Copyrights for A Century of Great Suspense Stories:

At my book signings and at mystery conference seminars, I’m frequently approached by fans who ask for advice in getting started in the business of writing suspense fiction. Many times these folks tell me that their intention is to start along this career path by taking up short stories and, once they’ve learned that medium, graduating to novels.

I have to break the news to them that this would be like mastering Japanese to help them learn Russian. Yes, both short stories and novels are literary forms that convey a fictional story to readers, but that’s about the end of the similarity. The skills used in writing a novel are very different from those required to write a short story. Crafting a story obviously takes less time than writing a novel but I’d venture to say that, word for word, the short story is a far more ambitious undertaking. Nuance and suggestion are the keys to successful stories; there is no room for needless atmosphere or characterization or for overwrought exposition. As the adage goes: I didn’t have much time, so I wrote it long.

The responses a short-story writer seeks to elicit are different from a novelist’s. Readers of short fiction have less opportunity to learn to love, or hate, the characters and to form attachments to the locale, so the emotional force in short stories derives from plotting. Twists and surprises are the readers’ payoff and the best short stories are those that deliver a one-two punch. I find that in my novels my protagonists, while possibly flawed, are at their core decent, likable individuals who strive mightily against truly nasty evildoers. They more or less prevail. In the stories I write, on the other hand, that ain’t necessarily so; my apparent heroes often emerge at the end of the story as heinous villains, while the innocent suffer like Job.

Short stories are, in other words, a unique literary form — and one that has remained remarkably consistent throughout this century. Slang, syntax, and fashion may have changed, but — adjusted for inflation, so to speak — the structure and dynamics of stories written in the early days of the century are virtually the same as those written today, as the selections in this volume attest.

It was an enviable job to compile these stories, though culling a handful from the thousands written over the past one hundred years and daring to label those the best was, well, an arduous task. Making the job even more difficult is the key defining word in the title: suspense. While all crime fiction — from whodunits to procedurals to cozies to hard-boiled detective stories — is about conflict and therefore should be suspenseful, I’ve focused on stories whose purpose is to unnerve readers and speed them to the end of the tale, where a twist or turn awaits, rather than to let them spend a pleasant twenty minutes or so with a favorite series character or puzzle about who a killer might be or laugh at the wry observations of a witty amateur sleuth. This has resulted in some glaring omissions, but I find comfort in the fact that the authors not represented here appear voluminously in other anthologies; their work is not neglected.

Apologies disposed of, let me then say what a delightful mix we have here.

While many writers of short fiction recount the exploits of public law enforcers and private detectives (here represented by Marcia Muller; Mickey Spillane; Ross Macdonald, and the mother of detective fiction, Anna Katharine Green), it is in the cobwebby attic of psychological suspense that the short story excels, and these are the tales that form the core of this anthology. Among the contributors who’ve mined this vein are Harlan Ellison, John Lutz, John D. MacDonald, Margaret Millar, Ed McBain, Sharyn McCrumb, Sara Paretsky, and James M. Cain. Some writers in the collection provide us with uncompromisingly grim stories while others take a more fanciful or ironic look at the workings of the criminal mind (Donald Westlake, Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block, and Ed Gorman).

The focus here is largely on American writers, but no collection of this sort would be complete without a sampling of the superb writers from across the Big Puddle, among them Robert Barnard, Ruth Rendell, and... we’ll take a further jump, across the Big Channel — the prolific Frenchman George Simenon.

Every practitioner approaches the craft of writing differently, and short-story authors are no exception. Some of the stories here are lush, some are austere — in the best postmodern tradition. Length varies dramatically, points of view differ — even the methodology of creation varies significantly. We have represented here perhaps the two most polar opposite of craftsmen: Stanley Ellin would slowly rework and polish each page of his stories many times before proceeding to the next. Rex Stout, on the other hand, shunned revision at all costs and his fiction would explode, virtually unedited, from his mind.

Some of the writers here are specialists in a particular genre and never deviate from that category; others are comfortable with other genres. Contributor Fredric Brown wrote science fiction in addition to suspense. Stephen King is, of course, the master of the horror genre (not to mention any other category he might wish to write in). Robert Barnard, another of the British delegation here, is a well-respected critic and writer of nonfiction.

No anthology compiling suspense in the 1900s would be complete without a few legal thrillers (not as new a genre as youngsters who’ve recently discovered John Grisham would think — consider Bleak House and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy). Here we have stories by masters Steve Martini; Lisa Scottoline; Jeremiah Healy; and Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of the most popular fictional lawyer of all time — Perry Mason.

The settings of these stories vary widely and several I’ve included because, in addition to being excellent tales, locale is virtually another character: the Southwest (Tony Hillerman), the Carolinas (Michael Malone), the California/Nevada woods (Bill Pronzini), and Papua New Guinea (Janwillem van de Wetering).

A final note: Special mention should be made of several of our contributors, who might be called the linchpins of short suspense fiction in the past one hundred years: the cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay, known to the world as Ellery Queen, critic and reviewer Anthony Boucher, and Edward D. Hoch, who is perhaps the only person in the country whose full-time career has been writing short stories.

Enough of my rambling. Now it’s time to do your part: Make a cup of tea or pour a glass of whisky, sit yourself down comfortably in your favorite chair, and enjoy the highlights of a hundred years of writing by men and women who love nothing more than to take their readers on a brief, but delightful, literary roller coaster ride.

“Among the writers I admire most are Christie, Allingham, Rendell and Margaret Millar,” Robert Barnard once noted. Perhaps this is why his own voice is that of a “pure” detective writer. Whatever else a given Barnard novel may offer (humor, keen social observation, place description that is genuinely poetic), his novels and stories always remain focused on the mystery. While one hates to speculate on which writers of our time will be read by future generations, Barnard, with his grace, intelligence, and enormous range of skills, is certainly a likely contender. Death of an Old Goat (1977), Bodies (1986), and A City of Strangers are among his many worthwhile novels, with his latest including Unholy Dying.

There had been violent storms that night, but the body did not come to the surface until they had died down and a watery summer sun sent ripples of lemon and silver across the still-disturbed surface of Derwent Water. It was first seen by a little girl, clutching a plastic beaker of orange juice, who had strayed down from the small car park, over the pebbles, to the edge of the lake.

“What’s that, Mummy?”

“What’s what, dear?”

Her mother was wandering round, drinking in the calm, the silence, the magisterial beauty, the more potent for the absence of other tourists. She was a businesswoman, and holidays by the Lakes made her question uncomfortably what she was doing with her life. She strolled down to where the water lapped onto the stones.

“There, Mummy. That.”

She looked towards the lake. A sort of bundle bobbed on the surface a hundred yards or so away. She screwed up her eyes. A sort of tweedy bundle. Greeny-brown, like an old-fashioned gentleman’s suit. As she watched she realised that she could make out, stretching out from the bundle, two lines... Legs. She put her hand firmly on her daughter’s shoulder.

“Oh, it’s just an old bundle of clothes, darling. Look, there’s Patch wanting to play. He has to stretch his legs too, you know.”

Patch barked obligingly, and the little girl trotted off to throw his ball for him. Without hurrying the woman made her way back to the car, picked up the car phone, and dialed 999.

Psycho (book and film alike) is the dividing line separating old-style suspense fiction from new-style. After Psycho, all bets were off. Suspense fiction (as opposed to the straight mystery) could and did go anywhere. The man who started all this was an unassuming, friendly and very witty writer named Robert Bloch (1917–1994), a talented professional whose other novels included such dark suspense masterpieces as The Scarf, The Kidnapper, and The Night of the Ripper. Some insist that his short stories were even better than his novels. He published several volumes of his stories during his lifetime. You never quite knew what to expect from a Bloch story. He delighted in defying expectations, often by incorporating unexpected humor in his work. Even in the grim struggle of Norman Bates, Bloch managed to work in a laugh or two. His skills as a short-story craftsman par excellence are on full display here.

When Harry’s time capsule arrived, Jill made him put it in the guest-house.

All it was, it turned out, was a big metal box with a cover that could be sealed tight and soldered so that the air couldn’t get at what was inside. Jill was really quite disappointed with it.

But then she was quite disappointed with Harry, too — Professor Harrison Cramer, B.A., B.S., M.A., Ph.D. Half the alphabet wasted on a big nothing. At those flaky faculty cocktail parties, people were always telling her, “It must be wonderful to be married to a brilliant man like your husband.” Brother, if they only knew!

It wasn’t just that Harry was 15 years older than she was. After all, look at Rex Harrison and Richard Burton and Cary Grant and Lawrence Olivier. But Harry wasn’t the movie-star type — definitely not! Not even the mad-scientist type, like Vincent Price in those crazy “campy” pictures. He was nothing — just a big nothing.

Of course, Jill got the message long before she married him. But he did have that imposing house and all that loot he’d inherited from his mother. Jill figured on making a few changes, and she actually did manage to redo the house so that it looked halfway presentable, with the help of that fagilleh interior decorator. But she couldn’t redo Harry. Maybe he needed an interior decorator to work on him, too; she certainly couldn’t change him.

And outside of what she managed to squeeze out of him for the redecorating, Jill hadn’t been able to get her hands on any of the loot, either. Harry wasn’t interested in entertaining or going out or taking cruises, and whenever she mentioned a sable jacket he mumbled something under his breath about “conspicuous consumption” — whatever that was! He didn’t like modern art or the theater, he didn’t drink or smoke — why, he didn’t even watch TV. And he wore flannel pajamas in bed. All the time.

After a couple of months Jill was ready to climb the walls. Then she began thinking about Reno, and that’s where Rick came in. Rick was her attorney — at least, that’s the way it started out to be, but Rick had other ideas. Particularly for those long afternoons when Harry was lecturing at seminars or whatever he did over there at the University.

Pretty soon Jill forgot about Reno; Rick was all for one of those quickie divorces you can get down in Mexico. He was sure he could make it stick and still see to it that she got her fifty-fifty share under the community property laws, and without any waiting. It could all be done in 24 hours, with no hassle; they’d take off together, just like eloping. Bang, you’re divorced; bang, you’re remarried; and then, bang, bang, bang—

So all Jill had to worry about was finding the right time. And even that was no problem, after Harry told her about the time capsule.

“I’m to be in full charge of the project,” he said. “Complete authority to choose what will be representative of our present culture. Quite a responsibility, my dear — but I welcome the challenge.”

“So what’s a time capsule?” Jill wanted to know.

Harry went into a long routine and she didn’t really listen, just enough to get the general idea. The thing was, Harry had to pick out all kinds of junk to be sealed up in this gizmo so that sometime — 10,000 years from now, maybe — somebody would come along and dig it up and open it and be able to tell what kind of civilization we had. Big deal! But from the way Harry went on, you’d think he’d just won the Grand Prix or something.

“We’re going to put the capsule in the foundation of the new Humanities Building,” he told her.

“What are humanities?” Jill asked, but Harry just gave her one of those Good-lord-how-can-you-be-so-stupid? looks that always seemed to start their quarrels; and they would have had a fight then and there, too, only he added something about how the dedication ceremonies for the new building would take place on May 1st, and he’d have to hurry to get everything arranged for the big day. Including writing his dedicatory address.

May 1st was all Jill needed to hear. That was on a Friday, and if Harry was going to be tied up making a speech at the dedication, it would be an A-OK time to make that little flight across the border. So she managed to call Rick and tell him and he said yeah, sure, perfect.

“It’s only ten days from now,” Jill reminded Rick. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

She didn’t know it, but it turned out she wasn’t kidding. She had more to do than she thought, because all at once Harry was interested in her. Really interested.

“You’ve got to help me,” he said that night at dinner. “I want to rely on your taste. Of course, I’ve got some choices of my own in mind, but I want you to suggest items to go into the capsule.”

At first Jill thought he was putting her on, but he really meant it. “This project is going to be honest. The usual ploy is pure exhibitionism — samples of the ‘best’ of everything, plus descriptive data which is really just a pat on the back for the status quo ante. Well, that’s not for me. I’d like to include material that’s self-explanatory, not self-congratulatory. Not art and facts — but artifacts.”

Harry lost her there, until he said, “Everything preserved will be a clue to our contemporary social attitudes. Not what we pretend to admire, but what the majority actually believes in and enjoys. And that’s where you come in, my dear. You represent the majority.”

Jill began to dig it, then. “You mean like TV and pop records?”

“Exactly. What’s that album you like so much? The one with the four hermaphrodites on the liner?”

“Who?”

“Excuse me — it’s purportedly a singing group, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you’re talking about the Poodles!” Jill went and got the album, which was called The Poodles Bark Again. The sound really turned her on, but she had always thought Harry hated it. And now he was coming on all smiles.

“Great!” he said. “This definitely goes in.”

“But—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll buy you another.” He took the album and put it on his desk. “Now, you mentioned something about television. What’s your favorite program?”

When she saw that he was really serious, she began telling him about “Anywhere, U.S.A.” What it was, it was about life in a small town, just an ordinary suburb like, but the people were great. There was this couple with the two kids, one boy and one girl, sort of an average family, you might say, only he was kind of playing around with a divorcee who ran a discothetique or whatever they call them, and she had a yen for her psychiatrist — he wasn’t really her psychiatrist, he was analyzing one of the kids, the one who had set fire to the high school gymnasium, not the girl — she was afraid her parents would find out about her affair with the vice-principal who was really an enemy agent only she didn’t know it yet, and her real boy friend, the one who had the brain operation, had a “thing” about his mother, so—

It got kind of complicated, but Harry kept asking her to tell him more, and pretty soon he was smiling and nodding. “Wonderful! We’ll have to see if we can get films of a typical week’s episodes.”

“You mean you really want something like that?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t you say this show faithfully captured the lives of American citizens today?”

She had to agree he was right. Also about some of the things he was going to put into the capsule to show the way people lived nowadays — like tranquilizers and pep pills and income tax forms and a map of the freeway-expressway-turnpike system. He had a lot of numbers, too, for Zip Code and digit dialing, and Social Security, and the ones the computers punched out on insurance and charge-account and utility bills.

But what he really wanted was ideas for more stuff, and in the next couple of days he kept leaning on her. He got hold of her souvenir from Shady Lawn Cemetery — it was a plastic walnut that opened up, called “Shady Lawn in a Nutshell.” Inside were twelve tiny color prints showing all the tourist attractions of the place, and you could mail the whole thing to your friends back home. Harry put this in the time capsule, wrapping it up in something he told her was an actuarial table on the incidence of coronary occlusion among middle-aged, middle-class males. Like heart attacks, that is.

“What’s that you’re reading?” he asked. And the next thing she knew, he had her copy of the latest Steve Slash paperback — the one where Steve is sent on this top-secret mission to keep peace in Port Said, and right after he kills these five guys with the portable flame thrower concealed in his judo belt, he’s getting ready to play beddy-bye with Yasmina, who’s really another secret agent with radioactive fingernails—

And that’s as far as she’d got when he grabbed the book. It was getting so she couldn’t keep anything out of his eager little hands.

“What’s that you’re cooking?” he wanted to know. And there went the TV dinner — frozen crêpes suzettes and all. To say nothing of the Plain Jane Instant Borscht.

“Where’s that photo you had of your brother?” It was a real nothing picture of Stud, just him wearing that beatnik beard of his and standing by his motorcycle on the day he passed his initiation into the Hell’s Angels. But Harry put that in, too. Jill didn’t think it was very nice of Harry, seeing as how he clipped it to another photo of some guys taking the Ku Klux Klan oath.

But right now the main thing was to keep Harry happy. That’s what Rick said when she clued him in on what was going on.

“Cooperate, baby,” he told her. “It’s a real kinky kick, but it keeps him out of our hair. We got plans to make, tickets to buy, packing and like that there.”

The trouble was, Jill ran out of ideas. She explained this to Rick but he just laughed.

“I’ll give you some,” he said, “and you can feed ’em to him. He’s a real way-out kid, that husband of yours — I know just what he wants.”

The funny part of it was that Rick did know. He was really kind of a brain himself, but not in a kooky way like Harry. So she listened to what he suggested and told Harry when she got home.

“How about a sample of the Theater of the Absurd?” she asked. Harry looked at her over the top of his glasses, and for a minute she thought she’d really thrown him, but then he grinned and got excited.

“Perfect!” he said. “Any suggestions?”

“Well, I was reading a review about this new play everybody’s talking about — it’s about this guy who thinks he’s having a baby so he goes to an abortionist, only I guess the abortionist is supposed to be somebody mystical or something, and it all takes place in a greenhouse—”

“Delightful!” Harry was off and running. “I’ll pick up a copy of the book. Anything else?”

Thank God that Rick had coached her. So she said what about a recording of one of those concerts where they use a “prepared” piano that makes noises like screeching brakes, or sometimes no sound at all. And Harry liked that. He also liked the idea about a sample of Pop Art — maybe a big blowup of a newspaper ad about “That Tired Feeling” or maybe “Psoriasis.”

The next day she suggested a tape of a “Happening” which was the real thing, because it took place in some private sanatorium for disturbed patients, and Harry got really enthusiastic about this idea.

And the next day she came up with that new foreign movie with the long title she couldn’t pronounce. Rick gave her the dope on it — some far-out thing by a Yugoslavian director she never heard of, about a man making a movie about a man making a movie, only you never could be quite sure, in the movie, whether the scene was supposed to be a part of the movie or the movie was a part of what was really happening, if it did happen.

Harry went for this, too. In a big way.

“You’re wonderful,” he said. “Truthfully, I never expected this of you.”

Jill just gave him her extra-special smile and went on her merry way. It wasn’t hard, because he had to go running around town trying to dig up books and films and recordings of all the stuff he had on his list. Which was just how Rick said it would be, leaving everything clear for them to shop and set up their last-minute plans.

“I won’t get our tickets until the day before we leave,” Rick told her. “We don’t want to tip off anything. The way I figure it, Harry’ll be moving the capsule over to where they’re holding the ceremonies the next morning, so you’ll get a chance to pack while he’s out of the way.” Rick was really something, the way he had it all worked out.

And that’s the way it went. The day before the ceremony, Harry was busy in the guest house all afternoon, packing his goodies in the time capsule. Just like a dopey squirrel burying nuts. Only even dopey squirrels don’t put stuff away for another squirrel to dig up 10,000 years from now.

Harry hadn’t even had time to look at her the past two days, but this didn’t bother Jill any. Along about suppertime she went out to call him, but he said he wasn’t hungry and besides he had to run over and arrange for the trucking company to come and haul the capsule over to the foundation site. They’d dug a big hole there for tomorrow morning, and he was going to take the capsule to it and stand guard over it until it was time for the dedication ceremonies.

That was even better news than Jill had hoped for, so as soon as Harry left for the trucking company she phoned Rick and gave him the word. He said he’d be right over with the tickets.

So of course Jill had to get dressed. She put on her girdle and the fancy bra and her high heels; then she went in the bathroom and used her depilatory and touched up her hair where the rinse was fading, and put on her eyelashes and brushed her teeth, and attached those new fingernails after she got her makeup on and the perfume.

When she looked at the results in the mirror she was really proud of herself; for the first time in months she felt like her real self again. And from now on it would always be this way — with Rick.

There was a good moment with Rick there in the bedroom after he came in, but of course Harry would drive up right then — she heard the car out front and broke the clinch just in time, telling Rick to sneak out the back way. Harry would be busy with the truckers for at least a couple of minutes.

Jill forced herself to wait in the bedroom until she was sure the coast was clear. She kept looking out the window but it was too dark now to see anything. Since there wasn’t any noise, she figured Harry must have taken the truckers into the guest house.

And that’s where she finally went.

Only the truckers weren’t there. Just Harry.

“I told them to wait until first thing in the morning,” he said. “Changed my mind when I realized how damp it was — no sense my spending the night shivering outside in the cold. Besides, I haven’t sealed the capsule yet — remembered a couple of things I wanted to add.”

He took a little bottle out of his pocket and carried it over to the time capsule. “This goes in too. Carefully labeled, of course, so they can analyze it.”

“The bottle’s empty,” Jill said.

Harry shook his head. “Not at all. It contains smog. That’s right — smog, from the freeway. I want posterity to know everything about us, right down to the poisonous air in which our contemporary culture breathed its last.”

He dropped the bottle into the capsule, then picked up something else from the table next to it. Jill noticed he had a soldering outfit there to seal the lid, ready to plug in after he’d used a pump to suck all the air out. He’d explained about the capsule being airtight, soundproof, duralumin-sheathed, but that didn’t interest her now. She kept looking at what he held in his hand.

It was one of those electric carving knives, complete with battery.

“Another Twentieth Century artifact,” he said. “Another gadget symbol of our decadence. An electric knife — just the thing for Mom when she carves the fast-frozen, precooked Thanksgiving turkey while she and Dad count all their shiny, synthetic, plastic blessings.”

He waved the knife.

“They’ll understand,” he told her. “Those people in the future will understand it all. They’ll know what life was like in our time — how we drained Walden Pond and refilled it with blood, sweat, and tears.”

Jill moved a little closer, staring at the knife. “The blade’s rusty.”

Harry shook his head. “That’s not rust,” he said.

Jill kept it cool. She kept it right up until the moment she looked over the edge of the big metal box, looked down into it, and saw Rick lying there. Rick was stretched out, and the red was oozing down over the books and records and photos and tapes.

“I was waiting for him when he sneaked out the back of the house,” Harry said.

“Then you knew — all along—”

“For quite a while,” Harry said. “Long enough to figure things out and make my plans.”

“What plans?”

Harry just shrugged. And raised the knife.

A moment later the time capsule received the final specimen of life in the Twentieth Century.

There are two kinds of stylists: the show-off who wants to be congratulated every time he turns a nice phrase, and the kind who quietly turns a nice phrase but just gets on with the story. Lawrence Block is one of the latter. Even at the outset of his career, when he was turning out books at a furious pace, he managed to bring elegance and taste to even minor assignments. His hard work paid off. He is one of the premier crime novelists of our time, with two bestselling series: the Matt Scudder novels (dark), including Eight Million Ways to Die, The Devil Knows You’re Dead, and the Edgar-winning A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, and the Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries humorous, including The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart, and The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams. Block is also one of our most accomplished short-story writers. No wonder the Mystery Writers of America hailed him as one of the Grand Masters. Recently he has turned to editing books and has three stellar anthologies: Master’s Choice, Volumes 1 and 2. and Opening Shots.

Reliable’s offices are in the Flatiron Building, at Broadway and Twenty-third. The receptionist, an elegant black girl with high cheekbones and processed hair, gave me a nod and a smile, and I went on down the hall to Wally Witt’s office.

He was at his desk, a short stocky man with a bulldog jaw and gray hair cropped close to his head. Without rising he said, “Matt, good to see you, you’re right on time. You know these guys? Matt Scudder, Jimmy diSalvo, Lee Trombauer.” We shook hands all around. “We’re waiting on Eddie Rankin. Then we can go out there and protect the integrity of the American merchandising system.”

“Can’t do that without Eddie,” Jimmy diSalvo said.

“No, we need him,” Wally said. “He’s our pit bull. He’s attack trained, Eddie is.”

He came through the door a few minutes later and I saw what they meant. Without looking alike, Jimmy and Wally and Lee all looked like ex-cops — as, I suppose, do I. Eddie Rankin looked like the kind of guy we used to have to bring in on a bad Saturday night. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist. His hair was blond, almost white, and he wore it short at the sides but long in back. It lay on his neck like a mane. He had a broad forehead and a pug nose. His complexion was very fair and his full lips were intensely red, almost artificially so. He looked like a roughneck, and you sensed that his response to any sort of stress was likely to be physical, and abrupt.

Wally Witt introduced him to me. The others already knew him. Eddie Rankin shook my hand, and his left hand fastened on my shoulder and gave a squeeze. “Hey, Matt,” he said. “Pleased to meetcha. Whattaya say, guys, we ready to come to the aid of the Caped Crusader?”

Jimmy diSalvo started whistling the theme from “Batman,” the old television show. Wally said, “Okay, who’s packing? Is everybody packing?”

Lee Trombauer drew back his suit jacket to show a revolver in a shoulder rig. Eddie Rankin took out a large automatic and laid it on Wally’s desk. “Batman’s gun,” he announced.

“Batman don’t carry a gun,” Jimmy told him.

“Then he better stay outta New York,” Eddie said. “Or he’ll get his ass shot off. Those revolvers, I wouldn’t carry one of them on a bet.”

“This shoots as straight as what you got,” Lee said. “And it won’t jam.”

“This baby don’t jam,” Eddie said. He picked up the automatic and held it out for display. “You got a revolver,” he said, “a .38, whatever you got—”

“A .38.”

“—and a guy takes it away from you, all he’s gotta do is point it and shoot it. Even if he never saw a gun before, he knows how to do that much. This monster, though” — and he demonstrated, flicking the safety, working the slide — “all this shit you gotta go through, before he can figure it out I got the gun away from him and I’m making him eat it.”

“Nobody’s taking my gun away from me,” Lee said.

“What everybody says, but look at all the times it happens. Cop gets shot with his own gun, nine times out of ten it’s a revolver.”

“That’s because that’s all they carry,” Lee said.

“Well, there you go.”

Jimmy and I weren’t carrying guns. Wally offered to equip us but we both declined. “Not that anybody’s likely to have to show a piece, let alone use one, God forbid,” Wally said. “But it can get nasty out there, and it helps to have the feeling of authority. Well, let’s go get ’em, huh? The Batmobile’s waiting at the curb.”

We rode down in the elevator, five grown men, three of us armed with handguns. Eddie Rankin had on a plaid sport jacket and khaki trousers. The rest of us wore suits and ties. We went out the Fifth Avenue exit and followed Wally to his car, a five-year-old Fleetwood Cadillac parked next to a hydrant. There were no tickets on the windshield; a PBA courtesy card had kept the traffic cops at bay.

Wally drove and Eddie Rankin sat in front with him. The rest of us rode in back. We cruised up to Fifty-fourth Street and turned right, and Wally parked next to a hydrant a few doors from Fifth. We walked together to the corner of Fifth and turned downtown. Near the middle of the block a trio of black men had set up shop as sidewalk vendors. One had a display of women’s handbags and silk scarves, all arranged neatly on top of a folding card table. The other two were offering tee-shirts and cassette tapes.

In an undertone Wally said, “Here we go. These three were here yesterday. Matt, why don’t you and Lee check down the block, make sure those two down at the corner don’t have what we’re looking for. Then double back and we’ll take these dudes off. Meanwhile I’ll let the man sell me a shirt.”

Lee and I walked down to the corner. The two vendors in question were selling books. We established this and headed back. “Real police work,” I said.

“Be grateful we don’t have to fill out a report, list the titles of the books.”

“The alleged books.”

When we rejoined the others Wally was holding an oversize tee-shirt to his chest, modeling it for us. “What do you say?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you think it’s me?”

“I think it’s the Joker,” Jimmy diSalvo said.

“That’s what I think,” Wally said. He looked at the two Africans, who were smiling uncertainly. “I think it’s a violation, is what I think. I think we got to confiscate all the Batman stuff. It’s unauthorized, it’s an illegal violation of copy protection, it’s unlicensed, and we got to take it in.”

The two vendors had stopped smiling, but they didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of what was going on. Off to the side, the third man, the fellow with the scarves and purses, was looking wary.

“You speak English?” Wally asked them.

“They speak numbers,” Jimmy said. “ ‘Fi’ dollah, ten dollah, please, t’ank you.’ That’s what they speak.”

“Where you from?” Wally demanded. “Senegal, right? Dakar. You from Dakar?”

They nodded, brightening at words they recognized. “Dakar,” one of them echoed. Both of them were wearing western clothes, but they looked faintly foreign — loose-fitting long-sleeved shirts with long pointed collars and a glossy finish, baggy pleated pants. Loafers with leather mesh tops.

“What do you speak?” Wally asked. “You speak French? Parley-voo français?” The one who’d spoken before replied now in a torrent of French; Wally backed away from him and shook his head. “I don’t know why the hell I asked,” he said. “Parley-voo’s all I know of the fucking language.” To the Africans he said, “Police. You parley-voo that? Police. Pólicia. You capeesh?” He opened his wallet and showed them some sort of badge. “No sell Batman,” he said, waving one of the shirts at them. “Batman no good. It’s unauthorized, it’s not made under a licensing agreement, and you can’t sell it.”

“No Batman,” one of them said.

“Jesus, don’t tell me I’m getting through to them. Right, no Batman. No, put your money away, I can’t take a bribe, I’m not with the Department no more. All I want’s the Batman stuff. You can keep the rest.”

All but a handful of their tee-shirts were unauthorized Batman items. The rest showed Walt Disney characters, almost certainly as unauthorized as the Batman merchandise, but Disney wasn’t Reliable’s client today so it was none of our concern. While we loaded up with Batman and the Joker, Eddie Rankin looked through the cassettes, then pawed through the silk scarves the third vendor had on display. He let the man keep the scarves, but he took a purse, snakeskin by the look of it. “No good,” he told the man, who nodded, expressionless.

We trooped back to the Fleetwood and Wally popped the trunk. We deposited the confiscated tees between the spare tire and some loose fishing tackle. “Don’t worry if the shit gets dirty,” Wally said. “It’s all gonna be destroyed anyway. Eddie, you start carrying a purse, people are gonna say things.”

“Woman I know,” he said. “She’ll like this.” He wrapped the purse in a Batman tee-shirt and placed it in the trunk.

“Okay,” Wally said. “That went real smooth. What we’ll do now, Lee, you and Matt take the east side of Fifth, and the rest of us’ll stay on this side and we’ll work our way down to Forty-second. I don’t know if we’ll get much, because even if they can’t speak English they can sure get the word around fast, but we’ll make sure there’s no unlicensed Batcrap on the Avenue before we move on. We’ll maintain eye contact back and forth across the street, and if you hit anything give the high sign and we’ll converge and take ’em down. Everybody got it?”

Everybody seemed to. We left the car with its trunkful of contraband and returned to Fifth Avenue. The two tee-shirt vendors from Dakar had packed up and disappeared; they’d have to find something else to sell and someplace else to sell it. The man with the scarves and purses was still doing business. He froze when he caught sight of us.

“No Batman,” Wally told him.

“No Batman,” he echoed.

“I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” Wally said. “The guy’s learning English.”

Lee and I crossed the street and worked our way downtown. There were vendors all over the place, offering clothing and tapes and small appliances and books and fast food. Most of them didn’t have the peddler’s license the law required, and periodically the city would sweep the streets, especially the main commercial avenues, rounding them up and fining them and confiscating their stock. Then after a week or so the cops would stop trying to enforce a basically unenforceable law, and the peddlers would be back in business again.

It was an apparently endless cycle, but the booksellers were exempt from it. The courts had decided that the First Amendment embodied in its protection of freedom of the press the right of anyone to sell printed matter on the street, so if you had books for sale you never got hassled. As a result, a lot of scholarly antiquarian booksellers offered their wares on the city streets. So did any number of illiterates hawking remaindered art books and stolen bestsellers, along with homeless street people who rescued old magazines from people’s garbage cans and spread them out on the pavement, living in hope that someone would want to buy them.

In front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral we found a Pakistani with tee-shirts and sweatshirts. I asked him if he had any Batman merchandise and he went right through the piles himself and pulled out half a dozen items. We didn’t bother signaling the Cavalry across the street. Lee just showed the man a badge — Special Officer, it said — and I explained that we had to confiscate Batman items.

“He is the big seller, Batman,” the man said. “I get Batman, I sell him fast as I can.”

“Well, you better not sell him anymore,” I said, “because it’s against the law.”

“Excuse, please,” he said. “What is law? Why is Batman against law? Is my understanding Batman is for law. He is good guy, is it not so?”

I explained about copyright and trademarks and licensing agreements. It was a little like explaining the internal combustion engine to a field mouse. He kept nodding his head, but I don’t know how much of it he got. He understood the main point — that we were walking off with his stock and he was stuck for whatever it cost him. He didn’t like that part, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Lee tucked the shirts under his arm and we kept going. At Forty-seventh Street we crossed over in response to a signal from Wally. They’d found another pair of Senegalese with a big spread of Batman items — tees and sweatshirts and gimme caps and sun visors, some a direct knockoff of the copyrighted Bat signal, others a variation on the theme, but none of it authorized and all of it subject to confiscation. The two men — they looked like brothers and were dressed identically in baggy beige trousers and sky-blue nylon shirts — couldn’t understand what was wrong with their merchandise and couldn’t believe we intended to haul it all away with us. But there were five of us, and we were large intimidating white men with an authoritarian manner, and what could they do about it?

“I’ll get the car,” Wally said. “No way we’re gonna shlep this crap seven blocks in this heat.”

Anthony Boucher (1911–1968) was one of the most remarkable figures ever produced by the mystery genre. And the same could be said of him in the science fiction genre, too. Whether he was working as author, critic, or editor in these fields, his name on a story, novel, or magazine invariably meant that you were getting the best the field had to offer. Under the name H. H. Holmes, he wrote a number of memorable mystery novels; under his own name he created at least two dozen fantasy stories that are still being reprinted today. He touched virtually every writer of his time — by teaching them through the craft he brought to his fiction; or by buying and editing their stories for one of his magazines (he was co-founder of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for just one example); or as a critic: he wrote 850 weekly columns for the New York Times Book Review. And he was no snob. He was the first major critic to seriously review paperback originals. He died far too young, at age 57.

There seemed from the start to be an atmosphere of pressured haste about the whole affair. The wedding date was set even before the formal announcement of the engagement; Doreen was so very insistent that Marie must come at once to Hollywood to serve as maid of honor; the engagement party was already getting under way when Marie arrived at the house; and she had barely had time for the fastest of showers and a change of clothes when she was standing beside Cousin Doreen and being introduced to the murderer.

Not that she knew it for certain at that moment. Then — with one of Doreen’s friends ad-libbing a bebop wedding march on the piano and another trying to fit limerick lyrics to it and all the others saying “Darling...!” and “But my agent says...” and “The liquor flows like glue around here” and “Live TV? But my dear, how quaintly historical!” — then it was only a matter of some forgotten little-girl memory trying to stir at the back of her mind and some very active big-girl instincts stirring in front. Later, with the aid of the man in gray and his strange friend with the invisible fly, it was to be terrifyingly positive. Now, it was vague and indefinable, and perhaps all the more terrifying for being so.

Marie had been prepared to dislike him. Doreen was only a year older than she (which was 27) and looked a year younger; there was something obscene about the idea of her marrying a man in his fifties. Marie was prepared for something out of Peter Arno, and for a moment it was a relief to find him so ordinary-looking — just another man, like the corner grocer... or no, more like the druggist, the nice one that was a bishop in the Latter Day Saints. For a moment after that it was a pleasant surprise to find that he was easy, affable, even charming in a way you didn’t expect of ordinary elderly men. He was asking all about her family (which was of course Doreen’s, too) and about Utah and how was Salt Lake nowadays, and all the time he made you feel that he was asking about these subjects only because they were connected with you.

In these first few moments the Hollywood party seemed to vanish and it was almost as if she was still back in Salt Lake and it was perfectly understandable that Doreen should marry him no matter how old he was — and no matter how hard a little-girl memory tried to place the name LUTHER PEABODY (in very black type) and the photograph (much younger) that had gone with it.

At this point Doreen had said, “Luther, be nice to Marie, huh? I have to make like a hostess,” and disappeared. Marie was alone with Luther Peabody, the party whirling around them like a montage gone mad. It wasn’t quite what he said or where he touched her as he casually steered her toward the bar, though the words were deliberately suggestive and it was not a touch commonly bestowed by a bridegroom upon the maid of honor. It was more that the voice was too soft and the fingers were too soft and the eyes — the eyes that fixed her, and her alone, as if only they were in the room — the eyes were much too hard.

The little-girl memory was still a fragment; but whatever it was, it reinforced this sudden adult recognition of peril. Without conscious thought Marie found that she had evaded Peabody, slipped behind two men arguing about guild jurisdiction in TV, and lost herself in a deep chair in an obscure corner.

Her whole body was trembling, as if it had been, in some curiously public way, outraged. And she was thinking that by contrast, a Peter Arno Lecher-of-Great-Wealth would make a clean and welcome cousin-in-law.

It was in the corner that the man in gray found her.

“You’re Doreen’s cousin Marie,” he stated. “My name’s MacDonald. You don’t have a drink. Or rather,” he added, “you didn’t have one.” And he passed her one of the two martinis he was holding.

She managed, by an active miracle, not to spill any; but she still needed two sips before she could properly arrange her face into the right smile and say, “Thank you, sir.”

“Good,” he said. “I wasn’t sure about plying you. One never knows with girls from Salt Lake.”

“Oh, but I’m not a saint.”

“Who is? Thank God.”

“I mean” (the smile came more easily now) “I’m not a Mormon. Doreen isn’t, either. Our fathers came to Salt Lake when they were both widowers, with us squalling on their hands. They married Utah girls, and all this enormous Mormon family you read about in Doreen’s publicity is just step-family.”

“Remind Doreen some time,” he said dryly. “She’s never disbelieved a word of her publicity. Including” (his eyes wandered about the brawling room) “the word ‘starlet.’ How long does one go on being a starlet? Is it semipermanent, like being a Young Democrat? They’re still dunning me for dues when I should be putting the money into a hair-restorer.”

“Oh, but you are young!” she reacted hastily. She’d never have said so ordinarily — he must be in his late thirties. But she had stopped shaking and he was comfortable and reassuring and not at all like a middle-aged fragment of memory with soft fingers and eyes from hell.

Mac-what’sit seemed almost to read her thoughts. He looked across to the bar, where Luther Peabody was being charming to some columnist’s third assistant leg-woman. “You just got in, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Marie said uneasily. “It’s all been done in such a rush...”

“And you’d just as soon get out again.” It wasn’t a question. “I have a car...”

James M. Cain (1892–1977) wrote two indisputable masterpieces, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Some would add his novel Mildred Pierce to the list as well. He was always controversial because he wrote openly about sex, but what his critics never seemed to understand is that it was sex that became love of many different kinds. Nobody in the crime genre ever came to close to writing about man-woman relationships the way Cain did. And not even Cain could duplicate his own success in the second part of his career. While he wrote a variety of other novels, none matched his early ones. But then that doesn’t really matter, does it? As the man who wrote both Postman and Indemnity, he was already immortal.

I’d never so much as laid eyes on her before going in this place, the Here’s How, a night-club on Route 1, a few miles north of Washington, on business that was 99 percent silly, but that I had to keep myself. It was around 8 at night, with hardly anyone there, and I’d just taken a table, ordered a drink, and started to unwrap a cigar, when a whiff of perfume hit me, and she swept by with cigarettes. As to what she looked like, I had only a rear view, but the taffeta skirt, crepe blouse, and silver earrings were quiet, and the chassis was choice, call it fancy, a little smaller than medium. So far, a cigarette girl, nothing to rate any cheers, but not bad either, for a guy unattached who’d like an excuse to linger.

But then she made a pitch, or what I took for a pitch. Her middle-aged customer was trying to tell her some joke, and taking so long about it the proprietor got in the act. He was a big, blond guy, with kind of a decent face, but he went and whispered to her as though to hustle her up, for some reason apparently. I couldn’t quite figure it out. She didn’t much seem to like it, until her eye caught mine. She gave a little pout, a little shrug, a little wink, and then just stood there, smiling.

Now I know this pitch and it’s nice, because of course I smiled back, and with that I was on the hook. A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back. Not that I wanted to, as I suddenly changed my mind about the cigar I had in my hand, stuck it back in my pocket, and wigwagged for cigarettes. She nodded, and when she came over said: “You stop laughing at me.”

“Who’s laughing? Looking.”

“Oh, of course. That’s different.”

I picked out a pack, put down my buck, and got the surprise of my life: she gave me change. As she started to leave, I said “You forgot something, maybe?”

“That’s not necessary.”

“For all this I get, I should pay.”

“All what, sir, for instance?”

