Viewers of television programs featuring profiles of wanted criminals must all feel a little tantalized by the possibility that the outlaw is someone they know, but for the main character in Barbara Owens’s story, every new face bears a suspicious aspect...

By late evening St. Louis’s Lambert Airport was becalmed. An occasional arrival or departure still caused a brief flurry, but the hordes were gone — into the air somewhere, or waiting by phones in far-flung rooms to see if their lost luggage had been found. The few souls still wandering the terminal looked as though they lived there — familiar nods to concessionaires, a friendly “How’d it go today?” to a uniformed flight crew stepping smartly by.

Crawley’s Coffee Shop was waiting out the final hour to closing, its new manager, Arthur Woolsey, having already arrived to begin the day’s bookwork. Two of the three waitresses, Ruth Blackburn and Vonda Martin, retired to a booth to nurse black coffee and watch Cookie Gudermeyer sprint back and forth behind the counter as if she had a hundred hungry customers instead of three lone ones slumped there.

Vonda sighed. “Look at that girl. Never slows down. And nothing to her but skin wrapped around bones. She makes me tired.”

“I’m trying to remember if I had that much energy when I was nineteen,” Ruth said. “But I can’t remember when I was nineteen.”

“Cookie, come on over here and sit down,” Vonda called softly. “Leave those nice people alone. They’ll let you know if they want anything.”

With an embarrassed little grin, the thin blonde redirected her lope towards them. She fell into the booth with a bounce, pushing drifting strands of lank hair under her headband.

“I guess I still got a lot to learn.” Her voice was small and breathless. “I only want to do a good job, you know?” She had an ugly smear of gravy across the bib of her coral apron.

Vonda patted her hand. “Honey, you’re doing fine. You just got to be careful not to overdo. You’re real intense, aren’t you?”

Cookie’s brow wrinkled. “I guess. But with Buddy gone and all, just me to take care of Little Bud, I need to do everything right.”

Ruth and Vonda exchanged glances. If they didn’t change the subject she’d be off again, about how Buddy had coaxed her up from the Ozarks, promised to marry her and didn’t, then took off and left her with their baby boy, Little Bud. Cookie wasn’t mad. She was confident that Buddy would come back, she just didn’t know how soon. In the two months she’d been working at Crawley’s, they’d heard it many times.

“So, Vonda,” Ruth said quickly, “how’s Carlisle doing?”

Vonda’s dark eyes flashed gratitude. “Doing okay. If he ever gets graduated. I’ll be too old to have kids, but I’ll smile with the best teeth around.”

Her rich laugh made Ruth smile. Vonda was one of her favorite people. Here was an example of two black kids who’d fought their way out of an East St. Louis ghetto, gotten married, and worked together to put Carlisle through dental school. Nearing thirty, they were almost there, and Ruth had never heard a complaint about the hardships they’d endured. She had a lot of respect for Vonda and Carlisle.

“Well, kids aren’t everything,” she consoled. “I love mine, but some days I could live without them.”

Cookie leaned forward eagerly, her mouth opening, but Vonda was too fast for her.

“So how are yours getting along with that new boyfriend?” she teased. “That Raymond. You thinking to take the plunge again?”

Ruth felt herself blush. “They like him. But I don’t know. I got burned once. Now here I am with two teenage kids, and Walt’s hiding out so he won’t have to pay child support. Makes me a little gun-shy.”

Vonda grinned. “Raymond sounds awful nice, though.”

Ruth had to smile. “He is. Kind of scary. He’s almost too good to be true.”

Cookie released a sigh so gusty that neither woman could ignore it.

“Something wrong, Cookie?” Vonda asked reluctantly.

“Oh, it’s just that I didn’t spot one again today,” Cookie said.

Vonda rolled her eyes at Ruth. Cookie’s other obsession — the television series Lookout. It profiled wanted criminals, urging viewers to be on the lookout for them, and Cookie was addicted to it. She’d spent more than she could afford for a VCR to tape every episode, and she could spout offenses, aliases, and identifying marks until someone stopped her. She was certain that someday she’d spot a fugitive, maybe collect a big reward for turning him in. Cookie was on the lookout constantly.

