Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 141, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 858 & 859, March/April 2013
The Return of Crazy Horse
by Clark Howard
When Nelson Clay returned after lunch to his assistant curator’s office at the Great Plains Native American Museum that early summer South Dakota day, he had no way of knowing that his life was about to change forever. In retrospect, he might have suspected something when he saw a brand-new bright yellow Corvette parked in one of the spaces marked: reserved for staff. But it was Friday and his mind was elsewhere; he had just finished a bison burger, his favorite, for lunch, and he was looking forward to the weekend and driving up to Rapid City with his lady friend, for a performance of the Black Hills Chamber Music Society. His companion for the occasion would be Rose Blackthorn, the hostess at Buffalo Run Restaurant, where he had lunch every day. He had been seeing Rose for nearly three years, and their romance was flourishing.
Nelson was an average-looking man, if such a creature existed: forty, tall, still slim, graying just a bit, not exactly handsome by certain standards, more accurately thought of as clean-cut. His best feature was a smile that was warm enough to seem sincere even when he was simply being courteous.
Passing the information desk on his way to his office, he was spoken to by the receptionist on duty. “Mr. Clay, Mr. White would like to see you in his office, sir.”
“All right. Thank you.” The receptionist was referring to Martin White, the curator of the museum. Having one-quarter Crow Indian blood, he had shortened his name from Martin White Cloud many years earlier, merely in the interest, so he said, of abbreviation rather than the elimination of immediate identification of his Crow ancestry. Even though he was curator of the largest, most prestigious Native American museum in the country, founded nearly a century before by the council of the Great Sioux Nation, it was still guided by a board of directors that was seventy percent Sioux or Northern Cheyenne, with only three of its ten members having Crow blood. “Ah, Nelson, come in, my boy,” Martin White greeted Nelson on this day. He had called Nelson “my boy” for nineteen years, since, at the age of twenty-one, Nelson had first come to work for him as assistant curator. Now that Nelson had reached forty, the term had begun to nettle him a bit.
Entering the curator’s office, Nelson saw that Martin White had a visitor: a tall, tan, perfectly postured woman who looked to be not yet thirty, with shiny black hair worn in a French twist at the back, dressed in a smart dove-colored St. John knit suit.
“Nelson, my boy, I want you to meet my niece, Naomi White. My dear, this is Nelson Clay, my assistant that I’ve been telling you about.”
Naomi White, who also apparently had shortened her name, stood and extended her hand, which Nelson shook as he said, “My pleasure, Miss White.” He smiled that smile that always looked sincere. “Is that your classy Corvette parked outside?”
“It is, indeed,” she said, smiling back. “A graduation gift from my very generous Uncle Martin.”
“Naomi was just recently awarded her doctorate degree at Stanford University.”
“Well, congratulations,” Nelson said. “That’s quite a high honor. Stanford, no less. May I ask what field you specialized in?”
The curator answered for her. “Why, Native American Studies, of course,” he said proudly. “Any other field,” he added with a chuckle, “and she would have received a Volkswagen.”
“Yes,” Naomi said, “I followed in the footsteps of my uncle, a man I admire more than anyone in the world. He’s been like a father to me, since I lost my own as a child.”
“Naomi’s mother is my sister,” Martin explained. “Her father was killed in an automobile accident when Naomi was only five. I’ve helped raise her ever since.”
“Helped is hardly the word,” Naomi corrected. “Uncle Martin supported me all the way through high school, four years in college for a bachelor’s degree, two more years for a master’s, and three years of study for my doctorate.”
“Most generous, I’d say,” Nelson commented, with a bow to the curator. “And a Corvette, as well.”
“Now, now,” Martin White protested modestly, “just doing my familial duty” He rose and came around his desk. “Come along, my boy, and let’s show Naomi around the museum. She’s been here before, of course, visiting from time to time, usually on a weekend when you weren’t around, my boy, which is why you two haven’t met before—”
Driving into Rapid City the next day, Rose Blackthorn at his side, Nelson scoffed at the comment Martin White had made.
“Not only had I not
“Don’t belittle yourself,” Rose scolded mildly. “You worked seven years to put yourself through college — and there wasn’t a new car waiting for you at the end either. You should be proud of yourself.”
Rose Blackthorn was, like Naomi White, a tall, naturally tan woman, mid thirties, one-half Sioux, with large, dark macadamia-colored eyes. She had been born illegitimately to a Sioux mother from the Pine Ridge reservation and a white serviceman from the nearby Ellsworth Air Force Base. Her father was discharged when she was two years old and never heard from again; her mother became an alcoholic and drank herself to death. Rose was raised by her Sioux grandmother on the reservation and still lived in the little clapboard house where she grew up, now five years after her grandmother’s death. She earned good money as a restaurant hostess and could have moved into town anytime she wanted to, but as she had once told Nelson Clay, she felt more at home on “the res,” as she called it. Nelson wasn’t sure he understood why.
“You’re around whites all the time,” he had reasoned, “all day long at the restaurant.”
“Yes,” she had replied quietly, “but I do not
Nelson had once considered asking her to move in with him, but had abandoned the idea because he did not want to damage their relationship with the negative reply he felt certain he would have received.
As they drove toward Rapid City, Rose was quiet for a while before asking candidly, “What do you think White Cloud’s plans are for his niece?” She always referred to the curator by his tribal name.
“I think he may be grooming her as my replacement,” Nelson answered. He had been thinking that since meeting the curator’s niece, but this was the first time he had spoken of it.
“You’re not serious, are you? After you’ve put in nineteen years as assistant curator?”
“You forget one thing, my dear,” Nelson reminded her. “I have no Native American blood. Not a drop.”
“He knew that when you were hired. You were a summa grad in Native American studies with a four-point grade average. The museum board unanimously approved you. And the current board is very pleased with you. I don’t think White Cloud would dare pass you over — especially for a relative of his.”
“Blood is still blood, honey,” Nelson said ominously. He reached over and patted her knee. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
A week later, Nelson was at his desk checking invoices on several Apache artifacts they had obtained from the University of New Mexico, when Martin White came into his office.
“Nelson, my boy,” he said without preliminary, “I’ve decided to give my niece Naomi a paid internship with us. I want to help her obtain some practical experience to go with that degree of hers.”
“An internship?” Nelson allowed himself a moment to think about it, then said, “We’ve never had a paid intern before. Do you think the board will approve the expense?”
“Approve a paid intern with a
“No, sir. Of course I won’t.”
A paid internship, he thought when White left. One foot in the door.
He told Rose about it that night, when she was staying over at his apartment. She was amazed. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Nelson emphasized. “This is just the beginning.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Martin White saw to it that Nelson took Naomi well under his charge. She moved into a storeroom directly across from Martin’s office that her uncle had cleaned out and redecorated for her into small but comfortable working quarters. And, on a daily basis, Nelson received a list of assignments with the young woman designed to acquaint her not only with the running of the museum but the area around it as well.
One of the first things Nelson was tasked to do was familiarize Naomi with the extended community. Using his car, a modest sedan furnished by the museum as part of his compensation package, he took Naomi on casual driving excursions around Jackson and Shannon counties, introducing her to small towns like Red Shirt, Buffalo Gap, and Owanka, driving in a loose semicircle that skirted the northern and western boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
At one point on one of their excursions, when they stopped for lunch at a little cafe in Hermosa, Nelson asked, “Would you like me to show you some of Pine Ridge this afternoon?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “I’m not really interested in the reservation.”
Nelson thought that very odd. Years of studying Native Americans and not interested in seeing a reservation?
“Have you spent much time on reservations?” she asked.
“Yes, when I was studying at Oklahoma State. One summer I worked at the tribal museum on the Osage Reservation. And another time I hitchhiked up across Kansas and spent some time on the Potawatomi Reservation, then thumbed my way up to the Santee Reservation in Nebraska. And of course I’ve spent some time here on Pine Ridge.”
“All of that must have been very enlightening,” Naomi said, somewhat distantly, as if just being polite.
That evening, after having dinner at Rose Blackthorn’s little house on the Pine Ridge res, Nelson and Rose went onto the front porch to enjoy the cooling breeze and the mixed fragrances of the reservation night: the bitter sweetness of a hackberry bush, the pungence of chestnut soil in someone’s modest garden being hopefully watered, wisps of musky smoke from a wood-burning stove heating a cast-iron kettle for coffee. Off in the distance came the occasional bark of a prairie dog.
“I can’t figure her out,” Nelson said of Naomi White. “She seems to be interested in Native Americans only in the abstract. Like medieval history.”
“Do you like her?” Rose asked quietly.
“Like her?” Nelson shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about it. How do you mean?”
“Well, you know. White Cloud has you spending so much time with her, you’re bound to form some opinion of her.”
“Well, I don’t
Somewhere nearby, a woman could be heard calling someone named Teelie to come home at once. Rose spread her knees and drew her skirt partway up to let the evening air cool her thighs. Nelson had earlier removed his shirt and now sat in a sleeveless undershirt.
“I offered to show her some of the res today,” he told Rose. “But she wasn’t at all interested.”
“Maybe,” Rose theorized, “she has a different career path planned for herself. Something in public relations or some other high-profile work where her doctorate title would be impressive. Something entirely apart from your job.”
“Maybe,” Nelson said, his tone more doubtful than hers.
They fell silent for a few minutes, their shoulders occasionally touching as one or the other shifted position slightly. In the three years they had been intimate, they had reached a point where it was not necessary to have an ongoing conversation. Both found it comfortable just being together, theirs being at times a silent love.
After a while, Rose asked, “Are you staying over?”
“I don’t think so. I have to get the car washed and gassed in the morning before I take his niece out for the day.”
The next day, Nelson took it upon himself to drive Naomi White onto the reservation. She did not object or otherwise comment. They drove around, from Potato Creek to Porcupine to Wounded Knee. Along the way, he shared with her many of the things he had learned about Pine Ridge from Rose and his own observations.
“It’s the eighth largest Native American reservation in the country, and also the poorest. Unemployment is rarely less than eighty percent. Half the people here live below the federal poverty level. A large percentage of these homes don’t have electricity or running water. As you can see by the number of outhouses, they have no toilets or sewage systems. The only way they can cook or heat their homes is with wood-burning stoves. The infant mortality rate on Pine Ridge is five times the U.S. national average. The life expectancy of the men is forty-seven, for women it’s fifty-two. That’s the lowest life expectancy of any group in the entire Western Hemisphere.”
“Quite different from what’s depicted at the museum,” Naomi commented, without much feeling.
“Of course,” Nelson said. “The museum is for white people. You never see Indians visiting there.”
The following morning, Martin White summoned Nelson to his office. The expression Nelson encountered was one of obvious displeasure.
“At dinner last night,” he said, “my niece told me about your little excursion to Pine Ridge yesterday. She also related some of the statistics you quoted. May I ask what your purpose was in doing that?”
Nelson shrugged. “I thought some exposure to current conditions of Native American life today might give a little balance to what she’s learned from books.”
“I don’t agree with that,” White said irritably. “I cannot see any advantage in exposing her to the substandard conditions under which some of her own people live today.”
“They aren’t exactly her own people,” Nelson pointed out. “Pine Ridge is a Sioux reservation. You and your niece are Crow.”
“An Indian is an Indian!” White snapped.
Nelson’s mouth dropped open in surprise. The statement was absurd. Anyone of Sioux blood would have challenged it in a heartbeat. The Sioux considered the Crow far inferior to themselves. While the Sioux had been fighting to defend their tribal land, Crow men were wearing blue coats and scouting for the white soldiers.
The curator marshaled control of his displeasure. “At any rate, what’s done is done. But from now on, there will be no more excursions. Instead, I want you to explain in meticulous detail to my niece all of your duties as an assistant museum curator. You can begin with a full inventory and history of our entire collection. After you have done that, I will tell you what to do next. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. Understood.”
“He’s definitely replacing me,” Nelson told Rose that evening.
They had driven down to Hot Springs for dinner at the Buen Dia Mexican restaurant, and were taking a walk around town afterward. Nelson had purposely not mentioned his new conviction earlier in order to maintain tranquility during their meal. But now he decided he had to share it.
“How can you be sure?” Rose asked. “Has he said anything?”
“He doesn’t have to
“But what about the museum’s board of directors? Won’t they have something to say about it? Several of those board members are very fond of you.”
“Not enough to overrule any personnel change he recommends.”
“But she’s
“Ordinarily I’d say yes. But in this case it’s a relative who has a doctorate. White himself has only a master’s. The prospect of having a Ph.D. in Native American studies on the staff — and on the museum’s letterhead — is going to be a very impressive factor in their decision. Not to mention that it will carry a lot of weight in obtaining future private and government grants.”
“But it’s so
“Nobody ever said life was fair.”
They walked on for a while, along River Street, as usual admiring the many old sandstone buildings that always looked pink in the late twilight. Presently they came to a little public park and sat on a bench.
“What will you do if this happens, Nelson?” Rose finally asked. She was the kind of woman who always wanted to think about what the future might hold.
“I don’t know. I don’t imagine there’s a deep job market for assistant Native American museum curators.”
“We could move away somewhere, couldn’t we, Nelson? Start a new life. Together.”
“On what? I’ve got about sixteen thousand dollars saved. How much have you got?”
“Not very much. Couple of thousand.”
“So together we’ve got a little over eighteen thousand. That won’t take us very far in today’s economy, Rose.”
“Well, there must be
Nelson put what he hoped would be a comforting arm around Rose and drew her close to him. “If you think of anything,” he said quietly, “let me know.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks for saying we could move away
For the next month, under the close scrutiny of Martin White Cloud, Nelson tutored Naomi White Cloud in the operation of all the various departments that formed the administration, management, and maintenance of the Great Plains Native American Museum, which was referred to in the National Directory of Private Museums as “the most prestigious monument to Native American history and culture” in the U.S.
As was Nelson Clay’s nature, he did his best to accomplish what he now felt was the curator’s objective, that being to groom the young woman for the position Nelson had held for the past nineteen years. Had he been a person of less character and conscience, he might have slacked off in his teaching, omitting a detail here and there in order to pare down the efficiency of his successor when she assumed the responsibility after his departure. But Nelson Clay loved the big museum, loved every artifact, photograph, diorama, everything, down to the smallest Chippewa arrowhead in it, and from his first day of employment he had loved his job there. It was a position of which he was very proud, and to which he applied himself fully and faithfully. Distressed as he was at the prospect of his post being taken away from him, he nevertheless sincerely desired that his successor perform as capably and competently as he had.
“My God, I never dreamed there were so many
“Sure, if you’d like,” he said, wondering what
“Anytime, really, but let’s wait until after the annual board of directors meeting. My dear uncle has me working on polishing up his presentation. And he’s arranged for me to sit in as an observer at the meeting. I think I’ll find it most interesting. You’ll be there, won’t you?”
“I usually attend, yes.”
Several mornings later, when Nelson was perusing the scant few Positions Available classified advertisements in the
The parcel, about the size of an average paperback book, was neatly wrapped in plain brown paper, sealed with transparent tape, and addressed simply to: MANAGER, GREAT PLAINS NATIVE AMERICAN MUSEUM, in neat letters. Opening it, Nelson found a small manila envelope wrapped in a single sheet of lined notebook paper, on which was a letter inked in script which read:
Dear Sir,
My name is Nelli Mae Feathers. I am the great-great-great-granddaughter of the Sioux chief Crazy Horse. My grandmother’s name was Shawl-in-the-Sky. I spent much time with her in Oglala and she told me many stories that had been passed down from her mother and her grandmother. Her grandmother was She-Is-Not-Afraid, who was the daughter of Crazy Horse.
I am enclosing in this envelope several small pieces of Crazy Horse’s hand bones in the hope that you can verify their age so I can determine whether the stories I have been told were true. I will be happy to pay any expense involved in this service.
Sincerely,
At the bottom of the letter was an address in Cedar Butte, South Dakota.
Nelson immediately took the material to Martin White’s office. The curator was having coffee with his niece Naomi at his desk. “This is something I thought you should see,” Nelson said.
Martin read the letter, passed it to Naomi, and with soft-tipped tweezers from his desk drawer examined the relics under a magnifying glass.
“How can those be Crazy Horse’s bones?” Naomi asked. “I was under the impression that no one knew where he was buried.”
“That is the general impression, yes,” said Nelson.
“This smacks of some sort of confidence scheme,” said Martin. “As I recall, Crazy Horse did father a daughter, whom he named She-Is-Not-Afraid, but the child died of cholera when she was only two or three. Clearly, she could not be an ancestor of this letter writer. Where exactly is Cedar Butte anyway?” he asked Nelson.
“I believe it’s over in Millette County, about a hundred miles east.”
“So this person doesn’t live on reservation land.”
“Probably not. I think Cedar Butte would be east of the Pine Ridge agency, and north of the Rosebud agency.”
Martin rose. “I don’t expect anything to come of this, but let’s have a closer look as these relics anyway.” He returned the bones to the envelope and handed it to Nelson. “You and Naomi carbon-date them.”
The spectrometry laboratory of the museum was located underground in the subbasement of the main storage building. The spectrometer used to date samples of any type of raw material, such as organic items from archaeological sites, was no larger than an ordinary kitchen-variety toaster oven. It had the ability to determine the age of carbonaceous matter up to some sixty thousand years old. This was done by radiometrically measuring the amount of naturally occurring carbon-14, an isotope that forms in dormant states, such as decomposing human or animal bodies.
The instrument reports the age of the tested material in radiocarbon years known as BP, or before present time. Present time has been established as the year 1950.
“This should be an easy one for our spectro,” Nelson said when he and Naomi entered the lab. “Just from the look of these bones, they don’t appear to be more than a couple of hundred years old, if that.”
“I think you’re right,” Naomi agreed. “They look well preserved. Maybe they’ve been in an air-tight container of some kind.”
“Some of the old-timers, the ones they called ancients, kept relics of their ancestors in Mason jars that were distributed by the Indian agencies to teach them the canning process for foods.”
When the spectrometer results appeared on the instrument’s screen and a tape printout began to generate, Nelson and Naomi saw that their speculations had been close to accurate. The BP reading was 73.
Back in Martin White’s office, the curator studied the result thoughtfully. A BP reading of 73 dated the relics to the year 1877.
“That certainly lends some credence to the matter,” he said, glancing down at an open copy of
Martin rose and paced around the large, well-furnished, richly decorated office, an office that Nelson Clay had once thought would someday be his. As was the curator’s habit when deep in thought, he gently pulled at his lower lip. Finally reaching a decision, he returned to his chair.
“We have no alternative but to pursue this matter further. I want you two to pay a visit to this Nelli Mae Feathers in Cedar Butte.”
Leaving the museum at eight the next morning, this time taking Naomi’s yellow Corvette, Nelson and Naomi cruised at seventy miles an hour east on Interstate 90 for fifty miles, then had to slow down considerably when they turned south on narrow, curvy State Route 73, which took them to eastbound State Route 44 into Cedar Butte. It was barely a wide spot in the road, with a weather-worn sign that announced CEDAR BUTTE TOWNSHIP — POPULATION 48.
The address they had was a small white frame house. No one answered the door. A neighbor across the road told them that Nelli Mae was not at home during the day; she worked in the Visitors Center at the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, a Department of the Interior nature reserve. Nelson and Naomi had passed it on their way to Cedar Butte. Resignedly, they turned around and drove back.
At the Buffalo Gap Visitors Center, they found Nelli Mae Feathers to be a pleasant woman appearing to be in her late thirties, a very light-skinned Native American, clearly a ’breed, dark hair trimmed short, dressed in the neat gray uniform of the National Park Service.
“We’re here in response to your letter to the Great Plains North American Indian Museum,” Nelson said, introducing himself and Naomi.
“Oh,” Nelli said in surprise, “I didn’t expect a personal visit.”
On the pretext of a guided tour around the visitors center complex, they were able to have a conversation.
“Are the bones I sent you my three-times great-grandfather’s?” she asked eagerly.
“We know that they are old enough to have belonged to someone of that period,” Nelson said. “We don’t know
Naomi asked, “What makes you think that Crazy Horse is an ancestor of yours?”
“My late grandmother, who raised me on the Pine Ridge res, told me he was.”
“Who was your grandmother?” Nelson asked.
“Her name was Shawl-in-the-Sky, as I told you in my letter. As I also told you, she was the granddaughter of She-Is-Not-Afraid, who was the daughter of Crazy Horse.”
“But She-Is-Not-Afraid died of cholera when she was only two or three years old,” Nelson pointed out. “She could not have borne children.”
“The child who died was the
Nelson and Naomi exchanged reflective looks.
“Where did you get the relics — the bones — that you sent us?” Naomi asked.
“I dug them up. From the grave where Crazy Horse is buried.”
Now the expressions on Nelson’s and Naomi’s faces morphed from reflective to astonished.
“You
“Yes. It is a secret place near the Cheyenne River.”
“Will you show us the place?” Nelson asked, trying not to sound too eager. “Why?” Nelli asked, tilting her head inquisitively.
“For the sake of history,” Naomi said quickly. “No one has ever known where Crazy Horse was buried. He was a great warrior, a great leader of his tribe. People deserve to know where he is buried so that they can pay tribute to him, honor him.”
Nelli shook her head. “My grandmother, Shawl-in-the-Sky, never told anyone. Only me. She said Crazy Horse’s mother, Blanket Woman, wanted him buried in a secret place where the white people could not desecrate his grave.”
“We would protect him from that sort of thing,” Nelson emphasized. “We would put him in an environmentally safe display where his remains would be preserved forever, to be seen by generations of people in the future. And,” he added, “if those remains truly are those of Crazy Horse, the museum would pay you a substantial amount of money for them, since you are his living heir.”
“I don’t know,” Nelli shook her head hesitantly. “I wish my grandmother was here. She was wise and would tell me the right thing to do.”
Naomi put a gentle hand on Nelli’s arm. “Come to our museum,” she encouraged. “Meet my uncle, who is in charge there. You will see how carefully things are preserved there, how we honor those who are gone. Perhaps that will help you to decide.”
Nelli Mae Feathers thought about the invitation, her expression pensive, for a long, heavy moment, before finally saying, “All right. I will come and see for myself how you would honor my three-times great-grandfather.”
Martin White did not take their report graciously.
“What did you say she was: an ordinary visitor guide for the National Park Service? Hardly anyone qualified to judge
“She isn’t coming to judge it, Uncle Martin,” Naomi said placatingly. “She just wants to see for herself that it would be a proper resting place for her ancestor.”
“If he
“I’m not sure yet. She
Martin drew back in his chair. “I wasn’t aware that our prestige
Nelson Clay’s in-depth study of the renowned Oglala Sioux warrior chief, Crazy Horse, began with a verification of his birth year. Historians had placed it as late as 1845, but Nelson learned that it was actually five years earlier in 1840. That was proved by an Oglala warrior named Encouraging Bear, who in an interview years after Crazy Horse’s death related that both of them had been born in the fall of the year in which the Oglala bands to which both their fathers had belonged had stolen one hundred horses, at that time a tribal record. That year, according to Sioux elders Cloud Shield, American Horse, and Red Horse, was 1840. Even more compelling was the comment by Crazy Horse’s father, who said, when he came to claim the body of his son after a soldier had killed him in 1877, “My son would have been thirty-seven years old in another moon,” or month.
At birth, he had been named Cha-O-Ha, which in Sioux dialect meant Among-the-Trees. His father bore the name Crazy Horse at that time, and his mother was called Blanket Woman. She had a sister named Lone Horn, who gave birth to a son who as an adult was given the name Touch-the-Clouds because he grew to be seven feet tall. When Crazy Horse reached manhood and took his father’s name, he and his cousin, Touch-the-Clouds, became inseparable friends.
In 1860, when Crazy Horse was twenty, and was called Tasunke Witko, the Oglala translation of his name, he led a small band of young warriors on a buffalo hunt. They came upon a Minneconjou village being raided by a Crow band. The Crow were traditional Sioux enemies, so Crazy Horse led his men against them and overwhelmed them. The Minneconjou elder who was the head of the village was called Com. In gratitude for Crazy Horse’s help, he gave the young warrior three of his daughters: Between Horns, who was eighteen; Kills Enemy, seventeen; and Red Leggings, fifteen. When Crazy Horse proudly rode home with the three girls in tow, his mother, Blanket Woman, hit him smartly in the head with a spoon made from a mule’s leg, and turned the girls over to the Oglala elders, who allowed them to go among the young men of the village and select their own husbands. To Crazy Horse’s chagrin, none of them chose him. Touch-the-Clouds thought it was all very funny.
As was the Oglala custom, each young warrior was required to go alone into the wilderness for three moons to live by himself with no help from anyone. It was called a spiritual journey. Crazy Horse made his in the summer of 1865. While out on the great plains and up in the mountains of the badlands, Crazy Horse claimed that a red-tailed hawk had led him to a resting place where he experienced a vision that showed him riding his horse in a great battle in which many other warriors were killed by the enemy, but through which he rode unharmed. In that battle, he had three white circles painted on his forehead, representing three hailstones, and a red lightning bolt painted down the left side of his face. When he returned home from his spiritual journey, he proclaimed that no enemy would ever kill him in battle.
In Sioux society, it was permitted, even expected, for pretty young women to openly torment the young men with shy smiles, tantalizing poses, giggling, and whatever other mischief they could conjure up. One such young woman was Black Buffalo Woman, niece of Red Cloud, one of the Oglala’s greatest chiefs. Crazy Horse fell in love with Black Buffalo Woman and began courting her. But he had several rivals, among whom was No Water, whose brother, Black Twin, was a high member of the council headed by Red Cloud. Sioux maidens were required to remain chaste until marriage, and while it was clear that Black Buffalo Woman felt a strong physical attraction to Crazy Horse, who was handsome and muscular, compared to No Water, who was short and bowlegged, she knew that No Water came from a more prominent family, so to please her uncle, the great Red Cloud, she chose No Water as her husband. Devastated, Crazy Horse vowed to marry no other.
Over the years, Crazy Horse’s reputation grew as a great warrior and a great hunter. Before he was thirty, he had led bands in more than four dozen successful battles against traditional enemies of the Sioux: the Crow, whom they despised, and the arrogant Shoshone, as well as white settlers who ventured onto Sioux lands deeded to the tribe by treaty. Before long, he was selected by the chiefs of the council to become a Shirt Wearer. These were considered to be the bravest of the young warriors, and as a symbol of their authority they wore shirts made of two bighorn sheepskins, each one beautifully quilled with feathers and fringed with small locks of the wearer’s hair, each lock representing a brave deed accomplished in battle. Legend has it that before his death, Crazy Horse had two hundred and forty locks on his shirt.
Gradual, but continuous, encroachment of white settlers on their treaty lands eventually caused the Oglalas to move northward to the Yellowstone River area of Montana Territory, where they joined other tribes forced to relocate: the Minneconjous, Sans Arcs, and Hunkpapas, led by a revered medicine man named Sitting Bull. Soon there were more than two hundred lodges spread along the Yellowstone. Among them was the lodge of No Water and Black Buffalo Woman, who by now was the mother of three children.
In 1872, when Crazy Horse was thirty-two, returning from a raid against the Crows, he stopped his band near No Water’s lodge to rest. No Water was away on a hunting trip. When Black Buffalo Woman saw Crazy Horse again, her desire for him overcame her better judgment, and she took her three children to their grandparents and declared her intention to go with Crazy Horse. It was law among the Sioux, where women historically had many rights that even white women did not have, that a married woman could leave her husband at any time, for any reason, or no reason, and the husband had no recourse but to let her go. He could, however, demand compensation in horses or other property from any man with whom his wife subsequently cohabited.
When No Water returned and learned that his wife had ridden off with Crazy Horse, he loaded his pistol and went after them, feeling that it was his right since Crazy Horse had not paid him for Black Buffalo Woman. The lovers were soon overtaken in a tipi next to the Powder River. They were lying together beside a small campfire. No Water rushed in, his pistol at the ready. Crazy Horse reached for his knife and No Water shot him, the bullet striking him next to his left nostril, breaking his jaw, causing him to fall forward onto the campfire. Black Buffalo Woman fled, No Water close behind her. Others from nearby lodges rushed in to give aid to Crazy Horse.
The Oglala council now had before it a perplexing problem. Crazy Horse had taken another man’s wife without offering the man compensation of any kind. The man had physically attacked a Shirt Wearer charged with enforcing tribal laws. It was serious business, since word of it had spread throughout the Oglalas. Ironically, no blame was attached to Black Buffalo Woman, who had initiated the incident; under Oglala law, which enforced exceptionally permissive rights for women, she was permitted to live with any man she pleased, without regard to consequences.
After much consideration, the council ruled that Crazy Horse not see Black Buffalo Woman again and that No Water take her back as his wife, a ruling with which she complied since she could no longer have Crazy Horse. No Water was ordered to give his three best ponies to Crazy Horse’s father for the physical harm done to his son. And the worst punishment of all was that Crazy Horse was stripped of his status as a Shirt Wearer.
Crazy Horse recovered from the bullet wound, although permanently scarred across the left side of his face. The burns he had suffered falling into the campfire were superficial and soon healed. He now resumed his standing as an ordinary warrior, but over the ensuing years his deeds of bravery against enemy tribes and white settlers trespassing on Oglala treaty lands brought him wide acclaim among his people.
At some point, Touch-the-Clouds, seeing that his friend and cousin was not a happy man, arranged a marriage between Crazy Horse and a woman named Black Shawl, the sister of one of Crazy Horse’s most devoted followers, Red Feather. Black Shawl, who was young, strong, and beautiful, had rejected numerous offers of marriage because she had long admired Crazy Horse from afar. The opportunity to marry him brought her great joy. Their union was successful to the point of clearly making Crazy Horse a happy man who now had a home tipi of his own, and soon, to his delight, a baby daughter whom he named She-Is-Not-Afraid, and upon whom he doted. Life was now good for Crazy Horse — but it was not to remain so.
The last of the Great Plains tribes had united on the lush grasslands of the Rosebud and Powder Rivers in Montana Territory, determined under Sitting Bull to make one final stand against the incursion of the white man. But before that fateful day, Crazy Horse was to suffer still more personal grief. Returning from a raid on the Crows, who had now become scouts for the blue-coat soldiers, he learned that his beloved daughter, then only three years old, had contracted cholera and died. A cold bitterness came over the bereaved father, who blamed the white settlers and soldiers for the disease. Before they came, the tribes of the Great Plains knew nothing of sicknesses such as measles, smallpox, and the dreaded cholera that flourished in waters that the white man polluted. So Crazy Horse stood more than ready to take his band of followers to join warriors from the Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Sans Arcs, Santees, Arapahoes, Brulés, and Assiniboine, who had gathered under Sitting Bull to face three forces of the U.S. Army under Generals Crook, Gibbon, and Terry.
When the two enemy forces finally met in what would be the last great conflict of what was to be historically designated as the Indian Wars, it was called by the tribes the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and by the whites the Battle of the Little Big Horn. After the battle ended, another name also soon came to be applied. A daring, charismatic, yellow-haired officer under Terry’s command, who had been a brevet brigadier general in the Civil War — brevet meaning temporary, for the duration of a conflict — who was now a lieutenant colonel in command of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment, would glorify himself that day by losing his entire force through brash overconfidence.
That man was George Armstrong Custer, and the epithet he earned for his poor judgment was Custer’s Last Stand. He became a national hero. But the tribes won the battle.
Ultimately, however, they lost the war.
Crazy Horse fought the white settlers and the bluecoats sent to protect them for several more years. With a following of six hundred warriors, in a band that numbered two thousand including women and children, he moved from place to place across the vast Great Plains, along the Powder River, into the mountains, able to strike his lodges and travel miles away to a new camp within hours. But time and weather and illness took their toll on his people. Without the buffalo herds, now being killed for hides by white hunters, the Indians lacked food and warm robes. As the bluecoat net around them tightened, there were fewer places to raid for weapons, ammunition, and fresh horses. And then a dread new disease began to spread among them, a disease the whites called whooping cough.
The time finally came when Crazy Horse had no option but to surrender or watch his people starve. On May 6, 1877, he surrendered his band to Lieutenant William Howard Clark at Camp Robinson in the White River Valley of South Dakota Territory. There were only eight hundred and eighty-nine people left, two hundred warriors out of the original six hundred, and the men had only forty-six rifles among them.
Crazy Horse was now an “agency Indian,” one who had no tipi, no weapon, no pony. He and Black Shawl slept on the ground with the others, and ate what they were fed, like the agency mongrel dogs. Black Shawl had contracted the terrible whooping cough. Touch-the-Clouds persuaded Crazy Horse to put aside his pride and take her to the camp surgeon, Major Valentine McGillycuddy, who gave her medicine. The doctor treated Crazy Horse with respect and told him through a half-breed interpreter that Black Shawl must stop sleeping on the ground out in the night air. Late that night, Crazy Horse and Touch-the-Clouds stole three settler horses and left the camp to set up a hidden tipi in nearby woods for Black Shawl. They made a bed for her out of buffalo robes and saddle blankets stolen from a post trader’s supply stores.
Soon, Lieutenant Clark learned about the absence and activities of the two rogue Indians and offered a two-hundred-dollar reward for their capture. Unable to bring Black Shawl into the camp for regular visits ordered by Dr. McGillycuddy, Crazy Horse sought someone to do it for him, and to look after his wife when he and Touch-the-Clouds were away. He decided on the interpreter who had helped him talk with the white doctor, the daughter of one of the French traders at the post, who was half French, half Southern Cheyenne. She had grown up among the Sioux and was fluent in four languages. Crazy Horse slipped into camp and offered to buy the girl from her father, who was known as Long Joe. The father agreed and Crazy Horse paid him six mustang ponies caught on the prairie, plus two hundred dollars in gold stolen from a Wells Fargo stagecoach he and Touch-the-Clouds held up between Spearfish and Deadwood. Crazy Horse took the young woman to the hidden tipi, where she began to care for Black Shawl.
For a year, Crazy Horse and Touch-the-Clouds made hit-and-run raids on settlers’ homes all across the plains, stealing horses, chickens, hogs, and harvested com. Sometimes they were gone two or three days at a time, but always when they returned with the spoils of their raids, Crazy Horse found Black Shawl well cared for by the woman he had bought. The raids by the renegade cousins were becoming notorious, and the name of Crazy Horse was once again gaining fame, and few at a time other young warriors left the agency and rode out to join him. Lieutenant Clark’s superiors soon lost patience with the failure of his patrols to stop the raiding, and Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Bradley was dispatched from Omaha to take charge of the situation. His aide, Lieutenant Jesse Lee, accompanied him. Bradley learned that one of the older agency Indians, Spotted Tail, was an uncle through marriage to Crazy Horse. Spotted Tail was persuaded to leave the camp and go in search of his nephew to arrange a meeting to discuss ending the private war Crazy Horse was conducting. Spotted Tail did what none of the army patrols had been able to do: Within a day, he had located the hidden tipi.
Crazy Horse agreed to meet with the new commander at the camp and discontinue the raids if certain terms were met: If he surrendered, he must be treated as a chief and have a tipi for his wife, continued medical care for her from Dr. McGillycuddy, his own horse to ride and permission to leave the camp to hunt for his own food, and immunity from punishment for himself, Touch-the-Clouds, and all of the young men who had left the agency, for all of the raids and robberies they had committed. When Spotted Tail returned to the agency and recited Crazy Horse’s terms, Colonel Bradley accepted them at once. He sent Lieutenant Lee with Spotted Tail to meet with Crazy Horse out on the prairie. At the meeting, Lee assured Crazy Horse that he spoke for Colonel Bradley and that all of Crazy Horse’s terms would be met.
On the morning of September 5, 1877, Lieutenant Lee led Crazy Horse, Touch-the-Clouds, and the rest of the band into Camp Robinson. Upon the group’s arrival, all the agency Indians assembled to cheer them. Lee escorted Crazy Horse to the adjutant’s office and asked him to wait while he spoke to Colonel Bradley to arrange a meeting between them. But when Lee reported to Colonel Bradley, he was stunned by the order he received.
Bradley ordered that Crazy Horse be put in the guardhouse, and advised him that the following morning a military guard detail would arrive to transport him, in chains, to Omaha, Nebraska, and from there he would be taken to the Dry Tortugas Military Prison on an island seventy miles off the coast of Florida, where a military tribunal had determined he would spend the rest of his life.
Bradley summoned the Officer of the Day, Captain Franklin Maynard, to accompany Lee to where Crazy Horse waited.
Back in the adjutant’s office, where Crazy Horse patiently sat, Lee simply said, “We’re ready to go, Chief.” Nodding that he understood, Crazy Horse went with the two officers, thinking he was being taken to talk with Bradley. But outside, Private William Gentles, his rifle with bayonet fixed, was standing next to an open door, as he had been ordered to do by Captain Maynard while Lee was in Bradley’s office. Crazy Horse was directed through the door. It led into a three-foot-by-six-foot windowless cell.
Crazy Horse took only one step inside the door — and halted, knowing he had been tricked. Stepping back out, he poised to run.
“Stab him! Stab the son of a bitch!” Captain Maynard shouted the order.
As Private Gentles swung his rifle down to the attack position, Crazy Horse took two running steps — and Gentles bayoneted him in the back.
Dr. McGillycuddy, who had treated Black Shawl for her whooping cough, rushed out to help the wounded man, but it was too late. The blood coming from Crazy Horse’s body was black; the bayonet had gone through his liver. All the doctor could do was listen to the dying warrior’s last words.
“Once we had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing and for our tipis. Hunting was our way of life. But the white man’s government would not leave us alone. I was tired of fighting and came here to ask the white chief to let me live in peace. Instead, he killed me—”
The following morning, Crazy Horse’s body was turned over to his elderly parents.
Lieutenant Jesse Lee, despondent and aggrieved over the part he had been forced to play in the treachery, released Touch-the-Clouds from the guardhouse and allowed him to go with them. The huge warrior easily lifted his dead cousin onto a wagon and they left.
No white man ever saw Crazy Horse’s body after that day. His final resting place was never revealed.
Nelson Clay’s report on Crazy Horse’s genealogy contained no pertinent new information.
“I found nothing at all in his lineage or ancestry that would support the claim of Nelli Mae Feathers that she is a descendant of his.”
“That doesn’t negate the fact that she might know where Crazy Horse is buried,” the curator argued. “All those names she mentioned: Shawl-in-the-Sky, Blanket Woman; and that story of hers that a second daughter was born and given the same name as the earlier child who died of cholera, that’s just the sort of thing that a savage like Crazy Horse would do.”
“But there’s no record anywhere of Black Shawl
“True, very true,” Martin admitted. “Unless she gave the child to another family to raise, which was not uncommon among the Sioux. There are still loose ends to be tied up here. And if this Feathers woman
“She’s waiting for either Naomi or me to set a time. One of us is to call her.”
“I see.” Martin rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, instead of calling her, let’s you and I pay her another personal visit. While Naomi is still going through army records in St. Louis, perhaps you and I can persuade Ms. Feathers to show us the grave’s actual location.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Nelson grumbled.
“You’re too negative, my boy,” the curator said firmly. “That’s one of your major faults. We’ll leave in the morning and visit her at the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands visitors center, where she works.”
The next afternoon, Martin and Nelson were waiting for Nelli Mae Feathers when her shift ended at the visitors center. Nelson introduced the curator. Martin was all smiles and charm.
“I happen to know of a splendid restaurant just off Interstate 90, in the little town of Wall,” he said pleasantly. “I wonder if you would consent to have supper with Mr. Clay and myself so we can discuss the matter of payment for the remains of your late, great warrior relative, Crazy Horse?”
Nelson was surprised. Martin had not previously mentioned bringing payment into the equation, before even verifying the authenticity of her claim. Now things seemed to be moving right along.
Nelli accepted the curator’s offer and they all drove back to I-90 and on to Wall, where Martin took them to the Red Rock, which was indeed a very nice restaurant. “I recommend any steak on the menu,” the curator said urbanely, as if he were a regular customer.
Throughout the meal, which as touted consisted of one of the best steaks Nelson had ever tasted, Martin praised his Great Plains Native American Museum in the most laudable and flowery language Nelson had ever heard him use. His usual sour countenance was replaced by a smiling grandfatherly face that Norman Rockwell might have painted. By the time they finished eating, Nelli Mae Feathers seemed all but enthralled. That was when the Crow blood began to flow and Martin White Cloud struck like the viper Nelson now thought him to be.
“Now, my dear,” he all but purred, “let’s discuss how we are to proceed to your best advantage in addressing your claim to being a descendant of Chief Crazy Horse. I presume you do expect some sort of recompense for bringing the matter to our attention, am I correct?”
“Well, yes, I guess so,” Nelli Mae replied demurely, looking down at her plate. “I hadn’t really given the matter any thought until recently, when some of my coworkers at the visitors center were discussing the fact that two of the most famous Native American war chiefs of all time, Crazy Horse of the Oglala Sioux and Cochise of the Chiricahua Apaches, had been buried secretly in unknown locations. Of course, none of them knew that I was a descendant of Crazy Horse. But one of my friends, Agnes Two Mules, who is part Blackfoot, commented that for anyone finding either of those graves, it would be like finding buried treasure.”
“Yes, so it might,” Martin reluctantly agreed. “But of course everything would depend upon verification of the remains, as well as authenticating your relationship to them. Establishing the identity of the endoskeleton — the bones — would require more than the small samples you submitted to us.”
“Oh, I have more than that,” Nelli Mae said, almost exuberantly. “I also have his skull.” Nelson saw Martin’s mouth drop open and his normally squinty eyes widen in surprise. “You didn’t mention that to Ms. White and me when we visited you,” Nelson said.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure then that I could trust you. But after meeting Mr. White Cloud, I’m sure now that I can.” She smiled warmly at Martin.
“Where, uh — exactly where is the, uh — skull?”
“At my house. In the closet. On a shelf. In a shoe box.”
Nelli continued to smile, at both of them now, back and forth, as if she were very pleased with herself.
After Martin and Nelson meticulously examined the skull back in the museum laboratory, and radiocarbon dated it, twice, Martin found himself convinced that it very likely
“I don’t agree,” Nelson said unequivocally. “I think Ms. Nelli Mae Feathers is trying to run a con game on us. That skull could belong to anyone who died around eighteen seventy-seven. And there’s not a shred of evidence that she is a descendant of Crazy Horse. I’m not even convinced that she’s got any Indian blood in her!”
“She
“So did Tony Curtis when he played Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of the Iwo Jima flag raisers, in a movie. And Curtis was a Brooklyn Jew. Anybody can
“I’m surprised at you, Nelson,” the curator said sternly. “Aren’t you the one who said that finding Crazy Horse’s body would — how did you put it — bolster our prestige? Now you seem to be doing a complete turnaround.”
“I simply feel that caution is called for at this point.”
“And cautious we will be — until we have Naomi’s full report on her study of the military archives. In the meantime, the annual board meeting is rapidly approaching and I expect a full summary of your areas of responsibility to present along with my own report. As well as your recommendation regarding this claim of Ms. Feathers. I suggest we get busy on both.”
“Yes, sir, of course,” Nelson agreed.
The annual meeting of the Board of Directors of the Great Plains Native American Museum was held in the large conference room of the museum, where Martin White Cloud hosted luncheons for celebrity guests, gave lectures to visiting historians and other academicians, and frequently invited the press to release pertinent reports on new museum acquisitions and other matters of interest.
Around the table sat nine of the ten elected directors: four elders from the Oglala, Brule, and Hunkpapa Sioux tribes, three Northern Cheyenne elders, and two Crow. At the head of the table sat Moses Big Rain, Chairman of the Board, a direct descendant of Rain-in-the-Face, the Hunkpapa chief who led his tribe in the Battle of the Little Big Horn. At the opposite end sat Martin White Cloud.
Off to the side, away from the table, were two other chairs, one occupied by Nelson Clay, the other by Naomi White Cloud, who had just returned the previous evening from her assignment at the U.S. Army Records Archives in St. Louis.
“Mr. Chairman and Honorable Directors,” Martin White Cloud addressed the gathering. “All of you have received, prior to this meeting, reports from my assistant, Mr. Clay, with whom you are all familiar, and from myself, regarding the matter of one Ms. Nelli Mae Feathers and her claim to be a direct descendant of the venerated Oglala war chief, Tasunke Witko, or Crazy Horse, as he is known in English. We have processed a skull and other relics brought to us by Ms. Feathers and determined that they are authentic as to age. Our only uncertainty at this point is whether or not the lineage Ms. Feathers claims can be verified — which, if accomplished, would be almost certain evidence that the skull is authentic.
“As you see by the reports previously given to you, my assistant, Mr. Clay, has taken strong exception to the story of Ms. Feathers and rejected it as false. I have reserved my own opinion on the matter until we have heard the report of my niece, Dr. Naomi White Cloud, whom you all met at our welcoming breakfast this morning.”
A breakfast to which I was not invited, Nelson mused. Goodbye job.
“I now ask Dr. White Cloud for her report on this matter.” Martin bowed, stepping aside as Naomi stood.
She was resplendent in a white soft leather dress with jewelry representing Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Crow tribes, her sable black hair braided down the back all the way to her waist. Way to go, Naomi, Nelson thought.
“Good morning, Honorable Elders,” she said, with a ceremonial bow of her head, first to Moses Big Rain, then to each side of the table in turn. “Let me qualify my report by saying that I present it respectfully but reluctantly, since it is in direct contradiction to Mr. Clay’s report. After an extensive search and analysis of U.S. Army military records in the St. Louis archives, as well as Sioux tribal records and Bureau of Indian Affairs records, I believe I have incontrovertible evidence that Ms. Nelli Mae Feathers is indeed, without any doubt, a direct blood descendant of Crazy Horse. Here—” she distributed printed sheets to each director — “are the facts as I ascertained them.
“Army records show that in eighteen eighty-seven at Camp Robinson in Dakota Territory, a trader known as Long Joe, who was of French descent and whose actual name was Joseph Lavarie, had a daughter named Nelly May Lavarie, who was born of a Southern Cheyenne woman. This daughter was fluent not only in English and French, but also in dialects commonly used by Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, and other tribes as well.
“Nelly was frequently called upon by the army surgeon posted there, Major Valentine McGillycuddy, to act as an interpreter between the doctor and non-English-speaking patients such as the so-called agency Indians who lived on the post. One of the doctor’s patients was Black Shawl, the wife of Crazy Horse, who suffered from whooping cough. It was through Nelly’s work with the doctor that she came to know Crazy Horse. This was presumably during a period when peace negotiations were going on between the army and the Indians.
“There is a report in Dr. McGillycuddy’s medical logbook that Nelly Lavarie left Camp Robinson to live with Crazy Horse and care for Black Shawl outside the camp. All of this information supports Mr. Clay’s conclusions — up to this point. It is here, however, that we differ.
“Dr. McGillycuddy’s log also indicates that while living with Crazy Horse and Black Shawl, the young woman fell in love with Crazy Horse, became pregnant, and bore him a daughter in July eighteen seventy-seven, just two months before he was killed. That child was given the name She-Is-Not-Afraid, the same name as Crazy Horse’s first daughter who died of cholera years earlier. The child was half Sioux, one-quarter Southern Cheyenne, and one-quarter French.
“Twenty years later, in eighteen ninety-seven, according to Sioux tribal records, that child married a full-blooded Sioux named Chasing-the-Sun, and that same year gave birth to a daughter who was named Many Feathers, after the father’s mother, Bright Feathers. That child was the granddaughter of Crazy Horse. She was three-quarters Sioux, one-eighth Southern Cheyenne, and one-eighth French.
“Twenty years after that, in nineteen seventeen, according to Bureau of Indian Affairs records, Many Feathers herself married a full-blooded Sioux named Three Hawks. She bore five children, four of whom, all boys, died during the smallpox epidemic that followed World War One, while the fifth child, a daughter, survived. She was named Shawl-in-the-Sky, because her parents believed that her ancestors dropped a shawl from the spirit world to protect her from the disease brought by the white man. Shawl-in-the-Sky was the great-granddaughter of Crazy Horse. She was fourteen-sixteenths Sioux, and one-sixteenth each Southern Cheyenne and French.
“Twenty-five years after that, in nineteen forty-two, according to U.S. Marine Corps records, Shawl-in-the-Sky was married to a full-blooded Sioux named John Brave Deer, who was a corporal in the Marine Corps. He was killed in action in the battle for Guadalcanal, but not before he had fathered a daughter. The mother, Shawl-in-the-Sky, named her baby Little Shawl. She was thirty thirty-seconds Sioux and one thirty-second each Southern Cheyenne and French, and was the great-great-granddaughter of Crazy Horse.
“Thirty-three years later, in nineteen seventy-five, that child, at the age of thirty-three, bore a child out of wedlock to an unknown Caucasian first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, who was stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base, north of Rapid City and the Pine Ridge Reservation. Before the birth of that child, she had changed her name from Little Shawl to Lilly Shaw, and moved to Rapid City, where she worked as a night-club hostess, and where she met the officer and began the affair that resulted in her pregnancy. The child, whom she did not bother to name, was left with its grandmother, Shawl-in-the-Sky, to be raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The grandmother gave her the surname Feathers, after her own mother, Many Feathers, and the given names Nelli Mae, from the long ago, much storied Nelly May Lavarie, the mother of the second She-Is-Not-Afraid.
“So,” Naomi White Cloud concluded her report to the elders around the board table, “the records I have checked all indicate that the child named Nelli Mae
Feathers, born illegitimately in nineteen seventy-five, who is thirty-three sixty-fourths Caucasian, thirty sixty-fourths Sioux, and one sixty-fourth Southern Cheyenne, is the linear great-great-great granddaughter of Tasunke Witko, known in the white man’s history as Crazy Horse — and she has brought the relics of his venerated body to us.”
An almost reverential silence filled the boardroom as the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Crow elders exchanged awed, devout looks.
Crazy Horse had returned to them.
Two days later, Nelson Clay had just finished cleaning out his desk when Naomi White Cloud came into the office that would now be hers.
“I don’t know what to say, Nelson,” she began.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he told her.
“I really didn’t come here intending to take your job.”
“Doesn’t make much difference one way or the other now, does it?”
“I suppose not. You could stay on, you know.
“Please,” Nelson winced. Then he asked, “Did Ms. Feathers get her money today?”
“Yes. My uncle and Moses Big Rain met with her at our bank and formally transferred three million dollars into a trust account for her. So the museum now legally owns the relics of Crazy Horse. Uncle Martin is planning a big national publicity campaign and is going to remodel one wing of the museum into the Crazy Horse Memorial Exhibit.”
“Sounds like a lot of exciting work for you down the line.”
“Yes. And of course I’ll be taking over my uncle’s position one day.”
“Of course.” Nelson smiled and closed the suitcase into which he had packed his personal belongings. “Say goodbye to the curator for me,” he added wryly.
Naomi walked out to the museum lobby with him. “Since you’ll be leaving your museum car here, Nelson, can I give you a lift somewhere?”
“Thanks anyway, but someone is picking me up.”
She waited with him outside the museum entrance until, presently, a car drove up. Rose Blackthorn was driving. Sitting beside her was Nelli Mae Feathers. “So long, Dr. White Cloud,” Nelson said.
He tossed his bag into the backseat as Nelli Mae slid over to make room for him in the front seat.
Naomi’s mouth hung open in confusion and disbelief as the car drove away.
Down the highway, behind the wheel, Rose glanced at Nelli Mae and asked, “Do you think all those stories your grandmother told you were true? That you might really
“I don’t know,” Nelli Mae said. “Grandmother loved to tell stories that had been told to her as a child. I have to admit, though, that she never told the same story the same way twice. Anyway, what’s the difference?”
“None, I guess,” Rose allowed. “Nelson,” she then said, “I’d like to make a quick stop on our way out of town and put some flowers on my Great-great-great-great Uncle Hawk Wing’s grave. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not at all,” Nelson replied. “That’s the least we can do for him. Or what’s left of him.”
The Care and Feeding of Houseplants
by Art Taylor
During one of their trysts, one of those long lunch breaks they took from the ad agency where they worked, Roger invited Felicia to bring her husband over for a Friday-night cookout.
“Tell hubby it’s casual,” he explained to her after he’d caught his breath once more. “Tell him we’ll just—” and here he grazed his fingers a little more insistently along her damp skin — “just get together and heat up some meat in the backyard.”
Felicia arched a single eyebrow and then turned her head toward the far side of his bedroom — looking at what, Roger wasn’t clear. Unlike the other women who’d sometimes shared his bed, often under similar circumstances, Felicia seemed a true mystery — aloof, challenging, and the more desirable for it. He followed her gaze. Her beige linen business suit was folded sensibly across a chair by his bedroom window. Beyond stood the backyard itself, the patio, the teak table and chairs. Roger could already see himself standing by the grill, making small talk with her husband.
“Whatever you may think,” Felicia said finally, “Blanton is not a fool.”
“Blanton,” Roger said and then again, “Blan-ton,” stretching out the syllables as if they were his to twist and toy with. “You know, I still just love his name.”
Blanton’s grip was unsteady as he moved the watering can from one pot to the next in the solarium behind his and Felicia’s house. His fingers trembled. His attention faltered and fled. The bougainvillea got too much water, the passionflower too little. He nearly drowned a blossoming powder-puff before he jerked the can back — just in time. He looked at his hand as if it wasn’t his own. The age spots there had spread like a fungus. Further up, arm hairs had begun to gray. He thought of the gray hair sprouting from his ears. Were those really his ears? Could he believe them?
“We’ve been invited for dinner.” That’s what Felicia had told him barely a half-hour before. “One of my coworkers.”
Blanton had been making drinks at the time, their evening cocktails. Mango mojitos tonight — splitting open a mango one of his botany students had given him earlier in the afternoon, one of a quartet she’d delivered as a thank-you present. The gift had left him brimming with contentment, and he had been muddling them merrily when Felicia broke the news. An offhand remark — or meant to be.
“Have I met her?” Blanton had asked, adding a splash of white creme de menthe to the cocktails.
“Him,” she said. And the pinpricks became a knife.
“Just let me know when,” he had told her, and then excused himself hastily, the plants suddenly claiming his attention, some spritzing that needed to be done. And at least he was good for that, right?
Still balancing the watering can dumbly against his side, Blanton glanced over at a lyre-flower Felicia had given him, just one of the many plants the two of them had exchanged — this one a present for his forty-sixth birthday. “A perennial,” she’d said, learning from him, remembering. “Like our love.”