“I told you: the beauty that fills my eye.”

“The best things in life are free.”

“On that basis, fair lady, some of them, here, are tops. Would you care to sit down?”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Not allowed. We got rules.”

With that she went out toward the rear somewhere, and I noticed the proprietor again, just a short distance away, and realized he’d been edging in. I called him over and said: “What’s the big idea? I was talking to her.”

“Mister, she’s paid to work.”

“Yeah, she mentioned about rules, but now they got other things too. Four Freedoms, all kinds of stuff. Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

“I heard of it, yes.”

“You’re Mr. Here’s How?”

“Jack Conner, to my friends.”

I took a V from my wallet, folded it, creased it, pushed it toward him. I said: “Jack, little note of introduction I generally carry around. I’d like you to ease these rules. She’s cute, and I crave to buy her a drink.”

He didn’t see any money, and stood for a minute thinking. Then: “Mister, you’re off on the wrong foot. In the first place, she’s not a cigarette girl. Tonight, yes, when the other girl is off. But not regular, no. In the second place, she’s not any chiselly-wink, that orders rye, drinks tea, takes the four bits you slip her, the four I charge for the drink — and is open to propositions. She’s class. She’s used to class — out West, with people that have it, and that brought her East when they came. In the third place she’s a friend, and before I eased any rules I’d have to know more about you, a whole lot more, than this note tells me.”

“My name’s Cameron.”

“Pleased to meet you and all that, but as to who you are, Mr. Cameron, and what you are, I still don’t know—”

“I’m a musician.”

“Yeah? What instrument?”

“Any of them. Guitar, mainly.”

Which brings me to what I was doing there. I do play the guitar, play it all day long, for the help I get from it, as it gives me certain chords, the big ones that people go for, and heads me off from some others, the fancy ones on the piano, that other musicians go for. I’m an arranger, based in Baltimore, and had driven down on a little tune detecting. The guy who takes most of my work, Art Lomak, the band leader, writes a few tunes himself, and had gone clean off his rocker about one he said had been stolen, or thefted as they call it. It was one he’d been playing a little, to try it and work out faults, with lyric and title to come, soon as the idea hit him. And then he rang me, with screams. It had already gone on the air, as 20 people had told him, from this same little honky-tonk, as part of a 10 o’clock spot on the Washington FM pick-up. He begged me to be here tonight, when the trio started their broadcast, pick up such dope as I could, and tomorrow give him the low-down.

That much was right on the beam, stuff that goes on every day, a routine I knew by heart. But his tune had angles, all of them slightly peculiar. One was, it had already been written, though it was never a hit and was almost forgotten, in the days when states were hot, under the title Nevada. Another was, it had been written even before that, by a gent named Giuseppe Verdi, as part of the Sicilian Vespers, under the title O Tu Palermo. Still another was, Art was really burned, and seemed to have no idea where the thing had come from. They just can’t get it, those big schmalzburgers like him, that what leaks out of their head might, just once, have leaked in. But the twist, the reason I had to come, and couldn’t just play it for laughs, was: Art could have been right. Maybe the lilt was from him, not from the original opera, or from the first theft, Nevada. It’s a natural for a 3/4 beat, and that’s how Art had been playing it. So if that’s how they were doing it here, instead of with Nevada’s 4/4, which followed the Verdi signature, there might still be plenty of work for the lawyers Art had put on it, with screams, same like to me.

Silly, almost.

Spooky.

But maybe, just possibly, right.

So Jack, this boss character, by now had smelled something fishy, and suddenly took a powder, to the stand where the fiddlers were parked, as of course the boys weren’t there yet, and came back with a Spanish guitar. I took it, thanked him, and tuned. To kind of work it around, in the direction of Art’s little problem, and at the same time make like there was nothing at all to conceal, I said I’d come on account of his band, to catch it during the broadcast, as I’d heard it was pretty good. He didn’t react, which left me nowhere, but I thought it well to get going.

I played him Night and Day, no Segovia job, but plenty good, for free. On “Day and Night,” where it really opens up, I knew things to do, and talk suddenly stopped among the scattering of people that were in there. When I finished there was some little clapping, but still he didn’t react, and I gave thought to mayhem. But then a buzzer sounded, and he took another powder, out toward the rear this time, where she had disappeared. I began a little beguine, but he was back. He bowed, picked up his B, bowed again, said: “Mr. Cameron, the guitar did it. She heard you, and you’re in.”

“Will you set me up for two?”

“Hold on, there’s a catch.”

He said until midnight, when one of his men would take over, she was checking his orders. “That means she handles the money, and if she’s not there, I could just as well close down. You’re invited back with her, but she can’t come out with you.”

“Oh. Fine.”

“Sir, you asked for it.”

It wasn’t quite the way I’d have picked to do it, but the main thing was the girl, and I followed him through the OUT door, the one his waiters were using, still with my Spanish guitar. But then, all of a sudden, I loved it, and felt even nearer to her.

This was the works of the joint, with a little office at one side, service bar on the other, range rear and center, the crew in white all around, getting the late stuff ready. But high on a stool, off by herself, on a little railed-in platform where waiters would have to pass, she was waving at me, treating it all as a joke. She called down: “Isn’t this a balcony scene for you? You have to play me some music!”

I rattled into it quickly, and when I told her it was Romeo and Juliet, she said it was just what she’d wanted. By then Jack had a stool he put next to hers, so I could sit beside her, back of her little desk. He introduced us, and it turned out her name was Stark. I climbed up and there we were, out in the middle of the air, and yet in a way private, as the crew played it funny, to the extent they played it at all, but mostly were too busy even to look. I put the guitar on the desk and kept on with the music. By the time I’d done some Showboat she was calling me Bill and to me she was Lydia. I remarked on her eyes, which were green, and showed up bright against her creamy skin and ashy blonde hair. She remarked on mine, which are light, watery blue, and I wished I was something besides tall, thin, and red-haired. But it was kind of cute when she gave a little pinch and nipped one of my freckles, on my hand back of the thumb.

Then Jack was back, with champagne iced in a bucket, which I hadn’t ordered. When I remembered my drink, the one I had ordered, he said Scotch was no good, and this would be on him. I thanked him, but after he’d opened and poured, and I’d leaned the guitar in a corner and raised my glass to her, I said: “What’s made him so friendly?”

“Oh, Jack’s always friendly.”

“Not to me. Oh, no.”

“He may have thought I had it coming. Some little thing to cheer me. My last night in the place.”

“You going away?”

“M’m-h’m.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“That’s why you’re off at 12?”

“Jack tell you that?”

“He told me quite a lot.”

“Plane leaves at 1. Bag’s gone already. It’s at the airport, all checked and ready to be weighed.”

She clinked her glass to mine, took a little sip, and drew a deep, trembly breath. As for me, I felt downright sick, just why I couldn’t say, as it had all to be strictly allegro, with nobody taking it serious. It stuck in my throat a little when I said: “Well — happy landings. Is it permitted to ask which way that plane is taking you?”

“Home.”

“And where’s that?”

“It’s — not important.”

“The West, I know that much.”

“What else did Jack tell you?”

I took it, improvised, and made up a little stuff, about her high-toned friends, her being a society brat, spoiled as usual, and the heavy dough she was used to — a light rib, as I thought. But it hadn’t gone very far when I saw it was missing bad. When I cut it off, she took it. She said: “Some of that’s true, in a way. I was — fortunate, we’ll call it. But — you still have no idea, have you, Bill, what I really am?”

“I’ve been playing by ear.”

“I wonder if you want to know?”

“If you don’t want to, I’d rather you didn’t say.”

None of it was turning out quite as I wanted, and I guess maybe I showed it. She studied me a little and asked: “The silver I wear, that didn’t tell you anything? Or my giving you change for your dollar? It didn’t mean anything to you, that a girl would run a straight game?”

“She’s not human.”

“It means she’s a gambler.”

And then: “Bill, does that shock you?”

“No, not at all.”

“I’m not ashamed of it. Our home, it’s legal. You know where that is now?”

“Oh! Oh!”

“Why oh? And oh?”

“Nothing. It’s — Nevada, isn’t it?”

“Something wrong with Nevada?”

“No! I just woke up, that’s all.”

I guess that’s what I said, but whatever it was, she could hardly miss the upbeat in my voice. Because, of course, that wrapped it all up pretty, not only the tune, which the band would naturally play for her, but her too, and who she was. Society dame, to tell the truth, hadn’t pleased me much, and maybe that was one reason my rib was slightly off key. But gambler I could go for, a little cold, a little dangerous, a little brave. When she was sure I had really bought it, we were close again, and after a nip on the freckle her fingers slid over my hand. She said play her Smoke — the smoke she had in her eyes. But I didn’t, and we just sat there some little time.

And then, a little bit at a time, she began to spill it: “Bill, it was just plain cock-eyed. I worked in a club, the Paddock, in Reno, a regular institution. Tony Rocco — Rock — owned it, and was the squarest bookie ever — why he was a Senator, and civic, and everything. And I worked for him, running his wires, practically being his manager, with a beautiful salary, a bonus at Christmas, and everything. And then wham, it struck. This federal thing. This 10 percent tax on gross. And we were out of business. It just didn’t make sense. Everything else was exempted. Wheels and boards and slots, whatever you could think of, but us. Us and the numbers racket, in Harlem and Florida and Washington.”

“Take it easy.”

“That’s right, Bill. Thanks.”

“Have some wine?”

“...Rock, of course, was fixed. He had property, and for the building, where the Paddock was, he got $250,000 — or so I heard. But then came the tip on Maryland.”

That crossed me up, and instead of switching her off, I asked her what she meant. She said: “That Maryland would legalize wheels.”

“What do you smoke in Nevada?”

“Oh, I didn’t believe it. And Rock didn’t. But Mrs. Rock went nuts about it. Oh well, she had a reason.”

“Dark, handsome reason?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, but that reason took the Rocks for a ride, for every cent they got for the place, and tried to take me too, for other things beside money. When they went off to Italy, they thought they had it fixed, he was to keep me at my salary, in case Maryland would legalize, and if not, to send me home, with severance pay, as it’s called. And instead of that—”

“I’m listening.”

“I’ve said too much.”

“What’s this guy to you?”

“Nothing! I never even saw him until the three of us stepped off the plane — with our hopes. In a way it seemed reasonable. Maryland has tracks, and they help with the taxes. Why not wheels?”

“And who is this guy?”

“I’d be ashamed to say, but I’ll say this much: I won’t be a kept floozy. I don’t care who he thinks he is, or—”

She bit her lip, started to cry, and really shut up then. To switch off, I asked why she was working for Jack, and she said: “Why not? You can’t go home in a barrel. But he’s been swell to me.”

Saying people were swell seemed to be what she liked, and she calmed down, letting her hand stay when I pressed it in both of mine. Then we were really close, and I meditated if we were close enough that I’d be warranted in laying it on the line, she should let that plane fly away, and not go to Nevada at all. But while I was working on that, business was picking up, with waiters stopping by to let her look at their trays, and I hadn’t much chance to say it, whatever I wanted to say. Then, through the IN door, a waiter came through with a tray that had a wine bottle on it. A guy followed him in, a little noisy guy, who said the bottle was full and grabbed it off the tray. He had hardly gone out again, when Jack was in the door, watching him as he staggered back to the table. The waiter swore the bottle was empty, but all Jack did was nod.

Then Jack came over to her, took another little peep through the window in the OUT door, which was just under her balcony, and said: “Lydia, what did you make of him?”

“Why — he’s drunk, that’s all.”

“You notice him, Mr. Cameron?”

“No — except it crossed my mind he wasn’t as tight as the act he was putting on.”

“Just what crossed my mind! How could he get that drunk on a split of Napa red? What did he want back here?”

By now, the waiter had gone out on the floor and came back, saying the guy wanted his check. But as he started to shuffle it out of the bunch he had tucked in his vest, Jack stopped him and said: “He don’t get any check — not till I give the word. Tell Joe I said stand by and see he don’t get out. Move!”

The waiter had looked kind of blank, but hustled out as told, and then Jack looked at her. He said: “Lady, I’ll be back. I’m taking a look around.”

He went, and she drew another of her long, trembly breaths. I cut my eye around, but no one had noticed a thing, and yet it seemed kind of funny they’d all be slicing bread, wiping glass, or fixing cocktail setups, with Jack mumbling it low out of the side of his mouth. I had a creepy feeling of things going on, and my mind took it a little, fitting it together, what she had said about the bag checked at the airport, the guy trying to make her, and most of all, the way Jack had acted, the second she showed with her cigarettes, shooing her off the floor, getting her out of sight. She kept staring through the window, at the drunk where he sat with his bottle, and seemed to ease when a captain I took to be Joe planted himself pretty solid in a spot that would block off a runout.

Then Jack was back, marching around, snapping his fingers, giving orders for the night. But as he pressed the back door, I noticed his hand touched the lock, as though putting the catch on. He started back to the floor, but stopped as he passed her desk, and shot it quick in a whisper: “He’s out there, Lydia, parked in back. This drunk, like I thought, is a finger he sent in to stop you, but he won’t be getting out for the airport, right now.”

“Will you call me a cab, Jack?”

“Cab? I’m taking you.”

He stepped near me and whispered: “Mr. Cameron, I’m sorry, this little lady has to leave, for—”

“I know about that.”

“She’s in danger—”

“I’ve also caught on to that.”

“From a no-good imitation goon that’s been trying to get to her here, which is why I’m shipping her out. I hate to break this up, but if you’ll ride with us, Mr. Cameron—”

“I’ll follow you down.”

“That’s right, you have your car. It’s Friendship Airport just down the road.”

He told her to get ready, while he was having his car brought up, and the boy who would take her place on the desk was changing his clothes. Step on it, he said, but wait until he came back. He went out on the floor and marched past the drunk without even turning his head. But she sat watching me. She said: “You’re not coming, are you?”

“Friendship’s a little cold.”

“But not mine, Bill, no.”

She got off her stool, stood near me and touched my hair. She said: “Ships that pass in the night pass so close, so close.” And then: “I’m ashamed, Bill. I’d have to go for this reason. I wonder, for the first time gambling’s really much good.” She pulled the chain of the light, so we were half in the dark. Then she kissed me. She said: “God bless and keep you, Bill.”

“And you, Lydia.”

I felt her tears on my cheek, and then she pulled away and stepped to the little office, where she began putting a coat on and tying a scarf on her head. She looked so pretty it came to me I still hadn’t given her the one little bouquet I’d been saving for the last. I picked up the guitar and started Nevada.

She wheeled, but what stared at me were eyes as hard as glass. I was so startled I stopped, but she kept right on staring. Outside a car door slammed, and she listened at the window beside her. Then at last she looked away, to peep through the Venetian blind. Jack popped in, wearing his coat and hat, and motioned her to hurry. But he caught something and said, low yet so I could hear him: “Lydia! What’s the matter?”

She stalked over to me, with him following along, pointed her finger, and then didn’t say it, but spat it: “He’s the finger — that’s what’s the matter, that’s all. He played Nevada, as though we hadn’t had enough trouble with it already. And Vanny heard it. He hopped out of his car and he’s under the window right now.”

“Then OK, let’s go.”

I was a little too burned to make with the explanations, and took my time, parking the guitar, sliding off, and climbing down, to give them a chance to blow. But she still had something to say, and to me, not to him. She pushed her face up to mine, and mocking how I had spoken, yipped. “Oh!.. Oh! OH!” Then she went, with Jack. Then I went, clumping after.

Then it broke wide open.

The drunk, who was supposed to sit there, conveniently boxed in, while she went slipping out, turned out more of a hog-calling type, and instead of playing his part, jumped up and yelled: “Vanny! Vanny! Here she comes! She’s leaving! VANNY!”

He kept it up, while women screamed all over, then pulled a gun from his pocket, and let go at the ceiling, so it sounded like the field artillery. Jack jumped for him and hit the deck, as his feet shot from under him on the slippery wood of the dance floor. Joe swung, missed, swung again, and landed, so Mr. Drunk went down. But when Joe scrambled for the gun, there came this voice through the smoke: “Hold it! As you were — and leave that gun alone.”

Then hulking in came this short-necked, thick-shouldered thing, in Homburg hat, double-breasted coat, and white muffler, one hand in his pocket, the other giving an imitation of a movie gangster. He said keep still and nobody would get hurt, but “I won’t stand for tricks.” He helped Jack up, asked how he’d been. Jack said: “Young man, let me tell you something—”

“How you been? I asked.”

“Fine, Mr. Rocco.”

“Any telling, Jack — I’ll do it.”

Then, to her: “Lydia, how’ve you been?”

“That doesn’t concern you.”

Then she burst out about what he had done to his mother, the gyp he’d handed his father, and his propositions to her, and I got it, at last, who this idiot was. He listened, but right in the middle of it, he waved his hand toward me and asked: “Who’s this guy?”

“Vanny, I think you know.”

“Guy, are you the boy friend?”

“If so I don’t tell you.”

I sounded tough, but my stomach didn’t feel that way. They had it some more, and he connected me with the tune, and seemed to enjoy it a lot, that it had told him where to find her, on the broadcast and here now tonight. But he kept creeping closer, to where we were all lined up, with the drunk stretched on the floor, the gun under his hand, and I suddenly felt the prickle, that Vanny was really nuts, and in a minute meant to kill her. It also crossed my mind, that a guy who plays the guitar has a left hand made of steel, from squeezing down on the strings, and is a dead sure judge of distance, to the last eighth of an inch.

I grabbed for my chord and got it.

I choked down on his hand, the one he held in his pocket, while hell broke loose in the place, with women screaming, men running, and fists trying to help. I had the gun hand all right, but when I reached for the other he twisted, butted, and bit, and for that long I thought he’d get loose, and that I was a gone pigeon. The gun barked, and a piledriver hit my leg. I went down. Another gun spoke and he went down beside me. Then there was Jack, the drunk’s gun in his hand, stepping in close, and firing again.

I blacked out.

I came to, and then she was there, a knife in her hand, ripping the cloth away from the outside of my leg, grabbing napkins, stanching blood, while somewhere ten miles off I could hear Jack’s voice, as he yelled into a phone. On the floor right beside me was something under a tablecloth.

That went on for some time, with Joe calming things down and some people sliding out. The band came in, and I heard a boy ask for his guitar. Somebody brought it to him, and then, at last, came the screech of sirens, and she whispered some thanks to God.

Then, while the cops were catching up, with me, with Jack, and what was under the cloth, we both went kind of haywire, me laughing, she crying, and both in each other’s arms. I said: “Lydia, Lydia, you’re not taking that plane. They legalize things in Maryland, one thing specially, except that instead of wheels, they generally use a ring.”

Rare is the writer who makes an entire subgenre his own. But that’s just what Max Allan Collins has done with his Nate Heller historical private eye novels. From Bugsy Siegel to Amelia Earhart, from Al Capone to the Lindbergh infant, Collins has brought brilliant entertainment to the worldwide reading public, making him a major writer of his generation. A New York Times best-selling author, he has also written the Dick Tracy comic strip, produced at least four other series, become a legend in the world of comic book writing, and even managed to head up a very busy rock-and-roll band while keeping up his mystery career. He has also, if that is not enough, written screenplays for Hollywood and written and produced three films of his own, most notably Mommy and Mommy 2: Mommy’s Day, both of which were praised highly by esteemed critic Leonard Maltin. Both are available on home video.

It had been a long time since I’d had any trouble sleeping. Probably Vietnam, and that was gunfire that kept me awake. I’ve never been an insomniac. You might think killing people for a living would give you restless nights. Truth is, those that go into that business simply aren’t the kind who are bothered by it much.

I was no exception. I hadn’t gone into retirement because my conscience was bothering me. I retired because the man I got my contracts through got killed — well, actually I killed him, but that’s another story — and I had enough money put away to live comfortably without working, so I did.

The A-frame cottage on Paradise Lake was secluded enough for privacy, but close enough to nearby Lake Geneva to put me in contact with human beings, if I was so inclined, which I rarely was, with the exception of getting laid now and then. I’m human.

There was also a restaurant nearby, called Wilma’s Welcome Inn, a rambling two-story affair that included a gas station, modest hotel accommodations and a convenience store. I’d been toying with the idea of buying the place, which had been slipping since the death of Wilma; I’d been getting a little bored lately and needed something to do. Before I started putting people to sleep, I worked in a garage as a mechanic, so the gas station angle appealed to me.

Anyway, boredom had started to itch at me, and for the past few nights I’d had trouble sleeping. I sat up all night watching satellite TV and reading paperback westerns; then I’d drag around the next day, maybe drifting to sleep in the afternoon just long enough to fuck up my sleep cycle again that night.

It was getting irritating.

At about three-thirty in the morning on the fourth night of this shit, I decided eating might do the trick. Fill my gut with junk food and the blood could rush down from my head and warm my belly and I’d get the fuck sleepy, finally. I hadn’t tried this before because I’d been getting a trifle paunchy, since I quit working, and since winter kicked in.

In the summer I’d swim in the lake every day and get exercise and keep the spare tire off. But in the winter I’d just let my beard go and belt-size, too. Winters made me fat and lazy and, now, fucking sleepless.

The cupboard was bare so I threw on my thermal jacket and headed over to the Welcome Inn. At this time of night the convenience store was the only thing open, that and one self-serve gas pump.

The clerk was a heavy-set brunette named Cindy from nearby Twin Lakes. She was maybe twenty years old and a little surly, but she worked all night, so who could blame her.

“Mr. Ryan,” she said, flatly, as I came in, the bell over the door jingling.

“Cindy,” I said, with a nod, and began prowling the place, three narrow aisles parallel to the front of the building. None of the snacks appealed to me — chips and crackers and Twinkies and other preservative-packed delights — and the frozen food case ran mostly to ice-cream sandwiches and popsicles. In this weather, that was a joke.

I was giving a box of Chef Boyardee lasagna an intent once-over, like it was a car I was considering buying, when the bell over the door jingled again. I glanced up and saw a heavy-set man — heavy-set enough to make Cindy look svelte — with a pockmarked face and black-rimmed glasses that fogged up as he stepped in.

He wore an expensive topcoat — tan, a camel’s hair number you could make payments on for a year and still owe — and his shoes had a bright black city shine, barely flecked with ice and snow. His name was Harry Something, and he was from Chicago. I knew him, in another life.

I turned my back. If he saw me, I’d have to kill him, and I was bored, but not that bored.

Predictably, Harry Something went straight for the potato chips; he also rustled around the area where cookies were shelved. I risked a glimpse and saw him, not two minutes after he entered, with his arms full of junk food, heading for the front counter.

“Excuse me, miss,” Harry Something said, depositing his groceries before Cindy. His voice was nasal and high-pitched; a funny, childish voice for a man his size. “Could you direct me to the sanitary napkins?”

“You mean Kotex?”

“Whatever.”

“The toiletries is just over there.”

Now this was curious, and I’ll tell you why. I had met Harry Something around ten years before, when I was doing a job for the Outfit boys. I was never a mob guy, mind you, strictly a freelancer, but their money was as good as anybody’s. What that job was isn’t important, but Harry and his partner Louis were the locals who had fucked up, making my outsider’s presence necessary. Harry and Louis had not been friendly toward me. They had threatened me, in fact. They had beaten the hell out of me in my hotel room, when the job was over, for making them look bad.

I had never taken any sort of revenge out on them. I occasionally do take revenge, but at my convenience, and when a score strikes me as worth settling. Harry and Louis had really just pushed me around a little, bloodied my nose, tried to earn back a little self-respect. So I didn’t hold a grudge. Not a major grudge. Fuck it.

As to why Harry Something purchasing Kotex in the middle of the night at some backwoods convenience store was curious, well, Harry and Louis were gay. They were queens of crime. Mob muscle who worked as a pair, and played as a pair.

I don’t mean to be critical. To each his own. I’d rather cut my dick off than insert it in any orifice of a repulsive fat slob like Harry Something. But that’s just me.

And me, I’m naturally curious. I’m not nosy, not even inquisitive. But when a faggot buys Kotex, I have to wonder why.

“Excuse me,” Harry Something said, brushing by me.

He hadn’t seen my face — he might not recognize me, in any case. Ten years and a beard and twenty pounds later, I wasn’t as easy to peg as Harry was, who had changed goddamn little.

Harry, having stocked up on cookies and chips and Kotex, was now buying milk and packaged macaroni and cheese and provisions in general. He was shopping. Stocking up.

And now I knew what he was up to.

I nodded to surly Cindy, who bid me goodbye by flickering her eyelids in casual contempt, and went out to my car, a blue sporty Mazda I’d purchased recently. I wished I’d had the four-wheel drive, or anything less conspicuous, but I didn’t. I sat in the car, scooched down low; I did not turn on the engine. I just sat in the cold car in the cold night and waited.

Harry Something came out with two armloads of groceries — Kotex included, I presumed — and he put them in the front seat of a brown rental Ford. Louis was not waiting for him. Harry was alone.

Which further confirmed my suspicions.

I waited for him to pull out onto the road, waited for him to take the road’s curve, then started up my Mazda and glided out after him. He had turned left, toward Twin Lakes and Lake Geneva. That made sense, only I figured he wouldn’t wind up either place. I figured he’d be out in the boonies somewhere.

I knew what Harry was up to. I knew he wasn’t exactly here to ski. That lardass couldn’t stand up on a pair of skis. And he wasn’t here to go ice-fishing, either. A city boy like Harry Something had no business in a touristy area like this, in the off-season — unless Harry was hiding out, holing up somewhere.

This would be the perfect area for that.

Only Harry didn’t use Kotex.

He turned off on a side road, into a heavily wooded area that wound back toward Paradise Lake. Good. That was very good.

I went on by. I drove a mile, turned into a farmhouse gravel drive and headed back without lights. I slowed as I reached the mouth of the side road, and could see Harry’s tail lights wink off.

I knew the cabin at the end of that road. There was only one, and its owner only used it during the summer; Harry was either a renter, or a squatter.

I glided on by and went back home. I left the Mazda next to the deck and walked up the steps and into my A-frame. The nine millimeter was in the nightstand drawer. The gun hadn’t been shot in months — Christ, maybe over a year. But I cleaned and oiled it regularly. It would do fine.

So would my black turtle-neck, black jeans, black leather bomber jacket, and this black moonless night. I slipped a .38 revolver in the bomber jacket right side pocket, and clipped a hunting knife to my belt. The knife was razor sharp with a sword point; I sent for it out of the back of one of those dumb-ass ninja magazines — which are worthless except for mail-ordering weapons.

I walked along the edge of the lake, my running shoes crunching the brittle ground, layered as it was with snow and ice and leaves. The only light came from a gentle scattering of stars, a handful of diamonds flung on black velvet; the frozen lake was a dark presence that you could sense but not really see. The surrounding trees were even darker. The occasional cabin or cottage or house I passed was empty. I was one of only a handful of residents on Paradise Lake who lived year-round.

But the lights were on in one cabin. Not many lights, but lights. And its chimney was trailing smoke.

The cabin was small, a traditional log cabin like Abe Lincoln and syrup, only with a satellite dish. Probably two bedrooms, a living room, kitchenette and a can or two. Only one car — the brown rental Ford.

My footsteps were lighter now; I was staying on the balls of my feet and the crunching under them was faint. I approached with caution and gun in hand and peeked in a window on the right front side.

Harry Something was sitting on the couch, eating barbecue potato chips, giving himself an orange-mustache in the process. His feet were up on a coffee table. More food and a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun were on the couch next to him. He wore a colorful Hawaiian shirt; he looked like Don Ho puked on him, actually.

Hovering nervously nearby, was Louis, a small, skinny, bald ferret of a man, who wore jeans and a black shirt and a white tie. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying for trendy or gangster, and frankly didn’t give a shit, either way.

Physically, all the two men had in common was pockmarks and a desire for the other’s ugly body.

And neither one of them seemed to need a sanitary napkin, though a towelette would’ve come in handy for Harry Something. Jesus.

I huddled beneath the window, wondering what I was doing here. Boredom. Curiosity. I shrugged. Time to look in another window or two.

Because they clearly had a captive. That’s what they were doing in the boonies. That’s why they were stocking up on supplies at a convenience store in the middle of night and nowhere. That’s why they were in the market for Kotex. That’s what I’d instinctively, immediately known back at the Welcome Inn.

And in a back window, I saw her. She was naked on a bed in the rustic room, naked but for white panties. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and she was crying, a black-haired, creamy-fleshed beauty in her early twenties.

Obviously, Harry and Louis had nothing sexual in mind for this girl; the reason for her nudity was to help prevent her fleeing. The bed was heavy with blankets, and she’d obviously been keeping under the covers, but right now she was sitting and crying. That time of the month.

I stood in the dark in my dark clothes with a gun in my hand and my back to the log cabin and smiled. When I’d come out into the night, armed like this, it wasn’t to effect a rescue. Whatever else they were, Harry and Louis were dangerous men. If I was going to spend my sleepless night satisfying my curiosity and assuaging my boredom by poking into their business, I had to be ready to pay for my thrills.

But the thing was, I recognized this young woman. Like Harry, I spent a lot of hours during cold nights like this with my eyes frozen to a TV screen. And that’s where I’d seen her: on the tube.

Not an actress, no — an heiress. The daughter of a Chicago media magnate whose name you’d recognize, a guy who inherited money and wheeled-and-dealed his way into more, including one of the satellite super-stations I’d been wasting my eyes on lately. The Windy City’s answer to Ted Turner, right down to boating and womanizing.

His daughter was a little wild, frequently seen in the company of rock stars (she had a tattoo of a star — not Mick Jagger, a five-pointed star star — on her white left breast, which I could see from the window) and was a Betty Ford clinic drop-out. Nonetheless, she was said to be the apple of her daddy’s eye, even if that apple was a tad wormy.

So Harry and Louis had put the snatch on the snatch; fair enough. Question was, was it their own idea, or something the Outfit put them up to?

I sat in the cold and dark and decided, finally, that it just didn’t matter who or what was behind it. My options were to go home, and forget about it, and try (probably without any luck) to get some sleep; or to rescue this somewhat soiled damsel in distress.

What the hell. I had nothing better to do.

I went to the front door and knocked.

No answer.

Shit, I knew somebody was home, so I knocked again.

Louis cracked open the door and peered out and said, “What is it?” and I shot him in the eye.

There was the harsh, shrill sound of a scream — not Louis, who hadn’t had time for that, but the girl in the next room, scared shitless at hearing a gunshot, one would suppose.

I paid no attention to her and pushed the door open — there was no night latch or anything — and stepped over Louis, and pointed the nine millimeter at Harry, whose orange-ringed mouth was frozen open and whose bag of barbecue potato chips dropped to the floor, much as Louis had.

“Don’t, Harry,” I said.

I could see in Harry’s tiny dark eyes behind his thick black-rimmed glasses that he was thinking about the sawed-off shotgun on the couch next to him.

“Who the fuck...”

I walked slowly across the rustic living room toward the couch; in the background, an old colorized movie was playing on their captive’s daddy’s super-station. I plucked the shotgun off the couch with my left hand and tucked it under my arm.

“Hi, Harry,” I said. “Been a while.”

His orange-ringed mouth slowly began to work and his eyes began to blink and he said, “Quarry?”

That was the name he’d known me by.

“Taking the girl your idea, or are you still working for the boys?”

“We... we retired, couple years ago. God. You killed Louis. Louis. You killed Louis...”

“Right. What were you going to put the girl’s body in?”

“Huh?”

“She’s obviously seen you. You were obviously going to kill her, once you got the money. So. What was the plan?”

Harry wiped off his orange barbecue ring. “Got a roll of plastic in the closet. Gonna roll her up in it and dump her in one of the gravel pits around here.”

“I see. Do that number with the plastic right now, for Louis, why don’t you? Okay?”

Tears were rolling down Harry’s stubbly pockmarked cheeks. I didn’t know whether he was crying for Louis or himself or the pair of them, and I wasn’t interested enough to ask.

“Okay,” he said thickly.

I watched him roll his partner up in the sheet of plastic, using duct tape to secure the package; he sobbed as he did it, but he did it. He got blood on his Hawaiian shirt; it didn’t particularly show, though.

“Now I want you to clean up the mess. Go on. You’ll find what you need in the kitchen.”

Dutifully, Harry shuffled over, got a pan of warm water and some rags, and got on his knees and cleaned up the brains and blood. He wasn’t crying anymore. He moved slow but steady, a fat zombie in a colorful shirt.

“Stick the rags in the end of Louis’ plastic home, would you? Thank you.”

Harry did that, then the big man lumbered to his feet, hands in the air, and said, “Now me, huh?”

“I might let you go, Harry. I got nothing against you.”

“Not... not how I remember it.”

I laughed. “You girls leaned on me once. You think I’d kill a person over something that trivial? What kind of guy do you think I am, Harry?”

Harry had sense enough not to answer.

“Come with me,” I said, and with the nine millimeter’s nose to Harry’s temple, I walked him to the door of the bedroom.

“Open it,” I said.

He did.

We went in, Harry first.

The girl was under the covers, holding the blankets and sheets up around her in a combination of illogical modesty and legitimate fear.

Her expression melted into one of confusion mingled with the beginnings of hope and relief, when she saw me.

“I’ve already taken care of the skinny one,” I said. “Now Harry and me are going for a walk. You stay here. I’m going to get you back to your father.”

Her confusion didn’t leave, but she began to smile, wide, like a kid Christmas morning seeing her gifts. Her gift to me was dropping the blankets and sheets to her waist.

“Remember,” I said. “Stay right there.”

I walked Harry out, pulling the bedroom door shut behind me.

“Where are her clothes?”

He nodded to a closet. Same one he’d gotten the plastic out of.

“Good,” I said. “Now let’s go for a walk. Just you and me and Louis.”

“Loo... Louis?”

“Better give Louis a hand, Harry.”

Harry held the plastic-wrapped corpse in his arms like a B-movie monster carrying a starlet. The plastic was spattered with blood, but on the inside. Harry looked like he was going to cry again.

I still had the sawed-off shotgun under my arm, so it was awkward, getting the front door open, but I managed.

“Out on the lake,” I said.

Harry looked at me, his eyes behind the glasses wary, glancing from me to his plastic-wrapped burden and back again.

“We’re going to bury Louis at sea,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Just walk, Harry. Okay? Just walk.”

He walked. I followed behind, nine millimeter in one hand, sawed-off in the other. Harry in his Hawaiian shirt was an oddly comic sight, but I was too busy to be amused. Our feet crunched slightly on the ice. No danger of falling in. Frozen solid. Kids ice-skated out here. But not right now.

We walked a long way. We said not a word, until I halted him about mid-way. The black starry sky was our only witness.

“Put him down, Harry,” I said. The nine millimeter was in my waistband; the shotgun was pointed right at him.

He set his cargo gently down. He stood looking gloomily down at the plastic shroud, like a bear contemplating its own foot caught in a trap.

I blasted both barrels of the shotgun; they blew the quiet night apart and echoed across the frozen lake and rattled the world.

Harry looked at me, stunned.

“What the fuck...?”

“Now unroll Louis and toss him in,” I said, standing near the gaping hole in the ice. “I’m afraid that plastic might float.”

Horrified, the big man did as he was told. Louis slipped down the hole in the ice and into watery nothingness like a turd down the crapper.

“Slick,” I said, admiringly.

“Oh Jesus,” he said.

“Now you,” I said.

“What?”

I had the nine millimeter out again.

“Jump in,” I said. “Water’s fine.”

“Fuck you!”

I went over quickly and pushed the big son of a bitch in. He was flailing, splashing icy water up on me, as I put six bullets in his head, which came apart in pieces, like a rotten melon.

And then he was gone.

Nothing left but the hole in the ice, the water within it making some frothy reddish waves that would die down soon enough.

I gathered the weapons and the plastic and, folding the plastic sheet as I walked, went back to the cabin.

This was reckless, I knew. I shouldn’t be killing people who lived on the same goddamn lake I did. But it was winter, and the bodies wouldn’t turn up for a long time, if ever, and the Outfit had used this part of the world to dump its corpses since Capone was just a mean street kid. Very little chance any of this would come back at me.

Nonetheless, I had taken a risk or two. I ought to get something out of it, other than killing a sleepless night.

I got the girl’s clothes and went in and gave them to her. A heavy-metal t-shirt and designer jeans and Reeboks.

“Did you kill those men?” she said, breathlessly, her eyes dark and glittering. She had her clothes in her lap.

“That’s not important. Get dressed.”

“You’re wonderful. You’re goddamn fucking wonderful.”

“I know,” I said. “Everybody says the same thing. Get dressed.”

She got dressed. I watched her. She was a beautiful piece of ass, no question. The way she was looking at me made it clear she was grateful.

“What can I do for you?” she said, hands on her hips.

“Nothing,” I said. “You’re on the rag.”

That made her laugh. “Other ports in a storm.”

“Maybe later,” I said, and smiled. She looked like AIDS-bait to me. I could be reckless, but not that reckless.

I put her in my car. I hadn’t decided yet whether or not to dump the brown rental Ford. Probably would. I could worry about that later. Right now, I needed to get her to a motel.

She slept in the car. I envied her, and nudged her awake when we reached the motel just inside the Illinois state line.

I’d already checked in. I ushered her in to the shabby little room, its floor space all but taken up by two twin beds, and she sat on the bed and yawned.

“What now?” she said. “You want your reward?”

“Actually, yes,” I said, sitting next to her. “What’s your father’s number?”

“Hey, there’s time for that later...”

“First things first,” I said, and she wrote the number out on the pad by the phone.

I heard the ring, and a male voice said, “Hello?”

I gave her the receiver. “Make sure it’s your father, and tell him you’re all right.”

“Daddy?” she said. She smiled, then she made a face. “I’m fine, I’m fine... the man you sent... what?”

She covered the receiver, eyes confused again. “He says he didn’t send anybody.”

I took the phone. “Good evening, sir. I have your daughter. As you can hear, she’s just fine. Get together one hundred thousand dollars in unmarked, nonsequential tens, twenties and fifties, and wait for the next call.”

I hung up.

She looked at me with wide eyes and wide-open mouth.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “I’m just turning a buck.”

“You bastard!”

I put the duct tape over her mouth, taped her wrists behind her and taped her ankles too, and went over and curled up on the other bed, nine millimeter in my waistband.

And slept like a baby.

Jeffery Deaver has had a rapid and much-deserved rise to the top of the bestseller lists. While his early novels were perhaps less ambitious than those he writes today, they have always been riveting reads, especially those he wrote about Rune, a female police detective living and working in New York City. Seen through her eyes, the urban landscape is a wondrous — and sometimes frightening — place indeed. Manhattan Is My Beat is especially good. These days, he writes such bestsellers as Praying for Sleep; The Bone Collector, which was the basis for the successful movie of the same name; and A Maiden’s Grave. His readership expands with each new novel and with each new short story he writes.

The night went bad fast.

I looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t see any lights but I knew they were after us and it was only a matter of time till I’d see the cops.

Toth started to talk but I told him to shut up and got the Buick up to eighty. The road was empty, nothing but pine trees for miles around.

“Oh, brother,” Toth muttered. I felt his eyes on me but I didn’t even want to look at him, I was so mad.

They were never easy, drugstores.

Because, just watch sometime, when cops make their rounds they cruise drugstores more often than anyplace else. Because of the prescription drugs.

You’d think they’d stake out convenience stores. But those’re a joke and with the closed-circuit TV you’re going to get your picture took, you just are. So nobody who knows the business, I mean really knows it, hits them. And banks, forget banks. Even ATMs. I mean, how much can you clear? Three, four hundred tops? And around here the Fast Cash button gives you twenty bucks. Which tells you something. So why even bother?

No. We wanted cash and that meant a drugstore, even though they can be tricky. Ardmore Drugs. Which is a big store in a little town. Liggett Falls. Sixty miles from Albany and a hundred or so from where Toth and me lived, further west into the mountains. Liggett Falls’s a poor place. You’d think it wouldn’t make sense to hit a store there. But that’s exactly why — because like everywhere else people there need medicine and hair spray and makeup, only they don’t have credit cards. Except maybe a Sears or Penney’s. So they pay cash.

