle, hide away somewhere, finish it off, and fall asleep. I think he went out to
“The point is that Toper was doing something he wouldn’t ordinarily do and that piece didn’t fit. Then it developed that you ran him down, which could happen to anybody, but you didn’t stop and report it, and that piece didn’t fit either. You tried to conceal it. Why? You had little to worry about. You’re a respected member of the community and Toper was the town drunk. All you had to face was the loss of your driver’s license and an involuntary manslaughter sentence that probably would have been suspended.”
“I told you I panicked.”
“Panic is running away. Panic is not risking injury by smashing a guard rail deliberately.”
“That still isn’t murder.”
“Not yet. We’re still going through the pieces. Toper liked to crawl into cars to sleep it off. He would have loved that limousine of yours. He had worked for you and he knew where it was parked every night.”
“Are you implying I killed him for sleeping in my limousine?”
“Just another piece,” I said. “Now try this one. Suppose Toper was sleeping in that limousine that night your wife disappeared. He heard something, got up to investigate, and saw you carry your wife’s body into the funeral home. She was up when you arrived home, you had an argument, and you killed her. After placing her body in the mortuary, you went back, put her clothes in her car, and drove it away to make it appear as though she had left town.
“Because he was a little fuzzy, it probably took Toper a few days to put it all together and, if it hadn’t been October, he might have come to me and told me about it. But winter was coming and he hated the restriction of that ninety days in jail, so he went to you and told you he would keep quiet if you gave him enough to see him through until spring.
“But you couldn’t afford to have him around. You met him, gave him a hundred dollars, then ran him down. That was enough. If you were seen, you would claim it was just an accident, but you didn’t want to report it unless you had to because you wanted no connection with Toper at all, which was a mistake. We probably would have taken your word about what happened just as we took it about your wife’s leaving because your character and the facts as we knew them justified believing you.”
His voice was careful. “You still have no reason not to believe me.”
“A couple of phone calls give me a good reason,” I said. “I need only two more pieces to complete the picture and they won’t be hard to find because I know what I’m looking for. For instance, there aren’t too many places you could have disposed of the car. The river is one. It’s too cold now to be used very much and it will start to freeze over sometime in December, so there will be no swimming or diving until summer. I’m sure I can find the car, Milford. And then there’s your wife’s body. All I need for that is a court order.”
He raised his face toward the ceiling and covered it with his hands, the cords in his neck taut, and I thought he would scream, but then I realized he was crying.
“Read him his rights as you’re walking him to a cell, Julio,” I said.
When Julio came back, he stood silently for a moment and then said, “You think his wife’s body is still in the funeral home?”
When I spoke, I spoke carefully because until I had seen the expression on Milford’s face I had been doing exactly what I told him I was doing — testing pieces of a puzzle to see if they fit. “That would take a search warrant. I said court order, which is what is required to open a grave and disinter a body.”
Julio’s eyes widened and he said, “He buried her with someone else.” He turned away and took a few steps before turning to face me again. “It would work. Zoe Milford couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. The pall bearers wouldn’t hardly notice the added weight. But which one? If he doesn’t tell us, we’ll have to open the graves of everyone he buried during the week until we find her. The man must have been insane.”
“More so than you think, Julio,” I said. “You didn’t see the look in his eyes. I have the feeling she isn’t in just one.”
Julio was lean and tough, but he stared at me for a moment, then moved to the window to stand in the warmth of the bright October sun — and, almost imperceptibly, he shivered.
Killer Instinct
by Jerry Jacobson
I hadn’t planned on stopping in at McGuire’s that morning. It was 4:00 a.m. and I was beat from playing and from lack of sleep. My hands were shaking from too much coffee, but not out of nervousness or fear. I haven’t shot a scared stick since I was nine years old back in Omaha shooting with the old timers and the young slicks who’d play their own mothers for quarters at one-pocket, making them show their money in front of the rack. I wasn’t nervous, just tired, like a machine that was a little overused and needed its plug pulled so it could cool off.
Alter midnight, McGuire’s can be a pretty bad place. Bad people crawl out of the woodwork, like mice in homes when the family’s gone to bed. There’s more commerce in McGuire’s some nights than in the whole damn town from nine to five. Drugs, hot merchandise, dock jobs for a week’s pay — the works.
I do most of my hustling out of Packy’s on Jade Avenue and Palladium Billiards and Kosko’s Smoke Shop out on Drumheller Street, and a few bars and taverns downtown. McGuire’s has never been a hot spot for any of the pros. It’s about six cue-lengths from the city college — a bad location, since you can turn a dozen college kids upside down and shake them and not see five bucks in change hit the pavement. Nobody plays much pool at McGuire’s. There’s just too much other big business floating around to make it profitable.
But that morning I felt drawn to McGuire’s, whether on the faint promise of action or that the visit might be providential for me I can’t say. I moved on tides of hunch and promise in those days, always thinking I would have a long life and a painless death. I was like a thrown cat that continually landed on its feet.
McGuire’s always smelled of beer and fried green-pepper sandwiches and cheap perfume. I took a seat at the counter alongside all the furred pimps with their women clustered around them — Mickey Stollson, a fading second-story man; Ace McCausland, who ran poker games all over town; and a couple of strange male faces, who looked gaunt and secretive and on the run from a wife or a crime — you never knew which and so you never asked, because that could have you crawling around on the floor looking for your head.
Greta, pursing her full rose-petal lips in a mock kiss, leaned over at me. “You got serpentine eyes, Tony. There’s nobody in here worth hustling.”
“All hustled out,” I told her.
“Where you been bein’ bad? Jade Avenue?”
“Some there.”
“Packy’s?”
“It was profitable to stay an hour or two, yes.”
“But you brought your stick in with you. I seen you sneak it down to the floor when you sat down.”
“It’s an anatomical part of me. If I left it behind, I’d bleed to death.”
She winked. Her mascara was washing and running. She’d been on duty since 8:00 P.M. No woman ever looks good at 4:00 A.M., so she could be forgiven. “You don’t bleed, Tony. If I cut you open I wouldn’t have to use the ice machine for a week. You want a pepper sandwich?”
I nodded and Greta swished off to the grill, advertising her parts. A stripper’s habits never die, they merely become less and less alluring. The day before her father died, I scooped him up out of an alley near Polk Street. The poor guy was lying in his own vomit and a pool of tokay, his face the color of silver. That single act made Greta my friend for life, no matter what horrible or despicable things I would do to her or anyone else in the future.
There was another man at the counter whose presence had completely escaped me at first. He sat two stools down from Mickey Stollson, who was whispering with a college kid, wheeling and dealing some sort of stolen merchandise. The guy was thin, with an educated face. His suit was narrow and dark grey. He didn’t look like the kind of man who’d be sitting at the counter of a place like McGuire’s in the small hours. If he was a thief, he was either a poor one or a petty one. If he had just come from murdering someone, he was a solid 8-to-5 to have loused it all up from beginning to end, and would be propped up in a detective’s interrogation room by dawn. He wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the pimp and his circle of girls, making it clear he didn’t want or need a woman just then.