He was so touched by the intention that he hadn’t told her the other name for the flower: old-fashioned bleeding heart. Neither had he told her how some perennials only bloomed once before dying.
“Metaphors,” he laughed now, bitterly, and thought of others — the withered stalk, limp to the root — and about what he couldn’t do now that “most men” still could. His fault that she’d found one of those men, his fault twice, because wasn’t her infidelity his own suggestion?
He’d tried drugs first, then therapy. Then the herbal remedies he’d so thoroughly researched — not just relying on supplements but trying to grow the plants himself: panax ginseng, turnera diffusa, ginkgo biloba,
And then, standing in the solarium, he corrected himself — the bigger, truer picture.
“It’s biological,” Felicia’s mother had told her years before, when she hit her teen years. “It’s evolutionary. Now that you’re becoming a woman, they’ll all be sniffing around you. That’s what they do, that’s what they’ll
Felicia hadn’t wanted to believe it, but she’d found out too quickly how right her mother was. So many of them, it seemed, eyes glossing hungrily over a low-cut blouse she wore, mouths nearly salivating over a glimpse of her thigh — and not just the boys at school but men too, men passing her on the street, men at the country club where she worked weekends, teachers in high school, professors at college, her father’s friends, even a distant uncle at a wedding she went to, drunk and leering. Not just dogs, but wolves more like it, sly and relentless, fangs bared, hormones howling. She’d had to learn quickly how to walk among them.
And then had come Blanton — guileless, earnest. He’d brought her an orchid for their first date. He’d typed up tips for taking care of it. He’d kissed her on the cheek at the end of the evening. And she’d said, even then, “You’re not like other men, are you?” and he’d cocked his head and given her that lopsided smile. No, he wasn’t. Not at all.
Felicia sipped the drink he’d made.
When life hands you mangoes, make mojitos. And when life hands you lemons...
But Felicia had tried to be supportive, she had.
“You’re still a young woman,” he’d said. He held a plant in his hands, a symbol of what she wasn’t sure — the offer he was making? The words he couldn’t bring himself to speak? Peperomia, she found out later, its spiky flowers jutting up like tiny fingers, like phalluses. “I just ask that you keep it discreet. And, please, nothing... lengthy with anyone.”
“I’m not going to do that,” she’d said flatly, and she’d said it once more the next time he brought it up: “Thank you, but no.”
He never mentioned it again, but it was already too late. Appreciation turned to pity, and soon pity began to fester into frustration, then flare toward anger. Where did it come from, that desire to kick a person just for being generous to you, to kick a man not just when he’s down but
Ultimately, her mother had been right in more ways than one. “You’ll want it too,” she’d warned all those years before. “You’ll
She had needed it. And then she’d taken it. But what about this next step? Dog eat dog again? Was that what this was all about?
If so, Felicia did indeed know who she was.
The bitch in the middle.
Roger had invited a fourth for dinner: Jessica, an old friend who knew about the affair — knew about all his adventures, in fact. Her curiosity always bested her disapproval, and her disapproval always gave Roger an extra little thrill. He liked witnesses to his exploits.
“This dinner,” Jessica had said when she first arrived, “it’s kind of a jackass thing to do, you know? And what’s the point? I mean, are you
“Things with me and Felicia are perfect just the way they are,” he’d told her. “The sex is
Jessica had rolled her eyes. “And so the rooster struts.”
“Make up your mind, Jess. Am I a jackass or cock of the walk?”
The latter, he knew, even though she didn’t answer him, just smiled and rolled her eyes and shook her head.
The first time he’d met the husband of one of his lovers — purely by chance that time, at a cocktail party — he’d felt a surge of adrenaline and pride, a sudden strut to his step. The next time he and the woman tangled in bed had been passionate, relentless, charged.
He wanted that same intensity next time with Felicia, to break through that wall of immovability that he’d tried so many times to penetrate.
“You were
But to do that, he needed to go to battle first — needed to one-up the competition — and so the richly marbled steaks and the fine French wine and the freshly pressed shirt, gradually mounting more proof of his superiority. So too the plant that he’d moved from the bedroom to the study, where he would lead them all at evening’s end for an after-dinner glass of port — the plant that Felicia had given him just after the first time they’d slept together, now displayed prominently on a small mahogany stand.
It was all perfect, he thought, and when they arrived, he felt geared-up, ready — energized even a little more when he caught his first glimpse of Felicia in the doorway, those long lashes shadowing the dark gleam of her eyes, the corners of her lips curled just on the edge of some sly, elusive grin, that knee-length sundress showcasing those tawny legs.
But when Blanton trundled across the threshold, Roger felt a surge of disappointment, and more than disappointment, revulsion. The other man was older than Roger had anticipated. His hairline was receding, his face was not just slackjawed but jowly. His polo shirt — once green, evidently — was faded beyond the point at which Roger would have cast it aside. His weighty paunch sagged across the waistband of rumpled khaki shorts, whose fabric squeezed flabby haunches.
Roger’s revulsion deepened. What sense of victory could he achieve when there wasn’t really a challenge in sight?
Along the curving driveway, then glimpsing the house — modem and angular — and then walking up the steps, Blanton had been struck by the feeling that he was somehow spying on his wife, spying in plain sight. Rethinking possibilities, weighing consequences, he became so lost in his thoughts that he seemed to be watching himself too — all of this, his own finger on the doorbell, the door opening in response — as if from some great distance, some other man making these small moves, unsure where it would end.
And then another woman coming down the hallway — thick red hair, a wide smile, wiping her hands on a dishtowel — and Blanton felt relief and sudden elation. Maybe he’d been wrong?
“My, what a beautiful sight,” he exclaimed, too loudly — the volume suddenly back on but turned up too high — and he felt embarrassed at his outburst. But when she giggled and opened her arms — “I adore a man who flatters first thing. That deserves a hug instead of a handshake!” — he welcomed the sense of being embraced and all that this woman seemed to mean: This evening wasn’t the beginning of some horrible series of events, but a dinner to mark some end.
“Felicia didn’t tell me you had such a lovely girlfriend,” he said, almost on the verge of giddiness. But then he noticed the sudden hush.
“Jessica’s not my girlfriend,” Roger said.
“I know him too well,” Jessica laughed, nervously, blushing. “I’m not his style.”
There was some brief interplay of glances between the three of them, Blanton saw. Nothing was safe. None of them.
“A local artist,” Roger was explaining, pointing to the headless torso of a woman on a side table: bronze, nearly all breasts and the back arched to emphasize it. “Molded from her own body.”
“I’ve never liked that piece,” said Jessica.
Felicia had never liked the sculpture either, always felt that Roger thought of all women the way the artist had presented herself: all breasts, no head. But she didn’t say that now. Blanton hadn’t responded either, and Felicia wondered at his quietness. A dull panic? A simple sulk?
The image prompted a memory — a college boyfriend, a sulker himself. He’d loved David Lynch movies, she remembered as Roger continued his tour of the house, Blanton commenting on the light, Jessica throwing Felicia little glances, trying to catch her attention. Felicia couldn’t remember the boy’s name now, only his goatee and his baggy shirts and the two of them watching
Another night, they’d gone for pizza (Paul? Peter? Philip? P certainly) — late night, a local hangout, a crush of people, frat boys at a table nearby, and the two of them in a booth of their own. The pizza arrived, and she and P. had each taken a slice, and as they ate, one of the frat boys had turned and started talking to her: “How are you doing? You’re looking good tonight. That pizza smells great.” And then he’d turned to P. and said, “You don’t mind if I have a piece, do you?” and he’d picked up a slice of their pizza and eaten it in front of them, a smile and a wink at Felicia between bites.
“Yeah,” P. had said, hesitantly, and “Um” and “We’re kind of talking here.”
Later, P. had fretted and moaned — all the things he should’ve said, the things he should’ve done. “I could’ve punched him. I could’ve stabbed his hand with my fork, I could’ve...” Revenge fantasies, underscored by hints that maybe Felicia herself should’ve acted differently too.
Felicia had slept with the frat boy months later, long after P. was gone from her life. She didn’t remember his name now either, and wasn’t sure he’d remembered hers even at the time. That hadn’t seemed the point, and now she couldn’t quite remember what the point had been.
Standing at the grill with Blanton, Roger found himself just going through the motions of what he’d planned.
When Blanton said he liked his steaks well done, Roger said he preferred “a little more pink in the middle, the way a real man should.”
When Blanton asked how things were at the office, Roger volunteered that Felicia was “a real fireball. Get her going and she just won’t stop.”
“I’m surprised a man like you isn’t married,” Blanton said at one point, as Roger checked the steaks. “Jessica seems swell, doesn’t she?”
“Can’t say I’m the marrying type,” said Roger, not bothering to ridicule the man’s
“That kind of romancing is a younger man’s game,” Blanton said. “I just don’t know what I’d do without my Felicia.”
Jessica was telling a story across the patio, gesturing with her free hand, leaning toward Felicia, laughing a little. Felicia smiled, demurely, and took a sip of wine. Even from that distance, Roger could see the way her mouth left a smudge on the rim of the glass, the red outline of her lips. Despite the smoke from the grill, he could still remember — as if smelling it now — the vanilla and honeysuckle of her perfume, the scent that sometimes lingered on the pillows on the afternoons she stopped over.
Sometimes Roger had questioned why she talked so rarely about her home life. Unlike the other married women he’d had, she never went into tirades about a dull home life or demanding children, never recited ad nauseam bickering arguments about monies spent and monies earned or dull squabbles about whose turn it had been to take out the trash. Not once had Felicia embarked on some small drama insisting that they must stop this, they must, because she couldn’t do this to her husband, couldn’t do this anymore. At one point, he’d admired the way she handled the affair, but now, seeing Blanton, he felt that admiration turn to pity, a sour pity, and a cruelty too. He’d enjoyed the challenge she offered — all that he saw of himself in her, that strength, that will — and the power play between them. “Three lunches a week, no more,” she’d told him, wanting that control over the relationship, but then asking another time to be tied up, wanting to be dominated in ways she obviously wasn’t getting at home. Now he saw that it must be weakness that held her to Blanton, and he didn’t want to just dominate her but punish her for it.
While he and Roger had been alone at the grill, Blanton had tried to reason with the other man — indirectly, of course — to urge him toward Jessica, the beautiful woman available and in front of him, to throw him off the scent of his wife. On their way inside for dinner, he’d considered pulling Felicia aside, pleading with her for them to leave now, to leave forever, for her to stop this once and for all, for both their sakes, but he feared that such weakness might only drive her deeper into the other man’s arms.
And then, amidst the clamor of conversation, the clatter of forks and knives, the clink of the wineglasses, he realized something: There hadn’t been a plant in sight. Nothing green, nothing growing, no life. Could anyone really want to live in a place without that?
“Plants,” he told Jessica toward the end of dinner when she asked what he did. “Plants are my life, really. My plants and my wife, of course.” He wanted to reach out and touch Felicia’s hand, but he held back. He couldn’t even look at her, afraid of what he might find in her expression. “A flower is a beautiful thing. Each of them has a personality, just like we do. Each of them should be respected, tended to, and cared for.”
He talked on then, talking to Jessica as if she were a student of his, speaking to her but pleading with his wife. He listed the plants they had at home: begonias and caladium, bromeliads and ferns, geraniums, succulents, oleanders, ivy... plant after plant, name after name. He explained the different kinds of pots — clay, plastic, ceramic — and discussed the need to watch the humidity and to keep the house temperature in flux, stressing the importance of learning what each plant most wanted. Even when Roger tried to interrupt, Blanton kept going, stressing the difference in yellowing due to water shortage and yellowing due to iron deficiency, explaining how to watch for dormancy, lecturing about how to adjust the lighting to what each plant needed, telling how he cleaned the leaves each week, some of them with a sponge and others — “the fuzzier ones” — with a special camel-hair brush. “And yet despite all that, plants are tougher than you think,” he said at one point. “They’re the most adaptable things, so many of them. They’ll survive even under the most adverse conditions.”
After a while, he wasn’t sure what he was talking about, what he was trying to imply — was it Felicia who was the plant and he the tender? Or was he the plant, tough and adaptable, deceptively so? Metaphors popped into his mind again — more plant names: the lipstick plant; the crown-of-thorns with its red flowers and sharp spines; the screw pine, which drops its lower leaves as it gets older and sends out aerial roots instead — desperately, he thought now, considering it. But he could save the relationship still, couldn’t he? Wasn’t this the way?
“What was it Thoreau said?” he asked Jessica as they entered the study for more drinks, readying his favorite quote. His students joked that each time he repeated it, he pretended he was remembering it for the first time. “ ‘The Finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet—’ ”
But his words faltered when he saw the plant sitting on one of the shelves behind the couch — a plant that he recognized too well, the peperomia he’d given to Felicia when he offered her that window of sexual opportunity, that door toward infidelity.
“ ‘Yet what?’ ” asked Jessica. She had been, he thought then, a front-of-the-class kind of girl, and for a moment he imagined what a relationship with her might have been like, how this evening might never have happened.
“ ‘Yet,’ ” he said then, hearing the loss in his own words, the pity for himself and for them all, “ ‘Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.’ ”
The plant had never looked right anywhere — that’s what Felicia thought seeing it now. The peperomia with its spiky, phallic flowers.
After Blanton gave it to her, she’d kept it at home for a few days and then taken it to the office. She’d put it on the windowsill, and then at the corner of her desk and then up on a shelf. Wherever it was, it didn’t seem to belong. It caught her eye wrong, caught her mood wrong.
Or maybe it wasn’t the look of the plant itself, but the reminder it provided — opportunities, possibilities, desires, needs.
When she brought it to Roger’s place and placed it beside the bed, it looked even less like it belonged, but the context gave it a new life: responsibilities instead of opportunities, duties instead of desires. Sometimes even in the more blinding heat of passion, she’d look over at the plant and feel the guilt even deeper than Roger’s thrusts, feel the connection to Blanton even more than to the man rising above her.
The boy’s name came to her then. Patrick it was. And she remembered how he’d stopped in the middle of their own lovemaking that night, after the incident in the pizza parlor, and looked down on her.
“You’re not here,” Patrick had told her, accusation in his voice, deprecation too. “This isn’t... This isn’t what you... You’re thinking about
Damn that Jessica. No sooner had Felicia’s hubby finally stopped talking than she got him started again.
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “I grow some herbs at home, some basil and oregano and cilantro, a little mint.”
“Oh,” Blanton said. “Yes, I mean...” He reddened. “That reminds me.” And he looked around him, patting himself at the same time. He was like a wind-up robot, Roger thought — completely still and then suddenly in motion, and then still again until someone wound him up once more. “I forgot that I was going to provide the after-dinner drinks,” he said. “The mangoes and,” he reached inside his pocket and smiled, “aha, there it is. The mint.” He smiled — feebly, Roger thought — and started up on the plants again. “Could you be a dear and bring me those mangoes, Jessica? Proof that plants can give pleasure, certainly.”
Roger turned away from his view of the other man’s bulging belly and toward Felicia’s slender, sculpted form. Throughout Blanton’s tirade, Roger had tried to catch Felicia’s eye, but she’d steadfastly avoided his gaze, and did so again now.
“Are these like the drinks you made for me the other day?” Felicia asked Blanton.
“Yes. Mango mojitos,” he exclaimed. “These were a gift from one of my students,” he told them as Jessica returned. “I teach botany at the college. One of my students asked for some advice on growing a mango plant from a pit, and so I...” On and on, wound up again.
Roger pitied those students. All those plants, all that lecturing about how plants are people too.
Well,
Blanton had started a new lecture. “The difference is between sexual propagation, propagation by seeds, and vegetative propagation, where you just cut off a little part of the plant, and spread it somewhere else.” He looked as if he was concentrating heavily, as if any of this mattered. “Take this plant here,” he pointed to the plant Roger had placed in the study. Roger had forgotten about it.
“That was a gift from your wife,” Roger said then. Felicia shot him an ugly look, then blushed slightly. Two emotions. Unlike her.
“I thought it might be,” said Blanton, and he turned to Felicia. “A cutting, dear, or the original?”
“It’s the one you gave me,” said Felicia, composed again.
He nodded, and then to Roger: “She’s very generous, don’t you think?” And for the first time, Roger could see in the other man’s eyes some spark of a challenge, some knowledge. He was finally catching on, and Roger felt his own blood begin to rise.
But before he could answer, Felicia cut him off.
“A toast,” she said, “to these wonderful drinks. And to the student who gave you the mangoes. It’s good to be appreciated.”
“You can’t use drinks to toast the drinks themselves,” Roger snorted, but he raised his glass anyway.
“Then a toast to plants,” said Blanton, and suddenly Roger just wanted the evening over and all of them gone.
“I’m sorry to cause any trouble,” said Blanton, patting his pockets, “but I think I must have dropped my keys somewhere inside.” The four of them stood in the driveway, had already said their goodbyes. “No, no, ladies. You can stay out here and talk. We’ll take a look inside. Roger, you don’t mind helping me, do you?”
Felicia could see the reluctance in Roger’s expression, but he’d turned back toward the house anyway, leading Blanton inside, leaving her with Jessica. It was the first time they’d been truly alone.
“Well, the evening turned out better than I’d expected,” Jessica said, and Felicia could feel the woman’s eyes on her, some sense of judgment or curiosity. Maybe both.
“I’m going to end it,” Felicia said, not meeting the other woman’s look.
“With which one?” Jessica asked, and Felicia could tell from the tone that judgment was winning.
Felicia shook her head, leaned against her car. “What I’ve been doing, it’s not...”
The moon was peeking over the tops of the pine trees in Roger’s yard. Nearly a full moon, Felicia saw now. Other nights, there might have been something romantic about the image.
“Did you ever have boys fighting over you?” Felicia asked.
“Years ago,” said Jessica. “A bar fight. Some guy sent over a drink, and my boyfriend got jealous. My ex-boyfriend, I should add.”
“Who won?”
“Who knows? Both of them got kicked out of the bar. I decided to stay with my friends and keep drinking. Broke up with the guy by phone the next day. A real lunkhead.”
“There was a boy once,” Felicia said, and then she stopped, thinking about the word.
“All of them disappoint,” said Jessica. “That’s the way they are.”
But that wasn’t what Felicia meant at all. She tried to imagine Blanton fighting for her, throwing fists, getting kicked out of a bar. But that wasn’t who he was. Instead, she pictured him making those mojitos, his struggle to stay poised, some nervous attempt at grace. She thought about how complicated the adult world was, more than she’d ever imagined. Compromises and negotiations. With others, with yourself. Things weren’t ever just how they looked. “I thought Blanton was weak like that boy was, but I was wrong.”
Blanton and Roger came out again. Roger stood tall, framed by the doorway. Blanton took the handrail as he made his way down the front steps.
“Don’t say anything about it tonight,” Felicia told Jessica quickly. She felt liberated, frightened. She still didn’t know what the future was going to be like, how she was going to handle her desires, her needs, how she’d explain things to either of the men. But she’d made her decision. “I’ll tell Roger tomorrow that it’s over. I will.”
Blanton had found his keys easily enough, sitting in the study, precisely where he’d left them. Before they turned away again, he paused once more over the peperomia, Felicia’s gift to her lover.
“It’s a beautiful plant,” he said
As he touched its leaves one last time, Blanton imagined other ways that this night could have played out. Nightshade would have been more fitting, he thought, more poetic even, and he had a particularly nice specimen of the plant at home, those purple bell-shaped flowers bowing mournfully, those shiny black berries aching to be plucked. Those he could have blended into a daiquiri.
Then, at some small moment with Roger, he might have looked over at his wife and muttered, “Belladonna,” under his breath, but just loud enough for the other man to hear him. “What?” Roger might have said, and Blanton would have repeated it, “Belladonna,” and gestured toward Felicia. “My beautiful lady.” And perhaps later, when that poison had begun to take effect, perhaps then his victim would have remembered and understood.
But the ricin was more effective, of course. More certain. And the castor-bean plants had been growing on their own in the yard, even without his care. A weed really, just waiting to be used. “A toast,” Blanton had said, “to plants” — seeing the little wince in Roger’s expression, that bitter taste, like castor oil itself, but the mangoes had sweetened it adequately enough, just as he’d expected.
“See here, Roger,” Blanton said now, before they left the study a second time. “See the way the leaves are yellowing a little? A little water, a little more attention might do this plant some good.”
He turned to Roger and saw the sneer in the other man’s face, the pride, and the hints of something else, something Roger wasn’t aware of himself. Soon, the symptoms would reveal themselves. The nausea would turn to vomiting, Roger’s body trying to send the poison back out the way it had arrived. And then trying to expel it out the other end, bloodily so. Yes, many trips to the bathroom tonight, soiling the elegance he’d displayed so proudly, soiling himself. And then dehydration, seizures, even hallucinations perhaps, before liver and spleen and kidneys began calling it quits. No antidote. The end unavoidable now.
“Come to think of it,” Blanton squinted his eyes, “a little water might do you some good too. You’re looking a little peaked yourself.”
When Blanton reached the car, his wife turned to face him.
“All done?” she asked.
He held up the keys. “Everything’s taken care of,” he replied, and they told Jessica goodbye and got in the car. Blanton wondered how long Jessica would stay, if she’d be there for the finale — nursemaid first, corpse-bearer later. He hoped she wouldn’t be drawn into cleaning it all up. A nice girl, she was, and Blanton felt sorry for what she might be forced to witness.
He and Felicia hardly talked on the way back, but things were different already, he could feel it. At one point, there in the silence, she reached over and touched his hand, and he felt a tingling in his loins, a stirring that he’d nearly forgotten. He pressed down slightly on the accelerator, hurrying them homeward.
He had a dose for her too.
Murder at an Ad Agency
by Meredith Anthony
The definition of redundant: The boss keeps snakes in his office.
Jenny sighed. It was midnight and the stale air-conditioned air was scented with Chinese food, bad coffee, and the faint, sweet, unmistakable stink of corruption.
She wrinkled her nose, as much as her recent Botox would allow, and tried to breathe shallowly. Gordo’s snake had sicked up a mouse and although he’d cleaned out the terrarium quite thoroughly, the odor hung like a pall, all over the office floor. Not just dead mouse, Jenny thought bitterly, but vomited dead mouse.
If Gordo weren’t her boss, she would tweet this because no one would believe it. It would make a funny tweet, but Gordo would fire her in the proverbial heartbeat, as if he had a heart, the bastard. He was just looking for an excuse. He had been staying after hours whenever she worked late, skulking around, watching, sneaking up behind her. Once, she had come back from the ladies’ room and found him in her cube, bent over. He straightened up and asked her tersely what she was working on, but she knew he’d been looking in her recycling, probably searching for damning evidence, something to fire her for.
VP account execs at Gordo’s level never had to work late. It was one of the perks. Clearly, Gordo was up to something. He had it in for his copy team. He had fired her boss two weeks ago, a slot he still hadn’t filled. Jenny knew the score. He wanted to make a clean sweep. She knew she was next.
She shook her head to clear it and went back to reading the “fair balance” at the bottom of the page. The font was only one size smaller than the text, per FDA requirements, but it seemed like fine print to her. She had read this particular paragraph on ten previous rounds and it was getting hard to concentrate.
At night, the New York headquarters of any big ad agency is surprisingly busy. The executive offices with windows are mostly darkened, but the cubicles that make up the inner landscape of the floor show pockets of light and activity. At least one team is always working. A deadline looms and the account executive, the writer, the art director, the editor, the project manager, and assorted other personnel are working hectically to get the job done.
At Nathan and Massey, one of the world’s premier pharmaceutical advertisers, the oncology team, as usual, was working late. ASCO was coming up and the enormous panels used to decorate their client’s massive convention booth had been printed in plenty of time. But the FDA, in its wisdom, had imposed a last-minute label change on their drug, making the pregnancy warning even more stringent. As if anyone with this particular cancer would risk pregnancy. Or even have the energy to get pregnant, Jenny thought.
She tried reading the paragraph again. Jenny didn’t know whether it was the late hour, the exhaustion, or the faint stench of death, but she felt sick and unable to concentrate.
Add the fact that Gordo himself was still here, lurking, spying. She imagined him coming up behind her. Everyone hated him. Gordo, with his snakes and his venomous personality. Jenny would love to just quit, but she couldn’t afford to lose this job. She was older than she looked and she wasn’t sure she could get work at another agency. It was a young person’s industry, unless you were in the upper echelons. Jenny wasn’t. She couldn’t afford to be fired. Again.
She remembered her last agency, working late into the night to finish a pre-launch product brief for a new migraine remedy, the name the usual jumble of random letters. She had finished after midnight. The account team had already left. She resented being given the odious assignment. Everyone knew the product would never launch. It had taken her hours to review the research but it took no more than forty minutes to actually write the brief. Her fingers flew over the keys as she blathered on about how one of these would cure the condition, the auras, the light-sensitivity, the nausea, the intense pain. “Prescribe two of these and the patient will wake up smiling,” she typed at the end. Then, the night editor, the bastard, told her it would be more than an hour before he could even look at her piece. No freaking way, she thought. She sent it to the client unedited with a terse e-mail note. She didn’t even bother to read it through.
Unfortunately, her spell-check was set to auto and the product name had self-corrected to a perfectly innocent noun which unfortunately was also a slang term for a body part. While she was being fired the next morning, she could hear the gales of laughter as the story swept the office. “The patient will wake up smiling,” someone bleated.
Jenny took the bullet even though it wasn’t remotely her fault. Jenny hated her colleagues who had laughed at her. She hated the boss who fired her. And she hated her new boss, Gordo, and the snakes he actually did keep in his office, imagining them, for a moment, slithering around loose.
She started humming to herself, “Isn’t it redundant?” to the tune of “Isn’t It Romantic?” She was searching for a good second line when something touched her shoulder and she bolted up out of her seat, head-butting Traffic, who reeled back, staggered, and grabbed the spinning office chair to steady herself.
“No worries, Jenny.” Traffic rubbed her chin where Jenny’s head had caught it. Jenny leaned her hip on her cube desk, her hand over her thumping heart.
“You scared the hell out of me.”
“No worries. Just checking to see where we are with the replacement panels.” Traffic started every sentence with “No worries” to defuse the fact that she was there to whip someone into working faster. Her apologetic air did nothing to disguise the subtext. The longer Jenny took with the panels, the later everyone would have to stay.
Jenny paused, considering just signing off and letting it go. After all, the panels had been read, reread, looked at, and reviewed by up to a dozen people during the several rounds of drafts, revisions, layouts, and more. The colorful pages in her folder would be blown up to the size of a small building and hung as a backdrop at the huge medical convention in Chicago for roaming packs of doctors to ignore in their quest for the best free espresso or the most diverting interactive game or the most luscious sales rep. If there were a mistake, it would be in type that was roughly the size of a Xerox machine.
In this particular round, the editor had signed off after finding nothing but a few art issues — close up this space a hair, are you sure the logo is flush right with the block of copy, is the blue on this page the same as the previous pages or is it just a printer problem? The editor had found no copy mistakes, a miracle given his heavy hand with the red pen.
Jenny picked up her green pen to initial the cover sheet, then stopped. The editor had had it in for her ever since she’d thrown him under the bus for an error that had crept into print. It had cost the agency about fifty thousand to correct and someone was going to take the fall. Jenny already had a couple of strikes against her and had managed to buck that one to the editor. He hadn’t been pleased. Tonight, it would be just like him to leave an error in and somehow make sure she was blamed. But he had already initialed the top page, so they were both on the hook, if it came to that.
“No worries if you need more time,” Traffic lied. Tomorrow, the whole agency would know that Jenny had held up the job and kept everyone here an extra hour. Gordo would know.
“I just finished,” Jenny lied right back. “I was just about to sign off.”
She initialed the top page with a flourish, silently praying that the text was perfect. She couldn’t afford another error.
Jenny was idly straightening her desk, surfing the Web, waiting for Traffic to bring around the release copy for final sign-off, allowing her to leave, when she saw Carol come up the aisle to her cube, right across from Jenny’s. She gave a groan. Carol was the dimmest bulb in the agency and Jenny generally ignored her. But it was late and she was tired of checking Facebook and Twitter.
“Carol, what’s up?”
“Got a call that some genius in the studio dropped out a whole page of the sales aid. The team all got called in to restore it and sign off again.” Carol shrugged out of her coat and hung it on the cube wall hook. She sighed. “I actually had a date.”
“Really? That sucks.” Jenny hadn’t had a date in months. Advertising wasn’t conducive to relationships and the men inside the industry were all notoriously either gay or sadistic, or sometimes both.
Carol sat in her office chair, punched out an extension on her office phone, and told her team’s Traffic that she was in.
She swiveled around to face Jenny.
“You guys are going late again?”
“Blame the FDA. We had released a set of convention panels early, and now they make a label change at the last minute.”
“I thought you had a grace period before label changes had to go into effect.”
“We do. But the client insists that we show the FDA how on top of it we are and get them done for Chicago. It’s going to cost them half a million to rush these things through.”
“Ka-ching, ka-ching. The agency loves that sound.”
“Sure. And the hell with the human cost. Late nights. No sleep. No social life. So, tell me about your date.”
“Ah, it probably wouldn’t have worked out. Even if I didn’t have to leave before the tiramisu. I wouldn’t have gone out with him again anyway. He reminded me too much of my uncle. I mean, I loved my uncle, but I wouldn’t want to date him.”
Jenny raised her eyebrows.
“My dead uncle. Rest his soul. Just last year. Cancer.”
“Sorry,” Jenny murmured. Christ, this is why she always shut Carol out. Conversations like this one.
“Yeah, thanks. You know, I was there. I was with him at the end.”
Jenny shook her head, looking up the aisle to see if Traffic was coming back yet. Carol was rattling on about her relative’s difficult last days. Carol was too sincere for Jenny’s taste. She didn’t have the hard edge that Jenny required in her friends. But Traffic was nowhere to be seen. She glimpsed Gordo skulking past the head of the aisle. He flicked a glance in her direction. She felt a chill.
Jenny had fairly successfully timed Carol out, but now she snapped back around. Something Carol said had caught her attention.
“What? Sorry, Carol, I was distracted for a minute.”
“Oh, I was just saying that at the end he was in such awful pain, even with all the morphine they could give him, and he begged me. He begged me to help him. I had seen the nurse checking the connection on the morphine drip that went to the automated monitor that lets only so much through at certain intervals, and I knew that there was a manual override. So, when the nurse wasn’t around I turned the little thingy to open it and let it flow.”
Jenny held her breath and nodded for her to go on.
“So I watched as he felt better. He smiled at me and looked drowsy and then he closed his eyes. I waited until he stopped breathing before I tightened the connection again. Then a machine started beeping and I sat down and took his hand. The nurse came in to check. She told me he was gone. He had a DNR, so there was no fuss. And they were expecting it, so there were no questions. I felt good. I knew it was the right thing to do.”
Jenny nodded again, then impulsively got up and took Carol’s hand. Carol teared up a little at the unexpected sympathy. And at that moment, Traffic hurried down the aisle to tell Jenny that, no worries, they were going to do a group sign-off in the studio, then she could leave.
Jenny took her coat and bag and followed Traffic, pausing only to tell Carol good night. “Thanks for telling me about your uncle,” she said, giving Carol a pat on the shoulder. “I think you were wonderful to do what you did for him.”
“Thanks for being such a good listener.” Carol had always thought Jenny didn’t like her and she warmed to the possibility that she had won her over.
She didn’t notice the triumphant glitter in Jenny’s eyes. Carol was right. Now Jenny liked her. Carol’s little story was a gift. A gift Jenny could use. Carol had just unwittingly confessed to murder. Just that quickly Jenny had a plan.
The next afternoon it only took a second to slip the top piece of paper out of the job jacket on Carol’s chair. When Carol came back from the ladies’ room, she studied the job for a minute, leafing through the papers, before she called her team’s Traffic.
“I already signed off on this round. We all did. Shouldn’t there be a new one?”
Jenny could hear Traffic sputtering on the phone, then he came over to check the job jacket himself. Then he stormed away to see if the missing page was still on the editor’s desk. And before long, it was official: Carol’s entire team would be working late. Again.
Jenny and Carol ate their Chinese takeout from the waxy cartons at their desks. Jenny went to the ladies’ room and, on the way back, sauntered up and down the aisles of cubes, making sure no one else was in earshot of their aisle. Resuming her desk chair, she leaned back and stretched, glancing over at Carol, who gave her a touchingly pleading look. Jenny smiled an invitation and Carol wheeled her desk chair over for a cozy chat.
“Tell me about your family,” she begged. “I’m embarrassed that I did all the talking last night. You must have been so bored.”
“Not at all, Carol. I was fascinated. I’m so glad we’re getting to be friends.”
Carol beamed and clapped her hands together. “Me too,” she said fervently.
Jenny leaned forward. “I want us to be friends. Best friends. Can we do that, do you think, Carol?”
Carol couldn’t believe her good fortune. After all, Jenny was known for her skills and her wit. Her snarky sendups of bosses, colleagues, and clients were the talk of the agency. Carol was nodding like a bobble-head doll. “Yes. Yes, we can. I don’t have that many friends. I mean, I do, but not like, not like you.” She was babbling.
Jenny took her hand and leaned closer to whisper intimately. “I’m so glad. Because we need to be the best, best friends if we’re going to kill Gordo.”
Carol’s smile faltered, then grew bigger. “Yes! You are wild, Jenny. You are so funny. Kill Gordo.” She brayed the laugh that had always set Jenny’s teeth on edge. “If only.”
Jenny waited patiently while Carol’s laugh petered out, her smile stuttered and stopped, and her eyes got big and round. Finally, Carol put her hand to her mouth as if she were going to be sick.
“You mean it,” she whispered.
“Actually, to be more precise,
Carol’s head shook no, rapidly and repeatedly, but she said only, “Why me?”
Jenny replied in a sweetly rational tone. “Well, one, because you’re not on his team and you have no reason to kill him, and two, because I have leverage on you — the little incident with your uncle and all — but you have no leverage on me. So, if I kill him, there would be nothing to stop you from telling people that I did it.”
Carol looked at her speculatively.
Jenny tapped the side of her phone with its built-in recording feature. “Did I mention that I have that business with your uncle on tape?” It was a lie but Jenny was betting that Carol would believe it.
“I can’t do it,” Carol whispered. “I can’t just kill someone.”
“You’ve done it before.”
Carol watched her for a couple of beats, her face slack, then she grabbed for her recycling basket and heaved into it, a steaming batch of moo shu pork flying from her stomach.
Jenny adroitly scooted her chair back to avoid splatter and waited patiently until Carol was finished. She passed her a fistful of Kleenex and watched her wipe her mouth and her sweaty brow.
There, she thought to herself. That wasn’t so hard.
The top account execs at Nathan and Massey were allowed their eccentricities. Gordo kept snakes. Another one played country music in her office — letting it blare at top volume — playing one ghastly song over and over for weeks, then inexplicably segueing to another hellish ballad. No one said a word. A third zipped around the halls on a motorized scooter that the agency had bought for a special client presentation. This braying jackass whizzed around, endangering subordinates and scaring the crap out of the unsuspecting. Fine. Word was that for the über-bosses, anything goes. They were reportedly allowed one hissy fit per week without penalty. No matter how unreasonable.
Gordo had once famously banned all baked goods from the premises. You couldn’t bring in homemade brownies, Dunkin’ Donuts, or any other high-carb delight to help you get through the day. All because that asshole Gordo had a severe peanut allergy.
So, Jenny reasoned, it would be easy for Carol to add ground peanuts to Gordo’s nightly stir-fry. The restaurant would deny it, but hey, stuff happened.
Carol stopped snuffling and her face took on a crafty look.
“What about his EpiPen?”
Jenny smiled at her approvingly. “I’ll take care of the EpiPen. That will be my part of the deal.”
Carol nodded. Jenny would have hugged her if she weren’t so disgusting. Carol was in.
When her phone chimed the next day and Gordo’s name appeared on the ID readout, Jenny almost panicked. She fought down a scream and picked up the phone.
“Hey, Gordo. What’s up?”
“Come into my office, will you?”
It wasn’t a question. Damn. She was going to get fired before she could put her plan in motion.
“Sure. Right away.”
She was trembling as she entered his office.
“Shut the door.”
She sank into a chair. The snakes, inert behind the terrarium glass, watched her unblinkingly. Now and then one let his forked tongue flick out — the reptile equivalent of licking his chops, Jenny thought irrelevantly.
Gordo, too, watched her as if he were getting ready to strike.
“So? What’s up?” She tried to sound cheerful and unconcerned. Her mouth was dry and her palms were damp.
“I don’t want to fill that copy supe slot just yet,” Gordo said. “Can you cope for a while longer?”
“What? Oh, sure. No problem.”
“I know this puts extra pressure on you, but there will be some changes in the near future.”
Changes like her departure, no doubt.
“Sure. Whatever you need.”
“I knew I could count on you, Jenny.” He was actually sneering at her, mocking her openly.
She nodded weakly.
“Evaluations are due next week. Let’s set up a time to meet.”
He couldn’t have been more clear. He would give her a bad evaluation and fire her then.
Obediently, she brought her BlackBerry out of her pocket and leaned her elbows on his desk to thumb down her calendar. She managed to tip over a ceramic mug and pencils, pens, and highlighters rolled in all directions across Gordo’s desk and onto the floor. Great. Now Jenny’s humiliation was complete.
“Sorry, Gordo,” she whispered. She gathered the errant objects and stuffed them into the mug.
Gordo laughed meanly.
“How about we meet for that evaluation next Monday at ten?”
Jenny managed a smile as she backed out of his office.
How about we die first, asshole, she thought smugly. In her fist, Jenny held Gordo’s EpiPen.
Jenny thought that Carol would pass out as they circled the conference room table, checking the dozen Chinese food containers for their orders. She jabbed Carol in the ribs with her elbow as the night editor left with his pork chow fun. Jenny pointed her chopsticks at a waxy carton with Gordo’s standard order scribbled on the top. Sweating and shaking, Carol opened it and poured the contents of the baggie inside and stirred it with her finger. She had just closed it up when Traffic strolled in.
“You’re kung pao chicken, right?” Jenny asked, pointing with her chopsticks to the right container.
“No worries. Thanks, Jenny.”
Traffic showed no sign of noticing that Carol was having a full-scale anxiety attack.
Jenny picked up Carol’s dish and her own and steered her to the door. Carol allowed herself to be led blindly, stumbling against the doorframe as Gordo passed her coming in.
“Hey, Gordo,” Jenny said cheerfully, giving him a jaunty wave.
He gave her a nod and his lizard grin.
“Ladies.” The sibilant seemed to linger in the air like a hiss.
Jenny pushed Carol ahead of her and they made their way back to their cubicles. Carol slumped into her chair and shook her head as Jenny put the Chinese food container in front of her.
“Act normal, for God’s sake. Just eat dinner and finish up your work.”
Carol nodded mutely.
Jenny reached down and took the empty baggie from Carol’s clenched fist.
“I’ll keep this safe until we’re in the clear.”
Too late, Carol reached for it.
Jenny whisked it out of range, then smiled and pocketed the baggie. “It’s got both our prints on it. Just consider it insurance. We’re in this together.”
Carol nodded miserably and had just opened her Chinese food container when the first scream came.
Jenny reacted first and raced toward the sound. Gordo had staggered from his office, his face a ghastly red, already covered with welts, one hand outstretched like a movie zombie. The other hand was in his mouth, horribly, as if he were trying to eat himself. His eyes bulged. His khakis were wet in front where he had urinated.
Traffic had dropped a job jacket and screamed again, backing away from him, mesmerized, unable to turn and run. Gordo fell to one knee, holding himself up with his free hand and now, around his other hand, brown vomit was dribbling down his chin.
The few late workers popped up out of their cubicles like meerkats and came to find out what was happening. No one was reacting except to stare numbly.
“It’s anaphylaxis,” Jenny yelled. “Where’s his EpiPen?” She raced past Gordo, stepping on his hand where he was bracing himself upright. He made a sound, like he was trying to scream or gasp, a high-pitched horrible whistling sound, and fell onto his side.
Jenny rummaged around his desk, overturning his mug of pens, scattering them further as she pawed through them.
“Don’t touch him,” she screamed as she saw Traffic start to bend down. “Don’t!”
She couldn’t risk someone clearing his airway. She slipped the EpiPen out of her pocket and flung it under the credenza.
“Get help,” Jenny yelled, yanking open desk drawers and tossing the contents at random. “Call nine-one-one.”
Traffic raced to the nearest cubicle and Jenny could hear her stammering their office address and floor number into the phone.
Gordo had curled into a fetal position, his eyes rolled back, exposing blood-streaked whites, his face a livid red, welt-covered, inhuman. The ghastly wheezing, whistling sound stopped. His hand slipped out of his mouth and settled beside his head. Bloody vomit bubbled from his open mouth.
Jenny stepped over him and stood, breathing hard, with her colleagues, Carol among them, who had gathered, whimpering and crying, in the hallway.
“It’s too late,” Carol whispered. “Gordo’s dead.”
Jenny knelt and felt his neck for a pulse as she’d seen cops do on TV. Carol was right.
The cops, along with the emergency response team, arrived within minutes, although it felt like hours.
Jenny had herded her weeping, shocked, scared coworkers into the conference room to wait. All younger than she by a decade, now they looked less like sophisticated young professionals and more like the children they were. Carol sat apart from the others in a daze. Jenny took her hand and held it, squeezing hard enough to hurt. Carol winced but didn’t say anything or even look at her.
When the elevator chimed, Jenny went to meet the police and ambulance crew as they poured out into the hallway.
“This way.” She led them to Gordo’s corpse and stood back as they worked over him, confirming that he could not be brought back. The EMT in charge stood and shook his head.
“Looks like a massive allergic reaction. I smelled nuts on his emesis. Did he have a peanut allergy, do you know?”
Jenny nodded. “Yes, we all knew about it. He was very careful. But where’s his EpiPen? He always had one on his desk. I tried. I looked for it.” Her voice broke a little and she shuddered.
The cop nearest to Jenny turned to her, his notebook in his hand.
“I asked the others to wait in the conference room. I hope that’s okay.” Jenny teared up prettily and hugged herself. The cop nodded at his colleague, who moved off in the direction Jenny indicated.
“Let’s sit down for a minute. You’ve had quite a shock.”
Jenny nodded gratefully and they went to a nearby lounge to sit.
“Do you always work so late?”
Jenny told him all about the terrible evening. The work, the standard order of Chinese food, the scream from Traffic, the frantic search for his EpiPen as Gordo seemed to eat his own hand.
“People in crisis do all kinds of strange things,” the cop commented, writing. Jenny smiled.
“Right. Sure.”
Everything took about an hour, although like Gordo’s death itself, it seemed to take much longer. Someone came and took Gordo away in a neat black zippered bag. A cop had been dispatched to the hapless Chinese restaurant, which was probably in for a bad night.
One of the officers found the EpiPen on the floor of Gordo’s office. Jenny volunteered that Gordo had knocked over the pen mug earlier that day and she was certain she had seen it among the writing implements. She had picked it up and put it back herself.
The officer put away his notebook and patted Jenny’s hand.
“Don’t beat yourself up. It’s not your fault.”
The agency’s creative director arrived and spoke with the police and then the staff, giving them the next day off, half-day actually, he amended. He promised to bring in a counselor to help them deal with the grief.
Guilty looks were exchanged. They were shocked, but grief was not their paramount emotion.
The EMTs were gone. The police were pulling on their jackets and hats, still talking to the CD. The cop who had spoken to Jenny was going back through the pages of his notebook. They glanced back at her where she stood with her coworkers.
Jenny stiffened as the cops stood there while the CD walked purposefully in her direction. She caught a startled glance from Carol and suppressed a desire to run.
The CD thanked Jenny for her quick reactions and for keeping the staff from panicking. He actually hugged her briefly, in front of everyone. When Jenny turned around, the cops were gone.
Traffic called a car service to take everyone home.
And that, as they say, was that.
Gordo’s door remained closed and locked. Looking in the vertical glass panel beside the door, you could see that they had removed the terrariums, the snakes, and all of the personal effects. The desk was clean and empty. Two chairs stood by. The credenza was polished and the walls held no posters, whiteboards, or art.
Carol moved to another cubicle and studiously avoided Jenny. She never spoke another word to her. Jenny left her alone. Carol was scared. Carol was safe. Carol was no threat to her.
A funny story swept the agency. It seemed that two nights after Gordo’s death, a woman on the night cleaning staff was frightened almost to death when she got off the elevator and found a snake, dead, coiled up in the hallway. Several wags suggested it was Gordo come back to make mischief.
But one art director, a friend of Gordo’s, had a better explanation. It seemed that Gordo had come in one day to find the lid to a terrarium askew and one of his snakes missing. He had rushed out and bought a replacement snake so that no one would notice the empty terrarium. But he started staying late, roaming the offices and cubes, looking for the missing reptile. He was sure that he would be fired if one of his pets scared an employee. He knew that he was allowed his eccentricities but this would be going too far. Way too far. But no matter how many extra hours he put in searching, he never could find the errant snake.
By the following Wednesday, the gossip was dying down. Everyone who had been there that night had regaled his or her colleagues with tales of various acts of heroism that fateful night, all invented and embellished. Jenny herself had contributed a hilarious sendup of the creative director. “A terrible tragedy,” she intoned in his unctuous voice, “so take a day off to grieve. Well, after a halfday off, we’ll all join hands to feel our loss. Actually, let’s gather early tomorrow and have a moment of silence.”
Everyone had loved it. So it was disconcerting when Jenny was called to the creative director’s office. Traffic, who had been sent to summon her, must have sensed Jenny’s hesitation. “No worries, Jenny. I think it’s good news.”
Jenny’s heart leapt. The new definition of redundant: Kill your boss
The CD’s admin nodded her in and when she opened his door and saw Carol sitting on his sofa, Jenny’s smile faltered only slightly.
“Carol. CD. What’s up? You wanted to see me?”
Carol looked strange, almost frightened. Jenny’s heart sank. She glared a warning but Carol squirmed slightly in her chair and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“CD?”
“Jenny, I want to thank you again for taking charge last week. That was a terrible thing for this agency. For all of us.” He shook his stylishly barbered head. “A terrible thing.”
Jenny nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“But I have a clear idea of what Gordo had intended for his team and I want to honor his wishes.”
Jenny looked at the floor. Damn. Damn Gordo to hell. He had reached up from the grave to fire her. It was all for nothing. She had killed Gordo for nothing. Was there no justice?
The CD was rattling on in his unctuous tones about Gordo’s hard work and great leadership, skills that he had valued in Jenny herself. Jenny’s head snapped up.
“So now we’re looking at the job of copy supervisor on Gordo’s team. The job has gone empty long enough and I know that Gordo meant to promote you into it.”
Jenny’s eyes widened. She put her hand to her mouth. Her breath caught. Gordo. Gordo had valued her. Liked her, even. Gordo had intended to promote her. And she had killed him. She looked up to smile at the CD, but caught him glancing at Carol. Wait. Carol? What was wrong with this picture?
“But at the end of the day, I have to satisfy all our fine account execs and some of them feel that Carol also displays all those qualities. So what are we to do?”
He was looking at her brightly, although it was almost certainly a rhetorical question. She tried to look confident, interested. She couldn’t risk a look at Carol for fear she might leap up and strangle her.
“So,” the CD went on, “I have decided to wait a little while. I’m sure this will sort itself out very quickly.”
Carol was nodding and smiling. Jenny tried to do the same. The CD stood up and shook both their hands. “Better to have these things out in the open,” he said fatuously. “I’m a believer in complete transparency,” he lied.
Jenny and Carol left his office and Carol walked quickly away.
That night, as usual, the two teams were working late. Traffic had just called to tell Jenny the Chinese food was in the conference room when Carol appeared at her cubicle bearing two waxy white cartons. She put Jenny’s order down on her desk, along with chopsticks and napkins.
“I thought we should talk.” Jenny watched stone-faced as Carol pulled the desk chair from her old cube and rolled it over to Jenny’s, sitting and opening her own carton.
“You deserve that promotion,” Carol said sweetly. “You worked for it.” She lowered her voice. “You killed for it.”
Jenny opened her mouth to contradict her but Carol said quickly, “It was your plan. You deserve the credit. And the reward.”
Jenny nodded and opened her own Chinese food, as if this were a normal conversation between two colleagues.
“So, tomorrow I’m going to tell the CD to take me out of the race.”
Jenny stopped eating and stared at her.
“I don’t want to compete with you. After all, we’re friends, aren’t we?”
Jenny was still suspicious. Could Carol be for real? What an idiot. “Thanks, Carol. Are you sure?”
“Jenny, I’ve never been so sure of anything.”
Jenny couldn’t believe her luck. She felt her face flush, her heart race. She was going to get the promotion. She was safe.
Carol was smiling at her.
Jenny’s breathing grew more labored. Light-headed, she panted slightly, trying to take in enough air. Her peripheral vision seemed to contract. Carol.
“Carol?” With an effort, Jenny managed to stutter the one word.
Carol was watching her placidly. “Everything okay?”
Jenny stood unsteadily, her breathing ragged, her vision blurred. Her face itched, her arms and chest too. She scratched at her face, feeling welts that seemed to erupt and when she looked down she saw bloody pus on her fingers.
Carol was standing now too, still calmly watching. Jenny staggered to the end of the aisle, into the hallway, trying to call for Traffic, trying to scream.
Some of her colleagues were coming back from the conference room with food containers. She put out a hand to stop them, mewling, her voice gone, her breathing ragged. With mounting horror, she felt her bladder give way.
“Look,” Carol announced behind her. “Jenny’s doing Gordo. What a riot!”
Colleagues popped up and gathered around, giggling nervously.
“Look, she’s got the red welts and the zombie walk down perfectly,” Carol was laughing. Wikipedia had promised that the symptoms would mimic peanut allergy, but this was surprisingly perfect.
Sure enough, several of her coworkers were laughing and pointing. Jenny felt her airway constricting. Weakened, she dropped to her knees. She forced a hand into her swollen mouth. If she could make herself vomit maybe she could live.
“Oh my God, the hand thing. This is too funny,” someone squealed.
Traffic came at a run. “God, Jenny! No! What’s happening? Is that blood?”
“It’s okay. It’s a goof,” Carol told her. “I think it’s catsup.”
Traffic was grinning, still a little uncertain. Jenny tried to call to her, tried to signal, something. Anything.
She fell over on her side and felt her eyes roll up. She could still hear the delighted shrieks of her colleagues, laughing uproariously. Laughing at her.
SLO Pizza
by John A. Miller
Tony Packer, Ph.D., clipped a couple of VC firms that should have known better for twenty million dollars and one particularly fine California morning took it, as they used to say, on the lam. One year later, I was sitting in Roscoe Jackson’s office near the top of the Transamerica Pyramid watching a peregrine falcon dismember an unlucky pigeon on the ledge outside Roscoe’s window and beaming like a man who just filled an inside straight. Or the village idiot, depending on your point of view.
“What are you so happy about?” Roscoe asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Two things,” I told him, holding up two fingers for emphasis. “First, I can tell you with absolutely no doubt whatever that the estimable Dr. Packer has gone to earth in neither Europe nor Asia.”
“That’s not what the police and the FBI think,” Roscoe pointed out. Roscoe was a rainmaking partner in San Francisco’s most powerful law firm, and his client in this matter was the larger of the two Palo Alto venture-capital firms that had provided mezzanine funding to Dr. Packer’s software startup firm.
“They’re idiots, the lot of them,” I replied, waving a hand dismissively. “Listen, Roscoe, you know as well as I do that law-enforcement agencies, the FBI included, have an absolutely abysmal record of solving crimes where the perp isn’t a certifiable moron. And, hard as it may be to believe, they’re even worse when it comes to skip-tracing.” I shook my head. “In this case, they’re never going to find him because not only is our man not a moron, in fact, he happens to be a bona fide genius.” I pointed at the file on his desk containing all there was to know about Tony Packer, except, of course, his present whereabouts. “Graduated from college at sixteen with a computer-science degree, a doctorate in math from Berkeley, post-doc work in high-energy physics from Princeton, and a chaired professorship at Stanford before he was thirty.”
“And number two?” Roscoe asked, not quite sighing.
“Number two?”
“You said there were two things you were happy about.”
“Oh, right,” I said, nodding enthusiastically. “Number two: I know where the elusive Dr. Packer is.”
Roscoe’s jaw didn’t exactly drop, but almost.
Forty-eight hours later I was riding the dog south to San Luis Obispo with Joey Carbone, a man with whom I had served time at Folsom State Prison. Five minutes after we left the Greyhound station in San Francisco, Joey fell asleep, allowing me to replay the conversation I had had with Roscoe Jackson...
“You do?” Roscoe just looked at me for a couple of seconds. “You’re telling me that you actually know where Tony Packer is?”
“That is exactly what I’m telling you. I don’t know precisely where he is, you understand, not a street address, but I’ve pinned it down to within a radius of, say, twenty or thirty miles from a point certain.”
“That covers a lot of territory.”
“It does, and it’s the reason your client is going to have to spend a little money for me to run him to ground.”
“How little?” Roscoe asked, the suspicious tone returning to his voice.
I shrugged. “Not much, when you get right down to it. I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen thousand dollars should do it.” I paused a beat. “Twenty tops.”
“You call twenty thousand dollars not much?”
“Not much relative to the twenty million Dr. Packer is alleged to have absconded with. Besides, they’ll get a good bit of it back when I’m done with it.”
“What are you going to do with all that money?”
“Before I answer that let me ask you a question: ‘Have you ever heard of a café in Paris called Les Deux Magots?’ When he shook his head I explained that Les Deux Magots was a Parisian sidewalk café famous, particularly between the first and second world wars, for its artistic and literary clientele, people like Wilde, Sartre, Hemingway, Picasso, and Modigliani. It was so well known and popular that it was said, only half jokingly, that a detective looking for a wanted person from anywhere in the world need only sit patiently at a table at Les Deux Magots, for sooner or later his man, or woman, was bound to show up.”
“You’re proposing to open a café?” More than a hint of incredulity had crept into Roscoe’s voice.
“Of course not.”
“Thank God for that,” Roscoe said with a nervous laugh. “I can’t even imagine trying to explain such a thing to my client, not to mention my partners. They’d think I’d lost my mind.” He laughed again. “Wait a minute.” He looked at me carefully and the smile dropped off his face like a ball rolling off the edge of a table. Roscoe had known me for far too many years to accept a simple negative. “What
“A pizza parlor.”