“Oh, brother,” Toth whispered again. “Look.”

And he made me even madder, him saying that. I wanted to shout look at what, you son of a bitch? But then I could see what he was talking about and I didn’t say anything. Up ahead. It was like just before dawn, light on the horizon. Only this was red and the light wasn’t steady. It was like it was pulsing and I knew that they’d got the roadblock up already. This was the only road to the interstate from Liggett Falls. So I should’ve guessed.

“I got an idea,” Toth said. Which I didn’t want to hear but I also wasn’t going to go through another shootout. Sure not at a roadblock, where they was ready for us.

“What?” I snapped.

“There’s a town over there. See those lights? I know a road’ll take us there.”

Toth’s a big guy and he looks calm. Only he isn’t really. He gets shook easy and he now kept turning around, skittish, looking in the back seat. I wanted to slap him and tell him to chill.

“Where’s it?” I asked. “This town?”

“About four, five miles. The turnoff, it ain’t marked. But I know it.”

This was that lousy upstate area where everything’s green. But dirty green, you know. And all the buildings’re gray. These gross little shacks, pickups on blocks. Little towns without even a 7-Eleven. And full of hills they called mountains but weren’t.

Toth cranked down the window and let the cold air in and looked up at the sky. “They can find us with those, you know, satellite things.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You know, they can see you from miles up. I saw it in a movie.”

“You think the state cops do that? Are you nuts?”

This guy, I don’t know why I work with him. And after what happened at the drugstore, I won’t again.

He pointed out where to turn and I did. He said the town was at the base of The Lookout. Well, I remembered passing that on the way to Liggett Falls this afternoon. It was this huge rock a couple hundred feet high. Which if you looked at it right looked like a man’s head, like a profile, squinting. It’d been some kind of big deal to the Indians around here. Blah, blah, blah. He told me but I didn’t pay no attention. It was spooky, that weird face, and I looked once and kept on driving. I didn’t like it. I’m not really superstitious but sometimes I am.

“Winchester,” he said now, meaning what the name of the town was. Five, six thousand people. We could find an empty house, stash the car in a garage and just wait out the search. Wait till tomorrow afternoon — Sunday — when all the weekenders were driving back to Boston and New York and we’d be lost in the crowd.

I could see The Lookout up ahead, not really a shape, mostly this blackness where the stars weren’t. And then the guy on the floor in the back started to moan all of a sudden and just about give me a heart attack.

“You. Shut up back there.” I slapped the seat and the guy in the back went quiet.

What a night.

We’d got to the drugstore fifteen minutes before it closed. Like you ought to do. ’Cause mosta the customers’re gone and a lot of the clerks’ve left and people’re tired and when you push a Glock or Smitty into their faces they’ll do just about anything you ask.

Except tonight.

We had our masks down and walked in slow, Toth getting the manager out of his little office; a fat guy started crying and that made me mad, a grown man doing that. He kept a gun on the customers and the clerks and I was telling the cashier, this kid, to open the tills and, Jesus, he had an attitude. Like he’d seen all of those Steven Seagal movies or something. A little kiss on the cheek with the Smitty and he changed his mind and started moving. Cussing me out but he was moving. I was counting the bucks as we were going along from one till to the next and sure enough we were up to about three thousand when I heard this noise and turned around and what it was, Toth was knocking over a rack of chips. I mean, Jesus. He’s getting Doritos!

I look away from the kid for just a second and what’s he do? He pitches this bottle. Only not at me. Out the window. Bang, it breaks. There’s no alarm I can hear but half of them are silent anyway and I’m really pissed. I could’ve killed him. Right there. Only I didn’t. Toth did.

He shoots the kid, blam, blam, blam. And everybody else is scattering and he turns around and shoots another one of the clerks and a customer, just bang, not thinking or nothing. Just for no reason. Hit this girl clerk in the leg but this guy, this customer, well, he was dead. You could see. And I’m going, What’re you doing, what’re you doing? And he’s going, Shut up, shut up, shut up... And we’re like we’re swearing at each other when we figured out we hadta get outa there.

So we left. Only what happens is, there’s a cop outside. That’s why the kid threw the bottle. And he’s outa his car. So we grab another customer, this guy by the door, and we use him like a shield and get outside. And there’s the cop, he’s holding his gun up, looking at the customer we’ve got, and the cop, he’s saying, It’s okay, it’s okay, just take it easy.

And I couldn’t believe it, Toth shot him too. I don’t know whether he killed him but there was blood so he wasn’t wearing a vest, it didn’t look like, and I could’ve killed Toth there on the spot. Because why’d he do that? He didn’t have to.

We threw the guy, the customer, into the back seat and tied him up with tape. I kicked out the taillights and burned rubber outa there. We made it out of Liggett Falls.

That was all just a half hour ago but it seems like weeks.

And now we were driving down this highway through a million pine trees. Heading right for The Lookout.

Every generation produces one writer who stands a given genre on its head. The late Stanley Ellin (1936–1986) certainly did that with crime fiction. There was his style, as pithy and poignant as any literary writer’s; there were his ideas, ever the equal of such great idea men as Roald Dahl and Saki; and there was his world view, which was every bit as complex as some of his darker protagonists. For all this, though, he had a sense of everyday life and everyday people that few in the genre ever came close to matching. Perhaps this was because, early in his life, he was a steelworker, a dairy farmer, and a teacher. While he is primarily thought of as a short-story writer, he wrote a number of excellent novels, among them The Eighth Circle and Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall.

This is what happened, starting that Saturday in October.

That morning Morrison’s wife needed the station wagon for the kids, so Morrison took the interstate bus into downtown Manhattan. At the terminal there, hating to travel by subway, he got into a cab. When the cabbie turned around and asked, “Where to, mister?” Morrison did a double take. “Slade?” he said. “Bill Slade?”

“You better believe it,” said the cabbie. “So it’s Larry Morrison. Well, what do you know.”

Now, what Morrison knew was that up to two or three years ago, Slade had been — as he himself still was — one of the several thousand comfortably fixed bees hiving in the glass-and-aluminum Majestico complex in Greenbush, New Jersey. There were 80,000 Majestico employees around the world, but the Greenbush complex was the flagship of the works, the executive division. And Slade had been there a long, long time, moving up to an assistant managership on the departmental level.

Then the department was wiped out in a reorganizational crunch, and Slade, along with some others in it, had been handed his severance money and his hat. No word had come back from him after he finally sold his house and pulled out of town with his wife and kid to line up, as he put it, something good elsewhere. It was a shock to Morrison to find that the something good elsewhere meant tooling a cab around Manhattan.

He said in distress, “Jeez, I didn’t know, Bill — none of the Hillcrest Road bunch had any idea—”

“That’s what I was hoping for,” said Slade. “It’s all right, man. I always had a feeling I’d sooner or later meet up with one of the old bunch. Now that it happened, I’m just as glad it’s you.” A horn sounding behind the cab prompted Slade to get it moving. “Where to, Larry?”

“Columbus Circle. The Coliseum.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. The Majestico Trade Exposition. It’s that time of the year, right?”

“Right,” said Morrison.

“And it’s good politics to show up, right? Maybe one of the brass’ll take notice.”

“You know how it is, Bill.”

“I sure do.” Slade pulled up at a red light and looked around at Morrison. “Say, you’re not in any tearing hurry, are you? You could have time for a cup of coffee?”

There was a day-old stubble on Slade’s face. The cap perched on the back of his graying hair was grimy and sweatstained. Morrison felt unsettled by the sight. Besides, Slade hadn’t been any real friend, just a casual acquaintance living a few blocks farther up Hillcrest Road. One of the crowd on those occasional weekend hunting trips of the Hillcrest Maybe Gun and Rod Club. The “Maybe” had been inserted in jest to cover those bad hunting and fishing weekends when it temporarily became a poker club.

“Well,” Morrison said, “this happens to be one of those heavy Saturdays when—”

“Look, I’ll treat you to the best Danish in town. Believe me, Larry, there’s some things I’d like to get off my chest.”

“Oh, in that case,” said Morrison.

There was a line of driverless cabs in front of a cafeteria on Eighth Avenue. Slade pulled up behind them and led the way into the cafeteria which was obviously a cabbies’ hangout. They had a little wrestling match about the check at the counter, a match Slade won, and, carrying the tray with the coffee and Danish, he picked out a corner table for them.

The coffee was pretty bad, the Danish, as advertised, pretty good. Slade said through a mouthful of it, “And how is Amy?” Amy was Morrison’s wife.

“Fine, fine,” Morrison said heartily. “And how is Gertrude?”

“Gretchen.”

“That’s right. Gretchen. Stupid of me. But it’s been so long, Bill—”

“It has. Almost three years. Anyhow, last I heard of her Gretchen’s doing all right.”

“Last you heard of her?”

“We separated a few months ago. She just couldn’t hack it any more.” Slade shrugged. “My fault mostly. Getting turned down for one worthwhile job after another didn’t sweeten the disposition. And jockeying a cab ten, twelve hours a day doesn’t add sugar to it. So she and the kid have their own little flat out in Queens, and she got herself some kind of cockamamie receptionist job with a doctor there. Helps eke out what I can give her. How’s your pair, by the way? Scott and Morgan, isn’t it? Big fellows now, I’ll bet.”

“Thirteen and ten,” Morrison said. “They’re fine. Fine.”

“Glad to hear it. And the old neighborhood? Any changes?”

“Not really. Well, we did lose a couple of the old-timers. Mike Costanzo and Gordie McKechnie. Remember them?”

“Who could forget Mike, the world’s worst poker player? But McKechnie?”

“That split-level, corner of Hillcrest and Maple. He’s the one got himself so smashed that time in the duck blind that he went overboard.”

“Now I remember. And that fancy shotgun of his, six feet underwater in the mud. Man, that sobered him up fast. What happened to him and Costanzo?”

“Well,” Morrison said uncomfortably, “they were both in Regional Customer Services. Then somebody on the top floor got the idea that Regional and National should be tied together, and some people in both offices had to be let go. I think Mike’s in Frisco now, he’s got a lot of family there. Nobody’s heard from Gordie. I mean—” Morrison cut it short in embarrassment.

“I know what you mean. No reason to get red in the face about it, Larry.” Slade eyed Morrison steadily over his coffee cup. “Wondering what happened to me?”

“Well, to be frank—”

“Nothing like being frank. I put in two years making the rounds, lining up employment agencies, sending out enough résumés to make a ten-foot pile of paper. No dice. Ran out of unemployment insurance, cash, and credit. There it is, short and sweet.”

“But why? With the record you piled up at Majestico—”

“Middle level. Not top echelon. Not decision-making stuff. Middle level, now and forever. Just like everybody else on Hillcrest Road. That’s why we’re on Hillcrest Road. Notice how the ones who make it to the top echelon always wind up on Greenbush Heights? And always after only three or four years? But after you’re middle level fifteen years the way I was—”

Up to now Morrison had been content with his twelve years in Sales Analysis. Admittedly no ball of fire, he had put in some rough years after graduation from college — mostly as salesman on commission for some product or other — until he had landed the job at Majestico. Now he felt disoriented by what Slade was saying. And he wondered irritably why Slade had to wear that cap while he was eating. Trying to prove he was just another one of these cabbies here? He wasn’t. He was a college man, had owned one of the handsomest small properties on Hillcrest Road, had been a respected member of the Majestico executive team.

Morrison said, “I still don’t understand. Are you telling me there’s no company around needs highly qualified people outside decision-making level? Ninety percent of what goes on anyplace is our kind of job, Bill. You know that.”

“I do. But I’m forty-five years old, Larry. And you want to know what I found out? By corporation standards I died five years ago on my fortieth birthday. Died, and didn’t even know it. Believe me, it wasn’t easy to realize that at first. It got a lot easier after a couple of years’ useless job-hunting.”

Morrison was 46 and was liking this less and less. “But the spot you’re in is only temporary, Bill. There’s still—”

“No, no. Don’t do that, Larry. None of that somewhere-over-the-rainbow line. I finally looked my situation square in the eye, I accepted it, I made the adjustment. With luck, what’s in the cards for me is maybe some day owning my own cab. I buy lottery tickets, too, because after all somebody’s got to win that million, right? And the odds there are just as good as my chances of ever getting behind a desk again at the kind of money Majestico was paying me.” Again he was looking steadily at Morrison over his coffee cup. “That was the catch, Larry. That money they were paying me.”

“They pay well, Bill. Say, is that what happened? You didn’t think you were getting your price and made a fuss about it? So when the department went under you were one of the—”

“Hell, no,” Slade cut in sharply. “You’ve got it backwards, man. They do pay well. But did it ever strike you that maybe they pay too well?”

“Too well?”

“For the kind of nine-to-five paperwork I was doing? The donkey work?”

“You were an assistant head of department, Bill.”

“One of the smarter donkeys, that’s all. Look, what I was delivering to the company had to be worth just so much to them. But when every year — every first week in January — there’s an automatic cost-of-living increase handed me I am slowly and steadily becoming a luxury item. Consider that after fourteen-fifteen years of those jumps every year, I am making more than some of those young hotshot executives in the International Division. I am a very expensive proposition for Majestico, Larry. And replaceable by somebody fifteen years younger who’ll start for a hell of a lot less.”

“Now hold it. Just hold it. With the inflation the way it is, you can’t really object to those cost-of-living raises.”

Slade smiled thinly. “Not while I was getting them, pal. It would have meant a real scramble without them. But suppose I wanted to turn them down just to protect my job? You know that can’t be done. Those raises are right there in the computer for every outfit like Majestico. But nobody in management has to like living with it. And what came to me after I was canned was that they were actually doing something about it.”

“Ah, look,” Morrison said heatedly. “You weren’t terminated because you weren’t earning your keep. There was a departmental reorganization. You were just a victim of it.”

“I was. The way those Incas or Aztecs or whatever used to lay out the living sacrifice and stick the knife into him. Don’t keep shaking your head, Larry. I have thought this out long and hard. There’s always a reorganization going on in one of the divisions. Stick a couple of departments together, change their names, dump a few personnel who don’t fit into the new table of organization.

“But the funny thing, Larry, is that the ones who usually seem to get dumped are the middle-aged, middle-level characters with a lot of seniority. The ones whose take-home pay put them right up there in the high-income brackets. Like me. My secretary lost out in that reorganization too, after eighteen years on the job. No complaints about her work. But she ran into what I did when I told them I’d be glad to take a transfer to any other department. No dice. After all, they could hire two fresh young secretaries for what they were now paying her.”

“And you think this is company policy?” Morrison demanded.

“I think so. I mean, what the hell are they going to do? Come to me and say, ‘Well, Slade, after fifteen years on the job you’ve priced yourself right out of the market, so good-bye, baby?’ But those reorganizations? Beautiful. ‘Too bad, Slade, but under the new structure we’re going to have to lose some good men.’ That’s the way it was told to me, Larry. And that’s what I believed until I woke up to the facts of life.”

The piece of Danish in Morrison’s mouth was suddenly dry and tasteless. He managed to get it down with an effort. “Bill, I don’t want to say it — I hate to say it — but that whole line sounds paranoid.”

“Does it? Then think it over, Larry. You still in Sales Analysis?”

“Yes.”

“I figured. Now just close your eyes and make a head count of your department. Then tell me how many guys forty-five or over are in it.”

Morrison did some unpalatable calculation. “Well, there’s six of us. Including me.”

“Out of how many?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Uh-huh. Funny how the grass manages to stay so green, isn’t it?”

It was funny, come to think of it. No, funny wasn’t the word. Morrison said weakly, “Well, a couple of the guys wanted to move out to the Coast, and you know there’s departmental transfers in and out—”

“Sure there are. But the real weeding comes when there’s one of those little reorganizations. You’ve seen it yourself in your own department more than once. Juggle around some of those room dividers. Move some desks here and there. Change a few descriptions in the company directory. The smokescreen. But behind that smoke there’s some high-priced old faithfuls getting called upstairs to be told that, well, somebody’s got to go, Jack, now that things are all different, and guess whose turn it is.”

Slade’s voice had got loud enough to be an embarrassment. Morrison pleaded: “Can’t we keep it down, Bill? Anyhow, to make villains out of everybody on the top floor—”

Slade lowered his voice, but the intensity was still there. “Who said they were villains? Hell, in their place I’d be doing the same thing. For that matter, if I was head of personnel for any big outfit, I wouldn’t take anybody my age on the payroll either. Not if I wanted to keep my cushy job in personnel, I wouldn’t.” The wind suddenly seemed to go out of him. “Sorry, Larry. I thought I had everything under control, but when I saw you — when I saw it was one of the old Hillcrest bunch — it was too much to keep corked up. But one thing—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want anybody else back there in on this. Know what I mean?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Don’t just toss off the ‘oh, sure’ like that. This is the biggest favor you could do me — not to let anybody else in the old crowd hear about me, not even Amy. No post-mortems up and down Hillcrest for good old Bill Slade. One reason I let myself cut loose right now was because you always were a guy who liked to keep his mouth tight shut. I’m counting on you to do that for me, Larry. I want your solemn word on it.”

“You’ve got it, Bill. You know that.”

“I do. And what the hell” — Slade reached across the table and punched Morrison on the upper arm — “any time they call you in to tell you there’s a reorganization of Sales Analysis coming, it could turn out you’re the guy elected to be department head of the new layout. Right?”

Morrison tried to smile. “No chance of that, Bill.”

“Well, always look on the bright side, Larry. As long as there is one.”

Outside the Coliseum there was another of those little wrestling matches about paying the tab — Slade refusing to take anything at all for the ride, Morrison wondering, as he eyed the meter, whether sensitivity here called for a standard tip, a huge tip, or none at all — and again Slade won.

Morrison was relieved to get away from him, but, as he soon found, the relief was only temporary. It was a fine Indian summer day, but somehow the weather now seemed bleak and threatening. And doing the Majestico show, looking over the displays, passing the time of day with recognizable co-workers turned out to be a strain. It struck him that it hadn’t been that atrocious cap on Slade’s head that had thrown him, it had been the gray hair showing under the cap. And there was very little gray hair to be seen on those recognizable ones here at the Majestico show.

Morrison took a long time at the full-length mirror in the men’s room, trying to get an objective view of himself against the background of the others thronging the place. The view he got was depressing. As far as he could see, in this company he looked every minute of his 46 years.

Back home he stuck to his word and told Amy nothing about his encounter with Slade. Any temptation to was readily suppressed by his feeling that once he told her that much he’d also find himself exposing his morbid reaction to Slade’s line of thinking. And that would only lead to her being terribly understanding and sympathetic while, at the same time, she’d be moved to some heavy humor about his being such a born worrier. He was a born worrier, he was the first to acknowledge it, but he always chafed under that combination of sympathy and teasing she offered him when he confided his worries to her. They really made quite a list, renewable each morning on rising. The family’s health, the condition of the house, the car, the lawn, the bank balance — the list started there and seemed to extend to infinity.

Yet, as he was also the first to acknowledge, this was largely a quirk of personality — he was, as his father had been, somewhat sobersided and humorless — and, quirks aside, life was a generally all-right proposition. As it should be when a man can lay claim to a pretty and affectionate wife, and a couple of healthy young sons, and a sound home in a well-tended neighborhood. And a good steady job to provide the wherewithal.

At least, up to now.

Morrison took a long time falling asleep that night, and at three in the morning came bolt awake with a sense of foreboding. The more he lay there trying to get back to sleep, the more oppressive grew the foreboding. At four o’clock he padded into his den and sat down at his desk to work out a precise statement of the family’s balance sheet.

No surprises there, just confirmation of the foreboding. For a long time now, he and Amy had been living about one month ahead of income which, he suspected, was true of most families along Hillcrest Road. The few it wasn’t true of were most likely at least a year ahead of income and sweating out the kind of indebtedness he had always carefully avoided.

But considering that his assets consisted of a home with ten years of mortgage payments yet due on it and a car with two years of payments still due, everything depended on income. The family savings account was, of course, a joke. And the other two savings accounts — one in trust for each boy to cover the necessary college educations — had become a joke as college tuition skyrocketed. And, unfortunately, neither boy showed any signs of being scholarship material.

In a nutshell, everything depended on income. This month’s income. Going by Slade’s experience in the job market — and Slade had been the kind of competent, hardworking nine-to-five man any company should have been glad to take on — this meant that everything depended on the job with Majestico. Everything. Morrison had always felt that landing the job in the first place was the best break of his life. Whatever vague ambitions he had in his youth were dissolved very soon after he finished college and learned that out here in the real world he rated just about average in all departments, and that his self-effacing, dogged application to his daily work was not going to have him climbing any ladders to glory.

Sitting there with those pages of arithmetic scattered around the desk, Morrison, his stomach churning, struggled with the idea that the job with Majestico was suddenly no longer a comfortable, predictable way of life but for someone his age, and with his makeup and qualifications, a dire necessity. At five o’clock, exhausted but more wide-awake than ever, he went down to the kitchen for a bottle of beer. Pills were not for him. He had always refused to take even an aspirin tablet except under extreme duress, but beer did make him sleepy, and a bottle of it on an empty stomach, he estimated, was the prescription called for in this case. It turned out that he was right about it.

In the days and weeks that followed, this became a ritual: the abrupt waking in the darkest hours of the morning, the time at his desk auditing his accounts and coming up with the same dismal results, and the bottle of beer which, more often than not, allowed for another couple of hours of troubled sleep before the alarm clock went off.

Amy, the soundest of sleepers, took no notice of this, so that was all right. And by exercising a rigid self-control he managed to keep her unaware of those ragged nerves through the daylight hours as well, although it was sometimes unbearably hard not to confide in her. Out of a strange sense of pity, he found himself more sensitive and affectionate to her than ever. High-spirited, a little scatterbrained, leading a full life of her own what with the boys, the Parent-Teachers Club, and half a dozen community activities, she took this as no less than her due.

Along the way, as an added problem, Morrison developed some physical tics which would show up when least expected. A sudden tremor of the hands, a fluttering of one eyelid which he had to learn to quickly cover up. The most grotesque tic of all, however — it really unnerved him the few times he experienced it — was a violent, uncontrollable chattering of the teeth when he had sunk to a certain point of absolute depression. This only struck him when he was at his desk during the sleepless times considering the future. At such times he had a feeling that those teeth were diabolically possessed by a will of their own, chattering away furiously as if he had just been plunged into icy water.

In the office he took refuge in the lowest of low profiles. Here the temptation was to check on what had become of various colleagues who had over the years departed from the company, but this, Morrison knew, might raise the question of why he had, out of a clear sky, brought up the subject. The subject was not a usual part of the day’s conversational currency in the department. The trouble was that Greenbush was, of course, a company town, although in the most modern and pleasant way. Majestico had moved there from New York 20 years before; the town had grown around the company complex. And isolated as it was in the green heartland of New Jersey, it had only Majestico to offer. Anyone leaving the company would therefore have to sell his home, like it or not, and relocate far away. Too far, at least, to maintain old ties. It might have been a comfort, Morrison thought, to drop in on someone in his category who had been terminated by Majestico and who could give him a line on what had followed. Someone other than Slade. But there was no one like this in his book.

The one time he came near bringing his desperation to the surface was at the Thanksgiving entertainment given by the student body of the school his sons attended. The entertainment was a well-deserved success, and after it, at the buffet in the school gym, Morrison was driven to corner Frank Lassman, assistant principal of the school and master of ceremonies at the entertainment, and to come out with a thought that had been encouragingly flickering through his mind during the last few insomniac sessions.

“Great show,” he told Lassman. “Fine school altogether. It showed tonight. It must be gratifying doing your kind of work.”

“At times like this it is,” Lassman said cheerfully. “But there are times—”

“Even so. You know, I once had ideas about going into teaching.”

“Financially,” said Lassman, “I suspect you did better by not going into it. It has its rewards, but the big money isn’t one of them.”

“Well,” Morrison said very carefully, “suppose I was prepared to settle for the rewards it did offer? A man my age, say. Would there be any possibilities of getting into the school system?”

“What’s your particular line? Your subject?”

“Oh, numbers. Call it arithmetic and math.”

Lassman shook his head in mock reproach. “And where were you when we really needed you? Four or five years ago we were sending out search parties for anyone who could get math across to these kids. The last couple of years, what with the falling school population, we’re firing, not hiring. It’s the same everywhere, not that I ever thought I’d live to see the day. Empty school buildings all over the country.”

“I see,” said Morrison.

So the insomnia, tensions, and tics continued to worsen until suddenly one day — as if having hit bottom, there was no place for him to go but up — Morrison realized that he was coming back to normal. He began to sleep through the night, was increasingly at ease during the day, found himself cautiously looking on the bright side. He still had his job and all that went with it, that was the objective fact. He could only marvel that he had been thrown so far off balance by that chance meeting with Slade.

He had been giving himself his own bad time, letting his imagination take over as it had. The one thing he could be proud of was that where someone else might have broken down under the strain, he had battled it out all by himself and had won. He was not a man to hand himself trophies, but in this case he felt he had certainly earned one.

A few minutes before five on the first Monday in December, just when he was getting ready to pack it in for the day, Pettengill, departmental head of Sales Analysis, stopped at his desk. Pettengill, a transfer from the Cleveland office a couple of years before, was rated as a comer, slated sooner or later for the top floor. A pleasant-mannered, somewhat humorless man, he and Morrison had always got along well.

“Just had a session with the brass upstairs,” he confided. “A round table with Cobb presiding.” Cobb was the executive vice president in charge of Planning and Structure for the Greenbush complex. “Looks like our department faces a little reorganization. We tie in with Service Analysis and that’ll make it Sales and Service Evaluation. What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?”

“No, I’m all right,” said Morrison.

“Looks like you could stand some fresh air. Anyhow, probably because you’re senior man here, Cobb wants to see you in his office first thing tomorrow morning. Nine sharp. You know how he is about punctuality, Larry. Make sure you’re on time.”

“Yes,” said Morrison.

He didn’t sleep at all that night. The next morning, a few minutes before nine, still wearing his overcoat and with dark glasses concealing his reddened and swollen eyes, he took the elevator directly to the top floor. There, out of sight on the landing of the emergency staircase, he drew the barrel and stock of his shotgun from beneath the overcoat and assembled the gun. His pockets bulged with 12-gauge shells. He loaded one into each of the gun’s twin barrels. Then concealing the assembled gun beneath the coat as well as he could, he walked across the hall into Cobb’s office.

Miss Bernstein, Cobb’s private secretary, acted out of sheer blind, unthinking instinct when she caught sight of the gun. She half-rose from her desk as if to bar the way to the inner office. She took the first charge square in the chest. Cobb, at his desk, caught the next in the face. Reloading, Morrison exited through the door to the executive suite where Cobb’s assistants had been getting ready for the morning’s work and were now in a panic at the sound of the shots.

Morrison fired both barrels one after another, hitting one man in the throat and jaw, grazing another. Reloading again, he moved like an automaton out into the corridor where a couple of security men, pistols at the ready, were coming from the staircase on the run. Morrison cut down the first one, but the other, firing wildly, managed to plant one bullet in his forehead. Morrison must have been dead, the medical examiner later reported, before he even hit the floor.

The police, faced with five dead and one wounded, put in two months on the case and could come up with absolutely no answers, no explanations at all. The best they could do in their final report was record that “the perpetrator, for reasons unknown, etc., etc.”

Management, however, could and did take action. They learned that the Personnel Department psychologist who had put Morrison through the battery of personality-evaluation tests given every applicant for a job was still there with the company. Since he had transparently failed in those tests to sound out the potentially aberrant behavior of the subject, he was, despite sixteen years of otherwise acceptable service, terminated immediately.

Two weeks later, his place in Personnel was filled by a young fellow named McIntyre who, although the starting pay was a bit low, liked the looks of Greenbush and, with his wife in complete agreement, saw it as just the kind of quiet, pleasant community in which to settle down permanently.

There is no more overused word in our contemporary lexicon than legendary. Yet how else does one describe fiction writer, opinion-shaper, tilter-at-windmills, and social critic Harlan Ellison? Not that his “legend” is always a good thing. Too often it gets in the way of his accomplishments as a short-story writer and novelist. He first came to prominence in the early 1960s with a first-rate collection of stories called Gentleman Junkie. Dorothy Parker was nice enough to give it a much-deserved rave in Esquire magazine. He has since spent time as a TV scriptwriter, newspaper columnist, speaker, and occasional anthology editor. But most important of all, he has continued to write fiction that is singular of voice, aspiration, and accomplishment. At his best, he is one of the two or three best short story writers on our blue-green little world, and this is true whether he is writing science fiction, fantasy, or — as here — suspense.

If God (or Whoever’s in charge) had wanted Dr. Netta Bernstein to continue living, He (or She) wouldn’t have made it so easy for me to kill her.

The night before, she had said again, do it again, we can do it once more, can’t we; and her thick, auburn hair smelled fresh and clean and it flowed across the pillows like the sunsets we get these days. The kind that burn the eyes they’re so beautiful. Our grandparents never saw such wonders of melting copper, flickering at the edges, sliding into darkness at the horizon. Exquisite beyond belief, created by pollution. Smog produces that kind of gorgeous sunset. Grandeur, created by imminent destruction. Her hair burned and slid into darkness and I buried my face in it and we made love and I didn’t make any mistakes.

And the next day she acted as if she didn’t know me.

Talked to me as though I were one of the test children she had in for her perception analyses. I felt waves of actual dislike coming from her. “Netta,” I said, “what’s the matter? Did I say something?”

She looked back at me with the expression of someone who has been asked for her driver’s license or other identification at a bank where she has had an account for sixteen years. I was a troublesome new teller, a trainee, an upstart stealing her time, impertinent and callow. “Duncaster,” she said, calling me by my last name, “I have work to do. Why don’t you go on about your business.” The night before she had called me Jimmy a hundred times in a minute.

She pretended not to know what I was talking about. I tried to be polite referring to what had happened between us. I didn’t want to use the wrong words, but there were no words she responded to. It was as if that bed, and the two of us on it, had never existed. I couldn’t believe she could be that brutal. I left the office early that day.

And the next day she hung me out to dry. It was even more brutal than the day before. The day before, it had only been obvious dislike, go on about your business, Duncaster. But the next day we were mortal enemies. Like ancient antagonists from some primordial swamp, she was after me, and I knew it. I can’t explain how I knew, I simply understood somewhere deep in the blood and bones that this woman was determined to rip out my throat.

Or perhaps I can explain it.

Take the film they made of Jaws. That is a terrifying film. It collapses entire audiences, and not merely because of the cinematic tricks. People in the middle of Kansas, people who’ve never even seen an ocean or a shark, go into cardiac arrest. Why should that be? There are terrors much closer to us — muggers on the streets, a positive biopsy report, being smashed to pudding in a freeway accident — terrors that can reach us; why should we be so petrified by that shark? I reject abstractions: the vagina dentatus, that paranoid hobgoblin of Freudian shadow-myth; the simplicity of our recoiling from something filled with teeth, an eating machine. I have another theory.

The shark is one of the few life forms that has come down to the present virtually unchanged from the Devonian. So few: the cockroach, the horseshoe crab, the nautilus, the coelacanth — probably older than the dinosaurs. The shark.

When we were still aquatic creatures... there was the shark. And even today, in the blood that boils through us, the blood whose constituency is the same as sea water, in the blood and somewhere deep in our racial memory, there is still the remembrance of the shark. Of swimming away from that inexorable eating machine, of crawling up onto the land to be safe from it, of vowing never to return to the warm seas where the teeth can reach us.

When we see the shark, we understand that that is one of the dreadful furies that drove us to become human beings. Natural enemy from beyond the curtain of time, from beneath the killing darkness. Natural enemies.

Perhaps I can explain how I knew, that next day, that Netta Bernstein and I were blood enemies.

The moment I walked into the conference room and saw her sitting next to Sloan — a clipboard fat with charts lying on the table in front of her — I knew she was lying in wait for me. The teeth, the warm seas, the eating machines that had followed us onto the land. And in that instant, I now realize, I first decided to kill her.

You have to understand how it is with a major toy company, how it works in the corporate way; otherwise it doesn’t make sense... the killing of Netta Bernstein.

Fighting my way to the top at the MyToy Corporation had been the commitment of ten years of my life. It wouldn’t have been any different at Mattel or Marx or Fisher-Price or Ideal or Hasbro or Kenner or Mego or Playskool or even Creative Playthings. The race is always to make The Big Breakthrough, to come up with the new toy that sweeps the field before the competition can work up a knockoff imitation. Barbie, G.I. Joe, Hot Wheels, they made millions for one man and one company because they were The Big Breakthroughs. In an industry where sixty percent of each year’s product is brand-new, has to be brand-new because the kids have a saturation/boredom threshold that is not to be believed, it is the guy with The Big Breakthrough who gets to be Vice President of Product Planning, at $50,000 a year.

I was Director of Marketing Research. Gumball, Destruction Derby, Change-A-Face, those had been my weapons in the fight toward the $50,000 plateau. MyToy was one of the big five and I’d been on the rise for ten years.

But the last four ideas I’d hawked to top management had either been rejected or been put into production and bombed. The fashion-doll line had been too sophisticated — and the recession had hit; there was backlash against opulence, conspicuous consumption; and the feminist movement had come out strong against what they called “training little girls to be empty-headed clotheshorses.” Dinosaur had been too impractical to produce at a reasonable per-unit cost. Pretesting had shown that kids rejected Peggy Puffin as being “ugly,” even though parents found the packaging attractive; they’d buy it, but the kids wouldn’t play with it. And the lousy sales reports on Mother’s Helper had verified a negative transference; old learning habits had generally inhibited learning new techniques. It was what the president of MyToy, Sloan, had called “disastrously counterproductive.” And I’d begun to smell the ambivalence about me. Then the doubts. Then the veiled antagonisms. The dismissals, the offhand rejections of trial balloons I’d floated. And now there was even open hostility. I was at the crunch point.

Everything was tied up in the two new projects I’d worked out with R&D. The Can-Do Chipper and the Little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes doll. Research & Development had gotten the approval to put them into preliminary design, both aimed at pre-school development markets, and Netta Bernstein had tested them in the MyToy play therapy facilities.

MyToy was the only major toy company in America to maintain a full-time staff of child and research psychologists. Netta headed the team. The prototypes had been sent to her for live evaluation with test kids. The reports filled that clipboard. Fifty thou filled that clipboard. And I knew she was out to get me.

Sloan wouldn’t look at me. I went down the length of the conference table, took an empty seat between Dixon and Schwann; I was bracketed by cost accountants, a pair of minor sales potential vassals. The seat on the right hand of Brian Sloan, God of MyToy, the seat I’d held for almost ten years, was occupied by Ostlander, the hungry little turncoat from Ideal who’d come over, bringing with him design secrets worth a fortune. Not The Big Breakthrough, but enough knockoff data to pay his way to the other side.

And on the left hand of God sat Netta Bernstein.

My future lay before her fastened tight in the clipboard. Her tests with the kids would make or break me. And the night before last she had said she loved me. And the day before she had told me to go away. And today I smelled the killing darkness of the Devonian seas.

The first hour was marking time. Sales reports, prospectus for third-quarter production, a presentation about the proposed Lexington, Kentucky, plant site, odds and ends. Then Sloan said we’d hear Netta’s test results on the new designs. She never looked at me.

“I’ll begin with the big dolls for preschoolers,” she said, releasing the clip and removing the first batch of reports. “They all reach or exceed the expectations projected by prelim. They have the ‘kid appeal’ Mr. Sloan discussed last Thursday, with one small modification on the shopper doll. The mother model. I found, in giving the dolls to six selected groups of test children — eight in each group — that the pocket on the apron was ignored completely. The children had no use for it, and I think it can be eliminated to the advantage of the item.”

Sloan looked at me. “Jimmy,” he said, “what would that mean in terms of lowering the per-unit cost of the mother shopper?”

I already had my calculator out and was running the figures. “Uh, that would be... three cents per unit on a projected run of—” I looked at Schwann; he scribbled 3 mil on his pad. “A run of three million units: ninety thousand dollars.” It had been a most ordinary question, and an ordinary answer.

Netta Bernstein, without looking at me, said to Sloan, “I believe that figure is incorrect. The per-unit saving would be closer to 4.6 cents, for a total of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars.”

Sloan didn’t answer. He just looked at Schwann and Dixon. They both nodded rapidly, like a pair of those Woolworth’s cork birds that dip their beaks into a glass of water and then sit upright again. It would have been pointless to say the three-cents-per-unit figure had been given to me by prelim the week before and that Netta had obviously gotten more up-to-date stats on the project. It would have been pointless, not only because Sloan didn’t like to hear excuses, but because Netta had clearly set out to mousetrap me. Cost stats were not her area, never had been, never should be; yet she had them. Chance? I doubted it. Either way, I looked like a doughnut.

There was a hefty chunk of silence, and then Netta went on to the test results of three other proposals, none of them mine. On one of them the changes would have been impractical, on the second the kids simply didn’t like the toy, and on the third the changes would have been too expensive.

Then she was down to the last two sheafs of notes, and I smelled the warm Devonian seas again.

How I killed her was slovenly, sloppily, untidily, random, and rumpled.

As she reached into the clothes closet for her bathrobe I pushed her inside and tried to strangle her. She fought me off and started to come out and I pushed her back. The clothes rack bar fell out of its brackets and we were lying in a heap on the floor. I hit her a couple of times and she hit me back, even harder than I’d hit her. Finally, I grabbed the plastic clothing bag from a dress fresh from the dry cleaners, and suffocated her with it. Then I went into her bathroom and vomited up the prime rib and spinach.

I could feel Sloan’s eyes on me as she launched into the recitation of the problems inherent in producing the Can-Do Chipper. The toy was a preschool game that flipped a group of colored chips into the air when the child stomped on a foot pedal. The chips came in four distinct shapes and colors, four of each, with decals on them of bees, birds, fishes, and flowers. The object was for the child to grab as many of his designated decal chips as possible. Some of the squares were yellow with bees, some of the circles were red with flowers, some of the triangles were blue with birds, some of the stars were green with fishes. But some stars had bees on them, some circles had birds on them... and so forth. So a child had to identify in that instant the chips were in the air not only its proper decal, but its shape and its color as well.

Netta had given the game to ten groups of four kids each, for “can-do” testing. She had left them alone in the big playroom on the third floor of the Research & Development wing. One needed a yellow color-coded badge to get onto the third floor, and a top-clearance red dot in the center of the yellow badge to get into that wing.

The children had not responded to the game as I’d indicated they would. They ignored the decals entirely, set up the rules the way they wanted to play it, and simply caught shapes or colors. The cost analysis people said we’d save twenty-five thousand dollars by omitting the decals, and I thought I was home free; but Netta added what I thought was a gratuitous observation: “I think the sales potential of this item is drastically reduced by the loss of the decals. There won’t be any ready-to-hand advertising lures. In fact, when we gave each child a list of toys they could have for participating in the tests, and this was when we first brought them in, the Can-Do Chipper was in the lowest percentile of choice. And after we observed them through the one-way mirrors playing with the game, and after we showed them the cartoons and the commercials and then told them we’d made an error on the forms and they should now pick their prizes, it was the least wanted item on the list.”

They scrubbed the project. I was two down for the day.

She went on to the Little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes doll, my Big Breakthrough. It was the last sheaf of test notes, and I harbored the foolish hope that Netta had been playing some kind of deadly stupid lovers’ game with me, that she had saved my hottest project for last, so she could recommend it highly. She hung me out to dry.