“Cookie,” Vonda said patiently, “what makes you think you’ll ever see one of those guys? You know the chances of that happening? You shouldn’t get your hopes up.”

Cookie hunched over the table, her freckles quivering. “It just makes sense!” she whispered. “Think about it. When they’re on the run they have to keep moving, don’t they? So they travel a lot. And this is an airport, right? See my point? They’ve got to travel and they’ve got to eat. I work in an airport coffee shop.” She fell back against the booth, beaming. “It’s just a matter of time before I see one.”

Vonda winked at Ruth. “So how about the guy in your apartment building? You got anything on him yet?”

Cookie sobered. “I’m just not sure about him. And you should be pretty sure before you call. I’ve been through all my tapes, but they try to look different. Disguise themselves, you know, beards and glasses and stuff. But I’m not giving up. I know he’s one.”

Before any more could be said, Arthur Woolsey approached. “Come on, girls. Time to wrap it up for the night.”

Small and tentative, Arthur was like a puppy asking to be petted. He was new at the job and had gone out of his way to be nice to them. Vonda suspected he had a thing for Cookie.

And Cookie was up, bounding away to do his bidding. Ruth and Vonda scooted slowly from the booth. Vonda rose, her lean elegant length towering over the little man. Leaning forward, she planted a kiss on the top of his straw-colored rug.

“Whatever you say, boss,” she murmured, giving his belly a little pinch.

Arthur squeaked, flapping his hands at her. “Honestly, Vonda, you’re incorrigible,” he said before hurrying away.

Vonda’s eyes danced at Ruth. “Artie says I’m incorrigible. Was that a slur, you think?”

It was the end of a long day. Ruth shifted, testing the soles of her aching feet. “Could be. But we’ve both been called worse. Come on, let’s go home.”

With seven Edgar nominations to his credit, Robert Barnard must be placed with the leading crime writers of our day. Publishers Weekly called his recent novel Fatal Attachment “another gem.”

“Mais c’est incroyable!”

The hotel manager looked down towards his beautifully shod feet with an expression more of distaste than of disbelief. The head porter, who had summoned him, thought to himself that if you find a trickle of blood seeping under the door of one of the bedrooms into the corridor, it is not altogether surprising to discover a corpse behind the door, or to find that the corpse was murdered. But, as an intelligent man, he held his peace.

“It’s that man Radovan Radič,” said the manager, his mouth twisting as he looked down at the body with the gaping wound between its shoulders.

“A Bulgarian, wasn’t he?” the porter asked.

“Serbian, I believe. But Serbian, Bulgarian, Hungarian — they’re all the same. Brutes!” He looked around the spare, ill-furnished room, one of their cheapest. “I only know of this creature because the police were around asking about him last week.”

“Illegal resident?”

“Worse, much worse. Apparently he was a thoroughly unsavoury character. All sorts of activities, including blackmail. He had been touting letters from Marie of Romania.”

“Ah — to Prince Stirbey?”

“No, not that old story. Something more recent. They thought it possible he was an agent of the King of Serbia, but on balance they thought he was acting for his own ends. I was all for throwing him out onto the street at once, but the Sûreté begged me not to. Here they could keep an eye on him, they said. I wish now that I had insisted, but when the Sûreté begs...”

“Of course. In our position one obeys. Who have we in the hotel tonight?”

“Ah, that is the question.”

It was indeed. The Hotel George IV, formerly the Imperial, situated on the Avenue Decazes, had carved for itself a minor but vital role in the diplomatic comings and goings of that year 1919, the year of the Peace Conference. Paris was awash with kings, statesmen, and mere politicians, not to mention the attendant diplomats, secretaries, and the inevitable newspapermen. Behind the ceremonial and the open negotiations there mushroomed encounters of a more personal nature. The George IV catered, discreetly, for any assignation, whether political, romantic, or frankly sexual, that the participants wished to keep from the gaze of the public or of rival statesmen. The hotel’s system of backstairs access and private corridors was unrivalled in the French capital, and the manager was formidably discreet. He already regretted the renaming of the hotel, which had been done in the hope of profiting by a confusion with the new and magnificent George V. The hotel had found a quite different and much more lucrative identity, and would have benefited from a more anonymous name. That very morning an English visitor had commented cheerily that the only connection George IV had had with France had been his delusion that he led the allied troops at the Battle of Waterloo. The manager’s demeanour had been glacial. It was the height of bad taste to mention the Battle of Waterloo in Paris.