Greta brought my pepper sandwich and a cream soda. A bleary-eyed boy hustled in an armload of morning papers wrapped tightly with a strip of wire and placed them on the floor behind the cigar stand at my back. When he left I got up and slipped one out of the middle of the stack without disturbing the others and took it back to my seat.
I started to consume box scores of the pro basketball games when out of the corner of my eye I saw the thin guy in the bland suit get out of his seat and come walking tentatively my way. Conscious of the wallet on my hip fat with pool winnings, I watched him furtively, ready to make him part of a wall if he was another of those fleet-footed wallet grabbers finishing up a night of sweeping small change from tavern bartops and coats and jackets from all-night restaurants.
He slipped onto the stool next to me carefully, as if he were sensitive about disturbing the volume of space occupied by another human. Very softly he said, “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”
I looked at his eyes. They had a lazy, tired look.
“Not yet,” I said to him.
“I notice you have a pool cue down on the floor.”
I told him he was very observant for such a late hour.
“I’m a graveyard supervisor at the post office. Down at the Terminal Annex Building, Registry Section.”
I recognized a hint of apology in his manner, as if he were saying he was sorry for having reached a dead end in his life so soon. There was something else in his manner as well — a fool’s eagerness, a desperate man’s reckless courage. He wanted to play pool. A thin sweat began to rise on my palms. Damn! A mark in McGuire’s at 4:00 A.M.! Were there any more wonders for fate to toss down?
“I wondered if you wanted to shoot a couple of games,” the man said. “My name is Morris Dunkirk. I don’t feel much like going straight home. My wife and I are on the outs at the present. She’s a nurse at Providence Medical Center and she leaves for work around six A.M.”
Although he didn’t say so, I took him to mean that he and his wife were two opposing forces, chess bishops escaping confrontation by never meeting on a mutual path.
“I have my stick out in the car,” Dunkirk said. “What do you say?”
“You haven’t even asked my name yet,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. I just want to play a few games.”
“It’s Tony.”
His handshake wasn’t firm or resolute. Good players have a way of making a handshake more a test of strength than an expression of greeting, as though they intend to gain complete control of you even before the balls are racked. Dunkirk, it was clear, wasn’t at all into the psychology of games playing.
“I’ll get my cue. I won’t be but a minute.”
He left. I hastily finished my sandwich and chugged down the rest of my cream soda. I saw Greta roll her eyes at me as I brought my stick up from the floor. To her it was a fishing rod with which I would shortly reel in another fish.
“You got the feelin’, Tony? Yeah, I can see you got the feeling all right. Be decent and leave him with cab fare, Iceman.”
All the tables were empty. I went to the front one and slipped a quarter into the slot. My game is one-pocket, though not to the exclusion of some others when a mark begins to feel uncomfortable with a game he doesn’t play all that often. Rotation, straight pool, three-ball, nine-ball — I always let the mark pick his game. That way, he becomes disturbed that he’s picked the wrong game to play when he begins to lose, not the wrong player to play against. There’s only one pool game I won’t play a mark, and that’s eight-ball. Any near-fool or strung-out wino is liable to beat you at eight-ball, slamming those balls around the table with all those rails and pockets to catch them. Eight-ball is a hustler’s suicide.
Dunkirk came back. He took his two-piece stick out of its cloth holder and put it together. I unzipped my battered leather case, with the velvet stripped from the inside to make it look like it was picked up at a garage sale after the garage had fallen on it. I paid $200 for my stick and then beat it against walls and chairs until it looked like something you’d start a beach fire with. But it was weighted and balanced to 18 ounces. Dunkirk’s weighed a preposterous 22 ounces — as cumbersome as Nellie Fox’s baseball bat!
“Nice stick,” I told him, handing it back with mock care. A tavern stick, a bludgeon — a barkeep might slip you a five-dollar bill to walk out with it. “What’ll we play, Morris?”
“How about some eight-ball?”
“That’s kind of a boring game, isn’t it? I mean, you and me can probably play that game in our sleep. You ever play YMCA pool?”
“No, I don’t think I ever have.” Dunkirk fooled with his necktie-knot a bit. “Is it anything like rotation?”
“No, no. You don’t have to play the balls in order by number. You play them in any order. Just call the ball and the pocket. We play to a total of sixty points. When both our scores add up to sixty, the player with the lesser amount pays the other the difference at a dollar a point. For instance, if you score thirty-two points and I score twenty-eight, I owe you four bucks.”
“I think I get it,” said Dunkirk. “We count the numbers on the balls, right? If I make a nine-ball and the ten, the running total is nineteen. If you follow with the five-ball, the total goes up to twenty-four, with my score nineteen and yours five.”
“You got it, Morris.”
I coasted through the first two games. Morris won them both. I paid him six dollars. He was elated and therefore blinded to the fact that I had gone after only low-numbered balls. He bought us both a Heineken and told me to rack them up.
He was purely apples on a low tree-limb — there to be picked. To pile up point totals he began shooting at distant balls with the big numbers on them. He was behind 32–20 the next game with a fairly easy shot on the 15-ball in the side for game. He set it up and I watched the end of his stick fishtail with nervousness. It was a cut-shot and he stepped back from it twice to check the angle.
Stepping back from a shot after you’re locked in on it is the kiss of death and Dunkirk had just kissed himself twice. I could almost see the cue ball dancing under his gaze like a laser illusion. He rechalked, swigged some beer, and took a third stance over his shot. His eyes had already given it up. His stroke came in segments, like a sequence of stop-action photos of a golf-swing. The 15-ball hit the edge of the rail and ran down the table to come to rest less than six inches from an end pocket. A tap-in putt. Dunkirk sighed and handed me a twenty, a five, and two ones.
He was caught by panic now to recoup his losses. He went for outlandish shots on high-numbered balls, while I chipped away at the small. He lost the next two: $23.00 in the first, $31.00 in the next. He broke his stick down and put it back into its cloth covering, giving me a drained smile. There was no animosity in his expression, only resignation.
“I don’t have the killer s instinct,” he said when we were back at the counter for our final Heineken. “My life story, I’m pained to say, is never to be able to finish much of what I initiate. My father was like that, too easygoing, too self-effacing. When he was a young man, he was fired from a pulp mill because the foreman suspected he was after his job. Instead of fighting the dismissal, he wrote a letter to the mill owner thanking him for the work experience.”
It was almost dawn. Dunkirk finished off his beer and rose. “I’d like to play again sometime. I come into McGuire’s nearly every morning.”
“Well, I don’t play all that much,” I told him. “But if you’re around when I stop in for a pepper sandwich, we’ll play a few games.”