Although Joey Carbone was not by nature predisposed to look gift horses in the mouth, neither was he so credulous as to accept one out of the blue without first checking to see if it might be hollow. “I don’t know,” he’d first said when I approached him with my proposition.
Joey was an essential element of my plan to locate Tony Packer, because, apart from the fact that Joey preferred to earn a living dealing in stolen goods, he was also the scion of a Detroit family that had been making pizza for three generations. Joey and I had shared a cell at Folsom State Prison for almost nine months, a time in which he had bemoaned on a stupefyingly regular basis the fact that it was impossible to find a good pizza in all of California. “My dad or granddad would come out here,” he said on more than one occasion, “and the first thing they’d do would be have a heart attack when they saw what these morons call a pizza. I got a thousand dollars says my five-year-old nephew, he could make a better pizza than you can get anywhere in this state.”
“You don’t have a thousand dollars,” I pointed out. “And what’s wrong with the pizza in California?”
He looked at me much as one might look at a simpleton. “You been to college, got all these degrees, and you don’t know nothing. You want to know what’s wrong with pizza in California, I’ll tell you what’s wrong.” He held up three fingers. “Cheese, sauce, and dough.”
“First, they glop on the cheese like it’s a goddamn cheese sandwich. Worse, it’s not even good cheese, it comes from a factory someplace, probably China, so right away you know it’s got no flavor to it at all. Then the sauce, talk about no flavor, it’s right out of a can with no spice, no nothing. They might as well be spreading on plain tomato paste, ’cause that’s all it is. And the dough. Man, don’t even get me started on the crap these places call pizza dough.” He shook his head dolefully. “Tell you what,” he added, pointing a finger at me, “as quick as you get out of this dump I’ll make you a
Joey was as good as his word. He got out of prison about six months ahead of me and the first thing he did when I arrived back in San Francisco was make me a pizza. “Jesus, Joey,” I said after the first bite, “this is the best pizza I’ve ever eaten.” And I’ve got to tell you, it was. And not by a little. By a whole lot.
“I don’t know,” Joey had said when I first approached him with my proposition.
I knew that he was considering getting back into fencing stolen goods with a guy over in Oakland. “What’s in it for me?”
“You mean other than a lot of money?” I replied sarcastically. “
“I gotta tell you, it sounds a little too good to be true,” Joey observed, not the least offended by my sarcasm. “Someone’s paying big bucks for you—”
“For us.”
“Okay, for us, to open a pizza parlor in this place down south—”
“San Luis Obispo,” I interjected. “Just north of Santa Barbara.”
“Whatever. These clients of yours, they’re paying you, us, to open a pizza parlor just so you can finger a guy who’s done such a good job of dropping out of sight that nobody, not the cops, not a whole bunch of private dicks, has been able to find him for over a year. What makes you think that in all the world this guy’s gonna come strolling into your — our — place?”
I smiled. “The pizza.”
Roscoe Jackson, of course, had asked essentially the same question. But first he wanted to know how I knew where Dr. Packer was hiding out.
“It’s all there,” I told him, nodding toward the thick file on his desk. “Everything you need to know about Tony Packer, including where he is even as we speak.”
“Okay,” Roscoe said, “I’ll bite — where is he?”
“I can’t tell you,” I replied, smiling as his initial look of surprise at my answer turned immediately to one of annoyance. “Look, Roscoe, if I tell you, you’ll have to tell your client, and before you could say
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. The point is, has nobody yet figured out that Packer almost certainly has someone on the inside of probably both the VCs and local law enforcement keeping him abreast of developments?”
Roscoe looked away briefly, an unhappy expression on his face. “I will admit that the thought has occurred to me.” He shook his head. “But you expect my client to write you a blank check for up to twenty thousand dollars without knowing where, or even exactly how, you intend to spend it?”
“Basically, yes. But they do know how I’m going to spend it,” I reminded him. “Instead of running around like a chicken with its head cut off I’m going to sit in one place and let him come to me, like the detective at Les Deux Magots in Paris.”
“I can’t tell one of the most important venture capitalists in the Western world that you’re going to take his money and open a pizza parlor,” Roscoe said, obviously meaning it.
I laughed. “Then don’t tell him. He doesn’t need to know exactly how I’m going to spend his money, at least not right away. And to make it easier for both you and your client, you may tell him that I’m so certain I know where Dr. Packer has gone to earth that I won’t take a fee, not a penny, unless I’m successful in fingering him.”
“So, tell me,” Joey asked as we rode the Greyhound south, “how you’re so certain that this crook—”
“Dr. Tony Packer.”
“—whatever, how this so-called genius, is laying up in a small town—”
“San Luis Obispo. Everybody who lives there calls it SLO.”
“—south of San Francisco, when nobody else could figure it out.”
“Simple, Joey. The guy grew up there, stayed in town to go to Cal Poly when he could have gone to any university in the state — Stanford, for one, had offered him a full scholarship, as had Caltech. He thinks San Luis Obispo is heaven on earth, and has said so in at least half a dozen interviews over the past twenty years. Plus, he’s put lots of his own money, several million dollars at least, where his mouth is, by funding a bunch of local charities and community organizations. And,” I smiled, “the icing on the cake, so to speak, is that he’s been an avid surfer since he was a little kid, and SLO is just a few minutes away from some of the best surfing on the Central California coast.”
“How do you know all this?”
I smiled. “There’s this thing in San Francisco called a library, where you can get free access to this other thing called the Internet...”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Joey responded, shaking his head. “But what you’re talking about, him taking it on the lam in his own hometown, is too obvious. Way too many people would know him, would have heard of the theft up here in the Bay Area.” He shook his head again. “Even today, twenty million’s a lot of dough. Someone would have said something if they’d seen him down there. I guarantee you, somebody woulda dropped a dime by now.”
“I don’t think so. Sure, lots of people might know him, but even more people down there admire him, admire what he’s done for the community. And keep in mind, stealing money from fabulously wealthy venture capitalists in Palo Alto wouldn’t even be considered a crime by more people than you might think — particularly if the thief was otherwise well liked, and for good reason. The local attitude down there would be, hey, if he clipped a couple of Silicon Valley greed merchants, more power to him.”
“I know what you’re saying, but how about the local police? The sheriff’s office? As soon as he disappeared, you can bet law-enforcement agencies up and down the state were told to be on the lookout for him. If he’d settled in down there the police woulda known about it.”
“Not necessarily. Remember, Packer’s not exactly a dummy. He hasn’t been down openly strolling around town, telegraphing his presence to anyone interested enough to take notice. No,” I shook my head confidently, “he’s stayed under the radar, probably changed his appearance somewhat, kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. I would also be astonished if he doesn’t have at least one, and probably several, of the local police and sheriff’s deputies on his payroll, maybe even the chief, keeping him advised as to any official activity that might crop up from time to time.”
“Now that,” Joey interjected forcefully, “I can believe. Any cop that isn’t taking a little money under the table isn’t worth a damn to anybody.”
“And, almost certainly, a few, a very few of the local civilian heavy hitters know he’s in the area and keep him informed as to what’s moving up and down the grapevine as it relates to him.”
Joey and I got off the Greyhound in San Luis Obispo, bought a local paper, and, two hours later, found a furnished duplex apartment within walking distance of the quaint downtown. That evening we walked around the commercial district, checking out the small restaurant scene. Several places sold pizza, mostly aimed, not surprisingly, at what could charitably be called the student trade. Joey dismissed them as competitors based on smell and ambiance alone.
“I’m not even going to tell you what I smell in there in terms of nothing you want to eat, but beyond that any place that plays loud rock music is no place to expect good food of any kind,” he assured me. “Take my word for it,” he added, nodding his head as if to confirm the veracity of his own words, “these people,” meaning, I presumed, the good citizens of San Luis Obispo, “are going to be talking about us for years to come.”
Thanks to hard economic times that had resulted in a glut of commercial vacancies downtown, it took only two weeks to find a suitable spot, sign a rental agreement, hire a local starving artist to paint a tasteful Roman street scene on one of the interior walls, and lease the bare essentials needed to get a pizza parlor up and running. Knowing how outsiders are often viewed with suspicion by the local bureaucrats, I retained the services of a former city attorney, Anabel Fuentes, to help us with the necessary licenses and permits, and paid her a nice premium on top of her usual hourly billing rate for cutting through the clutter with admirable efficiency.
“What are you going to call your business?” Ms. Fuentes asked as we were filling out forms in her office.
“SLO Pizza,” I immediately replied. The name was totally spur of the moment — it arrived on my lips at the same instant it hit my brain.
If Ms. Fuentes was impressed, she didn’t show it. “If the pizza’s any good you’ll do just fine — most people around here, the ones with a brain anyway, believe that you’ve got to go all the way to San Francisco for a good pizza.”
“Yeah, and good luck finding one there,” Joey interjected with a snort of derision.
“Joey comes from a multigenerational family of Detroit pizza makers,” I assured her. “It takes him twenty-four hours just to make and simmer the tomato sauce. Furthermore, we’re going to use only local, certified organic vegetables, together with handmade artisan cheeses from a small creamery in Santa Barbara.” I smiled at her. “Tell all your friends about us — I promise you they won’t be disappointed.”
“Oh, by the way, if you haven’t hired your delivery boys yet I know a couple of high-school kids who would do a good job,” she said, looking up from the forms.
“Thanks, but at SLO Pizza there’s going to be no delivery and no takeout.” I looked over at Joey, who nodded his head. “Our pizza’s too good to eat any way other than right out of the oven.”
Ms. Fuentes raised an eyebrow and I could see her thinking that she was glad she had demanded a cash retainer before doing any work for us.
We opened SLO Pizza soon thereafter, and I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who showed up. Several told me they had heard about us from either Anabel Fuentes or our landlord while the rest said they had been walking by and were attracted by the smell of the simmering tomato sauce and the cooking pizzas. Joey stayed busy behind the counter spinning pies while I waited tables, chatting up the customers and enjoying the looks of disbelief when people took their first bites. We closed at two-thirty and while Joey walked back to our apartment to take a short nap, I cleaned up and got the front end ready for the dinner trade. We opened again at five and by the time we closed at ten I was exhausted.
“I hope to hell our boy Packer shows his face soon,” I told Joey after the last customers left and I locked the front door. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this — my feet and back are killing me.”
Joey laughed. “See, the thing is, most guys got no idea how hard it is running a restaurant, even a little pizzeria like this. But I got to tell you,” he sat down and put his feet up, a happy smile on his tired face, “it feels good to be back in the kitchen. I never realized how much I missed it before.”
After a week we were filling up for both lunch and dinner, and we had to hire a kid to help Joey out in the kitchen with prep work and dishwashing. I was running around like a madman out front but managing to hold my own, at least for the time being. Every night we both collapsed into bed, exhausted, and every day it seemed like we sold more and more pizzas. Just as we had planned, our customers by and large represented the upper echelons of the broader SLO community — both town and university. Given that our pizzas were priced at double those of the competition, such as it was, and our environment — no loud music, no video games, no flat-screen televisions tuned to ESPN or MTV — was ill suited for anyone under the age (chronologically or emotionally) of thirty, we attracted exactly the cohort into which I expected Dr. Packer to fit. It was just a matter of time, as I repeatedly explained to Roscoe Jackson during our weekly telephone calls.
“Plus,” I told him during the most recent of our calls, “we’re making money hand over fist down here. I mean, who would have guessed that there could be so much profit in pizzas? In fact,” I shook my head at the thought, “if we could get a beer and wine permit, it’d be like having a license to print money.”
Three days later five surfers walked in just as we were preparing to close for the afternoon. Two were middle-aged, in their fifties I guessed, one was ten or so years younger, and two were probably mid-twenties. All were dressed in T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, the official footwear of SLO, and had obviously just come over from the beach. The two young guys were tatted and big-time buffed, with arms like cannons, whitewall haircuts, and attitudes that shouted law enforcement so loudly a deaf man would have heard it. One of the older guys and the forty-something sported beards while the other, a guy who would have been called a silver fox at Folsom, wore his surfer gear as if it were a Brooks Brothers suit.
“We just came over from San Onofre,” the silver fox explained in a voice that reminded me of Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” It also reminded me of the voice of the judge who had sentenced me to three-to-five years. “We’re not too late for a pizza, are we?” He smiled. “We would have gotten here earlier but the waves were too good to leave.”
“The sign on the door says we close at two o’clock,” I replied casually, “but we’re not fanatics about it. Welcome to SLO Pizza. Everything’s fresh and,” I nodded toward the chalkboard on the wall that showed the toppings available that day, “if it’s not up there, we don’t have it.”
“What kind of beer have you got?” one of the young cops asked.
“We sell no intoxicating spirits,” I replied, shaking my head for emphasis. “The state of California, in its infinite wisdom, believes that issuing beer and wine permits to convicted felons would lead inevitably to a breakdown in public order, if not outright anarchy.” The three older guys all laughed. The two younger ones didn’t even crack a smile.
“Too bad,” the bearded oldster said, clearly meaning it. “Nothing goes with pizza like a cold beer.” He looked at his two buds and then back at me with a mischievous grin on his face. “Say, how about if we bring our own? I’ve got a cooler out in the Jeep filled with Coronas.”
“Well, with a group like yours, and the fact that we’re now officially closed for the afternoon, perhaps we could accommodate you.”
“What do you mean a group like ours?”
I smiled. “I’m guessing that at least one of you,” I indicated the three older men, “is a judge, and that you guys,” I nodded at the two steroidal stiffs, “are sworn peace officers.”
“Excellent,” the forty-something said, smiling and nodding his head. “You’ve got a good eye.” He pointed at the silver fox. “Meet Judge Sam Jackson, presiding judge of the superior court here in SLO, and Matt and James here are, as you guessed, deputy sheriffs. Bill Masterson,” the other bearded one, “owns Seven Hills Winery, the oldest and largest vineyard along the Central Coast, and I’m Charles Young, a healthcare consultant.”
“And surf bum,” the judge interjected.
“The pleasure’s all mine,” I said, shaking their hands. “And, like I said a minute ago, welcome to SLO Pizza.” The fact that Young had neglected to tell me Matt’s and James’s last names confirmed that they were the hired help, so to speak.
“What were you in the joint for?” Matt rather rudely asked.
“Stupidity,” I answered, looking not at him but at the three older men. They laughed and even the two hard-faced young cops cracked a smile.
They ordered three large pizzas with Italian sausage and mushrooms and, an hour later, when they were finished, left a twenty-dollar tip on the table. Back in the kitchen Joey watched as I dropped the twenty in our tip jar.
“I take it they liked the pizza,” he said as he chewed on a toothpick.
“They liked it a lot,” I assured him. “And by the way, the forty-something guy, the one who paid the bill and left the tip, is none other than the elusive Dr. Tony Packer.”
“Yeah?” Joey nodded his head, apparently no more impressed than if I’d just given him a weather report. “You sure it’s him?”
“About ninety-nine percent sure. He’s grown a beard and had what looks like a little plastic surgery done, but yes, I’d say I’m as sure as I need to be short of lifting his fingerprints. Which reminds me, I notice that they took all their empty beer bottles with them when they left.”
“Probably to be sure they got their bottle deposits back,” Joey sniffed. “You see it all the time — guys worth a million bucks would rather be poked in the eye with a stick than leave a nickel lying on the table.”
“Which probably explains why they’ve got the million dollars to begin with,” I pointed out.
“Whatever. So, what are you going to do now that you’ve ID’d our boy?”
“Nothing for the time being. His crew out there,” I nodded back toward where they had been sitting, “consisted of the presiding judge of the superior court, one of the leading vintners in all of California, and, for beef, two sheriff’s deputies.”
“I spotted the young guys as dicks the minute they walked in.” Joey paused and looked at me in a way that made me a little uneasy. “So,” he finally said, still working on his toothpick, “what’s the plan?”
“I don’t know, Joey, I’m going to have to think about it for a while. This guy is so smart, and so well protected, just like I told you he would be, that taking him into custody is going to be no easy thing.”
“It sounds like you’re not planning on calling the guy in San Francisco...”
“Roscoe Jackson?”
“Yeah, him. It sounds like you’re not planning on calling him with the news right away.”
“No,” I confirmed, shaking my head, “I’m not. Actually putting the collar on Dr. Packer and the missing twenty million dollars is going to require an extraordinarily delicate touch. If Roscoe’s client sends in the cavalry Packer’ll hear about it and be gone before they even leave San Francisco. And the big problem with that is that if they don’t actually succeed in apprehending Packer the VCs who hired us will almost certainly refuse to pay our fee.”
“Not good.”
“Not good at all. So, until I have more information, like where he’s living and what his day-to-day routine is, I’m saying nothing.”
“I heard that.” Joey paused for a long minute, obviously choosing his next words with some care. “Now that our boy has shown his face, I was thinking of something else,” he finally said.
“What’s that?”
“We drop a dime on him and, you know, as popular a guy as he seems to be around here, I mean it being his hometown and all that, our business is going to take a big hit.” He shook his head. “A big hit,” he repeated for emphasis.
I started to laugh, thinking for a second that Joey was being ironic, when it hit me — Joey liked it here, liked having his own pizzeria, liked being respected, admired even, as a legitimate member of the business community. I cut the laugh off. “The pizzeria was never intended to survive beyond our search for Dr. Packer,” I gently reminded him. “For one thing, the VCs who fronted the money are going to want as much of it back as possible, which means we’re going to have to liquidate all the assets as soon as we finger Packer. And for another, you’re right, as admired as Packer is locally, I doubt you and I are going to be the most popular dudes in town when word gets around that we’re the ones who busted him.”
“You’re coming up in the world.”
I was sitting in Anabel Fuentes’s office and had just told her about meeting the judge, the vintner, and the man who had introduced himself as Charles Young.
“If they like your pizza you can bet that everybody who’s anybody in SLO will hear about it,” she added.
“Just what we need,” I said, feigning dismay. “More business. I’m about to work myself into an early grave as it is.” I paused for a second, striving, probably unsuccessfully, for an air of nonchalance. “So what’s the story on this Charles Young? He introduced himself as a healthcare consultant and, to be honest, Joey and I should probably be thinking about some sort of health-insurance plan. Would he be someone we should maybe talk to?”
“If your question is does he sell health insurance, the answer is no.”
I waited for her to say something more and when she didn’t I couldn’t not smile. “Do you know him? Personally, I mean.”
“What, precisely, are you getting at?”
I shook my head and stood up, her obvious disinclination to talk about Charles Young telling me all I needed to know for the time being. “Just trying to get more acquainted with the local movers and shakers. Who knows,” I smiled and turned to leave, “at some point Joey and I may want to join the SLO Country Club and, God knows,” my smile broadened, “in that eventuality we’re going to need all the sponsors we can get.”
Anabel looked at me silently for several seconds, the expression on her face reminding me of the one on the associate warden’s face when he welcomed me, so to speak, to Folsom. “You would do well to keep in mind that SLO is still very much a small town, particularly when it comes to the men and women who matter most, from a business and political point of view. People asking questions, particularly people newly arrived like you and your partner, often raise suspicion, regardless of motivation. My advice is that you count yourself fortunate that Charles Young and his friends like your pizza and let it go at that.”
Two evenings later, twenty minutes after we’d closed for the night, the man who had introduced himself as Charles Young strolled into SLO Pizza, this time unaccompanied. I was alone, lying on the floor with my feet up one wall, a restorative yoga pose called viparita karani. Not something, I can assure you, I learned at Folsom.
“Namaste,” he said, a smile in his voice.
“Namaste.” I lowered my legs and rolled to one side, standing in one easy motion.
“You look closed,” he said with obvious disappointment, gesturing toward the darkened kitchen.
“Not only do we look closed, we are closed,” I confirmed. “But if it’s a slice or two of pizza you were looking for you’re in luck. Joey made me up a pie just before he left and you’re more than welcome to share it with me when it comes out of the oven.”
We chatted about inconsequential things — the quality of the surf at Pismo Beach, his favorite yoga studio in SLO — while I set a table for two. By the time everything was ready the pizza was done and I brought it to the table still bubbling from the oven.
“Be careful not to burn your mouth,” I warned. “It’s even hotter than it looks.”
He smiled. “I understand you’ve been asking around about me,” he said as he moved a slice to his plate.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it
“Not surprisingly?”
I tasted the pizza and closed my eyes momentarily as the intense flavors of Joey’s sauce spilled across my palate and rose into my sinuses. “Not surprisingly inasmuch as she and a few other heavy hitters in SLO like Bill Masterson and Judge Jackson know that your name isn’t Charles Young.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“None other than the elusive Dr. Tony Packer.” I took another bite and smiled with pleasure. “Can Joey make a dynamite pizza, or what?”
“I’ve never tasted anything like it,” he admitted, “anywhere in the world, including Italy. And as far as Tony Packer is concerned, most folks who think about it at all think he’s living like a king in Bangkok, or lying on the beach at Phuket.”
I shook my head. “That’s yesterday’s news. Just before leaving San Francisco I heard that the latest confirmed sighting has you living the ex-pat high life in Ho Chi Minh City, in a colonial French mansion overlooking the Saigon River.” I smiled. “Where, even as we speak, the FBI and a veritable posse of private dicks are throwing serious money around from the Mekong Delta to Hanoi in the hopes of finding a capitalist-minded communist official who will drop a dime on you.”
Packer laughed. “A delightful image.” He helped himself to another slice. “But answer me this: Why a pizza parlor? I mean, I know you’re here on behalf of your friend Roscoe Jackson, and that he, of course, is working for the VCs from whom twenty million dollars was borrowed—”
“Dude, I don’t think they think it was borrowed.” I smiled. “
“—but why,” he continued, ignoring my good-natured interruption, “a pizza parlor?”
“I’ll tell you why a pizza parlor if you’ll tell me how you knew about me working for Roscoe Jackson.”
“All it took was a single phone call to a friend in San Francisco.” He shrugged. “She, my friend, asked one or two reasonably well-informed people who in turn made a call or two, and
“Have you ever heard of a cafe in Paris called Les Deux Magots?”
Puzzled, he shook his head, and I told him the same story I had told Roscoe Jackson. He threw back his head and laughed. “Too cool for school.” Still smiling, he looked at me carefully. “I’m curious as to why you haven’t yet told your friend and employer Roscoe Jackson about what you think you’ve discovered?”
“How do you know I haven’t told him?”
“Because if you had, all those FBI agents allegedly wasting taxpayer dollars in Vietnam would be agitating the natives here in SLO instead.”
“Heaven forfend.” sighed contentedly, pleasantly satiated by yet another of Joey’s extraordinary pizzas. “You are, of course, correct — Roscoe knows nothing yet. As to why I haven’t told him anything, it’s simple: My deal for finding you is entirely on the come — I succeed I get paid. I fail,” another shrug, “it’s
“Are you also thinking that perhaps I might give you more money to stay quiet than they would to know my whereabouts?”
I laughed with genuine humor. “If I learned anything at Folsom it was not to do business with crooks.” I held up a hand. “No offense intended. No, as I said a minute ago, I merely needed a little more time to dig up information. That’s why I went to Ms. Fuentes. Beyond that, I must say that I’m also mildly curious as to why you stole the money in the first place.”
“Why do you think I took it?”
“It certainly wasn’t for the money per se — not in the sense that you needed it to support a drug habit, or toys like Gulfstream jets or exotic cars. You could have done all that quite easily on the money you had already earned. And, despite your success to date in staying severed steps ahead of the law, there’s no way you would have believed you could remain under cover forever, not with twenty million on the line. No,” I shook my head, “clearly something else was going on, and until I figure it out I have no intention of telling Roscoe or anyone else that I found you.” I snapped my fingers as it suddenly came to me. “Jesus, I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been.” I looked at him, shaking my head ruefully. “You never intended to stay hidden long-term, did you?”
“And why not?” Packer asked, obviously pleased that I was starting to figure things out.
“Because you never intended to keep the money — you always intended to return it.” I paused for a sip of water. “But I still don’t know why you took it in the first place.”
Packer waved a dismissive hand. “Simple enough — my startup wasn’t a startup anymore. You see, we’d proceeded well past the mezzanine funding stage and were all set to do an IPO. At that point, the VCs controlled the board of directors and were really running the company, leaving me with lots of time on my hands. During the dog-and-pony shows we were putting on for Wall Street ahead of the IPO I met a guy, a quant for one of the big private-investment houses, and got interested in the concept.”
“A quant?”
“A quantitative analyst, someone who uses mathematic formulas to predict movement in the stock market. At its heart quantitative analysis is based on stochastic calculus, coincidentally a particular interest of mine when I was studying at Cal.”
“Does it work? Reasonably dependably, I mean.”
“Depends on who you ask. The concept got wildly popular some years back and math Ph.D.’s from the best universities across the country suddenly found themselves swamped with ridiculous employment offers from Wall Street.” He shook his head. “Between you and me, I believe one of the reasons for quantitative analysis’s sudden popularity was that few brokers on Wall Street could spell stochastic calculus, much less understand its strengths and limitations when applied to the stock market. In any event, fortunes were made and, as is usually more often the case, lost, and the bloom has gone somewhat off the rose, so to speak.”
“So let me guess: You secretly became a quant and needed money, big money, to break the bank at Monte Carlo.”
Packer smiled and nodded his head affirmatively. “I was able to come up with what is a truly novel approach, mathematically speaking, and used it to write a computer program to play the market in a very specific way. After putting it through several dry runs I was convinced that the program worked and calculated that twenty million was the minimum amount I needed to get into the game.”
“Now, see, this is the part I still don’t understand. Why steal it? I mean, everybody already knew you were a genius, wouldn’t your VC partners have been more than happy to front you the money once they had seen your program?”
“You don’t know a great deal about the venture capital business, do you?”
“Almost nothing,” I cheerfully admitted.
“Then the main thing you need to understand is that, contrary to popular opinion, venture capitalists hate risk. In fact, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that they positively loathe it. The men and women who run the major VC firms are little more than bean counters, glorified bankers and accountants who demand an almost ridiculous level of assurance before they’ll deign to invest in a new firm or a novel idea.” He shook his head again. “There’s absolutely no way they’d have backed a computer program based on mathematical principles not fifteen people in the entire country could fully understand. What’s more, even if they did, it would have been next to impossible to keep the specifics of my computer program, not to mention the underlying math, a proprietary secret.”
“But it is their money, right? I mean, it’s up to them how they want to invest or not invest it.”
“Correct. That’s why I had to borrow it without their consent.”
I smiled. “Back to that word
“Well, it
“Not on your or the VCs’ part, perhaps, but the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco is not likely to be deterred from pursuing the matter merely because the money got paid back.”
Packer smiled broadly. “U.S. Attorneys work for the Attorney General in Washington, and the Attorney General works for the President, and the President, all Presidents, work for men and women like me.” He shook his head. “A bank robber steeds twenty grand and goes straight to jail, whether the money is ultimately recovered or not. A wildly successful entrepreneur borrows twenty million and,” he shrugged expressively, “accommodations can be made, particularly when the so-called victims hugely profit in the end. And especially when the entrepreneur takes nothing for himself.”
“Nothing? Not even a little to cover expenses, overhead, pizza, stuff like that?”
“Nada. As you figured out before you even left San Francisco, I already had more money than I could reasonably expect to spend in my lifetime, plus the ability to make more by cranking out a succession of high-tech startups, all of which I could easily get funded based on my reputation alone. Difficult as it may be to believe, the entire point of this particular caper,” he smiled again when he said the word
“With big money on the line.”
“Exactly. Otherwise it’s just an intellectual exercise.”
“So where is your share of the profit going?”
“Into a nonprofit foundation established and controlled by Judge Jackson and Bill Masterson—”
“The wine baron,” I interjected.
“The wine baron indeed. Another one of those men and women for whom the President of this country actually works. As I was saying, all the profit from my trades, after an appropriate set-aside for my VC friends up in Palo Alto, goes directly to their foundation, from whence it is put to use here in SLO.”
“Doing what?”
“Doing good, of course.” Packer smiled. “For instance, no child living in this county will ever go without medical care because of an inability to pay. No child living here will ever pay a penny in tuition at an institute of higher education, whether the local community college or Stanford. The local schools have fully funded music and arts programs, and free after-school tutoring in math and the sciences for all who need it.”
“You
“More than you can imagine. Enough to fund all that I just described plus a one hundred percent return for the VCs from whom the money was borrowed.”
“Stolen,” I said, shaking my head, “not borrowed. And Robin Hood notwithstanding, doing good with ill-got gains in no way alters the underlying crime.” Packer looked at me with obvious irritation for several seconds before responding. “As a convicted felon I should think you’re hardly—”
“You’re right,” I said, holding up a hand as I interrupted him. “My own appallingly long list of shortcomings, both moral and neurochemical, has been well documented by the California judicial system, and in any event I came down here only to find you, not to pass judgment. And having done so, as I said a minute ago, I was just curious as to why you stole the money. All that’s left now is a quick phone call to Roscoe Jackson and Joey and I are out of here.”
“I’m afraid you’re too late by about,” he looked at his watch and then back at me, a broad smile on his face, “eight hours or so.”
I nodded my head, knowing right away what he meant. “So a deal was done before you came in here tonight?”
“Pretty much. Judge Jackson drove up to San Francisco this morning and has spent most of today meeting first with the VCs and then with the U.S. Attorney.”
“Fast work.”
“Not really. We’ve been laying the groundwork for the past couple of months, lining up the support of both of California’s senators as well as a handful of House members.”
“Still,” I paused a second, running the numbers around in my head, “on the face of it you took a chance, and something about that worries me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You knew who I was at least two days ago, right? I mean, three days ago you first came in for pizza with your buds, and the next day you supposedly made your call to San Francisco. But then, even when you knew who I was you waited a couple of days before sending the judge up to make the deal, all of which time you couldn’t have known whether I was telling Roscoe Jackson or not.”
“Maybe I like to gamble.”
“Not about this,” I disagreed, shaking my head. “You’ve planned everything too well right from the beginning to risk a wild-card like me dropping a dime before you had a chance to make your deal.” Suddenly it hit me and I felt a major-league stomach ache coming on. “Oh, man,” I said with a genuine groan of pain, “Joey.” I shook my head again and looked at Packer. “You didn’t call anyone in San Francisco, did you?”
“Didn’t have to,” Packer confirmed. “That first time we came in, three days ago? The next morning, while you were still asleep, Joey called the judge and set up a meeting with me. He told me all about the deal you had with Roscoe Jack-son and that you weren’t going to call him until you knew more. That’s what gave us time to set things up in San Francisco without worrying about what you were up to. Joey knew you wouldn’t call Jackson without telling him first.”
“What was the deal? I mean, how much did he settle for?”
Packer looked around the pizzeria. “This place.” He smiled. “Joey didn’t want any money, just the freedom to keep this place going as his own. So part of my deal with the VCs was that they agreed to forgive the startup money they gave you to get the pizzeria going.”
“Meanwhile, assuming the VCs elect not to pay my fee for finding you, I take it in the shorts.”
“Consider it tuition,” Packer said as he stood to leave. “When push comes to shove I don’t trust anybody, and neither should you.”
As I had assumed they would, the VCs refused to pay me, taking the position that the instant Packer turned himself in our deal was rendered null and void. Roscoe tried to push them on it but could gain no traction, so I returned to San Francisco with my curiosity satisfied and my billfold empty. I probably could have sued, but they were too a big a client of Roscoe’s firm for me to want to rock that boat. Well before I left SLO I had gotten over my annoyance at Joey selling me out. He felt real bad about it but, as he pointed out with an eloquent shrug, in the final analysis a fellow’s got to look out for number one.
“I been gettin’ into bed wit’ crooks all my life,” Joey assured me as I was boarding the Greyhound for the ride north, the irony of his own statement apparently lost on him. “And this one’s easy money ’cause he don’t even know he’s a crook. He ain’t careful,” he rolled a toothpick around his mouth and smiled, “I’ll have him waitin’ tables for me before it’s all over.”
Does Thee Murder?
by Robin Hathaway
“How terrible!” Mrs. Doyle frowned into the phone.
Horatio, the teenaged office clerk, looked up from his filing. Maybe the day wouldn’t be such a drag after all.
“Where did it happen?” Mrs. Doyle’s forehead wrinkled. “Oh, my — she was warned not to walk there alone.”
Horatio grimaced. “Blame the neighborhood,” he muttered.
“Of course, I’ll tell the doctor. He’ll be very upset.” As she replaced the receiver, her gaze met Horatio’s. “Miss Jennings — murdered by a mugger,” she said. There was a catch in her voice.
Horatio grunted. He knew Miss Jennings. She was one of the few patients who noticed him. Didn’t treat him like a piece of furniture. She once asked him about his career as if she were really interested.
The front door squeaked open. A patient or the doctor? Mrs. Doyle went to see.
“Inspector Rafferty called with some bad news,” Horatio heard the nurse say.
“Oh?”
“Miss Jennings was murdered.”
Horatio couldn’t hear the doctor’s reaction, but when he appeared in the doorway his face was gray and his mouth was set in a grim line. He nodded at Horatio and disappeared into his office, shutting the door behind him.
Martha Jennings was a Philadelphia institution. A wealthy Quaker, she was always involved in worthy causes. In the Quaker tradition, she believed in accumulating wealth, but not displaying it. If you met her on the street, you might mistake her for a homeless person. There was a story that she went into a bank one day wearing a coat held together with a large safety pin. A new young employee rose quickly with the intention of ushering her out. But he was intercepted by the bank manager, who hurried to greet the woman and escorted her into his office as if she were the Queen of England.
Miss Jennings was descended from a distinguished Quaker family that was known for its philanthropy. And she carried on the family tradition. One of her favorite causes was helping disadvantaged youths in her neighborhood of Germantown. She founded a summer camp for teenagers and even donated some of her land for the teens to make their own vegetable gardens. Her house, a colonial stone structure built in 1766, before the Revolution, was believed to have been the temporary home of George Washington during the yellow-fever epidemic. Her ancestors had owned many acres, bought from the Indians, which had been sold piece by piece as the rural area grew into a prosperous commercial center. But in recent years the neighborhood had declined and the graceful stone house circled by sycamore trees was a shady island in a sea of boarded-up buildings, shabby storefronts, and derelict taprooms. Her friends and relatives had urged her for years to move to the suburbs or at least to a retirement home. But she stubbornly refused, insisting that this was where she had been born and where she would die. “Besides, this is where my work is,” she always added.
Like most Quakers, she lived simply. The furnishings of her house were plain, like her clothes, and she rarely bought anything new unless it was a necessity. She had a part-time housekeeper, a black woman named Henrietta, who came in three days a week to cook and clean, and occasionally do the shopping if Miss Jennings’ rheumatism was bothering her. Henrietta was a dependable and devoted employee. Miss Jennings also had a chauffeur, her “driver,” she called him, who took her on errands and visits when they were too far to walk. Mike was Irish, full of jokes, and could always make Miss Jennings laugh. But most of the time Miss Jennings prepared her own meals and shopped at the local stores, even though she was often the only white woman in them.
The neighbors were familiar with the old Quaker woman who had always lived in the big stone house, and they knew she was responsible for many of the improvements in their neighborhood. There was the summer camp, of course. But she had also helped fund a gymnasium for the local high school, turned a vacant lot into a park, and aided the poor by organizing clothing drives and starting a soup kitchen. A familiar and revered figure, she came and went without fear. When a mugger murdered her, everyone was shocked. People gathered in clusters on street corners and in doorways shaking their heads. Some even wept.
Dr. Fenimore punched Rafferty’s number. “Where did it happen?” he asked without preamble.
“On Harris, just off the Avenue.”
“When?”
“Yesterday — about six P.M. No one in their right mind walks there alone even in the daytime.”
“But everyone knew her.”
Rafferty didn’t answer.
“Was she robbed?”
“Her handbag wasn’t recovered.”
“How did he do it?”
“Came up behind her and hit her with a brick.” His friend paused. “The ferocity of the attack is what worries me. The assailant wasn’t just out to stun her. From the nature of the wounds, he had murder in mind.”
“Wounds?”
“Oh, yeah. He administered several heavy blows. Her skull was smashed.”
Fenimore gripped the telephone. After a pause, he asked, “Any witnesses?”
“In that neighborhood? The chances of anyone coming forward are zero.”
“Keep in touch,” Fenimore said.
“Right.”
Because of Miss Jennings’ philanthropic reputation, her death was front-page news. In addition to her obituary, the
The funeral was scheduled for the following week at the Germantown meetinghouse. She had been a member her whole life, as had her parents and grandparents before her. Fenimore was going, of course. And Mrs. Doyle said she would like to attend too.
“Can I come?” Horatio asked. In answer to their surprised looks, he shrugged and said, “She was a nice old lady.”
“We’ll have to close the office,” Mrs. Doyle said.
“That’s all right,” Fenimore said. “I’ve canceled my patients for that afternoon. And if there are any drop-ins, I’ll leave a note on the door.”
So, it was settled, Dr. Fenimore and his entire office staff would attend the Jennings funeral. But Fenimore thought he should warn his two employees, both members of the Catholic faith, about the nature of a Quaker funeral service. “You’ll find this very different from the services you’re both used to. The meetinghouse is very plain, no stained glass, no decoration of any kind, no music, and no priest or minister. Complete silence is maintained until the spirit moves one of the members to rise and speak about the deceased.”
“Huh,” said Horatio.
“I’ve read about that,” said Mrs. Doyle.
“Could I speak?” asked Horatio.
The doctor cast the teenager a baleful look. “As long as it’s inspirational,” he said. “Anyone may speak if the spirit moves them.”
Horatio grinned broadly and Fenimore felt a quiver of fear.
“Well, I’d like to say a thing or two about that mugger,” announced Mrs. Doyle. “I’d like to—”
“Now let’s not get carried away,” warned Dr. Fenimore. “The prime purpose of a Quaker funeral is
“What—?” Horatio looked startled.
“What did you expect to wear to the service,” asked Mrs. Doyle. “Your sweats?”
“Uh...”
“Don’t worry, Rat,” Fenimore intervened. “Just ask your mother what you should wear. She’ll know.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” The boy frowned, beginning to regret his offer to attend.
“Well, I know what I’m wearing,” said Mrs. Doyle. “My new straw hat.” Then, remembering the nature of the occasion, she added quickly, “It’s black.”
“Is that all you’re wealin’?” muttered Horatio.
Feeling it was time to end the conversation, Fenimore suggested they all get back to work.
Meanwhile, Dr. Fenimore decided to spend Wednesday, his day off, visiting Miss Jennings’ home, in hopes he might run into some family members, employees, or neighbors who could throw some light on his patient’s tragic death.
As Fenimore turned his car from the dusty, trash-filled avenue into the cool, shaded driveway, he felt as if he was entering another world. Two cars — Miss Jennings’ gray Ford Escort and a dark blue VW — were already parked in front of the house. Fenimore pulled up behind the VW.
The front door and all the front windows were open (air conditioning was a luxury Miss Jennings had never indulged in), but there was no one in sight. As Fenimore approached the house, a mop was shaken from an upstairs window and he narrowly escaped a shower of dust. Although the door was open, he used the knocker and waited on the stone stoop. Presently he heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs.
A large, elderly black woman appeared, wearing an apron. “Yes, sir?” she asked.
Fenimore suddenly felt awkward. He had not prepared any excuse for coming. On an impulse, he had just come. “I’m — was — Miss Jennings’ physician, Dr. Fenimore, and...”
“Please come in, Doctor,” the woman said. “I’ll tell Miss Stokes you’re here.”
“Miss Stokes?”
“Miss Jennings’ niece. She’s upstairs, going through the books.” The woman was already starting up the stairs.
Fenimore looked around the hall. Like most colonial houses, there was a central hall and staircase, with rooms branching out on either side. He peeked in the room on the left, the parlor, he guessed, and saw furniture shrouded in white sheets. All except the piano, which stood naked to one side.
“Doctor?”
He started and turned. A small, wiry woman, about fifty, in jeans, a sweat shirt, and sneakers held out her hand. Because of the sneakers, he had not heard her coming down the stairs.
“Forgive my intrusion,” he apologized. “I was in the neighborhood [lie number one] and thought I’d stop by and offer my condolences.”
“How kind.” Her smile was forced. “Come sit down.” She led him into the parlor. As she drew open the curtains and slid the sheet cover from the sofa, she explained, “We’re in the throes of clearing out Aunt Martha’s house. She lived here her entire life and although she wasn’t a saver, she still accumulated an amazing number of things. Please sit down.” She indicated the sofa — a stiff Victorian piece covered in worn rose velvet.
When they were seated, Fenimore said, “Your aunt was my patient for many years and my father’s before me. Her violent end was a great shock to me.”
“To us all.” Ms. Stokes caressed the sofa, eyes downcast. “But...” She looked up, “everyone warned her about walking these streets alone.”
“But she was so well known here.”
“True, but after dusk — and that’s when the attack occurred — she was just any elderly person — easy prey for someone looking for quick cash.” She frowned.
Apparently Ms. Stokes did not share her aunt’s fondness for the neighborhood, Fenimore thought.
“I know you have a sideline to your profession, Doctor,” Ms. Stokes said and stared at him. “I can’t help wondering if this call doesn’t have something to do with your other occupation?”
Slightly taken aback, Fenimore said, “Well... I can’t say that I wouldn’t like to see your aunt’s murderer brought to justice.”
Her eyes sparkled dangerously. “So would I. How can I help you?”
Fenimore was about to tell her when a ruddy-faced, gray-haired man in jeans and a T-shirt interrupted them. “Excuse me, Ms. Stokes, but I have those things you sent me for. Shall I put them in the kitchen?”
“Yes, Mike. This is Dr. Fenimore, Aunt Martha’s physician.”
“How do you do. I’ve sat in your waiting room many times,” he said with a smile.
“I recognize you. Miss Jennings’ driver.” Fenimore held out his hand. “I’m so sorry—”
“Yes.” He nodded. “A terrible thing.” Shifting his packages, he left the room quickly.
When they were alone again, Fenimore asked, “Did your aunt have any enemies?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Aunt Martha wasn’t the type to make enemies.”
Fenimore hesitated before his next question, then decided to risk it. “This is a personal question and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to...”
Her eyebrows rose slightly but she said nothing.
“Could you tell me who will profit from your aunt’s death?”
She blinked and said coldly, “That will be common knowledge as soon as the estate is settled.”
“I realize that, but you see, time is of the essence.” He waited.
“Then...” her words came slowly, “you don’t think my aunt’s death was a random mugging?”
“It’s important to look into every possibility.”
“Like on TV?” she said mirthlessly.
“Well...” He smiled.
Unexpectedly, she laughed. “I can tell you that she left me this house and the land around it. And her two employees, Henrietta and Mike, will never have to work again in their lives. So now you have three suspects.” She went back to caressing the sofa. “The bulk of the estate will go to my aunt’s favorite charities.”
Fenimore could detect no bitterness in her tone. “Do you plan to live here?”
“God no!” She gave a harsh laugh. “Fortunately this house is a historic landmark and the city has offered me a handsome sum for it. It will be restored to its former glory and opened to the public as a Heritage Site.”
At this point Mike reappeared in the doorway. “Will you be wanting me for anything else today, Ms. Stokes?”
“No, Mike. But tomorrow morning I could use your help with the books. I can pack them but I need you to carry them downstairs. And of course, you’ll be driving us to the funeral next week?”
“Oh yes, ma’am.” He was about to leave, when Fenimore stopped him.
“Mr.—?”
He turned back. “Mike.”
“Mike — do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Miss Jennings?”
The driver’s eyes widened. “I thought they were after her pocketbook.”
“So you believe it was a random mugging?”
“Sure. What else? We told her over and over not to walk in this neighborhood by herself, but — if you’ll excuse me, ma’am,” he said with a glance at Ms. Stokes, “when it came to some things, your aunt was a very stubborn lady.”
“Yes, Mike, I know,” she said sadly.
“We all loved her,” Mike went on, “but she had a will of her own.” He looked again at Ms. Stokes for confirmation.
Ms. Stokes smiled slightly and nodded. “Mike is right. My aunt did not listen to advice when it didn’t suit her.”
“I’ll be going then,” Mike said. “Nice to meet you, Doctor.”
As soon as he left, Fenimore asked, “How long has Mike been in your aunt’s employ?”
“Oh, goodness. Forever. I think he was in his twenties when he came to work for her.”
“And Henrietta?”
“She’s been with my aunt for as long as I can remember.”
“Two trusted family servants.”
“Absolutely.”
“Did they know about your aunt’s bequests?”
“I’m sure they expected her to leave them something, but I doubt if they knew the exact amount. Even I didn’t know that, and I was quite surprised by her generosity.”
For the first time Fenimore detected a slight note of disapproval. “Could I have a word with Henrietta before I leave?”
“Certainly.” She went into the hall and called the housekeeper.
The woman came from the kitchen, drying her hands. Her face showed traces of weeping.
“Are you all right, Henrietta?” Ms. Stokes looked concerned.
“Yes, ma’am.” She sniffed. “I just came on that teapot Miss Jennings was so fond of and...”
Ms. Stokes put her arm around the black woman. “I know this sorting out of her belongings is very hard on all of us. Dr. Fenimore would like to speak to you, if you feel up to it.”
She wiped her eyes and managed a smile.
“I won’t keep you. I just wondered if you knew if Miss Jennings had any enemies?”
Her mouth fell open.
“I know she wasn’t the type of person to have enemies, but she was active in the neighborhood, helping the high school, sponsoring a park, and creating a summer camp. There are always objections to major renovations of this kind. She must have stepped on a few toes.”
“If she did, I never heard of it,” Henrietta said defiantly. “That woman did nothing but good from the day she was born. You ask anybody around here and they’ll tell you the same.”
“That’s quite an epitaph.”
“Pardon me?”
“Many people would like to have such words said about them,” he explained.
“Well, it’s the truth.” Henrietta showed signs of starting to weep again.
Ms. Stokes patted her arm. “There, there.”
“She treated me just like family. Mike too. She spoke to us with ‘thees’ and ‘thys,’ you know how the Quakers do.” She looked at Ms. Stokes, who nodded in return. “In the old days, they talked like that to everybody, but nowadays they only use it with family. Right, Miss Stokes?”
Again, she nodded. “But Miss Jennings always talked that way to Mike and me.”
“I see.” Fenimore rose and took her hand. “You’ve been a great help. I sympathize with your loss.”
“Thank you, sir.” She swallowed hard and went back to the kitchen.
“Do you still think my aunt’s murder was an
Fenimore met her gaze. “I don’t know what to think.”
“Next I suppose you’ll be asking for our alibis?”
“Actually—”
“I was playing tennis at the Cricket Club with Jean Cummings,” she snapped.
“And her phone number?”
She shook her head in disbelief, but gave it to him.
“And what about Mike? It would help if you could tell me where he was and I won’t have to track him down.”
“He always stops by Farley’s Tavern in Mount Airy for a few before going home. He’s a regular there and I’m sure the bartender can vouch for him.”
“Thank you. That’s a big help.”
Ms. Stokes looked as if she was sorry she had been a help. He made a note to stop by Farley’s on his way home. “Do you know where Henrietta was at the time?”
“You can ask her yourself.” She went into the hall and called the housekeeper.
When she appeared, Fenimore said, “Could you tell me where you were when Miss Jennings was murdered?”
The woman wrung her hands. “Right here, in this house. She went to the deli to get some milk. I wanted to go for her, but she said, ‘No, Hen, thee’s worked hard all day and I need the exercise.’ And... and that’s the last I saw of her.”
“Did you wait for her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yes, and I was still here when the police came, and...” Her lip quivered.
“That’s enough,” Ms. Stokes interrupted. “I’m sure Dr. Fenimore can get all these details from the police.” She turned on him. “The police seemed satisfied that my aunt was the victim of a random mugging, Doctor. They haven’t paid us any visits since their initial one.”
“That’s true. So you have nothing to worry about, Ms. Stokes. I’ve taken far too much of your time. Thank you for putting up with me.” He left her in the gloomy parlor and headed for the front door.
As soon as he was in the car he drew out his cell phone and called Jean Cummings. The line was busy. A coincidence? Perhaps.
Farley’s was empty except for one man seated at the bar nursing a beer. The bartender was polishing glasses while making desultory talk with his single customer. His face brightened when he saw Fenimore. Another customer? Fenimore introduced himself and was about to ask him if he remembered Mike being here on the night of the murder and, to his horror, realized he didn’t know the driver’s last name. Haltingly, he described him.
“Oh, yeah. Mike was here. He never misses a night. I can set my watch by him. Always comes in at a quarter to six.” He smiled. “The day Mike don’t show up, I’ll know the world’s ended.”
“And when does he leave?”
“Now that’s another story. I don’t keep tabs on my customers. Well, I do, as far as their bill’s concerned.” He laughed. “But I don’t watch them every minute. They come and go, sometimes just to the men’s.”
“That’d be a job!” The single customer laughed.
Fenimore looked at him. “Do you know Mike?”
“Oh, sure. Everybody knows Mike.”
“Do you remember him here last Wednesday night?”
“He must have been. I’d have remembered if he
“Uh, may I use your facility?” Fenimore asked.
“Be my guest.” The bartender nodded toward the back.
The men’s room was surprisingly clean and smelled strongly of disinfectant. Fenimore looked around for another exit. There was only one door, the one he had entered by, but there was a window. He grabbed the sash and pushed it up easily. There was plenty of room for a man to climb out into the alley that led to the street. Thoughtfully, he closed the window.
The day of the funeral was bright and warm. Mrs. Doyle arrived at the office looking very stylish in her new black straw hat. Horatio, thanks to his mother, was wearing a shirt and tie.
“Lord almighty!” Mrs. Doyle pressed her hand to her heart. “I never thought I’d see the day.”
Horatio sent her his most evil look.
The doctor was the last to arrive. He came trotting down the stairs (he lived above the office) in his best navy-blue suit, white shirt, and regimental striped tie. “Ready?” He politely avoided commenting on the dress of either of his employees, and they set off in the suffocating heat.
The meetinghouse, with its thick stone walls, was surprisingly cool despite the lack of air conditioning. And the dark green blinds that covered the upper half of the windows reduced the brazen sun to a mellow glow. The large room was completely unadorned, as the doctor had warned. The only furnishings were the rows of plain wooden benches, many of which were already filled.
Mrs. Doyle settled in on one side of the doctor and Horatio sat on the other. The latter looked around in astonishment at the room. No stained glass, no candles, no crosses. The place where the altar should have been was filled by three tiers of benches.
“That’s where the elders sit,” Fenimore whispered.
“The what?”
“The people who have been members of the meeting the longest,” he explained.
“Oh.”
Just then, Ms. Stokes, Henrietta, and Mike entered, and took their places in the front row. When they were seated, a young man rose and quietly closed the doors. All whispering and rustling instantly ceased and a complete silence fell upon the gathering.
Mrs. Doyle felt ill at ease with the silence at first, but soon, out of habit, began to say her rosary softly to herself. Rat tapped his foot on the bar of the bench in front of him, until Fenimore placed a restraining hand on his knee. Fenimore closed his eyes and thought about Miss Jennings and her good deeds. But gradually his thoughts strayed to Ms. Stokes, Henrietta, and Mike, wondering if they were physically capable of smashing in someone’s skull. Mike was a sturdy fellow who looked in good shape, despite his sixty-some years; Henrietta was large, with a heavy build, and muscles well toned from years of housework; and Ms. Stokes, although small in stature, looked very fit. She probably played tennis and worked out several times a week.
Minutes passed, when suddenly a man’s voice rose at the back of the room. He spoke about Miss Jennings’ good works, and told some anecdotes about her childhood that made even the sternest elder on the facing bench smile. He ended with the thought that we should all be grateful to have known such a rare person.
More silence descended.
At intervals, others rose and said a few words, usually relating an experience they had shared with the deceased — some serious, others evoking gentle laughter. At one point, a tall black woman rose and in a clear, rich voice said, “I just want to say I’ve seen in the paper that the police think Miss Jennings was killed by someone in the neighborhood—” There was a general intake of breath throughout the room. “And I want to say, I don’t believe it. We loved Miss Jennings. She was a good woman.” And she sat down. Some people were so startled by this statement, they turned in their seats to see who had spoken — a curiosity Quakers rarely indulged.
Fenimore was just recovering from the shock of this unusual declaration, when he felt a stirring on his left. To his horror, Horatio was getting to his feet. The doctor resisted an impulse to pull him down and held his breath.
After a prolonged clearing of his throat, Horatio’s young voice rang out. “I just want to say that Miss Jennings was a nice woman. She really cared about people. She even cared about me! And I’m sorry she got offed... er... that she’s gone.” He sat down.
A few people looked his way and several women smiled. An elderly man stood up and in a wavering voice said, “I think this young man has put it very well. Martha Jennings did care about other people — and she showed her caring through her good works. She will be sorely missed.”
A short silence followed this speech, then the people on the facing bench leaned toward one another and shook hands, the signal that the meeting was over.
Someone announced that the burial would take place in the adjoining cemetery immediately after the meeting and anyone who wished to attend was welcome.
Fenimore told his companions to wait for him at the car and sought out the black woman who had spoken. He spied her standing alone on the brick walkway surrounding the meetinghouse. She was staring at the graveyard with its plain white headstones. He hurried over to her. “Excuse me,” he said, “I’m an old friend of Miss Jennings and I was interested in what you had to say in there.”
Almost a head taller than the doctor, the woman looked down at him. Statuesque, Fenimore would have described her. “What makes you think Miss Jennings wasn’t the victim of a random mugging?”
She frowned and bit her lip.
“Andrew Fenimore.” He offered his hand. “I was Miss Jennings’ physician.”
Her face relaxed slightly. Other people had come outside and were gathered on the path, talking in low tones. “Rose Walker,” she said, accepting his hand. Glancing over her shoulder, she said, “Could we go somewhere more private?”
He led her to a wrought-iron bench under a tree, away from the crowd. When they were seated, she said in a low tone, “I was a witness.”
Fenimore sat up. “But you didn’t come forward!”
She drew back, her eyes narrowing. “I have a family.”
Fenimore nodded. Reprisals in the form of beatings and even death were not uncommon in her neighborhood.
“But I couldn’t stand all those wh—” she caught herself, “people thinking one of us had hurt Miss Jennings.” She raised her chin and her mouth was set.
“What did you see?” Fenimore asked gently.
“It’s not what I saw, it’s what I heard.”
“Go on.”