“This is one of the most dangerous toys I’ve ever tested,” she began. “To refresh your memory, it is a baby doll that contains a voice-activated tape loop. When you say to the doll, ‘Good dolly, you’re a good dolly,’ or similar affectionate phrase, the doll goes mmmmmm. When you say, ‘Bad dolly, you’ve been a bad dolly,’ or similar hostile phrase, the dolly whimpers. Unfortunately, my tests with a large group of children—” and she looked directly at me, “—which I’ve cross-checked through our independent testing group at Harvard, clearly show that not only the tape loop is activated by hostile phrases. This toy activates aggression in children, triggering the worst in them and feeding it. They were brutal with the dolls, tormenting them, savaging them, tearing them apart when merely spanking them and throwing them against the walls failed to satisfy their need to hear the whimpering.”

I was, on the spot, in an instant, a pariah.

I was the despoiler of the children’s crusade.

I was the lurking child molester.

I was the lizard piper of Hamelin.

I was, with the good offices of Netta Bernstein, at the end of an auspicious career with the MyToy Corporation.

And the next day she kissed me, surreptitiously, in the elevator; and asked me if I was free to have dinner at her apartment that night.

I left the body in the clothes closet, shoved back in a fetal position under the mound of wrinkled dresses and pants suits. I went out and wandered around the marina till morning, playing the messy murder of Netta Bernstein over and over again. Then I went to work.

I walked past Sloan’s office, toward my own, expecting the door to burst open and Sloan to be standing there with a couple of cops. “That’s him, officers. The one who wanted us to sell a demon doll. And he killed our research psychologist, a beautiful woman named Netta Bernstein. Take his yellow color-coded badge with the red dot in the center, and get him the hell out of here.”

But nothing of the kind happened. Sloan’s door stayed closed, I walked past and headed for my office. As I came abreast of Netta’s glass-walled office, I glanced in as casually as I had every day and saw Netta poring over a large graph on her desk.

I once visited the Olympic peninsula of Washington state. I thought it was very beautiful, very peaceful. Up beyond the Seattle-Tacoma vicinity. Virgin wilderness. Douglas fir and alder with whitish bark and brownish-red at the tops of the leaves. It’s flat, but you can see the Olympic range and the Cascades and Mr. Rainier when the mist and fog and rain aren’t obscuring the view. And even the mist and fog and rain seem peaceful, comfortable; cold, but somehow sanctified. A person could live there, fast and hard away from Los Angeles and the freeway stranglehold. But there was no $50,000 plateau on the Olympic peninsula.

I couldn’t accept it. I don’t think I even broke stride. I just walked past, well down the corridor, leaned against the wall for a moment, and breathed deeply. Staff walked past and Nisbett stopped to ask me if I was all right; I said I was fine, just heartburn, and he said, “Ain’t it the truth,” and he walked away. I could feel my heart turning to anthracite in my chest. I thought I would die. And then I realized I’d been hallucinating, projecting my guilt, having a delayed reaction to what had happened the night before, to what lay huddled in that clothes closet till I could figure out how to dispose of it.

I got myself under control, swallowing several times to force down the lump, breathing through my mouth to clear the dark fog that had begun to swirl in like the fog of the Olympic peninsula.

And then I turned back, walked slowly to Netta’s office, and looked through the window-wall. She was talking to one of her assistants, a young woman who had worked with Madeline Hunter at UCLA, or had it been Iris Mink at UCLA Neuropsychiatric... what the hell was I thinking!

I had killed Bernstein the night before, had seen her eyes start from her head and her tongue go fat in her mouth and her skin turn dark blue with cyanosis when the strangling failed and the suffocation succeeded. She was meat, dead meat, lying under a pile of coat hangers. She could not possibly be in there talking to her assistant.

I opened the door and walked in.

They both looked up and the assistant stopped talking. Netta looked at me with annoyance and said, “Yes?”

“I, uh, the report, I, uh...”

She waited. They both waited. I moved my hands in random patterns. The assistant said, “I’ll check it again, Netta, and show it to you after lunch; will that be all right?”

Netta Bernstein nodded it would be all right, and the assistant took the graph and slipped past me, giving me a security guard’s look; when was the last time I’d seen a look like that?

When she was gone, Netta turned to me and said, “Well, what is it, Duncaster?”

Netta Bernstein was thirty-seven. I had checked. Her dossier in personnel said she had attended the University of Washington, had obtained her degree in psychology, and had majored in child therapy. She had been married at the age of eighteen, while still an undergraduate to one of her professors, who had soon after their marriage left the academy for a job with Merck Sharp & Dohme, the drug company, in New Jersey. She had remained with him until he had received a federal grant for a research project (unspecified, probably defense-oriented), and they had moved to a remote part of the Olympic peninsula of Washington state, where they had remained for the next sixteen years. Grays Harbor County. The husband had died three years before, and Netta Bernstein had gone to work in Houston, at the Baylor Medical School, department of biochemistry. Research on the RNA messenger molecules; something related to autistic children. She had left Baylor and come to MyToy, for a startling salary, only thirteen months before. She was beautiful, with thick auburn hair and the most penetrating cobalt-colored eyes I had ever seen. Eyes that were wide and dead in a clothes closet near the marina. Before I had killed her, she looked no more than nineteen years old, still as young and beautiful as she must have been when she was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. When I left her she looked like nothing human, certainly nothing living.

I stared at her. She looked nineteen again. There were no black bruises on her throat, her color was fresh and youthful, her cobalt-colored eyes staring at me.

“Well, Duncaster?”

I ran away. I hid in my office, waiting for the cops to come. But they never did. I went crazy, waiting. I had all the terrors and the guilt of knowing she would turn me in, that she was playing cobra-at-the-mongooserally with me. She hadn’t died. Somehow she had still been breathing. I’d thought she was dead, but she wasn’t dead; she was alive. Down the hall, waiting for me to throw myself out a window or run shrieking through the corridors screaming my confession. Well, I wouldn’t do it! I’d outsmart her, I’d make sure she never told anyone about the night before.

I left the building by the service elevator, went to her apartment, and used the key I’d stolen the night before in anticipation of returning to dispose of the body. The first thing I did was check the clothes closet.

It was empty. The clothes were hung neatly. The dress with the plastic clothing bag from the dry cleaner was hanging among the others. There was no sign I’d even been there, that we had had dinner together, that we’d made love, that we’d argued over her performance in the conference room, that she’d denied meaning me any harm, that she had professed her love... and no sign I had killed her.

The apartment was silent and had never been the scene of a battlefield engagement for possession of the $50,000 plateau. I thought I might, indeed, be going crazy.

But when she got home, I killed Bernstein. Again.

I used a wooden cooking mallet intended to soften meat. I crushed her skull and wrapped her in the shower curtain and tied up her feet and torso with baling twine from under the sink. I attached a typewriter to the end of the cord, an IBM Selectric, and I carried her out to the marina at three a.m. had threw her in.

And the next day, Netta Bernstein was in her office, and she paid no attention to me, and I thought I’d go crazy, perhaps I’d already gone crazy. And that night I killed her with a tire iron and buried her body in the remotest part of Topanga Canyon. And the next day...

She didn’t come to work.

They told me she had taken a leave of absence, had gone to Washington state on family business.

I ransacked the dossier and found the location. I flew up from LA International to the Sea-Tac Airport and rented a car. West from Olympia toward Aberdeen. North on Highway 101. Twenty miles north. I turned west and drove for fifteen miles, and came to the high wire fence.

I could see the long, low structure of the research facility where Netta Bernstein had lived with her husband for sixteen years. I got in. I don’t remember how. I got in, that’s all.

I circled the building, looking for a way inside, and when a crack of lightning flashed down the slate of the sky I saw my reflection in a window, wild-eyed and more than a little crazy. It was terribly cold, and I could smell the rain coming.

I found a set of doors and they were open. I went into the building. I went looking, wanting only one thing: to find Netta Bernstein, to kill her once again, finally, completely, thoroughly, without room for argument or return.

There was music coming from somewhere far off in the building. Electronic music. I followed the sound and passed through research facilities, laboratories whose purpose I could not identify, and came, at last, to the living quarters at the rear of the building.

They were waiting for me.

Seven of them.

Netta times seven.

The husband had been a geneticist. Fallen in love with an eighteen-year-old, auburn-haired, cobalt-colored-eyed undergraduate he met at a lecture. He had cloned her. Had taken the cutting and run off nine copies that had been raised from infancy, that had grown up quickly as she aged so slowly, so beautifully. Netta times ten. And when they had raised their children, there, far away from all eyes and all interference, he had died and left the mother with her offspring; left the woman with her sisters; left the thirty-four-year-old original with her sixteen-year-old duplicates. And Netta had had to go out into the world to make a living, to the drug company, to Baylor, to MyToy.

But when she wanted to return to see herself in the mirrors of their lives, she would call one or two or another of the Nettas to come do her work at MyToy.

And one of them had fallen in love with me.

Killing Bernstein was impossible. Killing Netta, because love had made me crazy, was beyond anyone’s power, beyond even madness and hatred.

And one of them had fallen in love with me.

I sat down and they watched me. They had removed the body of their sister from the closet, and they had brought her back home for burial. And soon they would return to Los Angeles and drive up into wild Topanga Canyon and dig up another. And the third they would never see again.

And one of them had fallen in love with me.

Here on the Olympic peninsula, the fog and the mist and the rain are cool and almost sanctified. There is music, and they don’t harm me, and some day they may let me leave. They don’t bind me, they don’t keep me from going out into the night; but this is where I’ll stay.

And perhaps some day, when they clone again, perhaps I’ll get lucky again.

And perhaps one of them will fall in love with me.

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970) was one of the best-selling writers of all time — and one of the most prolific. When you put together his pulp magazine work with his novels, you have to add him to any list that includes Simenon and at least two members of the Dumas family for being mind-numbingly prolific. He did it all as far as mystery fiction was concerned — puzzles, noir, light comedy, howdunits, whydunits, and on and on — and he did it all competently and some of it much better than that. His comic novels under the pseudonym A. A. Fair are probably his best, with The Bigger They Come and Bats Fly at Dusk fetching as hell. His great successes were the Perry Mason novels and the long-running TV series of the same name. Gardner was a lawyer before turning to writing fiction, and he knew how to make trials exciting. He is easy, too easy, to undervalue.

Mae Devers came into my office with the mail. She stood by my chair for a moment putting envelopes on the desk, pausing to make little adjustments of the inkwell and paper weights, tidying things up a bit.

There was a patent-leather belt around her waist, and below that belt I could see the play of muscles as her supple figure moved from side to side. I slid my arm around the belt and started to draw her close to me.

“Don’t get fresh!” she said, trying to pull my hand away, but not trying too hard.

“Listen, I have work to do,” she said. “Let me loose, Pete.”

“Holding you for ransom, smile-eyes,” I told her.

She suddenly bent down. Her lips formed a hot circle against mine — and Cedric L. Boniface had to choose that moment to come busting into my office without knocking.

Mae heard the preliminary rattle of the door-knob, and scooped up a bunch of papers from the desk. I ran fingers through my hair, and Boniface cleared his throat in his best professional manner.

I couldn’t be certain whether I had any lipstick on my mouth, so I put my elbow on my desk, covered my mouth with the fingers of my hand and stared intently at an open law book.

Mae Devers said, “Very well, Mr. Wennick, I’ll see that it gets in the mail,” and started for the door. As she passed Boniface, she turned and gave me a roguish glance, as much as to say, “Now, smartie, see what you’ve got yourself into.”

Boniface stared at me, hard. His yellowish eyes, with the bluish-white eyeballs, reminded me of hard-boiled eggs which had been peeled and cut in two lengthwise. He was in a vile humor.

“What was all the commotion about?” he asked.

“Commotion?” I inquired raising my eyes, but keeping my hand to my mouth. “Where?”

“In here,” he said.

Mae Devers was just closing the door. “Did you hear anything, Miss Devers?” I asked in my most dignified manner.

“No, sir,” she said demurely, and slipped out into the corridor.

I frowned down at the open law book on the desk. “I can’t seem to make any sense out of the distinction between a bailment of the first class and a bailment of the second class.”

That mollified Boniface somewhat. He loved to discourse on the academic legal points which no one else ever gave a damn about.

“The distinction,” he said, “is relatively simple, if you can keep from becoming confused by the terminology. Primarily, the matter of consideration is the determining factor in the classification of all bailments.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, my voice muffled behind my hand.

Boniface stared at me. “Wennick,” he said, “there’s something queer about your connection with this firm. You’re supposed to be studying law. You’re supposed to make investigations. You’re a cross between a sublimated law clerk and a detective. It just happens, however, that in checking over our income tax, I find that the emoluments which have been paid you during the past three months would fix your salary at something over fifteen thousand dollars a year.”

There was nothing I could say to that, so I kept quiet.

Mae Devers opened the door and said, “Mr. Jonathan wants to see you at once, Mr. Wennick.”

I got out of the chair as though it had been filled with tacks and said, “I’m coming at once. Excuse me, Mr. Boniface.”

Mae Devers stood in the doorway which led to the general offices and laughed at me as I jerked out a handkerchief and wiped lipstick from my mouth. “That,” she told me, “is what you get for playing around.”

I didn’t have time to say anything. When old E. B. Jonathan sent word that he wanted to see me at once, it meant that he wanted to see me at once. Cedric L. Boniface followed me to the door of my office and stared meditatively down the corridor as though debating with himself whether or not to invade the sanctity of E. B.’s office to pursue the subject further. I popped into E. B.’s private office like a rabbit making its burrow two jumps ahead of a fox.

Old E. B. looked worse than ever this morning. His face was the color of skimmed milk. There were pouches underneath his tired eyes as big as my fist. His face was puckered up into the acrimonious expression of one who has just bit into a sour lemon.

“Lock the door, Wennick,” he said.

I locked the door.

“Take a seat.”

I sat down.

“Wennick,” he said, “we’re in a devil of a mess.”

I sat there, waiting for him to go on.

“There was some question over certain deductions in my income tax statement,” he said. “Without thinking, I told Mr. Boniface to brief the point. That made it necessary for him to consult the income tax return, and he saw how much you’d been paid for the last three months.”

“So he was just telling me,” I said.

“Well,” E. B. said, “it’s embarrassing. I need Boniface in this business. He can spout more academic law than a college professor, and he’s so damn dumb he doesn’t know that I’m using him for a stuffed shirt. No one would ever suspect him of being implicated in the... er, more spectacular methods which you use to clean up the cases on which he’s working.”

“Yes,” I conceded, “the man’s a veritable talking encyclopedia of law.”

E. B. said, “We’ll have to handle it some way. If he asks you any questions, tell him it’s a matter you’d prefer to have him discuss with me. Wennick! Is that lipstick on the corner of your mouth?”

Mechanically, I jerked a handkerchief out of my pocket to the corner of my mouth. “No, sir,” I said, “just a bit of red crayon I was using to mark up that brief and...”

I stopped as I saw E. B.’s eyes on the handkerchief. It was a red smear. There was no use lying to the old buzzard now. I stuck the handkerchief back in my pocket and said, “Hell, yes, it’s lipstick.”

“Miss Devers, I presume,” he said dryly.

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “it’s going to be necessary to dispense with her services. At the time I hired her, I thought she was just a bit too... er, voluptuous. However, she was so highly recommended by the employment agency that—”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Go ahead and fire her.”

“You won’t mind?”

“Certainly not,” I told him. “I can get a job some other place and get one for her at the same time.”

“Now, wait a minute, Wennick,” he said, “don’t misunderstand me. I’m very well satisfied with your services, if you could only learn to leave women alone.”

I decided I might as well give him both barrels. “Listen,” I said, “you think women are poison. I think they’re damned interesting. The only reason I’m not going to ask you whether the rumor is true that you’re paying simultaneous alimony to two wives is that I don’t think I have any business inquiring into your private life, and the only reason I’m not going to sit here and talk about my love life is that I know damned well you haven’t any business prying into mine.”

His long, bony fingers twisted restlessly, one over the other, as he wrapped his fists together. Then he started cracking his knuckles, one at a time.

“Wennick,” he said at length, “I have great hopes for your future. I hate to see you throw yourself away on the fleeting urge of a biological whim.”

“All right,” I told him, “I won’t.”

He finished his ten-knuckle salute and shook his head lugubriously. “They’ll get you in the long run, Wennick,” he said.

“I’m not interested in long runs,” I told him. “I like the sprints.”

He sighed, unlaced his fingers and got down to business. “The reason I’m particularly concerned about this, Wennick, is that the case I’m going to send you out on involves a woman, a very attractive woman. Unless I’m sadly mistaken, she is a very vital woman, very much alive, very... er, amorous.”

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Her name is Pemberton, Mrs. Olive Pemberton. Her husband’s Harvey C. Pemberton, of the firm of Bass & Pemberton, Brokers, in Culverton.”

“What does she want?” I asked.

“Her husband’s being taken for a ride.”

“What sort of a ride?”

He let his cold eyes regard me in a solemn warning. “A joy ride, Pete.”

“Who’s the woman?”

Old E. B. consulted a memo. “Her name is Diane Locke — and she’s redheaded.”

“What do I do?”

“You find some way to spike her guns. Apparently she has an ironclad case against Pemberton. I’ll start Boniface working on it. He’ll puzzle out some legal technicality on which he’ll hang a defense. But you beat him to it by spiking her guns.”

“Has the redhead filed suit?” I asked.

“Not yet,” E. B. said. “At present it’s in the milk-and-honey stage. She’s getting ready to tighten the screws, and Mrs. Pemberton has employed us to see that this other woman doesn’t drain her husband’s pocketbook with this threatened suit. Incidentally, you’re to stay at the Pemberton house, and remember, Mr. Pemberton doesn’t know his wife is wise to all this and is trying to stop it.”

“Just how,” I asked, “do I account for my presence to Mr. Harvey C. Pemberton?”

“You’re to be Mrs. Pemberton’s brother.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Mrs. Pemberton has a brother living in the West. Her husband has never seen him. Fortunately, his name also is Peter, so you won’t have any difficulty over names.”

“Suppose,” I asked, “the real brother shows up while I’m there at the house?”

“He won’t,” E. B. said. “All you have to do is to go to the door at seven-thirty this evening. She’ll be waiting for your ring. She’ll come to the door and put on all the act that’s necessary. You’ll wear a red carnation in your left coat lapel so there’ll be no mistake. Her maiden name, by the way, was Crowe. You’ll be Peter Crowe, sort of a wandering ne’er-do-well brother. The husband knows all about you by reputation.”

“And hasn’t seen any pictures or anything?” I asked.

“Apparently not,” E. B. said.

“It sounds like a plant to me,” I told him dubiously.

“I’m quite certain it’s all right,” he said. “I have collected a substantial retainer.”

“O.K.,” I told him, “I’m on my way.”

“Pete,” he called, as I placed my hand on the door.

“What is it?”

“You’ll be discreet,” he warned.

I turned to give him a parting shot. “I certainly hope I’ll be able to,” I said, “but I doubt it,” and pulled the door shut behind me.

If versatility is a virtue, then Ed Gorman is virtuous indeed. He has written steadily in three different genres — mystery, horror, and westerns — for almost twenty years. He has also written a large number of short stories, with six of his collections of wry, poignant, unsettling fiction in print in the United States and United Kingdom. Kirkus said, “Gorman is one of the most original crime writers around,” taking particular note of his Sam McCain — Judge Whitney series, which is set in small-town Iowa in the 1950s and has won rave reviews from coast to coast. It is no surprise that he captures the essence of life in the Midwest, since he lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. As for the wealth of detail he brings to every novel and story he writes, well, he’s been there and back again, and the observations he shares about life, love, and loss make his books all the richer. His most recent novel is Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, the third Sam McCain book.

The thing you have to understand is that I found it by accident. I was looking for a place to hide the birthday gift I’d bought Laura — a string of pearls she’d been wanting to wear with the new black dress she’d bought for herself — and all I was going to do was lay the gift-wrapped box in the second drawer of her bureau...

...and there it was.

A plain number-ten envelope with her name written across the middle in a big manly scrawl and a canceled Elvis Presley stamp up in the corner. Postmarked two days ago.

Just as I spotted it, Laura called from the living room, “Bye, honey, see you at six.” The last two years we’ve been saving to buy a house so we have only the one car. Laura goes an hour earlier than I do, so she rides with a woman who lives a few blocks over. Then I pick her up at six after somebody relieves me at the computer store where I work. For what it’s worth, I have an M.A. in English Literature but with the economy being what it is, it hasn’t done me much good.

I saw a sci-fi movie once where a guy could set something on fire simply by staring at it intently enough. That’s what I was trying to do with this letter my wife got. Burn it so that I wouldn’t have to read what it said inside and get my heart broken.

I closed the drawer.

Could be completely harmless. Her fifteenth high-school reunion was coming up this spring. Maybe it was from one of her old classmates. And maybe the manly scrawl wasn’t so manly after all. Maybe it was from a woman who wrote in a rolling dramatic hand.

Laura always said that I was the jealous type and this was certainly proof. A harmless letter tucked harmlessly in a bureau drawer. And here my heart was pounding, and fine cold sweat slicked my face, and my fingers were trembling.

God, wasn’t I a pitiful guy? Shouldn’t I be ashamed of myself?

I went into the bathroom and lathered up and did my usual relentless fifteen-minute morning regimen of shaving, showering, and shining up my apple-cheeked Irish face and my thinning Irish hair, if hair follicles can have a nationality, that is.

Then I went back into our bedroom and took down a white shirt, blue necktie, navy blazer, and tan slacks. All dressed, I looked just like seventy or eighty million other men getting ready for work this particular sunny April morning.

Then I stood very still in the middle of the bedroom and stared at Laura’s bureau. Maybe I wasn’t simply going to set the letter on fire. Maybe I was going to ignite the entire bureau.

The grandfather clock in the living room tolled eight-thirty. If I didn’t leave now I would be late, and if you were late you inevitably got a chewing-out from Ms. Sanders, the boss. Anybody who believes that women would run a more benign world than men needs only to spend five minutes with Ms. Sanders. Hitler would have used her as a pin-up girl.

The bureau. The letter. The manly scrawl.

What was I going to do?

Only one thing I could think of, since I hadn’t made a decision about reading the letter or not. I’d simply take it with me to work. If I decided to read it, I’d give it a quick scan over my lunch hour.

But probably I wouldn’t read it at all. I had a lot of faith where Laura was concerned. And I didn’t like to think of myself as the sort of possessive guy who snuck around reading his wife’s mail.

I reached into the bureau drawer.

My fingers touched the letter.

I was almost certain I wasn’t going to read it. Hell, I’d probably get so busy at work that I’d forget all about it.

But just in case I decided to...

I grabbed the letter and stuffed it into my blazer pocket, and closed the drawer. In the kitchen I had a final cup of coffee and read my newspaper horoscope. Bad news, as always. I should never read the damn things... Then I hurried out of the apartment to the little Toyota parked at the curb.

Six blocks away, it stalled. Our friendly mechanic said that moisture seemed to get in the fuel pump a lot. He’s not sure why. We’ve run it in three times but it still stalls several times a week.

Tony Hillerman created a whole new subgenre of crime fiction with the appearance of his novel The Blessing Way in 1970, that of mysteries exploring Native American culture. Though Native Americans had appeared in crime stories before, Hillerman gave his Navajos depth as well as breadth. Having been raised among them, and sent to a Native American boarding school, Hillerman has also spent most of his later life with them. This gives his novels a purity of intent and a true kinship with his characters that other writers simply can’t match. It’s hard to pick a favorite among the Hillerman novels — they’re all that good — but two of the best are Listening Woman and Skinwalkers. He also edited The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, a retrospective look at the evolution of the genre in the twentieth century.

Snow is so important to the Eskimos they have nine nouns to describe its variations. Corporal Jimmy Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police had heard that as an anthropology student at the University of New Mexico. He remembered it now because he was thinking of all the words you need in Navajo to account for the many forms of witchcraft. The word Old Woman Tso had used was “anti’l,” which is the ultimate sort, the absolute worst. And so, in fact, was the deed which seemed to have been done. Murder, apparently. Mutilation, certainly, if Old Woman Tso had her facts right. And then, if one believed all the mythology of witchery told among the fifty clans who comprised The People, there must also be cannibalism, incest, even necrophilia.

On the radio in Chee’s pickup truck, the voice of the young Navajo reading a Gallup used-car commercial was replaced by Willie Nelson singing of trouble and a worried mind. The ballad fit Chee’s mood. He was tired. He was thirsty. He was sticky with sweat. He was worried. His pickup jolted along the ruts in a windless heat, leaving a white fog of dust to mark its winding passage across the Rainbow Plateau. The truck was gray with it. So was Jimmy Chee. Since sunrise he had covered maybe two hundred miles of half-graded gravel and unmarked wagon tracks of the Arizona-Utah-New Mexico border country. Routine at first — a check into a witch story at the Tsossie hogan north of Teec Nos Pos to stop trouble before it started. Routine and logical. A bitter winter, a sand storm spring, a summer of rainless, desiccating heat. Hopes dying, things going wrong, anger growing, and then the witch gossip. The logical. A bitter winter, a sand storm spring, a summer awry. The trouble at the summer hogan of the Tsossies was a sick child and a water well that had turned alkaline — nothing unexpected. But you didn’t expect such a specific witch. The skinwalker, the Tsossies agreed, was the City Navajo, the man who had come to live in one of the government houses at Kayenta. Why the City Navajo? Because everybody knew he was a witch. Where had they heard that, the first time? The People who came to the trading post at Mexican Water said it. And so Chee had driven westward over Tohache Wash, past Red Mesa and Rabbit Ears to Mexican Water. He had spent hours on the shady porch giving those who came to buy, and to fill their water barrels, and to visit, a chance to know who he was until finally they might risk talking about witchcraft to a stranger. They were Mud Clan, and Many Goats People, and Standing Rock Clan — foreign to Chee’s own Slow Talking People — but finally some of them talked a little.

A witch was at work on the Rainbow Plateau. Adeline Etcitty’s mare had foaled a two-headed colt. Hosteen Musket had seen the witch. He’d seen a man walk into a grove of cottonwoods, but when he got there an owl flew away. Rudolph Bisti’s boys lost three rams while driving their flocks up into the Chuska high pastures, and when they found the bodies, the huge tracks of a werewolf were all around them. The daughter of Rosemary Nashibitti had seen a big dog bothering her horses and had shot at it with her .22 and the dog had turned into a man wearing a wolfskin and had fled, half running, half flying. The old man they called Afraid of His Horses had heard the sound of the witch on the roof of his winter hogan, and saw the dirt falling through the smoke hole as the skinwalker tried to throw in his corpse powder. The next morning the old man had followed the tracks of the Navajo Wolf for a mile, hoping to kill him. But the tracks had faded away. There was nothing very unusual in the stories, except their number and the recurring hints that the City Navajo was the witch. But then came what Chee hadn’t expected. The witch had killed a man.

The police dispatcher at Window Rock had been interrupting Willie Nelson with an occasional blurted message. Now she spoke directly to Chee. He acknowledged. She asked his location.

“About fifteen miles south of Dennehotso,” Chee said. “Homeward bound for Tuba City. Dirty, thirsty, hungry, and tired.”

“I have a message.”

“Tuba City,” Chee repeated, “which I hope to reach in about two hours, just in time to avoid running up a lot of overtime for which I never get paid.”

“The message is FBI Agent Wells needs to contact you. Can you make a meeting at Kayenta Holiday Inn at eight P.M.?”

“What’s it about?” Chee asked. The dispatcher’s name was Virgie Endecheenie, and she had a very pretty voice and the first time Chee had met her at the Window Rock headquarters of the Navajo Tribal Police he had been instantly smitten. Unfortunately, Virgie was a born-into Salt Cedar Clan, which was the clan of Chee’s father, which put an instant end to that. Even thinking about it would violate the complex incest taboo of the Navajos.

“Nothing on what it’s about,” Virgie said, her voice strictly business. “It just says confirm meeting time and place with Chee or obtain alternate time.”

“Any first name on Wells?” Chee asked. The only FBI Wells he knew was Jake Wells. He hoped it wouldn’t be Jake.

“Negative on the first name,” Virgie said.

“All right,” Chee said. “I’ll be there.”

The road tilted downward now into the vast barrens of erosion which the Navajos call Beautiful Valley. Far to the west, the edge of the sun dipped behind a cloud — one of the line of thunderheads forming in the evening heat over the San Francisco Peaks and the Cococino Rim. The Hopis had been holding their Niman Kachina dances, calling the clouds to come and bless them.

Chee reached Kayenta just a little late. It was early twilight and the clouds had risen black against the sunset. The breeze brought the faint smells that rising humidity carries across desert country — the perfume of sage, creosote brush, and dust. The desk clerk said that Wells was in room 284 and the first name was Jake. Chee no longer cared. Jake Wells was abrasive but he was also smart. He had the best record in the special FBI Academy class Chee had attended, a quick, tough intelligence. Chee could tolerate the man’s personality for a while to learn what Wells could make of his witchcraft puzzle.

“It’s unlocked,” Wells said. “Come on in.” He was propped against the padded headboard of the bed, shirt off, shoes on, glass in hand. He glanced at Chee and then back at the television set. He was as tall as Chee remembered, and the eyes were just as blue. He waved the glass at Chee without looking away from the set. “Mix yourself one,” he said, nodding toward a bottle beside the sink in the dressing alcove.

“How you doing, Jake?” Chee asked.

Now the blue eyes reexamined Chee. The question in them abruptly went away. “Yeah,” Wells said. “You were the one at the Academy.” He eased himself on his left elbow and extended a hand. “Jake Wells,” he said.

Chee shook the hand. “Chee,” he said.

Wells shifted his weight again and handed Chee his glass. “Pour me a little more while you’re at it,” he said, “and turn down the sound.”

Chee turned down the sound.

“About thirty percent booze,” Wells demonstrated the proportion with his hands. “This is your district then. You’re in charge around Kayenta? Window Rock said I should talk to you. They said you were out chasing around in the desert today. What are you working on?”

“Nothing much,” Chee said. He ran a glass of water, drinking it thirstily. His face in the mirror was dirty — the lines around mouth and eyes whitish with dust. The sticker on the glass reminded guests that the laws of the Navajo Tribal Council prohibited possession of alcoholic beverages on the reservation. He refilled his own glass with water and mixed Wells’s drink. “As a matter of fact, I’m working on a witchcraft case.”

“Witchcraft?” Wells laughed. “Really?” He took the drink from Chee and examined it. “How does it work? Spells and like that?”

“Not exactly,” Chee said. “It depends. A few years ago a little girl got sick down near Burnt Water. Her dad killed three people with a shotgun. He said they blew corpse powder on his daughter and made her sick.”

Wells was watching him. “The kind of crime where you have the insanity plea.”

“Sometimes,” Chee said. “Whatever you have, witch talk makes you nervous. It happens more when you have a bad year like this. You hear it and you try to find out what’s starting it before things get worse.”

“So you’re not really expecting to find a witch?”

“Usually not,” Chee said.

“Usually?”

“Judge for yourself,” Chee said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve picked up today. You tell me what to make of it. Have time?”

Wells shrugged. “What I really want to talk about is a guy named Simon Begay.” He looked quizzically at Chee. “You heard the name?”

“Yes,” Chee said.

“Well, shit,” Wells said. “You shouldn’t have. What do you know about him?”

“Showed up maybe three months ago. Moved into one of those U.S. Public Health Service houses over by the Kayenta clinic. Stranger. Keeps to himself. From off the reservation somewhere. I figured you federals put him here to keep him out of sight.”

Wells frowned. “How long you known about him?”

“Quite a while,” Chee said. He’d known about Begay within a week after his arrival.

“He’s a witness,” Wells said. “They broke a car-theft operation in Los Angeles. Big deal. National connections. One of those where they have hired hands picking up expensive models and they drive ’em right on the ship and off-load in South America. This Begay is one of the hired hands. Nobody much. Criminal record going all the way back to juvenile, but all nickel-and-dime stuff. I gather he saw some things that help tie some big boys into the crime, so Justice made a deal with him.”

“And they hide him out here until the trial?”

Something apparently showed in the tone of the question. “If you want to hide an apple, you drop it in with the other apples,” Wells said. “What better place?”

Chee had been looking at Wells’s shoes, which were glossy with polish. Now he examined his own boots, which were not. But he was thinking of Justice Department stupidity. The appearance of any new human in a country as empty as the Navajo Reservation provoked instant interest. If the stranger was a Navajo, there were instant questions. What was his clan? Who was his mother? What was his father’s clan? Who were his relatives? The City Navajo had no answers to any of these crucial questions. He was (as Chee had been repeatedly told) unfriendly. It was quickly guessed that he was a “relocation Navajo,” born to one of those hundreds of Navajo families which the federal government had tried to reestablish forty years ago in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other urban centers. He was a stranger. In a year of witches, he would certainly be suspected. Chee sat looking at his boots, wondering if that was the only basis for the charge that City Navajo was a skinwalker. Or had someone seen something? Had someone seen the murder?

“The thing about apples is they don’t gossip,” Chee said.

“You hear gossip about Begay?” Wells was sitting up now, his feet on the floor.

“Sure,” Chee said. “I hear he’s a witch.”

Wells produced a pro-forma chuckle. “Tell me about it,” he said.

Chee knew exactly how he wanted to tell it. Wells would have to wait awhile before he came to the part about Begay. “The Eskimos have nine nouns for snow,” Chee began. He told Wells about the variety of witchcraft on the reservations and its environs: about frenzy witchcraft, used for sexual conquests, of witchery distortions, of curing ceremonials, of the exotic two-heart witchcraft of the Hope Fog Clan, of the Zuñi Sorcery Fraternity, of the Navajo “chindi,” which is more like a ghost than a witch, and finally of the Navajo Wolf, the anti’l witchcraft, the werewolves who pervert every taboo of the Navajo Way and use corpse powder to kill their victims.

Wells rattled the ice in his glass and glanced at his watch.

“To get to the part about your Begay,” Chee said, “about two months ago we started picking up witch gossip. Nothing much, and you expect it during a drought. Lately it got to be more than usual.” He described some of the tales and how uneasiness and dread had spread across the plateau. He described what he had learned today, the Tsossies’ naming City Navajo as the witch, his trip to Mexican Water, of learning there that the witch had killed a man.

“They said it happened in the spring — couple of months ago. They told me the ones who knew about it were the Tso outfit.” The talk of murder, Chee noticed, had revived Wells’s interest. “I went up there,” he continued, “and found the old woman who runs the outfit. Emma Tso. She told me her son-in-law had been out looking for some sheep, and smelled something, and found the body under some chamiso brush in a dry wash. A witch had killed him.”

“How—”

Chee cut off the question. “I asked her how he knew it was a witch killing. She said the hands were stretched out like this.” Chee extended his hands, palms up. “They were flayed. The skin was cut off the palms and fingers.”

Wells raised his eyebrows.

“That’s what the witch uses to make corpse powder,” Chee explained. “They take the skin that has the whorls and ridges of the individual personality — the skin from the palms and the finger pads, and the soles of the feet. They take that, and the skin from the glans of the penis, and the small bones where the neck joins the skull, and they dry it, and pulverize it, and use it as poison.”

“You’re going to get to Begay any minute now,” Wells said. “That right?”

“We got to him,” Chee said. “He’s the one they think is the witch. He’s the City Navajo.”

“I thought you were going to say that,” Wells said. He rubbed the back of his hand across one blue eye. “City Navajo. Is it that obvious?”

“Yes,” Chee said. “And then he’s a stranger. People suspect strangers.”

“Were they coming around him? Accusing him? Any threats? Anything like that, you think?”

“It wouldn’t work that way — not unless somebody had someone in their family killed. The way you deal with a witch is hire a singer and hold a special kind of curing ceremony. That turns the witchcraft around and kills the witch.”

Wells made an impatient gesture. “Whatever,” he said. “I think something has made this Begay spooky.” He stared into his glass, communing with the bourbon. “I don’t know.”

“Something unusual about the way he’s acting?”

“Hell of it is I don’t know how he usually acts. This wasn’t my case. The agent who worked him retired or some damn thing, so I got stuck with being the delivery man.” He shifted his eyes from glass to Chee. “But if it was me, and I was holed up here waiting, and the guy came along who was going to take me home again, then I’d be glad to see him. Happy to have it over with. All that.”

“He wasn’t?”

Wells shook his head. “Seemed edgy. Maybe that’s natural, though. He’s going to make trouble for some hard people.”

“I’d be nervous,” Chee said.

“I guess it doesn’t matter much anyway,” Wells said. “He’s small potatoes. The guy who’s handling it now in the U.S. Attorney’s Office said it must have been a toss-up whether to fool with him at all. He said the assistant who handled it decided to hide him out just to be on the safe side.”

“Begay doesn’t know much?”

“I guess not. That, and they’ve got better witnesses.”

“So why worry?”

Wells laughed. “I bring this sucker back and they put him on the witness stand and he answers all the questions with I don’t know and it makes the USDA look like a horse’s ass. When a U.S. Attorney looks like that, he finds an FBI agent to blame it on.” He yawned. “Therefore,” he said through the yawn, “I want to ask you what you think. This is your territory. You are the officer in charge. Is it your opinion that someone got to my witness?”

Chee let the question hang. He spent a fraction of a second reaching the answer, which was they could have if they wanted to try. Then he thought about the real reason Wells had kept him working late without a meal or a shower. Two sentences in Wells’s report. One would note that the possibility the witness had been approached had been checked with local Navajo Police. The next would report whatever Chee said next. Wells would have followed Federal Rule One — Protect Your Ass.

Chee shrugged. “You want to hear the rest of my witchcraft business?”

Wells put his drink on the lamp table and untied his shoe. “Does it bear on this?”

“Who knows? Anyway there’s not much left. I’ll let you decide. The point is we had already picked up this corpse Emma Tso’s son-in-law found. Somebody had reported it weeks ago. It had been collected, and taken in for an autopsy. The word we got on the body was Navajo male in his thirties probably. No identification on him.”

“How was this bird killed?”

“No sign of foul play,” Chee said. “By the time the body was brought in, decay and the scavengers hadn’t left a lot. Mostly bone and gristle, I guess. This was a long time after Emma Tso’s son-in-law saw him.”

“So why do they think Begay killed him?” Wells removed his second shoe and headed for the bathroom.

Chee picked up the telephone and dialed the Kayenta clinic. He got the night supervisor and waited while the supervisor dug out the file. Wells came out of the bathroom with his toothbrush. Chee covered the mouthpiece. “I’m having them read me the autopsy report,” Chee explained. Wilson began brushing his teeth at the sink in the dressing alcove. The voice of the night supervisor droned into Chee’s ear.

“That all?” Chee asked. “Nothing added on? No identity yet? Still no cause?”

“That’s him,” the voice said.

“How about shoes?” Chee asked. “He have shoes on?”

“Just a sec,” the voice said. “Yep. Size ten D. And a hat, and...”

“No mention of the neck or skull, right? I didn’t miss that? No bones missing?”

Silence. “Nothing about neck or skull bones.”

“Ah,” Chee said. “Fine. I thank you.” He felt great. He felt wonderful. Finally things had clicked into place. The witch was exorcised. “Jake,” he said. “Let me tell you a little more about my witch case.”

Wells was rinsing his mouth. He spit out the water and looked at Chee, amused. “I didn’t think of this before,” Wells said, “but you really don’t have a witch problem. If you leave that corpse a death by natural causes, there’s no case to work. If you decide it’s a homicide, you don’t have jurisdiction anyway. Homicide on an Indian reservation, FBI has jurisdiction.” Wells grinned. “We’ll come in and find your witch for you.”

Chee looked at his boots, which were still dusty. His appetite had left him, as it usually did an hour or so after he missed a meal. He still hungered for a bath. He picked up his hat and pushed himself to his feet.

“I’ll go home now,” he said. “The only thing you don’t know about the witch case is what I just got from the autopsy report. The corpse had his shoes on and no bones were missing from the base of the skull.”

Chee opened the door and stood in it, looking back. Wells was taking his pajamas out of his suitcase. “So what advice do you have for me? What can you tell me about my witch case?”