“I’d like that,” said Morris Dunkirk, with those bleak eyes, a man who seemed to have burned all the bridges to his world.
Four mornings later, we played again. We played four games of nine-ball, betting a five-spot on the five and ten bucks on the nine. Dunkirk had a good clean stroke. He could play angles and make cross-corner shots with real skill. It was evident he had played a good deal of pool in his youth. But when it came to the big shots there seemed to be a massive unseen barrier between him and winning. He took three five-balls; I took the other and all four nines. And Dunkirk took a thirty-dollar loss, which he paid without heavy grief or malice.
“When I was a young man,” he began, after we’d finished and had what was to be our ritualistic Heinekens at the counter, “in the early years of my marriage, I was a welfare clerk. I typed the SSI checks. It was pretty much of a dead-end job. I knew it and so did my wife. It was a point she rarely ignored when we argued about money and goals and my lack of ambition.
“We did a lot of fencing in those days — attack, parry, riposte, redouble. Polite viciousness. Nothing visceral, not the kind of fighting married couples usually do. No sparring, or boxing, or street brawling or tavern fighting. Knockdown, drag-out stuff wasn’t Margo’s style. I acquitted myself better in those days, but it was very brutal just the same.
“Anyway, we’d just had another match over why I wasn’t getting anywhere in my job. One day at work — it was noontime and everyone was across the street in the park eating lunch — I began to devise this scheme with the checks.
“I would type about two dozen of them for around $400 each, using my own name. Then I’d type Void on the carbon copies. I’d cash the checks and on the same afternoon send in the first carbons on the Daily Void List, knowing the second and third carbons wouldn’t go to the State Capitol until the end of the month.
“Morris Dunkirk, mysterious welfare client — it would have been months before anyone at the welfare office put it all together and came up with me. Ten thousand dollars, free and clear. I could have invested, started a business, got that clean slate Margo was continually torturing me to make.”
“But you didn’t go through with your scheme,” I said.
“Tony, do I look to you like a hunted man? A haunted man, yes, but not a hunted one. No, the combination of all that risk and my lack of nerve made me back off. But it was a wonderful notion to have, if only for a brief madness.”
A week later, we played again. I was beginning to place more distance between our meetings. Postal supervisors with their woefully low five-figure incomes couldn’t afford to be high rollers, and reeling him in with such ease wasn’t setting all that well with me. Hustlers, when they get too close to their marks, never fare well. And I was beginning to like Dunkirk, starting to sympathize with him in his failing marriage and his missed opportunities.
“Lately my wife has acquired the perverse pleasure of inviting her relatives to stay with us so she can design events to embarrass me. Bridge, backgammon, paddleball, badminton — she knows I’m poor at games and sports. Physical coordination is not one of my strong points. Her brother was an oarsman in college, her oldest sister a tennis player — on the men’s team! After I’m thoroughly humiliated by losing every game, Margo will turn to career success. The brother is a physician, the sister is the first woman port commissioner in the state of Massachusetts. I endure it as long as I can and then I go out to my garden for a little peace.
“I have a beautiful garden, Tony, with zebra plants, Rex begonias, aralia plants that grow seven feet high, autumn crocuses whose colors take your breath away. Sometimes when I spend time there I wish I never had to rejoin the real world. One day Margo will push too far, embarrass me once too often, devise one more game I can’t play...”
There was no finish to the sentence, simply a shrug of the shoulders to indicate an impasse, a woeful want of an instinct for retaliation he knew didn’t exist within him.
We played three games of rotation, after which Dunkirk handed over forty dollars, thanked me for the games and conversation, and left McGuire’s without a backward glance. They were games I hated to win. His technique was becoming so much better, his selection of shots almost professional in their gradation. And yet there was this terrible lack in his game of finishing off the opponent when the opportunity came.
We were, I knew, coming to the end of our games together because Morris Dunkirk was becoming a friend. At pool I didn’t know how to compensate for that. I couldn’t make adjustments in my play, friend or enemy, and I knew I would begin to feel bad about taking his money. The loss of income caused me no concern. There was always plenty of fresh meat at Packy’s and the Palladium and Kosko’s, foolish punks who would get caught too far downtown for their own good. Pickings for a pool hustler are never slim.
For the next couple of weeks, my schedule didn’t permit me to stop at McGuire’s. Two naval training ships had docked in the bay that curled north of town, and there seemed no end to young sailors in crisp dress-whites with base-exchange pool cues tucked under their arms and fat wallets folded into their beltlines. Every so often I thought of Morris Dunkirk, waging his little war and trying to resurrect his deadened instincts. I also gave serious thought to going out to California for a while. Spending too much time in one place always unnerves me.
One morning after the training ships had moved out of port, I stopped in at McGuire’s again, merely out of a craving for a pepper sandwich. I took a seat at the counter. Greta looked up from slicing green peppers and her face seemed suddenly to fill with an odd combination of grief and confusion. She bent to a shelf below the grill where some bread loaves were stacked and took out her purse, pulling a scrap of paper from it.
“Tony, I got something here I cut out of the paper I think you oughta see. Just in case the cops come to visit you out of the fact you been seen playing pool with him.”
It was a local news story dated a week earlier, a single-column story beneath a photograph of Morris Dunkirk, and a two-line headline that read LOCAL MAN, WIFE VANISH.
The article related a tale of disappearance that police, friends, and relatives were at a loss to explain. Neither Morris nor Margo Dunkirk had shown up for work at their respective jobs and their stone rambler on Grandview Street remained vacant. Margo Dunkirk’s late-model Vega station wagon was parked and locked in the double garage, but Dunkirk’s four-year-old light-green sedan was missing from its accustomed spot next to the Vega.
“They’ve been murdered, that’s what,” said Greta in a voice filled with foreboding. “The police will find the two of them dead in that other car someplace, shot to death or worse.”
To calm her, I told her things less heinous were possible and that she shouldn’t leap to hasty conclusions. I handed back the clipping and ordered a sandwich and a cream soda. Greta turned back to the grill.
It was then that he came into McGuire’s, all wild-eyed and unshaven, his pool cue under his arm. He wore tinted glasses and a dark moustache was gaining good growth on his upper lip.
He slipped onto the stool next to me and ordered a Heineken. Greta didn’t recognize him.
When she served him and left, I said to Dunkirk, “Do you know the police are looking for you? Have you seen the article in the paper?”
“Seen it.” There was a new forcefulness to his tone, a recklessness. But he didn’t appear drunk or crazy.
“Where have you been, Morris?”
“Here, there, and everywhere. On vacation. I’ve been playing poker, shooting pool, keeping company with midnight women. I spent two days in Las Vegas — just bought a plane ticket and climbed aboard! I played blackjack, saw some shows. That Buddy Hackett can really make me laugh, you know?”