He now enumerated the hotel’s more sensitive guests, strictly in order of rank.

“The King of Spain is in Suite Fifteen with a woman who is not his mistress.”

“Madame Grigot would raise hell if she knew.”

“Quite... Alfonso XIII — such an unlucky number. I’m surprised his mother chose the name.”

The head porter caught his drift.

“Spain remained neutral during the course of the war,” he remarked.

“Very profitably neutral. His Majesty was a noncombatant, at least on the field of battle... I think, you know, that we need take no special steps where His Majesty is concerned.”

The head porter nodded sage agreement.

“Then there is the President of the United States. He is in Suite Seven with the Prime Minister of Italy.”

“There is no question of—?”

“No, no. Out of the question. The president has no such inclinations. Mrs. Wilson would never allow it. They are engaged in extremely sensitive discussions concerning Italy’s new borders in the Tyrol. They will have to be informed.”

“Of course.”

“And then there is the Prime Minister of Great Britain...”

“Ah yes. Mr. Lloyd-George.”

The head porter of the George IV naturally managed “George” more or less in the English manner, but “Lloyd” came out as “Lo-id”. He was, nevertheless, extremely familiar with the name.

“Yes. With a most attractive woman of a certain age. I escorted them personally to Suite Twelve, his favourite suite. The prime minister’s patronage is of course an honour to the hotel...”

“Naturally.”

“Though it is not an honour we can proclaim...”

“Except discreetly.”

“Exactly. We proclaim it discreetly. Mr. Lloyd-George must of course be told before the police are summoned... Who else? The Belgian ambassador, the Latvian chargé d’affaires, the Australian foreign minister, all with ladies. They can be informed. For the rest, diplomats, members of various parliaments — they must take their chance. We will inform them if we can, but before too long, for our good name, we must summon the Sûreté. Mon dieu! They said they wished to keep an eye on him! What an eye!”

And leaving the head porter on guard outside the door, with instructions to inform any curious guests that there had been an unfortunate accident, the manager bustled off in his stately fashion to alert his guests.

There could hardly be a better chronicler of the world of popular music than Doug Allyn, who has been touring with bands in northern Michigan for more than twenty-five years. This tale of a gumshoe hired to collect unpaid royalties takes us to the heart of the record industry and the early days of the Motown sound...

Papa Henry’s Hickory Hut serves the best barbeque in the city of Detroit, bar none. Ribs to die for. The Hut is just a storefront diner, booths along one wall, a scarred Formica counter and backless chrome stools. Ah, but behind the counter, shielded by a spattered Plexiglas screen, is an honest to Jesus barbeque pit. You can watch your order revolve on the rotisserie, kissed by flames and hickory smoke, while homebaked hoecakes warm on the grill. High cholesterol? Probably. But since the Hut’s on the rough side of Eight Mile, keeping your veins intact is a more pressing worry than having them clogged.

I’d ordered a late breakfast at Papa’s, and was sipping coffee, waiting, when a white Cadillac limo ghosted to the curb out front. The chauffeur, a uniformed black the size of a small building, popped an umbrella against the April drizzle, and opened the back door. An elderly black gentleman eased slowly out. The chauffeur watched, wooden, offering no help.

The old man looked exotic, like a Nigerian diplomat. An orange patterned kente-cloth cap, a Kuppenheimer’s continental-cut black suit, hand-tailored to a tee. He had café au lait skin, a spray of coppery freckles across the bridge of his nose, a metallic gray Malcolm X goatee. Dark, intense hawk’s eyes.

He’d have stood six feet plus upright, but he was pain-hunched into a question mark, using a silver-headed bamboo cane for support. I guessed him to be fiftyish. Fifty isn’t old for most people. It was for this guy.