She glanced around, making sure no one was within hearing, before she spoke. “The mugger’s face was hidden by a scarf. I couldn’t even tell if they were a man or woman. But after the first blow Miss Jennings turned and seemed to recognize them, because she said, very clear, in a surprised voice, ‘Does thee murder?’ ”
Fenimore drew a deep breath. “Are you sure she said ‘thee’?”
“Oh yes, because it struck me as strange.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“I don’t know, because I ran to get help.” She gave a deep sigh. “But by the time I got back, it was too late.”
“Can you describe the mugger in more detail? Size? Clothes...?”
“No. It was getting dark. And they were bent over when they struck her... no, I couldn’t judge their size.”
“What about the voice? Male or female?”
“They didn’t speak. Wait a minute...” She stared at Fenimore. “I saw their watch. As they raised their hand, their sleeve slid back and the watch was caught in the light of the street lamp...”
“Yes?”
“It was a man’s watch.”
Fenimore closed his eyes. When he opened them, Rose was walking away.
He looked across the drive at the graveyard. A mountain of earth stood at some distance from the hole and a small circle of people had gathered. Fenimore tried to make them out. Ms. Stokes, her head bowed, Henrietta, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat — and Mike.
Fenimore waited until the simple ceremony had been performed and the small group broke up. One by one the mourners turned and came across the grass, stepping carefully between the headstones. Mike was in the lead. Slowly Fenimore moved forward to greet him.
He offered his condolences, and they said how nice it was for him to come.
“And who was that delightful young man who spoke so beautifully?” asked Ms. Stokes.
Fenimore told her. His office assistant. Then he said, “I must be off. Still have my hospital rounds. By the way, what time is it?”
Eager to help, all three looked at their watches. Mike pulled out a large pocket watch on a silver chain. “Belonged to my dad, and his dad before him,” he said. Henrietta glanced at the delicate watch on her sturdy wrist. And Ms. Stokes let the sleeve of her jacket fall back so she could see her watch — a masculine variety with a wide elastic band and broad face. Catching Fenimore’s expression, she laughed and said, “I lost my watch about a year ago. My husband lent me his and I liked it so much I kept it.”
Over her shoulder, Fenimore saw Horatio and Mrs. Doyle waving from the car. They were getting restless. A pity, because it was going to be a long afternoon.
Restraint
by Alison Gaylin
When the woman who killed Kevin Murphy’s daughter walked into Cumberland I Farms to pay for her gas, the first thing Kevin noticed about her was the way she crumpled her money.
There were a lot of other things to notice — the small, smooth hands, the neatly trimmed pink nails that reminded Kevin, briefly, of the polished conch shell he had bought for his ex-wife Candace during a trip to Jamaica. There were the thick blond streaks in the brown hair, the pale lipstick and the pastel clothes and the golden summer tan — all new things. All attempts, no doubt, to soften the hard angles, to make her appear sweeter, to make Kevin, to make
Attempts to hide what she really was.
Above all, there was the fact that it was
Three years and then this. The waiting over. The moment here. His daughter’s murderer standing over him and saying, “Thirty-five on pump three,” and yet all he bothered to see was the money... A twenty. A ten. A five. Looked like she’d dug them out of the garbage, blown her nose in them, balled them up and driven her car over them a few times before finally throwing them back into her smudged and overstuffed wallet.
“Thank you,” the voice said.
Kevin just nodded. He couldn’t lift his gaze from the counter...
...until Chuy glanced up from the
Kevin’s head snapped up. The glass door drifted shut behind her. He saw the blond streaks in the brown hair, the jeans and the pale pink T-shirt and the tanned skin — all that artifice and yet still he knew, even from the back, even through the thick glass, he knew.
When he walked back in, he noticed Chuy staring at him. “Tried to catch her,” Kevin said. “She paid too much.”
“Oh,” said Chuy. “I thought you wanted her digits.”
“Digits?”
“Bony booty call.” Chuy grinned. “Thought maybe you like ’em anorexic.”
Kevin stared at his manager. His face felt hot, and so he turned away. He didn’t want Chuy to see his skin reddening.
“Dude, I was just kidding.”
Kevin couldn’t look at him. He stared at the floor. “I don’t like them that way,” he said. “I don’t like them that way at all.”
Her name was Sarah Jane Ledbetter. Kevin was sure she never used her middle name, but he always did, on paper and in his thoughts. There was something comforting in all three names. The completeness of it, as if she were already dead.
A year after she killed Kevin’s daughter, Sarah Jane Ledbetter had left her job. She had packed up her belongings and sold her large, comfortable house in Larchmont and moved three hundred miles north to her second home — a lake house, Kevin had heard, in the mountains near Pinekill.
“I’m glad she’s gone,” Candace had said, late one night in the quiet of their bed.
“Who?”
“You know. Ledbetter.”
Kevin switched on the light to see Candace turned away from him, as she often was during the year following their daughter’s death. He watched his wife for a long time — the soft honey hair, the round shoulders moving with her breathing.
“Aren’t you glad she’s gone, Kev?” she said, a little louder.
“She’s not gone,” he said. “Not yet.”
Three weeks later, Candace filed for divorce.
Patience was one virtue that Kevin had always possessed. In his previous life, he had supported his family as a food stylist and photographer, but it was in nature photography — his passion — where that patience came into play. Kevin could watch a robin’s nest for hours, waiting for the sun to hit the pale blue eggs in a way that made them glow. He could sit inches away from a mother deer with her fawns, perfectly still, do it long enough for them to think of him as something inanimate, something safe. Once, in the woods surrounding the White Plains Reservoir, he’d experienced such a reward — the mother gently licking pollen from the face of the fawn. The look in the black eyes — so soft, so protective.
Kevin stopped taking his nature photos after his daughter’s murder. He no longer found joy in watching things. Not after all those weeks of watching Rachel in the hospital bed, her little chest rising and falling at the whim of the ventilator. A machine doing Rachel’s breathing, until even the machine couldn’t do it anymore and her heart stopped and her brain stopped and there was nothing left to watch. No more Rachel. Nothing to love.
Kevin tried with Candace. He did. But as much as he wanted his wife to feel cherished, that part of him had stopped breathing along with his daughter. “Let it go, Kev,” Candace would say. “Let it go and just grieve with me.”
But Kevin couldn’t. Not yet. All he wanted was justice, and yet no one wanted to get it for him — not the police, not those lawyers, not even Candace.
He had to go out and get it for himself.
After Candace left him, Kevin sold his photography business. He let his few remaining clients know that he was retiring. “I’m moving upstate,” he said. He was vague about it, though his plan was not vague at all.
Kevin found a six-room cottage on the outskirts of Pinekill with three acres of land and a clean, dry cellar. He bought it upfront, paid in cash.
He located the only gas station within a twenty-mile radius of Pinekill, got a job there. With his usual patience and competence, he made the improvements on the cottage that needed to be made. And then, without joy, Kevin watched. For three years, going home every night to his quiet cottage, he would unlock the door to the cellar. He would stare into its emptiness. He would wait.
“You know why marriage doesn’t work?” Chuy said to Kevin while he was closing out the cash register.
Kevin was trying to add up the bills and get them into the lockbox as fast as he could, so he could go home and put his plan into action. The last thing he needed was Chuy waxing poetic on marriage when, far as Kevin knew, Chuy’s longest relationship had lasted one and a half weeks, with a Poughkeepsie cocktail waitress he affectionately referred to as The Perfect Rack. Still, he was Kevin’s boss and so Kevin sighed and put down the stack of twenties he’d been counting and looked at Chuy, sitting on the stool the shorter clerks used to reach the chewing tobacco,
“Men marry women hoping that they will not change. Women marry men hoping that they will change. Everyone’s disappointed.”
Kevin looked at him. “That’s very insightful, Chuy.” He meant it.
Chuy nodded. “Vaughn.”
“Excuse me?”
“Vince Vaughn.” He thumped his hand against the newspaper.
“The actor?”
“Bet your ass, the actor. He says that right here in this article. Freakin’ genius. Knows marriage, knows life... When I get famous, you know who’s going to play me in the movie?”
“Vaughn?”
“Bet your ass.” He held up the newspaper so Kevin could see the page-sized article he’d been reading — huge picture of the actor on the red carpet at the premiere of his latest film, grinning beneath the thick black headline: I VAUGHN TO TELL YOU. “Vince freakin’ Vaughn.”
Kevin went back to the twenties. Near the bottom of the stack, he got to the crumpled twenty — her twenty — and his breath caught.
When Kevin had finished counting the money, Chuy closed the paper and cleared his throat. “Hey, uh...”
“Yes, Chuy?”
“Nothing. Just...”
“What?”
“Your ex-wife. I bet she wasn’t a skank.”
Kevin looked at him. “No. She was not.”
“Didn’t think so. You seem like a classy dude. I bet you had a nice house too.”
“It was.”
“Did you have any kids?”
“Where is this leading?”
“I guess I’m just... just wondering why you decided to leave all that. Pretty wife, nice house in the ’burbs. If I had a shot like that, I don’t think I’d ever let it go.”
Kevin slipped the locked metal box into the wall safe and worked the combination. “Okay,” he said. “All done.”
“Sorry. I know you don’t like to talk about personal stuff. It’s just...”
“I changed, Chuy. My wife didn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Not to knock Vaughn or anything. That’s just the way it went.” On his way to the door, he checked his wallet, made sure the license-plate number was inside.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Kevin turned to see the manager pointing at the Hostess display. He put on a smile. “Right.” He took a package of Twinkies from the display, jammed them into his jacket pocket. “My daily treat.”
“Couldn’t imagine you leaving here without taking a Twinkie or a Yodel or whatever.”
Kevin shrugged. “Makes me happy.”
“Bet that’s your only vice, right?” Chuy said. “Bet you don’t drink or smoke weed or screw around or nothing.”
Kevin nodded. “Yep. That’s pretty much it.”
“See? Three years, you tell me jack about yourself. But still, I
“You are very perceptive,” he said. “See you tomorrow, Chuy”
“See ya, George.”
Kevin pushed open the glass door. As he got into his car, he glanced back and saw the manager, smiling after him as he left. “Perceptive,” he said.
Sarah Jane Ledbetter had never apologized. Dr. Sheldon, the therapist Candace had forced him into seeing during Rachel’s final months of life, would mention this fact to Kevin frequently during their sessions, often in the form of a probing question:
Sixteen years old, Rachel had a voice like powdery snow under the soles of your boots. So soft and frail that you could barely hear it
Dr. Sheldon was fond of imaginary scenarios. “Put yourself in a room with Miss Ledbetter,” he said during a later session. “What would you do?”
Kevin hadn’t even bothered thinking about it. “Kill her.”
He remembered that now, as he climbed down the cellar stairs, taking in all of his home improvements, making sure everything was where it needed to be. Earlier tonight, when he’d first come home, he’d typed the license-plate number into the search bar of the online service he’d been subscribing to for the past three years, and watched all the information from Sarah Jane Ledbetter’s driver’s license materialize on the computer screen. As it turned out, she lived less than twenty minutes away.
Killing would be too quick. Kevin had just unlocked the cell he’d built. He was gripping the metal bars with both hands, testing their strength. There was a mattress on the floor, a porcelain sink and a bedpan. Outside the bars, across the room, he’d affixed two huge, full-length mirrors to the wall so that, inside the cell, there was no avoiding one’s own reflection.
Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. He felt hot tears seeping out of the corners. He gripped the metal bars, pressed his face into them, trying to see only blackness, but the image stayed in his head. Rachel at fourteen. The freckles. The ponytail. The wide-open smile...
Kevin was sobbing now, breathing words into the cold bars. “Please don’t go to that tryout. Please, Rachel. Please, honey. Please stay home with Mom and me. Please stay home, you’re too good, Rachel. You’re too good to leave us, honey, please, please...”
The police didn’t care. The lawyers didn’t care. Nobody cared that Sarah Jane Ledbetter had taken Kevin’s daughter. She’d taken Kevin’s only child and made her into a ghost.
Kevin slammed the cell door closed. The metal clanged and echoed. He dragged his hand across his wet face and took a deep, shaking breath, and then he left the basement fast, taking the stairs two at a time. After printing out the map he’d made online, Kevin went into his garage, where he pulled two spools of black duct tape from his toolbox, as well as a length of thick rope and a small burlap sack that used to hold Florida tangerines and still smelled of them. He then packed all the things into a large black duffel that he’d purchased at the same time as this house.
When he threw it all into his car and started driving, the citrus scent was thick in the air — strange and fresh and hopeful. It reminded Kevin of a family vacation, taken years ago and long since forgotten.
“I sympathize with you, Mr. and Mrs. Murphy. I really do,” the last lawyer had said. “But I’m sorry... you don’t have a case.”
She worked for a firm that Kevin had seen advertised during one of the daytime soap operas. “Ambulance chasers,” Candace had called the firm, yet she’d gone with Kevin anyway because he’d assured her that this attorney visit would be their last.
“What do you mean?” Kevin had asked the lawyer. “The woman killed our daughter. Of course we have a case.”
“Not technically. Not in the eyes of the law.”
Kevin felt Candace’s hand gripping his... a gesture not so much supportive as restraining. “What do you mean?” he said again.
The attorney leaned forward. She wore a lot of pancake makeup, a shade darker than it should have been. Under the bright office lights, it looked like paint on a pocked wall. She was wearing eye shadow the color of a fly’s body, and her lips were a deep, angry red. It struck Kevin that this lawyer went through the day wearing a mask, a disguise. How could he trust anyone like that?
“Miss Ledbetter,” she said carefully, “is a very insensitive woman...”
“She’s a lot more than that.”
“...but she isn’t a criminal.”
“She’s a
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Kevin turned to Candace. She stared straight ahead. “Maybe Rachel’s death was our fault,” she said, very quietly. “Ever think of that, Kevin?”
Sarah Jane Ledbetter’s house was much smaller than the one she’d owned in Larchmont. A raised ranch, they called it — a top-heavy cottage with big windows staring awkwardly out of a bloated second story, the smaller story on the bottom shouldering all the weight.
It was one of a handful of houses rimming a small lake. Thick hedges bounded her house, shielding her from the neighbors. A vacation home, with privacy. There was a light on in one of the big windows, her Ford Explorer in the driveway, but the houses on either side of hers were completely dark. The days were still warm, but it was September, after all, and there was a very good chance her neighbors had closed up their houses for the season.
Still, Kevin didn’t want to take any chances. It was ten P.M. The neighbors could be home and asleep.
After he’d pulled in behind the Ford Explorer and slid the duffel out of the front seat, he was careful to close his car door very quietly, to walk up the brick pathway that led to her house with the same soft step he used to employ in his nature photography. He glanced at the property as he walked. The small lawn was cut short and bristly. There were sturdy shrubs pressing into the house, but no flowers planted anywhere — nothing that needed nurturing.
He unzipped the duffel bag, placed it next to him on the front step, and rang the doorbell. He hadn’t intended to do this. The one part of the plan he’d yet to come up with was how to get her to open the door, and he had been hoping to come up with an idea first. Too late now.
Kevin heard footsteps approaching the door. He was aware of her studying him through the peephole and raised a hand in a weak wave. He had grown a thick beard since she left town and much of his hair had gone gray. He used to dress differently back then too. The clothes he wore under his new name of George Fisk were all dark and tired-looking. Nondescript. Would she remember?
The door opened, and Sarah Jane Ledbetter was standing in front of him. She was still wearing the pink T-shirt and jeans, and this close, he could see how her collarbones pressed against the cotton, how the sleeves swirled around her bony arms without touching them. The eyes were huge and black in the gaunt face, and they carried within them a hint of recognition. Kevin thought,
“What did I leave?” Sarah Jane Ledbetter said.
“What?”
“You’re from Cumberland Farms. I saw you there today. Did I leave something behind?”
“Then why are you here?”
Kevin took a breath. “Rachel Murphy.”
“Who?”
Kevin’s jaw tightened. He felt his right hand balling into a fist
Sarah Jane Ledbetter took a step back. She put her hands on her bony hips and cocked her head to one side and peered at Kevin, as if he’d just told her a joke she didn’t get, and she was trying to decide whether or not to admit it.
“She tried out for cheerleading.”
Her eyes went flat.
The words pushed into his ears like broken glass. Kevin punched her in the stomach. She doubled over, gasping, and Kevin punched her again. He hadn’t intended to do this. He’d never hit a woman before, but she wasn’t a woman, was she? She wasn’t even a human being.
Ledbetter wheezed. Kevin yanked the small burlap sack out of the duffel and threw it over her head, binding the bottom with duct tape. He duct-taped her hands behind her back and pushed her like a prisoner to the car. She’d found her voice by now, but the thick burlap muffled her screams. Once he’d thrown her in the trunk and gotten it closed, Kevin stood there behind his car for several seconds, listening to the quiet.
It wasn’t until he was driving home that, for the first time in years, Kevin allowed himself to think of that whole, awful day. He stared ahead at the empty road, glowing beneath the spotlight of a nearly full moon. He kept both hands on the wheel and he recalled that day, the day of cheerleader tryouts, the day that Sarah Jane Ledbetter had killed his daughter. All of it. And unlike any other time that he’d recounted that day, Kevin’s eyes stayed dry.
There was a reason for this, Kevin knew. His plan was working. His daughter’s murderer was in the trunk of his car, and the night was clear and cool and beautiful, a night to be photographed. A night to remember.
The Larchmont High gym had held in it the same smell as Kevin’s old high-school gym — antiseptic, sneaker soles, basketball rubber, sweat. It had been a good smell for Kevin in the past. He’d never been a gloating jock but he’d always been good at sports and for Kevin, the gym had been a place to escape that feeling he always had in high school, that sense of being continuously tested — by teachers, by girls...
No more.
“Not everyone can make the cheerleading squad, Mr. Murphy.” The coach’s voice had echoed against the gym walls — the two of them here alone at seven P.M., four hours after tryouts.
“I understand that.”
“Do you?”
“What I don’t understand is why you would want to hurt a child.”
“She’s not a child. She’s fourteen years old, and if she’s going to live in this world, she’s going to have to toughen up.”
“She’s locked in her room, crying. She won’t come out. She won’t speak to me. And then my wife... she told me what you said to Rachel.”
“Mr. Murphy. Your daughter didn’t make the cut. She asked why and I told her.”
“It was cruel.”
“It was the truth.”
“You told a sensitive fourteen-year-old girl that she’s fat. Don’t you understand that children take these things to heart? She won’t eat dinner, Coach Ledbetter. She won’t—”
“I think we’re through now, Mr. Murphy.” Coach Sarah Jane Ledbetter had stood up, her eyes trained on him. “Just so you know. I’m not naturally thin. I watch what I eat. Exercise. If your daughter skips a fattening dinner one night, I don’t see where that’s such a bad thing.” She’d then turned and left the gym, her sneakers squeaking as they hit the gleaming floor. It was the last conversation they ever had.
“You’re crazy,” Sarah Jane Ledbetter said. To Kevin, it felt ironic. She was on the mattress in Kevin’s homemade cell, forced into a sitting position with the burlap sack still over her head. If anyone looked crazy, she did, though Kevin didn’t bother pointing that out. Sarah Jane Ledbetter had stopped screaming around ten minutes ago, once Kevin had gotten her down the stairs, once he’d let her know that he had equipped the whole space with soundproofing tiles. “What is wrong with you?” she said. “Why can’t you just let it go? I didn’t kill your daughter.”
“Do you remember when we spoke in the gym?”
She said nothing. The burlap fluttered with her heavy breath.
“You told me that if Rachel missed a dinner, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”
“Yes,” she said. “So?”
“Rachel was a sensitive girl. Cheerleading was supposed to give her confidence. Instead you... you stripped it from her. You killed her spirit.”
“It’s a hard world. If I didn’t let her know, then someone else would have.”
“Let her know what? That she didn’t meet your ridiculous physical standards?”
“If your daughter took constructive criticism too seriously, then that isn’t my fault.”
“
“I told the truth.”
“She missed that dinner. She missed every dinner, every meal. After a year she stopped eating altogether. By the time we realized it, she was... We took her to therapy, to nutritionists, brain specialists, eating coaches... Nothing worked. Her hair fell out, her teeth. By the time she was sixteen years old, she weighed sixty-eight pounds. She went into a coma. She died five months before her seventeenth birthday...” Kevin felt a rush of heat into his eyes, his arms, his fists, as if all the hate in his body — endless reserves of it — was racing to the surface, racing there to beat these awful truths. He wanted to sock Ledbetter in the face. He wanted to break her jaw, to stop her from talking forever. But he took a step back, breathed. She would live down here for a very long time, but he would never touch her again. That was part of the plan. He had to stick to the plan.
“I’m not naturally thin,” she was saying, her voice a growl under the burlap. “I watch myself. I have discipline. I have restraint...”
Back at Cumberland Farms, Kevin had, at duty’s urging, taken a Twinkie from the Hostess display. It was still in his pocket — a keepsake from an earlier time of day. As Sarah Jane Ledbetter continued to talk — about diet and exercise, about the power of self-control — Kevin removed the Twinkie from his pocket. He placed it atop the pile that lined the cell — three years’ worth of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Yodels, Cupcakes, Snowballs, Ring Dings, fruit pies, Little Debbie cakes and Streusel Swirls and countless other prepackaged desserts, not to mention cases and cases of Coke and orange soda, all of it filled with preservatives, with empty calories and refined sugar and synthetic fluff. Food that fattened but didn’t nurture. Food that never went bad.
“What are you going to do to me?” Sarah Jane Ledbetter said.
Kevin undid the duct tape around her hands. He removed the sack from her head and exited the cell, locking it as she stood there, gaping at her surroundings.
“Why... why did you put all this... stuff in here with me?”
Kevin looked at her. “Because you aren’t naturally thin. And eventually, you will get hungry.”
Ledbetter stared at him, her eyes widening, changing. She understood now, Kevin saw. She knew exactly what would happen to her in a week, in a month, in a year. She caught sight of the two enormous mirrors across the room and shrieked, “You can’t do this!”
“See you in two years.”
Kevin turned away from her and headed for the cellar stairs, his shoes scuffing the concrete floor, her screams hurtling after him, desperate as the screams of a child. “You’re a monster! You’re insane! You can’t do this to me, I’ll kill you!”
Kevin climbed the stairs one by one, hoping that his home improvements had worked. She was much louder than he thought she’d be — all that sound coming out of such a spindly body. Who would have thought?
The instant he closed and locked the door, though, the screams evaporated into the soundproofing tiles.
Alternative Medicine
by Marilyn Todd
The Jacket Blurbs Puzzle
by Jon L. Breen
Ask not my words for jacket flaps,
Flapping in the breeze;
I’d rather recite urban raps
In my BVDs.
In my life I’ve had my claps,
Although I know I’ve sinned,
But writing blurbs for jacket flaps
Is public breaking wind.
The Tuesday before the murder at Worden University’s Conference on Bestselling Fiction found Stephen Fenbush in the campus bookstore browsing among a display of the conferees’ books. It was a crisp I December morning, with a prospect of snow for the weekend, and Stephen was so happily settled into his position as Film Critic in Residence, he had begun to wish the appointment lasted more than one year.
Of the five participants in the bestseller conference, two were members of the Worden faculty: the English Department’s Cosmo McDougall, who had made the
A young female student was systematically picking up a book from each pile, reading from a few pages at random, making disparaging clucks and disdainful gasps. Finally, she looked up and said to Stephen, “They’re all terrible, aren’t they? Can’t anybody on the bestseller list write at all?”
“Oh, most of them can,” Stephen said with the wisdom of almost four decades on earth. “But it’s not a requirement.”
“You’re Mr. Fenbush, aren’t you? The film critic?”
“Guilty.”
“Hi, I’m Willy Ames. That’s short for Williametta.” She offered a hand for shaking. “I’m looking forward to attending your silent-classics series. I’m so glad you’re not doing only the comedies, though some would say that is a brave decision.”
“Or a foolhardy one,” Stephen said with a smile.
“I adore old films. But what a dismal life you must lead having to watch all those horrible new Hollywood atrocities.”
“Well, at least they don’t take as long as reading a bestseller.”
“Maybe. But I wouldn’t have to put in more than a couple of hours on any of these.”
“Speed reader?”
She shook her head. “Speed skimmer, speed skipper, speed gagger.”
Willy was dressed in the drabbest possible student attire, faded baggy jeans, oversize gray sweatshirt, worn and aged sneakers. She had a practical short haircut but a lovely face free of makeup and apparent piercings.
“I’m making a study of these,” Willy said, casting a hand over the display of blockbusters. “I should probably read a few all the way through before this weekend, shouldn’t I?”
“Why?” Stephen said. “I mean, if you have such a low opinion of them.”
“I need to figure out the formula. I’m going to write one to help finance graduate school.”
“You think it’s that easy?”
“It worked for Michael Crichton, didn’t it? And he was Tolstoy compared to most of these people. It must be a real effort to write this badly. I must ask Professor McDougall how he does it.”
“I’d be careful how I phrased that, if you do,” Stephen said.
“Oh yes, I can be tactful if I try very, very hard.”
“Well,” Stephen said, glancing at his watch, “I’m late for a meeting. Good luck with your writing, and I’ll see you at the silents program.”
“Where is your meeting, Mr. Fenbush?”
“Over in the library.”
She replaced the book she had been holding and said, “I’m going that way. My next class is in Lyden Hall. May I walk with you?”
“Ah, sure.”
She donned a bulky anorak from the coat rack by the door, and they set off across the picturesque campus together. Willy was quiet for around thirty seconds. Then she looked over at Stephen and said, “I know how I seem to you. The naivete and arrogance of youth personified, isn’t that right?”
“There are nicer words for it.”
“I prefer accurate to nice. Usually. Is it true Professor McDougall and Professor Bosworth hate each other?”
“What?”
“That’s what I’ve heard. And I noticed on those books by the writers in the bestseller conference that Professor McDougall had a quote on the back recommending every one of them. Except Professor Bosworth’s. They really must hate each other.”
“Look, Willy, I’ve only been on campus a few months, so I’m really not up on faculty relationships. And anyway, I really shouldn’t be exchanging gossip with a student.”
“Oh my God, a student! A different species. Be careful what you say.” She smiled. “But you’re probably wise. If they do hate each other, it may just be that they don’t understand each other. They come from different places, one a literary person and the other a scientist. They haven’t bridged C.P. Snow’s two cultures.”
Stephen was impressed. He wondered how many Worden undergraduates had even heard of C.P. Snow.
“I wish I could know you better,” Willy went on wistfully. “There’s probably a lot you could teach me. Outside of the classroom, I mean.”
Uh-oh. Stephen had already been feeling a sense of alarm to go with the natural male impulses he was working to keep at bay. Now the alarm was getting louder.
Willy read his expression and laughed. “Don’t worry, Mr. Fenbush. I understand how things are. Back in the day, student-teacher relationships were possible, if not exactly encouraged, and both classes of people could benefit from them. But it’s not that way anymore, is it? And anyway, the whole campus knows your heart belongs to Professor Strom.”
“Oh, does it?”
“Absolutely. She talks about you in class.”
“No, she doesn’t,” Stephen said with confidence. He knew Vanessa that well.
“All right, she doesn’t,” Willy admitted. “Don’t mind me. I just like to tease.”
They had arrived at the crossroads, with Lyden Hall to their left and the Chandler Memorial Library to their right. Stephen was both relieved and a little sorry. Willy said, “It’s been fun talking to you, Mr. Fenbush. Will I see you at the bestseller conference?”
“Uh, sure, probably. Good luck with your writing.”
Stephen walked across to the library, pondering how the whole campus could know about his relationship with Vanessa Strom. Hadn’t they been almost absurdly discreet? Ah, well, gossip would find a way.
When he reached the top of the library steps, a fast-moving figure in a white lab coat came storming through the tall doors and plowed into him. The much larger man gripped Stephen by the shoulders just long enough to prevent him from falling, rasped out a barely civil “Excuse me,” and continued on his angry way down the steps. Though they had never met, Stephen recognized Professor Amos Bosworth from a much happier view on the back jacket of his novel.
Just inside the door, Stephen saw the other parties to his meeting, which was more accurately a lunch date. Vanessa Strom, the tall and elegant Professor of English who had occupied much of his time and thoughts since his arrival on campus, was in close conversation with Edie Yamamoto, the petite and energetic collection-development librarian. Stephen had pegged her for a youthful fifty until he found out she was a very youthful sixty.
When she finally looked up and saw him standing there, Vanessa said simply, “Oh, hi, Stephen. Save the smart comments for once. Edie’s had a tough morning.”
“Not really,” Edie said. “It’s infuriating, but it’s funny too.”
“Let’s hear about it,” Stephen demanded. “Something to do with Professor Bosworth, by any chance? He nearly ran over me on his way out.”
“We shouldn’t talk about it here,” said Vanessa.
“
“Yes, but we’re capable of talking quietly. Your voice booms off the four walls.”
The bestseller’s life is not a happy one;
Bookstore signings keep you on the run.
Those first-class flights to twenty cities,
Interviews by TV pretties.
Hotel suites with no vacation,
Women’s club lionization,
Boxed white plonk with writing wannabes,
Whose envy blooms among the canapés.
It feels so good when all the tour is done;
The bestseller’s life is not a happy one.
At a quiet table in the Faculty Club, a bottle of zinfandel at the ready, Edie Yamamoto unburdened.
“It comes down to this,” she said. “University libraries don’t collect schlock fiction.”
Stephen said, “And you told Bosworth that?”
“Of course not. I was very diplomatic. I know how to handle prickly academics. I’ve been dealing with them for almost forty years. But I still provoked him enough for the reaction you saw. He’ll probably complain about me to the Librarian.”
Edie pronounced the capital letter on the word with the faintest of irony. The thirtyish Gillian Godfrey, recently appointed to administer the Chandler Memorial Library and all the satellite collections scattered over Worden’s campus, had decades less experience and probably less librarian smarts than Edie.
“There’s popular fiction and popular fiction,” Edie went on. “Some of it has real literary merit.”
“But not the sort of thing Amos Bosworth hit the jackpot with,” Stephen put in. “I heard somebody describe his book as Tom Clancy with all the military and technological detail but none of the elegant style.”
“That’s lovely,” said Vanessa.
“Anyway” Edie said, “action-adventure in simplistic, flavorless prose has its place, but how could I possibly justify spending the university’s book budget on that kind of thing? I simply couldn’t do it, and I tried to make him understand”
“It’s not as if students who want to read it won’t have a chance,” Stephen mused. “You know the public library’s buying multiple copies. The hardcover’s heavily discounted all over the place. If you have an e-reader, it’s cheaper still. And I imagine he’d rather have the sales, wouldn’t he? Why does he care so much?”
“Prestige?” Edie said with a shrug. “Self-esteem?”
“Wait a minute, though. I’ve seen Cosmo McDougall’s books on your shelves, and he’s about as schlocky as Bosworth.”
“Not quite,” said Vanessa. “Cosmo has a certain saving wit. It’s sort of like he’s saying to the reader, we both know this is junk, but let’s have a good time with it anyway.”
Stephen snorted. “Yes, I know Cosmo’s a friend of yours.”
“No, not at all, though it pays to stay on good terms with all my colleagues. Cosmo can be quite amusing, but there’s a vicious streak there too.”
“Example, please.”
“He does light verse on the side, most of it pretty good but some of it downright cruel. He has a whole sequence of ten jolly poems celebrating jewel thieves, muggers, forgers, insider traders, bunco artists, Ponzi schemers, and so forth. He told me he has an eleventh that was never published for reasons of his own. He found it all very funny in a Thomas De Quincey vein, and I guess it was, but kind of disquieting too.
“Anyway, there’s another difference between Bosworth and McDougall, a big one,” Edie said. “Professor McDougall donates a copy of each new novel as it comes out. If faculty authors donate their books, they are accepted into the collection as a matter of courtesy. But if the faculty member expects us to buy the book, it has to meet the standards of the library’s acquisition policies. Professor Bosworth wants that validation, and he’s not going to get it.”
“There’s still another difference,” Vanessa pointed out. “Cosmo is in the English Department, and he understands the distinction between literature and, uh, what he’s writing. Amos Bosworth is a scientist, and the difference may be lost on him.”
“That’s it exactly. In my first library job, back in the early seventies, there was a physics professor who had heard all the controversy about Philip Roth’s
“You don’t want Amos Bosworth mad at the library,” Stephen said. “He’s too powerful in campus politics.”
Vanessa nodded. “He’s on committees that affect budgetary decisions, building plans, all sorts of things.”
“What’s the book cost anyway, twenty-five bucks? My point is, with the size of the library budget, the expenditure for Bosworth’s book is like filling an eyedropper out of Lake Michigan. Couldn’t you just buy his book?”
“No,” Edie said.
“When you get a book donated, you still spend money to process it, don’t you? So, technically, the library has some outlay even for McDougall’s books.”
“Not my department,” said Edie, “and it doesn’t compromise the integrity of our acquisitions policy. You tell me this, Stephen. If the publisher of
“That’s not the same thing at all.”
“To me, it is exactly the same thing.”
“What Amos’s high dudgeon really comes down to...” Vanessa began.
“Does anybody ever have low dudgeon?” Stephen wondered.
“Yes, Stephen, I have low dudgeon, but it will climb rapidly if you keep interrupting me. Amos Bosworth would probably just donate his book if it weren’t for Cosmo McDougall. They used to be friends.”
“Ah!” said Stephen. “One of your students was just asking me this morning about the rumors those two guys hate each other.”
“It’s more than rumors,” Edie said.
“One of my students?” Vanessa said. “Who?”
“Girl named Williametta Ames. Willy for short.”
“Oh, yes, Willy.” Vanessa’s reaction seemed a little guarded and distant.
“So why do Bosworth and McDougall hate each other?”
“I don’t know that Cosmo hates Amos,” Vanessa said, “but the ill feeling flies the other way pretty strongly. Amos asked Cosmo for a quote for the jacket of his first novel. Cosmo hates to do jacket blurbs and used to have a rule against it, though he’s relented somewhat in the past few years.”
“Those books on display for the conference this weekend all seemed to have McDougall quotes. Except Bosworth’s, I mean.”
“Jackson and Turnbow and Bates are all friends of his,” Edie said. “He twisted their arms to participate in the conference, and the jacket quotes may have been a subtle bribe. I think the librarian had some influence with him.”
“Anyway,” Vanessa continued, “Amos thought Cosmo would give him a quote in the name of friendship and faculty solidarity. And Cosmo did, but... well, let’s just say it’s a good thing Amos figured it out in time. I think I can remember what he said. It has its own built-in mnemonic.” She closed her eyes. “ ‘Prose unrivaled! Rare energy! Cunning reader anxiety production!’ ” She smiled across at Stephen. “What do you think?”
Stephen took out a pen and started scribbling on the paper napkin provided for Faculty Club diners. “Try this one,” he said.
He passed the napkin across to Vanessa, who said, “Yes, he gets it,” and passed it on to Edie.
Stephen had written,
“Stunning
Triumph
In
Nervously
Kinetic
Suspense.”
“I think mine is better,” Stephen said. “STINKS is shorter and punchier than PURE CRAP. But they’re both too easy to solve. To really bring the stunt off, you’d have to hide your negative message cleverly enough to actually get it placed on the jacket but still make it transparent enough that somebody would decipher it when the book came out.”
“If anyone was mean enough to do that,” Vanessa said, “it’d be Cosmo.”
Table talk turned to other matters. After an hour, Edie Yamamoto looked at her watch and said, “I have to get back to work or the librarian will be after my head. Anyway, you two won’t mind if I leave you alone, will you?”
“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “People might talk.” Edie laughed, but Vanessa didn’t seem amused.
When Edie had left, Stephen said, “Okay, out with it.”
“Be careful of that girl,” Vanessa said.
“Who? Edie?”
“No, not Edie! What girl did you just meet today and become besotted over?”
“I didn’t — you mean Willy? I’m not besotted with anybody but you, Professor Strom, dear. And why should I be careful of her? She seemed nice enough to me.”
“Did she really? Stephen, I know all the signs. You’re a man. I’m a woman. I see things about other women that men don’t. She’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Willy the femme fatale?”
“Not fatale maybe, but poisonous nonetheless.”
“Vanessa, you don’t need to be jealous of a student.”
“Jealous of a—? Oh, Stephen, don’t be so tiresome. It’s just that I understand women.”
“I thought you were a feminist. Aren’t women the same as men, obvious physical differences and child-bearing potential apart?”
Vanessa shook her head. “My concept of feminism has always been that a woman should be able to do whatever she wants to do and is capable of doing in life without society putting up artificial barriers of law and gender prejudice to stop her. But I never denied common sense and life experience to claim that men and women think the same or communicate the same or operate the same or always want the same things. And I also understand men a little bit.”
“We’re a lot simpler.”
“Granted. Anyway, be careful of Willy. Yes, she’s brilliant. Yes, she’s charming. Yes, she’s attractive.”
“The way she dresses, she’s doing her best to hide it.”
“If you noticed it, she’s not hiding it all that well, now is she? And that mousy pure student facade makes it all the more dramatic when she chooses to throw it off. Willy is all those things I said, but she’ll manipulate people to get what she wants. Just think over the conversation you had with her. What ploys did she use to try to gain an advantage?”
“She didn’t use any ploys—”
“Think about it. And if you weren’t already involved with a woman as fascinating as I, might you have acted differently in response? Think about that too.”
There once was a writer named Irving,
Whose loyalty to schlock was unswerving.
When a high-brow reviewer
Sent sales down the sewer,
Irving found praise quite unnerving.
Advertising quotes in general were a sore point with Stephen Fenbush, as they are with many critics. Since he tended not to write “selling quotes” in his film reviews, what he said rarely appeared in ads, but when it did, it was too often taken out of context to make him appear to like something he’d actually hated. The film world had so many quote whores — TV movie reviewers, talk-show hosts, starstruck bloggers — that there was always a ready source of hyperbolic raves, however awful the product in question. In perusing ads, the savvy filmgoer would look for quotes from print sources, preferably well-known newspapers and national magazines.
The quotes authors gave each other for jacket blurbs were a different matter: an act of friendship, payback, a calling in of literary markers, a big name’s gesture to help out a neophyte, or, very occasionally, a heartfelt message to the blurbing author’s readers that the book in hand was worth their attention.
That afternoon, Stephen felt himself drawn back to the campus bookstore and the current titles representing the bestselling conferees. He had no interest in the books themselves, only the jacket blurbs. He took out a pad and scribbled down McDougall’s quotes on the books by Jackson, Turnbow, and Bates. On the back jacket of McDougall’s own current offering the laudatory quotes came not from other popular novelists but from famous academics. Stephen recognized two professors of English and one of political science from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, but the fourth name stood out for a couple of reasons: Malcolm Good, USC. Stephen had never heard of this particular professor, which in itself meant nothing, but why was his academic affiliation given with initials instead of being spelled out in full, as was the case with the other blurbers? He assumed Professor Good must be from the University of Southern California, but the initials could equally denote the University of South Carolina. Stephen wrote that one down as well. By now, the store manager was looking at him suspiciously, but after all, he was faculty, damn it.
Other matters claimed his attention — a lecture he needed to prepare on the early films of Alfred Hitchcock, plans for that silent-movie series — and it wasn’t until Saturday night and the murder that he put together a connection of three of the blurbs that he later thought should have been obvious, plus a joke in the fourth blurb that should have been even more obvious.
Six decades of Hollywood history come to vivid life as if on the biggest screen ever to give an audience of fans like me the real compelling truth about a magical industry that can either break your heart or win it.
I don’t mean to dis any of the fictional bar, but for courtroom savvy, this talented counselor is the guy. Buy his fifth book immediately.
Literary genius goes about its matchless business as four find love — erotic, romantic, steamy love — as the reader follows a luxurious cruise ship’s route through the Panama canal.
Just when you thought the political novel empty of fresh situations or innovations worthy of praise, along comes the one living writer who destroys the mold every time out. See how the master of Washington intrigue illuminates the very soul of American government.
A light snowfall on Saturday served only to outline the bare tree branches in white and augment the Worden University campus’s picture-postcard quality. And the weather certainly did nothing to inhibit the turnout at the main evening event of the Conference on Bestselling Fiction. Vanessa, though grumbling that she could be home grading papers, had agreed to attend with Stephen. The five principal attractions, who had already enjoyed a private dinner and (Stephen suspected) free-flowing libations with high-end donors to the library, took the stage of the Terhune Memorial Theatre to face a full house of students, faculty, journalists, members of local writing groups, and others from the town and gown communities.
The five authors would be doing individual lectures and small-group meetings with literary wannabes in the course of the weekend, but this was the only time they would appear on a platform together. In the six chairs, from left to right, were the panel discussion’s moderator, Librarian Gillian Godfrey, who successfully held at bay any professional stereotype with a calculatedly windswept hairdo and low-cut evening dress; Cosmo McDougall, chubby and dapper with a permanent expression of sharing a private joke with himself; Muriel Bates, a tiny grey-haired woman who, apart from her Bronx accent, would have been well cast as British TV’s next Miss Marple; Gresham Turnbow, huge and bearded, exuding courtroom presence without even opening his mouth; Callie Jackson, still a raven-haired stunner from the right angle but dressed decades too young and the recipient of more plastic surgery than one of her Hollywood characters; and Amos Bosworth, looking nervous, eager, excited, and uncomfortable in a suit rather than his customary lab coat.
Gillian told the assembled masses that her guests needed no introduction before spending about fifteen minutes introducing them. Then she beamed at her panelists and said, “You are five of the most successful authors in the Western world, and we are incredibly fortunate to be able to exploit your knowledge and experience this evening. Some of you are full-time writers, but others, amazingly enough, have day jobs, including two members of our own faculty. First, could you each tell us something about what your working schedule is like. We’ll start at the far end with Professor Bosworth.”
Bosworth appeared startled at being asked to speak first. “Well, I’m not really working on a book at the moment. And when I was, I guess my working methods were what you might call — what’s the word I want? — compulsive. Yeah, compulsive. For a solid three years, I was up at three in the morning every single day and banged on my computer till six. The rest of the day I spent on reading, teaching, and research, but even then I was thinking about what I was going to write the next morning. Good thing I can get along without a lot of sleep.”
“In common with other great scientists,” Gillian said. “Edison, for example. Ms. Jackson?”
“I must write every day, wherever I am, even when I’m on tour. I used to write in longhand, using ballpoint pens with the ink color-coded to the mood of the chapter. Now I take a notebook computer with me everywhere and select different fonts and colors to suit the scene I’m working on. I’ve written on private jets, in the Green Room at the Letterman show, on a yacht off Baja California, poolside at resorts all over the world, even between holes on the Old Course at St. Andrew’s. I’m incorrigibly sociable and don’t mind being interrupted when I write, even in the middle of a sentence, but before the day is out, I must complete at least one perfect page, sometimes three or four, maintaining an average of two, thus one book a year.”
“Remarkable dedication! Mr. Turnbow?”
“Callie, I envy your ability to multitask. I can’t write when I’m on trial, though that doesn’t happen often anymore as I only take the occasional case that really interests me. When I’m not on trial, I go to my upstairs study, put a ‘Do not disturb’ on the door — and my wife and the kids and even the dog respect that sign, I can tell you — and write on an old manual typewriter for no more than six or seven hours at a stretch. I play Mozart symphonies while I write. Loud. My teenagers complain about the noise, to give you an idea, but I just remind them who paid for all their expensive junk. When I revise, I cover the typewritten sheets with scribbles in longhand. Then my secretary at the law firm puts them into the computer, ’cause she’s the only one who can read my writing.”
“And do you bill a client for that, Mr. Turnbow?” Muriel Bates asked softly.
He turned to her with an amused expression. “No, I do not.” Pause. “But if I could find an excuse to, I would.”
“And what about your working methods, Ms. Bates?” Gillian Godfrey said.
“Months and months and months of research, often including travel, always involving the great research libraries. Libraries like this one, so my compliments to you and your staff, Ms. Godfrey. The research is the fun part. Then, everything compiled and organized, a month or two of full days at the computer. Writing the thing is sheer agony, but it justifies the pleasure of the research. Truthfully, I’d write nonfiction, real history, if it would pay me, but it wouldn’t, more’s the pity. My most recent book is a contemporary romance, quite outside my usual historical mode, so I spent almost as much time on writing as research. Got a tax-deductible Panama Canal cruise out of it, however.”
“And finally you, Professor McDougall,” Gillian said. “How do you manage?”
“Terrible work habits. Driven by deadlines. Desktop computer. Write in odd moments on no set schedule. Write fast, don’t revise much, do no research.” Cosmo McDougall smiled with appalling self-satisfaction.
“No research, Professor?” Gillian Godfrey said archly. “But your political thrillers have been lauded for their authenticity.”
Cosmo shrugged. “Well, I do read the paper and check out a few websites. Other than that, I make it all up. Politics is politics. I just take my experiences in academe and transfer them to the world stage.”
“Aren’t you afraid your colleagues will recognize themselves?”
“They never have yet.”
“What about you, Professor Bosworth? Do you get any ideas from academic politics?”
Bosworth’s mouth twitched. “I loathe academic politics. The university doesn’t represent the real world. It’s a refuge from reality. Outside of the natural sciences, the university’s a playpen for middle-aged adolescents with crackbrained radical ideas they’d like to impose on the impressionable young.” A few gasps greeted this, one audible hiss, but no actual boos.
“Glad you’re leaving politics out of this, Amos,” Cosmo McDougall said, to general laughter.
“Another general question for all of you,” Gillian Godfrey said. “You were selected for this program because of your great popular success, but sometimes today’s mainstream literary world makes a sharp distinction between literature and popular culture. Will you still be read in a hundred years?”
“I’ll settle for being read right now,” Callie Jackson said airily. “I have no illusions about literary immortality.”
“Actually, though,” Muriel Bates put in, “it’s not for us to say what reputation we might have a century from now. Did not Shakespeare write to entertain a mass audience? Was not Dickens the bestseller of his day?” This drew a smattering of supportive applause.
“Nothing more fickle than reputation, is there?” Cosmo McDougall mused. “Counselor Turnbow and I were speaking on this very subject earlier this evening, and he pointed out that everyone knows John Updike and many remember Ogden Nash. But what about Richard Armour? Totally forgotten.”
“Not totally,” Gillian Godfrey said. “He was a wonderful humorist. Wrote
“Always ask a librarian,” said Callie Jackson.
“And I believe we still have some of his books in our collection.”
“Left-winger, was he?” Amos Bosworth muttered.
“Would a couple of football players volunteer to carry Professor Bosworth’s hobby horse back to the lab so we can proceed?” Cosmo McDougall said, earning him laughs from the audience and a glance of pure hatred from his colleague. “Relax, Amos. I’m only joking. The university finds a place for all strains of opinion.”
“Really?” Bosworth snapped back. “I checked the library catalog for some of our finest conservative writers and political thinkers, and what did I find?”
“A well-selected book collection, I’m sure. I hear they didn’t buy your book, but you might be pleased to know they don’t buy mine either. Which is a good indication of their taste.”
Gillian, looking a bit unnerved by the sniping, said, “Of course we’ll be glad to add Professor Bosworth’s book to our collection.” Somewhere, Stephen mused, Edie Yamamoto is cringing. “We believe in supporting faculty authors and are open to all shades of opinion on controversial issues. Now, I think we have time for some questions from the audience.”
Several people had already lined up behind a microphone set up below the stage. Stephen thought the third questioner in line, a stunning beauty in tight, low-cut jeans and belly shirt, looked familiar. Could that be Willy Ames? He almost nudged Vanessa but decided it wouldn’t be wise.
A law student engaged Turnbow on an obscure legal point from one of his novels and received a brief, jargon-free answer. An enthusiastic middle-aged lecturer asked the standard question about where the five writers’ ideas came from and got the usual trite answers. Then Willy took the mike, and things got interesting.
“Professor McDougall,” she said, “for a long time you resisted blurbing your fellow novelists’ new books, but lately you seem to be doing it more frequently.”
McDougall shrugged. “Well, some of them are friends of mine.”
“I often wonder about jacket blurbs,” Willy went on. “They aren’t compensated, are they?”
“Certainly not!” said Muriel Bates, apparently outraged.
“Not with money, anyway,” said Callie Jackson.
“I can’t imagine what you’re suggesting, Callie,” Gresham Turnbow said with heavy-handed irony. “Seriously, though, jacket comments aren’t just paybacks or tokens of friendship, at least not when I do them. They represent an honest attempt to guide my readers to a book I feel they might enjoy, and I trust the same is true when someone blurbs me.”
“Absolutely, Gresham,” said Callie Jackson.
Though the next young man in the questioners’ line was clearly impatient and Gillian Godfrey was beginning to look a bit nervous, Willy was not ready to relinquish the mike. “I’ve often wondered how sincere they are. I’ve wondered if somebody might be playing games with their jacket blurbs.”
In the audience, Stephen nudged Vanessa. “What does she know?” he said.
Bosworth was looking at McDougall poisonously but said nothing.
“You have an active imagination, young woman,” said Muriel Bates. “But who would do something like that? And what sort of game are you talking about?”
“Let’s say a writer wanted to subtly ridicule his or her fellow writers, putting the jacket blurbs in a sort of code that no one would notice from looking at one blurb but that someone might figure out if they looked at several of them together. Would any of you care to comment on that? How about you, Professor McDougall?”
Turnbow, Bates, and Jackson turned to McDougall with curiosity.
“Idea might work for fiction,” McDougall said, seeming unconcerned. “But it sounds a little far-fetched. You don’t want to be more specific, do you?”
“No, I don’t think I do,” Willy said. “But if any of you were to see me privately...” She finally relinquished the questioner’s mike with a mischievous smile, and the interest level of the proceedings dropped considerably.
Poems in Praise of Evil-Doers No. 11: The Blackmailer
Now let me start on the blackmailer’s art
By asking first, who is the worst?
The holder of secrets or the extorting one
Or the honest crime-fighter who spoils all the fun?
Criminous nature has nothing paler
Than a timid, reluctant blackmailer;
When it’s deserved by a doer of evil,
The mark is the cotton and I the boll weevil.
My life’s ethical record when I collect
From a snake? Morally correct!
And in heaven’s books, what could be lighter
Than bringing to book a substandard writer?
I know who you are and I know what you did,
And from bestselling heights you surely will skid!
If I don’t need the money, you may think me mad,
But even mad justice can bring down the bad!
It was three in the morning when Stephen Fenbush’s bedside telephone interrupted a particularly fascinating dream that he had forgotten completely by the time his hand found the receiver.
“Hello,” he said, suppressing a yawn.
“Is that Stephen Fenbush?”
“It is. I could ask you if you know what time it is, but you probably do. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“Detective Ortiz. City police. Homicide. We’ve met before. You helped us out a little on that Anderson case.”
“So I did, but if you think I’m a gifted amateur sleuth who helps the police solve their difficult cases, I’m flattered, but believe me, I was just lucky.”
“Yes, sir. I agree. We want your help again but not to do our job for us. There was another murder on campus tonight, at that VIP guest building they have there. Qualen House?”
“I know it well.” In fact, it was where they were putting up the writers for the bestseller conference. “Who’s been murdered?”
“A faculty member, sir, man named Cosmo McDougall. We found a young woman student sitting by the body. She insists on talking to you.”
“Is her name by any chance Williametta Ames?”
“That’s her. How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess. Is she a suspect?”
“I can’t really say, but she was sitting by the body reading this weird poem off a piece of paper, making no effort to report the crime or get out of there. Her position could look better.”
“She didn’t kill anybody,” Stephen said.
“Well, whether she did or not, she’s not telling us everything she knows, and if she talks to you, she might.”
“How did McDougall die exactly?”
“Slowly. Stabbed with a knife from the Qualen House kitchen. Lots of blood.”
“Any clues?”
“Dying messages, you mean?” Ortiz said, a suggestion of irony in his tone.
“Well, Anderson did one. Sort of.”
“No such luck.”
“Still, McDougall left some clues before he was dying. Detective Ortiz, you’re going to be glad you called me.”
By the time Stephen got to Qualen House, the police were finished with Willy for the time being. They hadn’t charged her with anything, and while she was a little bit more subdued than usual, for somebody who’d been sitting in the Qualen House kitchen with a bleeding body reading something or other, she seemed remarkably calm.
“Thanks for bailing me out, Mr. Fenbush,” said Willy Ames.
“Bailing you out? You weren’t arrested and you weren’t in jail.”
“Thanks to your pull with the local police.”
“I don’t have any pull with the — why aren’t you more upset, anyway?”
“It’s deceptive,” Willy told him. “I recover fast, but before I went all girly, cried and everything. Shameful.”
“Willy, what the hell were you doing in the building, anyway?”
“I was invited. There was a post-program party, and I was invited.”
“By whom?”
“Professor Bosworth. He seemed to like what I said at the meeting.”
“Yeah, I guess he would.”
“I think I was the only student there who wasn’t walking around with hors d’oeuvre trays. Naturally, I was determined to take advantage of it, pick the brains of the bestselling writers. What an opportunity.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t murdered yourself. That stunt you pulled at the panel sounded like a threat.”
“No, I was just having fun, and it got me an invitation, didn’t it? Professor McDougall didn’t seem to mind, by the way. He thought it was funny, if anything, and he was very nice to me at the party. They all were.”
“Look, Willy, I know you’ve been over this with the police, but if you don’t mind—”
“Ask away. I want to help.”
“Why did you come to the kitchen?”
“It was like this. I was determined to stay as long as I could, not miss anything. Somehow, as the caterers packed up and left and the party was breaking up, nobody asked me to leave, so I didn’t. I hung out in the Qualen House library looking at the book collection. Then I wandered around exploring. It’s quite an interesting old building, and I thought I might run into one of the writers who were staying there.”
“All this creeping around in an old dark house didn’t seem dangerous to you?”
“Oh, you mean like the ingénue who walks into danger while everybody in the audience is saying, don’t, don’t. It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t thinking murder, and I wasn’t afraid of anybody. When I walked into the kitchen and saw him lying there in a pool of blood, I about freaked out.”
“Uh-huh. But you recovered quickly and apparently made no effort to report it to anybody.”
“I would have eventually. I mean, I would have raised the alarm immediately, but then I saw that poem lying near the body, and I had to look at it. Then a cleaning lady came through and found me and found the body and screamed and probably thought I did it. And when the cops came, I made a spectacle of myself, I have to admit, sobbing like a kid, but like I said—”
“You recover fast, got it.”
“All I wanted was to see you, Mr. Fenbush, because I thought you and you alone would understand.”
“Understand what?”