And then Dunkirk was up and out of his stool, heading for the pool tables, and I followed him. He put his cue together with lightning speed, throwing its cloth covering aside with the dash of a medieval warrior hurling down a gauntlet. He took some bills from his wallet and slapped them down on the apron of the table, then racked the balls, chalked his stick, and pulled a quarter from his pocket.
“Call it for break.”
“Heads,” I said, still flabbergasted at his manner.
The coin fell tails. “We’ll play YMCA to sixty points, two bucks a point,” Dunkirk announced and then broke the rack of balls viciously, sending them scattering like fifteen beads of water in a hot frying pan. The five-ball fell. He ran six more to bring him to a tricky cross-corner on the fourteen-ball for a 61-point total. He chalked once, took a reading on the shot, stepped up to it, and calmly put it down.
“That’s $122, Tony. Rack ’em and let’s play this damn game!”
He had the instinct now; at long last and a little late in life, but he had it. Morris Dunkirk was haunted no longer. Now, he was only hunted, even as he was hunting me. And as we continued to play, I pondered the proper time to ask Morris Dunkirk where he had buried his wife.
Inspector Saito’s Small Satori
by Seiko Legru
Inspector Saito felt a bit better when the constable had switched off the Datsun’s siren, but just a trifle better for his headache throbbed on. Once more he felt sorry about having visited the Willow Quarter the night before, and about the sixth jug of sake. He should have remembered his limit was five jugs. But it had been a good bar and there had been good people in the bar. And the difference between six jugs and five jugs is only one jug, one small jug. But the headache, which had now lasted nearly sixteen hours, showed no sign of abating.
He forced himself to walk over to the uniformed sergeant, a middle-aged man in a crisp green uniform waiting under the large ornamental gate. The sergeant bowed. Saito bowed back.
“In that direction, sir, in the alley next to the temple.”
Saito grunted. There was a corpse in the alley, a female corpse — a
Saito’s foot stumbled over a pine root that twisted over the gravel of the path. He had to swing out his arms and then sidestep to regain his balance. He was dancing quite gracefully for a moment, but the effort exhausted him and he stopped and looked around. Daidharmaji, Temple of the Great Teaching. A gong sounded in the center of the compound and its singing metal clang filled the quiet path and was caught and held by the eight-foot-thick mud-and-plaster walls shielding the temples and their peaceful gardens.
Saito’s brain cleared and he could think for a few seconds. The Great Teaching. He remembered that these temples had but one purpose: the teaching of the truth to priests, monks, and laymen. Right now monks were sitting in meditation after having chanted to the accompaniment of the bronze gongs of the main temple. In their minds insight was supposed to develop and this insight would, in time and after much effort, rise to the surface of their beings like bubbles, or flashes of light. Enlightenment, manifested in sudden outbursts of what the teachers called
He smiled unhappily. Satori indeed. He recollected what he knew about the term. Insight has to do with detachment, with the breaking of the shell in which ego hides and which it uses as a defense to hold onto its identity — to a name, to possessions, to having and being. Satori cracks the shell and explodes into freedom. By becoming less, one gains. The experience is said to be a release and leads to laughter. Monks who, through their daily discipline and meditation, manage to touch reality usually laugh or, at least, smile.
Saito sighed. All very interesting on some lofty level. Not his level, however. He was an ordinary dim-witted man, muddling about. He was muddling about now, and the sergeant was waiting, a few steps ahead. Saito nodded and limped forward.
“Did you hurt yourself, sir?”
“Just a little. I didn’t see the root.”
“It’s a bad root, sir, but it can’t be removed, it belongs to that great pine over there, a very old tree, a holy tree.”
Saito followed until the sergeant stopped and began to gesture. They had come to a narrow path with some shrubbery on each side, backed by temple walls.
The sergeant pointed and stepped back. Two uniformed constables were guarding two well-pruned cherry trees.
“In there?”
“Yes sir. Another few yards, under a bush. We haven’t touched the corpse, sir.”
Saito walked on, protecting his face with an arm that felt as if it was made out of hard plastic. He didn’t want a branch to snap against his head. One little blow and his skull would break.
He sat on his haunches and studied the corpse. It was a woman, still young, perhaps in her late twenties. She had long blonde hair and was dressed in white cotton trousers and a white jacket buttoned up to the neck, Chinese Communist style. A red scarf had been tucked into the jacket’s collar. Its color matched the stains on the jacket. Saito produced a small flashlight and shone it on her face. It was the sort of face seen on models in expensive Western-style fashion magazines — beautiful, but cold, quite devoid of expression. Cool, impersonal, and dead. He studied the slack painted mouth. Very dead.
The sergeant was hissing respectfully just behind Saito’s head. The inspector straightened up. “Yes, Sergeant. Please tell me all you know.”
The sergeant checked his watch. “Ten fifteen p.m. now, sir. Young Tanaka reported the death at nine fifty-four. Young Tanaka lives nearby and he goes to drawing classes in the temple at the end of this alley on the left. He said he was going home and saw something white in the bushes. He investigated, saw the dead person, and came to tell us at the station.”
“Person?”
“Yes, sir. He told us he had found a dead person.”
“But this is a woman.”
“Yes, sir. I came here with him, ran back and told my constables where the corpse was and ordered them to guard it, then I telephoned Headquarters.”
Saito bent down and straightened up again, painfully. “The blood seems fresh. Sergeant. I hope the doctor is on his way. Do you know the lady?”
“Yes, sir. She studied meditation in the temple at the end of the alley, on the right, opposite the temple where young Tanaka learns how to draw. She is an American. Her name is Miss Davis and she stayed at the Kyoto Hotel. She came here most evenings, walked through this alley on her way in and out of the compound, and hailed a taxi from the main gate, opposite our station.”
“Ah. And the priest who teaches her meditation?”
“The Reverend Ohno. He has several
“Nine o’clock,” Saito said, “and then they go home?”
“Yes, sir. But the others — there are two elderly ladies and a gentleman, also old — walk another way. They take a taxi from the west gate. They don’t live in such an expensive hotel as the Kyoto Hotel. Miss Davis always walked by herself. It’s only a short distance to the main gate and the compound is reputed to be safe.”
Saito glanced down at the sprawling corpse. “Yes. Very safe. That’s a knife wound, Sergeant. Do you know of anybody walking around here at night, anybody who carries a knife?”
At least two sirens tore at the quiet cool evening and Saito’s hands came up and rubbed his temples. The sirens increased in volume and stopped. The sergeant barked at one of the constables and the young man saluted and jumped away.
“Anybody with a knife, Sergeant?”
The sergeant bowed and looked sad. “Yes, sir. There are street robbers, it is true. The compound is not safe any more. It used to be, and Miss Davis believed it to be. But...”
“But?”