He moved like he’d been wounded at Gettysburg. Step, lean, step, lean. The gait was familiar. Sickle cell anemia, very late in the game. I grew up around it down home. This old man had lasted longer than most. But it was coming for him now. And he was coming for me, sizing me up all the way. I was easy enough to spot! As usual, I was the only white face in the Hut.

It took him a month to limp the dozen paces back to my booth. He stopped in front of my table, leaning on the cane, wobbly as a foundered horse. “You’d be Axton, right? From the detective agency up the street?” he asked, his voice a low rasp. Black velvet.

“Yes, sir. Something I can do for you?”

“For openers, you can speak up. I don’t hear too well. My name’s Mack, Varnell Mack.”

“R. B. Axton,” I said, offering my hand. He ignored it. “Would you care to sit down, Mr. Mack?”

“No thanks, too damn hard to get up again, and I won’t be here long. I’m into a few things around Detroit, mostly real estate, own some rental units. Willis Tyrone, the guy that owns them pawns down in the ward? Willis tells me you’re good at collectin’ money folks ain’t altogether sure they owe.”

“I make collections sometimes,” I said cautiously, “but I don’t do evictions.”

“Neither do I,” Mack said, “that’s the problem.” A spasm took his breath for a moment. His knuckles locked on the cane and a faint sheen of moisture beaded on his forehead. “I believe I will sit down after all,” he said, swallowing. He drew a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, flicked the dust off the bench across from me, then casually replaced the handkerchief in his pocket with a flip of his wrist. A perfect fleur-de-lis. I was impressed. I can barely manage to knot a necktie.

“See, I had this old gentleman livin’ in one of my buildin’s,” Mack said, easing into the booth. “Used to be a helluva singer ’round Detroit back in the fifties, early sixties, even cut a few records. Horace DeWitt. Ever hear of him?”

“Can’t say I have, but I’m not from Detroit originally.”

“Knew that the minute you opened your mouth. Where you from, boy? Alabama?”

“No, sir, Mississippi. A little town called Noxapater.”

“They teach you to call blacks ‘sir’ down there, did they?”

“They taught me to be polite to my elders,” I said evenly. “And to watch my mouth around strangers. You were saying about Mr. DeWitt?”

“I used to write tunes, sing backup in Horace’s group. Called ourselves the Sultans of Soul.”

“No kidding? I remember the group. From when I was a kid, down home. I’ve still got one of your songs on an oldies tape. ‘Motor City... something?”

“ ‘Motor City Mama.’ I wrote that one. Our last single. Cracked the top twenty on the race charts in sixty-one. Never made no money off it, record company folded right after, but it got us a name so we could make a few bucks doin’ shows. Then things petered out, the group busted up. I went into real estate, did all right for myself. Helped out Horace some, last few years, with rent and such. He had a stroke a few months back, had to move to a rest home. One of them welfare places. I offered to help, but he wouldn’t take it. He’s flat busted, cain’t even afford a TV in his room.”

“Sorry to hear it,” I said.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be,” Mack said. “Might be somethin’ in it for you. Thing is, I still hear ‘Motor City Mama’ on the radio sometimes. So I figure somebody must owe the Sultans some money. I want you to collect it.”

“Collect it?” I echoed.

“That’s what you do, ain’t it?”

“I, ahm... Look, Mr. Mack, what I do is skip-traces mostly. People who light out owing other people money. I hunt ’em up, talk ’em into doin’ the right thing.”

“So?”

“So, for openers, who do you expect me to collect from?”

“That’s your problem. If I knew who owed Horace, I wouldn’t hafta hire you. I’d see to it myself.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Boy, I never joke about money.”

“All right then, straight up. Even if I could find somebody who’d admit to owing the Sultans some royalties or whatever, it probably wouldn’t amount to beans. And I don’t work cheap.”

“Two-fifty a day, Willis told me,” Mack said, snaking an envelope out of an inner pocket, tossing it on the table. “Here’s a week in advance. Fifteen hundred. You need more, my number’s on the envelope. But I expect to see some results.”