“This poem. It was printed on a sheet of white paper. As soon as I saw it, I thought it might be important. And I knew the police would snatch it away immediately, as evidence. I wanted you to have a look at it. It may be a clue, but not the kind the police would see. So I memorized it.”
“You memorized it?”
“I’m a quick study. Ask any of my teachers. I wrote it all out while I was between police grillings and waiting for you to get here. Professor McDougall’s dust-jacket quotes had a sort of code to them. I thought maybe the message by the body was following his code too, though I didn’t have time to check it out completely. Isn’t that interesting?”
“Very. So are you going to let me see it after going to all this trouble?”
She passed it over, and Stephen glanced at it. “Unsigned?”
“Yes, just like you see it.”
Homage to Cosmo McDougall
Cosmo McDougall must have nine lives.
Here is somebody who socially thrives,
Who teaches his classes, and who writes his books,
Who’s so over achieving, it could be, cooks—
I don’t know anything he cannot do.
He can do that old as well as this new.
Can his left hand raise prose up to a great height
While he’s gloriously poetic with his right?
What inspirational muse nurses his fire,
My friends — this wit, this light versifier?
Every honor he deserves, no one will dispute—
For any who tries to will fail to refute.
His work will not die; it has even survived
My poetic efforts, so badly contrived.
Stephen and Vanessa were back in the Faculty Club two days later, waiting for Edie Yamamoto to join them. Stephen had been looking forward to doing his supersleuth act, but Vanessa’s mood was putting a bit of a damper on things.
“So why did she call you?” she asked.
“I don’t know, really, but when somebody in trouble wants your help, you go, right?”
“You have to watch that girl, Stephen.”
“Oh, I watch her every chance I get.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why? You think she’s a murderer?”
After a long pause, Vanessa said, “No,” grudgingly.
Edie arrived and the atmosphere lightened a bit. They ordered more hurriedly than usual, and the librarian asked eagerly, “So what do you have to tell us, Stephen?”
“The late Professor McDougall, a guy who for most of his life disdained giving jacket quotes, suddenly started giving them. And I figured them out.”
Vanessa couldn’t resist a dig, but it came across good-humored. “You or your student protegee?”
“We figured them out independently.”
“Didn’t put your heads together?”
“No, dam it. Look, do you want to hear this or not?”
“I do,” said Edie, “unless I decide the subplot is more interesting.”
“It’s not.” He passed them a sheet of paper with McDougall’s blurbs for the novels by Callie Jackson, Gresham Turnbow, and Muriel Bates. “Now look at all these quotes carefully. See anything unusual about them?”
“Yes,” Vanessa said. “They’re God-awful.”
“And how is that unusual for jacket blurbs?”
“Because Cosmo is supposed to have written them.”
“You’re right,” said Edie. “I can’t believe he could write this awkwardly even if he did them in a hurry. ‘Literary genius goes about its matchless business’? That’s dreadful.”
Vanessa said, “Are you telling us Cosmo didn’t write these?”
“Oh, he wrote them, all right,” Stephen said. “A major publisher couldn’t put phony quotes from a bestselling author on a book and expect to get away with it. But there’s another reason they’re so bad.”
“Tell us.”
“Spot one more feature the quotes have in common and then I will.”
“They’re all exaggerated praise,” said Vanessa.
“Undeserved,” said Edie.
“More specific than that.”
Vanessa gave him a dirty look and studied the four quotes once more. Then she brightened for an instant, quickly darkened again when she remembered how much he was annoying her, and said, “It’s the numbers! There’s a number in each quote. Six, five, four.” She paused a moment. “They’re in descending order.”
Stephen shook his head. “The order has nothing to do with it. An accident of how I arranged them. But you’re right. It’s the numbers I’m referring to.”
“There’s a message in here somewhere,” Edie said, “like he did for Amos Bosworth’s book but better hidden.”
Stephen nodded. “His messages were concealed well enough to get past whoever edits the jacket blurbs but transparent enough that somebody would eventually figure them out, especially if you put several of them together as I did and saw what they have in common. I’m told by some publishing contacts that he insisted they use his quotes word for word as he wrote them or not at all.”
“So how do we crack the code?” Vanessa said.
“If my ‘student protégée can do it, so can you.”
Vanessa glared at him. She and Edie peered at the four quotes for a few moments, until a look of exasperated understanding crossed Vanessa’s face. “Of course. You take the number mentioned in the quote and then use that to know which words to highlight. In the first one, you take every sixth word.” She took out a teacher’s ever-ready red pencil and started to work. A minute later, she handed the list of quotes back to Stephen. The messages were as follows.
On
On
On
“They get better,” said Vanessa, “but they really aren’t all that clever. Or all that scathing for that matter.”
“What’s this fourth quote you listed?” Edie asked. “There’s no number in that.”
“Well, McDougall put a joke blurb on his own jacket,” Stephen said.
“It’s an anagram,” Edie said. “Malcolm Good, USC. Cosmo McDougall.”
“You got it. Now have a look at that poem that was found by the body. Apply the code to that.”
“ ‘Cosmo McDougall must have nine lives,’ ” Edie read. “So we take every ninth word.” A moment later, she had it. “It says, ‘Somebody who could do this to his friends deserves to die badly.’ And the murderer wrote this?”
“Yes, and not on the spur of the moment. The killer wrote that before coming to the conference and had it ready to spring on McDougall.”
“All very clever, Stephen and Edie,” Vanessa pointed out, “but it doesn’t tell us who killed Cosmo. The police haven’t made an arrest, have they?”
“Yes it does, and yes, they have,” Stephen said with outrageous casualness. “Better not mention that to anybody, though, till it’s generally reported. Putting together two clues, one from the jacket blurbs and the other something that came out at the symposium the night of the murder, convinced me I knew who did it, even though there wasn’t an ounce of proof that would hold up in a court of law. When I called Detective Ortiz to tell him who it was, I expected him to laugh, but instead he asked me how I knew. They’d arrived at the same conclusion after going through McDougall’s effects and following boring old police procedure. McDougall not only praised blackmailers, he was a blackmailer. One of the people he got here for the bestsellers’ conference was really called for another reason. Anger over being subtly ridiculed in a jacket blurb wasn’t really a motive for murder, but a secret that would ruin the murderer’s reputation and career was.”
“So who was it?” Edie asked.
“First the two clues. Look at those messages in the jacket quotes. One is pretty bland and unfocussed: ‘Come on give me a break.’ Another is clever and insulting — ‘About as erotic as a route canal’ — but still relatively harmless. The third one, though, could easily be taken as a threat: ‘Disbar this guy immediately.’ A pretty serious thing for a lawyer, especially if there was some criminal activity involved that would bring an even worse penalty.”
“So from that you get Gresham Turnbow?” Vanessa said. “That’s pretty thin.”
“Ah, but my other clue was that discussion with Turnbow that McDougall alluded to. He mentioned three writers, a very odd combination that seemed to have little in common. John Updike, great American novelist, recently deceased. Ogden Nash, poet, also a radio personality and mystery-book editor, too. And the third, Richard Armour, humorist, comic historian, not as widely known as the other two. But they had one thing in common. They all wrote light verse. Like Cosmo McDougall — and like the author of that deceptively laudatory poem. Like Gresham Turnbow. Why would the two of them be discussing those three otherwise dissimilar writers in a group if they didn’t have a common interest in light verse?”
“Still pretty thin,” Vanessa said. “Lots of writers can or could write light verse.”
“Never said it was airtight. But the stuff they found in McDougall’s papers, evidence of a massive financial fraud Turnbow had been involved in, plus some forensic evidence on the knife, made the case. I understand Turnbow caved in immediately, either had a mental breakdown or started laying the groundwork for an insanity defense. He’s in custody now writing not legal briefs but poetry.”
“So really they didn’t need your brilliant deductions at all,” Vanessa said.
Stephen looked at Edie for sympathy. “Did Ellery Queen ever have to put up with this?”
The Murderer’s Lament
My legal infraction wasn’t much of a crime;
Thousands have done it time after time.
But mistakes were made and it was found out
And I am disbarred, disgraced, left with nowt!
I really do have a dog, name of Beans,
Plus a wife and two growing teens.
If I cannot argue court cases hammily,
At least I can spend more time with my family!
But to effect this, they’ll have to know
Where to find my cell on death row.
When Mourning Stirs the House
by Gary A. Mitchell
“I will beat you this time, Hector.” Paris waved his sword in my face and thrusthis ox-hide shield, bound in bronze, between us. I was eighteen, tall, already broad of shoulder, and marked by my grandfather’s red hair as a warrior. I had commanded the Trojan host in a short, successful campaign against the Dardanians. Paris was sixteen, olive-skinned like his mother, and slight of build. Men called him Hector’s little brother.
Priam, our father, called to us from his couch, where he watched us train on the grassy field set aside for practice beyond the Scaean Gates. “Let us see if all those months training with Sacander have given you more than just the arrogance of a warrior, Paris.”
Pain and anger darkened my brother’s eyes.
“I bested Glauchos, the captain of your guards, didn’t I?”
“Old Glauchos? He is captain for his loyalty, not his swordsmanship.”
“He is a better warrior than you, Father, and younger.” Paris swung his sword back and leapt at me with a cry of rage. Our blades were blunted for practice, but could break a bone if a strong blow landed. Paris meant to hurt me.
He battered at my shield; I shrugged off the attack. He had the advantage of speed, but he let anger guide him. We circled, looking for an opening. Several men gathered to watch. Paris had worked hard with Sacander and had won praise from him, no easy feat.
We closed and traded a flurry of blows. His defense was solid. I could find no gaps. Sacander had done well. We broke apart, and circled again.
“Stop prancing like a temple dancer, Paris. You bragged you had learned how to handle a sword. Your brother is holding back, like Glauchos.” Our father’s words came straight out of the pinch-mouthed jug of wine he’d already emptied.
Some men, like me with my ruddy complexion, turn red when anger rides us. Paris wasn’t like other men. His face turned as white as Egyptian royal linen. He swung at me with all his might and sought to club aside my shield with his own. Did he think to overcome me by brute force? His wrath had betrayed him. I dodged, leaving him unbalanced and vulnerable; I kicked out with my foot and sent him sprawling. His shield flew off his arm and clanged noisily against the low stone wall that surrounded the field. He lay facedown on the ground. I pitied my brother.
“Contemptible!” shouted the king, slamming his ivory cup down on the low table in front of him. “Praise the Gods that they gave me at least one son.” He tossed a gold armband at my feet. “For the victor. As for you, Paris, I am sending you on an embassy to Paionia. They live by the bow, and cower behind somebody else’s spearmen in battle. You will be among brothers, there. I charge you to master their weapon. That, or take up the shuttle and whorl.” He was standing now, shouting at the top of his voice. “And pay court to Menze’s daughter while you are there. You remember Lelwani, don’t you? Try not to dwell on her hog-jowled face. It is the hips that matter. Maybe you can find a son in there and then there will be at least one warrior in your family.” He tried to drink and laugh at the same time, and succeeded only in choking. A pair of slaves guided him back to the palace.
I offered Paris my hand. “He only wants to make you a better man.”
He knocked my hand away. “I hate you both,” he snarled. “Someday you will pay for your arrogance. I swear it, brother.”
He got up and stomped off the field, the walls of our city strong and proud behind him. And that, I think, was the beginning of the Trojan War.
Six years passed. I married Andromache, the daughter of the King of Cilician Thebes. It was a marriage of dynastic convenience. She was plain and short and had blond hair, a rarity among the Trojans. Andromache was a devoted mother and an obedient wife. Plentiful food was always available at my hearth, and good wine at my table. She welcomed my companions and managed our apartments with an eye towards order. I was content and came to feel affection for her. Even Priam grudgingly respected her.
My father sat upon his throne, the open four-pillared hearth in the center of the room swept clean and heaped with flowers and fragrant cedar. The walls were painted in the style of Mycenae with colorful frescoes of horses, animals for which Troy was famous. The bright afternoon sun of summer shone through the opening over the hearth, scattering the shadows. We, the leaders of Troy, stood on each side of the throne, flanking Priam. We had assembled to greet my brother and his bride, Helen, come home from Achaea.
“What was Paris thinking?” my father muttered. “I told him I was arranging a match for him before he left. Now he has ruined everything.” He took a long drink from the cup in his hand and gestured to a slave to have it refilled for the third time.
“He’s done good work as ambassador,” I said. “He has earned the trust of our allies and won you several more.”
“But not this time. I sent him to Achaea to blunt their anger, not kindle it. Agamemnon and his war party had few allies among the other Achaean kings. They may hate us because our city sits astride the straits and we tax their ships, but there was little enthusiasm for a war. If the rumors of Paris’s seduction of Helen are true, all that has changed.”
I decided to keep my own counsel. Arguing with my father was like trying to yoke a charging bull. Wine made him worse. Besides, I knew that the seduction was not a rumor. I had questioned Paris’s advisor last night as soon as he had debarked from Paris’s ship.
The Achaeans had ridiculed Paris, the advisor told me, insulting his skill with horse and bow. Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother, had been the most vocal. Paris had responded the way he always did. Without thinking. He’d kidnapped the man’s wife, fled Achaea with her like a thief, and married her. Now we waited for this troublesome woman to be formally introduced to the king.
We could hear laughter and footsteps echoing down the long hallway. Two voices: Paris, and the other must be Helen. Men said she was the most beautiful woman in Achaea. We would soon see how much the Achaeans lied.
They entered the throne room. Paris had grown a beard while he was in Achaea. He was still thin, and shorter than me by a head. He wore an elaborate cape with designs of marsh fowl along the border. His short, sleeveless tunic was red. I couldn’t tell you what Helen wore. Something plain that didn’t compete with her looks. Her eyes were piercing blue, and put to shame the snow glories that carpeted the mountains of the Hittites in spring. She wore an outline of kohl around her eyes, in the Egyptian style. Her lips were painted red, and her fine blond hair hung in elaborate curls down to her shoulders. Next to me Andromache fingered her own blond hair. Hers was drab and coarse in comparison to Helen’s. The Achaeans, for once, had not lied.
The newly wed couple stood before the throne hand in hand and bowed. My father took a moment to find his voice. “Um, greetings, Helen. And... son.” He licked his lips, took another sip of wine, and began again. “You are welcome here, Daughter. I extend the hospitality and protection of my house. I have given you the rooms next to Hector and Andromache.”
He said many other things. I didn’t hear them. My heart was beating too loudly to make out his words, and my mouth was as dry as straw. My manhood stiffened and I had to concentrate on the horse frescoes to master my arousal. I was not completely successful. My eyes kept darting back to the woman whom Paris had brought among us.
Andromache shook my arm. I looked up in confusion. Helen was staring at me, a slight smile on her lips. They looked like the ripe, wild berries of summer.
“Hector?” said my father. He sounded annoyed.
“Yes, Father?”
“I asked you if you had any questions for Helen regarding the Achaeans. You have been brooding since last night. Here is a chance to hear what council they keep.”
“I have one question,” I said, glaring at Helen. She had embarrassed me. “Will Agamemnon go to war to get you back?”
She laughed. It made me think of the sound a brook makes in spring, splashing over the smooth stones. “War? The Achaeans have no love for me. I was not happy with my husband.” She flushed. “My
She took Paris’s arm in her embrace and laid her head upon his shoulder. He smiled like a besotted fool. She was seven years his senior yet somehow managed to look younger than he. She was thin by nature, and women like that retain their beauty. She never took her eyes off me.
Did I see a challenge in them?
“You have your answer,” pronounced my father. “No war. The couple must be weary after their voyage. My steward will show you to the rooms I have had prepared.”
Helen stepped forward. “A moment, sire — Father. I have a favor to ask.” She spoke up in the throne room just as a man would. Apparently she was accustomed to being indulged.
My father tolerated her boldness. “Yes, daughter?”
“I beg your permission to establish a sacred grove to Aphrodite, and begin the worship of her here.”
That was the other thing they said about Helen. She never forgot to honor her goddess. It was harmless enough, and my father agreed.
Helen and Paris bowed, then followed the steward through the side door that led to the royal apartments.
I called the captains Kilistes and Paramenes immediately to my side. “Gather the host, Kilistes. Send ships to Imbros, Lemnos, and Lesbos to spy out any Achaean activity. Put watchers along the coast and double the guards on the walls. Send messages to our allies to be prepared to come to Troy in case of war.” I turned to Paramenes. “Start moving stores into the palace granary. Have the shepherds drive their flocks close to the walls. In case of a siege, I want food to last a year. The Achaeans will be gone by then.”
“The Achaeans?” asked Kilistes. “Helen said there’d be no war.”
“Helen is more familiar with matters of the bedroom than she is with matters of war. A woman’s smile will not blind us.” The cruel edge in my voice was meant to disguise the whispers in my heart.
“Did you see the way she looked at me?” Kilistes said, lowering his voice. “I don’t know what those looks mean in Sparta, but I know what they mean in Troy. Do you think the stories they tell about her are true?”
“You fool,” said Paramenes. “Her eyes were on me. Now I have to go home and stare at my wife, but I will be seeing someone else.” We all laughed, and my captains departed.
They were both fools. I knew at whom she had been staring.
I sensed a presence behind me and knew who it was before turning. Andromache. She had pulled her wrap closely about her as if she were chilled, despite the sun’s heat that reached deep into this many-chambered pile of stone.
“I saw the way you looked at that woman,” she said.
My heart thumped in my chest, so loudly that she had to have heard it. My blood still raced from the brief encounter with Helen. I raised my hand to my forehead. I felt warm. Probably I was flushed as well. She’d be able to interpret the signs.
“Andromache, I—”
“Don’t speak, husband. She’s your brother’s wife. For his sake you have to put aside your disapproval. At least pretend to like her. We must make her welcome.”
“Disapproval?”
“You would not look at her, and when you did, you scowled. It must have been very frightening for her. Promise me you will apologize for your bad manners.”
“But Andromache—”
“For me, if you won’t do it for Paris. Welcome this woman into the palace.”
“Why are you so concerned about Helen?” I asked. “She has a reputation for scandal.”
“You don’t know what it is like to leave your family and dwell with strangers. She will be lonely. I want to be her friend. She will need one if everybody thinks as you do.”
I stared at Andromache. My thoughts kept returning to the red lips and the sapphire eyes that had stripped me bare. I could sense the meddling of the gods in this. I ignored their gifts at my peril.
“All right. I give my word.” I swear that my oath was tinged with regret. I knew I had no defenses against Helen. Didn’t Andromache understand the viper she was inviting into her chambers?
“I knew I could depend upon you, husband. I will pray to the gods that Hector and Helen find the happiness that we have found.” She reached up and gave me her kiss.
I returned it dutifully and pushed a false smile to my face. Red lips and the bluest eyes.
That evening we dined at my father’s table. I mixed and poured Helen’s wine and placed the cup in front of her. I watched her bring the kylix to her lips and sip from its broad, shallow bowl. A tiny drop of wine glistened at the corner of her mouth, brighter than the necklace of gold she wore at her slender throat. My wife patted my leg to show her approval. Paris entertained us with stone of the Achaeans and their strange manners. Helen laughed at everything he said. He kissed her frequently, with great passion, to remind us that she was his, and none of ours. For me the food and drink had no taste.
Later I lay in bed with Andromache. She curled against me, a leg draped over mine. We could both hear a loud thumping coming through the wall. On the other side was Helen’s bed chamber. Andromache giggled. “She is enthusiastic, I will give her that.”
Now a loud, long, drawn-out, shuddering moan. “And noisy.”
I made a sound indicating my disgust. “They rut like common farm animals,” I whispered. “Have they no shame?”
“The marriage bed is still new. His passion will cool soon enough.”
Another moan. Paris muttered something unintelligible and the bed knocked against the wall and the thumping began again.
“Gods, will they never stop?” I was in agony.
“Would you like it if I was loud like that?” Andromache ran her fingers down across my stomach.
“What is this?” she cooed, finding my erection. “You still desire me, don’t you?” She rolled on her back and drew me to her. I had no choice now. I made love to Andromache, but all the time I imagined the woman on the other side of the wall.
The first Achaean ship arrived a month later. Soon there were dozens, then two hundred. They came with at least ten thousand men. I welcomed them. It gave me something to occupy my thoughts during the day. Every night, though, I had to listen to Helen pretend to find pleasure with my brother. He acted the fool, fawning over her during the meals Andromache insisted we take together. I could see the misery in Helen’s eyes when she looked at me. I found ways to brush against her, and soon I was engaged in a series of chaste kisses and brotherly embraces, while Andromache urged me on and Paris began to drink the way our father did. It was more than I could stand. My thwarted passion haunted me, a reproving ghost.
We skirmished with the Achaeans daily, but avoided a pitched battle. Every morning I watched them from the roof of the palace. One day Paris joined me.
“It will be hard to drive them out,” he said, pointing to Agamemnon’s camp on the promontory on the far side of the wide bay.
“Too hard. The approach to their camp is narrow, and that ditch and rampart look sturdy enough.”
“What do we do, just let them sit there? Look at the damage they are doing.”
The Achaeans were burning farms and fields. It looked like Troy was surrounded by a landscape of funeral pyres, the columns of smoke climbing tall and straight into the autumn sky.
“That is exactly what we do,” I said. “Father has decided to leave the fighting to me, and that is our strategy. We wait. Eventually they will do something foolish, like attacking our walls. We will make many Achaean widows when they do.” I patted my sceptical brother on his back. “We can always plant new fields and build new farms. I will need your help. I have to be able to depend on you.”
“Expecting me to do something foolish, brother?” he said. “Promise me they will not carry off Helen.”
His weakness disgusted me. It was his responsibility to safeguard his wife, not mine.
“I promise, Paris. No Achaean will lay hands on her while I draw breath.” I made no such promise for my own hands.
In the following months, the Achaeans tried the walls twice. Then it was their turn to weep at the smoke-darkened skies, coming as they did from the pyres of their slain. We took each other’s measure, like wrestlers seeking the hold that would lead to victory.
The long days slowly passed. The fighting flared and diminished like an improperly banked fire. Achilles made his presence felt. He was terrible to behold. He was dangerously fast and fought with great rage. But unlike most men, Achilles focused it, and so it was a source of strength. I did not relish crossing spears with him. Our tactic was to withdraw before him and pin his warriors in place with the threat of cavalry, while archers harried his men. Paris led this force, and soon began to accumulate reputation and not a little fame. He reveled in his success, and it translated into an insatiable appetite in the bedroom. I could hardly take myself to my own bed, knowing what I would have to hear.
Andromache watched me with mounting concern.
“Husband, you are distracted. You are always tense, and snap at me for no reason. Tell me what I can do to put you at ease.”
I shrugged. “My father hides in a wine cup. I have to rule the city as well as lead in battle. What do you expect?”
“The only time you smile is when we take our meal with your brother and Helen. I’m glad that his jests and boasts entertain you.”
“My troubles will pass once the Achaeans leave.”
I knew Andromache found no pleasure in Paris’s bragging and crude humor. How the war had changed him! Her failure to make friends with Helen had left her guilty and confused.
It was clear, however, that she had something more important on her mind than Paris’s table conversation.
“I have bad news, husband. It is my mother. She is dying. My father has asked me to return to help. Will you permit me to go?”
“I am sorry to hear this,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulder. “Of course, you must go.”
“Helen has noticed your unease as well. She watches out for you, as a sister should. I wish I could be a better friend to her. She said she’d look after you if I went. That is a great burden lifted from my shoulders.”
She hesitated. “I can trust you when I am gone, can’t I?” She was blushing and her eyes glinted with distress.
“Trust me? If you mean the Achaeans, I will keep them at bay.”
“Yes, husband. That is what I mean. The Achaeans. Every one of them.”
I sat without moving, my thoughts churning in my head and my breath suddenly trapped inside my chest. “When do you leave?”
“In three or four days. One of my father’s ships is due to land up the coast. I’ll cross the straits on it and then travel by land.” She took my hand. “The Achaeans are too busy to pursue a single ship. Paris says I will be safe.”
“I will make certain of it. The day you sail, I will take the host out and threaten the Achaean camp. That will hold their attention.”
She squeezed my arm in thanks. “I will be gone a month at most. I shall miss you.”
I embraced her but said nothing. I had sworn an oath to myself not to speak falsely to her.
The days leading to Andromache’s departure were wearing. My mind was unsettled, and I was careless in battle. I received a deep cut in my arm and had to stay behind when our host marched out to decoy the Achaeans. Odysseus led the Achaeans in a feigned retreat, and Paris was deceived into launching the attack I had long warned against. The attack covered Andromache’s passage, but at the cost of many of our best warriors. Afterward, at the evening meal, Paris was angry and scornful. He drank himself into a stupor and was carried senseless to his chambers. That left only Helen and me at the table.
“How is your wound?” she asked, nervously wrapping and unwrapping a blond curl around one finger.
“It has hardly healed since I answered that question earlier. I will be fine in another week.”
She turned red. “I am sorry if I seem so witless. The war...”
The war. We used that to excuse everything. My rudeness? The war. Lust for my brother’s wife? The war. It had been almost a year and still the Achaeans had not departed. They hadn’t enough men to encircle the city in a tight siege, so a trickle of supplies and reinforcements slipped through the loose net of Achaean outposts.
“I told your wife I would look after you while she was gone. I try hard to be her friend, but she guards her thoughts. It is hard to know what she thinks.”
“I have the opposite problem. Years of marriage have made her transparent.”
“If there is anything I can do...”
I had had enough of idle talk. I had held my tongue for a year, and here I was alone with this woman and so distracted that I could hardly think straight. Talk was for Achaeans.
“I want to make love to you,” I said.
She blushed and cast down her eyes. “I hardly think that is what Andromache had in mind.”
“No.”
I pulled her out of her chair and embraced her. “Would you deny me? I sense the way your body moves against mine. I smell the way you respond.”
“Deny you? You are the king in all but name. I am only a guest under your roof. How could one powerless woman deny the hero of Troy?”
I kissed her.
“Remember that I did not begin this,” she said, holding me at arm’s length.
I had no patience for her pretended reluctance. “You began it by being born.” My throat was so tight with hunger for her that the words were little more than a snarl. I lifted her and set her on the edge of my father’s table.
Then I had no use for words at all.
The war dragged on for nine long years. Each fall the Achaeans would leave behind a token force to raid and harry us. Each spring the black ships would return, and the war would be renewed. The tenth year started with no hope of an end to the bloodshed. The city looked worn; trash and rubble seemed as much a part of the landscape as the crowded shelters that filled the streets. The lower city, safe behind its wide ditch and palisade, overflowed with refugees.
Sometimes I felt I was the only thing holding us together. When I brought my spear into the battle line, the shield wall stiffened and surged forward. I kept bad counsel from squandering the safety our arms had won us. I outthought the wily Achaeans and foiled every one of their traps and ambushes. I was Troy.
In the last few years Helen and I had managed only a handful of trysts. I was frustrated and angered by the obstacles that always seemed to appear. Finally I cornered her in the storeroom where we once had kept newly harvested figs in rows of fragrant baskets. It was a harvest we had not enjoyed in many years. The baskets were still there, awaiting return of better days.
“Why did you not come to my bed yesterday? I sent word that Andromache was gone for the day and there would be time for us.”
“I could not,” she replied, without looking me in the eye. “I had to wait on Paris and his friends, mixing the wine while they talked and drank.”
“He treats you like a servant.”
She shrugged.
“I must see more of you. There is always some excuse and I have to conduct an elaborate campaign to be with you. I cannot live like this. I am not a man who sneaks into a woman’s bed.”
“I am no happier than you.” She began to pace, picking her way through the stacks of empty baskets. “Paris is your brother and my husband. There are no secrets in a palace; people are whispering. Who knows what would happen if we were discovered. Perhaps it is time to abandon this madness.”
I could hear the earnestness in her voice. She was frightened and she was right. The palace was the problem. But I could fix that.
“I was afraid you were avoiding me, but now I understand your reluctance. I will take steps to ensure our privacy.”
Then I pulled Helen to the floor and made love to her in the faint perfume of long-vanished figs.
I moved into a small house by the Scaean Gates. I said it was to be closer to the danger, to share the hardships of the men. That was true. But it also allowed me to escape the palace. It was simple enough to send Paris on a series of visits to our nearest allies, seeking men and grain. Then I could call Helen to my bed whenever I had the need to be with her. My warriors protected us from prying eyes and wagging tongues.
In late spring, after a long and bloody battle, I sent for Helen and told her to bring wine. We drank, and the wine loosened her tongue. She lay by my side, naked and covered in sweat. I had made love to her once, and was regathering my strength.
“Do you think this is fair to me?” she complained. “I am no longer young.”
“None of us are,” I said, tracing the lines that radiated from the corners of her eyes. She had stretch marks too, from the two children she had borne at Troy. Who was to say they were not Paris’s? Despite the ways she had changed, the only place I could find relief from the cries of the dead was with her.
She sat up and looked at me, rubbing a hand across my chest. “You are covered with scars. You look just like this city. How much longer can you go on?”
“As long as I have to. If there was a way to end it, I would.” That set me to thinking. What would I be willing to sacrifice for peace?
She filled my cup with wine and handed it to me. “Tell me about Achilles,” she said. “Could you defeat him? No boasts, only the truth.”
The question angered me. People who had never been in battle were forever asking me such things. Even Andromache, who visited once a month to spy on me, had plied me with the same nonsense a week ago.
“He is fast and very skilled. I have watched him kill many men. Sometimes, when he is reacting to a sudden opening and makes an unbalanced thrust with his spear, he brings his shield up a little to protect his head and shoulders. It leaves his side open to a counter-thrust. That is the only weakness I see.”
“So you could defeat him.”
“Perhaps. We are closely matched.” I downed the wine she had handed me.
“What about Odysseus...”
I placed my hand over her mouth, silencing her. “Enough about Achaeans. You’re the only Achaean I want to fight.” I rolled over and pulled her on top of me.
“So you’ll ride me until I’m sore and can hardly walk.” She spoke in that petulant voice I had come to dislike. “Then I will have to return to the palace and lie about where I’ve been. You do remember that Paris returns tonight? He’ll tell me he loves me and then carry me to his bed. I thought I had escaped brothers when I fled Menelaus and Agamemnon. You and Paris are worse. At least in Achaea, three days’ journey lay between the beds I was expected to keep warm. I am not as good as Andromache when it comes to lying.”
That caught me unawares. “What do you mean?”
“Andromache? When she comes back to the palace after her little visits to you here, she pretends to everyone that you and she are still happily wed. Everyone tells her what a brave husband you are and what a good wife she is and she smiles and goes into her apartments with all the appearance of a contented wife. Then she cries all night. I can hear her sobbing. There are now more liars in Troy than there ever were in Mycenae.”
I thought of Andromache’s last visit. She had brought so much wine that I had become drunk. She had encouraged me to talk, and it seemed a little like it was in the old days, just the two of us sharing private words. I sent her home after she began to cling and beg me to come back to the palace with her. I almost wished I had gone.
And now the bitterness arose in Helen again. She had shown it more and more often. She rarely smiled. If it were not that I had to have her, I would have sent her away long ago. She was tiresome. Could I do it, though? Could I send her away?
My mind began to pick at it, pulling at the ends of the knot. I hadn’t known she had slept with Agamemnon. I had thought the war was the stepchild of geography and tribute. What if, instead, this war was about Helen and Agamemnon? What if I weighed her down with gold and sent her back to him with offers of peace? Secretly, at night? No; why not during the day? Let all the damn Achaeans see her. They were tired of fighting too. My spies told me they were at each other’s throats. If they had Helen back, most of them would be eager to go home. Those in favor of continuing the war would be shouted down. A few carts of treasure and they would gladly board their black ships and return to Achaea.
Helen had been watching my face. “You are not thinking of me,” she said. She refilled my cup. “You look just like Odysseus when he is hatching one of his little plots. Tell me what you are thinking.”
“Not now. It is only an idea. A way to end the war, perhaps.”
“End the war? That’s all I ever wanted — for men to stop fighting over me. All I ever prayed for was to be left alone.”
She said it as if she believed it. What nonsense.
“Do you know what I would really like to be?”
The question baffled me. People are what they are born to be.
“I would like to become a priestess. Take care of Aphrodite’s grove. Harvest the olives, press the sacred oil. That is the life I wish I lived.”
I laughed and raised the cup to my lips, draining it. “You have the best of lives now. You have me.”
The rumors began soon after: Hector is afraid of Achilles. Hector ran away from Achilles. Hector sends his men to face Achilles when he will not face him himself. I laughed at first. My reputation could withstand a few lies. But I had misjudged the mood of the city. People began to curse me in the streets. A woman threw rotten fruit at me, calling me a whoremonger and saying I had murdered her husband.
Then Paris called a council of war.
I was angry when I arrived. Our strategy had not changed since the day, nine years ago, when I had first taken charge. Don’t risk too much. Wear the Achaeans down. They would leave eventually. It was the right strategy, but it had never been popular.
I was surprised to see Priam seated at the council table. He had not come to one of these since the Achaeans had arrived at our shores. What was important enough to make him set aside his wine cup now?
Paris began. He recited the well-known litany of the city’s sufferings and the hardships of the war.
“What is new in that?” I asked. “People suffer. At least we have a city to call our own.”
“My brother is a great warrior,” said Paris, avoiding my eyes. “But we do not all have his stamina. We cannot all fight one battle in the day, and another at night.”
Several men snickered.
I ignored his remarks. “If you have a solution, Paris, other than another cup of wine and an arrow in some real warrior’s back, tell us.”
He turned on me with a scowl. “I do have a solution, brother. We must break the will of the Achaeans. It hangs by a thread. One tug and it will snap. The war will be over.”
“I agree.” Paris was preparing the ground for me to explain my new plan to the council. There were still loose threads, but the idea was sound. Troy would be willing to pay a high price to be rid of the Achaeans. Paris might object to it, but what choice did he have?
“I am glad that you do, brother,” said Paris. “Because you hold the key. I have heard that you are Troy.”
Where had he heard that? Had I said it to Helen after too much wine? Had she been foolish enough to reveal our lovemaking?
“Who am I to debate such a claim?” he continued. “But I say we cannot hold out any longer. The war must end. The question is how. I will give you the answer, my friends: Achilles. He is the one binding the Achaeans together. Were he to die, they would leave. Only one man among us can accomplish that. Hector. Our own Achilles. Hector the brave. That is my plan. March out in battle array, and when the Achaeans come against us, we thrust Hector into the line opposite Achilles and let the war be decided there.”
I sneered. What a witless plan. I was the one indispensable Trojan. My strategy was the right one. We would win if we did nothing but sit behind our walls. And if we threw Helen onto the scales... I was surprised to hear several men murmur that Paris’s plan might work. These men were my captains of battle, the trusted councilors who administered the city. Paris, I could understand, but the others?
“Could you do it?” At first I didn’t clearly hear the voice, nor comprehend the question.
“
“Perhaps, Father. He is a great warrior. I might win, but I might lose.”
“That is the same chance that every man takes in battle. Do you know if Achilles has a weakness?”
Why was he asking that? The only one whom I remembered saying that to was Helen. What mischief had she been up to?
“I will not lie,” I answered. “Everyone around this table knows I do not lie. I have seen a weakness in his fighting. But I would have to expose myself, and give him the opening to kill me first.” They ignored the last part. Instead, they seized on Achilles’ vulnerability, and how I would certainly defeat him.
Paris smiled. “You have my proposal. I request that the council approve it.”
I stood up. “You forget that I am the leader of the Trojan host. I have not asked for a council meeting. I have not asked for a plan. We will not risk the safety of the city in single combat.”
The almost-forgotten voice spoke again. “You forget
I opened my mouth but no words came forth.
“The plan
“Over? Of that there can be no doubt. Whether our portion is victory or defeat, who can say?” I shouted. “You are fools.”
I stormed out of the council room. My feet brought me to my old apartments. Andromache was sewing in the main chamber, as she always did. What a contrast to Helen, who didn’t know one end of a needle from the other. Andromache never liked to waste a single moment when work could be found to fill it.
She flushed when I entered the room. “Hector,” she said.
“Yes, wife. I have come for some wine. Do you still keep the Chian by the kitchen door?”
“All is in waiting for your return, husband, just like you left it.”
I brushed past her and found a cup and filled it. When I returned, she had set aside her sewing.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Well enough. The war... and now those fools...”
“I know. They want to send you out against Achilles.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“They’ve talked of nothing but that for days. Helen has even been to see the king. She’s very persuasive, they say. If you had stopped here, I would have warned you.” There was gentle reproach in her voice. And then I thought that of all the Trojans, the only one the war had not changed for the worse was Andromache. Kind, caring Andromache. I should ask for her forgiveness. She would grant it. But that was another Hector. I had lost him years ago.
She waited in silence, as if giving me time to order my thoughts.
“You are still a man of truth, are you not? No one has yet called you a liar.”
“There is that, at least,” I said. “I still have my honor.”
“Then I will ask for the truth, husband, on your honor. People have whispered things. Some out of concern, some out of cruelty. I laughed in their faces and called them fools, ignoring my growing doubt. But now I need to hear it from an honorable man. Did you make love to Helen?”
Gods, did she doubt that? If so, she was the only one left in the city. But she had sworn me to tell the truth.
“Yes, wife. I made love to Helen.”
“Many times?”
“Many times.” It sounded shameful when I said the words.
“Do you love her?”
I could not answer that. Did I love Helen? Or was it only some primal force, an earthquake that I had fallen victim to? Was there a difference between need and love?
“Your silence is answer enough,” she said at last. Then she sighed, and it sounded like a hundred years of sorrow captured in a single breath. “I never liked Helen, you know. I didn’t like her from the moment we met. Helen of the golden hair. Helen the beautiful. Helen who launched a thousand ships. How could I like her? Look at me. I’m plain. I have no wit for conversation. I only have love. What man is ever satisfied with that?”
She stood up and brushed the scraps off her lap.
“Once I heard they wanted you to face Achilles, I went to the armorers and had them make new armor. Yours is old and scarred, like you. But now you will stand for Troy in single combat. It would not do for the stories to say you faced great Achilles looking like a beggar.”
“Stories?”
“That is what we make here now. They are already singing some of them. I’ve heard the Achaean prisoners reciting like bards.”
“And what do they say?”
“That the end is near. When you start to pass into story and song, you know there is not much time left.” She put her hands to her eyes and rubbed them. “You have hurt the people who love you most.”
I thought about that. There was blame to be shared all around. I had been hurt far worse in return.
She dropped her head. A tear fell from her downcast eyes. “Wear my armor, husband. It is my gift to you for all that you have done. Stay home tonight. I will leave and sleep elsewhere. I have a few last-minute adjustments to make to the armor’s fittings. It will be here in the morning when you awake. I will send Helen to you. Don’t worry, I will see to it that Paris is occupied.”
“If I see Helen, I will kill her. She has betrayed me.”
“Now I
“I mean it. I will.”
“So you think. I won’t be watching tomorrow when you fight Achilles. I will be here at my loom. I will tell our son one of the stories they are singing about you.”
“I never should have left you.” It was all the apology I could give her.
“No,” she agreed. “You never should have left me.”
Helen came to me at dark. I was sitting in my chair, clutching the dagger I intended to kill her with. She carried a lamp and I could see her face. She was frowning.
“I have been waiting.”
She raised the lamp and stepped closer until she could see me plainly. Then she smiled.
“Why do you smile at men?” I asked.
“I only smile at men when they smile at me. My mother taught me it was good manners. Sometimes I think it was bad advice. Maybe if I had returned a scowl to all your smiles, none of this would have happened.”
I had to touch my face to be sure. I
We made love for the last time. I still found peace in her arms. Tomorrow the gods would judge me. Tonight was not the time for judgments.
When at last I lay exhausted on the bed coverings, questions came to me like crows circling above a battlefield.
“Why did you tell Paris we shared a bed?”
“Do you think I am a fool? I would never tell him that. He would have killed me. When he came to me two weeks ago and asked me, I denied it.”
“Then why did you mention it to my wife?”
“You are full of accusations tonight, Hector. I did not tell your wife. We hardly talk. She doesn’t like me.”
“I will pretend to believe your lies. I know you went to my father. Why did you urge him to send me out against Achilles?”
“I never told him that. I told him to send me to the Achaeans adorned in gold. Was that not your plan?”
“It was. But how did you know that? I never told you.”
“You talk far too much when you drink. When it comes to secrets, you can’t keep your tongue still.”
That is when I finally understood Helen. She had betrayed me to my brother, my wife, and my father because she did not want to return to Agamemnon. She was angry that I would think of casting her aside.
“What did my father say when you told him of your plan?”
“He laughed and asked me why every woman in Troy seemed to have a scheme to end the war. Then he grabbed me and tried to kiss me.”
Exactly the behavior I would expect from a drunken old stoat.
“The gods know why you have plotted to destroy me, Helen. I do not care. I am a fool.”
“That, at least, is not a lie,” she said, and kissed me. I fell asleep beside her. Later, when day was just beginning to creep into the sky, I heard Andromache and Helen talking in another room. Then Andromache left. I lay in silence, listening and waiting. A long time passed before Helen came back to my bed.
“Your armor is here. Shouldn’t you be preparing?”
“I no longer command the host. Let Paris gather the troops and explain his battle plan to the captains. He has been up all night, worrying and fretting. Eventually he will notice I am missing and he will panic and send a herald to fetch me. I can steal a few more minutes of rest until then.”
Helen covered me with a light blanket. “I will send someone to help you with your armor. I never learned to do it. The things that men use to kill each other unsettle me.”
I laid my head back on the pillow but I was no longer able to sleep.
Our men fought with ardor in the morning. They knew the war would end before the sun had passed its zenith. I waited in the rear, where Paris had placed me. At midmorning he dashed up beside me, his chariot drawn by two foam-flecked horses.
“We have found Achilles. He is on the left of the battle line. Face him and defeat him, brother!” I could hear the excitement in his voice.
He paused a moment, thinking. “If you should fall, your shade can rest easy. I will avenge you. Proud Achilles will get careless and expose himself. Then I will put an arrow in his throat. I swear it.”
Paris always told a good tale. I wondered what the stories would say about him.
I rode to the left of the line to face the fiercest of the Achaeans. As if all the warriors had been waiting for just that moment, both sides fell back. Achilles stood alone between the lines of sweating and gasping men. A ring of bloody corpses surrounded him. He didn’t use the heavy plate armor favored by some of the Achaeans. He wore only a leather cuirass and bronze greaves, and one of the strange boar’s-tusk helmets their heroes were so proud of. I stepped down from my chariot and acknowledged the shouts of my warriors. As I sprinted forward to close with Achilles, the sandal twisted on my right foot, tripping me. I fell to the ground. The Achaeans laughed and beat their shields with their spears and shouted insults. My Trojans were silent. It was a bad omen. The thong tying the sandal to my foot had parted, which was odd, since the thongs had never been used before.
I stood up, shrugged my armor back into place, and pushed the helmet down on my head. I kicked the useless sandal off my foot. The wind blew for a moment, and I could feel the helmet’s red horsehair plume streaming in the wind, like a standard flying before battle.
Achilles crouched and began to circle to my left, moving towards me with each step. I thought of his weakness and of how I had to draw him into it. I would need to be rid of my spear. Achilles would think me at a disadvantage, since he favored the spear. I launched it at him with all my strength. He ducked, using his shield to brush aside my throw. The spear caromed off and flew harmlessly over his head. The Achaeans cheered. My men shouted encouragement. My shield shifted a little and I had to shake my forearm to settle it back into its proper position. The new straps must be stretching. Perhaps it would have been better to stay with my old armor, but that was nothing I could worry about now. I drew my new sword for the first time.
Achilles stabbed at my head, then shifted and tried to bring the shaft of his spear around to trip me. I blocked and jumped, spoiling the move. I feinted with my sword. He kept an arm’s distance between us, refusing to let me close where my sword could come into play. He attempted several more sallies, even trying to hook my shield with his spear to pull it off my arm. I frustrated each of his attacks.
The sweat dripped from beneath my helmet. Achilles was laboring too. He had already faced a number of men before me, and so I was fresher. Hope rose in me. I could defeat him. I could match his speed. My plan would work.
Suddenly he rushed forward, crashing into me with his shield, hoping to bull me over. I stumbled back, my feet scrabbling to find purchase. The toes of my unshod foot found a crack in the dry earth and I was able to retain my balance. Had I been wearing two sandals I would have fallen, and Achilles would have killed me. Now I knew the gods were with me. My men cheered as I drove Achilles back. I had to rein in my enthusiasm. I had to trick him into exposing his vulnerable side. I delayed my reactions. Just enough to make him think I was tiring.
As he sensed his advantage, he launched a flurry of jabs and thrusts. I was hard pressed to keep him back. He managed to cut my face, but the cheek piece of my helmet prevented it from being more than a long, bleeding scratch. I hardly felt the pain. The contest had been going on for some time, longer than Achilles was used to. I could sense that he was desperate to end it. Now is when I would take him. I waited until he had drawn his spear back. Then I jumped forward, crowding him, and lunged with my sword. I dropped my shield, just enough to expose my throat. He saw the opening and struck instinctively like a snake, swift and deadly. I was already twisting aside, expecting his spear thrust. He had a surprise for me. I had been feigning slowness, but so had he. He was much faster than I thought. I couldn’t twist aside in time. His spear caught me in the arm, slicing though the muscle that lay across the top of my shoulder. I was badly wounded. He smiled as I screamed. But more fool he, if he thought it was a scream of pain. It was my shout of triumph. His side was exposed! I brought my sword around in a powerful slashing blow. It landed squarely on the waist of his leather armor where it thinned to allow more flexibility. A place where my sword would cut through it and open a great wound in his side. The blow that would kill him.
I saw the surprise in his eyes when the blow landed. He jerked sideways. It was too late. I jumped back to avoid his desperate counter-thrust. Achilles stood there, looking at his side. His armor was unscathed. There was no cut, no blood. He gave a great shout, withdrawing several paces to address the Achaean lines.
“I am immortal,” he cried. “Immortal, as the songs say.” The Achaeans began to chant his name.
I stared at my sword. And that’s when I saw it. The blade’s edge was blunt, like a practice sword, so that it wouldn’t cut even bread. I had struck Achilles, perhaps broken a rib, but I had not slain him. How could this be? Who could have... and then I knew. Helen. Seeking her revenge. I raised my shield to look at the straps. The one my fist held, the strap that gave me control of my shield during battle, was nearly parted. It had been cut, then sewn shut with a single thread. Sewn so I would not notice it, but ready to fail at a critical moment. It had been cunningly done. I doubted it would take even a single new blow. And that meant my sandal hadn’t parted by mistake either. Helen, how could you do this to me? After Andromache had given you my armor, you were alone with it while I waited for you in my bed. That was when you laid your deadly trap.
There was no chance to defeat Achilles now. I threw my shield at him and ran. My only hope was to reach the Trojan lines. I heard Achilles’ laughter a moment before I felt the bite of his spear in my back. Achilles may have thrown it, but Helen had placed it in his hand.
The Trojan War was over.
Death of a Good Girl
by Carmen Iarrera
Melina Sardi’s cadaver lay decomposing on the little living room floor. Her arms sprawled open and her right foot, still wearing a red stiletto, stuck out from under the calf of her left leg. Her open white thighs were left exposed by the pink robe amassed around her hips. Her left foot, naked, looked abandoned. Her glassy eyes stared at a little bronze statue lying beside her. A mass of bleached blond hair extended out in a pool of clotted blood around her. Rosa Belli screamed and ran back down the stairs.
“Do you feel better now, Signora?” the commissioner asked politely.
“Yes... I think so. You came right away,” murmured Signora Belli as she lifted her eyes to see him clearer. He was a good-looking young man, thirty-five years old, with dark hair and intensely blue eyes, almost violet. He sat immobile in front of her, with his beautiful hands crossed over his knees as if he had all the time in the world. But his calm pose was contradicted by the intermittent pulsing of a vein in his neck that revealed a contained energy, a tension ready to explode.
He had said to call him D’Orso. Commissioner Tommaso D’Orso.
“Are you able to answer a few questions?”
Signora Rosa stiffened slightly in the old chintz flowered armchair in her sitting room and looked up at the ceiling. “Have they... have they taken her away yet?”
The commissioner looked up at the ceiling too. The girl’s body was surely still up on the next floor, above their heads. He could hear the heavy steps of Officer Sorrento and the rummaging of the lab agents who were examining every square centimeter of the pathetically pretentious living room, taking photos of the stuffed animals strewn about the house and searching the bedroom closet where cheap, gaudy clothes hung orderly next to inexpensive childish dresses.
“They’ve certainly taken her away by now...” he lied. “Would you please go over everything again, from the beginning?”
Signora Rosa nodded her head. “This morning I didn’t hear her come down,” she began. “I hear her every day, when she comes down the stairs in those stilettos, but not this morning. So I started to worry.”
“Why?” asked the commissioner. “Did she always leave at the same time?”
“No.” Signora Rosa squirmed in discomfort. “No, actually... you know how cinema people are, they never have regular schedules...”
“Was she an actress?”
“No... I don’t know,” Signora Rosa stuttered, blushing. “She just said she worked in the movie business.”
The commissioner looked at her perplexed, asking himself why the signora turned so red over such a simple question.
“Let’s go over it again,” he proposed. “Miss Sardi didn’t leave on a regular schedule and so you, not hearing her come down, didn’t have any reason to be alarmed. But, at a certain point, you went upstairs because you were worried. Why?”
Signora Rosa bit her wrinkled lips. “Because of the noises I heard last night, that’s why,” she snapped.
“What kind of noises?” the commissioner asked patiently. He knew from experience that some people were not forthcoming and you had to get things out of them little by little.
“An argument. An argument that woke me up suddenly.”
“What time was that?”
“Around midnight. It sounded like pandemonium. Shouting, things smashing on the floor, then heavy steps running down the stairs and a car squealing off in a hurry.”
“And then what did you do?” asked D’Orso. “Did you go to the window? Did you see anything?”
“No,” murmured Signora Rosa, shaking her head with a guilty air. “How could I have imagined what had happened? I rolled over and went back to sleep, that’s what I did... I had already given my advice to that girl. In vain, apparently. What can I do if people won’t listen to me? I told her that that guy, with his leather jacket and his black car, was up to no good. But Melina told me he was her boyfriend and that he was a producer. Nice boyfriend, I said. In my opinion, the one before was better, the one from her hometown. A good boy. She did nothing but fight with the new one. It certainly wasn’t the first time I had been awakened by these tremendous arguments, you know.”
“What is this boyfriend’s name?” asked the commissioner.
Signora Rosa shook her head.
“Can you describe him to me?”
“I only saw him in passing a couple of times. What can I say? He isn’t tall, he isn’t short, his hair’s not really brown or blond. The only thing that struck me was his, how do you say, vulgar look. Yes, vulgar, that’s it.”
“And do you remember the make or model of his car?”
“I don’t know anything about cars.” Signora Rosa shook her head. “I don’t even recognize the FIATs anymore, they’ve changed so much... but I know that there was some kind of disc with white and blue points on the hood.”
“So it’s a BMW...” murmured the commissioner. “And did you see him last night?”
“That guy? No. To tell you the truth, no. I only thought it was him.”
“I understand,” said the commissioner. “Let’s go back to this morning. This morning you thought about what you had heard and started to worry.”
“Yes, this morning I thought about it and I went to knock on her door. Just to see if she needed anything. No one answered. So I came back here and I got the key.”
“And why did you have the keys to Miss Sardi’s place?”
“She gave them to me when she rented the apartment, just in case. This is a really small building, Signor Commissioner. There’s only her apartment and mine. We don’t have a doorman and in my old age I don’t go out much. I got her mail for her, opened for the electric company... little favors like that. That’s all.”
“Did you see each other often?”
Signora Rosa had the impression there was a flash of sincere curiosity in Commissioner Tommaso D’Orso’s eyes. A curiosity that maybe made him wonder what an old widow like her and a young, vibrant girl who lived, who had lived, above her could ever have to say to one another. But this impression lasted for only a split second and Signora Rosa found herself staring embarrassed into the commissioner’s attentive blue eyes.
“Did you see each other often?” he repeated, with an absolutely professional tone.
“Just a little chitchat when we met on the stairs, or when I took her mail. She seemed like such a good girl... I invited her to lunch a few times, before...”
“Before what?” asked D’Orso, but Signora Rosa blushed again, stammered, and burst into tears.
Really, she hadn’t answered the question, the commissioner thought while gazing out his office window. Before him, beyond the trees and the road, the Coliseum suffered, majestic and indifferent, the carousel of automobiles that went around it to reach the wide boulevard that runs along the ancient Roman Forums. But Tommaso D’Orso didn’t even see it: he had his eyes fixed on the four little buildings just behind it, on the little two-story one with crumbling plaster walls, held up by the walls of the other structures. The apartment where Melina Sardi had been killed.
“I brought you an espresso, Commissioner.” Officer Sorrento’s deep baritone voice made him spin around suddenly. Strange, he hadn’t heard him come in.
“Another espresso. You’re spoiling me.”
The officer looked at his commissioner with affectionate deference and put the miniature mug on his muddled desk. If it were up to him, he would have brought him a slice of pizza too, maybe the hot, steamy white kind studded with coarse salt that the neighborhood bakery made, just like in the olden days. He was sure the commissioner had forgotten to eat lunch, just as he always did when he started investigating a difficult case.
“Some coffee can’t hurt,” he assured him.
Tommaso D’Orso drank his espresso without taking his eyes off Sorrento. He was a strange guy: He was nearing retirement age but was still a noncommissioned officer, even though he had seen all sorts of things and knew more than D’Orso did about the central database in headquarters. But he never complained, as if it was written somewhere that he would never be promoted, as if he had accepted his menial job as support and assistance a long time ago. And he did it the best he could, almost in self-sacrifice, happy to give his modest contribution to justice.
“What did we learn from the fingerprints?” asked D’Orso.
“Other than the girl’s, there are a few from Signora Rosa. She must have left them when she went to see what happened. Then there are another three kinds, all of them probably male. Some are clear. But the ones on the little bronze statue are smudged and useless.”
“What about the information I asked for?” He eyed the file that Sorrento held under his arm.
The officer held it out. “We didn’t manage to find much. We still don’t know where the victim worked. According to what she told Signora Rosa she worked in cinema, but the term is vague and it’s a wide field. Nobody knows her at Cinecittà and we didn’t find a single receipt or bank statement in the house, nothing. We’ll keep looking...”
“Signora Rosa also mentioned a producer, her lover, who was always at the girl’s apartment.”