“But there are young men, young men in tight trousers and leather jackets. They robbed an old man last week. The victim described the young men and I found the suspects and confronted them with the old man. He recognized the robbers but the suspects went free. There was only one witness, sir. To charge a suspect I need two witnesses.”
“Were these robbers around tonight?”
“Probably, sir. When they aren’t drinking or smoking the drug they roam about. They live close by. This is their territory. I will have them brought in for questioning.”
“Good. And what about young Tanaka, where is he now?”
“At home, sir. I know his parents. I can call him to the station.”
“Is he a good boy?”
The sergeant smiled his apology.
“Is he?”
“No, sir, and yes. We arrested him last year, and the year before. He is still young — sixteen years old. Indecent exposure, sir. But he is much better now. The priest who teaches him drawing says he has been behaving very well lately.”
The constable had come back, leading a small party of men in dark suits, carrying suitcases. The men bowed at Saito and Saito returned the greeting, adjusting the depth, or lack of depth, of each bow to the colleague he was facing. The doctor grunted and asked for light. Several powerful torches lit up the grisly scene. A camera began to click. A light fed by a heavy battery was set up on a tripod.
Saito touched the sergeant’s sleeve and they stepped back together. “Where is the hotel where these other Westerners stay?”
“The old
Saito nodded. “I will go there now. And then I will come back to the station. Later on I will speak with the Reverend Ohno. Bring the young men and the boy Tanaka to the station so I can question them. Your information has been very clear. Thank you, Sergeant.”
The sergeant bowed twice, deeply.
“I have served in this neighborhood for many years now, sir. I try to know what goes on.”
“Yes,” Saito said and closed his eyes. The sergeant had spoken loudly and he had a high voice.
“I see,” the old gentleman in the bathrobe said. He had knelt down on the tatami-covered floor of the hotel’s reception room and seemed quite at ease on the thick straw mat. Saito sat opposite the old gentleman, with the two elderly ladies on his right in low cane chairs. They were both dressed in kimonos printed with flowers. They weren’t the right sort of kimonos for old ladies to wear. Flower patterns are reserved for young girls, preferably attractive girls.
“My name is McGraw,” the old gentleman said, “and my friends here are called Miss Cunningham and Mrs. Ingram. They are spending a year in Japan and I have lived here for several years now. We are studying with the good priests of Daidharmaji.”
Saito acknowledged McGraw’s opening by bowing briefly.
Miss Cunningham coughed and made her thin body lean forward.
“Are you a follower of the way too, Inspector?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Do you meditate?”
“No, Miss Cunningham, I do not practice. My family belongs to a temple in another part of the city. I go there with my parents on special days and the priests visit our home. That is all.”
“What a pity,” said Mrs. Ingram. “Meditation is such a marvelous exercise. It has done wonders for us. But you are very busy, of course. Perhaps later, when you retire?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ingram.” He felt proud that he could remember the difficult names and that he was speaking English. He had studied English because he had wanted to be a police officer in Tokyo. There were many foreigners in the capital and English-speaking police detectives were rapidly promoted. But so far he had been confined within the limits of his home city, Kyoto, the city of temples.
He cleared his throat and addressed himself to McGraw. “Please, sir, what do you know about Miss Davis?”
McGraw’s heavy-lidded pale-blue eyes rested on the neat impassive form of the inspector.
“May I ask, Saito-san, what sort of trouble Miss Davis is into?”
“She is dead.”
While the two ladies shrieked, McGraw’s eyes didn’t change. They remained gentle and precise. “I see. And how did she die?”
“We are not sure yet. I would think she had been knifed.”
The two ladies shrieked again, much louder. Saito closed his eyes with desperate determination.
When he left the small hotel a little while later Saito carried some information. Miss Davis had spent only two months in Japan. She was rich. Her father manufactured most of the shoe polish used in the United States. She could have lived a life of leisure, but she had not; she had been very diligent, never missing an evening’s meditation at the priest Ohno’s temple. She had managed to master the full lotus position, wherein both legs are crossed and the feet rest upside down on the opposite thighs. She had been in pain but she had never moved during the half-hour periods in which the two-hour sessions were divided. She had been very good indeed.
McGraw was most positive about the young woman’s efforts. He himself, Miss Cunningham, and Mrs. Ingram couldn’t be compared to Miss Davis. The three older students had some experience in the discipline, but even they still moved when the pain became too severe and they still fell asleep sometimes when they happened not to be in pain and Ohno-san often had to shout at them to make them wake up. Miss Davis never fell asleep. She had been an ideal student, yes, absolutely.
But McGraw knew little about Miss Davis’s personal life. He didn’t know how she spent her days. He had asked her to lunch once and she had accepted the invitation but never returned it. They had conversed politely but nothing of consequence. All he had learned was that she had lived in New York, held a degree in philosophy, and had experimented with drugs.
And tonight? Had he noticed anything in particular?
No. It had been an evening like the other evenings. They had sat together in Ohno’s magnificent temple room. When the two hours were up and the sound of Ohno’s heavy bell floated away toward the garden, they had bowed and left. McGraw had walked Miss Cunningham and Mrs. Ingram home and Miss Davis had left by herself, as usual.
Saito sat in the back of the small Datsun and asked the young constable to drive slowly. When he spied a bar, Saito asked him to stop. He got out and drank two glasses of grape juice and one glass of orange juice and swallowed two aspirin provided by the attractive hostess, who snuggled against his shoulder and smiled invitingly. But Saito thanked her for the aspirin and hurried back to the car.
The Datsun stopped under a blue sign with the neat characters that make up the imported word “police.” Saito marched into the station. The sergeant pointed to a door in the rear and led the way. Saito sat at the desk. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes. After a phone call.”
The doctor’s hoarse voice described what Saito wanted to know. “Yes, she died of a knife wound. A downward thrust, with considerable force. The blade hit a rib but pushed on and reached the heart. Death must have been almost immediate. The knife’s blade was quite long, at least three-and-a-half inches. I can’t say how wide for it was moved about when it was pulled free.”
“Sexual intercourse?” Saito asked.
“Not recently, no.”
“Thank you. Can you connect me with whoever went through her pockets? I noticed she had no handbag.”
Another voice greeted the inspector politely. “No, Inspector, there was no handbag, but the lady carried her things in the side pockets of her jacket. We found a wallet with some money, almost ten thousand yen, and a credit card. Also a key, cigarettes, a lighter, and a notebook — excuse me, sir, I have a list here. Yes, that’s right, and a lipstick. That was all, sir.”
“What’s in the notebook?”
“Names and phone numbers.”
“Japanese?”
“No, sir, American names. And the phone numbers begin with 212, 516, and 914.”
Saito nodded at the telephone. “New York area codes. I have been there once. Very good, thank you.”