I left the envelope where it was. “Mr. Mack, I really don’t think I can help you. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Willis gave me your card,” Mack said, using the cane to lever himself to his feet. “R. B. Axton, private investigations. That makes you some kinda detective, right?”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“So maybe you oughta try earnin’ your fee. Investigate or whatever. Look, I know it’d be cheaper to just lay the damn money on Horace. He won’t take it. He was a dynamite singer once. And people are still listenin’ to his music. He shouldn’t oughta go out broke like this. It ain’t right.”

“No, sir,” I said, “I suppose it isn’t.”

“All right then,” he said grimly. “You find out who owes the Sultans some money. And you get it. How much don’t matter, but you get Horace somethin’, understand?”

I picked up the envelope, intending to give it back to him. But I didn’t. There was something in his eyes. Dark fire. Anger perhaps, and pain. It cost him a lot just to walk in here. More than money. I put the envelope in my pocket. “I’ll look into it,” I said. “I can’t promise anything.”

“Banks don’t cash promises anyway,” Mack said, turning, and limping slowly toward the door. Step, lean, step, lean. “Call me when you got somethin’.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. He didn’t look back.

We are especially glad to be able to include in this 52nd anniversary issue a story by one of the most distinguished of contemporary crime writers. With her eerily acute depiction of character, Ruth Rendell often transcends the crime genre, producing mainstream novels and stories, but here she gives us a mystery almost in the classic vein...

“Have you got the Times there?” Henry would say, usually at about eight, when she had cleared the dinner table and put the things in the dishwasher.

The Times was on the coffee table with the two other dailies they took, but it was part of the ritual to ask her. Fiona liked to be asked. She liked to watch Henry do the crossword puzzle, the real one of course, not the quick crossword, and watch him frown a little, his handsome brow clear as the answer to a clue came to him. She could not have done a crossword puzzle to save her life (as she was fond of saying), she could not even have done the simple ones in the tabloids.

While she watched him, before he carried the newspaper off into his study as he often did, Fiona told herself how lucky she was to be married to Henry. Her luck had been almost miraculous. There she was, a temp who had come into his office to work for him while his secretary had a baby, an ordinary, not particularly good-looking girl, who had no credentials but a tidy mind and a proficient way with a word processor. She had nothing but her admiration for him, which she had felt from the first and was quite unable to hide.

He was not appreciated in that company as he should have been. It had often seemed to her that only she saw him for what he was. After she had been there a week she told him he had a first-class mind.

Henry had said modestly, “As a matter of fact, I have got rather a high IQ, but it doesn’t exactly get stretched round here.”

“I suppose they haven’t the brains to recognise it,” she said. “It must be marvellous to be really intelligent. Did you win scholarships and get a double first and all that?”

He only smiled. Instead of answering he asked her to have dinner with him. One afternoon, half an hour before they were due to pack up and go, she came upon him doing the Times crossword.

“In the firm’s time, I’m afraid, Fiona,” he said with one of his wonderful, half-rueful smiles.

He hadn’t finished the puzzle but at least half of it was already filled in and when she asked him he said he had started it ten minutes before. She was lost in admiration. Henry said he would finish the puzzle later and in the meantime would she have a drink with him on the way home?

That was three years ago. The firm, which deserved bankruptcy it was so mismanaged, got into difficulties and Henry was among those made redundant. Of course he soon got another job, though the salary was pitiful for someone of his intellectual grasp. He was earning very little more than she was, as she told him indignantly. Soon afterwards he asked her to marry him. Fiona was overcome. She told him humbly that she would have gladly lived with him without marriage, there was no one else she had ever known to compare with him in intellectual terms, it would have been enough to be allowed to share his life. But he said no, marriage or nothing, it would be unfair on her not to marry her.

She kept on with her temping job, making sure she stopped in time to be home before Henry and get his dinner. It was ridiculous to waste money on a cleaner, so she cleaned the house on Sundays. Henry played golf on Saturday mornings and he liked her to go with him, though she was hopeless when she tried to learn. He said it was an inspiration to have her there and praise his swing. On Saturday afternoons they went out in the car and Henry had begun teaching her to drive.