“The guy with the leather jacket, the black BMW, and a suspicious attitude,” recapitulated Sorrento. “We don’t have anything on him either. We’re looking into the Department of Motor Vehicles records, who knows...”
“We’ve got to find him,” D’Orso affirmed. “His description set off an alarm in my head. I’ve been thinking about it all day. He reminds me of someone I dealt with some time ago. A real delinquent, dangerous, who managed to get off scot-free because he could pay the best lawyers, the ones who know all the loopholes. He should be in jail for corruption and exploitation of minors, at the very least. But who knows where he is... His name was Aldolfo Cini.”
“Adolfo Cini... I’ll check his fingerprints in the database. It won’t take long.”
“Anything else?” asked D’Orso, mindlessly sifting through the contents of the file.
“Yes, sir. Raffaele Conte, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, the one you wanted to interrogate, is waiting outside.”
“Great.” D’Orso closed the file and looked up at Sorrento. “What kind of kid is he?”
He trusted Sorrento’s judgment: Years of experience had sharpened the older man’s profound intuition. He was rarely wrong.
“He’s a good kid,” the officer immediately responded. “He comes from Magliano and works at the night desk at the university. He studies medicine. In my opinion the worst thing he could do would be parking in a no-parking zone, but even that’s not likely, since he doesn’t have a car.”
“Let him in, then.”
Yes, Raffaele Conte had just the air of a good kid. You didn’t need Sorrento’s intuition to see it; a quick glance was enough. He wore jeans, a shirt, and moccasins. He had hesitated while coming into the commissioner’s office but with reverence. Now he was sitting in front of him and looking straight at him with dark eyes still red from crying.
“You were Melina Sardi’s boyfriend, right?” said the commissioner.
“Ex-boyfriend: Melina left me.”
He pronounced the words with a suffering he didn’t try to hide at all and that couldn’t go unnoticed. D’Orso looked upon him with interest. He couldn’t decide yet whether Raffaele Conte suffered because the girl was dead, because she had rejected him... or for some other reason. He settled back into his uncomfortable chair. It was worth it to try to find out.
“Can I ask you why she didn’t want to be with you anymore?” he said kindly.
The kid shrugged. It wasn’t an indifferent gesture, but a defensive one. “You’ve certainly seen the album Melina kept on her coffee table. Do you remember the first picture?”
The commissioner nodded. It was a full-page photo of the girl wearing a bikini and a sash with Miss Something-or-other written on it.
“Ever since that damned day, Melina wasn’t the same. She got it into her head to do films, and the worst part is that she found someone who thought it was a good idea too. She did a couple of little parts... then nothing. So she got more and more frustrated and left our town — we’re from Magliano Sabina — to move here to Rome. And she left me too.”
“Why?”
“She said she had to be free, she had to think about her career, about making it big. She was obsessed.”
“And what did she do in the meantime? For a living, I mean.”
“She worked at wardrobe at Cinecittà, but she made me swear not to tell anyone back home. She was ashamed.”
Tommaso D’Orso wrinkled his eyebrows. Officer Sorrento had told him that nobody at Cinecittà knew her, that she wasn’t on any of the books. But then... how did Melina Sardi make a living?
“Did she see other men?”
Raffaele Conte suddenly sat upright as if someone had whipped him and swallowed hard. The commissioner kept looking at him with an impassable air. Asking that kind of question was his duty, even if sometimes, as in this case, he didn’t like his job at all.
“Yes,” the kid finally answered. “One in particular, a producer, but she never told me his name.”
“A tough guy always dressed in a leather jacket that drives around in a black BMW?”
The boy nodded silently. Tommaso D’Orso took a deep breath. He had to ask him one last question. No, his job wasn’t much fun...
“When did you last see her?”
“Late last night,” the kid answered, shifting around uncomfortably in his chair. “I wanted to go up and talk, to convince her to come back to me. She didn’t even open the door. She came to the window and shouted at me to go away.”
“What time was it?”
“Almost midnight.”
Commissioner D’Orso read the short medical report again.
He folded the paper and put it back into the file. The report didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.
He sighed and called out for Officer Sorrento.
“Sir?” he answered, materializing at the threshold of the office door and looking at him complacently. He had gone to pull Adolfo Cini’s records and perfectly understood the commissioner’s mood. Adolfo Cini had a file up to here. He exploited, bribed, corrupted minors, dealt drugs, and now he might even be a killer. And he had never done a day in prison.
“The fingerprints match, I just got the results back and was coming to give them to you, but there is no trace of him. It’s like he’s disappeared into thin air. Maybe he’s going under another name.”
“I think so too,” said D’Orso as he ran his fingers through his hair.
“And we still don’t even know what the girl did for a living. She might have been in the oldest profession in the—”
“Come in!” the commissioner nearly yelled. He though he had heard someone knock.
Signora Rosa Belli timorously appeared in the doorway. “May I come in?” she asked in a whisper.
The commissioner welcomed her warmly and pulled up a chair. If she had come all the way here she must have something to say. Any new clue would be welcome.
“Did you remember the name of the guy with the BMW?” he asked her right away, but without any real hope.
“No...” she answered. “I wanted to tell you something else.”
D’Orso encouraged her with a smile. “Go ahead.”
Signora Rosa blushed, wiggled in her chair, and furtively looked over to Officer Sorrento. He and D’Orso exchanged a knowing glance.
“I’ll go look for that file,” Sorrento said, and disappeared. But his departure didn’t help Signora Rosa’s emotional state; she was blushing more and more and even began to sweat. The commissioner looked at her, deep in thought.
“Is what you have to tell me that serious, Signora?”
“Yes... that is, no... I mean... it’s embarrassing, quite embarrassing... but I thought it might help you with your investigation. Deep down, I’m sure Melina was always a good girl at heart...”
Tommaso D’Orso remained silent. Experience had taught him that sometimes saying nothing is the best way to get people to talk.
Signora Rosa Belli wiggled around some more and pulled out a white tissue from her aging purse to dry her forehead. Then she made a long sigh, staring for a moment into the commissioner’s deep blue eyes, and immediately looked down again.
“It was six months ago,” she muttered. “On a Wednesday. You know, in Rome on Wednesday cinemas are half price, so my friend Maria and I usually go. We’re both retired and money is tight...”
The commissioner gave her a look of comprehension that was lost on her grey hair since she had bowed her head as if she didn’t ever want to look up again.
“So, as I was saying,” she began again, mumbling, with her eyes down. “We always go to the cinema on Wednesday and that day, that day the curiosity was too much. Just open the newspaper and you’ll see... We worked up the courage together and we went in... We had to see one before we die, didn’t we? And she was the actress! You can imagine how I felt... my own neighbor, the one I had lunch with... there, on the screen... what shame, what shame...”
“I don’t understand. You knew that Miss Sardi worked in the film industry, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean you don’t understand, Commissioner!?” Signora Rosa exclaimed, looking up all of a sudden. “Melina Sardi made pornographic movies!”
So, thanks to Signora Rosa Belli, who perfectly remembered the title of the film, the plot, and even the director’s name, Commissioner D’Orso finally got his hands on Adolfo Cini, who had become a porn producer under another name.
Now Cini was standing in front of him and looked at him arrogantly.
“Melina was of age, Signor Commissioner. A consenting adult. I’m pretty damn good at keeping my nose clean, don’t you remember?”
Tommaso D’Orso remained impassive, but Officer Sorrento, who was taking the deposition, couldn’t help himself and snorted in disgust. People like him should rot in jail!
“Why do you use a fake name?”
“Fake? No, you’re mistaken. It’s my
“Nice business you’re in.”
“Yeah, it’s great. We’re always surrounded by a ton of good little girls. See, I’ve even learned to speak nicely.”
“Good little girls like Melina Sardi?” asked the commissioner without letting Cini’s provocations get to him.
“Exactly. She had talent in her field. She was a real goose with golden eggs...”
“So why did you kill her?”
“Kill her? Me?!” Cini was stunned. “Are you joking?”
“Don’t get smart with me, Cini. We know that you spent a lot of time with her, and we have witnesses who heard you fighting with her the other night and your car screeching off like a rocket. Right at the time of the homicide. Don’t you think that’ll be enough?”
“It’d be enough if I had killed her, but I didn’t. I only smacked her around a bit because she deserved it. I made the mistake of promising her a little part in a normal film and ever since then she wouldn’t leave me alone, she was always busting my balls.”
“And you had no intention of keeping that promise, did you?”
“You’ve got to keep girls like Melina on a leash, Signor Commissioner,” Cini explained as if he were talking to a small child. “Give them the stick one day and the carrot the next. Make them understand who is in control one day and make them promises the next, to keep them calm. And making promises isn’t illegal.”
“But murder is.”
“I’m telling you I didn’t kill her. I wouldn’t have anything to gain from her death. The opposite! I told you she was a goose with golden eggs, didn’t I? Her films earned well. I only gave her a couple of smacks to shut her up and tore that stupid red dress off of her. She only put it on to get a rise out of me. She knew I hated that stupid little red dress.”
Officer Sorrento lifted the pencil from the notebook and looked at the commissioner. Tommaso D’Orso stared at him and clenched his teeth.
Melina Sardi’s body had been discovered with a pink robe on. The shredded red dress was found in her garbage bin.
Commissioner Tommaso D’Orso flipped through the photos of the cadaver for the umpteenth time. But as many times as he flipped through them, the pink robe remained a pink robe.
“Ugly business, Signor Commissioner,” sighed Officer Sorrento.
“Really ugly,” D’Orso answered. “Adolfo Cini isn’t smart enough to make up a story like that in order to look innocent.”
“Yeah,” said Sorrento, slumping down on the chair in front of the desk.
“He’s sly, but too crude to come up with such a plan,” continued D’Orso with an ominous air. “It’s impossible, absolutely impossible that he killed the girl while she was wearing the red dress and then ripped it off and redressed her in the robe, staining it with blood in just the right places, and then screeched off right at the end of the fight only to fake complete ignorance of the facts during an interrogation.”
“You’re sure it’s impossible?” said Sorrento.
The commissioner looked him right in the eyes, understood that they were thinking the same thing, and then shook his head.
“The red dress wasn’t bloody,” he said, resigned. “Plus, the victim was wearing red stiletto shoes. Shoes like that with a robe. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Yup,” said the officer. “It means that after her fight with Cini she took off the ripped-up dress and put on the robe, and she would have certainly put on her slippers if—”
“If the murderer hadn’t arrived,” concluded the commissioner darkly. “Someone she would open the door for late at night, even wearing a robe.”
Officer Sorrento shook his head.
“Go get me Raffaele Conte,” sighed Tommaso D’Orso.
“Yes sir,” answered Sorrento with a hint of hesitation in his voice.
Raffaele Conte’s eyes were even redder than the day before. When the commissioner asked him if he knew about his ex-girlfriend’s profession, he closed them and sighed.
“I found out the other night.” He trembled. “She told me.”
“From the window?” D’Orso interrogated him. Bitter.
“No. You’re right in treating me like this,” the boy answered weakly. “I lied. I was a coward, I was afraid. But it was all so horrible, so... sudden.”
“An instant of rage... dismay over what you learned... you lost your head and grabbed that bronze statue, didn’t you?” Sorrento interjected, charitably.
Raffaele Conte shook his head.
“No, no... that’s not what happened. The other night, after she yelled at me from the window to leave, I stayed below her apartment, waiting for I don’t know what. Maybe just to see her shadow through the window... I don’t know.
I saw that guy go up then. Half an hour later, I saw him come out. I was furious and he had left the door open and took off screeching. So I took advantage of the fact that the door was open and went up and knocked. Melina opened right away. She thought I was that other guy. She was all banged up, she had a black eye and bruises on her arms. I asked her what had happened and she told me to mind my own business and to go away. I told her I wasn’t leaving, because I loved her, that I had never stopped loving her. She laughed in my face. She was hysterical, out of her head. She asked me what I was going to do with a cheap whore who shot porn films. That’s how she said it, with those words. I was shocked, out of breath, I didn’t know how bad things had gotten... but then, then I told her I didn’t care, that I’d take her away, that we could start over, that we could forget the past.”
“And then...” D’Orso encouraged him with a rocky voice.
“Then she got even worse, she was screaming out all the details, horrible details. She wouldn’t stop. It was clear she didn’t want to hurt me but hurt herself. I tried to calm her, but the more I talked, the more she went crazy. She looked like she was possessed, she was moving all jerky... I tried to stop her, to hold her by her arms, but she got loose and all of a sudden... she tripped. She tripped, Signor Commissioner, I swear to God. She fell back and hit her head on the statue. It all happened so suddenly... it’s incredible that someone can die like that...”
He broke down in tears.
“It was an accident,” said Sorrento, convinced.
“I know.” Tommaso D’Orso stared at the chair where, just a few moments ago, the kid had been sitting.
“Even if they believe him, his life is ruined.”
“And if they don’t believe him, they’ll put him away for murder. I know.”
“If we hadn’t noticed what Cini said about the red dress, he’d be in jail by now and the boy would be home licking his wounds... trying to forget.”
“But we did notice, both of us did.”
“If we could at least—” Sorrento started to say dejectedly.
“We can’t,” Tommaso D’Orso interrupted him, running his hands through his hair in a tired gesture. “You know very well we can’t.”
He closed the case file with a deep sigh. It was true that sometimes he didn’t like his job at all. Not at all.
The Playlist
by Geoffrey Thorne
Yeah. I didn’t buy it.
Oh, sure, I believed she was dead. They had the pictures — a pale, skinny brunette lying at the bottom of a stairwell in a pool of her blood. They had the name right — Jenny Charles, of the Harp Street Charleses. They had her age and address and a list of all her friends. They even knew where she’d been for all but two of the forty-eight hours that led up to her ugly end. They claimed they had a note.
It was Jenny, all right, and she was definitely dead.
But, a suicide? No. That wasn’t Jenny.
I was actually surprised when the cops showed up to interview me.
I mean, what was she doing in the Harkness Wing that night, by herself? She wasn’t a big reader of tomes and she sure as hell wasn’t the type to go for ancient Latin and Aramaic. Given that’s all the H-Wing had to offer, I just couldn’t see her going there alone, not even to do herself in, not with a knife or a gun or a rope and certainly not with a four-story jump.
The cops cleared me, of course. As far as they could tell I was just somebody on the periphery of Jenny’s little life — a casual notation in her to-do list. SEE JACK ABOUT THAT POSTER/WEDNESDAY, that kind of thing. Easy to track down and easy to rule out, right?
Wrong.
They didn’t know. Not about me and absolutely not about me and Jenny. Nobody did, really. I guess, in retrospect, she wanted it that way. I mean, I might not be as off-putting as I pretend to be (nobody could be that antisocial, right?) but that doesn’t mean people like her want it getting out that they actually like me. Or want to spend time with me. Or that they might find anything I’ve got to say worth saving.
But she did.
She caught me listening to an obscure live recording of Cannery Row’s “Vanishing” and just couldn’t believe somebody like me would be into their stuff.
“Somebody like me?” I said. I knew what she meant but I wanted her to say it.
“Yeah,” she said with that little twinkle. “You know: all gothy and mopey and grim.”
“I keep a summer place in Cancun, though,” I said. “So, you know, maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“I guess not,” she said. Again with the twinkle. What is it with some chicks, anyway?
“So,” she said after just standing there on the other side of the counter long enough for me to get a whiff of her. Clean, sort of minty, that was her. “Any chance you could burn me a disc of that set?”
“Sure,” I said. “Come back on Friday.”
“Great.”
And that was the beginning of me and Jenny.
What, you were expecting some great love affair? Me and Jenny tearing up the secret sheets between her quartet recitals? Keep dreaming. We had a connection, that’s all. It was deep and she definitely kept it close, but not because of sex. I was a part of her life that she kept in a box. It happens like that sometimes.
Which doesn’t mean I didn’t love the little preppie; I did. You have to love a girl who swims in a world of Chopin and Brahms but dreams of thrashing to Bobby Crux and the Boonwillies every night.
Jenny. Jenny of the Secret Life. Jenny of the night. Jenny. Dead.
But not by her own hand. Never. No way.
Why was I so sure? How did I know that this girl I only saw when she had time, only to talk about unknown bands with tiny followings, couldn’t have done what everybody was saying?
Because of the lists.
We’ll get to that.
The point is, I knew something about her that nobody else knew and I had something from her that nobody else had. I couldn’t share it and it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it was enough for me to know. No way Jenny was a suicide. No effing way.
As soon as the cops crossed me off, but before her folks had a chance to plant her in the family plot outside Kenton Green, I decided I was going to look into whatever had left her at the bottom of those stairs in that ugly, lonely way.
And if it turned out to be a somebody other than herself who put her there...
Well.
There’s antisocial and then there’s antisocial.
When Claire Aprillo wrote “Drifting in the Ocean of You” she was talking about her ugly breakup with that actor whose name I can never remember. The one with the messy hair and the green eyes the girls all love.
She had this one line in the hook —
Me, I just love the way the guitar trips along underneath the words, making you feel what a complete dick the actor must have been and all the lies he must have told her before she showed him the door.
Her lyrics were in my head for two reasons. One, the guy I was watching at the far end of the library looked a lot like the green-eyed actor. I could tell he knew it too.
He had cut his hair just so and had that accidental-on-purpose ruffle in his shirt and jeans that was supposed to sell the idea that he’d just chosen them at random instead of spending hours.
The other reason my mind went to “Drifting” and sort of the reason I tracked this guy down first, was that it was at the top of Jenny’s last playlist.
She didn’t want it getting out that she knew me, remember, so she started leaving me notes on the community board by the health-food store.
At first they were mostly just requests for rare books or vinyl recordings of obscure bands. Could I, please? Would it be a bother if? Et cetera.
Eventually, after she got comfortable that I was as laconic as I seemed, she started with the lists. A lot of them were just random little things: collections of images or quotes from unnamed philosophers or places I
I don’t know what our connection was, but it was there. I felt it every time I looked at a familiar building in a new way or cracked a book that I hadn’t known existed before.
It might not have been Love, but what it turned into was just as deep. It could even have been something completely fresh, some new way of enjoying another person that was outside holding hands or trying to get in their pants. Whatever it was, it was ours. Now it was gone.
The last note she posted, maybe the last contact she had with anyone before she died, was a list of songs without the artists’ names attached. It would have been my job to find those names, dig up the tracks, and burn her a disc with the music. Well. I wouldn’t be burning anything, but I would be digging.
The first song was “Drifting in the Ocean of You.” It was easy to peg, sort of a wink from her to me.
So, after deciding to talk to some of her friends about the parts of her life I didn’t know, I found myself at the Capra Memorial Library staring hard at Joshua Sykes.
He didn’t notice me until I was right next to him. In fact he didn’t until he felt my breath on his neck as I looked over his shoulder at the book he was reading.
“Sorry,” I said after he nearly jumped out of his skin. “You’re Josh, right?”
He gave me a quick scan and I could hear the gears in his head clicking:
“And you are?” he said. Obviously he figured I was close to the brush-off level of his personal totem pole.
“John Red,” I said, smiling. Yeah. I can be charming when I want. “We met at India Pierce’s last thing.”
India was Number Three on my list of Jenny’s friends. She was one of those chicks who threw a lot of parties where attendance was mandatory if you expected to maintain your social life.
“Oh. Yeah,” he said after completing the social calculus in his head. “Hey.”
“I didn’t know you were a Lear fan,” I said, indicating his book. It was one of those leather-bound tomes that got churned out in the 1950s by upstart publishers trying to simulate Old World Credibility.
“What?” He blinked rapidly as if I’d asked him to solve a particularly knotty algebra problem, before remembering the copy of
“Funeral?”
“Yeah,” he said as he resumed thumbing through the thing. “You didn’t hear about Jenny?”
“Jenny?” I said, as if tasting the name. “Jenny Charles?”
“Did you know her?” There was something like suspicion in his voice. For a second his face held the expression of somebody who’d just realized he wasn’t the only person with a map to the buried treasure.
When I said I didn’t know her, that I must have heard India mention her sometime or other, he relaxed again.
“How did she die?” I said in an intimate whisper. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
I watched him decide how much to tell me. I might be some peripheral friend of India’s and I’d served the purpose of letting him vent a little, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be the one to dump the details of her suicide into the rumor mill.
“She fell,” he said eventually. “Broke her neck.”
“What, like at a party or something?”
“No,” he said, still flipping pages. “She was by herself.”
“At home?”
“No. At some museum, they said.”
“ They?’ ”
“Her folks. Her brother. Maybe it was at the symphony. It was so sudden I actually had a hard time processing it all.”
“Sure,” I said. Then I waited a bit so he’d think I meant it as sympathy. “So, it was an accident?”
“Look,” he said, slamming the book shut, his perfect actor face all furrowed in the middle. “What’s with all the questions? You said you didn’t even know her.”
“Sorry,” I said, doing a little acting of my own. “It just seemed like, you know, you wanted to talk about it.”
“Well, I don’t.” For a second it looked like he was thinking about hitting me. This guy probably hadn’t smacked anything bigger than a tennis ball in his entire life, if that. So, even though he would’ve been on the downside of any scrap he might start with me, the fact that he considered it told me a lot.
His face shifted again, back to the mask of pretty-boy grief he’d been wearing when I walked in. He snorted something piss-offish and moved away.
I liked him a little better after that. The mask was for the ongoing stage play that was his life, but underneath it was some very real sorrow. Maybe Jenny should’ve moved him to the front burner.
As I waited for the muni-bus, I thought about the playlist. “Drifting” had been the first song and the few things Jenny had told me about Josh had instantly linked the two of them in my mind. The second track was “Trouble in the Bubble” by the Wavecats.
The ’cats were an obscure band — nobody ever went in much for punkabilly and, honestly, they weren’t very good at it — but that song was their one moment of actual inspiration. It bounced in the right places, scratched in the right others. It wasn’t overproduced, like the rest of their crap.
See? Nice. If they’d written it in the sixties they might have actually gotten somewhere. The problem was, while “Drifting” fit Josh Sykes like a tailored jacket, “Trouble” didn’t fit anything. Not even the ’cats. It’s just one of those songs, no matter who you are, that makes you want to move when you hear it. Maybe that was Jenny’s point.
Track three was “Heavy Water” by Michael Thomson. Okay, not
The song’s about drowning, of course, but only in that oblique way that doesn’t depress you too much the first time you hear it. The second or third time is when the words,
The Charles house — I won’t call it an estate because it was in the middle of the city and didn’t have any real grounds to speak of — was a four-story brick thing that took up a quarter of its block.
There was no way I was getting inside to interview Jenny’s folks directly, but there was nothing stopping me from playing Peeping Tom from the giant oak in the park behind the house.
The top-floor windows were all dark, though whether this was from curtains being drawn or from the lights actually being off, I couldn’t say.
There was some motion on the third floor. A willowy brunette, obviously Jenny’s mom, drifted in and out of rooms, sometimes lingering in a doorway or disappearing into a closet for long minutes.
She’d been a real stiffener once. You could tell. She had a lot of that same buttoned-up charm the girls in Jane Austen books made famous. But that was before. Now she looked like somebody had sucked twenty years of life out of her. Twenty-two, I guess. The whole of her daughter’s life.
At one point she startled me by jumping up from a chair she’d been sitting in and dashing out into the hall only to came back a couple of minutes later carrying a cordless phone. She talked for a few minutes in the window and then disappeared into the hidden parts of the house.
I know I shouldn’t have tried it. It was a total invasion of her privacy to approach the place, much less knock.
It took four hard thumps, but she eventually came to the door. The resemblance between her and her daughter was really striking that close up. It was as if I was looking at Jenny twenty years later.
“Yes?” she said in a voice that told me it really was a mistake intruding on her this way. Of course it was also too late.
The second she opened the door I was committed. I had a stack of questions for her, all about Jenny’s mood and activities up until the moment of her supposed suicide but, looking at her face, I just couldn’t dredge them up.
I stammered something about being a friend of her daughter’s and having just heard the bad news. I just wanted to pay my respects.
She looked at me a little sceptically at first, I mean, I was about as far from her daughter’s usual cronies as a Palestinian is from a card-carrying member of the JDL. But somewhere in my stuttery it’s-awfuls and jeez-that’s-terribles, her expression changed.
“You aren’t,” she started, stopped, and then took another run at it. “You aren’t Jack, by any chance?”
Turns out I wasn’t the secret I’d always thought. Jenny and her mom — Anne — were close. At least they were in Anne’s mind. Jenny hadn’t told her everything about me, not how we’d met or about the lists passing back and forth, but enough. I was Jack, Jenny’s one Low Society friend, made palatable to Mom by the fact that I ran a bookstore that specialized in obscure works.
She thanked me for my sympathy and segued into a rambling account of Jenny’s life, punctuated with silences and occasional tears.
She’d been a problem birth, too many hours of labor, too much work at the start to get her to breathe. She’d spent the first six weeks of her life in an incubator.
Then there were the ailments that took up most of her childhood — asthma, anemia, even a few scary months of leukemia that she’d thankfully managed to kick.
She eventually put the breathing problems away as well, but not before she’d developed what her mother considered an unhealthy fascination with death.
“She kept most of it from me,” said Anne. “She knew I didn’t like all those Mexican skeleton dolls. Now I think maybe all those years being so close to it made her more comfortable with the thought of dying than most people are.”
Made sense to me. Only Jenny hadn’t shown me any of that side of herself either. If not for this chat with Queen Anne, I would never have thought her capable of those kinds of shadows.
“But she seemed so happy,” I said. Trite, I know, but it’s what you say in times like that — especially if you want the other person to keep talking.
“Oh, did you think so?” said Anne, pouring me a little more of their imported French roast. “So did I. She had her music (thank God we pushed her toward the cello) and Chad, of course (such a sweet, sweet boy). Her father and I really thought she’d turned the corner. That she was truly embracing life.”
I nodded and asked if she’d left a note of any kind, any way to explain her suicide. It was difficult reconciling her version of her daughter with mine.
“Yes,” said Anne after thinking about it. Her eyes went flat, as if she was suppressing something and it was taking all her mind to keep it in check. “It was just a few lines of some poem by one of her little-knowns. At least I never heard of it before — before...”
After some tears, she got through the words of the note. After some more, I was at the front door, saying a quiet goodbye.
It wasn’t a poem. It was more song lyrics, this time from a short-lived Irish band called 1916. Their lyrics were strictly modem, mostly political, but their music was traditional all the way. Jenny’s “suicide note” was a snip from the last cut on their
I pictured the jacket art — a young girl in a thin white shift, walking across water towards some distant grey island — as Queen Anne’s words stumbled around my mind.
That was the note they found in her fingers, written in her hand, when they discovered her at the bottom of those stairs. Of course they assumed she was a jumper.
Of course, her mom figured Jenny was just more nuts than she’d originally guessed. After all those years fighting and then being fascinated with death, there was a kind of symmetry in the idea that she’d finally succumbed to her demons.
They’d cry about it. Maybe Queen Anne would start up a foundation of some kind in her daughter’s name. Everybody would roll on down the highway until the whole thing was just a distant pothole in the rearview mirror.
Everybody but me.
I might not have known all that doom-and-gloom stuff was in Jenny’s head before she met me, but I knew for a fact it hadn’t been running her anymore.
What I didn’t know about Jenny might fill up the rest of my afternoon. What her family and friends didn’t know would fill up the rest of the year.
Obsessed with death? No. That wasn’t Jenny, not the one I knew. Queen Anne’s Jenny might have been nothing more than a pile of broken china, but mine sparkled. Mine laughed and dashed and dreamed herself out of the strictures of her caste. She was all about music and secrets and hidden moments. She was all about living and I had the proof. I got it about three weeks before she died in the form of one of her more cryptic lists.
It took me a little while to figure out that this meant I was supposed to walk out of my shop, go left two blocks, right six, walk a little way around the statue of Sir John Milton, go another ten blocks and down two flights of ancient crumbling stairs to find something I never expected to see in life.
Not ten miles from the Metropolitan Hotel, fairly near the heart of Downtown, buried and forgotten under a building that should’ve been pummeled to dust years before, was a dragon.
Black, massive, with wings the length of a city bus and jaws like every nightmare you ever had about sewer gators, this thing was just coiled there, waiting for me, at the bottom of those rickety stairs.
Of course, it wasn’t a live dragon. Not the kind that breathes fire and sits on a cool trillion bucks in coins and jewels while picking the bones of virgins from its teeth. But it was a
Somebody, some totally insane genius of a somebody, had carved the thing right out of a wall of rock that looked like it had to be part of a subway tunnel.
Who had done it? How long had it taken? Why would somebody so gifted carve something this startling and vibrant only to have it gather dust in the ass end of a building that would have to work its way up to qualify as a rat trap?
How had Jenny even found it?
I pondered those questions and all the others you’d expect as I hiked back to my shop.
I found a note there, in her handwriting, taped to the display window glass, right under the big gothic X so I couldn’t miss it. It contained just four words.
Maybe she expected me to sum up the experience in a couple of random quotes from obscure liner notes like we always had. If she did, she was dreaming.
Her leading me to that dragon, sharing it with me in that way, was like being given the keys to every secret treasure that had ever been lost and found.
There was no question that I had to see her face-to-face to give her a proper telling.
“That was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said. I think I startled her by stepping out from behind the community board. We hadn’t laid eyes on each other in person in weeks. “And I’ve seen a lot of wacky stuff.”
“Really?” was all she said after she recovered her composure. She was dressed for something formal and I could see her cello case lurking in the backseat of the cab behind her. I couldn’t read the expression on her face — something between puzzlement and amusement, I thought at the time — before she said, “Well. I’m glad I could share it with you,” and hopped back into her cab.
After that, it was back to the lists.
Three weeks after that, she was dead and I was digging.
Funny that particular encounter should pop up just at that time, with me leaving her mother’s place and hustling off downtown for my third interview.
There was nothing on her final playlist to point me back to that moment and yet, for some reason, I suddenly had a hard time shaking the image of her softly knit brow and over-large eyes from my mind.
“Who are you again?” said the intercom voice.
I was standing under the arch of a battleship-sized grey brick of a building on the southeast tip of the Shady Green, right where the residentials start mutating into the bowery. There was a big wooden sign nailed to one wall that read CODE: INDUSTRY in generic black and white.
“John Red,” I said for the third time. Rich people love their intercoms. Anything to keep the proles at arm’s length. In a few years all the occupants of Code: Industry would have shifted to one of the posh co-ops off Metro West, exchanging the intercoms for a burly doorman or two.
“And how do I know you?” said the voice.
“You don’t,” I said. “We both know Jenny Charles.”
“Wrong tense, Book Boy,” said the voice and I could hear the corners of her mouth curling.
Jesus. Even this close to her friend’s suicide, India couldn’t resist playing games.
Instead of one of those harsh buzzers to let us lowlies know the gates were being opened on our account, the occupants of Code: Industry had sprung for a very soothing bell.
“Take the back stairs,” she said as I heard the gate clang shut behind me.
There were only five stories, but they were bigger than average. This wasn’t an apartment building, it was a former factory that had evolved into something the classifieds called Live/Work lofts.
Maybe once upon a time people like Pollack and Basquiat had turned old sweatshops into kick-ass spaces where they could do their art and drugs. Maybe they’d even been cool.
Nowadays these joints were just excuses for the children of the top castes to comfortably slum while they worked out their issues with their folks’ money.
I’d never actually met India Pierce but, by the time I got to the top of those stairs, I’d already decided not to like her.
The second to last song on Jenny’s list was the remix of “Demonic” by Coil.
Nobody liked Coil, not even the neo new-wave posers who bought their stuff in the nineties. They were a joke and I thought Jenny had only added them to the list to put a smile on my face.
Taking a look at India Pierce, curled on her imported Persian throw pillows like Hugh Hefner’s version of the Cheshire Cat, I was about as far from smiling as I had ever been in my life.
Her place was like a temple to India herself; everything about it advertised life above the glass ceiling and sex with consequences.
First-edition Fitzgeralds lay wrinkled and yellow over the latest copies of
The one huge window, looking out on the city center and the mass of grey cubes in between, was the only remnant of the building’s original sweatshop life: a giant glass grid with cracks and spots you just knew had been allowed to remain for purely aesthetic reasons.
“Book Boy,” she said in that overly syrupy tone. “It’s about time I got a look at you.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” I said, letting the big steel door swing shut behind me. “Guess we just keep missing each other.”
“Guess we just,” she said. “Want a drink?”
I didn’t. She gestured toward a plate of something that looked like a small mountain made of bulgy triangle pastries. I could smell the meat and spices wafting off it, trying to pull me in, but I wasn’t there to eat either.
“You don’t stack up the way I thought,” she said. I rested a hip on the ottoman, placing the food between us.
I shrugged. “Seems like you were expecting me,” I said.
“I was.” She reached for another pastry. “From the way she made you out, I’m insulted you didn’t come to me first.”
“Jenny talked to you about me?”
“Surprised?” she said.
I was, a little, but I kept it off my face. People like India treated life like an ongoing hand of hold ’em. You blink or let your mouth twitch the wrong way and they own your ass.
She sashayed into a little speech about her and Jenny growing up together, bonding over boys and fashion and their mutual disdain for just about everybody else they knew.
They both chafed hard under the rules of conduct set down by their social caste but neither was willing to walk away from the cash. Jenny’s way of coping with that friction was to carve her life up into little boxes. It gave her control over who knew what about her and how much.
India preferred to make trouble.
She’d crushed dynasties between her perfect caramel thighs. A stray whisper from her in the right ear and reputations that had taken generations to build crumbled to dust.
“I figured you’d be the type to want to look into her death,” she said, winding down. “But anybody with any sense would definitely have come to me first.”
“I’m here now.”
“You are,” she said through her teeth.
“I just came to ask you some questions, is all,” I said.
“Okay.” She leaned back into her nest of pillows. “I’ll play.” The slight arch in her spine wasn’t exactly pornographic but it still took a second for the blood to flow back to my brain.
I grilled her the same way I’d gone at pretty-boy Josh; was she surprised about Jenny ending up at the bottom of those stairs? Did she have any idea why Jenny was in the dusty-tome section of the library that night? How long had it been since she’d seen her friend?
India just smiled. It was one of those grins that doesn’t quite make it to the eyes.
“You think she was murdered,” she said eventually. “So do I.”
“Any idea whodunit?”
“A guy,” she said. “I’m thinking it was one of her strays.”
“ ‘Strays’?”
“Jen was a collector, Book Boy,” she said, using her finger to stir whatever the sparkly liquid was in her glass. “But, you know that, right?”
That figured. Her life was a warehouse of boxes. She needed stuff to put in them. Stuff. People. Sure.
The songs on the list made even more and even less sense now. It was easy enough linking them up with the people in her life that I knew of but, if this day had told me anything, it was that there were acres more to Jenny Charles than you could see from the front gate.
“Any stray in particular?” I said as the bubbles in India’s glass finally got swallowed. She savored it for my benefit, letting her chest rise and fall in that way that tells anyone looking that the stuff you just drank had a nice kick.
“What do you actually know about Jenny?” she said. My face obviously gave away more than I wanted because she added, “Not as much as you thought, huh?”
No. Between the damned playlist and talking to Jenny’s mother — not to mention India — I realized I might be just as much in the dark about her as everyone else in her life.
“That’s how she wanted it,” said India. “It wasn’t just people she collected. It was clothes. Stories. Music. Puzzles (she was crazy for puzzles). She had at least one of everything, Book Boy. Trust me. She even collected other collectors like you and me.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to link what she was saying up with the thoughts that were swirling faster and faster in my head.
“
Her glass was empty and she had eaten enough of the little meat triangles. She got up and wafted through a break in the hanging drapes, disappearing into the darkness beyond. I heard some clinking of glass and something being poured and then she was back.
“It was how she kept it together,” she said, standing there halfway between the shadows beyond the curtains and the amber light of the sitting room. “There’re a lot of rules to this life, Book Boy. Where to live. How to talk. Who to sleep with. When.
“Hidden depths,” I said.
“Jenny was the Grand Canyon,” said India, still not moving from the space between the rooms. “And it wasn’t just the secrets and the control. She was looking for something.”
“Like what?”
“You’re slower than she said you were too,” she said, gliding over to the nest again. “Love, Book Boy. She was looking for love.”
It made sense in a way. If you think your life is a cage you’re going to do what you need to do to pick the lock.
“Stupid,” said India, not bothering to hide her bitterness. “That’s what she was. Just totally, massively poxy and stupid. Like there’s any such thing. Like there’s any point.”
“That the kind of friendly advice you gave Jenny?”
It was a shitty thing to say, but I was sick of her trying to wind me up and even sicker of her succeeding.
So Jenny wasn’t exactly who I thought she was. So what? Who is what they seem to be, really? Who doesn’t have a little Jack the Ripper inside them, right next to their personal Galileo?
So India Pierce thought the world was a pile of shit. Stop the presses. If I had a penny for every rich kid that felt like that, I’d be one.
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she said. “Did you give her anything better, Book Boy? Playing her stupid games with the lists and the quest for Music by Total Failures?”
“She seemed happy with it,” I said.
“Yeah,” said India. “You would say that. So sharp. So insightful. So
“Look,” I said, really heating up. This fencing game of hers stopped being fun in the first ten seconds. I had no idea how or why the guys in her set put up with this sort of shit but, “I’m not one of your party boys, okay, princess? I work for a living.”
“Call that living?” she said softly, still not turning my way. The egg timer in my head went off and I was halfway to the door. “Book Boy.”
“That’s enough of that,” I said. All of a sudden I was back on her side of the room, pushing toward her, toppling the towers of books in my way.
I was the monster now, tearing through Lit City. It wasn’t like I meant to do anything harsh. I didn’t even plan to touch her. I’d just had enough of the Blanche DuBois bullshit.
“My name’s
Then, without remembering when I’d actually decided to do it, I was shaking her. India-effing-Pierce of the South Richeston Pierces. She was vibrating in my hands like a kite in a tornado.
I realized what I was doing about five seconds too late. Before I could stop on my own, India’s knee was slamming into my crotch, giving me other things to think about than rattling her fillings.
She sat beside me on the floor, watching me from behind her ropes of thick black hair the way leopards watch anything smaller and slower than themselves.
“Feel better?” she said when I finished unclenching.
“Great,” I said, slowly sitting up. “Thanks.”
“We mostly keep our hands to ourselves around here.”
She sat quiet again for a few long moments. A warm little breeze skipped briefly through the place, making the curtains flutter.
“So,” she said, watching them dance. “About that list.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s on yours?” she said. “Novelty shot glasses or handmade books or what?”
“Music,” I said and then, thinking of it for the first time, “dead music.”
India smiled. It was a pretty little thing, delicate; kind of like that string of pearls your grandmother only takes out on special occasions.
All the songs on the list were done by obscure bands that never went the distance. Even Michael Thomson’s try for a comeback was a dismal failure. Nobody remembered any of them anymore except nutjobs like me and Jenny.
“You get through them all yet?”
“One left,” I said.
“ ‘Epochsy’ by Canto,” said India. Again I must have had trouble hiding my shock. She was giving me the cat’s eyes.
“How do you know that?” I said.
India sort of
“Jenny only ever played that game with two people, Book Boy,” she said, returning with the giant hardcover of
Canto was a girl group. They were pretty good, actually, but they fell into that crack between the end of the rule of the Riot Grrls of the nineties and the rise of Lolita pop.
They cut only one CD,
And there’s the slow guitar underneath it, hinting of small-town Texas back roads, decaying honky-tonks, and shots of whiskey drunk after-hours.
I’m one of the few people who actually owns
“Love,” she said, though I think she was really talking to herself. “Jenny never felt like she got enough. Or it wasn’t the right kind.”
“Never is,” I said.
She laughed a little at that. It was the first honest sound that had come out of her since I’d been there. “That’s true.”
“So she didn’t get it and she was looking for it,” I said. “And the lists were part of that?”
“Sure,” she said. “Of course. Obviously.”
It wasn’t obvious to me and I said so. They were just random collections of other people’s art. Sure, Jenny put them together according to whatever theme struck her at the moment, but that was it. I was supposed to believe that all of that random stuff was actually part of some master plan of Jenny’s?
“Of course, you don’t want it to be true,” said India. “You want Jenny to be some kind of waify little sexpot, right? Something to smile about when you’re drinking your lattes?”
“I just want her to be alive,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Well. She’s not. And she wasn’t what you thought of her either. She was relentless.”
“You said she did the list thing with you and me only?”
India nodded.
“And she played with you first?”
Again she nodded.
“So, what, you failed?”
“I screwed up one of the lists,” said India, dropping the words like little pebbles from her mouth.
“Which one?” I had an idea forming that I didn’t much like. Everything she said made sense as long as you stuck to the lists. But they weren’t all lists, that was the thing. One of them was something else. “Which one did you screw up, India?”
“Same as you, Book Boy,” she said. “Only she didn’t give me a second chance.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I never dropped one of them.”
“Yeah,” she said, looking into my face. Her eyes were like penny candles shining through the lattice in a priest’s confessional. “You did.”
“Which one?”
“You found the dragon, didn’t you?”
“I was supposed to find the dragon,” I said. “She gave me the directions.”
“You sure about that?” said India.
I was. I told her so. She laughed. It was an ugly sound, bitter, that had nothing to do with humor.
“I can’t believe she thought you were the one,” she said.
I was really uncomfortable suddenly, wanting out of there. “So, just tell me who you think pushed her off that landing and I’ll go find them.”
“And what?” she said again with the strange, flickery light in her eyes. “What will you do?”
“You point me to whoever did Jenny and I guarantee nobody else will have a reason to point that way again.”
I watched her chew it. I watched the million little clockwork gears she kept running in her head spin and click. The process took all of two seconds.
She brushed past me, heading for the nearest of the little mahogany end tables she had all over. She opened the drawer and pulled out a small metal frame. I was expecting a picture, some kind of candid photo of people at a party, one of whom would be Jenny’s murderer. Maybe he’d even have a bull’s-eye drawn around his head in India’s burgundy lipstick.
She came back to me and held the thing up so I could see it clearly.
“That’s him,” she said.
It wasn’t a picture she was holding in front of me, framed or otherwise; it was a mirror.
By the time my brain started working again I was out of her place, back on the street, running in a direction I didn’t remember choosing.
India’s words were still in my ears, making me so sick I knew if I stopped running it would only be to empty my stomach onto the pavement.
“You killed her, Book Boy,” they said. “You failed and you killed her.”
I remembered screaming at her that it wasn’t my fault about Jenny. All I’d found was what she wanted me to find. I’d run her stupid mazes like a lab rat, like there was treasure waiting for me at the end instead of that hideous, beautiful, ravenous monster squatting, almost alive, in the city’s guts. But somehow, according to India, I’d spiked it. Somehow finding the dragon was the wrong answer to the puzzle I hadn’t even known I was supposed to solve.
My head was splitting. My brain was still working on the whole big mess — list after list, map after map, book after book, song after song — all of it adding up to some kind of test, some way Jenny expected to sift out the gold from the world she lived in and leave behind the dross.
The puzzles were her way of pushing me to see if I was the one who would know her.
The one who could love her.
And the sick bit, the awfulness that wrenched my guts, was the realization that I did love her.
I was so full of murder for her killer, so ready to make whoever the sonofabitch was that pushed her take that last step down to the dark ugly places where meat and bone make hash of each other. But that whoever-it-was was me. I
Jenny worked it all out, had her picture of how it should be, and we’d kicked the thing to shreds. We failed Jenny, but she was the one who lost. She would never be seen. Never be known. Never be loved the way she wanted. Never. Ever.
Faced with that, who would want to stick around? Not me, man. Definitely not me.
Eventually I found myself back at the shop. The distance between
I was in a panic — what my mother would call
I don’t remember tearing into my closet, shoving the boxes and winter coats aside. I don’t remember the desk drawers screaming as I tore them off their tracks. I only remember the storm of paper floating around me as I sat in the eye, looking at the little note.
Jenny’s directions.
Simple. Straightforward. Barely even a code once you understood what the notations meant.
Simple. Simple as stepping off a curbside into the street.
But somehow I’d got it wrong.
It hit me as I was locking up again. Just as I was turning the key in the front door I realized my mistake. I’d planned to retrace my steps to see if somehow I really had misunderstood the whole thing. Maybe I’d missed a hidden alley or side street and turned or climbed too soon.
Then, just as I heard the deadbolt click into place, I got it.
Jenny wasn’t trying to reveal anything. She wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of all those codes and obscurities if she were. She wanted to be found. She wanted somebody to look for and eventually discover that secret self of hers, the one she kept in the smallest, most hidden of her boxes.
She wanted somebody to find her, even if she had to lay out some of the clues.
So, what kind of a moron was I, thinking that she’d meant me to start the search from where I lived, from where
Again the city dripped and melted around me, shuffling into the background of my perception as I trudged the long way to the Charles family home.
I stood outside for an eternity of long minutes trying to decide if I had the stones to go through with it. I didn’t want India to be right any more than I wanted Jenny to be dead.
A light came on in one of the upstairs windows and I could just barely make out Queen Anne’s silhouette lurking by the drapes. Was that Jenny’s room? Was she lingering over a school photo or the scarf from her twelfth birthday and wondering what she could have done to save her child’s life?
Anne never really knew her daughter any more than I had. Didn’t she deserve to know what really killed Jenny, even if that meant me?
I pulled the crumpled notepaper from my pocket, checked the directions again, and started walking.
As the structures blurred past me my mind went back to the playlist that had put me here. There was no way Jenny could have known, in advance, that I’d go on this journey, was there? Yet the songs had all seemed to have meaning beyond their titles and writers. It had felt like they were telling me dig here, go there, find out. So I had dug and gone and found.
But what if that was just my grief shaping things?
Worse, what if it was some kind of deeply submerged guilt, some basic knowledge that, if Jenny was dead, it was because I had failed her somehow?
Had I known, even before the cops showed up at my door in their over-worn shoes and drip-dry jackets? Had I already known that my friendship with Jenny had been too thin and rickety to keep her from falling?
When I passed the statue of Socrates in Poet’s Square, I began to get sick. A clammy chill ran through me, across my skin, down into my lungs, and I had to stop for a minute to breathe.
KNOW THYSELF, the words were carved into the pedestal — English words cut to ape ancient Greek. KNOW THYSELF.
But it was right. I could feel it. This was the path Jenny had wanted me to walk, the one both India and I had been too stupid or self-obsessed or blind to see.
The chill subsided but didn’t leave. It hung on me and in me the way the dread draped across my mind.
I sucked it up and moved on, taking the lefts and the rights and the appropriate pauses until I found myself at another set of stairs.
DOWN 2, the note read.
Suddenly I wasn’t sure. I stood there, staring at them, pretending not to but simply not wanting to know what lay at the bottom of these few flights.
They weren’t the same decayed hardwood and broken concrete as the ones that led to the dragon. These were metal, bronze that had been mottled green by a century of oxidation.
Two flights.
Two long flights down through a thin little tunnel with walls polished to a stony shine. Two flights down to what should have been something underground but turned out not. The bronze gave way to steel, some turn-of-the-last-century filigree of iron gate that managed not to be locked.
I pushed it wide and moved into the next skinny corridor, this one going straight ahead instead of down. There was light at the far end, curling around what I realized was sharp corner as I got near.
I had the sensation of Jenny walking ahead of me, a ghost of herself, smiling, finally leading me to what I should have been able to find on my own.
I wrestled with myself for another endless moment. Did I want this? If India was right about this, I’d turn the corner and see some kind of physical representation of Jenny. Her heart. Her soul (whatever that is). Maybe her life. It could be a tattered old movie one-sheet, taped to the inside of the tunnel wall, or another sculptured beast, or a billion other things that she might look at and think, “That’s me.”
Whatever it was, if India was right, it would prove that it wasn’t some screwed-up party boy or psycho killer who had pushed Jenny over. If India was right, the way I felt she was, what pushed her over was me.
Well.
I’d made promises about what would happen to whoever was responsible. No backing out now.
I turned the corner and found myself standing in front of a big steel safety door of the kind you find in the basement of libraries and museums. From the patina of rust on the hinges and handle, this one hadn’t been used in a long time.
In the center, held in place by equally ancient duct tape, was the cover for an old-style vinyl LP. I didn’t recognize the title,
The photo was of an old street leading out of what I guessed was some desert small town into a lush green wilderness.
A small blot of red in the lower right corner caught my eye and I bent, squinting to get a look in the flickering neon light. The blot was words, six of them.
WORDS AND MUSIC BY JENNY CHARLES.
Cities have lives, you know — just like amoebas and horses and killer whales. They start as somebody’s little trading post or campsite and they grow in these sort of undulating lurches that last for decades. Things go up, they go out, they go down. Some bits last for the whole life of the city the way a particular giggle emerges in childhood and keeps popping up over and over till the grave. Some bits stick like scars.
Once in a while, when something old isn’t quite cleared away for the something new, what’s left is a chimney without a house or a wall with nothing to support but its own crumbing self.
I stepped through Jenny’s door and onto what had probably once been the linoleum floor of a sweatshop or second-rate dentist’s office. Someone had knocked down most of the building that housed it, leaving just a little paint-flecked lip of wood and brick.
I had a second of vertigo and several of complete panic as I tried to keep from plummeting the five stories down to the gravel and broken glass.
Then I looked up. I looked up and out across the thing that Jenny had meant me to see.
It was the city, our city, spread out to the horizon in every direction. Tall and twinkling, dark and screaming, moving and burning and blinking and still, the city seemed like a goddess wrapped in a shift of jewels and stars.
I saw her hips in the curve of Clemens Boulevard; I saw her hair in the steam from the Central Station. Her legs curled around the giant stacks of the Bowery Ironworks, warming themselves in the smoke.
And, in the goddess’s flesh, the thousand, thousand boxes — windows, doors, co-ops — every square with a square inside and, inside each, a story.
People and animals and machines moved and spun, sang, and died, loved and killed and lived out there, all of it in little boxes.
It was Jenny I was seeing, the real one, the one I’d missed and in missing, killed.
It was my fault, just as India had said.
It wasn’t just that last list or the cryptic note that had finally led me here. Everything Jenny had ever shown me had been a clue. Every note, every structure, every scrap of pleasure we’d shared had been meant to pull the veils away. She’d tried to show us, in that crazy corkscrew way, the path through her personal maze. We’d both missed it but I was the fallback, the last chance. When I failed, it killed her.
So I stood there, cold and shaking from the rush of grief. I stood there as the sun dipped slowly away and the sleeping goddess became a range of mountains made of stars. I watched the people milling and doing in their little boxes of light.
I wanted to. For a lot longer than I care to admit, I seriously considered stepping off that ledge. But when it came to actually moving my feet in that direction, I couldn’t.
Stepping off was the quick payment for what I’d done to her, the cheap way out. I owed her more than that.
I edged back into the dank little hallway and closed the door behind me.
Then I peeled
Mine now.
Mine for her.
It went home with me.
How often I play it is my secret.
And I’m keeping it.
Wine on Ice
by Cheryl Rogers
Knocks me senseless, opening the paper to an eyeful of Ginnie Dimond-Billing leglless on page three. Not a good look for a member of the glitterati usually dripping bling on the social pages. “
“Get down to the station, Spanner.” DS Rod Gudgeon’s not strong on preliminaries. “Unless you’re doing something worthwhile on your RDO. Like colouring your ever-changing hear.”
“Was planning to drain the sump on my new Rover actually, Sarge, change the oil in the transmission, maybe move on to the diffs as a chaser if—”
“Rhetorical question,” he cuts in before I can breathe mention of my plans for the front swivel housings. “Double-barreled socialite had one too many sherries, nose-dived down her cellar.”
There’s the faintest pause, then the boss cuts to the chase.
“Close personal friend of the police minister,” he says gruffly. “He wants the investigation wrapped up pronto, no hint of scandal.”
Another pause.
Longer this time.
“Hinting at funding cuts, Spanner,” he chokes.
I’m already out the door, kicking the chocks free of the Rover’s wide Pirellis with the steel-capped toes of my snazzy kitten heels. It’s not even gone eight, yet the morning air hangs heavy with heat.
“Starter motor’s kicked in, Sarge,” I sign off in a bid to smooth Gudgeon’s worry lines.
A DS firing on three cyls
The rival in question’s undoing his bicycle clips in the stairwell when I burst into the station via double doors leading from the staff car park. His sandy helmet-hair clings, damp with sweat. His usually pale cheeks are flushed.
“Limped in, in your old banger, did you, Spanner?” gasps Jack Darwin, B.Sc. (Botany), Hons. (Forensic Palynology), stooping from a lofty height to lift his sit-up-and-beg into a recess near the bins. “I noticed a pall of black smoke enveloping the city.” He forces a couple of coughs and starts securing the rear tyre with a battery of combo locks on chains.
“New wheels, Charlie,” I say grandly. “Got myself a Rover.”
No need to mention it’s a Land Rover, is there?
Clacking upstairs, two at a time, I resist glancing back to witness his envy.
The sacrifice is worth it to be first to the drinks vending machine. Used to have a staff canteen. Then a tea lady with a wonky trolley. Now this robot. Still, least it delivers more choice. Filtered water, tea (regular, green, and an assortment of herbals), and coffee (drip brew, espresso, or cappuccino) on tap. It’s where we brains in Major Crime chew a serious amount of fat in our relentless quest for truth.
I’ve ditched last week’s grounds, switched filters in the drip brewer, and have a fistful of Reggae blend beans on the go when Darwin makes it to the second floor.
Just as Gudgeon shuffles out of his lair, mopping his brow. He joins us at the font to bring us up to speed.
“Virginia Dimond-Billing, widow of former Sergeant Frank D-B, whose family founded Billing Estate Wines when Adam was still in Snugglers. Wife took over the reins after her husband fell off the perch six years ago.”
Darwin already has his hand up.
“Former sergeant, Sergeant? As in ex-police? Or ex-army?” he says, then jets iced dandelion tea into a personalized floral mug.
“Sharp question, Charlie,” the boss concedes and I feel my teeth ache. “Vietnam vet. Earned a couple of gongs. Took over the family business in the late seventies and added to a tidy fortune selling headaches in bottles. Not long after he died, the Australian wine industry did a belly-flop.”
“But Frank’s widow jump-started the company, if my memory serves me, Sarge,” I chip in, trawling the depths. “Installed their son, Leeuwin, as winemaker. Carbonated some of the cheaper fruities. Launched a new range of fizzies.”