The sergeant was waiting at the door and led Saito to a small room where two surly young men sat slumped on a wooden bench in the back. A chair had been placed opposite the bench. The sergeant closed the door and leaned against it. “The fellow on the left is called Yoshida, and the other one is Kato.”
Saito was thirsty again and wondered whether he should ask the sergeant for a pot of green tea but instead he plunged right in. “O.K., you two, where were you tonight? You first — Kato, is it?”
The two young men were hard to tell apart in their identical trousers, jackets, and shirts. They even wore the same hairstyle, very short on top, very long on the sides.
“We were around.”
“Where were you between nine and ten?”
They looked at each other and shrugged. “Around.”
“That’s bad,” Saito said cheerfully. “Real bad. If no one saw you between nine and ten, you are in trouble. You may have to spend the night here, and many other nights besides. This is a nasty place, eh, Sergeant?”
Yes, sir.
“Small cells, bad food, nothing to smoke. Do you fellows smoke?”
They nodded.
“You’ll have to give it up for a while.” He took out a cigarette. “But I’ll smoke for you. Did you go through their pockets, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any knives?”
The sergeant stepped out of the room and came back carrying two yellow plastic trays, neatly labeled. There was a pack of cigarettes in each tray, plus a dirty handkerchief, a wallet, and a long knife sheathed in leather.
“Good. Please have one of your men have the knives checked for blood.”
“Blood?” the young man called Yoshida asked. “What blood?”
“A lady’s blood, a
Kato answered, “An old lady or a young lady?”
“A young lady with long blonde hair, wearing white clothes.”
“Not tonight, but we know her. She came every evening to Ohno-san’s temple. She was a holy woman.” He sniggered and nudged his friend.
Saito jumped up, leaped across the room, and grabbed Kato by the shoulders, shaking him vigorously. “What do you mean, you punk! What do you mean?” He pushed Kato back on the bench and stood over him, one hand balled up.
“Nothing.”
“You meant something. Tell me, or...” He could feel the artificial rage turning into real rage. He would have to watch himself.
“I just mean that maybe the lady liked the priest. Me and Yoshida saw them together in the garden one afternoon last week, in the temple’s garden.”
“What were they doing?”
“Laughing, talking.”
“That’s all?”
“They weren’t kissing,” Yoshida said gruffly, “just enjoying a good conversation.”
Saito turned to the sergeant, who had returned. “Would you ask somebody to make me a pot of tea, Sergeant? And bring a chopstick, just one.”
The sergeant raised his eyebrows but bowed and left the room. He came back with the chopstick.
“Here,” Saito said. “You, Kato. You are a knife fighter, eh? Here is a knife. Now attack me.”
Kato hesitated and Saito waited. Kato got up and took the chopstick.
“Come on, attack me. Here I am, and you hold a knife. Show me that you can handle it.”
Kato got up and the sergeant’s hand dropped down and touched the revolver on his belt. The atmosphere in the room became tense. Kato spread his legs and hefted the chopstick. Saito waited, motionless. Then Kato yelled loudly and jumped. The hand holding the chopstick shot up. But Saito was no longer there — he had fallen sideways and his foot was against Kato’s shin. Kato fell too. The chopstick broke on the floor. Saito helped the young man back on his feet. “Fine. Sergeant, may we have another chopstick?”
Yoshida’s attack was more artful and took more time. He approached Saito, holding the chopstick low, but seemed to change his mind and feinted at the sergeant. The sergeant pulled his gun as the chopstick went for Saito’s stomach, but Saito’s arm effectively blocked it with a blow to Yoshida’s arm, knocking it aside.
A constable brought a pot of tea. Saito poured himself a steaming cup of tea and sat sipping it, eyeing his opponents. Kato was rubbing his shin and Yoshida was massaging his wrist. “Did I hurt you?”
Both shook their heads and tried to smile.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you. But carrying knives with blades longer than three inches is illegal. The sergeant will charge you and you will be kept here for the night. Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow. If you want to see me you can tell the sergeant. Good night.”
He got up and went outside, beckoning the sergeant to follow him. “Now the other one, Tanaka, the boy who found the corpse.”
“He is waiting in the other room, sir.”
Saito smiled when he saw the boy. Young Tanaka was a good-looking young man, with a childish open face but wide shoulders and narrow hips. He wore his school uniform, and his cap was on the floor under his chair. He got up when Saito entered and he bowed.
“Thank you for reporting to us tonight, Tanaka-san,” Saito said, “that was very good of you. I am sorry to have you called in so late, but we have to work quickly. Did you know the
“Yes, sir, I have seen her many times. She studied at Ohno-san’s temple. But I never spoke to her. And I didn’t know the corpse was the
“So that’s why you said you saw a
“Yes, sir. I just saw the legs and a hand.”
Saito tried to remember the corpse. There had been no polish on the nails, no colored polish anyway. He lowered his voice. “Now tell me, Tanaka-san, tell me and be honest. I know you have been in trouble with the police before. You know what I am referring to, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. But I don’t do that any more. I used to, but that has gone.”
“What has gone?”
“The need to do that, sir.”
“You are sure, are you? You were in the alley, and the lady was in the alley. You were facing her and she was coming closer...”
“No, sir. The body was in the bushes.”
Saito turned to the sergeant. “May I have a chopstick, Sergeant?”
When the sergeant returned with the chopstick Saito gave it to the boy. “Imagine this is a knife. Can you do that?”
The boy held the chopstick. “Yes, sir. It is a knife.”
“And I am your enemy. I am a burglar sneaking into your room. I am going to attack you and you must kill me. Stick the knife into me. It is very important. Please do it for me.”
“Like this, sir?”
The boy raised his arm high, pointing the chopstick at Saito’s chest.
“Yes, you are very angry, very frightened. All you know is that you have to kill me.”
The chopstick hit Saito’s chest with force and broke.
“Thank you. You can go home now. Sleep well...”
When Saito left the police station, his driver came to attention and opened the rear door. The inspector shook his head. “No. I am going into the temple compound. I may be a while. You can wait in the station if you like. The tea isn’t bad.”
He walked until he found Ohno’s temple and stopped and looked about. He could feel the quietness of hundreds of years of solitude, of silent effort. The aspirin had dulled his headache, and his thoughts connected more easily.
The gate of the temple hadn’t been locked and he walked through it.
“Good evening.” The voice came from the shadows of the building.
“Good evening. My name is Saito. I am a police inspector. I have come to see the priest Ohno.”
“I am Ohno. Walk up the steps and come and sit next to me.”
Saito took off his shoes and walked across the polished boards of the porch. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could see the shape of a man sitting upright with his legs folded. Saito bowed and a cushion slid toward him. He took the cushion and sat down.
“Do you know that Miss Davis died tonight?”
“I heard.”
“Who told you?”
“The old woman who cleans the temple. She heard a commotion in the alley and found out what had happened.”