They had quite a big garden — they had bought the house on an enormous mortgage — and she did her best to keep it trim because Henry obviously didn’t have the time. He was engaged on a big project for his new company, which he worked on in his study for most of the evenings. Fiona did the shopping in her lunchtime, she did all the cooking and all the washing and ironing. It was her privilege to care for someone as brilliant as Henry. Besides, his job was so much more demanding than hers, it took more out of him, and by bedtime he was sometimes white with exhaustion.

But Henry was first up in the mornings. He was an early riser, getting up at six-thirty, and he always brought her a cup of tea and the morning papers in bed. Fiona had nothing to do before she went off to take first a bus and then the tube but put the breakfast things in the dishwasher and stack yesterday’s newspapers in the cupboard outside the front door for recycling.

The Times would usually be on top, folded with the lower left-hand quarter of the back page uppermost. Fiona soon came to understand it was no accident that the section of the paper where the crossword was, the completed crossword, should be exposed in this way. It was deliberate, it was evidence of Henry’s pride in his achievement, and she was deeply moved that he should want her to see it. She was touched by his need for her admiration. A sign of weakness on his part it might be, but she loved him all the more for that.

A smile, half-admiring, half-tender, came to her lips as she looked at the neatly printed answers to all those incomprehensible clues. She could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had failed to finish the crossword. The evening before his father died, for instance. Then it was anxiety that must have been the cause. They had sent for him at four in the morning and when she looked at the paper before putting it outside with the others, she saw that poor Henry had only been able to fill in the answers to four clues. Another time he had flu and had been unable to get out of bed in the morning. It must have been coming on the night before to judge by his attempt at the crossword, abandoned after two answers feebly pencilled in.

His father left him a house that was worth a lot of money. Henry had always said that when he got a promotion, she would be able to give up work and have a baby. Promotion seemed less and less likely in time of recession and the fact that the new company appreciated Henry no more than had his previous employers. The proceeds of the sale of Henry’s father’s house would compensate for that and Fiona was imagining paying off the mortgage and perhaps handing in her notice when Henry said he was going to spend it on having a swimming pool built. All his life he had wanted a swimming pool of his own, it had been a childhood dream and a teenage ideal and now he was going to realise it.

Fiona came nearer than she ever had to seeing a flaw in her husband’s perfection.

“You only want a baby because you think he might be a genius,” he teased her.

“She might be,” said Fiona, greatly daring.

“He, she, it’s just a manner of speaking. Suppose he had my beauty and your brains. That would be a fine turn-up for the books.”

Fiona was not hurt because she had never had any illusions about being brighter than she was. In any case, he was implying, wasn’t he, that she was good-looking? She managed to laugh. She understood that Henry could not always help being rather difficult. It was the penalty someone like him paid for his gifts of brilliance. In some ways intellectual prowess was a burden to carry through life.

“We’ll have a heated pool, a decent-size one with a deep end,” Henry said, “and I’ll teach you to swim.”

The driving lessons had ended in failure. If it had been anyone else but Henry instructing her, Fiona would have said he was a harsh and intolerant teacher. Of course she knew how inept she was. She could not learn how to manage the gears and she was afraid of the traffic.

“I’m afraid of the water,” she confessed.

“It’s a disgrace,” he said as if she had not spoken, “a woman of thirty being unable to swim.” And then, when she only nodded doubtfully, “Have you got the Times there?”

EQMM author George Baxt is becoming well known on the international literary scene of late, with the German translation of his novel The Greta Garbo Murder Case featured at the Frankfurt Book Fair and several other novels scheduled for foreign language publication. Here he treats a theme and characters only L.A. could provide...

Devotees of the obituaries in the Los Angeles Times (and they are legion) were titillated one Friday morning to read this one:

The mistress, who had a mental problem, was not amused, but the widow’s friends, acquaintances, and patients showered her with luncheon, dinner, and breakfast invitations and phoned to praise her audacious bravery. It was standing room only at his funeral and the Times sent a photographer. The widow sat in a front pew with her best friend, Maxwell Trumpet, an occasional writer for television soap operas whose own mountain of debts was all he had in common with the deceased.