“To tell the absolute truth, Chee, I’m not into witches,” Wells said. “Haven’t been since I was a boy.”

“But we don’t really have a witch case now,” Chee said. He spoke earnestly. “The shoes were still on, so the skin wasn’t taken from the soles of his feet. No bones missing from the neck. You need those to make corpse powder.”

Wells was pulling his undershirt over his head. Chee hurried.

“What we have now is another little puzzle,” Chee said. “If you’re not collecting stuff for corpse powder, why cut the skin off this guy’s hands?”

“I’m going to take a shower,” Wells said. “Got to get my Begay back to L.A. tomorrow.”

Outside the temperature had dropped. The air moved softly from the west, carrying the smell of rain. Over the Utah border, over the Cococino Rim, over the Rainbow Plateau, lightning flickered and glowed. The storm had formed. The storm was moving. The sky was black with it. Chee stood in the darkness, listening to the mutter of thunder, inhaling the perfume, exulting in it.

He climbed into the truck and started it. How had they set it up, and why? Perhaps the FBI agent who knew Begay had been ready to retire. Perhaps an accident had been arranged. Getting rid of the assistant prosecutor who knew the witness would have been even simpler — a matter of hiring him away from the government job. That left no one who knew this minor witness was not Simon Begay. And who was he? Probably they had other Navajos from the Los Angeles community stealing cars for them. Perhaps that’s what had suggested the scheme. To most white men all Navajos looked pretty much alike, just as in his first years at college all Chee had seen in white men was pink skin, freckles, and light-colored eyes. And what would the imposter say? Chee grinned. He’d say whatever was necessary to cast doubt on the prosecution, to cast the fatal “reasonable doubt,” to make — as Wells had put it — the U.S. District Attorney look like a horse’s ass.

Chee drove into the rain twenty miles west of Kayenta. Huge, cold drops drummed on the pickup roof and turned the highway into a ribbon of water. Tomorrow the backcountry roads would be impassable. As soon as they dried and the washouts had been repaired, he’d go back to the Tsossie hogan, and the Tso place, and to all the other places from which the word would quickly spread. He’d tell the people that the witch was in custody of the FBI and was gone forever from the Rainbow Plateau.

Edward D. Hoch is a marvel among mystery writers, a man who has made his living during the past three decades from working nearly entirely in the short story. He has published nearly 850 crime, mystery, and suspense tales, many of them in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, where he has been a very familiar author since the mid-1970s. He has served as the past president of Mystery Writers of America, and was the winner of its 2001 Grand Master award and its Edgar award for best short story of 1968. He has also edited distinguished anthologies, collections and even found time to write a novel or two. He has been Guest of Honor at the annual Bouchercon mystery convention and received its Anthony Award for best short story. In 2001 he will receive the convention’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2000, he received The Eye, the life achievement award of the Private Eye Writers of America. In everything he does, he is the soul of graciousness, intelligence, and wit. He resides in Rochester, New York, with his wife, Patricia.

She was too beautiful to make a convincing Medusa, even with the terrible wig and its writhing plastic serpents. Gazing at herself in the mirror, Gretchen could only wonder at the chain of events that had caused Dolliman to hire her in the first place. Then the buzzer sounded and it was time to make her entrance.

She rose through a trap door in the floor, effectively masked by a cloud of chemically produced mist. As the mist cleared enough for the audience to see her, there were the usual startled exclamations. Then Toby, playing the part of Perseus, came forward with his sword and shield to slay her. It wasn’t exactly according to mythology, but it seemed to please the audience of tourists.

As Toby lifted his sword to strike, her mind was on other things. She was remembering the charter flights to the Far East, the parties and the fun. But most of all she was remembering the gold. It was a great deal to give up, but she’d made her decision.

Toby, following the script they’d played a hundred times before, pushed her down into the swirling mists and grabbed the dummy head of Medusa that was hidden there. The sight of the bloody head always brought a gasp from the crowd, and this day was no exception. Gretchen felt for the trap door and opened it. While the crowd applauded and Toby took his bows, she made her way down the ladder to the lower level.

That was where they found her, an hour later. She was crumpled at the foot of the ladder, her Medusa wig a few feet away. Her throat had been cut with a savage blow, as if by a sword.

There are certain things that are almost always mentioned when the name Stephen King comes up. How many books he’s sold. What he’s doing in and for literature today. And (recently) the terrible accident he suffered while walking down a road near his home in Maine. One thing almost never mentioned — and not generally perceived — is that he single-handedly made popular fiction grow up. While there were many good best-selling writers before him, King, more than anybody since John D. MacDonald, brought reality to genre novels. He’s often remarked that Salem’s Lot (1977) was “Peyton Place Meets Dracula.” And so it was. The rich characterization, the careful and caring social eye, the interplay of story line and character development announced that writers could take worn themes such as vampirism and make them fresh again. Before King, many popular writers found their efforts to make their books serious blue-penciled by their editors. Stuff like that gets in the way of the story, they were told. Well, it’s stuff like that that has made King so popular, and helped free the popular name from the shackles of simple genre writing. He is a master of masters.

Morrison was waiting for someone who was hung up in the air traffic jam over Kennedy International when he saw a familiar face at the end of the bar and walked down.

“Jimmy? Jimmy McCann?”

It was. A little heavier than when Morrison had seen him at the Atlanta Exhibition the year before, but otherwise he looked awesomely fit. In college he had been a little thin, pallid chain smoker buried behind huge horn-rimmed glasses. He had apparently switched to contact lenses.

“Dick Morrison?”

“Yeah. You look great.” He extended his hand and they shook.

“So do you,” McCann said, but Morrison knew it was a lie. He had been overworking, overeating, and smoking too much. “What are you drinking?”

“Bourbon and bitters,” Morrison said. He hooked his feet around a bar stool and lighted a cigarette. “Meeting someone, Jimmy?”

“No. Going to Miami for a conference. A heavy client. Bills six million. I’m supposed to hold his hand because we lost out on a big special next spring.”

“Are you still with Crager and Barton?”

“Executive veep now.”

“Fantastic! Congratulations! When did all this happen?” He tried to tell himself that the little worm of jealousy in his stomach was just acid indigestion. He pulled out a roll of antacid pills and crunched one in his mouth.

“Last August. Something happened that changed my life.” He looked speculatively at Morrison and sipped his drink. “You might be interested.”

My God, Morrison thought with an inner wince. Jimmy McCann’s got religion.

“Sure,” he said, and gulped at his drink when it came.

“I wasn’t in very good shape,” McCann said. “Personal problems with Sharon, my dad died — heart attack — and I’d developed this hacking cough. Bobby Crager dropped by my office one day and gave me a fatherly little pep talk. Do you remember what those are like?”

“Yeah.” He had worked at Crager and Barton for eighteen months before joining the Morton Agency. “Get your butt in gear or get your butt out.”

McCann laughed. “You know it. Well, to put the capper on it, the doc told me I had an incipient ulcer. He told me to quit smoking.” McCann grimaced. “Might as well tell me to quit breathing.”

Morrison nodded in perfect understanding. Nonsmokers could afford to be smug. He looked at his own cigarette with distaste and stubbed it out, knowing he would be lighting another in five minutes.

“Did you quit?” he asked.

“Yes, I did. At first I didn’t think I’d be able to — I was cheating like hell. Then I met a guy who told me about an outfit over on Forty-sixth Street. Specialists. I said what do I have to lose and went over. I haven’t smoked since.”

Morrison’s eyes widened. “What did they do? Fill you full of some drug?”

“No.” He had taken out his wallet and was rummaging through it. “Here it is. I knew I had one kicking around.” He laid a plain white business card on the bar between them.

“Keep it, if you want,” McCann said. “They’ll cure you. Guaranteed.”

“How?”

“I can’t tell you,” McCann said.

“Huh? Why not?”

“It’s part of the contract they make you sign. Anyway, they tell you how it works when they interview you.”

“You signed a contract?”

McCann nodded.

“And on the basis of that—”

“Yep.” He smiled at Morrison, who thought: Well, it’s happened. Jim McCann has joined the smug bastards.

“Why the great secrecy if this outfit is so fantastic? How come I’ve never seen any spots on TV, billboards, magazine ads—”

“They get all the clients they can handle by word of mouth.”

“You’re an advertising man, Jimmy. You can’t believe that.”

“I do,” McCann said. “They have a ninety-eight percent cure rate.”

“Wait a second,” Morrison said. He motioned for another drink and lit a cigarette. “Do these guys strap you down and make you smoke until you throw up?”

“No.”

“Give you something so that you get sick every time you light—”

“No, it’s nothing like that. Go and see for yourself.” He gestured at Morrison’s cigarette. “You don’t really like that, do you?”

“Nooo, but—”

“Stopping really changed things for me,” McCann said. “I don’t suppose it’s the same for everyone, but with me it was just like dominoes falling over. I felt better and my relationship with Sharon improved. I had more energy, and my job performance picked up.”

“Look, you’ve got my curiosity aroused. Can’t you just—”

“I’m sorry, Dick. I really can’t talk about it.” His voice was firm.

“Did you put on any weight?”

For a moment he thought Jimmy McCann looked almost grim. “Yes. A little too much, in fact. But I took it off again. I’m about right now. I was skinny before.”

“Flight 206 now boarding at Gate 9,” the loudspeaker announced.

“That’s me,” McCann said, getting up. He tossed a five on the bar. “Have another, if you like. And think about what I said, Dick. Really.” And then he was gone, making his way through the crowd to the escalators. Morrison picked up the card, looked at it thoughtfully, then tucked it away in his wallet and forgot it.

The card fell out of his wallet and onto another bar a month later. He had left the office early and had come here to drink the afternoon away. Things had not been going well at the Morton Agency. In fact, things were bloody horrible.

He gave Henry a ten to pay for his drink, then picked up the small card and reread it — 237 East Forty-sixth Street was only two blocks over; it was a cool, sunny October day outside, and maybe, just for chuckles—

When Henry brought his change, he finished his drink and then went for a walk.

Quitters, Inc., was in a new building where the monthly rent on the office space was probably close to Morrison’s yearly salary. From the directory in the lobby, it looked to him like their offices took up one whole floor, and that spelled money. Lots of it.

He took the elevator up and stepped off into a lushly carpeted foyer and from there into a gracefully appointed reception room with a wide window that looked out on the scurrying bugs below. Three men and one woman sat in the chairs along the walls, reading magazines. Business types, all of them. Morrison went to the desk.

“A friend gave me this,” he said, passing the card to the receptionist. “I guess you’d say he’s an alumnus.”

She smiled and rolled a form into her typewriter. “What is your name, sir?”

“Richard Morrison.”

Clack-clackety-clack. But very muted clacks; the typewriter was an IBM.

“Your address?”

“Twenty-nine Maple Lane, Clinton, New York.”

“Married?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“One.” He thought of Alvin and frowned slightly. “One” was the wrong word. “A half” might be better. His son was mentally retarded and lived at a special school in New Jersey.

“Who recommended us to you, Mr. Morrison?”

“An old school friend. James McCann.”

“Very good. Will you have a seat? It’s been a very busy day.”

“All right.”

He sat between the woman, who was wearing a severe blue suit, and a young executive type wearing a herringbone jacket and modish sideburns. He took out his pack of cigarettes, looked around, and saw there were no ashtrays.

He put the pack away again. That was all right. He would see this little game through and then light up while he was leaving. He might even tap some ashes on their maroon shag rug if they made him wait long enough. He picked up a copy of Time and began to leaf through it.

He was called a quarter of an hour later, after the woman in the blue suit. His nicotine center was speaking quite loudly now. A man who had come in after him took out a cigarette case, snapped it open, saw there were no ashtrays, and put it away — looking a little guilty, Morrison thought. It made him feel better.

At last the receptionist gave him a sunny smile and said, “Go right in, Mr. Morrison.”

Morrison walked through the door beyond her desk and found himself in an indirectly lit hallway. A heavyset man with white hair that looked phony shook his hand, smiled affably, and said, “Follow me, Mr. Morrison.”

He led Morrison past a number of closed, unmarked doors and then opened one of them about halfway down the hall with a key. Beyond the door was an austere little room walled with drilled white cork panels. The only furnishings were a desk with a chair on either side. There was what appeared to be a small oblong window in the wall behind the desk, but it was covered with a short green curtain. There was a picture on the wall to Morrison’s left — a tall man with iron-gray hair. He was holding a sheet of paper in one hand. He looked vaguely familiar.

“I’m Vic Donatti,” the heavyset man said. “If you decide to go ahead with our program, I’ll be in charge of your case.”

“Pleased to know you,” Morrison said. He wanted a cigarette very badly.

“Have a seat.”

Donatti put the receptionist’s form on the desk, and then drew another form from the desk drawer. He looked directly into Morrison’s eyes. “Do you want to quit smoking?”

Morrison cleared his throat, crossed his legs, and tried to think of a way to equivocate. He couldn’t. “Yes,” he said.

“Will you sign this?” He gave Morrison the form. He scanned it quickly. The undersigned agrees not to divulge the methods or techniques or et cetera, et cetera.

“Sure,” he said, and Donatti put a pen in his hand. He scratched his name, and Donatti signed below it. A moment later the paper disappeared back into the desk drawer. Well, he thought ironically, I’ve taken the pledge. He had taken it before. Once it had lasted for two whole days.

“Good,” Donatti said. “We don’t bother with propaganda here, Mr. Morrison. Questions of health or expense or social grace. We have no interest in why you want to stop smoking. We are pragmatists.”

“Good,” Morrison said blankly.

“We employ no drugs. We employ no Dale Carnegie people to sermonize you. We recommend no special diet. And we accept no payment until you have stopped smoking for one year.”

“My God,” Morrison said.

“Mr. McCann didn’t tell you that?”

“No.”

“How is Mr. McCann, by the way? Is he well?”

“He’s fine.”

“Wonderful. Excellent. Now... just a few questions, Mr. Morrison. These are somewhat personal, but I assure you that your answers will be held in strictest confidence.”

“Yes?” Morrison asked noncommittally.

“What is your wife’s name?”

“Lucinda Morrison. Her maiden name was Ramsey.”

“Do you love her?”

Morrison looked up sharply, but Donatti was looking at him blandly. “Yes, of course,” he said.

“Have you ever had marital problems? A separation, perhaps?”

“What has that got to do with kicking the habit?” Morrison asked. He sounded a little angrier than he had intended, but he wanted — hell, he needed — a cigarette.

“A great deal,” Donatti said. “Just bear with me.”

“No. Nothing like that.” Although things had been a little tense just lately.

“You just have the one child?”

“Yes. Alvin. He’s in a private school.”

“And which school is it?”

“That,” Morrison said grimly, “I’m not going to tell you.”

“All right,” Donatti said agreeably. He smiled disarmingly at Morrison. “All your questions will be answered tomorrow at your first treatment.”

“How nice,” Morrison said, and stood.

“One final question,” Donatti said. “You haven’t had a cigarette for over an hour. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” Morrison lied. “Just fine.”

“Good for you!” Donatti exclaimed. He stepped around the desk and opened the door. “Enjoy them tonight. After tomorrow, you’ll never smoke again.”

“Is that right?”

“Mr. Morrison,” Donatti said solemnly, “we guarantee it.”

He was sitting in the outer office of Quitters, Inc., the next day promptly at three. He had spent most of the day swinging between skipping the appointment the receptionist had made for him on the way out and going in a spirit of mulish cooperation — Throw your best pitch at me, buster.

In the end, something Jimmy McCann had said convinced him to keep the appointment — It changed my whole life. God knew his own life could do with some changing. And then there was his own curiosity. Before going up in the elevator, he smoked a cigarette down to the filter. Too damn bad if it’s the last one, he thought. It tasted horrible.

The wait in the outer office was shorter this time. When the receptionist told him to go in, Donatti was waiting. He offered his hand and smiled, and to Morrison the smile looked almost predatory. He began to feel a little tense, and that made him want a cigarette.

“Come with me,” Donatti said, and led the way down to the small room. He sat behind the desk again, and Morrison took the other chair.

“I’m very glad you came,” Donatti said. “A great many prospective clients never show up again after the initial interview. They discover they don’t want to quit as badly as they thought. It’s going to be a pleasure to work with you on this.”

“When does the treatment start?” Hypnosis, he was thinking. It must be hypnosis.

“Oh, it already has. It started when we shook hands in the hall. Do you have cigarettes with you, Mr. Morrison?”

“Yes.”

“May I have them, please?”

Shrugging, Morrison handed Donatti his pack. There were only two or three left in it, anyway.

Donatti put the pack on the desk. Then, smiling into Morrison’s eyes, he curled his right hand into a fist and began to hammer it down on the pack of cigarettes, which twisted and flattened. A broken cigarette end flew out. Tobacco crumbs spilled. The sound of Donatti’s fist was very loud in the closed room. The smile remained on his face in spite of the force of the blows, and Morrison was chilled by it. Probably just the effect they want to inspire, he thought.

At last Donatti ceased pounding. He picked up the pack, a twisted and battered ruin. “You wouldn’t believe the pleasure that gives me,” he said, and dropped the pack into the wastebasket. “Even after three years in the business, it still pleases me.”

“As a treatment, it leaves something to be desired,” Morrison said mildly. “There’s a newsstand in the lobby of this very building. And they sell all brands.”

“As you say,” Donatti said. He folded his hands. “Your son, Alvin Dawes Morrison, is in the Paterson School for Handicapped Children. Born with cranial brain damage. Tested IQ of 46. Not quite in the educable retarded category. Your wife—”

“How did you find that out?” Morrison barked. He was startled and angry. “You’ve got no goddamn right to go poking around my—”

“We know a lot about you,” Donatti said smoothly. “But, as I said, it will all be held in strictest confidence.”

“I’m getting out of here,” Morrison said thinly. He stood up.

“Stay a bit longer.”

Morrison looked at him closely. Donatti wasn’t upset. In fact, he looked a little amused. The face of a man who has seen this reaction scores of times — maybe hundreds.

“All right. But it better be good.”

“Oh, it is.” Donatti leaned back. “I told you we were pragmatists here. As pragmatists, we have to start by realizing how difficult it is to cure an addiction to tobacco. The relapse rate is almost eighty-five percent. The relapse rate for heroin addicts is lower than that. It is an extraordinary problem. Extraordinary.”

Morrison glanced into the wastebasket. One of the cigarettes, although twisted, still looked smokeable. Donatti laughed good-naturedly, reached into the wastebasket, and broke it between his fingers.

“State legislatures sometimes hear a request that the prison systems do away with the weekly cigarette ration. Such proposals are invariably defeated. In a few cases where they have passed, there have been fierce prison riots. Riots, Mr. Morrison. Imagine it.”

“I,” Morrison said, “am not surprised.”

“But consider the implications. When you put a man in prison you take away any normal sex life, you take away his liquor, his politics, his freedom of movement. No riots — or few in comparison to the number of prisons. But when you take away his cigarettes — wham! bam!” He slammed his fist on the desk for emphasis.

“During World War I, when no one on the German home front could get cigarettes, the sight of German aristocrats picking butts out of the gutter was a common one. During World War II, many American women turned to pipes when they were unable to obtain cigarettes. A fascinating problem for the true pragmatist, Mr. Morrison.”

“Could we get to the treatment?”

“Momentarily. Step over here, please.” Donatti had risen and was standing by the green curtains Morrison had noticed yesterday. Donatti drew the curtains, discovering a rectangular window that looked into a bare room. No, not quite bare. There was a rabbit on the floor, eating pellets out of a dish.

“Pretty bunny,” Morrison commented.

“Indeed. Watch him.” Donatti pressed a button by the windowsill. The rabbit stopped eating and began to hop about crazily. It seemed to leap higher each time its feet struck the floor. Its fur stood out spikily in all directions. Its eyes were wild.

“Stop that! You’re electrocuting him!”

Donatti released the button. “Far from it. There’s a very low-yield charge in the floor. Watch the rabbit, Mr. Morrison!”

The rabbit was crouched about ten feet away from the dish of pellets. His nose wriggled. All at once he hopped away into a corner.

“If the rabbit gets a jolt often enough while he’s eating,” Donatti said, “he makes the association very quickly. Eating causes pain. Therefore, he won’t eat. A few more shocks, and the rabbit will starve to death in front of his food. It’s called aversion training.”

Light dawned in Morrison’s head.

“No, thanks.” He started for the door.

“Wait, please, Mr. Morrison.”

Morrison didn’t pause. He grasped the doorknob... and felt it slip solidly through his hand. “Unlock this.”

“Mr. Morrison, if you’ll just sit down—”

“Unlock this door or I’ll have the cops on you before you can say Marlboro Man.”

“Sit down.” The voice was cold as shaved ice.

Morrison looked at Donatti. His brown eyes were muddy and frightening. My God, he thought, I’m locked in here with a psycho. He licked his lips. He wanted a cigarette more than he ever had in his life.

“Let me explain the treatment in more detail,” Donatti said.

“You don’t understand,” Morrison said with counterfeit patience. “I don’t want the treatment. I’ve decided against it.”

“No, Mr. Morrison. You’re the one who doesn’t understand. You don’t have any choice. When I told you the treatment had already begun, I was speaking the literal truth. I would have thought you’d tipped to that by now.”

“You’re crazy,” Morrison said wonderingly.

“No. Only a pragmatist. Let me tell you all about the treatment.”

“Sure,” Morrison said. “As long as you understand that as soon as I get out of here I’m going to buy five packs of cigarettes and smoke them all the way to the police station.” He suddenly realized he was biting his thumbnail, sucking on it, and made himself stop.

“As you wish. But I think you’ll change your mind when you see the whole picture.”

Morrison said nothing. He sat down again and folded his hands.

“For the first month of the treatment, our operatives will have you under constant supervision,” Donatti said. “You’ll be able to spot some of them. Not all. But they’ll always be with you. Always. If they see you smoke a cigarette, I get a call.”

“And I suppose you bring me here and do the old rabbit trick,” Morrison said. He tried to sound cold and sarcastic, but he suddenly felt horribly frightened. This was a nightmare.

“Oh, no,” Donatti said. “Your wife gets the rabbit trick, not you.”

Morrison looked at him dumbly.

Donatti smiled. “You,” he said, “get to watch.”

After Donatti let him out, Morrison walked for over two hours in a complete daze. It was another fine day, but he didn’t notice. The monstrousness of Donatti’s smiling face blotted out all else.

“You see,” he had said, “a pragmatic problem demands pragmatic solutions. You must realize we have your best interests at heart.”

Quitters, Inc., according to Donatti, was a sort of foundation — a nonprofit organization begun by the man in the wall portrait. The gentleman had been extremely successful in several family businesses — including slot machines, massage parlors, numbers, and a brisk (although clandestine) trade between New York and Turkey. Mort “Three-Fingers” Minelli had been a heavy smoker — up in the three-pack-a-day range. The paper he was holding in the picture was a doctor’s diagnosis: lung cancer. Mort had died in 1970, after endowing Quitters, Inc., with family funds.

“We try to keep as close to breaking even as possible,” Donatti had said. “But we’re more interested in helping our fellow man. And of course, it’s a great tax angle.”

The treatment was chillingly simple. A first offense and Cindy would be brought to what Donatti called “the rabbit room.” A second offense, and Morrison would get the dose. On a third offense, both of them would be brought in together. A fourth offense would show grave cooperation problems and would require sterner measures. An operative would be sent to Alvin’s school to work the boy over.

“Imagine,” Donatti said, smiling, “how horrible it will be for the boy. He wouldn’t understand it even if someone explained. He’ll only know someone is hurting him because Daddy was bad. He’ll be very frightened.”

“You bastard,” Morrison said helplessly. He felt close to tears. “You dirty, filthy bastard.”

“Don’t misunderstand,” Donatti said. He was smiling sympathetically. “I’m sure it won’t happen. Forty percent of our clients never have more than three falls from grace. Those are reassuring figures, aren’t they?”

Morrison didn’t find them reassuring. He found them terrifying.

“Of course, if you transgress a fifth time—”

“What do you mean?”

Donatti beamed. “The room for you and your wife, a second beating for your son, and a beating for your wife.”

Morrison, driven beyond the point of rational consideration, lunged over the desk at Donatti. Donatti moved with amazing speed for a man who had apparently been completely relaxed. He shoved the chair backward and drove both of his feet over the desk and into Morrison’s belly. Gagging and coughing, Morrison staggered backward.

“Sit down, Mr. Morrison,” Donatti said benignly. “Let’s talk this over like rational men.”

When he could catch his breath, Morrison did as he was told. Nightmares had to end sometime, didn’t they?

Quitters, Inc., Donatti had explained further, operated on a ten-step punishment scale. Steps six, seven, and eight consisted of further trips to the rabbit room (and increased voltage) and more serious beating. The ninth step would be the breaking of his son’s arms.

“And the tenth?” Morrison asked, his mouth dry.

Donatti shook his head sadly. “Then we give up, Mr. Morrison. You become part of the unregenerate two percent.”

“You really give up?”

“In a manner of speaking.” He opened one of the desk drawers and laid a silenced .45 on the desk. He smiled into Morrison’s eyes. “But even the unregenerate two percent never smoke again. We guarantee it.”

The Friday Night Movie was Bullitt, one of Cindy’s favorites, but after an hour of Morrison’s mutterings and fidgetings, her concentration was broken.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked during station identification.

“Nothing... everything,” he growled. “I’m giving up smoking.”

She laughed. “Since when? Five minutes ago?”

“Since three o’clock this afternoon.”

“You really haven’t had a cigarette since then?”

“No,” he said, and began to gnaw his thumbnail. It was ragged, down to the quick.

“That’s wonderful! What ever made you decide to quit?”

“You,” he said. “And... and Alvin.”

Her eyes widened, and when the movie came back on, she didn’t notice. Dick rarely mentioned their retarded son. She came over, looked at the empty ashtray by his right hand, and then into his eyes. “Are you really trying to quit, Dick?”

“Really.” And if I go to the cops, he added mentally, the local goon squad will be around to rearrange your face, Cindy.

“I’m glad. Even if you don’t make it, we both thank you for the thought, Dick.”

“Oh, I think I’ll make it,” he said, thinking of the muddy, homicidal look that had come into Donatti’s eyes when he kicked him in the stomach.

He slept badly that night, dozing in and out of sleep. Around three o’clock he woke up completely. His craving for a cigarette was like a low-grade fever. He went downstairs and to his study. The room was in the middle of the house. No windows. He slid open the top drawer of his desk and looked in, fascinated by the cigarette box. He looked around and licked his lips.

Constant supervision during the first month, Donatti had said. Eighteen hours a day during the next two — but he would never know which eighteen. During the fourth month, the month when most clients backslid; the “service” would return to twenty-four hours a day. Then twelve hours of broken surveillance each day for the rest of the year. After that? Random surveillance for the rest of the client’s life.

For the rest of his life.

“We may audit you every other month,” Donatti said. “Or every other day. Or constantly for one week two years from now. The point is, you won’t know. If you smoke, you’ll be gambling with loaded dice. Are they watching? Are they picking up my wife or sending a man after my son right now? Beautiful, isn’t it? And if you do sneak a smoke, it’ll taste awful. It will taste like your son’s blood.”

But they couldn’t be watching now, in the dead of night, in his own study. The house was grave-quiet.

He looked at the cigarettes in the box for almost two minutes, unable to tear his gaze away. Then he went to the study door, peered out into the empty hall, and went back to look at the cigarettes some more. A horrible picture came: his life stretching before him and not a cigarette to be found. How in the name of God was he ever going to be able to make another tough presentation to a wary client, without that cigarette burning nonchalantly between his fingers as he approached the charts and layouts? How would he be able to endure Cindy’s endless garden shows without a cigarette? How could he even get up in the morning and face the day without a cigarette to smoke as he drank his coffee and read the paper?

He cursed himself for getting into this. He cursed Donatti. And most of all, he cursed Jimmy McCann. How could he have done it? The son of a bitch had known. His hands trembled in their desire to get hold of Jimmy Judas McCann.

Stealthily, he glanced around the study again. He reached into the drawer and brought out a cigarette. He caressed it, fondled it. What was the old slogan? So round, so firm, so fully packed. Truer words had never been spoken. He put the cigarette in his mouth and then paused, cocking his head.

Had there been the slightest noise from the closet? A faint shifting? Surely not. But—

Another mental image — that rabbit hopping crazily in the grip of electricity. The thought of Cindy in that room—

He listened desperately and heard nothing. He told himself that all he had to do was to go to the closet door and yank it open. But he was too afraid of what he might find. He went back to bed but didn’t sleep for a long time.

In spite of how lousy he felt in the morning, breakfast tasted good. After a moment’s hesitation, he followed his customary bowl of cornflakes with scrambled eggs. He was grumpily washing out the pan when Cindy came downstairs in her robe.

“Richard Morrison! You haven’t eaten an egg for breakfast since Hector was a pup.”

Morrison grunted. He considered since Hector was a pup to be one of Cindy’s stupider sayings, on a par with I should smile and kiss a pig.

“Have you smoked yet?” she asked, pouring orange juice.

“No.”

“You’ll be back on them by noon,” she proclaimed airily.

“Lot of goddamn help you are!” he rasped, rounding on her. “You and anyone else who doesn’t smoke, you all think... ah, never mind.”

He expected her to be angry, but she was looking at him with something like wonder. “You’re really serious,” she said. “You really are.”

“You bet I am.” You’ll never know how serious. I hope.

“Poor baby,” she said, going to him. “You look like death warmed over. But I’m very proud.”

Morrison held her tightly.

Scenes from the life of Richard Morrison, October-November: Morrison and a crony from Larkin Studios at Jack Dempsey’s bar. Crony offers a cigarette. Morrison grips his glass a little more tightly and says: I’m quitting. Crony laughs and says: I give you a week.

Morrison waiting for the morning train, looking over the top of the Times at a young man in a blue suit. He sees the young man almost every morning now, and sometimes at other places. At Onde’s, where he is meeting a client. Looking at 45s in Sam Goody’s, where Morrison is looking for a Sam Cooke album. Once in a foursome behind Morrison’s group at the local golf course.

Morrison getting drunk at a party, wanting a cigarette — but not quite drunk enough to take one.

Morrison visiting his son, bringing him a large ball that squeaked when you squeezed it. His son’s slobbering, delighted kiss. Somehow not as repulsive as before. Hugging his son tightly, realizing what Donatti and his colleagues had so cynically realized before him: love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.

Morrison losing the physical compulsion to smoke little by little, but never quite losing the psychological craving, or the need to have something in his mouth — cough drops, Life Savers, a toothpick. Poor substitutes, all of them.

And finally, Morrison hung up in a colossal traffic jam in the Midtown Tunnel. Darkness. Horns blaring. Air stinking. Traffic hopelessly snarled. And suddenly, thumbing open the glove compartment and seeing the half-open pack of cigarettes in there. He looked at them for a moment, then snatched one and lit it with the dashboard lighter. If anything happens, it’s Cindy’s fault, he told himself defiantly. I told her to get rid of all the damn cigarettes.

The first drag made him cough smoke out furiously. The second made his eyes water. The third made him feel lightheaded and swoony. It tastes awful, he thought.

And on the heels of that: My God, what am I doing?

Horns blatted impatiently behind him. Ahead, the traffic had begun to move again. He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, opened both front windows, opened the vents, and then fanned the air helplessly like a kid who had just flushed his first butt down the john.

He joined the traffic flow jerkily and drove home.

“Cindy?” he called. “I’m home.”

No answer.

“Cindy? Where are you, hon?”

The phone rang, and he pounced on it. “Hello? Cindy?”

“Hello, Mr. Morrison,” Donatti said. He sounded pleasantly brisk and businesslike. “It seems we have a small business matter to attend to. Would five o’clock be convenient?”

“Have you got my wife?”

“Yes, indeed.” Donatti chuckled indulgently.

“Look, let her go,” Morrison babbled. “It won’t happen again. It was a slip, just a slip, that’s all. I only had three drags and for God’s sake it didn’t even taste good!”

“That’s a shame. I’ll count on you for five then, shall I?”

“Please,” Morrison said, close to tears. “Please—”

He was speaking to a dead line.

At 5 P.M. the reception room was empty except for the secretary, who gave him a twinkly smile that ignored Morrison’s pallor and disheveled appearance. “Mr. Donatti?” she said into the intercom. “Mr. Morrison to see you.” She nodded to Morrison. “Go right in.”

Donatti was waiting outside the unmarked room with a man who was wearing a smile sweatshirt and carrying a .38. He was built like an ape.

“Listen,” Morrison said to Donatti. “We can work something out, can’t we? I’ll pay you. I’ll—”

“Shaddap,” the man in the smile sweatshirt said.

“It’s good to see you,” Donatti said. “Sorry it has to be under such adverse circumstances. Will you come with me? We’ll make this as brief as possible. I can assure you your wife won’t be hurt... this time.”

Morrison tensed himself to leap at Donatti.

“Come, come,” Donatti said, looking annoyed. “If you do that, Junk here is going to pistol-whip you and your wife is still going to get it. Now where’s the percentage in that?”

“I hope you rot in hell,” he told Donatti.

Donatti sighed. “If I had a nickel for every time someone expressed a similar sentiment, I could retire. Let it be a lesson to you, Mr. Morrison. When a romantic tries to do a good thing and fails they give him a medal. When a pragmatist succeeds, they wish him in hell. Shall we go?”

Junk motioned with the pistol.

Morrison preceded them into the room. He felt numb. The small green curtain had been pulled. Junk prodded him with the gun. This is what being a witness at the gas chamber must have been like, he thought.

He looked in. Cindy was there, looking around bewilderedly.

“Cindy!” Morrison called miserably. “Cindy, they—”

“She can’t hear or see you,” Donatti said. “One-way glass. Well, let’s get it over with. It really was a very small slip. I believe thirty seconds should be enough. Junk?”

Junk pressed the button with one hand and kept the pistol jammed firmly into Morrison’s back with the other.

It was the longest thirty seconds of his life.

When it was over, Donatti put a hand on Morrison’s shoulder and said, “Are you going to throw up?”

“No,” Morrison said weakly. His forehead was against the glass. His legs were jelly. “I don’t think so.” He turned around and saw that Junk was gone.

“Come with me,” Donatti said.

“Where?” Morrison asked apathetically.

“I think you have a few things to explain, don’t you?”

“How can I face her? How can I tell her that I... I...”

“I think you’re going to be surprised,” Donatti said.

The room was empty except for a sofa. Cindy was on it, sobbing helplessly.

“Cindy?” he said gently.

She looked up, her eyes magnified by tears. “Dick?” she whispered. “Dick? Oh... Oh God...” He held her tightly. “Two men,” she said against his chest. “In the house and at first I thought they were burglars and then I thought they were going to rape me and then they took me someplace with a blindfold over my eyes and... and... oh it was h-horrible—”

“Shhh,” he said. “Shhh.”

“But why?” she asked, looking up at him. “Why would they—”

“Because of me,” he said. “I have to tell you a story, Cindy—”

When he had finished he was silent a moment and then said, “I suppose you hate me. I wouldn’t blame you.”

He was looking at the floor, and she took his face in both hands and turned it to hers. “No,” she said. “I don’t hate you.”

He looked at her in mute surprise.

“It was worth it,” she said. “God bless these people. They’ve let you out of prison.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes,” she said, and kissed him. “Can we go home now? I feel much better. Ever so much.”

The phone rang one evening a week later, and when Morrison recognized Donatti’s voice, he said, “Your boys have got it wrong. I haven’t even been near a cigarette.”

“We know that. We have a final matter to talk over. Can you stop by tomorrow afternoon?”

“Is it—”

“No, nothing serious. Bookkeeping really. By the way, congratulations on your promotion.”

“How did you know about that?”

“We’re keeping tabs,” Donatti said noncommittally, and hung up.

When they entered the small room, Donatti said, “Don’t look so nervous. No one’s going to bite you. Step over here, please.”

Morrison saw an ordinary bathroom scale. “Listen, I’ve gained a little weight, but—”

“Yes, seventy-three percent of our clients do. Step up, please.”

Morrison did, and tipped the scales at one-seventy-four.

“Okay, fine. You can step off. How tall are you, Mr. Morrison?”

“Five-eleven.”

“Okay, let’s see.” He pulled a small card laminated in plastic from his breast pocket. “Well, that’s not too bad. I’m going to write you a prescrip for some highly illegal diet pills. Use them sparingly and according to directions. And I’m going to set your maximum weight at... let’s see...” He consulted the card again. “One-eighty-two, how does that sound? And since this is December first, I’ll expect you the first of every month for a weigh-in. No problem if you can’t make it, as long as you call in advance.”

“And what happens if I go over one-eighty-two?”

Donatti smiled. “We’ll send someone out to your house to cut off your wife’s little finger,” he said. “You can leave through this door, Mr. Morrison. Have a nice day.”

Eight months later:

Morrison runs into the crony from the Larkin Studios at Dempsey’s bar. Morrison is down to what Cindy proudly calls his fighting weight: one-sixty-seven. He works out three times a week and looks as fit as whipcord. The crony from Larkin, by comparison, looks like something the cat dragged in.

Crony: Lord, how’d you ever stop? I’m locked into this damn habit tighter than Tillie. The crony stubs his cigarette out with real revulsion and drains his scotch.

Morrison looks at him speculatively and then takes a small white business card out of his wallet. He puts it on the bar between them. You know, he says, these guys changed my life.

Twelve months later:

Morrison receives a bill in the mail. The bill says:

Those sons of bitches! he explodes. They charged me for the electricity they used to... to...

Just pay it, she says, and kisses him.

Twenty months later:

Quite by accident, Morrison and his wife meet the Jimmy McCanns at the Helen Hayes Theatre. Introductions are made all around. Jimmy looks as good, if not better, than he did on that day in the airport terminal so long ago. Morrison has never met his wife. She is pretty in the radiant way plain girls sometimes have when they are very, very happy.

She offers her hand and Morrison shakes it. There is something odd about her grip, and halfway through the second act, he realizes what it was. The little finger on her right hand is missing.

The old-fashioned private eye just plumb wore out back in the seventies. The trench coat was frayed, the constant boozing had become a serious medical problem, and there were so many dollies a guy needed Viagra, which, alas, hadn’t been invented yet. It was at this time that a few gifted writers, such as John Lutz, took a look at the genre and said,“This has got to change.” Alo Nudger was Lutz’s first entry in the neo-private-eye sweepstakes, and boy, was he a good one. Alo doesn’t try to conquer life’s vicissitudes with swill and swagger; he simply hopes to survive them — with a lot of help from his endless supply of Turns. Fred Carver came along after that. Fred is a kind of James Joycean P.I., a Portrait of a Middle-Aged Shamus. He is all the things a private eye isn’t supposed to be: generally confused; frequently unnerved; and unfailingly in need of donuts, sympathy, and various kinds of medication for his various physical ailments. All this is rendered in very nice prose, and with a worldview that occasionally reads like St. Francis of Assisi with a hangover. Lutz is also a true short-story master. He has an Edgar to prove it, and even if he didn’t, this story, like dozens of others, would say it just as clearly.

You can live your life through and try hard to be a decent sort, but trouble might still come to you. That’s the way it seems to have been with me. My trouble was never the direct result of what I did, but the product of others. Neighbours especially. My advice is, don’t ever get too friendly with your neighbors. I had to learn that the hard way.

Adelaide and I finished moving into our new house on a Sunday. That Monday I managed to stay away from the office and helped her sort the contents of cardboard boxes and move furniture about. We were both very happy that day, for we’d worked and saved for a long time to be able to afford our own home built here in the beautiful rolling hills south of the smoke-palled city. Here the air was clear as crystal and the view was the best nature had to offer.

And the house itself was what we’d always wanted. Though not large, it was well built with excellent materials and designed with a tasteful touch of miniature elegance. Adelaide and I took a walk around our green property before dark that evening and admired the way the wood-shingled house seemed to blend so well with the forest-like setting.