“The death of the
He could see the priest’s face now. Ohno was still a young man — thirty years old perhaps, or a little older. The priest wore a simple brown robe. The faint light of a half moon reflected on his shaven skull.
“Who did you arrest?”
“Two young toughs, Yoshida and Kato. They have robbed in the Daidharmaji compound before but nothing could be proved. They couldn’t explain their movements at the time of Miss Davis’s death. They both carried knives. We are also holding a boy called Tanaka, who reported the crime. Excuse me, do you have a telephone?”
Ohno got to his feet and led his guest inside the temple. Saito dialed. A man in the laboratory answered.
“The knives? They both fit the wound but so would a million other knives. And they are both clean, no traces of blood.”
“Whoever did it could have cleaned the knife afterward.”
“He could. If he did, he did a good job.”
“Thank you.”
The priest invited Saito into his study and an old woman made them tea. Saito sipped slowly, enjoying the rich bitter taste.
“Very good tea.”
“A present from Mrs. Ingram. I couldn’t afford it myself.”
“You have only foreign disciples?”
“Yes. When
“I see. Did you get to know Miss Davis well?”
“A little. She was a dedicated woman, very eager to learn.”
“Did she learn anything?”
Ohno smiled. “There is nothing to learn. There is only to unlearn.”
Saito shook his head.
“You don’t agree?”
“I have no wisdom,” Saito said. “I am a policeman; my level of investigation is shallow. I have small questions and need small answers. Yoshida and Kato weren’t helpful. The boy Tanaka tried, but he couldn’t tell me much. Mr. McGraw and the old ladies who study with you tried to clarify my confusion. But I am still confused and now I have come to see you.”
“I know the two young men, Yoshida and Kato,” Ohno said. “I know their parents too — they often come to these temples. The boys have lost their way, but only for the time being. They will find the way again. They may have robbed people but they have never killed anyone. They watch movies and try to imitate images of what they think is admirable.”
“In the movies many images get killed. Yoshida and Kato carry knives, killing knives with slits in the sides so that the blood will drain easily.”
“They didn’t kill tonight.”
“And the boy Tanaka, do you know him too?”
“Very well. When his mind was sick, his parents came to see me. They live close by and they often bring gifts to this temple. They knew the priest who lived here before and now they come and visit me. The boy was mad, they said, but I didn’t think so. The boy came too sometimes — he liked to help me in the garden. He placed the rocks and we planted moss.”
“He would show himself when he met women, right here, in this holy compound.”
“I know.”
“You don’t think that is a bad thing to do?”
“It is embarrassing, for the women and for the boy himself. But he had a need to reveal himself to that which he loved. I wanted to help him but I didn’t know what to do and I spoke to the old priest in the temple next door. Young Tanaka likes to paint and draw, and the old priest is an accomplished artist. So we agreed that he would try to lead Tanaka away from his compulsion. Since then the boy’s trouble has faded away. There have been no more complaints.”
Saito got up. He wanted to say something noncommittal before he left. He looked around and saw several cameras on a shelf and another on the floor. “Do you like photography, Ohno-san?”
“Yes, it is my hobby.” The priest picked up the camera. “I use a new method now. I make instant photographs and if I succeed in obtaining a well-balanced picture I try again with a conventional camera that can be adjusted to a fine degree of perception. One day when you have time you should come and see some of my photographs — if you are interested, that is.”
“I would very much like to. Thank you.”
Saito looked at his watch. It was past one o’clock but he might as well go on. He was very close now, but there were still important questions.
The temple next door was dark and the gate had been locked, but he found a side door and made his way into the courtyard, using his flashlight. He took off his shoes and climbed the steps and knocked on the door of the main building. Within seconds a light came on inside and shuffling steps approached. The priest was old and bent — and sleepy.
“Yes?”
Saito showed his identification. “Inspector Saito, Criminal Investigation Department. I am sorry, sir, but I have to bother you for a few minutes. May I come in?”
“Of course. I heard about the lady’s death. Most regrettable. Please come in, Inspector-san.”
In view of the late hour, Saito decided that it would be impolite to be polite. He came to the point.
“You are teaching a boy called Tanaka?”
“That is correct.”
“He draws and paints. Please tell me what his favorite subjects are.”
“Women. He only draws women. I don’t allow him to paint yet. He sketches. I showed him copies of famous paintings and he seemed most interested in portraits of Kwannon, the goddess of compassion. He has been drawing her for months now and doesn’t tire.”
Saito smiled. “Tanaka-san is in love with the goddess?”
The priest looked serious. “Very much so. And that is good for the time being. I want him to continue, to approach perfection. Later he will see that her real shape is truly perfect and then perhaps he will meet and know her. But first he must do this. He is talented. I am grateful he was brought to me.”
“May I see the drawings?”
“Surely. Follow me, please.”
The sketches were all in the same vein, although the postures and moods of the divine model were different. The boy clearly had only one type of woman in mind, and the woman was Japanese, with a long narrow face, thick black hair, a small nose, and enormous slanting eyes.
“Thank you.”
“Not at all.”
“One last question, sir. Do you know Ohno-san well?”
The old priest nodded.
“Does Ohno-san engage in any of the martial sports? Judo? Sword fighting? Bowshooting, perhaps?”
The old priest tittered. “Oh, no. Ohno-san likes to fuss in his garden, to make photographs, and to meditate, in that order. He once came to help me chop some wood for my bathhouse. He broke two axe handles in one hour. I had no more axes so we had tea instead. No, Ohno-san is, shall we say, a little clumsy?”
Nearly five minutes passed before Saito could bring himself to walk through Ohno’s gate again. He found the priest where he had found him before, on the porch. Saito didn’t say anything but sat down.
“Yes?”
“I am sorry, I have come to arrest you.”
Ohno didn’t reply. Saito sat quietly.
Several minutes passed.
“Please come with me, Ohno-san.”
The priest turned and faced the inspector. “No. I will have to ask you a favor. Let me go inside and please wait half an hour. I will leave a confession and you can close your case.”
Saito smiled, but the smile was neither positive nor negative. It was very quiet on the porch.
Ohno cleared his throat. “Would you mind explaining why you chose me?”
“Because you killed her. She was killed by an amateur, by someone who doesn’t know how to handle a knife. A knife fighter will hold his weapon low and thrust upward, so that the knife pierces the soft skin of the belly and so its point will travel upward, behind the ribs. To stab downward is silly — the ribs protect the heart. Much unnecessary force is needed. And the attacker who holds his knife high has no defense, his own body is left open.”
“Many people walk through this compound. Most of them do not know how to handle a knife.”
“That is not true. There are very few people about after nine o’clock. Even when we found the dead woman a crowd didn’t gather. And whoever killed Miss Davis either hated her or was frightened of her. To hate or to fear takes time. The feeling isn’t born overnight. Miss Davis only spent a few months in Japan and kept herself apart. The only person she involved herself with was you. You were her teacher. She came here every night. But she also came during the day. Did you sleep with her, Ohno-san?”