Reverend Wister, said to be a descendant of Owen Wister, who had written the Western classic The Virginian, knew it was hopeless to eulogize the deceased as the obituary had itself become a classic within two days of its first publication, albeit it had been denounced by the pope and the Chinese Central Committee. Ruth Bennett had hoped there might be television or movie interest, but none had come forth to date, and she was still hopelessly mired in that pile of debts her husband had amassed and left as his dubious legacy.

Ruth and her friend Maxwell groaned as they heard the reverend extolling the late Armand as a respected certified public accountant (“Who had a problem with figures,” Ruth felt like shouting) who was a fine golfer and excelled at fly-fishing and contributed to the community chest. Said Ruth in a whisper to Maxwell, “I wish I knew how many community chests he’s contributed to.” Maxwell giggled and Ruth squeezed his hand. Good old Maxwell, thought Ruth as the reverend droned on about Armand’s good taste in neckwear, you can always count on good old Maxwell. He’s deeper in hock than even I am, and she was touched when he offered to pawn his late mother’s silver service to help defray the funeral costs. She squeezed his hand again and Maxwell wondered as he had wondered for over two decades if now there was some hope she’d go to bed with him.

Ruth’s thoughts were dwelling on the day Armand keeled over and the police arrived with the ambulance. One policeman questioned her and admired her for skillfully masking her bereavement. There was a tray of chocolates on the coffee table and she popped one in her mouth when he asked her, “Did your husband have a history of heart disease?”

“Not really,” said Ruth as she munched away. “He had a small disturbance about five years ago, but I always suspected it was indigestion. He liked to eat in exotic places, you know: Star of India, Mandarin Dynasty, McDonald’s.” She added with a sigh as she picked at a piece of caramel caught between two teeth, “Only last Monday I tested his heart and his blood pressure. Everything was quite normal then.”

“You’re your husband’s physician?”

“Yes. It’s cheaper.”

“And you signed the death certificate?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that a little unorthodox?”

“Why? We also have — had — a joint bank account.”

A real charmer, thought the policeman, whose name was Aubrey Winthrop. She also had great legs and a pretty face. Maxwell arrived as Armand’s body was being carried out of the apartment. Ruth accepted his hug as Aubrey wondered if there was anything going on between the two of them. But after further examination of Maxwell as he heard him consoling the widow, he decided they were just good friends, Maxwell having the kind of unappealing physical qualities that would consign him to the role of “good friend” for eternity.

Maxwell said to the policeman, “Forgive me for intruding, but the doctor and her husband and I have been good friends for many years. His death is a terrible shock. Why, only yesterday he crowed about swimming twenty lengths in his club’s swimming pool.”

The policeman clucked his tongue and said to Ruth, “Will you authorize an autopsy?”

“What for?”

“Some families permit an autopsy, especially in the case of a sudden, unexpected death.”

“Young man,” said Ruth authoritatively, “there is no such thing as sudden, unexpected death in my private canon. As a doctor, I know that death can strike at any time. Death is unavoidable. It comes to all of us. My husband always said he thought he’d die young.”

Maxwell agreed wistfully. “Yes, he always thought he would. The way he lived life to the hilt: drinking, eating, whor...” he caught himself, “...worn out by high living...”

“...And snorting crack,” said Ruth matter-of-factly.

Aubrey shot her a quizzical look and then decided against further investigation of her statement. He suspected she was pulling his leg. He wished he could pull hers.

A few days after the funeral, Ruth and Maxwell were brunching on the porch of a restaurant in West Hollywood. The topic under discussion was always a pressing one, their financial state. “Thank God for Armand’s insurance,” said Ruth as she bit into a buttered bagel. “It was even more than I dreamt. It’ll cover the funeral, the payments on the apartment, I can settle some of his debts, and...” she went suddenly silent. The way she looked, he was afraid she was about to go teary on him.

“What’s wrong, Ruth?”

“That cow he was seeing.”

“You’ve found out who she is?”

“She could be one of half a dozen. I’ve been through his papers, his address book, his Rolodex at the office. How that bastard covered his tracks! But I’ll tell you this — and may he burn in hell — he bought her an awful lot of expensive trinkets. And I have to pay for them.” She sipped her Bloody Mary. “She was madly in love with him.”

“How do you know that, if you don’t know who she is?”