Of course the best thing about the house and the property was that it was ours. I’d worked hard to build up my own mail order business, Smathers Enterprises, and Mr. and Mrs. Will Smathers were comparatively well heeled for a couple in their early thirties who’d started married life on practically nothing.

Adelaide stopped strolling and gazed down the narrow blacktop road that fronted our property. I stood off and admired her delicate features and shining blonde hair, the weight of her lithe, graceful body resting on one slender leg. Adelaide, too, blended well with the natural surroundings. She was a natural beauty, the type makeup couldn’t improve.

“I wonder about our neighbor,” she said.

I moved next to her, slipping my arm about her waist. From where we stood we could see the nearest home through a break in the heavy green of the trees. A large brick home with a swimming pool behind it, it was the only house within a mile of us in either direction. I could just see the top of a small beach house near the pool. Within plain view near the attached two-car garage was a long, expensive blue convertible.

“Whoever our neighbor is,” I said, “he has money.”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“On the other hand, he may be mortgaged up to his neck.”

We stood for a moment longer looking down at the big house before going back inside. I say looking down because our home was situated high on one of the hills, and the blacktop road snaked sharply downward for the next two or three miles as it meandered like a still tributary to the Red Fox River.

I suppose I had no business saying anything about how our neighbor might have his property mortgaged. We’d gone into debt heavily to buy our own home. But the business was going well, and promised to continue to do so, and there was no reason we shouldn’t be happy now and pay as we went along.

And in a way owing on the house could be a good thing. Once we were in it I knew we’d never give it up unless we absolutely had to, and it might serve as a spur to help make me work even harder.

But all the house motivated me to do that day was leave the office early so I could get home to enjoy living there with Adelaide. As I drove up the winding driveway I wondered when I’d get over the feeling that this was someone else’s charming home I was approaching and not my own.

Adelaide knew I was coming home early and had dinner in the oven. She fixed us each a drink while we were waiting and we sat in the disarranged living room.

“I don’t know when we’ll ever get things the way we want them,” Adelaide said, glancing around at the mess.

I grinned at her and took a sip of my Scotch and water, admiring her fresh good looks in the plain housedress she did so much for. “There’s plenty of time.”

“I suppose so.” She sighed with contentment and settled back in her chair. “I saw our neighbor today,” she said.

“Did he drop by to introduce himself?”

“No, but you can see the house from our bedroom window upstairs. When I looked out this afternoon I noticed a man swimming in the pool. He had a guest, a girl in a purple bikini who stayed there most of the day, then drove away in a little sports car.”

I had to laugh. If Adelaide had any faults at all, one of them would be that she was a trifle nosy. “Are you going to stare a dossier on them?” I asked jokingly.

“Not yet,” she said with a smile. “And it’s not ‘them’, it’s ‘him’. The man seems to live there alone.”

“Big house for a single man,” I remarked, “though it sounds like he has his fun there.”

A timer bell sounded in the kitchen and Adelaide put down her drink and stood. I walked behind her as she hurried into the kitchen to check on the dinner.

“You keep an eye on him and keep me posted,” I said, rubbing the back of my hand playfully up the nape of her neck. She didn’t answer and I kept quiet. Experience had taught me to joke only so far about Adelaide’s feminine curiosity.

Though without any prompting she had another tidbit of information for me the next evening when I returned home.

“Our neighbor seems to be something of a swinger,” she said. “There was a girl in a red bikini there today.”

“Same girl, different bikini,” I speculated.

Adelaide shook her head. “The first one was a tall brunette. Today it was a short blonde.”

I smiled and shrugged. “His sister?”

“I doubt it,” Adelaide said, and drew a miniature bronze rooster from the carton.

“I’m sure we’ll find out more about him,” I said. “He’ll probably turn up at our door one of these days soon to introduce himself. Could be he doesn’t even realize there’s anybody living here yet.” Silently I wondered if he’d plant a shade tree between us and his pool when he did find out. Then for the next few hours I was busy helping Adelaide finish the job of unpacking and thought about little else.

But that night my own curiosity about our neighbor was aroused when I walked across the bedroom to close the drapes.

As my hand reached for the pull cord my eye caught the flash of a revolving red light in the distance. I leaned forward and squinted into the darkness, and I saw that a police car was parked in our neighbor’s driveway beside his long blue convertible.

As I watched another car pulled up behind that one. In the reflection of its headlights I could see that it was a plain gray sedan. Two men got out of it and went into the house without knocking.

A hand touched my shoulder and Adelaide was standing beside me.

“Now who’s nosy?” she asked.

I didn’t answer, and we stood there for a while and watched shadows cross the distant draped windows. Then the two men and a uniformed policeman came out of the house. They got into their respective cars, the red light on the patrol car was turned off, and both cars left together. A few minutes later the windows of the house went black and Adelaide and I were staring at nothing.

“What do you think?” Adelaide asked as we turned away from the window.

“It could have been a lot of things,” I said. “Maybe the police were called because somebody was sick. Maybe the two men in the plain car were doctors. Maybe our neighbor thought he saw a prowler. I guess if we really wanted to find out the thing to do would be to ask him.”

Sometimes novelists achieve fame for the wrong books. The Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) are exemplary adventure books of their type, that being an updating and derivation on the private-eye formulas and mechanisms of the thirties and forties. They contain wisdom, grace, and more than a little droll manly humor. But for many they are not MacDonald’s most accomplished work. His novels Cry Hard, Cry Fast (1955), Murdering the Wind (1956), Slam the Big Door (1960), A Flash of Green (1962), and the astonishingly good The End of the Night (1960) were among his finest work. There were also an imposing number of other paperback originals that were also first-rate crime stories — among them Dead, Low Tide (1953) and One Monday We Killed Them All (1961) — that were never done in hardcover in the United States. His best work bore the stamp of John O’Hara and John P. Marquand. He knew that crime was an essential part of the American Century (whether it was crime in corporate boardrooms or crime in a Charles Starkweather — like murder spree) and he made it a point to let his readers know how crime really worked. He was the greatest storyteller of his time.

The appearance of Sheriff Commer’s hand as he sat in the office of the jail told as much about him as most people who had lived in that little Southern city all their lives had learned. It was a square heavy hand with a thatch of brown curling hair on the back and short knobbed powerful fingers, tanned by the sun and wind, yellowed by the constant cigarette. He sat listening to the angry crowd noises, yelling for Burton, roaring from the park across from the jail, his thumb and first finger clenched so tightly on the short butt of his cigarette that the damp end of it was only a thin brown line.

He glanced down at his hand propped against the side of the oak desk and marveled that his finger didn’t tremble; secretly he always wondered at it. He respected and admired the independent nervelessness of his body, the way his brain could whirl in a mad haze of fear, his throat knotted, his heart thumping, and still his body, huge, ponderous and powerful, would go about its appointed tasks, with steady hands, calm eyes, quiet voice.

He kept safely tucked back on a secret shelf of his mind the thought that one day the body would break, the frenzied mind would have its way; and he would collapse into a quivering hulk, moaning over the imminence of pain and death.

The swelling roar of the lynching crowd faded from his conscious mind as he remembered the bright afternoon long ago when he had walked out of the group surrounding the Otis barn, walked steadily across the dark timbered floor, climbed slowly and heavily up the ladder until his head was above the floor of the loft, turned slowly and looked with chill impassivity into the crazed eyes of Danny Reneta. The only objects he saw in the dim hay-fragrant loft were those two shining eyes and the round vacant eye of the rifle which stared at him with infinite menace.

The room seemed to swing around him in a dizzy cycle of remembered fear as he recalled how he had calmly said, “Now, Danny. Better give me the gun,” had slowly reached out with a hand as firm as a rock and grasped the muzzle of the rifle.

The two insane eyes had stared into the two calm ones for measureless silent seconds until Commer thought he would drop screaming down the ladder.

Then a great rasping sob had come from Danny’s throat and Commer had pulled the rifle out of the nerveless fingers.

Now he dropped his cigarette butt on the stained floor and ground it out with his heavy heel while that incident faded with the others from the dark place in his soul.

He rose slowly to his feet, walked over to the window, stood and looked out into the park, saw dimly the shifting, growing crowd, heard the increased roar as they saw his bulky silhouette against the office light. He half-sneered as he realized who they must be: The drug-store commandos. The pool room Lotharios. The city’s amateur Cagneys.

But he felt also the slow certain growth of fear, an ember threatening to ignite the ready tinder of his mind. He realized what a lynching would mean to him and to the city. It would kill his pride and self-respect more certainly than the impact of lead would kill his stubborn body.

He sighed, trying to shrug off his fear, walked to the desk and brought out two large official thirty-eights. He held one in each hand and looked at them then tossed them back into the drawer, slamming it shut with his chunky knee. He fumbled in the wall locker and brought out a submachine gun. He held it and looked down at it, looked at its shining, oiled efficiency, fingered the compensator, tested the slide and then stood silently, testing his strength against the smoldering ember of fear.

He grunted as he stooped and hauled two heavy drums of fifty shells each out of the bottom of the locker. He snapped one onto the gun and then walked back toward the cells, the gun dangling from one blunt hand, the drum clenched in the other.

At the door of Burton’s cell he laid the gun and drum on the floor, unlocked the cell and walked in. The hanging bulb made harsh light and blocky shadows in the cell. Burton slid off the cot and made quick short steps backward until he was pressed against the far wall, his huge black hands pressed palm-flat, fingers spread, against the whitewashed concrete, his face a shining impassive mask except for the wide eyes, dark iris rimmed with white. He was straight and tall, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, a graceful and living creature, shocked and helpless under the pressure of the threat of sudden, violent death.

Commer stood for a few minutes looking at him, expression calm, eyes friendly. “Got a feeling you didn’t do it, Burton,” he said. “You look like a good boy to me.”

Burton licked his lips, the glaze of fear fading slightly from his eyes as he answered, “I swear to God, Sheriff, I didn’t do it. I ain’t a killin’ man. I hear ’em yellin’ out there like they goin’ to come in and get me any minute. Don’t let ’em do it. Don’t let ’em do it!” The last few words were a sob.

“Whether they come in or not depends on you, Burton.”

“On me, sir? On me?” His tone was incredulous.

“That’s right. Can I trust you?”

“Yes, sir. I do anything you tell me.”

“Would you run away if you had the chance and knew I didn’t want you to?”

Burton stood silently. Then he said, “No, sir.” Commer believed him, believed him because of the pause, the weighing of loyalty against the fear that he could almost see in Burton’s eyes. The man hadn’t answered too fast.

Commer walked out, picked up the gun and drum and went back into the cell. He threw the drum onto the cot and poked the gun toward Burton. The big man stared in silent wonder and then reached out and took the gun in shaking hands.

“Careful, now! This-here thing is the safety. I’ve set the gun so that each time you pull the trigger you get a shot. The drum comes off like this. See? When it’s empty the slide stays back and then you stick on the other drum like this.”

“Yessir, but...”

“Now I’m going to leave you with your cell door open so you can sight down the hall here. If they come in, they’ll come through that door there, the door to my office. Shoot first into the ceiling. If they keep coming put a few in the floor. If they still keep coming, lock yourself in quick. Here’s the key. Then drop behind the corner of the cot and shoot low through the bars at their legs. Understand?”

“Yessir.” Burton stood holding the gun, a glow of hope in his eyes, his face full of a gratitude so deep that tears formed along his lower lids. “I’ll do just like you tell me, sir. I couldn’t let you down after this, Sheriff.” And he held the gun out, cradled in his arms as though it were the present of kings.

Commer grunted, turned on his heel and walked out, leaving the cell door open, walking steadily and slowly down the corridor, through his office, out the front door and onto the porch. There he stopped and watched the crowd, listening to their animal growling, every fiber of his mind screaming to him to turn and run for shelter. But he stood and held his arms up, a travesty of a benediction, calling for silence. For long minutes there was no response, then the shouting died to a murmuring. He heard a few last shouts of “We want Burton” and “Bring him out or we’re a-comin’ in after him!”

In his deep slow voice Commer bellowed into the darkness, “You all can come in after him right now. I just give him a submachine gun and plenty of ammunition. He’s in there a-waitin’ for you. Come ahead, boys! He’s all yours!”

There was an angry mutter from the crowd. Commer imagined that those who had bolstered their frail courage with corn liquor now felt a sudden sobering chill. He was glad that he had always backed up his statements, never bluffed. Yet he could hardly see because of the dizzy spin of fear in his head.

Then a top-heavy man with a shock of light hair came striding out of the shadows into the dim glow of the street lamp. Commer walked heavily down the steps to meet him, recognizing him as Ham Alberts, itinerant handyman, loud-mouth and trouble-maker. But he was a bull in the strength of his youth.

They stared at each other. Commer saw through his film of fear that Ham was quivering with outraged righteous indignation. The offended honor of a taxpayer who had never paid a tax.

“Commer,” he said hoarsely, “you got no call to arm a killer. You’re paid to stay on the side of the law. What the hell you doin’?”

“Just saving a man from a bunch of corner loafers. Why?” Commer’s voice sounded flat and disinterested, but he wondered if Alberts could hear the beating of his heart.

“If any of us gets kilt goin’ in after him, it’s gonna be your fault!”

“Do I looked worried, sonny? I do my duty my own way. No call for you to try to tell me how to do it. Now go on in and get him. What you waiting for? Yellow maybe?”

“Why, you tin-shield copper...” and Alberts lifted a beefy fist back and poised it two feet from Commer’s jaw. In spite of the roaring in his ears, Commer looked calmly at the fist and then into Alberts’ narrowed eyes.

“Don’t know as that there is one of your best ideas, sonny. I’m going down to the corner for some coffee while you boys take care a this little matter.” He turned away from Alberts, jiggling a cigarette out of a crumpled pack as he walked away.

Inside he writhed with terror, but there was room in his mind to wonder at the sober, quiet way his thick legs carried him along down the street. He stopped at the corner and lit his cigarette, his fingers strong and steady, the flare of the wooden match lighting up his stolid cheek bones, his mild brow.

Then he glanced back and saw Ham Alberts under the light, hollering into the shadows, his arms spread wide in a beseeching gesture. Commer couldn’t hear the words, but he could see in the distance the vague forms of the men who had been clustered in the park melting back away from the jail, away from the deadly Burton, ignoring the furious Alberts.

Then Alberts dropped his arms helplessly and wandered after them.

Commer sucked in a deep lungful of smoke and expelled it in a long, blue column into the soft night air. He turned and headed for his coffee, knowing in his heart that the strong body had defeated the fear demons of the mind, this time.

But the next time...

The mystery field had long needed a Proust, and it got in it Kenneth Millar (1915–1983), who wrote under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald. Here was a writer who believed that most truths about the present could be found in the past, and he revealed that idea with incredible grace and style in his novels. His private eye Lew Archer was an antiques dealer of sorts, though instead of objects he dealt in souls. Macdonald’s version of Southern California of the fifties and sixties is comparable to what Nathaniel West and Horace McCoy achieved in the thirties. Archer was a refined man in a vulgar time, and yet one sensed that for all his surface calm, he was just as deeply troubled as the people he pursued. The Way Some People Die (1951), The Ivory Grin (1952), and The Far Side of the Dollar (1965) are particularly good novels. The Chill (1964) is most likely his masterpiece. Tom Nolan’s biography Ross Macdonald is heartily recommended if you want to know more about this intriguing author.

A man was waiting for me at the gate at the edge of the runway. He didn’t look like the man I expected to meet. He wore a stained tan windbreaker, baggy slacks, a hat as squashed and dubious as his face. He must have been forty years old, to judge by the gray in his hair and the lines around his eyes. His eyes were dark and evasive, moving here and there as if to avoid getting hurt. He had been hurt often and badly, I guessed.

“You Archer?”

I said I was. I offered him my hand. He didn’t know what to do with it. He regarded it suspiciously, as if I was planning to try a Judo hold on him. He kept his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker.

“I’m Harry Nemo.” His voice was a grudging whine. It cost him an effort to give his name away. “My brother told me to come and pick you up. You ready to go?”

“As soon as I get my luggage.”

I collected my overnight bag at the counter in the empty waiting room. The bag was very heavy for its size. It contained, besides a toothbrush and spare linen, two guns and the ammunition for them. A .38 special for sudden work, and a .32 automatic as a spare.

Harry Nemo took me outside to his car. It was a new seven-passenger custom job, as long and black as death. The windshield and side windows were very thick, and they had the yellowish tinge of bulletproof glass.

“Are you expecting to be shot at?”

“Not me.” His smile was dismal. “This is Nick’s car.”

“Why didn’t Nick come himself?”

He looked around the deserted field. The plane I had arrived on was a flashing speck in the sky above the red sun. The only human being in sight was the operator in the control tower. But Nemo leaned towards me in the seat, and spoke in a whisper:

“Nick’s a scared pigeon. He’s scared to leave the house. Ever since this morning.”

“What happened this morning?”

“Didn’t he tell you? You talked to him on the phone.”

“He didn’t say very much. He told me he wanted to hire a bodyguard for six days, until his boat sails. He didn’t tell me why.”

“They’re gunning for him, that’s why. He went to the beach this morning. He has a private beach along the back of his ranch, and he went down there by himself for his morning dip. Somebody took a shot at him from the top of the bluff. Five or six shots. He was in the water, see, with no gun handy. He told me the slugs were splashing around him like hailstones. He ducked and swam under water out to sea. Lucky for him he’s a good swimmer, or he wouldn’t of got away. It’s no wonder he’s scared. It means they caught up with him, see.”

“Who are ‘they,’ or is that a family secret?”

Nemo turned from the wheel to peer into my face. His breath was sour, his look incredulous. “Christ, don’t you know who Nick is? Didn’t he tell you?”

“He’s a lemon-grower, isn’t he?”

“He is now.”

“What did he used to be?”

The bitter beaten face closed on itself. “I oughtn’t to be flapping at the mouth. He can tell you himself if he wants to.”

Two hundred horses yanked us away from the curb. I rode with my heavy leather bag on my knees. Nemo drove as if driving was the one thing in life he enjoyed, rapt in silent communion with the engine. It whisked us along the highway, then down a gradual incline between geometrically planted lemon groves. The sunset sea glimmered red at the foot of the slope.

Before we reached it, we turned off the blacktop into a private lane which ran like a straight hair-parting between the dark green trees. Straight for half a mile or more to a low house in a clearing.

The house was flat-roofed, made of concrete and fieldstone, with an attached garage. All of its windows were blinded with heavy draperies. It was surrounded with well-kept shrubbery and lawn, the lawn with a ten-foot wire fence surmounted by barbed wire.

Nemo stopped in front of the closed and padlocked gate, and honked the horn. There was no response. He honked the horn again.

About halfway between the house and the gate, a crawling thing came out of the shrubbery. It was a man, moving very slowly on hands and knees. His head hung down almost to the ground. One side of his head was bright red, as if he had fallen in paint. He left a jagged red trail in the gravel of the driveway.

Harry Nemo said, “Nick!” He scrambled out of the car. “What happened, Nick?”

The crawling man lifted his heavy head and looked at us. Cumbrously, he rose to his feet. He came forward with his legs spraddled and loose, like a huge infant learning to walk. He breathed loudly and horribly, looking at us with a dreadful hopefulness. Then he died on his feet, still walking. I saw the change in his face before it struck the gravel.

Harry Nemo went over the fence like a weary monkey, snagging his slacks on the barbed wire. He knelt beside his brother and turned him over and palmed his chest. He stood up shaking his head.

I had my bag unzipped and my hand on the revolver. I went to the gate. “Open up, Harry.”

Harry was saying, “They got him,” over and over. He crossed himself several times. “The dirty bastards.”

“Open up,” I said.

He found a key ring in the dead man’s pocket and opened the padlocked gate. Our dragging footsteps crunched the gravel. I looked down at the specks of gravel in Nicky Nemo’s eyes, the bullet hole in the temple.

“Who got him, Harry?”

“I dunno. Fats Jordan, or Artie Castola, or Faronese. It must have been one of them.”

“The Purple Gang.”

“You called it. Nicky was their treasurer back in the thirties. He was the one that didn’t get into the papers. He handled the payoff, see. When the heat went on and the gang got busted up, he had some money in a safe deposit box. He was the only one that got away.”

“How much money?”

“Nicky never told me. All I know, he come out here before the war and bought a thousand acres of lemon land. It took them fifteen years to catch up with him. He always knew they were gonna, though. He knew it.”

“Artie Castola got off the Rock last spring.”

“You’re telling me. That’s when Nicky bought himself the bulletproof car and put up the fence.”

“Are they gunning for you?”

He looked around at the darkening groves and the sky. The sky was streaked with running red, as if the sun had died a violent death.

“I dunno,” he answered nervously. “They got no reason to. I’m as clean as soap. I never been in the rackets. Not since I was young, anyway. The wife made me go straight, see?”

I said: “We better get into the house and call the police.”

The front door was standing a few inches ajar. I could see at the edge that it was sheathed with quarter-inch steel plate. Harry put my thoughts into words.

“Why in hell would he go outside? He was safe as houses as long as he stayed inside.”

“Did he live alone?”

“More or less alone.”

“What does that mean?”

He pretended not to hear me, but I got some kind of an answer. Looking through the doorless arch into the living room, I saw a leopardskin coat folded across the back of the chesterfield. There were redtipped cigarette butts mingled with cigar butts in the ash trays.

“Nicky was married?”

“Not exactly.”

“You know the woman?”

“Naw.” But he was lying.

Somewhere behind the thick walls of the house, there was a creak of springs, a crashing bump, the broken roar of a cold engine, grinding of tires in gravel. I got to the door in time to see a cerise convertible hurtling down the driveway. The top was down, and a yellow-haired girl was small and intent at the wheel. She swerved around Nick’s body and got through the gate somehow, with her tires screaming. I aimed at the right rear tire, and missed. Harry came up behind me. He pushed my gun-arm down before I could fire again. The convertible disappeared in the direction of the highway.

“Let her go,” he said.

“Who is she?”

He thought about it, his slow brain clicking almost audibly. “I dunno. Some pig that Nicky picked up some place. Her name is Flossie or Florrie or something. She didn’t shoot him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You know her pretty well, do you?”

“The hell I do. I don’t mess with Nicky’s dames.” He tried to work up a rage to go with the strong words, but he didn’t have the makings. The best he could produce was petulance: “Listen, mister, why should you hang around? The guy that hired you is dead.”

“I haven’t been paid, for one thing.”

“I’ll fix that.”

He trotted across the lawn to the body and came back with an alligator billfold. It was thick with money.

“How much?”

“A hundred will do it.”

He handed me a hundred-dollar bill. “Now how about you amscray, bud, before the law gets here?”

“I need transportation.”

“Take Nicky’s car. He won’t be using it. You can park it at the airport and leave the key with the agent.”

“I can, eh?”

“Sure. I’m telling you you can.”

“Aren’t you getting a little free with your brother’s property?”

“It’s my property now, bud.” A bright thought struck him, disorganizing his face. “Incidentally, how would you like to get off my land?”

“I’m staying, Harry. I like this place. I always say it’s people that make a place.”

The gun was still in my hand. He looked down at it.

“Get on the telephone, Harry. Call the police.”

“Who do you think you are, ordering me around? I took my last order from anybody, see?” He glanced over his shoulder at the dark and shapeless object on the gravel, and spat venomously.

“I’m a citizen, working for Nicky. Not for you.”

He changed his tune very suddenly. “How much to go to work for me?”

“Depends on the line of work.”

He manipulated the alligator wallet. “Here’s another hundred. If you got to hang around, keep the lip buttoned down about the dame, eh? Is it a deal?”

I didn’t answer, but I took the money. I put it in a separate pocket by itself. Harry telephoned the county sheriff.

He emptied the ash trays before the sheriff’s men arrived, and stuffed the leopardskin coat into the woodbox. I sat and watched him.

Dingley Falls, Handling Sin, Uncivil Seasons, and Time’s Witness are novels that endure in popularity and acclaim. Author Michael Malone has demonstrated that literary fiction can both appeal to its basic audience and find favor with readers of popular novels as well, including those most often found in the mystery sections of bookstores. The story reprinted here, winner of the 1996 Edgar award for short fiction, is a sample of Malone’s writing at its finest.

Up on its short slope the columned front of our courthouse was wavy in the August sun, like a courthouse in lake water. The leaves hung from maples, and the flag of North Carolina wilted flat against its metal pole. Heat sat sodden over Devereux County week by relentless week; they called the weather “dog days,” after the star, Sirius, but none of us knew that. We thought they meant no dog would leave shade for street on such days — no dog except a mad one. I was ten that late August in 1959; I remembered the summer because of the long heat wave, and because of Stella Doyle.

When they pushed open the doors, the policemen and lawyers flung their arms up to their faces to block the sun and stopped there in the doorway as if the hot light were shoving them back inside. Stella Doyle came out last, a deputy on either side to walk her down to where the patrol car, orange as Halloween candles, waited to take her away until the jury could make up its mind about what had happened two months earlier out at Red Hills. It was the only house in the county big enough to have a name. It was where Stella Doyle had, maybe, shot her husband, Hugh Doyle, to death.

Excitement over Doyle’s murder had swarmed through the town and stung us alive. No thrill would replace it until the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Outside the courthouse, sidewalk heat steaming up through our shoes, we stood patiently waiting to hear Mrs. Doyle found guilty. The news stood waiting, too, for she was, after all, not merely the murderer of the wealthiest man we knew; she was Stella Doyle. She was the movie star.

Papa’s hand squeezed down on my shoulder and there was a tight line to his mouth as he pulled me into the crowd and said, “Listen now, Buddy, if anybody ever asks you, when you’re grown, ‘Did you ever see the most beautiful woman God made in your lifetime,’ son, you say ‘Yes, I had that luck, and her name was Stella Dora Doyle.’ ” His voice got louder, right there in the crowd for everybody to hear. “You tell them how her beauty was so bright, it burned back the shame they tried to heap on her head, burned it right on back to scorch their faces.”

Papa spoke these strange words looking up the steps at the almost plump woman in black the deputies were holding. His arms were folded over his seersucker vest, his fingers tight on the sleeves of his shirt. People around us had turned to stare and somebody snickered.

Embarrassed for him, I whispered, “Oh, Papa, she’s nothing but an old murderer. Everybody knows how she got drunk and killed Mr. Doyle. She shot him right through the head with a gun.”

Papa frowned. “You don’t know that.”

I kept on. “Everybody says she was so bad and drunk all the time, she wouldn’t let his folks even live in the same house with her. She made him throw out his own mama and papa.”

Papa shook his head at me. “I don’t like to hear ugly gossip coming out of your mouth, all right, Buddy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“She didn’t kill Hugh Doyle.”

“Yes, sir.”

His frown scared me; it was so rare. I stepped closer and took his hand, took his stand against the rest. I had no loyalty to this woman Papa thought so beautiful. I just could never bear to be cut loose from the safety of his good opinion. I suppose that from that moment on, I felt toward Stella Doyle something of what my father felt, though in the end perhaps she meant less to me, and stood for more. Papa never had my habit of symbolizing.

The courthouse steps were wide, uneven stone slabs. As Mrs. Doyle came down, the buzzing of the crowd hushed. All together, like trained dancers, people stepped back to clear a half-circle around the orange patrol car. Newsmen shoved their cameras to the front. She was rushed down so fast that her shoe caught in the crumbling stone and she fell against one of the deputies.

“She’s drunk!” hooted a woman near me, a country woman in a flowered dress belted with a strip of painted rope. She and the child she jiggled against her shoulder were puffy with the fat of poverty. “Look’it her” — the woman pointed — “look at that dress. She thinks she’s still out there in Hollywood.” The woman beside her nodded, squinting out from under the visor of the kind of hat pier fishermen wear. “I went and killed my husband, wouldn’t no rich lawyers come running to weasel me out of the law.” She slapped at a fly’s buzz.

Then they were quiet and everybody else was quiet and our circle of sun-stunned eyes fixed on the woman in black, stared at the wonder of one as high as Mrs. Doyle about to be brought so low.

Holding to the stiff, tan arm of the young deputy, Mrs. Doyle reached down to check the heel of her shoe. Black shoes, black suit and purse, wide black hat — they all sinned against us by their fashionableness, blazing wealth as well as death. She stood there, arrested a moment in the hot immobility of the air, then she hurried down, rushing the two big deputies down with her, to the open door of the orange patrol car. Papa stepped forward so quickly that the gap filled with people before I could follow him. I squeezed through, fighting with my elbows, and I saw that he was holding his straw hat in one hand, and offering the other hand out to the murderer. “Stella, how are you? Clayton Hayes.”

As she turned, I saw the strawberry gold hair beneath the hat; then her hand, bright with a big diamond, took away the dark glasses. I saw what Papa meant. She was beautiful. Her eyes were the color of lilacs, but darker than lilacs. And her skin held the light like the inside of a shell. She was not like other pretty women, because the difference was not one of degree. I have never seen anyone else of her kind.

“Why, Clayton! God Almighty, it’s been years.”

“Well, yes, a long time now, I guess,” he said, and shook her hand.

She took the hand in both of hers. “You look the same as ever. Is this your boy?” she said. The violet eyes turned to me.

“Yes, this is Buddy. Ada and I have six so far, three of each.”

“Six? Are we that old, Clayton?” She smiled. “They said you’d married Ada Hackney.”

A deputy cleared his throat. “Sorry, Clayton, we’re going to have to get going.”

“Just a minute, Lonnie. Listen, Stella, I just wanted you to know I’m sorry as I can be about your losing Hugh.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “He did it himself, Clayton,” she said.

“I know that. I know you didn’t do this.” Papa nodded slowly again and again, the way he did when he was listening. “I know that. Good luck to you.”

She swatted tears away. “Thank you.”

“I’m telling everybody I’m sure of that.”

“Clayton, thank you.”

Papa nodded again, then tilted his head back to give her his slow, peaceful smile. “You call Ada and me if there’s ever something we can do to help you, you hear?” She kissed his cheek and he stepped back with me into the crowd of hostile, avid faces as she entered the police car. It moved slow as the sun through the sightseers. Cameras pushed against its windows.

A sallow man biting a pipe skipped down the steps to join some other reporters next to us. “Jury sent out for food,” he told them. “No telling with these yokels. Could go either way.” He pulled off his jacket and balled it under his arm. “Jesus, it’s hot.”

A younger reporter with thin, wet hair disagreed. “They all think Hollywood’s Babylon and she’s the whore. Hugh Doyle was the local prince, his daddy kept the mills open in the bad times, quote unquote half the rednecks in the county. They’ll fry her. For that hat if nothing else.”

“Could go either way,” grinned the man with the pipe. “She was born in a shack six miles from here. Hat or no hat, that makes her one of them. So what if she did shoot the guy, he was dying of cancer anyhow, for Christ’s sake. Well, she never could act worth the price of a bag of popcorn, but Jesus damn she was something to look at!”

Now that Stella Doyle was gone, people felt the heat again and went back to where they could sit still in the shade until the evening breeze and wait for the jury’s decision. Papa and I walked back down Main Street to our furniture store. Papa owned a butcher shop, too, but he didn’t like the meat business and wasn’t very good at it, so my oldest brother ran it while Papa sat among the mahogany bedroom suites and red maple dining-room sets in a big rocking chair and read, or talked to friends who dropped by. The rocker was actually for sale, but he had sat in it for so long now that it was just Papa’s chair. Three ceiling fans stirred against the quiet, shady air while he answered my questions about Stella Doyle.

He said that she grew up Stella Dora Hibble on Route 19, in a three-room, tin-roofed little house propped off the red clay by concrete blocks — the kind of saggy-porched, pinewood house whose owners leave on display in their dirt yard, like sculptures, the broken artifacts of their aspirations and the debris of their unmendable lives: the doorless refrigerator and the rusting car, the pyre of metal and plastic that tells drivers along the highway, “Dreams don’t last.”

Stella’s mother, Dora Hibble, had believed in dreams anyhow. Dora had been a pretty girl who’d married a farmer and worked harder than she had the health for, because hard work was necessary just to keep from going under. But in the evenings Mrs. Hibble had looked at movie magazines. She had believed the romance was out there and she wanted it, if not for her, for her children. At twenty-seven, Dora Hibble died during her fifth labor. Stella was eight when she watched from the door of the bedroom as they covered her mother’s face with a thin blanket. When Stella was fourteen, her father died when a machine jammed at Doyle Mills. When Stella was sixteen, Hugh Doyle, Jr., who was her age, my father’s age, fell in love with her.

“Did you love her, too, Papa?”

“Oh, yes. All us boys in town were crazy about Stella Dora, one time or another. I had my attack of it, same as the rest. We were sweethearts in seventh grade. I bought a big-size Whitman’s Sampler on Valentine’s. I remember it cost every cent I had.”

“Why were y’all crazy about her?”

“I guess you’d have to worry you’d missed out on being alive if you didn’t feel that way about Stella, one time or another.”

I was feeling a terrible emotion I later defined as jealousy. “But didn’t you love Mama?”

“Well, now, this was before it was my luck to meet your mama.”

“And you met her coming to town along the railroad track and you told your friends ‘That’s the girl for me and I’m going to marry her,’ didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir, and I was right on both counts.” Papa rocked back in the big chair, his hands peaceful on the armrests.

“Was Stella Dora still crazy about you after you met Mama?”

His face crinkled into the lines of his ready laughter. “No, sir, she wasn’t. She loved Hugh Doyle, minute she laid eyes on him, and he felt the same. But Stella had this notion about going off to get to be somebody in the movies. And Hugh couldn’t hold her back, and I guess she couldn’t get him to see what it was made her want to go off so bad either.”

“What was it made her want to go?”

Papa smiled at me. “Well. I don’t know, son. What makes you want to go off so bad? You’re always saying you’re going here, and there, ’cross the world, up to the moon. I reckon you’re more like Stella than I am.”

“Do you think she was wrong to want to go be in the movies?”

“No.”

“You don’t think she killed him?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Somebody killed him.”

“Well, Buddy, sometimes people lose hope and heart, and feel like they can’t go on living.”

“Yeah, I know. Suicide.”

Papa’s shoes tapped the floor as the rocker creaked back and forth. “That’s right. Now you tell me, why’re you sitting in here? Why don’t you ride your bike on over to the ballpark and see who’s there?”

“I want to hear about Stella Doyle.”

“You want to hear. Well. Let’s go get us a Coca-Cola, then. I don’t guess somebody’s planning to show up in this heat to buy a chest of drawers they got to haul home.”

“You ought to sell air conditioners, Papa. People would buy air conditioners.”

“I guess so.”

So Papa told me the story. Or at least his version of it. He said Hugh and Stella were meant for each other. From the beginning it seemed to the whole town a fact as natural as harvest that so much money and so much beauty belonged together, and only Hugh Doyle with his long, free, easy stride was rich enough to match the looks of Stella Dora. But even Hugh Doyle couldn’t hold her. He was only halfway through the state university, where his father had told him he’d have to go before he married Stella, if he wanted a home to bring her to, when she quit her job at Coldsteam’s beauty parlor and took the bus to California. She was out there for six years before Hugh broke down and went after her.

By then every girl in the county was cutting Stella’s pictures out of the movie magazines and reading how she got her lucky break, how she married a big director, and divorced him, and married a big star, and how that marriage broke up even quicker. Photographers traveled all the way to Thermopylae to take pictures of where she was born. People tried to tell them her house was gone, had fallen down and been used for firewood, but they just took photographs of Reverend Ballister’s house instead and said Stella had grown up in it. Before long, even local girls would go stand in front of the Ballister house like a shrine, sometimes they’d steal flowers out of the yard. The year that Fever, her best movie, came to the Grand Theater on Main Street, Hugh Doyle flew out to Los Angeles and won her back. He took her down to Mexico to divorce the baseball player she’d married after the big star. Then Hugh married her himself and put her on an ocean liner and took her all over the world. For a whole two years, they didn’t come home to Thermopylae. Everybody in the county talked about this two-year honeymoon, and Hugh’s father confessed to some friends that he was disgusted by his son’s way of life.

But when the couple did come home, Hugh walked right into the mills and turned a profit. His father confessed to the same friends that he was flabbergasted Hugh had it in him. But after the father died Hugh started drinking and Stella joined him. The parties got a little wild. The fights got loud. People talked. They said he had other women. They said Stella’d been locked up in a sanatorium. They said the Doyles were breaking up.

And then one June day a maid at Red Hills, walking to work before the morning heat, fell over something that lay across a path to the stables. And it was Hugh Doyle in riding clothes with a hole torn in the side of his head. Not far from his gloved hand, the police found Stella’s pistol, already too hot from the sun to touch. The cook testified that the Doyles had been fighting like cats and dogs all night long the night before, and Hugh’s mother testified that he wanted to divorce Stella but she wouldn’t let him, and so Stella was arrested. She said she was innocent, but it was her gun, she was his heir, and she had no alibi. Her trial lasted almost as long as that August heat wave.

The word “prolific” has been used to describe Ed McBain so many times you might think it was part of his name. Mr. Ed “Prolific” McBain. But there’s no denying that McBain — aka Evan Hunter — has amassed a body of work that stuns the senses when one sits down to reckon with it. That so much of it is excellent, and that some of it is possessed of true genius, and that every single piece of it makes for enjoyable reading is a testament to the man’s prowess as an author. He is like watching a world-class boxer at his peak; he knows all the moves. Because of such bestsellers as The Blackboard Jungle and A Matter of Conviction, his early fame was for his mainstream novels. But over the years he became better known for the 87th Precinct series. It’s impossible to choose the “best” of the 87th books — there are just too many good ones — but one might suggest a peek at He Who Hesitates (1965), Blood Relatives (1975), Long Time No See (1977) and The Big Bad City (1999). He wrote the screenplay of The Birds for Alfred Hitchcock and his powerful novel Last Summer became one of the seminal films of the seventies. His recent novels include another 87th Precinct book, The Last Dance.

Sitting at the bar, Pete Charpens looked at his own reflection in the mirror, grinned, and said, “Merry Christmas.”

It was not Christmas yet, true enough, but he said it anyway, and the words sounded good, and he grinned foolishly and lifted his drink and sipped a little of it and said again, “Merry Christmas,” feeling very good, feeling very warm, feeling in excellent high spirits. Tonight, the city was his. Tonight, for the first time since he’d arrived from Whiting Center eight months ago, he felt like a part of the city. Tonight, the city enveloped him like a warm bath, and he lounged back and allowed the undulating waters to cover him. It was Christmas Eve, and all was right with the world, and Pete Charpens loved every mother’s son who roamed the face of the earth because he felt as if he’d finally come home, finally found the place, finally found himself.

It was a good feeling.

This afternoon, as soon as the office party was over, he’d gone into the streets. The shop windows had gleamed like pot-bellied stoves, cherry hot against the sharp bite of the air. There was a promise of snow in the sky, and Pete had walked the tinseled streets of New York with his tweed coat collar against the back of his neck, and he had felt warm and happy. There were shoppers in the streets, and Santa Clauses with bells, and giant wreaths and giant trees, and music coming from speakers, the timeless carols of the holiday season. But more than that, he had felt the pulse beat of the city. For the first time in eight months, he had felt the pulse beat of the city, the people, the noise, the clutter, the rush, and above all the warmth. The warmth had engulfed him, surprising him. He had watched it with the foolish smile of a spectator and then, with sudden realization, he had known he was a part of it. In the short space of eight months, he had become a part of the city — and the city had become a part of him. He had found a home.

“Bartender,” he said.

The bartender ambled over. He was a big red-headed man with freckles all over his face. He moved with economy and grace. He seemed like a very nice guy who probably had a very nice wife and family decorating a Christmas tree somewhere in Queens.

“Yes, sir?” he asked.

“Pete. Call me Pete.”

“Okay, Pete.”

“I’m not drunk,” Pete said, “believe me. I know all drunks say that, but I mean it. I’m just so damn happy I could bust. Did you ever feel that way?”

“Sure,” the bartender said, smiling.