“Ice Maiden’s Surprise, Peasant Girl’s Blush,” confirms the DS, naming the two top-sellers in the range. Considers himself a connoisseur, at least of the cheaper lines. “Mrs. D-B was able to resume her very active and public social life on the strength of sales.”
“A classic tragedy then, surely?” pleads Darwin, who really ought to know. “News reports said she’d over-imbibed. It’s logical to deduce that she tripped on her killer heels on some rickety cellar steps, missed her footing, bingo.”
“But totally out of character,” I feel obliged to protest. “Ginnie D-B was a patroness of the arty-farts, benefactress of kids’ charities. Never any hint she was ever tired and emotional in public.”
“I agree, with you
“Pushed, as in literally? Or metaphorically, Sarge?” the pedantic DC inquires.
That flicks the switch on Gudgeon’s hazard lights. Fresh beads of perspiration puddle in the sags of his jowls. His hands are trembling as he snaffles a paper clip and pulls it apart.
Real slow.
Just in time, the green light on the drip-brewer starts flashing to a peculiar Reggae beat.
“Caffeine hit?” I suggest. The sarge looks like he’d benefit.
“Au lait, barista!” Darwin shouts, before the boss can get in a word.
I never find out if he’s road-testing his Romance languages or craving some milk. Because that’s when we get word the Minister’s on the hooter, demanding an update.
“You drive, Spanner,” the boss huffs a few moments later as we home in on an unmarked Ford in the car pool. “Charlie, find me some facts on Billing Estate Wines?”
Darwin’s cranked up his laptop on the back seat before Gudgeon finds the latch for his seat belt.
“Family business, hit financial strife when wine sales dropped, revived after a bold move to value-add cheaper lines,” affirms the stream of consciousness from the rear.
“Tell us something we
Then I notice Gudgeon’s hairy eyeball, and fix my gaze back on the road. We’re cruising north on an arterial, heading for the vineyards in a river valley beyond the industrial zone.
Factory units and truck dealerships flit past like we’re in a newsreel. Leeuwin Billing’s life story’s the soundtrack. Only child. Degree in oenology. Spent a vintage working at a chateau in Champagne, France.
“Shares a passion for horses with wife, Amity. Equine vet. Highly regarded in the racing game,” Darwin furnishes as we hit the scrag end of the industrials. Used cars. A railway-shunting depot. A junkyard that’s trying to be upmarket by calling itself a recycling facility. “Runs her practice from the estate and is contracted to some of the wealthier studs. In last month’s issue of
“Twee stuff, Charlie.”
But I stop wielding the bow to an imaginary fiddle and slam my hands back on the wheel when Gudgeon shoots me a meaningful. The Ford’s dash reveals the ambient temperature’s just topped the century. I flick the air-con to high.
“There’s a granddaughter, Sophie, seventeen. Studying food science at one of the techs.”
On cue the chief extracts a brown paper bag from his jacket, a donut from the bag, and shoves the scrunched bag in his side pocket. “Before anyone speaks, let it be known I skipped breakfast,” he mumbles, glumly chewing.
All’s silent apart from the sound of chomping and Darwin’s fingers scuttling across laptop keys. We’re off the arterial road now and onto a vein. Security mesh and razor wire’s given way to weed-infested hobby farms and tin sheds housing broiler chickens.
Then Darwin’s clearing his throat.
“Seems Billing Estate’s been plagued recently by attacks from... vandals.”
“Significant, surely?” Enthusiasm overrides the usual scepticism where my rival’s concerned. “You talking crop sabotage? Industrial espionage? Or just local youth on the prowl, up for some smash and grab?”
“I’m talking... parrots,” he says.
Gudgeon’s bulk stiffens in the death seat as Charlie pushes on.
“Rainbow lorikeets are decimating this season’s grape crop, on the estate and on properties contracted to supply fruit for vintage.”
Silence reigns for several blessed seconds, save for the staccato click of scrolling. “Shooters have been brought in, bounties offered...”
“But given that Ginnie didn’t have a bullet through her bonnet, they’re in the clear.”
“Sarcasm will get you nowhere, Spanner,” the boss bristles. “Get on with it, Charlie.”
“Big flocks of white corellas are the main culprits. They’ve quite literally been tearing chunks out of the heritage-listed family homestead, destroying roof shingles, chewing through reticulation pipes in the vineyard, nibbling electrical conduit...”
“A thrilling pastime, albeit brief,” I risk.
“Mrs. D-B recently made a generous public donation to an environmental group. But it was seen by critics as a token to appease the green lobby, who’d threatened violence if she went ahead with plans to cull birds.” Darwin ups his delivery from grave to manic. “Since then, corellas have nuked an avenue of
The botanist inside that bland exterior is revving full throttle. He’s pushing the laptop on to Gudgeon so the chief can weigh up the foliage damage displayed on the Net.
But the boss’s patience with junior officers has reached the end of its rope.
“The only dead bird we’re interested in, turned up her toes after apparently pitching down her cellar,” he says rigidly. “Are we nearly there yet?”
“Not much farther, Sarge,” I’m elated to report as the Ford crests the last rise. About a hundred square kilometers of fertile river valley opens out on the coastal plain below us, red soil and green vines shimmering under a merciless sun.
From our high vantage point, the rectangular blocks of vines in parallel rows seem vaguely familiar.
Suddenly, it hits me. “Same pattern as the tubes making up a convective cooling system,” I enthuse to the boys. “Just like the new Rover’s radiator, look.”
But Darwin’s peering intently at images on his laptop. The chief’s snapping open his mobile. He starts punching in a courtesy call to Billing Estate, warning of our imminent arrival.
“The granddaughter’s agreed to greet us,” he announces as we turn off the main drag. “Head for the marquee in the picnic grounds.”
I steer the Ford past an architect-designed entry statement and onto a private limestone road. A cluster of white parrots lifts and screams obscenities as we negotiate the ruts. Temporary signage marking the route to yesterday’s harvest brunch is still in place. Trellised vines flank our trail of dust. Each end strut is numbered and planted with a white rosebush.
One glimpse prompts the geek to start airing his Latin.
“Rosa Iceberg, no doubt planted to show the presence of
Condescension kicks in when he locks onto my steely gaze in the mirror.
“Mildews that attack grape vines, for the uninitiated. The rose is an indicator. Rather like a canary down a mine.”
“And there was me thinking it was because roses are pretty,” the DS sighs.
By now we’re pulling up at the picnic grounds. Turf cut within an inch of its life. Dappled shade, thanks to huge trees with spread-eagled branches which shut out the sky. The white marquee, roomy enough for Royal nuptials, stands out like a proverbial in a desert. Four sets of portaloos huddle discreetly behind a wall of shrubbery. Workmen in navy overalls move languidly, collecting plastic chairs and trestle tables. They’re being loaded onto the tray of a late-model Mitsubishi truck with a party-hire company logo splashed in primary colours on the door.
“Must’ve been some bunfight,” Gudgeon grunts as we emerge into the glare. Feels like we’re inside a wall oven.
“Wonder the food wasn’t off before the party had started,” is Darwin’s down-beat contribution.
I’d tell him as much, but Sophie Billing has her head down and is striding across the turf towards us. She’s slim, tanned, medium height, wearing denim jeans and a college T-shirt. Her pale apricot hair is long, dead straight, and spiky. It’s pulled back into a high ponytail. Reminds me of a fibre-optic lamp.
I sense my colleagues’ angst as she tugs the remains of a tissue from her pocket and lifts her head, revealing red-rimmed panda eyes.
“Here,” I’m digging into the pocket of my overalls for a pocket pack of Kleenex. “Take these.”
Gudgeon’s mumbling something trite about condolences and routine investigation. It’s a relief when his mobile goes and he drifts away to take the call.
“Close to your grandma, were you, Sophie?” I ask gently, steering her towards a distant bench. The chief’s gruff voice dips and sways in the distance. Darwin’s taking himself off on a tangent, inspecting jacarandas for parrot damage.
“Took me to France last holidays,” the girl confirms, sniffing. “Visited the chateau where my dad trained. Gran said she’d pay for me to do the same.”
The memory triggers a fresh bout of sobs. Sophie extracts a new tissue.
“How was your Gran yesterday, at the brunch?” I ask when she’s ready.
Bloodshot brown eyes narrow defensively. “What’s people been saying?”
“I understand you’re protective of your Gran’s reputation, Sophie. But her... indiscretion made the papers.”
“Did it? Oh God!” The girl’s shock seems genuine. “Haven’t had a chance to look. I mean, it’s been chaos here, what with... everything that’s happened. My dad said I should try to keep busy. I’ve been helping clean up.”
“Some party?” The hire truck’s trundled off and a small army’s on patrol, spearing rubbish with pointy sticks.
“Hundred and fifty acceptances, give or take,” she hiccups. Then stares into the middle distance. “That’s two thousand bits of finger food. Couple of hundred tempura prawns, three hundred rock oysters, a hundred and fifty spicy samosas, hundred and fifty Thai spring rolls... took a dozen melons for the seasonal fruit skewers with chocolate sauce alone.”
“Sounds more like a feast than a brunch,” I marvel, doing some quick mental.
“Gran always over-catered. Hated guests going hungry. Said it left people with a bad taste.”
“You know a lot about catering.”
“Should too, studying food science,” comes the tart reply. “Holidays I help organize events here, when Gran’ll let me.”
“Did you think it was risky, having so much seafood? And serving it outdoors? Given the heat?” I’m hearing myself ask this and making a mental note not to watch so many reality cooking shows on my days off.
My naivete provokes a smile, albeit watery.
“Ice, and plenty of it, that was Gran’s secret. We produce buckets of the stuff in the cold room. Even then, we still need to buy in...”
Sophie’s starting to dry up nicely. I’m getting ready to ease the topic of her gran’s social gaffe back into the fray when Gudgeon cuts in. He’s pocketing his mobile.
“Autopsy’s found no sign of serious damage,” he grumbles, planting one oversized foot firmly in it. “Just a chipped central incisor. No intercranial bleeding.”
Darwin jogs up, catching the tail end. “Alcoholic poisoning?”
“It’s possible. Results on the bloods are still pending.”
Before I can deliver a slap over the proverbials, Sophie utters a strangled cry.
“My lips are buzzing,” she manages.
Just.
Then her eyes start rolling and she clutches her chest. “Oh my God. I’m having a heart attack!”
I snaffle the discarded donut bag from a startled Gudgeon’s pocket and smooth it flat. Then I prise Sophie’s hands free to clutch the bag and steer it up over her nose and mouth.
“Panic attack. You were hyperventilating,” I tell her, once the crisis has passed. “Carbon dioxide levels in your blood plummeted, then your blood vessels tightened up, not unlike...”
I’m searching under the bonnet for a suitable analogy but something about the arched brows framing double-glazing tells me Sophie has little interest in the mechanics.
Probably not significant anyway.
Given that our huddle’s now under siege from a madman sprinting full pelt across the turf.
“Get away from her!”
This guy’s no lightweight. I can feel the earth move. He pushes us aside and kneels beside Sophie.
“Leeuwin Billing?” Gudgeon recites his scanty prelims and stumbles through the introductions while I weigh up the winemaker.
Built like a rugby defender.
Bald as a billiard hall.
And contrite as a rather bouncy terrier that’s been caught nicking the cat’s dinner.
“I really must apologise,” he says, ushering us towards the homestead. His daughter’s headed back to work. “We wanted Soph to take it easy but she insisted on supervising the cleanup.”
The stately old building is a monument to the region’s natural beauty and the family’s success. Solid walls crafted from local honeyed stone. The sheoak shingles remind me of chocolate buttons lined up to top a gingerbread house.
Except, on closer inspection, someone’s been picking.
“Parrot damage,” Billing snarls. Admittedly, we’re gawping. “Vermin birds. Cane toads on wings.”
Shredded shingles, chewed gutters, and a frayed length of cable give some idea of the power wrought by several hundred bills.
Lengths of chicken wire, medieval spikes, and three cutout cats silhouetted against the sky stand as evidence that the Estate’s fighting back.
“We’ve tried shooters, decoy crops, kites, miles and miles of tinsel. Next week we’re meeting with a fellow who uses a trained peregrine falcon to scare parrots away.” Billing grimaces. “Do forgive me. This tiresome subject may be our obsession, but it’s not why you’re here. Please, come in.”
He shows us into a capacious room.
“This was Mother’s office. Mine’s the monk’s cell, adjacent to the winery.”
The heat’s coloured Gudgeon’s palette puce by now. He starts shrugging off his jacket.
“Apologies for the heat.”
Disarray doesn’t even start to sum up the ambiance. There’s a sweeping jarrah desk, shaped like a kidney. The blotter’s littered with papers, as though several bins have been tipped. On the wall behind the desk, a painting’s been lifted. Revealing a firebox set into honey-gold stone.
Darwin’s eyeing the chaos. “Looking for something?”
“Obvious, isn’t it?” the wine buff responds. “The combination to the company safe!”
“Getting back to yesterday’s tragic events,” I cough. “Was your mother in the habit of bending her elbow?”
“Absolutely not.” Billing’s manner remains polite, but the mercury suddenly slumps. “Mother had hepatitis, years ago. She didn’t touch alcohol.”
“A tricky situation for a wine producer, surely?” I say carefully. “And wasn’t she often photographed raising her flute?”
“All show, DC Swift.” The son’s upending furniture now, starting with a swivel chair. “Mother believed in pushing the company product. But she supplied her own bottles. Non-al. Carbonated, of course. Poor love was a martyr to razzamatazz.”
“Yet you acknowledge her behaviour yesterday was somewhat out of character?” Someone has to ask.
The boys seem heat-affected.
“Somewhat?” Billing rights the swivel chair. His conviviality rating’s dipped to glacial. “Dancing on a table with a long-stemmed red rose clenched between her veneers. Yes, I think I can safely say Mother’s performance was way beyond her usual impeccable standard.”
“How do you explain that? If she hadn’t imbibed?”
“Obviously, someone slipped a Mickey Finn into her bubbly.”
“Who?” I push. “Your mother was well respected. Adept at pulling in funds for the deserving. Who might have wanted to sling mud?”
“Any one of the dozen growers whose contracts Mother had tom up in the past two months,” Billing says crisply. “They had no hope of finding buyers for their fruit. Perhaps Mother’s public humiliation afforded one of them some light relief.”
“Did anyone check your Mother’s glass? Or the bottle? After she’d done the cancan?”
“Didn’t occur to me,” Billing admits. “We were too busy hauling Mother down, then getting her home and into bed, to sleep it off.”
“What time was that?”
“Just after my presentation on the seasonal outlook.” His eyes close. Then fly open. “Just after one, give or take.”
“And how long afterwards did you find your mother?”
“Just on dark, it must’ve gone seven. I went over to the old cellar to lock up. We use it as a storeroom.”
Billing pauses, sighs.
“Go on,” Gudgeon prompts. “It may be important.”
“Mother always checked the cellar after an event. To see what we might recycle, that sort of thing. Then she’d lock up. Last night I thought she was still... indisposed, and decided to lock up for her.”
“And when you got there?” urges Gudgeon.
“Door was open. Infernally stuffy inside. It gets that way when the weather’s hot. That was why we built a modem facility, climate controlled,” he asides. “Mother was slumped on the flagstones. I called an ambulance, but she’d... gone.”
“What did you think had happened?” I prompt, after a few moments. “When you found her?”
“I assumed she’d still been... affected, when she risked the steps.” Billing shakes his head. “But I learned later that several members of staff had spoken to Mother last evening. They said she seemed quite recovered, though her pride was shaken. Maybe she fainted. And hit her head.”
“Autopsy’s ruled that out,” the chief is obliged to divulge.
“Any chance your mum was diabetic? Bad heart? Some other underlying medical condition?” I wonder aloud.
“Your autopsy should quickly determine if that was the case,” the son counters.
“Food poisoning? The menu boasted a heap of seafood for an outdoor event, on such a scorcher.”
Leeuwin Billing’s patience is running thinner than his hair. “Mother was meticulous when it came to presentation,” he says, crisp enough to snap. “It’s not rocket science, Detective Constable. You simply keep food chilled.”
Dr. Amity Billing’s tuning in via a stethoscope to the belly of a black stallion when Darwin and I roll up beside a stockyard at her horse clinic. It’s on the west side of the estate.
Gudgeon’s pitched us together as a
His words.
He’s loitering back at the winery, checking out the scene of death and taking snaps with his mobile.
There’s sweat foaming the black beast’s chest and hind legs, and it’s tucked up tight as a balled fist. But it seems sweet as a kitten compared to the vet’s reaction when Darwin nudges the front bumper against a yard rail.
“Back off, okay!” The doc flies out of the barrier. She’s a small, slim firebrand, hard-wired with high-tensile steel. Her auburn hair’s pulled back into a neat chignon that’s at odds with her work clobber overalls and heavy leather boots. “Got a tetchy one. With you in a minute.”
We park up and watch while she runs a calming hand over the stallion’s flank, plugs in to the ’scope, and leans in.
“Colic, probably. Bit like having grubby fuel injectors. Leads to clogging, poor performance, even dirty emissions.”
Charlie’s stony silent while I favour him with the practicals.
“Often just needs hooking up to pressurized solvent to give it a good flush.”
He’s about to speak when Dr. Billing finishes. She strides over, pulling off one glove and extending a hand.
“Sorry, was listening for sand in the colon. Sure sign of colic,” she confirms.
“Don’t!” Darwin asides, in my direction, before I can give her the benefit.
Just then, all conversation hits a dead end as a loud shot cracks at close range. The sky turns into a psychedelic carnival of screeching parrots and the stallion tries to buck its way free.
“Automatic scarecrow,” I hear the doc explain. Just. My ears are ringing. “Gas gun. Goes off every half-hour to scare the birdies from the blessed grapes. Now...” She glances at her wrist watch. “Leeuwin said you’re checking out Virginia’s death. Can you make it snappy? I’m about to feed a stomach tube into a half-tonne of unhappy horse flesh.”
“You were at yesterday’s brunch?” Darwin asks.
“Showed my face, yes. Virginia insisted the family pitch in at promotional events. I arrived late — had a tricky foal to deliver. By the time I’d cleaned up and fronted, all hell had broken loose.”
“Can you describe it?” I prompt.
“Leeuwin and Soph were carting Virginia away. It was all very embarrassing. My daughter’s just seventeen. You can’t begin to imagine how the event distressed her.”
“And the party?”
“A triumph — at least it
That’s when my mobile starts. It’s the chief, forward texting the bloods results from the lab. Then he sends through some snaps from the cellar. An open staircase. Flagstones. Some fairly unremarkable shots of empty Styrofoam boxes, stacked in tiers.
“How did you get on with your mother-in-law?” Darwin asks, in the light of new evidence.
The doc manages a dry laugh. “Do I look like I’m grieving?”
Maybe something about our awkward silence spurs the tart rider. “Rest assured, however, that I most certainly did not do anything to contribute to Virginia’s death.”
“Someone did. Seems her drink was spiked...” I start.
Dr. Billing tenses. “Surely you’ve been through this already.”
“No trace of alcohol in the victim’s blood,” I continue. “Just norketamine. It’s a breakdown product of ketamine.”
“What!”
“Tranquiliser. It’s used to give neddies the noddies.”
“Yes, yes, I
We’re led to a locked annexe. It’s adjacent to a rose-clad cottage a short canter from the yards.
“Who lives here?” Darwin asks, pausing to smell a cluster of Souvenir de la Malmaison.
“Just Leeuwin, Sophie, and me. It’s far enough from the winery to give us some peace.”
Inside, she unlocks a refrigerated cabinet and lifts out a tray of 10-milliliter vials. But doesn’t need to start counting.
“There’s one missing,” she says, suddenly pale. Her lips move as she goes through the motions. “Fourteen. Should be fifteen. Someone’s broken in.”
DS Gudgeon lays charges against Sophie Billing an hour and a half later.
“Thought the police minister would have our guts for garters,” I admit to Darwin, snaffling an éclair from the tray of cakes the man himself has supplied. We’re back at the drinks vending machine, experimenting with iced-tea cocktails.
“He considers she got off lightly,” the chief chips in, helping himself to a ginger zinger. “Drink spiking, given her youth, first offence... reads a lot better than murder.”
He takes a sip of zinger and sucks in his cheeks like he’s swallowed mouthwash.
“Explain to me how you two worked this one out,” he eventually splutters.
“Teamwork,” Darwin says sheepishly. “Spanner twigged that Sophie’s passion was catering, not winemaking.”
“She got really upset at mention of her gran’s plans to send her to France, to study wine. Guess she didn’t want to end like her dad, playing second fiddle. Frustration made her want to slap a bit of egg on Virginia’s face. Metaphorically speaking,” I aside, for Darwin’s benefit. “But then, when she overheard the autopsy finding that the victim’s injuries weren’t consistent with death, she thought her prank had killed her gran. And she figured it’d show up in the blood tests. Hence, the panic attack.”
“But the drug concentration wasn’t that high, according to the test results. Any effects would have worn off before Mrs. D-B paid her visit to the cellar. Several staff said she seemed normal.” Darwin, pausing for breath, gulps a mouthful of peppermint reviver.
“The old cellar was a deathtrap,” I continue. “Those empty boxes you photographed, Sarge,
“Dry ice changes directly from its solid form to gas, carbon dioxide, which is heavier than air,” the boff explains. “As the blocks disappeared and the boxes emptied, gas would have pooled on the floor of the cellar...”
“Just like water, puddling at the base of a fountain,” I add, whizzing a paper cup under the cold-water outlet and letting it spill into the drip tray, to illustrate the point. “Ordinarily, those boxes of dry ice would have been stored outside. Then the carbon dioxide would simply have disappeared. Into thin air. But in yesterday’s muddle, the job was left to a few helpful amateurs, who didn’t know the routine.”
“The victim died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Different gas, but same principle as the canary down the mine shaft,” Darwin finishes.
“Or a corella in a trap,” I add. “Carbon dioxide’s what trappers use to gas parrots.”
Neighbors
by Bill Pronzini
It was one of those rare late-summer evenings just past dusk, a light breeze blowing to soften the day’s heat, the air so clear the town lights spread across the shallow valley below had an unwinking, crystal clarity. Lorraine and I were sitting on the back deck with coffee and after-dinner brandy, enjoying the view and the quiet. At least I was. The neighborhood we live in, spread across the brow of the western hillside, is a haven of home and property improvement; the daylight hours, especially on weekends at this time of year, are filled with the racket of leaf blowers, chain saws, circular saws, electric hedge clippers, banging hammers.
But Lorraine had other things on her mind than the peaceful night. “Harry,” she said abruptly, breaking the long, mellow silence, “there’s something wrong with the Gundersons.”
“The Gundersons? What do you mean?”
“They’re not what they seem to be.”
I sighed. Here we go again, I thought.
“They struck me as a nice enough couple the one time we met them.”
“Well, I don’t think they are. They don’t fit into a neighborhood like this. Everyone else here is a homeowner. They’re transients.”
“A one-year lease doesn’t make them transients.”
“They’re standoffish. And secretive. Not our kind of neighbors.”
I happened to think the Gundersons, who had lived in the house slightly below and to the left of ours for over a month now, were exactly our kind of neighbors. Exactly my kind, anyway. They may have preferred keeping to themselves, but they were pleasant enough and, a major plus in my book, they were quiet — no home-improvement projects, no loud parties.
Lorraine leaned forward in her chair to look over the low deck railing. From here, unfortunately, she had a clear view of the near side of the Gundersons’ house and most of their front yard. “I don’t suppose you’ll believe me,” she said, “but there’s something very strange going on with those people. No, not just strange... sinister.”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.”
We’ve been married thirty years, Lorraine and I, and in most ways she’s been a good wife, mother, and companion. But she has two incurable flaws. She’s a busybody, poking her nose into other people’s business at every opportunity. And she has an overheated imagination that she fuels constantly with lurid novels, soap operas, and bad TV movies.
I made no comment, in the slim hope that she would drop the subject. No such luck. She said, “Their drapes and curtains are always closed, day and night, even the ones overlooking their patio. As if they’re trying to hide something. And Paul Gunderson, if that’s his real name... well, I don’t think he’s the architect he claims to be.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Architects keep regular hours, for one thing, and he doesn’t. Some weekdays he doesn’t leave the house at all.”
“Maybe he works at home part of the time. Some architects do.”
“And for another thing, he doesn’t know anything about Le Corbusier or Peter Eisenman.”
“Neither do I. Who are they?”
“Famous architects. I looked them up on the Internet so I could have an informed conversation with him about architecture if the opportunity came up. He knew Frank Lloyd Wright’s name, but not theirs.”
“When did you find this out?”
“Three days ago. I happened to be outside when he came home from... wherever, and I went over and tried to be neighborly. He didn’t want to talk to me. He was almost rude, in fact.”
“Well, maybe he had something important to do.”
“He also sneaks around in the middle of the night,” Lorraine said.
“Now how do you know that?”
“I got up to use the bathroom last night and happened to look out the bedroom window, and there he was leaving the house all by himself. At three A.M., and without any lights on. Don’t you think that’s odd behavior?”
“Not if he had a good reason for leaving home at that hour.”
“That’s not all,” she said. “Strange men keep coming and going over there during the day and sometimes in the evening, did you know that?”
“What do you mean by strange?”
“Different ages, different types. Half a dozen of them. For all we know Fran Gunderson could be prostituting herself.”
I managed not to laugh. “Or selling drugs.”
“Yes, or selling drugs.”
“Like what you thought Marguerite’s Mexican neighbor was doing to high-school students last year,” I said. Marguerite, our married daughter, lives in a development on the other side of town. “When what the woman was really doing was tutoring them in Spanish.”
“You don’t have to remind me of that,” she said stiffly. “We all make mistakes.”
Yes, and she’d made more than her share with her prying and spying. The time she convinced herself Tom Anderson had done away with his wife because Mary hadn’t been seen for three weeks and Tom was “acting suspiciously,” when the truth was Mary had gone off to a fat farm and Tom was too embarrassed to talk about it. And the time she was sure she’d seen the Brewsters’ sixteen-year-old daughter shoplifting perfume at Kohl’s and told the girl’s mother, only to be confronted with a sales slip. There were other incidents I could have reminded her of too. But all I said was, “Yes, dear.”
“But I’m right about the Gundersons,” she said. “I
“And what would that be?”
“Spies. Terrorists. One of those strange men I told you about looked Middle Eastern.”
I made an effort to hang onto my patience. “You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing,” I said. “Those men could be friends or relatives who were invited to see the Gundersons’ new house. They also could be salesmen like me.”
Lorraine made an exasperated noise. “The trouble with you, Harry, is that you look at the world through rose-colored glasses. You think everyone is basically good and honest and it’s just not so. There are a lot of bad people out there.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Well, then? Can’t you conceive of the fact that your new neighbors, living right next door, could be two of the bad ones?”
“Yes, dear.”
“You don’t mean it, I can hear it in your voice. You’re so mild-mannered about everything, it drives me crazy sometimes. I wish you had more gumption.”
“Yes, dear. So do I.”
She subsided, which meant she felt that she’d made her point. I sipped brandy and resumed my enjoyment of the cool breeze, the stationary light show, the quiet. But not for long.
“Harry.”
“Mmm?”
“Do you
“Unfortunately, yes. It’s that time again.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Depends on how long the sales meetings last. No more than a week.”
“A week,” she said. Then, “I really wish you didn’t have to travel so much.”
“But I don’t travel much,” I said. “Just one week, two at the most, a couple of times a year.”
“Couldn’t you get another salesman to cover for you this time? Or call and tell the company you’re ill?”
“You know I can’t do that. I might lose my job. Why would you even ask?”
“I hate the idea of being here alone. Especially now, with the Gundersons in the neighborhood.”
The Gundersons again. “If you’re so nervous, why don’t you ask Marguerite to come and stay with you? Or stay with her and Neal in their guest room?”
“I don’t want to impose on them. Besides...”
Lorraine let the rest trail off, but from past experience I knew what she’d been about to say. She may not have liked the idea of being here alone, but she was determined to keep a close watch on the Gundersons.
I didn’t try to argue with her; it wouldn’t have done any good. All I said was, “Do what you think is best. And try not to worry so much.”
On Monday morning I flew down to L.A. as scheduled. I was gone six days, and too busy to call home more than twice. Lorraine hadn’t seen any more “strange men” coming and going at the Gunderson house, or conjured up any more fantasies about the new neighbors, but this didn’t mean that her latest teapot tempest was ready to go away like all the others.
When I got home, she met me at the door all red-faced and breathless, and the first thing she said was, “Harry, the police were at the Gundersons last night. Two officers, just before midnight.”
“The police? Why? What happened?”
“Fran Gunderson
“How do you know about the prowler?”
“I went over there this morning and spoke to her. Tried to speak to her, I should say. She was very short with me. Covering up.”
“Covering up what?”
“The real reason the police were there so late.”
“Which was?”
“To question them about their illegal activities, whatever they are. You mark my words — they’ll be arrested before long and then it will all come out.”
I went into the kitchen, made myself a drink, and took it out onto the back deck. Lorraine followed me, talking the entire time, but I was no longer listening. I was thinking, defensively, about the assignment in L.A.
It had gone smoothly, as always. A dark street, a casual approach, the usual single shot behind the right ear. No witnesses, nothing overlooked or unaccounted for. How many did that make now? An even dozen? Three or four more, and I’d have enough saved to retire from the Company and live out the rest of my life in relative peace and quiet. If Lorraine would let me. And if Zagetti would keep his promise in the first place. “I’d hate to lose you, Harry,” he’d said to me once. “You’re the best shooter we got on account of you look and act just like what you are most of the time, a timid little salesman...”
Lorraine’s voice, raised querulously, penetrated again. “Harry? What’s the matter with you? You’re not paying attention!”
“Sorry. I was thinking about business.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake listen to what I’m trying to get through to you about the Gundersons. I told you all along they’re not
“Yes, dear,” I said. “Not like us at all.”
Death Match
by Chris Muessig and Steve Seder
Thursday — 10 A.M.
Al Brewer looked up from the burglary report clogging his typewriter. A man with the I brown, leathery skin of an outdoor laborer stood in the squad-room door. He looked familiar. He spotted Brewer and moved toward him, and the deliberate, sliding stride closed the connection.
“Holy crap!” Brewer said, standing up. Though they’d kept in sporadic touch by mail, he hadn’t seen Bud Mitchell in the flesh since they’d mustered out in ’46. Even after fifteen years, the guy still reminded him of the Duke in
Brewer grinned as he shook the vise grip of a hand, but Mitchell did not smile back.
“You got a minute, Al?” The deep baritone was burred from smoke and whiskey and a heft that told Brewer this was no social call.
“All the time you need. What’s up?” Brewer pointed to a chair. Bud sat, looking for an ashtray. An unfiltered cigarette burned between tobacco-stained fingers. Brewer fished a coffee container from the trash and handed it to him.
“How’s the family, Bud?”
Mitchell’s eyelids drooped like tired cloth. “Adele moved out on me since I last wrote you. Then she got the cancer. Least it was fast. And Chuck... well, that’s why I’m here.”
Another connection closed.
“That kid in the arena. That was your boy?”
“Yeah. I been to the morgue this morning. He was beat up pretty bad. What killed him was bleeding out from a cut artery in his head.”
“Bud, I’m sorry. I know Homicide checked into it. I heard it was a stunt gone wrong.”
Bud took a drag that left an ember pinched between thumb and forefinger. He dropped it into the coffee dregs and it hissed out. The bloodshot eyes locked with Brewer’s.
“Listen, the marks in the seats ain’t got a clue, and any so-called witnesses in the crew are ‘kayfabing’ your men.”
“Speak English.”
“Kayfabe is the way of life in the business. You do anything and everything at all times to promote the idea that wrestlin’ is a hundred-percent legit and on the up and up. You keep your mouth shut in front of ‘marks’ — the outsiders — and God help you if you don’t. But this was no accident.”
“Bud, you know something we don’t? I heard the kid cut his own self, which — let’s face it — you guys are crazy. I always thought you used those blood capsules, stage blood.”
Bud’s eyes wouldn’t let go. “Chuck was still a little green, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew how to get color. Marty Delaney beat hell out of him, and
They used to say Bud’s face was like a cigar-store Indian’s, but Brewer saw the masked grief, same as when a buddy had bought it overseas and it was time for payback.
“I watched it on TV,” Bud said. “Delaney wasn’t working at the end.”
“What do you mean ‘working’?”
“He wasn’t pulling punches with his fists or the chair he clobbered Chuck with. I didn’t see the blade job, but I know he did that too.”
“Bud, like I said, the homicide detectives already looked at this. I know you’re upset—”
“They wasn’t there to see it, and even if they was, they might not have seen what I seen, crap TV or no. It ain’t like I don’t know the business.”
“I know,” Brewer said soothingly. He saw the other two plainclothesmen in the room looking their way with open curiosity. “Let’s take a walk, Bud.”
Brewer took him down the block to the Imperial Diner. Bud kept stirring his black coffee as he talked.
“I never wanted Chuck to go into the business. Whether he was trying to prove a point or what, I don’t know. This promoter, Smiley Rose, he’s a scumbag, Al. The last guy I’d want my kid working for. He stiffed me on a few payoffs, told me he’d push me up the card and never did. Once I got hurt, he dropped me like a bad habit. I mean, I’m not cryin’ about it or nothin’, but he does this crap, he uses people. For his own pleasure.”
The spoon scraped and scraped inside the cup.
“The kid and I weren’t close. His mother got custody in the divorce because I always had to move around to where the steel work was. I’m still pushin’ iron all over the place.” He looked up. “But he was my kid — and somebody’s gotta pay for this.”
Brewer felt the undertow beneath the words.
“What did you see this Delaney do that nobody else seems to have noticed?”
“Rule one in the business is you gotta protect your opponent. That wasn’t happening at the end of the match. He punched Chuck square in the face, over and over. He hit him across the face hard with that chair. Normally, you take a chair shot on your hands, like you’re trying to block it. Maybe it hits you on the front part of your skull. It wouldn’t be a hard shot anyway, but... the kid’s hands were at his sides. And then Delaney...”
Bud stared hard at the tiny whirlpool of blackness before him.
“And then he drove the kid’s head into the ringpost. That sound... like a pipe hittin’ a watermelon.”
The tired lids closed on the memory. After a moment, they opened partway, and he sounded more matter-of-fact.
“When you juice, you gotta cover it somehow so the marks can’t see you cut yourself. I showed Chuck years ago how it only takes a little nick or two. I don’t even think he was fully conscious when he got the cut what killed him.
“I know that boy could be a smartass, Al. And Rose always used what they call a ‘policeman,’ a guy who can legit straighten out an attitude problem in the ring — so I’m betting this is what happened to Chuck.”
“What sort of attitude problem brings down that kind of punishment?”
Bud’s face suffused with such a hot, coppery flush that Brewer thought he might have a stroke. The words squeezed past a collapse in his throat. “I dunno, but he... they... killed my son, Al. I need you to take care of these guys, or so help me God, I will.”
“It ain’t gonna come to that, Bud. It can’t. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Bud looked at him intently and then seemed to disappear within himself, stirring the last of his overt emotion into the coffee while Brewer wondered if his old friend could still deal like one of the four horsemen.
“Bud, let’s take it from the top.”
Thursday — 12:30 P.M.
“Why didn’t you bring him over to Homicide?” Brewer’s boss said.
“He knows
“He knew better? From fifty miles away?”
“He has an educated eye. I got him to admit, though, that his TV was acting up. And he was doing boilermakers while he watched. But he’s a tough and stubborn man, and right now he’s just hanging back and depending on me to find out the truth.”
“Right, like there’s such a thing. This ain’t like you.”
“Lieutenant, I owe this guy.”
“I guess so. All right, but you gotta talk to the lead detective over there. Politics.”
Thursday — 1 P.M.
“This is Wendt.”
“Detective, Al Brewer at the Fourth. I have a favor to ask.”
“Sorry, Brew, the bowling league is all locked up.”
Wendt had a good memory for past conversations.
“It’s more important than that.”
Brewer chose his words carefully: An old army buddy and former pro wrestler, who also happened to be Chuck Mitchell’s father, thought the wrestling crew had been less than forthright during Wendt’s investigation; but Brewer immediately qualified Bud’s take on the action since it had been picked up from a crappy TV and seen from a parent’s standpoint.
Regardless, Mitchell was too good a friend to blow off. Would it be okay if Brewer revisited people Wendt had interviewed to ask a couple more questions from Bud’s inside view of things? He could tell them he was double-checking their memories in light of some new statements from the fans. It probably wouldn’t go anywhere, especially since Brewer’s boss had him on a clock.
“You’re right it won’t go anywhere,” Wendt said. “The whole thing was a comedy of errors in a freak show.” He seemed hesitant, of course, about opening up his flank to second-guessing. Then: “I got this dead housewife thing on my plate. Big uproar. So knock yourself out for auld lang syne. But if you do stumble across something relevant—”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
“I’d best be.”
“And you’ll let me know if anybody cancels out of the bowling league, right?”
“Funny.” Wendt did not hang up. “Listen, you wanna look at the videotape before we turn it back to Smelly Rose?”
“What tape?”
“The Wednesday night thing. They make a tape of the live action and run it around to area stations leading up to the big fight, like the one on the twenty-third. That’s how they promote it.”
“What did you think of it?”
“I haven’t seen it either, but you’re welcome to join me when I take a look at it over at the TV station. I’m going to do that tomorrow morning.”
They set a time and Wendt rang off.
Brewer thought he’d handled that as well as he could. Before doubt could creep in, he pulled out the police directory and found the number for the M.E.
An assistant answered. Brewer told him his precinct had received additional info about the Mitchell case and that Detective Wendt had asked him to check it out.
The chief examiner was still at lunch, but the subordinate gamely pulled the file.
“I hear he took an actual beating,” Brewer said.
“Yeah, but so do football players. It was the slash that killed him.”
“Were there any other razor cuts aside from the one that severed the artery?”
“Uh, yeah, the M.E. says there was another small slice near the hairline that he took to be a hesitation cut. If there were any more, they’ve been obscured by the breaks in the facial skin from the blows he forgot to duck.”
“What about the razor?”
“The evidence guy showed it to us to make sure it was consistent with the wounds. And it was not a razor blade per se, just a tiny sliver cut off the corner of a blade, a fraction of an inch in size, with a piece of adhesive tape exposing a small portion of the edge.”
“Enough of an edge to do him in?”
“Evidently. You know the head is pretty vascular. It doesn’t take much to get a flow.”
“Where’d they find it?”
“Tossed under the ring. His blood was on it.”
“His blood must have been on just about everything. Wasn’t there any attempt at the arena to stop the bleeding?”
“Well, the so-called doctor on hand was just a part-time trainer, really. He pressured the bleeding with a wad of gauze and got the kid responsive with smelling salts, but then he left him to hold the pressure by himself while he taped somebody else’s ankle. The deceased must have passed out as soon as the trainer walked away and let go of the compress. By the time the hack came back to stitch the kid up, Mitchell had bled out. They called an ambulance, but he was DOA.”
“And you guys definitely believe both these cuts were self-inflicted? And by that same blade?”
“That’s what it says here. Why? What’s this new info?”
Brewer did not want to be evasive with someone who’d helped him. He said, “We have at least one spectator with a different story from the wrestling groups. Just checking it out. Is the body ready to be released?”
“By the end of the day. The kid’s old man was in this morning for the ID. Funeral parlor’s already called.”
Brewer could see how Bud might believe the finding on Chuck’s demise had been prepackaged. Wendt obviously accepted the M.E.’s report as solid proof of an overzealous, self-inflicted blade job. So naturally, they had not thought to look for a second blade; and the assault... well, maybe that had not been as extreme as Bud had perceived it.
Thursday — 3 P.M.
Brewer took a chance and drove to Smiley Rose’s office without calling first. It was in the older commercial district, where mostly two- and three-story brick buildings harbored gilt-lettered storefronts with small professional offices above. The address he’d been given, however, was occupied by a single-story bike shop with an echelon of refurbished girls’ and boys’ bikes nosing forlornly against the inside glass. He thought he’d been misinformed until the owner responded with a morose nod toward the rear of the shop. Navigating a bicycle graveyard in the dark hallway, Brewer drew closer and closer to a male voice upraised behind a thin partition.
Opposite the lavatory was a door upon which someone had tacked a stenciled oak-tag sign: “International Wrestling League World Headquarters.” He knuckled the panel and went in without waiting for a response.
He entered a dingy, ten-foot-square space impregnated with the stink of flatulence and chewed stogies. A man was on the phone, sitting in the only chair in the room behind a battered desk piled up with crap. He was talking hard and fast at someone, perhaps a vendor. He made vigorous shooing gestures that made his chair squeak, no doubt taking Brewer for a solicitor or bill collector.
Brewer showed his badge. The unpleasant face scrunched up in a manner that reminded him in more ways than one of Benito Mussolini, except for the comb-over.
No windows in this crypt. The big ass of a droning, old air conditioner protruded from the rear wall, sounding asthmatic and impure. A single bare bulb hung down through a gap in the drop ceiling, from which several tiles were missing. Others had brown-bordered water stains and bulges that had dried just short of the bursting point. Dangling close by the dusty wire of that lone point of illumination was a fly strip stippled with desiccated black dots.
If ever a business survived on parsimony, this had to be it. Brewer looked around at walls with framed photos of men in trunks who seemed built more like blacksmiths or circus strongmen than modern-day wrestlers. Amongst the photos hung old poster boards advertising wrestling cards that were probably as ancient as the casts of silent films. On the floor at his feet was a heap of newer stuff touting the big night in Winsdale on the twenty-third. Bundles of single-fold programs wrapped in rubber bands weighted down the top poster. He stooped as if to tie his shoe, slipped one of the programs out, and stuck it in his inside pocket before rising.
The man slammed the phone down and looked at Brewer without getting up. “What?” he said, like the cop was a pesky kid tugging at his sleeve.
“Irwin Rosenfeld?”
“Don’t be a smartass. Wouldja ask for Bernard Schwartz if you were lookin’ for Tony Curtis? The hell do you want?”
Brewer saw the irony in the nickname “Smiley.”
“I’m here to ask a few follow-up questions about Chuck Mitchell’s death.”
“That wasn’t a Homicide badge you showed me.”
“Detective Wendt is tied up, and this is very routine.”
“Coulda called if it was routine.”
“Well, we have someone who alleges Delaney was dealing the kid real blows with his fists and a chair, and maybe made the cut that killed him.”
Rose gave him a cockeyed look. “Whattaya mean, ‘real blows’? This is professional wrestling, not the ladies’ sewing circle. You’re one of those ‘wrestling is fake’ types. I should have one of my boys show you how fake it is.”
“This is that kayfabe stuff, right?”
“Listen, Brower...”
“Brewer.”
“Whatever... Marty Delaney was doin’ his job, and the kid was too big-headed to admit he couldn’t work at the same level. He wasn’t too good with listenin’ to directions in general. Maybe if he kept his mouth shut, he coulda heard better.”
“Well, I’m told they worked just fine together in the first few minutes of the match, which calls for skill and cooperation on both parts, doesn’t it?”
“What’d Delaney say when you as’t
“He’s being questioned by someone else. We’ll compare notes later. I thought you — having your finger on the pulse here at World Headquarters...”
“Ah, I get it now. Mitchell’s drunk old man came in with some fairy tale that goes against what everybody else in the world saw, so they send you along to do their scut work and cover their ass.”
People had spoken down to Brewer before. His reaction to it was always on a case-by-case basis. This time he decided he would ignore it versus Wendt getting some unproductive flak about an uppity messenger boy.
“You may have a point there, Mr. Rose. But Mitchell Senior was once a professional wrestler — one of yours for a while, right? — and seems to know what
“Whattaya know from shinola? You taking the word of a drunken bum over a respectable businessman? Not to mention a thousand witnesses plus a million TV viewers.”
“I haven’t seen the Nielsen ratings. I suppose
A shrug.
“When exactly did Mitchell cut himself and ditch the gig?”
“
“I mean, if Mitchell was so inept, you probably saw when he cut himself. When did it happen exactly?”
“He was supposed to do it right before Delaney climbed down outta the ring to kick his ass. But I was on the other side of the ring, so I didn’t catch it. What else you need?”
“I guess that’s it. Maybe we’ll have some more questions after we look at the tape.”
“You guys are costin’ me money holdin’ on to that,” Rose said, seemingly unconcerned otherwise.
Brewer started to turn and then looked down at the posters on the floor. “Big night on the twenty-third, huh? How far in advance do you get all this stuff printed?”
Rose had already picked up his phone. “You still here?”
“How long?”
“Three weeks.” He started dialing.
Outside, the city air never smelled so sweet. Brewer took the program out and checked the match-ups. It proved nothing, but Chuck Mitchell’s name was not there.
He got in the car and thought about the man in the hellish back room. Rose was one of those pathological tyrants that cropped up now and then, sometimes as the head of a terrorized household, sometimes in the highest seat of government, like the ones he and Bud Mitchell had signed up to fight against. All of them, despots foreign and domestic, had the same appetite for power, the same hard-on for cruelty and violence, which they used to cow their followers and to subordinate men to do their worst bidding. On top of it all, Rose was sheltered by this kayfabe, the omerta of “the business.”
Too bad Wendt had talked to the creep at the arena and not in these squalid surroundings. He might have taken a harder look at him.
Brewer started the car, hoping Rose hadn’t been calling Martin Delaney.
Thursday — 4:45 P.M.
Delaney lived in a decent subsection of small prewar bungalows a few miles west of town. His was sided with pastel-green asbestos shingles. A big, well-trimmed lilac stood near the front walk like a polite greeter. The grass was neatly clipped and dandelion-free. Beds of yellow tulips cupped the late sunlight to either side of the porch steps.
No one answered the bell, so Brewer went down the driveway past a shiny black ’56 Chevy and saw more tulips, reds and pinks, alongside the house in orderly ranks between tubs of green mint. Every exterior wooden frame, soffit, and shutter had a recent coat of white paint. The place was so well kept that Brewer could not imagine its owner connected to the human spider he’d met in town.
Far down the long backyard, he saw a big blond man kneeling over another flower bed, both hands kneading the earth. A dark-haired woman sat in a wooden lawn chair behind him and pointed out something for his attention. They didn’t notice Brewer, even when he had drawn to within five paces and stopped to assess them; they were too intent on their project. A lively mockingbird and the shouts of children in a neighboring yard continued to mask both his presence and the couple’s companionable murmuring.
The man wore bib overalls and nothing else. Huge triceps moved rhythmically as he probed the earth with his pitchfork hands. The woman, wrapped in a pink housecoat, had a fine, delicate profile; but when she turned Brewer’s way, he saw signs of protracted strain slicing away from the wide mouth and gentle brown eyes. The hand she touched to Delaney’s shoulder was crippled, the fingers painfully gnarled.
Delaney looked Brewer’s way and sprang to his feet, the gentleness and cultivation gone from his posture. He stood a head taller than Brewer, and his yellow, Buster Crabbe hair avalanched toward the cop. He stood between his wife and the intruder, his face a caricature of ferocity, his bunched, earth-encrusted fists resting on his hips like Superman’s.
It was the woman who spoke. “Can we help you?” How even and placid her voice was, despite her obvious excruciations.
“Good evening, ma’am.” Brewer touched his hat brim and showed his badge.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s about that poor boy.” She looked up sadly at her husband.
Brewer looked at Delaney too, at the scarring from harelip surgery that ran down like petrified snot and made the man’s face doubly fierce. Delaney’s posture suggested that only his wife’s presence held him back from responding physically to the invasion.
“Martin,” she said gently. Reluctantly, the man stood down from whatever he had contemplated.
“I got nothin’ more to say.” The husky voice sounded like it had been injured by shouting.
“You know Bud Mitchell, don’t you?”
Delaney’s look got harder. The man turned to his wife and said, “I’m gonna walk down the lawn with this guy, Edna.”
“Help me up,” she said. “I’ll go inside; it’s getting buggy.”
They watched her step carefully toward a ramp built over the rear steps. It seemed an injustice had befallen this couple, but Brewer kept the thought to himself. Delaney appeared the type who might take any spoken sympathy as unwanted pity — or an interrogation ploy.
“I know you know Bud.”
Delaney held his tongue until his wife had made her laborious climb up the ramp and entered safely into the house.
“I know the bastard,” he said harshly. “Him and me mixed it up plenty.” He rounded on Brewer just as histrionically as Mitchell had said he would.
“Please. I know you were friends until he messed up his shoulder and left the game. You knew Chuck was his kid too — your
“He was nothin’ like his old man,” he said, folding his muscular arms across his chest. “Kid had a mouth on him.”
“So he deserved a beating?”
“Look, I don’t see the point of talkin’ about it no more. I don’t want my wife worryin’. Since you’re talkin’ to Bud, you can tell him I’m sorry about his boy.”
“Why don’t you tell him yourself? Eye to eye.”
There was finality in Delaney’s silence.
“Mr. Delaney, if I leave right now, you’re coming with me.”
Delaney sized him up. Brewer knew his only advantages were the police special clipped to his belt and Martin’s possible unwillingness to do anything that might upset Edna.
“So tell me exactly what happened from the time you tossed Chuck out of the ring.”
“I already told Wendt.”
“Tell
Delaney measured his words. “Look, it’s a rough business. Guys get hurt. Bad. Ask Bud Mitchell. Him and me, we’re old school. We earned our push, and we got hurt sometimes in the process. Now they want pretty boys, and they bring ’em along before they’re ready. The arena rats, the broads, they go for these guys, so they get put on top of the card but they’re still green. Some of ’em think they know it all, and then they get hurt, like the Mitchell kid. Maybe he was a snot-nosed little piss-ant, but we still had a job to do. I done mine right. He didn’t. End of story.”
“What’s that mean, he didn’t do his job?”
“He screwed up. You think I wanted this to happen? I puked! I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since. So screw you — and you need to get off my lawn.”
Thursday — 6 P.M.
Instead of going home, Brewer picked up some food and drove to the precinct, knowing a backlog of his normal backlog had accumulated by now. Lawns, shaded streets, and troops of kids on bikes gave way to brick and asphalt and herded traffic. He thought about his two interviews, searching for a salient into the guilt he detected in both. He needed to see more people to give it shape, and eventually he would get a handle on it and take it to Wendt. But would he be able to do that before Bud Mitchell’s timer ran out?
He set down his barbeque sandwich on the desk next to a message from Bud. They’d released Chuck’s body, and Bud was following the hearse up tonight. Plans were for a Friday viewing with burial on Saturday. He’d left a motel phone number where he expected to be by ten o’clock.
The day waned outside streaked windows. Brewer pecked away at the documentation of petty larcenies, mailbox vandalism, and obscene phone calls, much like hundreds of incidents come his way in the colorless years since the war. He had sympathy for some of the victims; others had brought their troubles on themselves. Maybe it was a good thing he had never felt enough ambition to seek a gold shield. Too many cases like Mitchell’s in the land of detectives.
Still at his desk at ten P.M., Brewer dialed the motel. When they put him through, Bud sounded a little looped. Brewer sketched the visits to Rose and Delaney and his plans for Friday. He said he intended to get up Saturday for the burial.
He listened for something ominous in the rumbling replies, but all he picked up was weariness lubricated by alcohol. As the call wound down, Bud said, “Go back and tell me exactly what Smiley and Delaney had to say.”
Brewer opened his notebook and fleshed out his earlier comments.
“You see anything there, Bud?”
“Can you sweat Delaney any more?”
“Not until I find something that would call for a fresh look at his story. I need more time, and a look at the tape. You concentrate on taking care of Chuck, and I’ll work on this. You hear me? I’ll see you Saturday.”
Friday — 9:15 A.M.
Doak Brookings didn’t work for Smiley Rose. He was an employee of the TV station that broadcasted Wednesday night wrestling. Brewer timed his arrival at WKRY-12 for the end of the morning news hour in which Brookings handled weather reports.
“Looking for Okie Doakie?” a stagehand said.
“Pardon?”
“Doak’s from Tulsa, so we call him Okie Doakie.”
Brookings was in a common dressing area, donning a turn-of-the-century fireman’s costume. He was a trim guy in his mid forties, and once he said hello, Brewer realized he had heard the pleasant baritone many times before.
“I thought you were the weatherman.”
“Yup, the weatherman, Firehouse Frank, Patrolman Pat, cartoons, puppets, comedy shorts, and Wednesday-night wrestling. Don’t forget the parades, Brick Bread commercials, and store openings.”
“Do you ever end up shaking hands with yourself?”
Brookings laughed, but the banter stopped when Brewer told him why he’d come by.
“Like I told Detective Wendt, my table was on the opposite side of the ring from where the kid got banged up. I had to call some of the action off the monitor I was watching because I didn’t have a direct view. How’s Bud doing? Haven’t seen him since he screwed up his shoulder. He must be busted up over this.”
“He’s not in the best shape. He saw it all on TV. He thought maybe you had seen something out of the ordinary during the match because he said you sounded a little funny at one point.”
“Well, when they went out of the ring, it seemed like they really notched it up. I got thrown off a little by the sound effects and the crowd reaction. But I wasn’t close enough to see if things weren’t right. Sorry.”
“Delaney reentered the ring on your side, though.”
“Yeah, he came around because he was getting hit with so much crap tossed by the fans on the other side.”
“And Smiley Rose, was he by you too?”
“Eventually.”
“Rose and Delaney made physical contact, didn’t they?”
“Well, Marty shoved him, but that was part of the angle. Where are you going with this? Marty’s a stand-up guy.”
“He was supposedly beaming like an idiot after leaving Mitchell facedown in his own blood.”
“I’ll be putting on a face myself when I come down the fire pole in thirty minutes.”
“Point taken. By the way, have you ever been to Rose’s office?”
“I haven’t had the time
Brewer figured it would be the undoing of Fireman Frank and Patrolman Pat if they ever saw the underbelly of the IWF.
Friday — 10 A.M.
Wendt was waiting for him in WKRY’S control room.
A station technician had set up the big reel of black-and-white videotape to run on a 21-inch monitor and stood by should they want anything rewound.
Wendt, a tall, politico-faced guy with a nice set of clothes, seemed to be working on a personal-improvement plan. He shook hands and said, “When we’re done looking at this, it goes back to Rose, where it will be erased and reused until it falls apart.”
“Unless we see something evidential.”
“Yeah, right.”
The picture was sharp and stable. As Brewer watched, he took out the notes he had made while listening to Bud at the diner and consulted them alongside the action like marginalia, picturing Bud’s continuous struggle with the vertical roll on his little black-and-white.