The priest’s head jerked forward briefly. “I did.”
“She seduced you?”
The head jerked again.
“She was in love with you?”
Ohno’s even white teeth sparkled briefly in the soft moonlight.
“No. To love means to be prepared to give. She wanted to have. And she wanted me to give to her. The way has many secrets, many powers. Our training, when practiced properly, is complete. It is also slow, unbearably slow. Miss Davis comes from a country that believes in quick results. Americans are capable of great effort, but they want rewards. She suspected that I knew something and she wanted what I knew.”
“You were teaching her meditation. You were giving.”
“Yes. But meditation takes forever, or so she began to believe. She wanted to be initiated, to be given powers. I told her my rank was too low, my development too minute. Only a true teacher can pass a student. This temple is a little school for beginners, for toddlers. The abbot knows I have disciples and he watches them. He will take over when he feels that the disciples are ready. Mr. McGraw is sometimes allowed to see the abbot. He has learned much — he has learned to be modest. Miss Davis had learned to be the opposite.”
“She tried to force you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I am a weak man, a silly man. She began to visit me during the day. I have lived in America and I am very proud of my experience with foreigners. We flirted. Then we slept together.”
“In the room where we were earlier on tonight?”
“Yes.”
“The room where you have your cameras?”
“Yes. The camera can be set so that it goes off after several seconds. I showed her how. She laughed and set it and pressed herself against me. We had no clothes on. The camera clicked. She took the photograph with her. I didn’t understand what she meant to do. I thought it was a joke.”
“She threatened to show the photograph to the abbot?”
“Yes. Today. She came to see me this morning. She said she was prepared to continue her meditation practice for another year, but she wanted something right now. Some power. That was all she wanted — not insight, just power. She said I knew about the secret initiations and that I must make her break through. I told her we have no secret initiations. I told her that perhaps in Tibet they do, but not here.”
“She planned to visit the abbot tonight?”
“Tomorrow. I had to stop her.”
Saito waited. “And the abbot, what would he have done?”
“He would have sent me away. And rightly so, for I have failed. I am only a low-ranking priest. My training has hardly begun. That I am allowed to teach meditation to beginners is a great honor. I am not worthy of the honor.”
Ohno’s voice dropped and Saito had to strain his ears to hear the priest’s words through the chirping of the cicadas.
“Tonight,” Ohno said, “I watched her walk through the gate. I ran through the garden and climbed the wall so that I would be waiting for her when she turned the corner of the temple wall and the alley. I had taken a knife from the kitchen. I put myself in her way and showed her the knife. I asked her to give me the photograph. She laughed and tried to push me aside. I became very angry. I don’t think I intended to kill her, I only meant to threaten. But her laugh infuriated me.”
“Do you have the photograph?”
“Yes. I don’t remember how I got it. I must have taken it from the pocket of her jacket.”
“And now you plan to kill yourself,” Saito said pleasantly.
“Yes.”
“But how can you continue your training when you are dead? Isn’t this life supposed to be the ideal training ground and isn’t whatever comes afterward a period of rest in which nothing can be achieved? You may have to wait a long time before you are given another chance. Is this not so?”
The dark shape next to Saito moved. “Yes.”
“I don’t know anything,” Saito said. “But priests sometimes come to our house to burn incense in front of the family altar and to chant the holy sermons. I have listened. Isn’t that what they say? What you say?”
“Yes.”
“And if you come with me, if you allow yourself to be arrested and to face the court and be convicted and spend time in jail, doesn’t that mean that your training will continue? That you can go on with your practice? And won’t the abbot, who is a master and your teacher, come and visit you or send messages, and help you along?”
“Yes.”
“And isn’t it true that we all fail? And that failure is never definite? That we can always correct our situation, no matter how bad it seems to be?”
“Yes.”
Saito thought he had said enough. He was tired of listening to his own voice. He brought out a cigarette and lit it. Ohno’s hand reached out and Saito gave him the cigarette and lit another. They smoked together. The two stubs left the porch at the same moment and sparked away as they hit the wet moss of the garden.
They walked to the gate slowly, two men strolling through the peaceful night.
“I was worried when you said you suspected Tanaka,” Ohno said. “He is a nice boy.”
“Yes,” Saito said. “He was the most likely suspect, but something didn’t fit. Indecent exposure is an act of surrender, not of aggression. I would have arrested him if he had drawn the face or body of Miss Davis. But his fantasies are centered on the beauty of our own women.
I checked just now at your neighbor’s temple. Miss Davis was beautiful, but not to young Tanaka. I don’t think she was even female in his eyes.”
“She was in mine.”
Saito didn’t answer. They had passed through the main gate and reached the car. Saito leaned inside and touched the horn. The driver appeared immediately from the station.
“Headquarters, please. This venerable priest is coming with us.”
“Sir.” The driver bowed to Ohno. Ohno bowed back.
Saito felt pleased. He had solved the case quickly, discreetly. This could be the credit that would get him transferred to the capital. He grinned but the grin froze halfway. He tried to analyze his state of mind but he was bewildered. The more he probed, the emptier his mind seemed.
He felt the priest’s presence and then his own hand reached out and touched the wide sleeve of Ohno’s robe.
“Yes,” Ohno said, “you were right, Inspector-san. It was silly of me to consider my shame and to respond to that shame. I am what I am and I will continue from the point where I find myself. The point happens to be bad, that is all. There will be good points later on, and they won’t matter so much either.
Saito grinned. The priest’s words had helped to make the grin break through, the priest’s words and the strange power of quietness he had felt seeping into his being while he wandered among the temples of Daidharmaji. And he realized that he didn’t care about his successful investigation or about the forthcoming praise of his superiors or about the possibility of a transfer to the capital. The priest’s shame was as much of an illusion as his own fame. He felt much relieved, lightheaded. The grin spread over his face. “
“So...” Ohno said.
“So nothing!” Saito replied.
The car took a sharp turn and they fell into each other’s arms. They laughed together while the embrace lasted.
At Headquarters, the priest was taken to a cell and Saito accompanied him. He waited while the constable locked the heavy door. Ohno bowed, Saito bowed. They straightened up and studied each other’s smile through the bars of the cell door.
“You understood something, didn’t you, Inspector-san?”
“Oh, yes,” Saito said softly. “Yes, I think I did.”
“Oh, yes,” Ohno whispered. “And it had nothing to do with you or me or even poor Miss Davis.”
“No, it didn’t.” Saito nodded and gazed at Ohno before turning and following the constable out of the cell block. He felt very tired, so tired that he was hallucinating. He wasn’t walking through a dimly lit concrete corridor but floating in a lake of light. The light began to fade as he approached his house and he found that he was shaking his head and talking to himself.