“Let me buy you a drink.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Bartenders never drink, I know, but let me buy you one. Please. Look, I want to thank people, you know? I want to thank everybody in this city. I want to thank them for being here, for making it a city. Do I sound nuts?”

“Yes,” the bartender said.

“Okay. Okay then, I’m nuts. But I’m a hick, do you know? I came here from Whiting Center eight months ago. Straw sticking out of my ears. The confusion here almost killed me. But I got a job, a good job, and I met a lot of wonderful people, and I learned how to dress, and I... I found a home. That’s corny. I know it. That’s the hick in me talking. But I love this damn city, I love it. I want to go around kissing girls in the streets. I want to shake hands with every guy I meet. I want to tell them I feel like a person, a human being, I’m alive, alive! For Christ’s sake, I’m alive!”

“That’s a good way to be,” the bartender agreed.

“I know it. Oh, my friend, do I know it! I was dead in Whiting Center, and now I’m here and alive and... look, let me buy you a drink, huh?”

“I don’t drink,” the bartender insisted.

“Okay. Okay, I won’t argue. I wouldn’t argue with anyone tonight. Gee, it’s gonna be a great Christmas, do you know? Gee, I’m so damn happy I could bust.” He laughed aloud, and the bartender laughed with him. The laugh trailed off into a chuckle, and then a smile. Pete looked into the mirror, lifted his glass again, and again said, “Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.”

He was still smiling when the man came into the bar and sat down next to him. The man was very tall, his body bulging with power beneath the suit he wore. Coatless, hatless, he came into the bar and sat alongside Pete, signaling for the bartender with a slight flick of his hand. The bartender walked over.

“Rye neat,” the man said.

The bartender nodded and walked away. The man reached for his wallet.

“Let me pay for it.” Pete said.

The man turned. He had a wide face with a thick nose and small brown eyes. The eyes came as a surprise in his otherwise large body. He studied Pete for a moment and then said, “You a queer or something?”

Pete laughed. “Hell, no,” he said. “I’m just happy. It’s Christmas Eve, and I feel like buying you a drink.”

The man pulled out his wallet, put a five dollar bill on the bar top and said, “I’ll buy my own drink.” He paused. “What’s the matter? Don’t I look as if I can afford a drink?”

“Sure you do,” Pete said. “I just wanted to... look, I’m happy. I want to share it, that’s all.”

The man grunted and said nothing. The bartender brought his drink. He tossed off the shot and asked for another.

“My name’s Pete Charpens,” Pete said, extending his hand.

“So what?” the man said.

“Well... what’s your name?”

“Frank.”

“Glad to know you, Frank.” He thrust his hand closer to the man.

“Get lost, Happy,” Frank said.

Pete grinned, undismayed. “You ought to relax,” he said, “I mean it. You know, you’ve got to stop...”

“Don’t tell me what I’ve got to stop. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Pete Charpens. I told you.”

“Take a walk, Pete Charpens. I got worries of my own.”

“Want to tell me about them?”

“No, I don’t want to tell you about them.”

“Why not? Make you feel better.”

“Go to hell, and stop bothering me,” Frank said.

The bartender brought the second drink. He sipped at it, and then put the shot glass on the bar top.

“Do I look like a hick?” Pete asked.

“You look like a goddamn queer,” Frank said.

“No, I mean it.”

“You asked me, and I told you.”

“What’s troubling you, Frank?”

“You a priest or something?”

“No, but I thought...”

“Look, I come in here to have a drink. I didn’t come to see the chaplain.”

“You an ex-Army man?”

“Yeah.”

“I was in the Navy,” Pete said. “Glad to be out of that, all right. Glad to be right here where I am, in the most wonderful city in the whole damn world.”

“Go down to Union Square and get a soap box,” Frank said.

“Can’t I help you, Frank?” Pete asked. “Can’t I buy you a drink, lend you an ear, do something? You’re so damn sad, I feel like...”

“I’m not sad.”

“You sure look sad. What happened? Did you lose your job?”

“No, I didn’t lose my job.”

“What do you do, Frank?”

“Right now, I’m a truck driver. I used to be a fighter.”

“Really? You mean a boxer? No kidding?”

“Why would I kid you?”

“What’s your last name?”

“Blake.”

“Frank Blake? I don’t think I’ve heard it before. Of course, I didn’t follow the fights much.”

“Tiger Blake, they called me. That was my ring name.”

“Tiger Blake. Well, we didn’t have fights in Whiting Center. Had to go over to Waterloo if we wanted to see a bout. I guess that’s why I never heard of you.”

“Sure,” Frank said.

“Why’d you quit fighting?”

“They made me.”

“Why?”

“I killed a guy in 1947.”

Pete’s eyes widened. “In the ring?”

“Of course in the ring. What the hell kind of a moron are you, anyway? You think I’d be walking around if it wasn’t in the ring? Jesus!”

“Is that what’s troubling you?”

“There ain’t nothing troubling me. I’m fine.”

“Are you going home for Christmas?”

“I got no home.”

“You must have a home,” Pete said gently. “Everybody’s got a home.”

“Yeah? Where’s your home? Whiting Center or wherever the hell you said?”

“Nope. This is my home now. New York City. New York, New York. The greatest goddamn city in the whole world.”

“Sure,” Frank said sourly.

“My folks are dead,” Pete said. “I’m an only child. Nothing for me in Whiting Center anymore. But in New York, well, I get the feeling that I’m here to stay. That I’ll meet a nice girl here, and marry her, and raise a family here and... and this’ll be home.”

“Great,” Frank said sourly.

“How’d you happen to kill this fellow?” Pete asked suddenly.

“I hit him.”

“And killed him?”

“I hit him on the Adam’s apple. Accidentally.”

“Were you sore at him?”

“We were in the ring. I already told you that.”

“Sure, but were you sore?”

“A fighter don’t have to be sore. He’s paid to fight.”

“Did you like fighting?”

“I loved it,” Frank said flatly.

“How about the night you killed that fellow?”

Frank was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Get lost, huh?”

“I could never fight for money,” Pete said. “I got a quick temper, and I get mad as hell, but I could never do it for money. Besides, I’m too happy right now to...”

“Get lost,” Frank said again, and he turned his back. Pete sat silently for a moment.

“Frank?” he said at last.

“You back again?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked to you about something that’s painful to you. Look, it’s Christmas Eve. Let’s...”

“Forget it.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“No. I told you no a hundred times. I buy my own damn drinks!”

“This is Christmas E...”

“I don’t care what it is. You happy jokers give me the creeps. Get off my back, will you?”

“I’m sorry. I just...”

“Happy, happy, happy. Grinning like a damn fool. What the hell is there to be so happy about? You got an oil well someplace? A gold mine? What is it with you?”

“I’m just...”

“You’re just a jerk! I probably pegged you right the minute I laid eyes on you. You’re probably a damn queer.”

“No, no,” Pete said mildly. “You’re mistaken, Frank. Honestly, I just feel...”

“Your old man was probably a queer, too. Your old lady probably took on every sailor in town.”

The smile left Pete’s face, and then tentatively reappeared. “You don’t mean that, Frank,” he said.

“I mean everything I ever say,” Frank said. There was a strange gleam in his eyes. He studied Pete carefully.

“About my mother, I meant,” Pete said.

“I know what you’re talking about. And I’ll say it again. She probably took on every sailor in town.”

“Don’t say that, Frank,” Pete said, the smile gone now, a perplexed frown teasing his forehead, appearing, vanishing, reappearing.

“You’re a queer, and your old lady was a...”

“Stop it, Frank.”

“Stop what? If your old lady was...”

Pete leaped off the bar stool. “Cut it out!” he yelled.

From the end of the bar, the bartender turned. Frank caught the movement with the corner of his eye. In a cold whisper, he said, “Your mother was a slut,” and Pete swung at him.

Frank ducked, and the blow grazed the top of his head. The bartender was coming towards them now. He could not see the strange light in Frank’s eyes, nor did he hear Frank whisper again, “A slut, a slut.”

Pete pushed himself off the bar wildly. He saw the beer bottle then, picked it up, and lunged at Frank.

Sharyn McCrumb, who holds degrees from the University of North Carolina and Virginia Tech, lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains but travels the United States and the world lecturing on her work, most recently leading a writers’ workshop in Paris in the summer of 2001.

McCrumb’s Ballad series, beginning with If I Ever Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990), has won her numerous honors, including the Appalachian Writers Association’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature and several listings as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times notable books. In the introduction to her short-story collection Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (1997), she details the family history in North Carolina and Tennessee that contributed to her Appalachian fiction. One of the continuing characters, Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, takes his surname from ancestors on her father’s side, while Frankie Silver (“the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina”), whose story McCrumb would incorporate in The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998), was a distant cousin. “My books are like Appalachian quilts,” she writes. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I place them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the nature of the mountain south.” The sixth and most recent title in the series, The Song-catcher, appeared in the summer of 2001.

The face was a little blurry, but she was used to seeing it that way. She must have looked at it a thousand times in old magazines — grainy black-and-white shots, snapped by a magazine photographer at a nightclub; amateurish candid photos on the back of record albums; misty publicity stills that erased even the pores of his skin. She knew that face. A poster-size version of it had stared down at her from beneath the high school banner on her bedroom wall — twenty-odd years ago. God, had it been that long? Now the face was blurry with booze, fatigue, and the sagging of a jawline that was no longer boyish. But it was still him, sitting in the bar, big as life.

Maggie used to wonder what she would do if she met him in the flesh. In the tenth grade she and Kathy Ryan used to philosophize about such things at slumber parties: “Why don’t you fix your hair like Connie Stevens’?” — “Which Man From U.N.C.L.E. do you like best?” — “What would you do if you met Devlin Robey?” Then they’d collapse in giggles, unable even to fantasize meeting a real, live rock ‘n’ roll singer. He lived a glamorous life of limousines and penthouse suites while they suffered through gym class, and algebra with Mrs. Cady. Growing up seemed a hundred years away.

When Maggie was a senior, she did get to see Devlin Robey — when you live on Long Island, sooner or later your prince will come. Everybody comes to the Big Apple. But the encounter was as distant and unreal as the airbrushed poster on her closet door. Devlin Robey was a shining blur glimpsed on a distant stage, and Maggie was a tiny speck in a sea of screaming adolescents. She and Kathy squealed and cried and threw paper roses at the stage, but it didn’t really feel like seeing him. He was a lot clearer on the television screen when she watched American Bandstand. After the concert, they had fought their way through a horde of fans to reach the stage door, only to be driven off by three thugs in overcoats — Mr. Robey’s “handlers,” while Devlin himself plowed his way through the throng to a waiting limousine, oblivious to the screams of protest in his wake.

They cried all the way home.

Maggie was so disillusioned by her idol’s callous behavior that she wrote him a letter, in care of his record company, complaining about how he let his fans be treated. She enclosed her ticket stub from the concert, and one of her wallet-size class pictures. A few weeks later, she received an autographed eight by ten of Devlin Robey, a copy of his latest album, and a handwritten apology on Epic Records notepaper. He said he was sorry to rush past them like that, but that he’d had to hurry back to the hotel to call his mother, who had been ill that night. He hoped that Maggie would forgive him for his thoughtlessness, and he promised to visit with his fans after concerts whenever he possibly could.

That letter was enough magic to keep Maggie going for weeks, and she played the album until it was scarred from wear, but eventually the wonder of it faded, and the memory, like the albums and fan magazines, was packed away in tissue paper in the closet of her youth, while Maggie got on with her life.

She took business courses, and made mostly B’s. She thought she’d probably end up as a secretary somewhere after high school. It was no use thinking about college: her parents didn’t have that kind of money, and if they had, they wouldn’t have spent it sending her off to get more educated. Since she’d just end up getting married anyway, her father reasoned, wasting her time and their savings on a fancy education made no sense. Maggie wished she could have taken shop or auto mechanics like the guys did, but the guidance counselor had smiled and vetoed the suggestion. Home economics and typing: that’s what girls took. He was sure that Maggie would be happier in one of those courses, where she belonged. Now, sometimes, when the plumbing needed fixing or the toaster wouldn’t work, Maggie wished she had insisted on being allowed to take practical courses, so that she wouldn’t have to use the grocery money to pay repair bills, but it was no use looking back, she figured. What’s done was done.

The summer after high school, Maggie married Leon Holtz, who wasn’t as handsome as Devlin Robey, but he was real. He said he loved her, and he rented a sky-blue tux and bought her a white gardenia corsage when he took her to the senior prom. There wasn’t any reason not to get married, that Maggie could see. Leon had a construction job in his uncle’s business, and she was a clerk at the Ford dealership, which meant nearly six hundred a month in take-home pay after taxes. They could afford a small apartment, and some furniture from Sofa City, so why wait? If Maggie had any flashes of prewedding jitters about happily-ever-after with Leon, or any lingering regrets at relinquishing dreams of some other existence, where one could actually know people like Devlin Robey — if she had misgivings about any of it, she gave no sign.

Richie was born fourteen months later. The marriage lasted until he was two. He was a round-faced, solemn child with his mother’s brown eyes, but he had scoliosis — which is doctor talk for a crook-back — so there were medical bills on top of everything else, and finally, Leon, fed up with the confinement of wedded poverty, took off. Maggie moved to Manhattan, because she figured the pay would be better, especially if she forgot about being a clerk. She was just twenty-one, then, and her looks were still okay.

After a couple of false starts, she got a job as a cocktail waitress in the Red Lion Lounge. She didn’t like the red velvet uniform that came to the top of her thighs, or the black net stockings she had to wear with it, but the tips were good, and Maggie supposed that the outfit had a lot to do with that. She was twenty-seven now. Sometimes, when her feet throbbed from spending six hours in spike heels and her face ached from smiling at jerks who like to put the make on waitresses, she’d think about the high school shop classes, wondering what life would have been like if she’d learned how to fix cars.

“You want to bring me a drink?” He smiled up at her lazily. The ladies man who is sure of his magnetism. You want to bring me a drink? Like he was conferring a privilege on her. Well, maybe he was. Maggie looked down at Devlin Robey’s blurring middle-aged features, and thought with surprise that once she would have been honored to serve this man. Would have fought for the chance to do it. But that was half a lifetime ago. Now she was just tired, trying to get through the shift with enough money to pay the phone bill. She’d been up most of the night before with one of Richie’s back aches, and now she felt as if she were sleepwalking. She stared at the graying curls of chest hair at the top of his purple shirt, the pouches under his eyes that were darker than his fading tan, and the plastic smile. What the hell.

“Sure,” she said with no more than her customary brightness, “A drink. What do you want?”

When she brought back the Dewar’s-rocks, he was reading the racing news, but as she approached, he set the page aside and smiled up at her. “Thanks,” he said, and then after a beat: “You know who I am?”

It struck her as kind of sad the way he asked it. Hesitant, like he had heard “no” too many times lately, as if each denial of his fame cut the lines deeper into his face. She felt sorry for him. Wished it were twenty years ago. But it wasn’t. “Yeah,” said Maggie, smoothing out the napkin as she set down his drink. “Yeah, I remember. You’re Devlin Robey. I seen you sing once.”

The lines smoothed out and his eyes widened: you could just see the teen idol somewhere in there. “No kiddin’!” he said, with a laugh that sounded like sheer relief. “Well, here...” That ought to be good for a twenty, Maggie was thinking, but as she watched, Devlin Robey pulled the cocktail napkin out from under his drink and signed his name with a flourish.

“Thanks,” said Maggie, slipping the napkin into her pocket with the tips. Maybe the twenty would come later. At least it would be something to tell Kathy Ryan if she ever saw her again. She started to move away to another table, but he touched her arm. “Don’t leave yet. So, you heard me sing, huh? At Paradise Alley?”

She told him where the concert had been, and for a moment she thought of mentioning her letter to him, but the two suits at table nine were waving like their tongues might shrivel up, so she eased out of his grasp. “I’ll check on you in a few,” she promised, summoning her smile for the thirsting suits.

For the rest of her shift, Maggie alternated between real customers and the wistful face of Devlin Robey, who ordered drinks just for the small talk that came with them. “Which one of my songs did you like best?”

“ ‘I’m Afraid to Go Home,’ ” said Maggie instantly, and when he looked puzzled, she reminded him, “It was the B side to ‘Tiger Lily.’ ”

“Yeah! Yeah! I almost got an award for that one.” His eyes crinkled with pleasure.

Another round he wanted to know if she’d seen him in the beach movie he made for Buena Vista. She remembered the movie, and didn’t say that she couldn’t place him in it. It had been a bit part, leading nowhere. After that he went back to singing, mostly in Vegas. Now in Atlantic City. “They love me in the casinos,” he told her. “The folks from the ’burbs go wild over me — makes ’em remember the good times, they tell me.”

Maggie tried to remember some good times, but all she found was stills of her and Kathy Ryan listening to records and talking about the future. She was going to be a fashion model and live in Paris. Kathy would be a vet in an African Wildlife Preserve. They would spend holidays together in the Bahamas. “You want some peanuts to go with that drink?” Maggie asked.

At two o’clock the Red Lion was closing, but Devlin Robey had not budged. He kept nursing a Dewar’s that was more water than Scotch, hunched down like a stray dog who didn’t want to be thrown out in the street. Maggie wondered what was wrong with the guy. He was rich and famous, right?

“Are you about finished with that drink? Boss says it’s quittin’ time.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m a night owl, I guess. All those years of doing casino shows at eleven. Seems like the shank of the evening to me.” He glanced at his watch, and then at her: the red velvet tunic, the black fishnet stockings, the cleavage. “You’re getting off work now?”

The smile never wavered but inside she groaned. Tonight had seemed about two days long, and all that kept her going was the thought of a hot bubble bath to soak her feet and the softness of clean sheets to sink into before she passed out from sheer weariness. So now — twenty years too late to be an answer to prayer — Devlin Robey wants to take her out. Where was he when it would have mattered?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Thanks anyway, but not tonight.” Maybe ten years ago, but not tonight.

The one answer she wouldn’t have made back when she was Devlin Robey’s vestal virgin turned out to be the only one that worked the charm. Suddenly his halfhearted invitation became urgent. “I’ll be straight with you,” he said, with eyes like stained glass. “I’m feeling kind of down tonight, and I thought it might help to spend some time with an old friend.”

Is that what we were? Maggie thought. I was twenty-five rows back at the concert; I was on the other side of the speakers when WABC’s Cousin Brucie played your records; and while you were airbrushed and glossy, I was wearing Clearasil and holding the fan magazine. We were friends? She didn’t say it, though. If Maggie had learned anything in seven years as a cocktail waitress, it was not to reply to outrageous statements. She shrugged. “I’m sorry,” thinking that would be the end of it. Wondering if she’d even bother to tell anybody about it. It wouldn’t be any fun to talk about if you had to explain to the other waitresses, bunch of kids, who Devlin Robey was.

“At least give me your phone number... uh... Maggie.” Her name was signed with a flourish on his check: Thank you! Maggie. “I get to the city every so often. Maybe I could call you, give you more notice. We could set something up. You’re all right. You ever think about the business?”

No. Show business offered the same hours as nightclub waitressing, and besides she couldn’t sing or dance. But Lana Turner had been discovered in a drugstore, so maybe... After all, who was Maggie Holtz to slap the hand of fate? She tore off the business expense tab from the Red Lion check, and scribbled her name and phone number across it. “Sure. Why not,” she said. “Call me sometime.”

She patted the autographed cocktail napkin folded in the pocket with her tips, wondering if Richie would like to have it for his scrapbook. Or maybe she should put it in his baby book: the guy I was pretending to make it with the night you were conceived. Two scraps of paper; one for each of them to toss. She figured that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t, though. Four nights later — four a.m. — the Advil had finally kicked in, allowing her to plunge into sleep, when the phone screamed, dragging her back. She’d forgotten to turn on the damned answering machine. She grabbed for the receiver, only to reinstate the silence, but his voice came through to her, a little swacked, crooning, “I’m Afraid to Go Home,” and she knew it was him.

“Devlin Robey,” she said, wondering why wishes got granted only when you no longer wanted them.

“Maggie doll.” He slurred her name. “I just wanted a friendly voice. I got the blues so bad.”

“Hangover?”

“No. That’ll be after I wake up — if I ever get to sleep, that is. Thought I might get sleepy talking about old times, you know?”

“Old times.”

“I lost big tonight at the tables. I played seventeen in roulette a dozen times and it wouldn’t come up for me. Seventeen — my number!”

She caught herself nodding forward, and forced the number seventeen to roll around in her memories. Oh, yeah. “ ‘Seventeen, My Heaven Teen,’ ” she murmured. “That was your big hit, wasn’t it?”

“I got a Cashbox Award for that one. S’in the den at my place in Vegas. Maybe I’ll show it to you some time.”

“Wouldn’t your wife object?”

She heard him sigh. “Jeez, Trina. What a cow. She was a showgirl when I married her. Ninety-five pounds of blonde. Now she acts like giving me a blow job is a major act of charity, and she’s in the tanning salon so much she looks like a leather Barbie doll. Not that I’m home much. I’m on the road a lot.”

“Yeah. It’s a tough life.” She pictured him in a suite the size of her apartment. Maybe one of those sunken tubs in a black marble bathroom.

“It’s not like I’m too keen to go home, you know? I have a daughter, Claudia, but jeez it breaks my heart to see her. She was born premature. Probably ’cause Trina was always trying to barf up her dinner to stay skinny. She’s never been right, Claudia hasn’t. Brain damage at birth. But she always smiles so big when she sees me, and throws her little arms out.”

“How old is she?”

“Twelve, I guess. I always picture her when she was little. She was beautiful when she was three all over. Now she’s just three inside. Her birthday is the seventeenth of June. My lucky number. Seventeen.”

“Not tonight, though, huh?”

“No. Tonight it cost me plenty. I shouldn’t bet when I’m loaded. Loaded drunk, I mean; the other kind is never an issue. I like to be with people, though. I’d like to be with you. You don’t have an ax to grind. You’re not like these glitter tarts here, running around in feathers, can’t remember past nineteen-seventy-five. You’re good people, Maggie. Look, can I come over some time?”

“I bet you get lotsa offers,” said Maggie, hoping somebody else would take the heat.

“I like you,” he said. “You’re real. Like my kid. Not just some hardass in the chorus line with a Pepsodent smile and an angle. I’ve had a bellyful of them.”

She shouldn’t have let him tell her about his kid. It made her think of Richie, and made her think that maybe Devlin Robey hadn’t had it all his way like she’d figured. All of a sudden, he wasn’t just some glossy poster that she could toss when she tired of it. He was a regular guy with feelings. And maybe she owed him. After all, she had used him as her fantasy all those years ago. Maybe it was time to pay up.

“Okay, like Tuesday? That’s when I’m off.” She could send Richie to her folks in Rockaway. They kept talking until his voice slurred into unconsciousness.

The novel How Like an Angel (1962) shows an eerie prescience: many of its characters are early versions of the hippies who came to dominate the Southern California social landscape in just a few years. Angel is Margaret Millar’s (1915–1994) darkest and most complex novel, but it is only one of her many masterpieces, which include An Air that Kills (1957), A Stranger in my Grave (1960), and The Murder of Miranda (1979). Some critics suggested that she was a more accomplished writer than her husband, Ross Macdonald (Ken Millar), a contention she always angrily denied. But her humility to the contrary, many argue that she was the single best writer of mysteries ever. The shame was that she never had a huge hit. She was somewhere between a cult and a coterie writer. Her vengeance is that her books are fresh as ever — brooding, frightening, and frequently hilarious right in the middle of all the terror. Her social eye was merciless and she delighted in lynching pomposity in all its forms. She is one of those rare writers of any stripe whose prose can be read aloud to great effect. Just open one of her books at random and start reading. You’ll find something quotable soon enough.

The first time the Bortons realized that someone had moved into the new house across the canyon was one night in May when they saw the rectangular light of a television set shining in the picture window. Marion Borton knew it had to happen eventually, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept the idea of neighbors in a part of the country she and Paul had come to consider exclusively their own.

They had discovered the site, had bought six acres, and built the house over the objections of the bank, which didn’t like to lend money on unimproved property, and of their friends who thought the Bortons were foolish to move so far out of town. Now other people were discovering the spot, and here and there through the eucalyptus trees and the live oaks, Marion could see half-finished houses.

But it was the house directly across the canyon that bothered her most; she had been dreading this moment ever since the site had been bulldozed the previous summer.

“There goes our privacy.” Marion went over and snapped off the television set, a sign to Paul that she had something on her mind which she wanted to transfer to his. The transference, intended to halve the problem, often merely doubled it.

“Well, let’s have it,” Paul said, trying to conceal his annoyance.

“Have what?”

“Stop kidding around. You don’t usually cut off Perry Mason in the middle of a sentence.”

“All I said was, there goes our privacy.”

“We have plenty left,” Paul said.

“You know how sounds carry across the canyon.”

“I don’t hear any sounds.”

“You will. They probably have ten or twelve children and a howling dog and a sports car.”

“A couple of children wouldn’t be so bad — at least, Cathy would have someone to play with.”

Cathy was eight, in bed now, and ostensibly asleep, with the night light on and her bedroom door open just a crack.

“She has plenty of playmates at school,” Marion said, pulling the drapes across the window so that she wouldn’t have to look at the exasperating rectangle of light across the canyon. “Her teacher tells me Cathy gets along with everyone and never causes any trouble. You talk as if she’s deprived or something.”

“It would be nice if she had more interests, more children of her own age around.”

“A lot of things would be nice if. I’ve done my best.”

Paul knew it was true. He’d heard her issue dozens of weekend invitations to Cathy’s schoolmates. Few of them came to anything. The mothers offered various excuses: poison oak, snakes, mosquitoes in the creek at the bottom of the canyon, the distance of the house from town in case something happened and a doctor was needed in a hurry... these excuses, sincere and valid as they were, embittered Marion. “For heaven’s sake, you’d think we lived on the moon or in the middle of a jungle.”

“I guess a couple of children would be all right,” Marion said. “But please, no sports car.”

“I’m afraid that’s out of our hands.”

“Actually, they might even be quite nice people.”

“Why not? Most people are.”

Both Marion and Paul had the comfortable feeling that something had been settled, though neither was quite sure what. Paul went over and turned the television set back on. As he had suspected, it was the doorman who’d killed the nightclub owner with a baseball bat, not the blonde dancer or her young husband or the jealous singer.

It was the following Monday that Cathy started to run away.

Marion, ironing in the kitchen and watching a quiz program on the portable set Paul had given her for Christmas, heard the school bus groan to a stop at the top of the driveway. She waited for the front door to open and Cathy to announce in her high thin voice, “I’m home, Mommy.”

The door didn’t open.

From the kitchen window Marion saw the yellow bus round the sharp curve of the hill like a circus cage full of wild captive children screaming for release.

Marion waited until the end of the program, trying to convince herself that another bus had been added to the route and would come along shortly, or that Cathy had decided to stop off at a friend’s house and would telephone any minute. But no other bus appeared, and the telephone remained silent.

Marion changed into her hiking boots and started off down the canyon, avoiding the scratchy clumps of chapparal and the creepers of poison oak that looked like loganberry vines.

She found Cathy sitting in the middle of the little bridge that Paul had made across the creek out of two fallen eucalyptus trees. Cathy’s short plump legs hung over the logs until they almost touched the water. She was absolutely motionless, her face hidden by a straw curtain of hair. Then a single frog croaked a warning of Marion’s presence and Cathy responded to the sound as if she were more intimate with nature than adults were, and more alert to its subtle communications of danger.

She stood up quickly, brushing off the back of her dress and drawing aside the curtain of hair to reveal eyes as blue as the periwinkles that hugged the banks of the creek.

“Cathy.”

“I was only counting waterbugs while I was waiting. Forty-one.”

“Waiting for what?”

“The ten or twelve children, and the dog.”

“What ten or twelve chil—” Marion stopped. “I see. You were listening the other night when we thought you were asleep.”

“I wasn’t listening,” Cathy said righteously. “My ears were hearing.”

Marion restrained a smile. “Then I wish you’d tell those ears of yours to hear properly. I didn’t say the new neighbors had ten or twelve children, I said they might have. Actually, it’s very unlikely. Not many families are that big these days.”

“Do you have to be old to have a big family?”

“Well, you certainly can’t be very young.”

“I bet people with big families have station wagons so they have room for all the children.”

“The lucky ones do.”

Cathy stared down at the thin flow of water carrying fat little minnows down to the sea. Finally she said, “They’re too young, and their car is too small.”

In spite of her aversion to having new neighbors, Marion felt a quickening of interest. “Have you seen them?”

But the little girl seemed deaf, lost in a water world of minnows and dragonflies and tadpoles.

“I asked you a question, Cathy. Did you see the people who just moved in?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Before you came. Their name is Smith.”

“How do you know that?”

“I went up to the house to look at things and they said, hello, little girl, what’s your name? And I said, Cathy, what’s yours? And they said Smith. Then they drove off in the little car.”

“You’re not supposed to go poking around other people’s houses,” Marion said brusquely. “And while we’re at it, you’re not supposed to go anywhere after school without first telling me where you’re going and when you’ll be back. You know that perfectly well. Now why didn’t you come in and report to me after you got off the school bus?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“That’s not a satisfactory answer.”

Satisfactory or not, it was the only answer Cathy had. She looked at her mother in silence, then she turned and darted back up the hill to her own house.

After a time Marion followed her, exasperated and a little confused. She hated to punish the child, but she knew she couldn’t ignore the matter entirely — it was much too serious. While she gave Cathy her graham crackers and orange juice, she told her, reasonably and kindly, that she would have to stay in her room the following day after school by way of learning a lesson.

That night, after Cathy had been tucked in bed, Marion related the incident to Paul. He seemed to take a less serious view of it than Marion, a fact of which the listening child became well aware.

“I’m glad she’s getting acquainted with the new people,” Paul said. “It shows a certain degree of poise I didn’t think she had. She’s always been so shy.”

“You’re surely not condoning her running off without telling me?”

“She didn’t run far. All kids do things like that once in a while.”

“We don’t want to spoil her.”

“Cathy’s always been so obedient I think she has us spoiled. Who knows, she might even teach us a thing or two about going out and making new friends.” He realized, from past experience, that this was a very touchy subject. Marion had her house, her garden, her television sets; she didn’t seem to want any more of the world than these, and she resented any implication that they were not enough. To ward off an argument he added, “You’ve done a good job with Cathy. Stop worrying... Smith, their name is?”

“Yes.”

“Actually, I think it’s an excellent sign that Cathy’s getting acquainted.”

At three the next afternoon the yellow circus cage arrived, released one captive, and rumbled on its way.

“I’m home, Mommy.”

“Good girl.”

Marion felt guilty at the sight of her: the child had been cooped up in school all day, the weather was so warm and lovely, and besides Paul hadn’t thought the incident of the previous afternoon too important.

“I know what,” Marion suggested, “let’s you and I go down to the creek and count waterbugs.”

The offer was a sacrifice for Marion because her favorite quiz program was on and she liked to answer the questions along with the contestants. “How about that?”

Cathy knew all about the quiz program; she’d seen it a hundred times, had watched the moving mouths claim her mother’s eyes and ears and mind. “I counted the waterbugs yesterday.”

“Well, minnows, then.”

“You’ll scare them away.”

“Oh, will I?” Marion laughed self-consciously, rather relieved that Cathy had refused her offer and was clearly and definitely a little guilty about the relief. “Don’t you scare them?”

“No. They think I’m another minnow because they’re used to me.”

“Maybe they could get used to me, too.”

“I don’t think so.”

When Cathy went off down the canyon by herself Marion realized, in a vaguely disturbing way, that the child had politely but firmly rejected her mother’s company. It wasn’t until dinner time that she found out the reason why.

“The Smiths,” Cathy said, “have an Austin-Healey.”

Cathy, like most girls, had never shown any interest in cars, and her glib use of the name moved her parents to laughter.

The laughter encouraged Cathy to elaborate. “An Austin-Healey makes a lot of noise — like Daddy’s lawn mower.”

“I don’t think the company would appreciate a commercial from you, young lady,” Paul said. “Are the Smiths all moved in?”

“Oh, yes. I helped them.”

“Is that a fact? And how did you help them?”

“I sang two songs. And then we danced and danced.”

Paul looked half pleased, half puzzled. It wasn’t like Cathy to perform willingly in front of people. During the last Christmas concert at the school she’d left the stage in tears and hidden in the cloak room... Well, maybe her shyness was only a phase and she was finally getting over it.

“They must be very nice people,” he said, “to take time out from getting settled in a new house to play games with a little girl.”

Cathy shook her head. “It wasn’t games. It was real dancing — like on Ed Sullivan.”

“As good as that, eh?” Paul said, smiling. “Tell me about it.”

“Mrs. Smith is a nightclub dancer.”

Paul’s smile faded, and a pulse began to beat in his left temple like a small misplaced heart. “Oh? You’re sure about that, Cathy?”

“Yes.”

“And what does Mr. Smith do?”

“He’s a baseball player.”

“You mean that’s what he does for a living?” Marion asked. “He doesn’t work in an office like Daddy?”

“No, he just plays baseball. He always wears a baseball cap.”

“I see. What position does he play on the team?” Paul’s voice was low.

Cathy looked blank.

“Everybody on a ball team has a special thing to do. What does Mr. Smith do?”

“He’s a batter.”

“A batter, eh? Well, that’s nice. Did he tell you this?”

“Yes.”

“Cathy,” Paul said, “I know you wouldn’t deliberately lie to me, but sometimes you get your facts a little mixed up.”

He went on in this vein for some time but Cathy’s story remained unshaken: Mrs. Smith was a nightclub dancer, Mr. Smith a professional baseball player, they loved children, and they never watched television.

“That, at least, must be a lie,” Marion said to Paul later when she saw the rectangular light of the television set shining in the Smiths’ picture window. “As for the rest of it, there isn’t a nightclub within fifty miles, or a professional ball club within two hundred.”

“She probably misunderstood. It’s quite possible that at one time Mrs. Smith was a dancer of sorts and that he played a little baseball.”

Cathy, in bed and teetering dizzily on the brink of sleep, wondered if she should tell her parents about the Smiths’ child — the one who didn’t go to school.

She didn’t tell them; Marion found out for herself the next morning after Paul and Cathy had gone. When she pulled back the drapes in the living room and opened the windows she heard the sharp slam of a screen door from across the canyon and saw a small child come out on the patio of the new house. At that distance she couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Whichever it was, the child was quiet and well behaved; only the occasional slam of the door shook the warm, windless day.

The presence of the child, and the fact that Cathy hadn’t mentioned it, gnawed at Marion’s mind all day. She questioned Cathy about it as soon as she came home.

“You didn’t tell me the Smiths have a child.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Girl.”

“How old?”

Cathy thought it over carefully, frowning up at the ceiling. “About ten.”

“Doesn’t she go to school?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She doesn’t want to.”

“That’s not a very good reason.”

“It is her reason,” Cathy said flatly. “Can I go out to play now?”

“I’m not sure you should. You look a little feverish. Come here and let me feel your forehead.”

Cathy’s forehead was cool and moist, but her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were very pink, almost as if she’d been sunburned.

“You’d better stay inside,” Marion said, “and watch some cartoons.”

“I don’t like cartoons.”

“You used to.”

“I like real people.”

She means the Smiths, of course, Marion thought as her mouth tightened. “People who dance and play baseball all the time?”

If the sarcasm had any effect on Cathy she didn’t show it. After waiting until Marion had become engrossed in her quiz program, Cathy lined up all her dolls in her room and gave a concert for them, to thunderous applause.

“Where are your old Navy binoculars?” Marion asked Paul when she was getting ready for bed.

“Oh, somewhere in the sea chest, I imagine. Why?”

“I want them.”

“Not thinking of spying on the neighbors, are you?”

“I’m thinking of just that,” Marion said grimly.

The next morning, as soon as she saw the Smith child come out on the patio, Marion went downstairs to the storage room to search through the sea chest. She located the binoculars and was in the act of dusting them off when the telephone started to ring in the living room. She hurried upstairs and said breathlessly, “Hello?”

“Mrs. Borton?”

“Yes.”

“This is Miss Park speaking, Cathy’s teacher.”

Marion had met Miss Park several times at P.T.A. meetings and report-card conferences. She was a large, ruddy-faced, and unfailingly cheerful young woman — the kind, as Paul said, you wouldn’t want to live with but who’d be nice to have around in an emergency. “How are you, Miss Park?”

“Oh, fine, thank you, Mrs. Borton. I meant to call you yesterday but things were a bit out of hand around here, and I knew there was no great hurry to check on Cathy; she’s such a well-behaved little girl.”

Even Miss Park’s loud, jovial voice couldn’t cover up the ominous sound of the word check. “I don’t think I quite understand. Why should you check on Cathy?”

“Purely routine. The school doctor and the health department like to keep records of how many cases of measles or flu or chicken pox are going the rounds. Right now it looks like the season for mumps. Is Cathy all right?”

“She seemed a little feverish yesterday afternoon when she got home from school, but she acted perfectly normal when she left this morning.”

Miss Park’s silence was so protracted that Marion became painfully conscious of things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed — the weight of the binoculars in her lap, the thud of her own heartbeat in her ears. Across the canyon the Smith child was playing quietly and alone on the patio. There is definitely something the matter with that girl, Marion thought. Perhaps I’d better not let Cathy go over there any more, she’s so imitative. “Miss Park, are you still on the line? Hello? Hello—”

“I’m here,” Miss Park’s voice seemed fainter than usual, and less positive. “What time did Cathy leave the house this morning?”

“Eight, as usual.”

“Did she take the school bus?”

“Of course. She always does.”

“Did you see her get on?”

“I kissed her goodbye at the front door,” Marion said. “What’s this all about, Miss Park?”

“Cathy hasn’t been at school for two days, Mrs. Borton.”

“Why, that’s absurd, impossible! You must be mistaken.” But even as she was speaking the words, Marion was raising the binoculars to her eyes: the little girl on the Smiths’ patio had a straw curtain of hair and eyes as blue as the periwinkles along the creek banks.

“Mrs. Borton, I’m not likely to be mistaken about which of my children are in class or not.”

“No. No, you’re... you’re not mistaken, Miss Park. I can see Cathy from here — she’s over at the neighbor’s house.”

“Good. That’s a load off my mind.”

“Off yours, yes,” Marion said. “Not mine.”

“Now we mustn’t become excited, Mrs. Borton. Don’t make too much of this incident before we’ve had a chance to confer. Suppose you come and talk to me during my lunch hour and bring Cathy along. We’ll all have a friendly chat.”

But it soon became apparent, even to the optimistic Miss Park, that Cathy didn’t intend to take part in any friendly chat. She stood by the window in the classroom, blank-eyed, mute, unresponsive to the simplest questions, refusing to be drawn into any conversation even about her favorite topic, the Smiths. Miss Park finally decided to send Cathy out to play in the schoolyard while she talked to Marion alone.

“Obviously,” Miss Park said, enunciating the word very distinctly because it was one of her favorites, “obviously, Cathy’s got a crush on this young couple and has concocted a fantasy about belonging to them.”

“It’s not so obvious what my husband and I are going to do about it.”

“Live through it, the same as other parents. Crushes like this are common at Cathy’s age. Sometimes the object is a person, a whole family, even a horse. And, of course, to Cathy a nightclub dancer and a baseball player must seem very glamorous indeed. Tell me, Mrs. Borton, does she watch television a great deal?”

Marion stiffened. “No more than any other child.”

Oh, dear, Miss Park thought sadly, they all do it; the most confirmed addicts are always the most defensive. “I just wondered,” she said. “Cathy likes to sing to herself and I’ve never heard such a repertoire of television commercials.”

“She picks things up very fast.”

“Yes. Yes, she does indeed.” Miss Park studied her hands, which were always a little pale from chalk dust and were even paler now because she was angry — at the child for deceiving her, at Mrs. Borton for brushing aside the television issue, at herself for not preventing, or at least anticipating, the current situation, and perhaps most of all at the Smiths who ought to have known better than to allow a child to hang around their house when she should obviously be in school.