The show opened with the familiar ringside voice of Doak Brookings touting the card of the extravaganza coming to the municipal auditorium in Winsdale Saturday night the twenty-third. Names: Iron Mike Something, the Masked Maulers, four mighty midgets tussling in tag-team action — including Big Tiny Blair and the Amazing Micronauts, and, in the main event, world heavyweight champion Paul “The Prince” Madison defending his title against the challenge of Mean Martin Delaney.
“Aaand, here’s our next bout. Let’s go to ring announcer Bill Fick for the introductions.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a one-fall contest with a thirty-minute time limit. In the corner to my left — he weighs two hundred and twenty-six pounds, from Baltimore, Maryland — Chuck Mitchell!”
Chuck, as Bud had explained, was the “babyface,” representing Mom and apple pie against the evil “heel.” The kid — who had never been to Maryland — looked good, fit, and a lot more innocent than he really was. He bounced in place with the confidence of charmed youth while the fans cheered hopefully.
“His opponent from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, at two hundred ninety-two pounds, Mean Mar—”
Fick never got a chance to finish the introduction because he had to backpedal away from Delaney’s unexpected charge at Chuck Mitchell. The referee signaled for the belated opening bell as Delaney commenced to deliver “worked” blows to Chuck’s head and upper back, which the kid dutifully “sold” by sinking to his knees. Delaney put on what Brookings called a rear chinlock, using his body as a shield against the scrutiny of the ref so that he could slip into a blatant choke visible to everyone — everyone, that is, except the ref.
Brewer found the stylized violence energetic, but more amusing than convincing.
In his role of rabble-rouser, Brookings stated the obvious, “Listen to the reaction of this crowd! They don’t care even a little bit for Delaney and his tactics.”
Brewer imagined the pop of a beer cap, the slide of the bourbon bottle across Bud’s kitchen table.
Delaney draped the youngster’s neck across the top rope and snapped him backwards into the ring. He followed this with a series of boots to the chest and one to the head for good measure, although most of the sound and fury seemed directed at the canvas.
The ref warned Delaney, pushing him to a neutral corner. Mitchell struggled to his feet, shaking the cobwebs loose.
Delaney rushed Mitchell again, but the kid ducked under a vicious forearm and came back with a “flying dropkick.” He repeated the move each time Delaney regained his feet until the latter began to stagger around with a goofy, disoriented look. Mitchell took him to the mat with a series of moves that Brookings recited like a yoga instructor pressed for time: an arm drag, into an arm bar, into a short-arm scissors, the last actually a rest hold that allowed the two men a breather.
Both of them were fine athletes in Brewer’s estimation, but the brutality so far had been staged. The kid looked arrogant as he sat beside his opponent and locked up on the captured arm. Bud’s thinking,
Delaney attempted to regain his footing as Mitchell maintained his hold, at one point grabbing Mitchell’s trunks to hoist him into a pin until the howling protests of the fans alerted the ref to the infraction. Their delight was equally voluble as Delaney was taken back to the mat. Eventually, Delaney managed to get a hand on the bottom rope, and the ref called for the break.
Parental pride riding a bourbon and beer-back rush, but then the vertical roll returned, fast and perverse, as they locked up “collar and elbow.”
Delaney viciously raked Chuck’s eyes with that garden-tool hand. The ref stepped in dutifully with a warning but was pushed aside. (Here Brewer pointed out the gig being passed surreptitiously from the ref to Mitchell. The tech played it back for good measure.) Delaney began simulating the type of violence that had sent many a man up for aggravated assault, gouging the eye of the youngster, grabbing him by the hair and slamming his head into the corner pad once, twice, three times. He tossed Mitchell through the ropes to the arena floor “like a sack of potatoes” and followed him out of the ring.
Brewer sat forward. It was here that Bud sensed Delaney’s punches had turned real, as opposed to “realistic.” Indeed, the heel seemed suddenly possessed of a frantic vigor, like a barroom thug getting in his murderous licks, but the camera angle...
Delaney wielded the aluminum folding chair now, another authentic blow according to Bud, though the mike did not quite pick up the “sickening thud of the ‘steel’ chair” Brookings claimed could be heard all over the arena. Brewer listened for a change in the latter’s tone.
“Mitchell apparently isn’t capable of defending himself against this relentless onslaught. What a disgusting display! This isn’t wrestling! Again the steel chair comes crashing down on Mitchell... and again... and again... this kid’s going to be seriously hurt! Why doesn’t someone put a stop to this?”
Delaney pulled the younger man up to a kneeling position and smashed him headfirst into the ringpost.
“Oh!” Doak said. “Oh, man!” And indeed, it might have been real distress in his voice as the kid’s head apparently busted wide open and bled profusely. But Brewer also knew that Brookings had been relying on his ringside monitor at this point, cut off from the actual action.
“Referee Tom Scruggs calls for Delaney to return to the ring as the debris showers down!”
The gloating villain worked away from the rain of soda cups, hard candy, and small coins, smirking left and right and pounding his chest.
Smiley Rose made his ringside appearance, come “to check on Mitchell’s condition.” He intercepted Delaney, who had yet to climb back into the ring and stood amongst the fans inciting more anger. The two went nose to nose.
“Delaney’s title bout with Madison on the twenty-third could be in jeopardy — and the shove he just gave Rose won’t help matters any!”
They replayed the fragmentary glimpse of contact a couple times, but neither of them could see anything passed from Delaney to Rose.
Scruggs convinced Delaney to climb back into “the squared circle” and completed the ten count on Mitchell
Frick was back to make the official announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, the time of the fall six minutes, sixteen seconds; your winner by a count out, Mean Martin Delaney!”
Bud’s big blunt fingers had coaxed the vertical to a slow hover at this point.
Brookings: “What a brutal beating sustained by young Chuck Mitchell at the hands of Mean Martin Delaney, who certainly seems ready for his Saturday night rendezvous with world champion Paul ‘The Prince’ Madison on the twenty-third at Winsdale.”
“All right already with the place and time!” Wendt said.
The camera peeked at Chuck from a steep and distant angle. He was prostrate on the concrete below the ring, facedown in what looked like a black puddle. A man in a cheap suit, “the attending physician,” knelt by his side, waved for a stretcher.
“Mitchell will no doubt be on his way to the hospital — so let’s go to commercial. We’ll be back with more All Star Wrestling right after this...”
Brewer knew that the infernal little set had allowed Bud this same steady, remote look as they turned up the kid’s bloodied face. Then he and Wendt were watching somebody lathering a five-o’clock shadow.
“Well?” Wendt said.
Brewer envisioned Bud up on his feet in the dark kitchen, a tiny reflection of the TV image flickering in his shot glass, the dark blood coming into his face. He shrugged, said nothing.
“Yeah, it’s like that Jap movie where everybody saw what they wanted to see.”
Friday — 2:55 P.M.
Tom Scruggs stood tall in the bleachers overlooking a cinder track where sets of harried-looking runners were practicing baton passes. The high-school coach was dressed in gray sweats, a whistle poised close to his lips. He seemed much more watchful than his referee persona, which made Brewer hopeful.
Scruggs glanced down at him as he ascended.
“You Brewer?”
Before Brewer could answer, the coach blew a piercing blast and bawled, “What kinda handoff was that, Wesley? Keep runnin’ till you’re rid of it!” Then quietly to the plainclothesman arriving alongside: “God he’p the nation if these boys live long enough to run it.”
Keeping an eye on the relay drills, Scruggs continued, “Still don’t know why you’re here. My recollection hasn’t changed.”
“Sometimes you surprise yourself when you have a different questioner. So. It was you who passed the blade to Chuck.”
Scruggs seemed to regret that admission. “That’s one of the ways it gets done. I’ve never seen it go so wrong, though. What? Are they trying to stick
Now Brewer had his undivided attention. “Relax. How’d you get involved with the operation anyhow?”
“Doak comes around to the school doing public-service talks. They had an opening. He remembered that I coached wrestling here and asked me if I wanted to make a few bucks on the side — as a
“I’m not looking at you for this. But tell me, why do you think things got so rough?”
“I’m not close enough to those guys to guess. I don’t want to know. It’s my job to turn a blind eye and move the match along. Some of these guys can really wrestle, but in the end, it’s just an athletic soap opera put on in a nut house.”
“Did you see Chuck slice himself?”
“No. I know when the book called for the kid to juice, but from my position everything looked as it should. I can tell ya Marty was really upset afterwards, though.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, I heard him reaming out the trainer for letting Mitchell bleed out like that. Then he threw up.”
“Did you pass Delaney a gig too?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Or could he have been hiding one during the match?”
“Jesus! For twenty bucks a night, you think I’m gonna be an accessory to...”
“To what?”
“To whatever it is you’re getting at. Look, for a double sawbuck I’ll put up with a crowd of toothless rednecks yelling up at me for being blind and let a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder pretend to push me around in the ring, but that’s it. I don’t buy into anything else.”
Some of the runners were slowing and looking their way. Scruggs waved them back into motion.
“Were you watching when Rose came down to check out the ruckus?”
“I was more concerned with this Hatpin Mary throwing a fit at ringside and giving me the evil eye. I don’t need to take a knife in the back for chicken feed. Don’t kid yourself it happens.”
“Why do you think Rose stuck his nose in and tussled with Delaney?”
Scruggs checked an automatic protest of ignorance, a peculiar inner questioning on his face. “You know that creep never shows his puss unless he’s hyping a big card.”
“So? If Delaney did use another gig on Mitchell, could Rose have come down so he could take it off him? Then Delaney could beat his chest while Rose made off with the evidence. Possible?”
Scruggs mulled it over and said, “It’s professional wrestling. What
Friday — 6 P.M.
Brookings and Scruggs had both expressed personalized doubts about the value of witnesses drawn from Wednesday’s live audience. Nevertheless, Brewer had taken the names of regulars they knew either worked or lived close to the arena.
Eyewitnesses in general are unreliable, but these were delusional: dishwasher, counter man, ward of the state, or person with no visible means of support, each was fixated on the personalities and predicaments unfolding weekly at what used to be the Majestic Theater. Their intense fascination left no room for doubt about the authenticity of the IWL saga. Brewer was surprised that Delaney and Scruggs hadn’t ended up in the morgue along with Chuck after experiencing the spittle-spraying diatribes he evoked from a couple observers. It reminded him of a story about frenzied soap-opera fans so deeply imbued with their suspension of disbelief that, happening upon an actress in public who portrayed a home-wrecking vixen on the tube, they had cursed and physically attacked her.
The worshipers of pseudo-mayhem presented him with a shared article of faith. Like Bud, all were convinced that Chuck Mitchell’s death was a result of Delaney’s brutal attack. They also believed that the reigning champ, “The Prince,” would exact a terrible vengeance against the killer on the twenty-third. Forever and ever, amen.
He found Kenny Stiglitz, the trainer, tucked into the corner of a dark booth in Webbie’s Tavern. He was a middle-aged guy with the build and demeanor of a discarded soldier. Brewer identified himself, and immediately tears began to run down the man’s stubbly face. His throat was so constricted he could barely speak. It was the first semblance of remorse Brewer had seen since first talking to Bud.
He told Stiglitz he was an old friend of Mitchell’s, hoping the connection would break down the kayfabe barrier, but it just made Stiglitz more gloomy.
“I wouldn’t blame Buddy if he came and broke my neck for this. I never shoulda walked away, even if the kid said he was all right.”
“The cut, Kenny. Can you tell me about that?”
“Whattaya mean? He went too deep on hisself.”
“Could you see there was more than one cut?”
“Was there? You think I could see that with all the blood? Christ!”
He put his face down on his clenched fists.
“Maybe if I’d been sober I woulda realized...”
That was about all Brewer could get out of him.
He grabbed some Chinese on his way back to the squad room. It was too late to make the Mitchell wake, but if he hacked away at his paperwork tonight, he could drive up for the burial tomorrow with a clear conscience.
He stopped the chopsticks halfway to his mouth, realizing loyalty and commitment to Bud were sinking now beneath the surface of forms, folders, and food containers littering his desk.
Mercifully, the phone rang. It was Wendt.
“What a good civil servant you are. What’s the wife got to say about all this?”
“No wife. No pets.”
“That ain’t the way I remember it.”
“That’s the way it is now.”
“You may be on to something. Anyway, you still churning the Mitchell thing?”
“Yeah, and you were right about it going nowhere.”
“What, you don’t like that Delaney guy no more?”
“I do, but nothing’s shaking loose. How’re you doing with that dead lady?”
“We’re sweating the husband, the smarmy bastard. Anyway, I’m not going to get blindsided on this Mitchell thing, am I?”
“I would’ve liked Bud with us while we watched that tape.”
“You can’t change reality, Brewer. Look, tell your guy he might be able to sue in civil court, but it falls short of criminal. So long.”
After some thought, Brewer picked up the phone again.
“Don’t hang up, Martin. Just listen. I’ve pretty much got it down, and I have you and a couple other sources tell me that you’re truly busted up about Mitchell once you find out how bad it is. I believe it. I think Rose asked you to put him down — just why, I don’t know — but I don’t believe you had your heart in it. Trouble is, no one tended to the cut the way they should have, and Chuck was too banged up to realize how bad off he was.
“When I look at you, I see a conscience at work. I think you need to say what really happened. Get out from under this weird storybook crap that Rose has you guys jammed up in.”
Silence...
“Look, Martin, I saw the tape of the match. So did Homicide. Wouldn’t it be better if you came forward
A long pause, then a heavy-handed click.
Friday — 9:15 P.M.
Adele had grown up in this town. Some of her old acquaintances plus the wrestling coach and a few kids from Chuck’s high-school days had come by earlier in the evening. Bud thanked everyone quietly and listened keenly to stories about Chuck and Adele. He tried not to come off as the brooding presence that had broken up the household, but he was pretty sure he failed at that too.
The funeral parlor grew quiet and filled with empty shadows. He sat alone with fifteen minutes to go and stared at a restored profile that had nothing to do with the boy who had been alive.
He heard something and turned. For a moment, he thought someone’s kid had wandered away from another wake and was peeking in at him. But when the short figure rolled into motion, he recognized the stunted body and got up.
Burgess “Big Tiny” Blair possessed a rugged, elongated face on a normalsized head, but its disproportion to the rest of his body was striking. His dark suit was from the husky-boys department at J.C. Penney’s and hung kind of loose.
He came straight to Bud and held up his small but powerful hand. “Sorry ’bout the boy, Bud. Lemme take a look at him.” Big Tiny’s voice had grown raspy, and Bud didn’t like the chalky pallor of his skin.
They went to the coffin and Blair stood on tiptoe on the kneeler. On impulse, Bud lifted him from behind and held him up for a better look, realizing just how much bulk Tiny had lost.
“Okay, Bud, put me down. We gotta talk. I was on the card.”
“I know. I was watchin’. You done good — considerin’.”
“It’s what happened after we gotta talk about.”
There was a tavern directly across the street. A couple of regulars on barstools gave them long, impassive looks as they came in and then went back to their private reveries. Some Irish mourners were reminiscing loudly in the back, so the pair took a booth up front. Bud sent the waitress for boilermakers.
He offered Tiny a butt, but his old friend shook his head with a slightly nauseated look. Bud put the pack away “You look like hell, Tiny.”
“I feel worse, and it ain’t gettin’ better. It’s catchin’ up with me fast. I guess that’s another reason why I took the train up. I got nothin’ to lose by tellin’ ya what they done to Chuck.”
The drinks came, but Tiny merely stared at his beer and shot. He had always had a presence larger than his physique, but it seemed hidden now behind a twelve-ounce glass. He pushed aside his infirmity, however, and got right to it.
“They didn’t know anyone was left in the locker room that night. I was kinda wiped out, tryin’ to get up the energy to go home, when I heard Rose rip Marty a new one. He says, ‘I didn’t say to kill the punk, ya stupid bastard! I just told ya to send him on a nice vacation!’ He’s got Marty doin’ his policin’ now, see? And Marty can’t kick back because Rose has stuff on him. I’ve heard him threatenin’ to tell Marty’s wife about the arena rats Marty was bangin’. Rose yells, ‘And now look what you did! Screw the kid, I’m happy he’s outta the way, but if they lock you up for this, there goes my gate on the twenty-third.’ Marty, he blames it on the trainer, but it wasn’t Stiglitz cut your kid.”
Big Tiny downed the shot and chased it with a gulp of beer before it could come back up again. He seemed to be listening intently to his stomach.
“I shouldn’ta told you, but we go way back, pal. What’s right is right. Look, I gotta go. Sorry about your son. And if I don’t see ya again — I’ll see ya.”
Bud sat blinded and straitjacketed by fresh anger. When he finally shook himself out of it, Tiny had gone, disappearing into the recesses as he always seemed to do.
Saturday — 9 A.M.
Steady drizzle fell upon the tiny gathering of dark figures. Eventually, Bud and Brewer were alone at the graveside, hat brims dripping.
Bud meant to wait until the diggers came to lower Chuck into the ground. In the meantime, he related Tiny’s story in the way people ramble about a dream. Brewer said it was no help unless the witness went on record.
“You got the tape,” Bud said.
“The tape’s no good as evidence.”
“Whattaya mean no good?”
“It didn’t show what we needed. You say Tiny took the train up here? Considering the hour you saw him, he might have missed the last one going back.”
“He ain’t gonna tell you what he told me.”
“We’ll see.”
Within ten minutes, Brewer was at the train station. Big Tiny, asleep against the cinder-block wall, had the small waiting room to himself. Likely, he’d been on the bench all night and had scared off anyone else wanting to wait inside; he looked contagious.
Feeling like a bully, Brewer shook Tiny several times before the tired expression became a shut-eyed scowl. One more shake and the eyes opened on the badge held six inches away.
“I got a ticket,” Tiny said.
“Wake up, Tiny. I’m a friend of Bud’s. I know what you told him, and I need it on record to nail Delaney and Rose.”
Tiny pushed himself erect with obvious effort. His face was peevish and sickly.
“Screw you,” Tiny said, feet dangling above the concrete floor.
Brewer noticed his shadow had fallen across the dwarf, perhaps to bad effect. He sat down beside him. “Hey, I said I’m Bud’s friend — a war buddy. He told me you came here special to clear things up for him.”
Tiny leaned on his hands and hung his head like someone getting ready to puke.
“I came up to pay my respects, and then we had a drink. When I left him, he was just gettin’ started on a bender, so whatever he told you musta come outta the bottle.”
“Look, I can’t prove foul play in this thing if you don’t back me up.”
Tiny’s head turned slowly toward Brewer. The dark, bloodshot eyes looked malarial.
“I didn’t hear nothin’. I didn’t see nothin’. If Bud’s a frienda yours, you know he’s prob’ly half in the bag allatime. Nobody did nothin’ to nobody. I got nothin’ else to say, so piss off.”
Brewer mulled over all the “nothin’s.”
“Look, Tiny, this is a murder, or at least manslaughter. Don’t you want to see justice done for your friend?”
Tiny was hanging his head again.
“I ain’t got enough time left to see your kinda justice.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It don’t mean nothin’ ’cause I don’t know nothin’” Brewer could feel the man clenching himself off in kayfabe, commitment as fanatical as a Japanese soldier’s.
“Bud wouldn’t have let me in on what you told him if he didn’t want this handled the right way.”
Outside, the clang and rumble of the arriving diesel charged into their hearing. Tiny hopped to the floor, heading for the door. He wobbled at first but got control of his stride by the time he reached up to the knob. His strange silhouette stood out against the braking cars for a moment; then he was gone into the rain.
Sunday — 6 P.M.
Bud answered his phone, his voice sounding smoky but sober enough. Brewer didn’t ask where he’d been all day.
“Tiny wouldn’t level with me, Bud. Why did he tell you one thing and me another?”
Silence on the other end.
“Even though the tape doesn’t help us, I hinted the opposite to Delaney to see what he does. It’s just a matter of staying patient.”
Bud said, “I got hired to push an open-deck job startin’ tomorrow. I’ll check with you later in the week.”
Was that an acceptance of Brewer’s advice, or lip service?
He had to figure a way of closing this thing.
Monday — 8 A.M.
The boss beckoned to Brewer as he entered the squad room. “Well?”
“The tape don’t help. Only two cameras and they weren’t placed right. If Bud hadn’t tipped me on what to look or listen for I wouldn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary. I think Wendt’s going to release it back. Meantime, I’ve been leaning on Delaney and Tiny Blair.”
“Who?”
Brewer explained.
“A giant and a leprechaun.”
“One or the other of those consciences has got to give.”
“When? Yeah, you’re done with this. You told Wendt what you think, right? Let him run with it if he wants. And your buddy, what’s he gonna do?”
“Don’t know. Lieutenant...”
“You’re done.”
Tuesday — 1 P.M.
Brewer’s phone rang.
Bud’s voice was more forceful than it had been on Sunday. Maybe that came from running a crew of ironworkers for two days. “Tell me what’s new, Al.”
“What’s new is I’m officially off the case.”
“But what about the tape?”
“It’s gone, Bud; we just couldn’t sort out what was staged and what wasn’t. Not conclusively. But I’m not quitting on this. I may be off the case as far as the brass is concerned, but that doesn’t mean I have to let it go.”
After a pause, Bud said, “It’s okay, Al, just drop it. I don’t want you hanging yourself out to dry.”
The dial tone was loud, like an air-raid warning.
Wednesday — 7:15 P.M.
Brewer ran aground with his paperwork, left the office, and walked toward the Imperial. It was jammed with exuberant kids so he kept walking. Up ahead he saw the vertical neon for Larkin’s, a bowling alley with good grinders at the snack bar.
He nursed a draft beer waiting for his sandwich and stared up at the TV. A coffee commercial finished up its jingle and then he was watching Wednesday-night wrestling.
He recognized Doak Brookings’ voice: “Welcome back, wrestling fans. Let’s head up to the ring and the very handsome Bill Fick.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a one-fall contest with a thirty-minute time limit. In this corner, from Sarasota, Florida, at two hundred thirty-six pounds, Steve ‘Doc’ Russell.”
Russell drew a smattering of cheers that was drowned out by an avalanche of boos and catcalls accorded Delaney’s introduction. The bell rang, and Brookings began his call of the match. No mention of the fate of Delaney’s last adversary.
Russell and Delaney circled the ring and locked up. For Brewer it was more of the same, like an oft-repeated bedtime story, except he had lost the renewable surprise of childhood.
Delaney forced Russell into the ropes. Referee Tom Scruggs commanded the break, but even as Delaney complied, he provoked the ire of the ringside fans with a humiliating bitch slap across Russell’s face.
Russell stomped around like a kid having a tantrum.
“No doubt this is exactly the reaction Delaney wanted,” Brookings said, “trying to goad Russell into a mistake.”
Something was visibly diverting the arena crowd’s attention, turning heads. The high-angle camera pivoted awkwardly to capture a man rushing the ring, his identity concealed by a hood.
What a circus, Brewer thought. But his mild contempt for the latest masked marvel evaporated; something about the new arrival’s odd combination of headsman’s hood and civilian clothes, the way he moved, sent shallow fire along his skin. The last time he had flashed this much adrenaline had been overseas, that night when Bud had waded into an enemy emplacement armed with only an entrenching tool, ignoring the Germans’ screams and upraised hands. Then as now, Brewer had felt spellbound, ambivalent. And as there had been no stopping Bud then, there would be no stopping him now.
Brookings’ voice reflected excitement bordering on panic as he called the action, some of which eluded the camera.
“The intruder is entering the ring and charging Delaney. Oh, man! A kick to... uh, let’s say the lower abdomen!”
Delaney crumpled to the mat in obvious agony. From under his jacket, the interloper produced an iron pipe.
“Good Lord! He’s beating Delaney to a pulp!”
At this point, Doc Russell, moments ago Delaney’s bitter adversary, broke kayfabe and came to his aid. An almost casual elbow and swipe of the bloodied pipe sent him to the canvas too.
“Here comes IWL President Smiley Rose, and he’s frantically waving in the reinforcements! There’s Iron Mike Bailey! Fred McKenzie! Here come the Bavarian Storm Troopers! This is... what the hell is going on here? Excuse me for that, folks, but one by one, they have all fallen victim to this maniac and his weapon. The ring is littered with fallen gladiators. Now the assailant is turning his attention to Smiley Rose! Rose isn’t a wrestler, so why would... the masked man has dropped the pipe and grabbed a pleading Smiley Rose in a front facelock, delivering a devastating spinning neck-breaker to the IWL president! Oh, no! Rose is lying on the mat, his head turned at an impossible angle, motionless. The masked man sits down in mid ring amidst the carnage and — what? Is he crying?
“We’d better go to a commercial. We’ll be right back — I think.”
Girl Feeding Birds
by Elizabeth Zelvin
I stumbled up the broad steps of the Metropolitan Museum six paces behind Cousin Ashley. My arms ached with the weight of the tower of books and files she’d loaded me up with. Every time I bumped another step upward, the whole pile threatened to escape from under my clamped chin and slide away. I nudged one knee up and braced my arms to grip the load more firmly. I winced as something sharp nicked my arm and added paper cuts to the list of hazards I hadn’t considered when I agreed to work for Cousin Ash.
I had only done it because, as Ash had predicted, in a bad economy I couldn’t get a job with my MFA in art conservation from NYU. It was infuriating when she was right.
“Let’s face it, Janny darling,” she had said, “you can’t be anything in the art world without a doctorate or good connections, especially if you’re not gay.” Her brow had furrowed prettily as she rummaged in her bottomless store of zingers. “If only you actually had talent. But we both know you’re not an artist.”
I remembered Ashley practicing that furrowed brow in the mirror in the room we shared, summers at Aunt Gwen’s in Southampton. And she remembered how to get to me. It had been the hardest decision of my life to accept that what Ash called “your little gift” was less talent than a working painter needed. I had thrown myself into the discipline of conserving and restoring the masters. I had grown to love the work. But she could still make me feel like a failure.
“You’d better come work for me, darling,” she’d said, “if you must work. Oh, that’s right, you don’t have a trust fund, do you?” She knew damn well I was the poor relation. She’d tossed her head without disordering the Bergdorf-blond hair.
“You could go to retail.” Retail was the Met’s bread and butter. “Anybody can do it, and they always have openings. Still, you’ll do better as my assistant.” Silvery laugh. She’d practiced that too. “Unless you’d rather be a guard?”
So I’d sold my soul to the devil and taken out the change in wear on the teeth I couldn’t help grinding in my sleep. Things got better when I met my current boyfriend. Joel was a guard at the museum and a gifted painter. Now he waved from the top of the steps as Ash sailed past him. He reached out to help me with the stack of books as Ash’s entourage of sycophants swept by, nearly knocking me down. Joel’s big, competent hands steadied me.
“Hey, you,” he said. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m okay. Listen, I got Cousin Ashley to promise she’d look at your portfolio.” Joel needed recommendations for the prestigious MFA program in painting at Yale, where he hoped to get a fellowship. I’d offered to call in a few chips with Ash.
“You didn’t have to.” He hugged me hard. “I hate for you to owe her anything. But thanks.”
“Janny! I don’t have all day!” Ash’s shrill voice floated back, impatient and commanding, like Hannibal telling the elephants to get a move on. “We’ve got a major event in less than two days, in case you’ve forgotten.”
I hadn’t forgotten. The museum was unveiling a major acquisition, a newly discovered Vermeer. For this occasion, the Met would throw a party on the scale of the Saturnalia in ancient Rome.
“Gotta go,” I told Joel. “Are you working the party tomorrow night?”
“Yep. Have you seen the Vermeer?”
“Not yet. Ash did. Even she was impressed.”
“Jan-ny!”
“You’d better go,” he said. “Can you get away at lunchtime?”
“Not a chance. Too bad.” I didn’t try to hide my disappointment. Joel and I could sometimes find half an hour in the workday to talk and even kiss. We would meet in a small gallery of late Roman architecture, most of it in fragments. Hardly anybody ever entered it, and those few only by accident. It had a marble bench and a little fountain whose gurgle was enough to mask soft conversation.
“This evening, then?”
“I wish I could, but I have to go see my uncle Solly. I want to talk to him about you. He’d make a better reference than Ash.”
“Janny! Now!”
“I guess I’ll see you at the party, then.”
“I’ll be working too, but look for me.” I blew him a kiss as I scurried after Ashley.
I let myself into Uncle Solly’s brownstone in the East Seventies, a four-story gem that, unlike most of its neighbors, had never been divided into apartments. He’d given me a key when I got the job with Ash, so I’d have someplace to disappear to within walking distance of the Met. I started down the high-ceilinged hall that ran the length of the parlor floor to Uncle Solly’s den at the back of the house.
“Is that you, Janny?” Uncle Solly called. “Come in, come in.”
“I’m looking at the naives. Oh, wow, is this new?”
“They were always your favorites.” Uncle Solly’s voice had cracked and faded with age, but his rich chuckle survived.
“When I was ten,” I said. “They’re still great, though.”
The track lighting made the most of his collection of American naive animal paintings: zoos, Noah’s arks, and peaceable kingdoms. Each canvas, crowded with bright colors and painstaking detail, was innocent of perspective yet perfectly balanced. Each scene attracted and satisfied the eye, charming without being cute.
“This one is new,” I said. “Did you really need another Bronx Zoo?”
“See if you can spot what makes it unique.” Uncle Solly chuckled. When I was little, he’d always made up games for me that involved some sort of visual training.
“The baby giraffe!” No doubt the Bronx Zoo really had a new baby giraffe. Uncle Solly had no use for anything inauthentic.
I wriggled out of my coat and slung it over the back of an armchair. Uncle Solly’s den was like a Victorian gentlemen’s club from the waist down: dark leather, chairs built for comfort, gleaming parquet peeking out around the edges of a muted but still gorgeous Persian carpet, an antique Kashan. The walls, however, were stark and white to show off his magnificent art collection.
Uncle Solly sat hunched forward, sunk in the depths of a bulky cabled sweater like an old, wrinkled turtle. I dropped a kiss on the top of his bald head.
“Sit, sit,” he said. He rubbed his hands together as if the friction between his palms might strike a spark. “I’m always cold these days.” He examined the backs of his hands, papery skin draped over blue veins that stood out like rivers on a map. “Never get old, Jannele.”
I sat down facing him and laid my hand over his.
“Don’t say you’re old.”
“The calendar doesn’t lie. I wish it did.” The remains of a Viennese accent still clung to his lips, turning “wish” into “veesh.” Uncle Solly had been a resistance fighter in his youth. He had come to America at twenty, right after the war. “So open your eyes and look. What do you see?”
This was an old game between us. I twisted in my chair and scanned the room.
“The Kandinsky.” It glowed on the wall behind him, another favorite from my childhood.
“You called it ‘The Big Bang’.”
“You told me that was its title!”
We both laughed. Uncle Solly had taught me how abstract painters like Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock express energy and motion. “Open your eyes and look” was an old catchphrase between us.
“So what else?”
“The Tchelitchew.” Another luminous painting, this one a small watercolor study for the famous “Hide and Seek,” which hung in the MOMA.
If my dad’s grandpa had been Solly’s father instead of his uncle — or if he had trusted Great-uncle Herman’s enthusiasm for the radical young painters he met in Paris before the war — I might not be a poor relation. But I never thought about that, except when Ash reminded me.
“So what else?”
“Something new?”
“There!” My eyes widened. The small painted panel hung where he could see it from his chair. “Is that a Botticelli?”
“So what’s wrong with the Old Masters? Meet
“My God, it really is.” Simonetta Vespucci, the toast of late fifteenth-century Florence and inspiration for its artists, dead at twenty-two.
“I outbid three museums for her. I put her where I can look at her all day.”
“This isn’t catalogued,” I said. “How on earth did they ever miss her?”
“How do you think?” His eyebrows, dappled tufts that had outlasted his hair, drew down in one of his rare frowns. “Looted and hidden away.”
Oh. He meant the Nazis, who had stolen a staggering amount of art from Jewish families. Pieces were still turning up, and international law was still grappling with the claims of the original owners’ descendants versus the collectors who had ended up with them.
“Is the provenance known?”
“They are all dead in the camps, with no survivors to start over after the war or children and grandchildren to come forward now. If I could, I would give it back, Jannele.” He shook his head to clear the moisture in his eyes.
“I know you would, Uncle Solly.”
“So. What’s bad and what’s good?” This was another game we’d always played. I could remember giggling at his accent as he explained, “Bad is wegetables. Bad is ven the teacher scolds because you make a mistake. Good is love and art and learning something new.”
“Bad is Cousin Ash, as usual,” I said.
“That girl.” He shook his head. “Good head, bad heart.” Ash was not on the Jewish side of the family — Aunt Gwen was my mother’s sister — but Uncle Solly was on the board of the Met, so their paths crossed from time to time.
“She’s okay,” I said. “Well, she’s not, but I can take it.” I didn’t want him worrying about me. “Good is Joel.”
“Ah, the boyfriend.” His head popped up out of his turtleneck, and his eyes were bright with interest.
“I think he’s a keeper, Uncle Solly.”
“He is the lucky one,” he said.
“The Vermeer is good too,” I said. “I haven’t seen it yet, but I can hardly wait. Are you going to the opening?”
“Too many people, too much standing, not so good champagne,” he said. He lifted a bushy brow and cocked his head. “You will be there? Working?”
“Holding Ash’s train as usual,” I said. “But I’ll get to see the painting. If I have to stay late, can I come back here?” The guest room on the top floor was always ready, though I didn’t like to impose on him too often.
“Yes, yes, whenever you wish.”
“I may not come.” I hoped that Joel would invite me home to his place in Brooklyn. We were too new as a couple to take anything for granted.
“Whatever is best for you, my Jannele. Be beautiful, and enjoy the party.”
The Met knows how to throw a party. The Great Hall was packed. Everybody from the mayor on down had been invited, and it looked as if no one had declined. The hall’s perpetual display of flowers was glorious tonight: out-of-season dogwood and mimosa, oversized sprays of lilies whose heavy scent mingled with the guests’ Chanel and Guerlain. Champagne flowed, canapes topped with dabs of caviar circulated, and vast trays of elegant finger food were demolished and replaced.
To view the Vermeer, guests had to mount the broad marble stairs and follow signs to the small gallery where they’d hung “Girl Feeding Birds.” It had gone up only that afternoon, the location a secret that had been widely leaked. Security and the higher-ups had been livid, but everybody else, like me, had managed to sneak away to see it before the crowds arrived. At the Met, even the trolls in the basement love art.
The setting was a seventeenth-century Dutch domestic interior. The amazing Vermeer light slanted in from the window. A shallow bowl sat on what could have been a kitchen table. A girl stood between table and window. A bird perched on her extended right hand, taking seeds from her palm. Another bird sat on her left hand, which she held up under her chin. The bird was taking a seed from between her lips, so it looked as if girl and bird were kissing. If the subject was unique, the coloring of the birds was astounding. Vermeer’s palette had included vermilion, yellow ocher, and red madder. But nothing in the known works was half as bright as those birds.
Cultural events, like funerals, can become noisy, cheerful parties at which the guests talk about anything and everything except what brought them together. But at this party, everyone was talking about the Vermeer. I caught the buzz in snatches as I darted through the crowd. Cousin Ash demanded frequent refills of champagne and made me put her bottle of Xanax in my purse so she wouldn’t be tempted to mix them. But in between, I enjoyed the party.
Halfway through the evening, I ran out of steam. My feet hurt. My cheeks ached from smiling. I was too tired to find a place to set down the empty champagne flute in my hand. I scanned the crowd. I couldn’t see Ash. Good. That meant she couldn’t see me. I closed my eyes and let the talk and laughter eddy around me.
“How do they know it is a real Vermeer? There was van Meegeren.”
“That was back in World War Two. With today’s techniques, it’s a lot harder to forge a painting that old. They’ve authenticated this one up and down and sideways.”
“What about the red and yellow birds? They’re so un-Vermeer.”
“Vermeer had the palette. He was a genius. Why shouldn’t he try something different?”
“Where did it come from, anyhow? How could a painting like that be hidden?”
“They’re still finding works the Nazis looted. I don’t want to spread any rumors, but I heard this was one of those.”
“Van Meegeren sold some of his forged paintings to the Nazis.”
“Aren’t those works all supposed to go back to the Jewish families that owned them before the war?”
“That’s a matter of opinion. Anyhow, a lot of those families died out completely.”
Died out? My eyes snapped open. Murdered! I felt a surge of fury. Six million Jews had been rounded up, herded into cattle trucks, thrown into concentration camps, and gassed or tortured to death. Uncle Solly’s parents and his younger brothers had been killed. I wanted to speak up. But I couldn’t make a scene in the middle of the Great Hall unless I wanted to throw away not only my job, but my career.
“Champagne? Your glass is empty.”
It took me a moment to realize the smooth male voice was addressing me and another to realize he was not a waiter, but a very attractive man in black tie that fit as if he’d had it custom made, possibly on Savile Row, not rented it for the evening. He smiled, flashing perfect teeth against skin a little darker than a world-class tan. Liquid black eyes narrowed as his face crinkled into lines of good humor. He took the glass from my unresisting fingers and handed me a fresh one, brimming with bubbles.
“You look rather lost. Do you know where you’re supposed to be?”
His accent was Oxbridge English over the faintest breath of foreign — from his looks, probably Arabic. I smiled at him.
“Thank you. I’m supposed to be glued to my boss’s heels all evening. But she’s vanished, and I don’t particularly want to go and look for her.” There, I’d let him know up front I wasn’t a somebody. “I’m Janny. How do you do?” I shifted the glass to my left hand, held out my right, and shook. His hand was warm, dry, and fine-boned, not a big paw like Joel’s.
“I am very glad to know you.” He held my hand in a light clasp until I pulled it away. “I am Daoud. I am nobody. That is my prince over there. Sheikh Akhmed Abdelaziz. I too am expected to heel and much happier not to.”
Too polite to point, he lifted his chin toward a knot of gentlemen wearing white
“He wanted the painting,” Daoud said.
“He could afford it?” I blurted before I could stop myself.
Daoud laughed.
“He is one of the great collectors.”
“Oh.” Belatedly, I recognized the prince’s name. “Stupid of me. I’ve heard of Prince Sheikh Akhmed Abdelaziz.”
“In my country,” Daoud said, “he has a museum that is part of his palace. Climate controlled, experts to make sure every piece is always in perfect condition.”
“Is it open to the public?”
Daoud laughed again.
“Americans are so refreshing! In my country, that is not the way things work. Only the prince’s most privileged guests are invited to view his collection.”
“What’s he got?” I asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I am not offended that you ask,” he said. “But regretfully, I am not allowed to tell you.”
I remembered reading that the prince’s collection was rumored to include quite a number of works that had passed through Nazi hands. He had fought against returning to their rightful owners those works that the families of European Jews had identified as theirs. All at once, Daoud didn’t look quite so attractive.
“Have you heard,” I asked, “that the reason this Vermeer has just come to light is that it was Nazi loot?”
“I have heard this.” Daoud pressed his lips together, and the twinkle faded from his eyes. “True or not, that is ancient history. Some collector acquired it decades ago, and now it belongs to the museum.”
“You don’t think the Jewish families ought to get their treasures back, if they can prove the provenance?”
“Is the Metropolitan Museum offering to give this painting back? Has the British Museum returned the Elgin Marbles? Besides, they are only J—.”
He caught himself. He must know it was impolitic to make anti-Semitic remarks in New York. But it was too late. To him, the Holocaust survivors’ descendants were “only Jews.”
We parted awkwardly. I still couldn’t see Ash anywhere, and I was in no mood for her. I needed a hug. I wanted Joel. He should be somewhere between the top of the stairs and the Vermeer. He’d told me Security wanted the guards to keep moving throughout the evening, so that part of the time he’d actually stand guard over the painting.
“I’ll be tom between wanting to examine every brush stroke and making sure no one makes off with it,” he’d admitted.
I couldn’t imagine how thieves would get it out the door, even if they rolled the canvas, which I could hardly bear to think about. But then, I wasn’t an art thief. There was always some crook who had the skills. And there was always a collector with more money than God and more covetousness than conscience who would pay a fortune to possess such a painting.
In the small gallery, the crowd had diminished but not dispersed. I walked the route from the Great Hall to the Vermeer and back twice, asking guards along the way if they’d seen Joel. The one who’d talked to him last said he had gone for a break, but he should have been back by now.
“Maybe he snuck out to smoke,” the guard suggested.
But Joel didn’t smoke. Maybe I’d find him in the little room with the fountain, our special place. It would be quiet there even with thousands of people on the premises. He’d been on his feet all evening. He’d want to sit down. Nobody else would preempt the marble bench. Maybe he’d even stretched out — or curled up, since the bench wasn’t that long, as we’d discovered — for a cat nap. He might have hoped I’d join him or simply lost track of time.
My feet were killing me. When I reached the first empty gallery, I slipped off my patent-leather party shoes, too high and teetery in the heel and too pointy in the toe for comfort. The marble floors felt cool under my stockinged soles as I walked from room to room, dangling the shoes from my hand. Not a single person crossed my path.
I reached the first of three rooms of boring late-Roman artifacts. From the innermost room, I could hear the gurgle of the fountain. Or was it laughter? I crept forward until I could see into the last gallery.
I saw Joel half-reclining on the bench. He wasn’t alone. I couldn’t see his companion’s face, but I knew her hair, her back, her low-cut glittering silver sequined gown. It was Ash. She straddled him, not only her arms but her long, slim legs wrapped around him and her lips glued to his. I stood watching long enough for them to run out of air. I kept telling myself to go, but my feet wouldn’t obey. My nose tickled. I pinched my nostrils closed, but it did no good. My breath exploded in a monumental sneeze. They had both heard my sneeze before. Joel sat up, pushing Ash off him. Our eyes met for a split second. Then I turned and fled.
I spent a miserable night tossing and turning in my bed at Uncle Solly’s. How could he! I didn’t exactly not blame Ash. But poaching and betrayal were in character for her. Her behavior didn’t shock me the way Joel’s did. I hadn’t known him as well as I thought I did. How could I face either of them? I thought of calling in sick, but for any Met employee not to appear at work the morning after a major party was Not Done. I wasn’t ready to leave my job — yet. Maybe Daoud’s prince could use a highly trained art restorer. An Arab emirate might be almost far enough from New York.
I cut over to Fifth Avenue and trotted uptown on the park side. I resisted the temptation to turn on my cell phone. I didn’t want to listen to Joel making excuses — or know for sure he hadn’t bothered to call. How could he? Was he that desperate to get into Yale? Or had I somehow failed to meet his standards? I couldn’t compete with Ash on any level. Except, as Uncle Solly had said, our hearts. At the moment, I didn’t know whether a connoisseur would value a bad heart higher or lower than a broken one.
Lost in my thoughts, I paid no attention to the sound of wailing sirens and excited voices — New York’s everyday music — until I stopped for the light at 79th Street. Then I saw police cars up ahead, red lights whirling. Barriers bracketed the museum, blocking Fifth Avenue from 79th to 84th. The cops had shooed everyone off the steps, though a crowd of onlookers lingered, milling around on the broad sidewalk by the fountains. I could see the flutter of yellow crime-scene tape.
I pushed my way forward through the crowd. The buzz of people asking what had happened gave way to a few authoritative voices claiming that they knew. The grim thought crossed my mind that if someone had murdered Ash, I’d be the prime suspect. But the word I kept hearing was not “killed,” but “stolen.”
The sidewalk vendors seemed to be packing up. One of them, a regular whose photographs of the city’s best-known monuments were popular with tourists, caught my eye. I threaded my way over to him.
“Someone stole that new Vermeer last night,” he said, “after the big bash. Biggest art theft ever in New York.” His voice rang with what sounded like civic pride. “Cops told us all to pack up and go. Dunno why, even if the museum stays closed all day.” He pursed his lips and surveyed the rubberneckers with regret. “It’d be a great day for sales.”
“But how? Who?” As if he would know.
“Cut the painting right outa the frame. Izznat what they do? They’re questioning all the guards.”
My insides felt as if a giant foot had tromped on my abdomen.
“Why the guards? There were a lot of people there last night.”
“That’s what I say.” The vendor zipped up his giant portfolio and kicked at the legs of his folding table so he could snap it shut. “Blame the proletariat.”
“I work there.” My voice came out cracked and wispy.
“You look upset.” He eyed me with a certain sympathy. “Why doncha call your boss? Bet he’ll tell you to go home. Enjoy the day.”
“Thanks,” I croaked. He waved and walked away as I fumbled in my purse. He was right. I’d better call Ash. As soon as I flipped the cell phone on, it started beeping. Seven messages. I didn’t want to hear them, but I couldn’t afford not to.
“Janny, I know you’re mad at me, but it’s not what you think. Please call me and let me explain.”
“Janny, I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be. Please, please don’t walk away without hearing my side of it.”
“Janny, I don’t know what Ashley told you, but it’s not true. I wasn’t coming on to her. She grabbed me. Who are you going to believe, her or me?”
“Janny, you probably have your cell phone off. I don’t blame you. But please call me back. We’ve got to talk.”
“Janny, call me, all hell is breaking loose around here. You probably never want to see me again, but — oops, gotta go. Please put on your cell phone and call back when you get this.”
“Janny, don’t hang up when you hear my voice. I’m in big trouble. I need you. Even if you hate me, call me right away.”
The last call was from Ash.
“Janny, I hate to tell you this,” she cooed, her voice thick with cream and canary feathers, “but you may be in serious trouble. I’m sure you already know the Vermeer is gone. You may not have heard the police have got your boyfriend. You’d better encourage him to tell them where he hid it. I told them you’re my cousin and I didn’t believe for a second you were in it with him. But your best chance is for your boyfriend to come clean as soon as possible.”
My hands shook with anger as I stabbed at the button to return her call. I expected to get her voice mail. Anticipating having to leave a message riled me even more. But she picked up on the second ring.
“Oh, Janny, you poor thing. Have you talked to the police? Did they let you see your boyfriend? I’m afraid it looks bad for him, because Security says he’s the only guard whose time last night isn’t completely accounted for. The detective in charge told me they can’t see how he got the painting out, unless he had an accomplice. But maybe he hid it somewhere in the museum. Believe me, they’ll search the whole place, no matter how long it takes, so he’d better tell them where it is before they decide they won’t accept a plea bargain.”
“What the hell are you talking about!” It came out in a screech. Yelling at Ash never did any good. It simply bolstered her conviction that you were irrational. I lowered my voice. “Who says his time isn’t accounted for? You know damn well where he was when he wasn’t on duty.”
“Janny, darling, I know you’re upset, or you wouldn’t be making things up like this. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
After I hung up on Ash, I stood irresolute, my thoughts racing. Had Joel been arrested? Had he called because he loved me and trusted me to help? Or did he just need bail? I pounded my fist against my palm, earning wary glances from the passersby. He knew I was the family have-not. For money, he should have gone to Ash. Unless he couldn’t go to Ash because they weren’t on intimate terms. Could I have misinterpreted what I’d seen? Maybe she’d pounced like a black-widow spider as he waited for me. If so, I’d walked in at just the wrong moment. Knowing Ash, I could believe she’d counted on that.
What did I know for sure? One, Joel hadn’t taken the Vermeer. I couldn’t be that mistaken about his character. Two, Ash had lied to me. She had been with Joel at least part of the time he’d been “missing.” I’d seen them with my own eyes. Who knew what lies she’d told the police. She’d managed to bring my name into it along with Joel’s. They’d had to talk to her because she knew all about the logistics for the party. But she’d had nothing to do with security for the Vermeer. She could pass as just another partygoer who hadn’t seen a thing. But wouldn’t Joel tell them he’d been with her? He might hesitate for fear that it would finish him with me. And if he dragged her into it, he could forget that recommendation to Yale. But his alibi was more important than a fellowship or what I thought. If he didn’t know that, I’d better call and tell him so.
My feet started moving of their own accord. I drifted down Fifth Avenue like a sleepwalker. I clutched the cell phone, squeezing and releasing it over and over. I made myself drop it back in my pocket. I couldn’t call, not yet. Uncle Solly. I’d go back to Uncle Solly’s, tell him everything. He’d help me figure out what to do. He’d still been asleep when I’d left this morning, but he’d be up by now. I wondered if he knew yet. At some point, they would have to notify all the members of the board that the Vermeer was gone.
If Joel needed money for bail or legal fees, I was sure Solly would supply it if I asked. I still wasn’t sure whether to rush to Joel’s rescue. It would depend on what he said about last night. Still, we were friends, weren’t we? I knew he didn’t have any family in New York, and his dad was a grocer back in Indiana. Was I still mad at him? I thought I wasn’t until I felt my fist punch my palm again. I wouldn’t call until I could tell him I had the money if he needed it. Then we’d see. My pace quickened. The sooner I talked to Solly, the better I’d feel.
My key clicked in the lock, and I swung open the heavy oak door. The scent of coffee floated in the air.
“Uncle Solly?” I raced down the stairs to the ground floor. He’d be in the kitchen, having breakfast looking out at the garden, which caught a little morning sun. But the level of the coffee in the electric pot had not gone down since I’d dashed out, and the table held only the small plate and scatter of toast crumbs I’d left.
“Uncle Solly! Are you up?” Could he be ill? Uncle Solly liked to get up and about early. He said sleeping in was for old men. I took the stairs to the parlor floor and the more heavily carpeted flight up to his bedroom two at a time. He kept the whole floor-through as a kind of suite. His door had been closed this morning when I clumped down from the top floor. It was still closed. The artworks in the hall were all museum quality: a Corot, a Klee, a Dürer woodcut. But I barely glanced at them.
I rapped on his door. Nobody entered the master suite without permission. It was his one area of reserve, as far as I knew.
“Uncle Solly! Are you there?” I knocked again. “It’s me, Janny.”
A faint groan responded, then my name.
“Come, Janny. Help me.”
I pushed open the door and peered in. At first I couldn’t see him, my view blocked by the early Empire pineapple four-poster bed, which I’d adored as a child and sometimes been allowed to bounce on, and the half-open doors to what he called his dressing room, really a deep walk-in closet.
“Here I am, Janny. I think I’ve broken my leg.”
He pushed the closet doors further ajar so I could see him lying on his back across the threshold. He wore silk pajamas and a Cardin bathrobe. Like Cinderella, he had lost a slipper, and the leg with the bare foot was twisted at an unnatural angle.
“Oh no! How did it happen?”
“I tripped,” he said, “like an old fool.”
I knelt beside him as he tried to push himself up, grunting with the effort. The leather scuff slipped off his other foot, and I caught it and laid it on the floor. At the same time, I eased my shoulder under his arm.
“Lean on me, Uncle Solly. Don’t try to move. Lie down and rest while I call nine-one-one”
My arm bracing his upper back, I tried to lower him to the floor.
“No, no!” He trembled as he shook his head. “Don’t call! Not yet!”
“You need an ambulance, Uncle Solly. And a stretcher, and probably some painkillers.” I reached for my phone. “Lie down so I can make the call.”
“No! I have to tell you first.”
Why wouldn’t he let me call? Was his distress simply old age’s fear of losing independence? I’d never had to humor Solly before.
“Tell me what?”
“I’m not getting senile, child.” That sounded more like the old Solly. “Open your eyes and look.”
As I slid my arm out from under him, he relaxed onto the floor and laid his head on the Kirman runner that started on the threshold of the closet and ran between ranks of beautifully tailored suits and shirts to what should have been the rear wall of the closet. Instead, a sliding door opened on a blaze of light that poured from a hidden room. Not daylight. Gallery light.
“May I look?”
“The secret is out,” he said without opening his eyes. He had aged ten years since the day before. “Unless — but see for yourself. Then I will explain. After that, it is up to you.”
The rows of clothing parted like a curtain going up. My feet made no sound as I stepped into the bright little room. I already knew what I would see: the missing Vermeer. Six other paintings hung on the spotless walls. I recognized all of them. All were of known provenance and had dropped out of sight in the past fifteen years. The art world believed that they were squirreled away in some private collection. And so they were.
Seeing them all together dazzled me. I took my time. It was hard to tear myself away, but eventually I came out and sank down next to Solly. I took out my phone.
“If I call nine-one-one,” I said, “I can ask for an ambulance and the police at the same time.”
“Don’t be angry with me, Jannele. I did not steal all of them, only my beautiful girl with birds. The others I paid for, more money than any museum would offer, through agents paid to be discreet.”
“But why? I don’t understand why you had to hoard them. You’re the one who always told me museums make art lovers of us all.”
“It is the vice of my old age,” he said, “the only one I have left. I become selfish and demanding, like any rich old lover.”
“But the Vermeer!” I insisted. “You’re cheating the museum.”
“It is well insured,” he said, “I made sure of that.”
“I still don’t understand. It was looted by the Nazis.”
“This I know,” he said. “It is the reason for everything.”
“That’s the part I want to hear.”
“Wait a little,” he said. Vait a leetle. Agitation made his accent more pronounced.
I could see beads of sweat on his forehead. He must be in terrible pain. Part of me thought he deserved it. He reached out for my hand, and I let him take it.
“You see, I know this painting. When I was a boy, it belonged to the family of my dearest friend. Her name was Elisabeth — Liserl, we called her. Such a pretty little girl. She died at Auschwitz. But her older brother survived. After the war, he made a family in America. It returns to his grandchildren when I die. The museum would have kept it forever.”
“But you’re not dying,” I protested — not because it made his crime more heinous, but because I loved him.
“I am, Jannele. I have an inoperable tumor. The doctors give me six months. Then the Vermeer goes back home where it belongs. I give the others to the Met to make up for it. I have made you my executor. You will find a way.”
“Give me a moment,” I said. I kissed his wrinkled knuckles and laid his hand gently on his chest. I entered the hidden room and looked at the Vermeer for a long time. Then I slid the door shut behind me. Closed, it looked like an ordinary wall.
I crouched down beside Uncle Solly.
“One more question. How?”
“I asked your cousin. I told you — good head.”
“Bad heart, you said. She did it for money?”
“Bad morals too.” He gave the ghost of a chuckle.
“But she had an—” Oh. She had an alibi. She’d made sure of it. Then she denied it, holding back as she waited for Joel and me to become outraged enough to tell the police exactly where she’d been.
“She hired a professional?” Of course she had. Cousin Ash didn’t even clip her own toenails.
“I thought it was better not to ask.”
I patted Solly’s hand and flipped my phone open.
“Emergency? I need an ambulance. My elderly uncle has a broken leg.”