“Don’t put too much pressure on Cathy about this,” she said finally, “until I talk the matter over with the school psychologist. By the way, have you met the Smiths, Mrs. Borton?”

“Not yet,” Marion said grimly. “But believe me, I intend to.”

“Yes, I think it would be a good idea for you to talk to them and make it clear that they’re not to encourage Cathy in this fantasy.”

The meeting came sooner than Marion expected.

She waited at the school until classes were dismissed, then she took Cathy into town to do some shopping. She had parked the car and she and Cathy were standing hand in hand at a corner waiting for a traffic light to change; Marion was worried and impatient, Cathy still silent, unresisting, inert, as she had been ever since Marion had called her home from the Smiths’ patio.

Suddenly Marion felt the child’s hand tighten in a spasm of excitement. Cathy’s face had turned so pink it looked ready to explode and with her free hand she was waving violently at two people in a small cream-colored sports car — a very pretty young woman with blonde hair in the driver’s seat, and beside her a young man wearing a wide friendly grin and a baseball cap. They both waved back at Cathy just before the lights changed and then the car roared through the intersection.

“The Smiths,” Cathy shouted, jumping up and down in a frenzy. “That was the Smiths.”

“Sssh, not so loud. People will—”

“But it was the Smiths!”

“Hurry up before the light changes.”

The child didn’t hear. She stood as if rooted to the curb, staring after the cream-colored car.

With a little grunt of impatience Marion picked her up, carried her across the road, and let her down quite roughly on the other side. “There. If you’re going to act like a baby, I’ll carry you like a baby.”

“I saw the Smiths!”

“All right. What are you so excited about? It’s not very unusual to meet someone in town whom you know.”

“It’s unusual to meet them.”

“Why?”

“Because it is.” The color was fading from Cathy’s cheeks, but her eyes still looked bedazzled, quite as if they’d seen a miracle.

“I’m sure they’re very unique people,” Marion said coldly. “Nevertheless they must stop for groceries like everyone else.”

Cathy’s answer was a slight shake of her head and a whisper heard only by herself: “No, they don’t, never.”

When Paul came home from work Cathy was sent to play in the front yard while Marion explained matters to him. He listened with increasing irritation — not so much at Cathy’s actions but at the manner in which Marion and Miss Park had handled things. There was too much talking, he said, and too little acting.

“The way you women beat around the bush instead of tackling the situation directly, meeting it head-on — fantasy life. Fantasy life, my foot! Now we’re going over to the Smiths right this minute and talk to them and that will be that. End of fantasy. Period.”

“We’d better wait until after dinner. Cathy missed her lunch.”

Throughout the meal Cathy was pale and quiet. She ate nothing and spoke only when asked a direct question; but inside herself the conversation was very lively, the dinner a banquet with dancing, and afterward a wild, windy ride in the roofless car...

Although the footpath through the canyon provided a shorter route to the Smiths’ house, the Bortons decided to go more formally, by car, and to take Cathy with them. Cathy, told to comb her hair and wash her face, protested: “I don’t want to go over there.”

“Why not?” Paul said. “You were so anxious to spend time with them that you played hooky for two days. Why don’t you want to see them now?”

“Because they’re not there.”

“How do you know?”

“Mrs. Smith told me this morning that they wouldn’t be home tonight because she’s putting on a show.”

“Indeed?” Paul said grim faced. “Just where does she put on these shows of hers?”

“And Mr. Smith has to play baseball. And after that they’re going to see a friend in the hospital who has leukemia.”

“Leukemia, eh?” He didn’t have to ask how Cathy had found out about such a thing; he’d watched a semidocumentary dealing with it a couple of nights ago. Cathy was supposed to have been sleeping.

“I wonder,” he said to Marion when Cathy went to comb her hair, “just how many ‘facts’ about the Smiths have been borrowed from television.”

“Well, I know for myself that they drive a sports car, and Mr. Smith was wearing a baseball cap. And they’re both young and good-looking. Young and good-looking enough,” she added wryly, “to make me feel — well, a little jealous.”

“Jealous?”

“Cathy would rather belong to them than to us. It makes me wonder if it’s something the Smiths have or something the Bortons don’t have.”

“Ask her.”

“I can’t very well—”

“Then I will, dammit,” Paul said. And he did.

Cathy merely looked at him innocently. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Then listen again. Why did you pretend that you were the Smiths’ little girl?”

“They asked me to be. They asked me to go with them.”

“They actually said, Cathy, will you be our little girl?”

“Yes.”

“Well, by heaven, I’ll put an end to this nonsense,” Paul said, and strode out to the car.

It was twilight when they reached the Smiths’ house by way of the narrow, hilly road. The moon, just appearing above the horizon, was on the wane, a chunk bitten out of its side by some giant jaw. A warm dry wind, blowing down the mountain from the desert beyond, carried the sweet scent of pittosporum.

The Smiths’ house was dark, and both the front door and the garage were locked. Out of defiance or desperation, Paul pressed the door chime anyway, several times. All three of them could hear it ringing inside, and it seemed to Marion to echo very curiously — as if the carpets and drapes were too thin to muffle the sound vibrations. She would have liked to peer in through the windows and see for herself, but the venetian blinds were closed.

“What’s their furniture like?” she asked Cathy.

“Like everybody’s.”

“I mean, is it new? Does Mrs. Smith tell you not to put your feet on it?”

“No, she never tells me that,” Cathy said truthfully. “I want to go home now. I’m tired.”

It was while she was putting Cathy to bed that Marion heard Paul call to her from the living room in an urgent voice, “Marion, come here a minute.”

She found him standing motionless in the middle of the room, staring across the canyon at the Smiths’ place. The rectangular light of the Smiths’ television set was shining in the picture window of the room that opened onto the patio at the back of the Smiths’ house.

“Either they’ve come home within the past few minutes,” he said, “or they were there all the time. My guess is that they were home when we went over, but they didn’t want to see us, so they just doused the lights and pretended to be out. Well, it won’t work! Come on, we’re going back.”

“I can’t leave Cathy alone. She’s already got her pajamas on.”

“Put a bathrobe on her and bring her along. This has gone beyond the point of observing such niceties as correct attire.”

“Don’t you think we should wait until tomorrow?”

“Hurry up and stop arguing with me.”

Cathy, protesting that she was tired and that the Smiths weren’t home anyway, was bundled into a bathrobe and carried to the car.

“They’re home all right,” Paul said. “And by heaven they’d better answer the door this time or I’ll break it down.”

“That’s an absurd way to talk in front of a child,” Marion said coldly. “She has enough ideas without hearing—”

“Absurd is it? Wait and see.”

Cathy, listening from the back seat, smiled sleepily. She knew how to get in without breaking anything: ever since the house had been built, the real estate man who’d been trying to sell it always hid the key on a nail underneath the window box.

The second trip seemed a nightmarish imitation of the first: the same moon hung in the sky but it looked smaller now, and paler. The scent of pittosporum was funereally sweet, and the hollow sound of the chimes from inside the house was like the echo in an empty tomb.

“They must be crazy to think they can get away with a trick like this twice in one night,” Paul shouted. “Come on, we’re going around to the back.”

Marion looked a little frightened. “I don’t like trespassing on someone else’s property.”

“They trespassed on our property first.”

He glanced down at Cathy. Her eyes were half closed and her face was pearly in the moonlight. He pressed her hand to reassure her that everything was going to be all right and that his anger wasn’t directed at her, but she drew away from him and started down the path that led to the back of the house.

Paul clicked on his flashlight and followed her, moving slowly along the unfamiliar terrain. By the time he turned the corner of the house and reached the patio, Cathy was out of sight.

“Cathy,” he called. “Where are you? Come back here!”

Marion was looking at him accusingly. “You upset her with that silly threat about breaking down the door. She’s probably on her way home through the canyon.”

“I’d better go after her.”

“She’s less likely to get hurt than you are. She knows every inch of the way. Besides, you came here to break down the doors. All right, start breaking.”

But there was no need to break down anything. The back door opened as soon as Paul rapped on it with his knuckles, and he almost fell into the room.

It was empty except for a small girl wearing a blue bathrobe that matched her eyes.

Paul said, “Cathy. Cathy, what are you doing here?”

Marion stood with her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle the scream that was rising in her throat. There were no Smiths. The people in the sports car whom Cathy had waved at were just strangers responding to the friendly greeting of a child — had Cathy seen them before, on a previous trip to town? The television set was no more than a contraption rigged up by Cathy herself — an orange crate and an old mirror that caught and reflected the rays of the moon.

In front of it Cathy was standing, facing her own image. “Hello, Mrs. Smith. Here I am, all ready to go.”

“Cathy,” Marion said in a voice that sounded torn by claws. “What do you see in that mirror?”

“It’s not a mirror. It’s a television set.”

“What... what program are you watching?”

“It’s not a program, silly. It’s real. It’s the Smiths. I’m going away with them to dance and play baseball.”

“There are no Smiths,” Paul bellowed. “Will you get that through your head? There are no Smiths!”

“Yes, there are. I see them.”

Marion knelt on the floor beside the child. “Listen to me, Cathy. This is a mirror — only a mirror. It came from Daddy’s old bureau and I had it put away in the storage room. That’s where you found it, isn’t it? And you brought it here and decided to pretend it was a television set, isn’t that right? But it’s really just a mirror, and the people in it are us — you and Mommy and Daddy.”

But even as she looked at her own reflection, Marion saw it beginning to change. She was growing younger, prettier; her hair was becoming lighter and her cotton suit was changing into a dancing dress. And beside her in the mirror, Paul was turning into a stranger, a laughing-eyed young man wearing a baseball cap.

“I’m ready to go now, Mr. Smith,” Cathy said, and suddenly all three of them, the Smiths and their little girl, began walking away in the mirror. In a few moments they were no bigger than matchsticks — and then the three of them disappeared, and there was only the moonlight in the glass.

“Cathy,” Marion cried. “Come back, Cathy! Please come back!”

Propped up against the door like a dummy, Paul imagined he could hear above his wife’s cries the mocking muted roar of a sports car.

Female private eyes date back to at least the pulps. They were always “gals,” saucy versions of guys, whose stories were told with a wink and a smirk. Marcia Muller reinvented the female private investigator, giving her pith, dignity, intelligence, and the kind of social sensitivity that had oddly been limited to the male P.I.s. All of her books about Sharon McCone, investigator for the All Souls Legal Cooperative in San Francisco, were sound and professional from the start. But Muller has proved to be one of those writers who constantly push themselves to do more challenging work. A Wild and Lonely Place (1994) and The Broken Promise Land (1996) signaled the start of longer and even more powerful McCone mysteries. And her audience was eager to accompany her on these journeys, turning Muller into a mystery genre brand name. Her most recent work is Listen to the Silence.

Amorfina Angeles was terrified, and I could fully empathize with her. Merely living in the neighborhood would have terrified me — all the more so had I been harassed by members of one of its many street gangs.

Hers was a rundown side street in the extreme southeast of San Francisco, only blocks from the drug- and crime-infested Sunnydale public housing projects. There were bars over the windows and grilles on the doors of the small stucco houses; dead and vandalized cars stood at the broken curbs; in the weed-choked yard next door, a mangy guard dog of indeterminate breed paced and snarled. Fear was written on this street as plainly as the graffiti on the walls and fences. Fear and hopelessness and a dull resignation to a life that none of its residents would willingly have opted to lead.

I watched Mrs. Angeles as she crossed her tiny living room to the front window, pulled the edge of the curtain aside a fraction, and peered out at the street. She was no more than five feet tall, with rounded shoulders, sallow skin, and graying black hair that curled in short, unruly ringlets. Her shapeless flower-printed dress did little to conceal a body made soft and fleshy by bad food and too much childbearing. Although she was only forty, she moved like a much older woman.

Her attorney and my colleague, Jack Stuart of All Souls Legal Cooperative, had given me a brief history of his client when he’d asked me to undertake an investigation on her behalf. She was a Filipina who had emigrated to the states with her husband in search of their own piece of the good life that was reputed to be had here. But as with many of their countrymen and — women, things hadn’t worked out as the Angeleses had envisioned: first Amorfina’s husband had gone into the import-export business with a friend from Manila; the friend absconded two years later with Joe Angeles’s life savings. Then, a year after that, Joe was killed in a freak accident at a construction site where he was working. Amorfina and their six children were left with no means of support, and in the years since Joe’s death their circumstances had gradually been reduced to this two-bedroom rental cottage in one of the worst areas of the city.

Mrs. Angeles, Jack told me, had done the best she could for her family, keeping them off the welfare rolls with a daytime job at a Mission district sewing factory and nighttime work doing alterations. As they grew older, the children helped with part-time jobs. Now there were only two left at home: sixteen-year-old Alex and fourteen-year-old Isabel. It was typical of their mother, Jack said, that in the current crisis she was more concerned for them than for herself.

She turned from the window now, her face taut with fear, deep lines bracketing her full lips. I asked, “Is someone out there?”

She shook her head and walked wearily to the worn recliner opposite me. I occupied the place of honor on a red brocade sofa encased in the same plastic that doubtless had protected it long ago upon delivery from the store. “I never see anybody,” she said. “Not till it’s too late.”

“Mrs. Angeles, Jack Stuart told me about your problem, but I’d like to hear it in your own words — from the beginning, if you would.”

She nodded, smoothing her bright dress over her plump thighs. “It goes back a long time, to when Benny Crespo was... they called him the Prince of Omega Street, you know.”

Hearing the name of her street spoken made me aware of its ironic appropriateness: the last letter of the Greek alphabet is symbolic of endings, and for most of the people living here, Omega Street was the end of a steady decline into poverty.

Mrs. Angeles went on, “Benny Crespo was Filipino. His gang controlled the drugs here. A lot of people looked up to him; he had power, and that don’t happen much with our people. Once I caught Alex and one of my older boys calling him a hero. I let them have it pretty good, you bet, and there wasn’t any more of that kind of talk around this house. I got no use for the gangs — Filipino or otherwise.”

“What was the name of Benny Crespo’s gang?”

“The Kabalyeros. That’s Tagalog for Knights.”

“Okay — what happened to Benny?”

“The house next door, the one with the dog — that was where Benny lived. He always parked his fancy Corvette out front, and people knew better than to mess with it. Late one night he was getting out of the car and somebody shot him. A drug burn, they say. After that the Kabalyeros decided to make the parking space a shrine to Benny. They roped it off, put flowers there every week. On All Saints Day and the other fiestas, it was something to see.”

“And that brings us to last March thirteenth,” I said.

Mrs. Angeles bit her lower lip and smoothed her dress again.

When she didn’t speak, I prompted her. “You’d just come home from work.”

“Yeah. It was late, dark. Isabel wasn’t here, and I got worried. I kept looking out the window, like a mother does.”

“And you saw...?”

“The guy who moved into the house next door after Benny got shot, Reg Dawson. He was black, one of a gang called the Victors. They say he moved into that house to show the Kabalyeros that the Victors were taking over their turf. Anyway, he drives up and stops a little way down the block. Waits there, revving his engine. People start showing up; the word’s been put out that something’s gonna go down. And when there’s a big crowd, Reg Dawson guns his car and drives right into Benny’s space, over the rope and the flowers.

“Well, that started one hell of a fight — Victors and Kabalyeros and folks from the neighborhood. And while it’s going on, Reg Dawson just stands there in Benny’s space acting macho. That’s when it happened, what I saw.”

“And what was that?”

She hesitated, wet her lips. “The leader of the Kabalyeros, Tommy Dragón — the Dragon, they call him — was over by the fence in front of Reg Dawson’s house, where you couldn’t see him unless you were really looking. I was, ’cause I was trying to see if Isabel was anyplace out there. And I saw Tommy Dragón point this gun at Reg Dawson and shoot him dead.”

“What did you do then?”

“Ran and hid in the bathroom. That’s where I was when the cops came to the door. Somebody’d told them I was in the window when it all went down and then ran away when Reg got shot. Well, what was I supposed to do? I got no use for the Kabalyeros or the Victors, so I told the truth. And now here I am in this mess.”

Mrs. Angeles had been slated to be the chief prosecution witness at Tommy Dragón’s trial this week. But a month ago the threats had started: anonymous letters and phone calls warning her against testifying. As the trial date approached, this had escalated into blatant intimidation: a fire was set in her trash can; someone shot out her kitchen window; a dead dog turned up on her doorstep. The previous Friday, Isabel had been accosted on her way home from the bus stop by two masked men with guns. And that had finally made Mrs. Angeles capitulate; in court yesterday, she’d refused to take the stand against Dragón.

The state needed her testimony; there were no other witnesses, Dragón insisted on his innocence, and the murder gun had not been found. The judge had tried to reason with Mrs. Angeles, then cited her for contempt — reluctantly, he said. “The court is aware that there have been threats made against you and your family,” he told her, “but it is unable to guarantee your protection.” Then he gave her forty-eight hours to reconsider her decision.

As it turned out, Mrs. Angeles had a champion in her employer. The owner of the sewing factory was unwilling to allow one of his long-term workers to go to jail or to risk her own and her family’s safety. He brought her to All Souls, where he held a membership in our legal-services plan, and this morning Jack Stuart had asked me to do something for her.

What? I’d asked. What could I do that the SFPD couldn’t to stop vicious harassment by a street gang?

Well, he said, get proof against whoever was threatening her so they could be arrested and she’d feel free to testify.

Sure, Jack, I said. And exactly why hadn’t the police been able to do anything about the situation?

His answer was not surprising: lack of funds. Intimidation of prosecution witnesses in cases relating to gang violence was becoming more and more prevalent and open in San Francisco, but the city did not have the resources to protect them. An old story nowadays — not enough money to go around.

Mrs. Angeles was watching my face, her eyes tentative. As I looked back at her, her gaze began to waver. She’d experienced too much disappointment in her life to expect much in the way of help from me.

I said, “Yes, you certainly are in a mess. Let’s see if we can get you out of it.”

Sara Paretsky is regularly reviewed in places where other mystery writers are never mentioned. Her novels, dealing as they do with the lives of contemporary women, have found an audience outside genre. She appeals to people who rarely if ever read mystery stories. And she appeals to that generation known as boomers who have learned the hard way that despite some major advances for women, there is still a substantial way to go before we reach anything like parity between the sexes. Here is Paretsky at the top of her game, much as she is in her latest novel, Total Recall.

Natasha’s hair, as sleek and black as a raven’s wing, framed the delicate oval of her face. Raoul thought she had never looked more desirable than now, with her dark, doelike eyes filled with tears, and a longing beyond tears.

“It’s no good, darling,” she whispered, summoning a valiant smile. “Papa has lost all his money. I must go to India with the Crawfords to mind their children.”

“Darling — for you to be a nanny — how utterly absurd. And in that climate. You must not!” His square, manly face suffused with color, betraying the strength of his feeling.

“You haven’t even mentioned marriage,” Natasha whispered, looking at the bracelets on her slender wrist, wondering if they, too, must be sold, along with Mama’s diamonds.

Raoul flushed more deeply. “We’re engaged. Even if our families don’t know about it. But how can I marry you now, when I have no prospects and your papa cannot give you a dowry...”

Ellery Queen was the joint pen name of first cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Their enormous and enduring contributions to the modern mystery came in three ways — through their Ellery Queen novels; through their founding and editing of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine; and through the untold number of careers their magazine started. Their run as writers lasted from roughly 1929 to the late 1960s, and they led the pack every year. While a number of paperback originals bearing their name were ghosted by other writers, their own earlier novels revived the pure detective story (Golden Age if you will) with a popularity that surpassed that of even S. S. Van Dine. Movies, radio shows, and — later — TV series also blossomed. While their novels are not much read today, their legacy lives on in the pages of the monthly EQ magazine, which continues to prosper and publish stories of import and entertainment, an all-too-rare accomplishment in this day and age.

There is a law among story-tellers, originally passed by Editors at the cries (they say) of their constituents, which states that stories about Christmas shall have children in them. This Christmas story is no exception; indeed, misopedists will complain that we have overdone it. And we confess in advance that this is also a story about Dolls, and that Santa Claus comes into it, and even a Thief; though as to this last, whoever he was — and that was one of the questions — he was certainly not Barabbas, even parabolically.

Another section of the statute governing Christmas stories provides that they shall incline toward Sweetness and Light. The first arises, of course, from the orphans and the never-souring savor of the annual Miracle; as for Light, it will be provided at the end, as usual, by that luminous prodigy, Ellery Queen. The reader of gloomier temper will also find a large measure of Darkness, in the person and works of one who, at least in Inspector Queen’s harassed view, was surely the winged Prince of that region. His name, by the way, was not Satan, it was Comus; and this is paradox enow, since the original Comus, as everyone knows, was the god of festive joy and mirth, emotions not commonly associated with the Underworld. As Ellery struggled to embrace his phantom foe, he puzzled over this non sequitur in vain; in vain, that is, until Nikki Porter, no scorner of the obvious, suggested that he might seek the answer where any ordinary mortal would go at once. And there, to the great man’s mortification, it was indeed to be found: On page 262b of Volume 6, Coleb to Damasci, of the 175th Anniversary edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A French conjuror of that name, performing in London in the year 1789, caused his wife to vanish from the top of a table — the very first time, it appeared, that this feat, uxorial or otherwise, had been accomplished without the aid of mirrors. To track his dark adversary’s nom de nuit to its historic lair gave Ellery his only glint of satisfaction until that blessed moment when light burst all around him and exorcised the darkness, Prince and all.

But this is chaos.

Our story properly begins not with our invisible character but with our dead one.

Miss Ypson had not always been dead; au contraire. She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most of them breathing hard. As her father used to remark, ‘She was a very active little verb.’ Miss Ypson’s father was a professor of Greek at a small Mid-western university. He had conjugated his daughter with the rather bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier students, an Iowa poultry heiress.

Professor Ypson was a man of distinction. Unlike most professors of Greek, he was a Greek professor of Greek, having been born Gerasymos Aghamos Ypsilonomon in Polykhnitos, on the island of Mytilini, ‘where’, he was fond of recalling on certain occasions, ‘burning Sappho loved and sung’ — a quotation he found unfailingly useful in his extracurricular activities; and, the Hellenic ideal notwithstanding, Professor Ypson believed wholeheartedly in immoderation in all things. This hereditary and cultural background explains the professor’s interest in fatherhood — to his wife’s chagrin, for Mrs. Ypson’s own breeding prowess was confined almost exclusively to the barnyards on which her income was based; he held their daughter to be nothing less than a biological miracle.

The professor’s mental processes also tended to confuse Mrs. Ypson. She never ceased to wonder why, instead of shortening his name to Ypson, her husband had not sensibly changed it to Jones. ‘My dear,’ the professor once replied, ‘you are an Iowa snob.’ ‘But nobody,’ Mrs. Ypson cried, ‘can spell it or pronounce it!’ ‘This is a cross,’ murmured Professor Ypson, ‘which we must bear with Ypsilanti.’ ‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Ypson.

There was invariably something Sibylline about his conversation. His favorite adjective for his wife was ‘ypsiliform’, a term, he explained, which referred to the germinal spot at one of the fecundation stages in a ripening egg and which was, therefore, exquisitely a propos. Mrs. Ypson continued to look bewildered; she died at an early age.

And the professor ran off with a Kansas City variety girl of considerable talent, leaving his baptized chick to be reared by an eggish relative of her mother’s named Jukes.

The only time Miss Ypson heard from her father — except when he wrote charming and erudite little notes requesting, as he termed it, lucrum — was in the fourth decade of his Odyssey, when he sent her a handsome addition to her collection, a terracotta play doll of Greek origin over three thousand years old which, unhappily, Miss Ypson felt duty-bound to return to the Brooklyn museum from which it had unaccountably vanished. The note accompanying her father’s gift had said, whimsically: ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’

There was poetry behind Miss Ypson’s dolls. At her birth the professor, ever harmonious, signalized his devotion to fecundity by naming her Cytherea. This proved the Olympian irony. For, it turned out, her father’s philoprogenitiveness throbbed frustrate in her mother’s stony womb: even though Miss Ypson interred five husbands of quite adequate vigor, she remained infertile to the end of her days. Hence it is classically tragic to find her, when all passion was spent, a sweet little old lady with a vague if eager smile who, under the name of her father, pattered about a vast and echoing New York apartment playing enthusiastically with dolls.

In the beginning they were dolls of common clay: a Billiken, a kewpie, a Kathe Kruse, a Patsy, a Foxy Grandpa, and so forth. But then, as her need increased, Miss Ypson began her fierce sack of the past.

Down into the land of Pharaoh she went for two pieces of thin desiccated board, carved and painted and with hair of strung beads, and legless — so that they might not run away — which any connoisseur will tell you are the most superb specimens of ancient Egyptian paddle doll extant, far superior to those in the British Museum, although this fact will be denied in certain quarters.

Miss Ypson unearthed a foremother of ‘Letitia Penn’, until her discovery held to be the oldest doll in America, having been brought to Philadelphia from England in 1699 by William Penn as a gift for a playmate of his small daughter’s. Miss Ypson’s find was a wooden-hearted ‘little lady’ in brocade and velvet which had been sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to the first English child born in the New World. Since Virginia Dare had been born in 1587, not even the Smithsonian dared impugn Miss Ypson’s triumph.

On the old lady’s racks, in her plate-glass cases, might be seen the wealth of a thousand childhoods, and some riches — for such is the genetics of dolls — possessed by children grown. Here could be found ‘fashion babies’ from fourteenth-century France, sacred dolls of the Orange Free State Fingo tribe, Satsuma paper dolls and court dolls from old Japan, beady-eyed ‘Kalifa’ dolls of the Egyptian Sudan, Swedish birchbark dolls, ‘Katcina’ dolls of the Hopis, mammoth-tooth dolls of the Eskimos, feather dolls of the Chippewa, tumble dolls of the ancient Chinese, Coptic bone dolls, Roman dolls dedicated to Diana, pantin dolls which had been the street toys of Parisian exquisites before Madame Guillotine swept the boulevards, early Christian dolls in their crèches representing the Holy Family — to specify the merest handful of Miss Ypson’s Briarean collection. She possessed dolls of pasteboard, dolls of animal skin, spool dolls, crab-claw dolls, eggshell dolls, cornhusk dolls, rag dolls, pine-cone dolls with moss hair, stocking dolls, dolls of bisque, dolls of palm leaf, dolls of papier mâché, even dolls made of seed pods. There were dolls forty inches tall, and there were dolls so little Miss Ypson could hide them in her gold thimble.

Cytherea Ypson’s collection bestrode the centuries and took tribute of history. There was no greater — not the fabled playthings of Montezuma, or Victoria’s, or Eugene Field’s; not the collection at the Metropolitan, or the South Kensington, or the royal palace in old Bucharest, or anywhere outside the enchantment of little girls’ dreams.

It was made of Iowan eggs and the Attic shore, corn-fed and myrtle-clothed; and it brings us at last to Attorney John Somerset Bondling and his visit to the Queen residence one December twenty-third not so very long ago.

Ruth Rendell is generally recognized as one of a handful of writers whose work has profoundly changed the crime genre. Whether with her psychological novels or her Inspector Wexford books, her style, insight, quiet but frequently tart wit, and constant confrontation with our modern moral dilemmas has elevated her books to their very own niche far above the average mystery effort. Her most recent novel is Harm Done. It has been argued that her short stories are even better than her novels. An enjoyable argument, really, because you have the pleasure of reading both and deciding for yourself.

After she had been doing it for a year, it occurred to Linda that looking after Betty fell to her lot because she was a woman. Betty was Brian’s mother, not hers, and Betty had two other children, both sons, both unmarried men. No one had ever suggested that either of them should take a hand in looking after their mother. Betty had never much liked Linda, had sometimes hinted that Brian had married beneath him, and once, in the heat of temper, said that Linda was “not good enough” for her son, but still it was Linda who cared for her now. Linda felt a fool for not having thought of it in these terms before.

But she knew she would not get very far talking about it to Brian. Brian would say — and did say — that this was women’s work. A man couldn’t perform intimate tasks for an old woman, it wasn’t fitting. When Linda asked why not, he told her not to be silly, everyone knew why not.

“Suppose it had been your dad that was left, suppose he’d been bedridden, would I have looked after him?”

Brian looked over the top of his evening paper. He was holding the remote in his hand but he didn’t turn down the sound. “He wasn’t left, was he?”

“No, but if he had been?”

“I reckon you would have. There isn’t anyone else, is there? It’s not as if the boys were married.”

Every morning after Brian had gone out into the farmyard and before she left for work, Linda drove down the road, turned left at the church into the lane, and after a mile came to the very small cottage on the very large piece of land where Betty had lived since the death of her husband twelve years before. Betty slept downstairs in the room at the back. She was always awake when Linda got there, although that was invariably before seven-thirty, and she always said she had been awake since five.

Linda got her up and changed the incontinence pad. Most mornings she had to change the sheets as well. She washed Betty, put her into a clean nightgown and clean bedjacket, socks, and slippers, and while Betty shouted and moaned, lifted and shoved her as best she could into the armchair she would remain in all day. Then it was breakfast. Sweet milky tea and bread and butter and jam. Betty wouldn’t use the feeding cup with the spout. What did Linda think she was, a baby? She drank from a cup, and unless Linda had remembered to cover her up with the muslin squares that had indeed once had their use for babies, the tea would go all down the clean nightgown and Betty would have to be changed again.

After Linda had left her and gone off to work, the district nurse would come, though not every day, not for certain. The Meals-on-Wheels lady would come and give Betty her midday dinner, bits and pieces in foil containers, all labelled with the names of their contents. At some point Brian would come. Brian would “look in.” Not to do anything, not to clear anything away or give his mother something to eat or make her a cup of tea or run the vacuum cleaner around — Linda did that on Saturdays — but to sit in Betty’s bedroom for ten minutes smoking a cigarette and watching whatever was on television. Very occasionally, perhaps once a month, the brother who lived two miles away would come for ten minutes and watch television with Brian. The other brother, the one who lived ten miles away, never came at all except at Christmas.

Linda always knew if Brian had been there by the smell of smoke and the cigarette end stubbed out in the ashtray. But even if there had been no smell and no stub she would have known because Betty always told her. Betty thought Brian was a saint and an angel to spare a moment away from the farm to visit his old mother. She could no longer speak distinctly, but she was positively articulate on the subject of Brian, the most perfect son any woman ever had.

It was about five when Linda got back there. Usually the incontinence pad needed changing again and often the nightdress too. Considering how ill she was, and partially paralysed, Betty ate a great deal. Linda made her scrambled egg or sardines on toast. She brought pastries with her from the cakeshop or, in the summer, strawberries and cream. She made more tea for Betty, and when the meal was over, somehow heaved Betty back into that bed.

The bedroom window was never opened. Betty wouldn’t have it. The room smelt of urine and lavender, camphor and Meals-on-Wheels, so every day on her way to work Linda opened the window in the front room and left the doors open. It didn’t make much difference but she went on doing it. When she had got Betty to bed she washed up the day’s teacups, emptied the ashtray and washed it, and put all the soiled linen into a plastic bag to take home. The question she asked Betty before she left had become meaningless because Betty always said no, and she hadn’t asked it once since having that conversation with Brian about whose job it was to look after his mother, but she asked it now.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we moved you in with us, Mum?”

Betty’s hearing was erratic. This was one of her deaf days.

“What?”

“Wouldn’t you be better off coming to live with us?”

“I’m not leaving my home till they carry me out feet first. How many times do I have to tell you?”

Linda said all right and she was off now and she would see her in the morning. Looking rather pleased at the prospect, Betty said she would be dead by the morning.

“Not you,” said Linda, which was what she always said, and so far she had always been right.

She went into the front room and closed the window. The room was furnished in a way which must have been old-fashioned even when Betty was young. In the center of it was a square dining table, around which stood six chairs with seats of faded green silk. There was a large, elaborately carved sideboard but no armchairs, no small tables, no books, and no lamps but the central light which, enveloped in a shade of parchment panels stitched together with leather thongs, was suspended directly over the glass vase that stood on a lace mat in the absolute center of the table.

For some reason, ever since the second stroke had incapacitated Betty two years before, all the post, all the junk mail, and every freebie news-sheet that was delivered to the cottage ended up on this table. Every few months it was cleared away, but this hadn’t been done for some time, and Linda noticed that only about four inches of the glass vase now showed above the sea of paper. The lace mat was not visible at all. She noticed something else as well.

It had been a warm sunny day, very warm for April. The cottage faced south and all afternoon the sunshine had poured through the window, was still pouring through the window, striking at the neck of the vase so that the glass was too bright to look at. Where the sun-struck glass touched a sheet of paper a burning had begun. The burning glass was making a dark charred channel through the sheet of thin printed paper.

Linda screwed up her eyes. They had not deceived her. That was smoke she could see. And now she could smell burning paper. For a moment she stood there, fascinated, marvelling at this phenomenon which she had heard of but had never believed in. A magnifying glass to make boy scout’s fires, she thought, and somewhere she had read of a forest burnt down through a piece of broken glass left in a sunlit glade.

There was nowhere to put the piles of paper, so she found another plastic bag and filled that. Betty called out something but it was only to know why she was still there. Linda dusted the table, replaced the lace mat and the glass vase, and, with a bag of washing in one hand and a bag of wastepaper in the other, went home to do the washing and get an evening meal for Brian and herself and the children.

Some reviewers have noted that Lisa Scottoline has brought back the Jean Arthur kind of female protagonist, Arthur being the bright, comely, sardonic heroine of some of Hollywood’s best screwball romances. There is at least one other similarity between Scottoline’s heroines and Jean Arthur’s characters. Despite the surface humor, they manage to convey an undercurrent of very real feelings. Without resorting to sentimentality, the Scottoline-Arthur heroine adds real emotional power to the sometimes frothy story lines. No small feat. Scottoline brings her own charms and talents to the legal thriller.

It was almost seven o’clock in the morning and Assistant District Attorney Tom Moran was late for court. He shaved lethally fast, slipped into his suitpants, and pinwheeled into his pinstriped jacket, all the time rehearsing his cross-examination in a continuous loop. If Tom didn’t break this witness today, he’d lose for sure. He jumped into his wingtips and sprinted downstairs, his tie flying behind him.

Tom hit the hardwood running and snatched his briefcase from the floor like it was a baton on the final leg. He had perfected his handoff at St. Joe’s Prep and could still hear the roar of the crowd cheering him toward the tape. WEEEAAAH! Then Tom realized that it wasn’t cheering he heard, it was one of the twins crying in the kitchen. At three months old, the babies cried a lot. Gastric reflux, Marie called it, but Tom didn’t think these two words should ever appear together.

He stopped in his tracks at the front door, his hand on the brass knob. The crying from the kitchen intensified. Tom checked his watch. 7:12 a.m. A tsunami of guilt washed over him. He had worked all night at the office, and Marie had been alone with the twins. He couldn’t leave without checking on her. Tom dropped his briefcase and dashed into the kitchen, where he froze in disbelief. Marie was asleep standing up, rocking the crying infant in sagging arms. “Honey, wake up!” he shouted.

Marie’s eyelids fluttered open. “Does it come in navy?” she asked, drowsy.

“Marie, wake up, wake up.” Tom rushed across the room and grabbed the wailing baby. It was Ashley, who was his favorite of the twins, even though Marie made him swear not to have a favorite. “You were sleeping.”

“No, I was shopping,” she said. Marie leaned against the kitchen counter, dark shadows encircling her blue eyes and her strawberry-blonde hair uncombed. She hadn’t lost the weight from the babies yet and wore a tentlike chenille robe over her Eagles T-shirt. She wasn’t the girl he married, but Tom was too sensitive a guy to expect that. It would be nice to have sex again, however.

“Sit down, you look exhausted,” Tom said. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“I’m fine. Fine, really. I slept a little. Really.” Marie sank into a chair, bumping into the kitchen table. Pink pacifiers rocked on its pine surface and an empty plastic bottle rolled onto the floor. In the middle of the table like a human centerpiece was the other twin, Brittany, slumbering through the ruckus in a quilted baby chair. Marie raked her fingers through her hair. “Ashley’s cold is worse, she’s coughing and wheezing. I had her on the nebulizer three times last night.”

“What’s a nebulizer?”

“That thing.” Marie waved a hand at a grayish machine on the counter. A clear plastic tube snaked from the machine, and at the end of the tube was a small plastic cup like a doll’s oxygen mask. “Got it yesterday from the pediatrician, but it didn’t help. I have to take her in again, and the pediatrician’s in his Cherry Hill office tomorrow. I mean, today.”

“Cherry Hill?” Tom felt terrible for her. “How will you get two babies to Cherry Hill? You’re beat.”

“I’ll do it somehow, I have to. Ashley’s not really a problem, if I could find someone to sit with Brittany.”

“What about your mom? Can’t she help?”

“On Tuesday? Her golf day?”

Tom bit his tongue. His bitchy mother-in-law, St. Teresa of the Perpetual Cigarette. “How about your sister?”

“Out of town.”

“Again?” His sister-in-law was never around when she wasn’t borrowing money. Damn. Tom jiggled Ashley and winced against the racket. The baby was so loud he couldn’t hear himself think. “I wish I could help you,” Tom said, and suddenly Marie looked up at him, her eyes full of adoration. It was the way she used to look at him. Back when they had sex.

“You can?” Marie asked, with a relieved smile. “But you’re on trial.”

“What?” Tom said, confused. Brittany was screaming full-throttle, and he still had his mind on the sex part.

“Tom, how can you take Brittany if you’re on trial?”

“Take who?”

“Brittany.” Marie was still giving him the love face, and Tom swallowed hard.

“Me take Brittany?”

“I thought that was what you said.” Marie’s love face dropped like a mask. “You’d take Brittany for the day so I could take Ashley to the pediatrician. Isn’t that what you said?”

What? Was she insane? “Right. Absolutely. Sure.” How could Tom say no? He didn’t have time to think about it. He’d figure something out. The D.A.’s office had 34,350 secretaries. One of them had to be lactating.

“This is so wonderful of you, Tom. I’m at my wit’s end. You sure you can do this?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not a problem. Nothing is a problem.” Tom felt sick inside. He didn’t want to think about how much time an infant would add to his trip downtown. It took an hour to get one strapped like a paratrooper into the car seat.

“But you have your big case today, don’t you?”

“Don’t worry, you take care of Ashley. I’m late. I have to go,” Tom said. He off-loaded Ashley into Marie’s lap and unhooked Brittany from her baby chair. Her head flopped to one side and her non-skid feet drooped in her fuzzy pink sleeper. He boosted her onto his shoulder and kissed his wife on the cheek. “Am I a hero or what?”

“Take the diaper bag.”

“Heroes don’t need diaper bags,” Tom said, and hurried out of the kitchen with the baby, trying not to get slobber on his suit.

“Take my car!” Marie called after him. “The keys are on the hall table!”

“Gotcha!” Tom called back, and scurried into the hall, genuflecting to pick up his briefcase and Marie’s keys. He bolted out the door into the sun, running in a cramped position so Brittany’s head wouldn’t bump around. Lucky it was spring, a warm morning, and Brittany was warm enough in her sleeper, the body bag for babies.

Tom dashed across the lawn to Marie’s huge Ford Expedition, the only car larger than their home, chirped it unlocked, and threw his briefcase in ahead of him. Then he popped the baby off his shoulder and into her car seat, facing backward in the passenger seat. Her head bobbled slightly but her eyes didn’t open as he fumbled with the woven straps, then ended up tying them in a knot. He didn’t have time to get fancy.

Tom jumped in beside the baby, started the ignition, and roared out of the driveway, his hand on Brittany’s tummy. Her minuscule chest rose and fell with a reassuring regularity. Her fleecy sleeper felt warm and soft. She smelled milky and sweet. She slept, well, like a baby.

Tom smiled. This was going to be a piece of cake.