“She sent him notes. I found some hidden away in the drawer where he kept his sports shirts.” There was a small smile on her face. “I don’t blame him for keeping them.”

“Gee Ruth, that’s very generous of you.”

“They said things I never said to him. I’m a doctor. I’m clinical. Cool. Self-contained.”

“You’re beautiful. You’re very beautiful.”

She shrugged. “The notes are all heat and passion. I was never like that with him. There’s nothing special about me. Not as a doctor. Not as a woman. But I loved Armand, I guess I just didn’t tell him often enough.”

“Did he tell you often enough?”

“Occasionally. We married very young. We were both innocent, unsophisticated, but we wanted each other desperately. And after five or six years, it began to wear off. Maybe if I’d been able to have children. But oh, what the hell, that’s in the past. Armand is dead. The insurance has me solvent again. I can hold my head up again. But once that money’s gone...? Who knows. What a way to live.”

“You should work at increasing your practice. You say you don’t meet expenses...?”

“That’s right. I don’t. I don’t specialize. Maybe if I had gone in for pediatrics...”

“It’s not too late, is it?”

“Right now, I have no enthusiasm for anything but this Bloody Mary. What about you, Maxwell? I can help you with a little cash. I won’t have much after I square all the debts.”

“Oh no no no. I can manage. I’m substituting for four weeks on Where Are My Children? They’re doing a leprosy story. I’ve got the hero at a leper colony off the coast of Madagascar and I’m going to keep him there until he’s found by Mike Wallace and he gets on Sixty Minutes and wins a five-million-dollar advance for his story from Simon and Schuster.”

“Sounds like fun.” She smiled. “And then what?”

“And then I pray my agent finds me something else. Oh God, why do I kid myself. I’m too old-for this town. They don’t want writers over thirty. They don’t want anybody over thirty. I have grey hair.”

“You’re a good writer.”

“There are plenty of so-called good writers in this town. Ah, let’s not get morbid. What we need are some laughs. We need Betsy Bering!”

“And who is Betsy Bering? She’s a new one on me!”

“She’s a nut I met when I was having breakfast the other morning at Angelo’s. I’d seen her there a few times and then we finally struck up a conversation. She’s a very funny lady. Very eccentric. And I suspect she’s very rich.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Her jewels. Very rich. I’ve been to her apartment.”

“Oh? Has it gone that far?”

“Don’t be cute. She invited me to tea. For want of anything better to do, I went.”

“Is she pretty? How old?”

“She’s pretty and she’s probably late thirties, early forties. She saw us at Armand’s funeral.”

Ruth’s eyebrows arched. “What was she doing at the funeral?”

He laughed. “The obituary. She thought it was so funny and she figured you probably wrote it, and it’s her kind of off-the-wall humor, so she wanted to see what you looked like. Anyway, she likes funerals.”

“One of those.”

“She called some local funeral parlors and finally found Dume Brothers, and they told her where and when the services were taking place.”

“Did she talk to me? Some strangers paid their condolences. I don’t remember any pretty woman, though.”

“She was going to, and then she decided not to. You were surrounded by so many friends.”

“Friends,” said Ruth with a snort. “That flood of invitations has certainly trickled down to a faucet drip.”

“You refused so many of them.”

“They were mostly his friends. You’re my only real friend, Maxwell.”

“I love you very much, Ruth. I wish you’d...”

She interrupted him abruptly. “Don’t. Please don’t. I’m not ready.”

He blinked his eyes rapidly and then said, “Betsy Bering asked me to bring you for drinks tonight. Say yes. I think you’ll enjoy her. She’s something new, someone fresh.”

“Does she do anything? Does she have a profession? Was she or is she married?”

“She’s divorced, a couple of years ago. She got a lot.”

“That’s what she told you.”

“I’ve got no reason to disbelieve her. What do you say?”

The breakup of the Soviet Union spawned much discussion amongst mystery writers, publishers, and editors as to what would become of spy fiction. But to answer that question, we must ask what has become of spies, as Mr. Hoch does in this latest Rand adventure...

Staring through the frosted windowpane at the snow outside, Rand could not remember a worse winter storm in all the years since he and Leila moved to Reading. It would have been a perfect day to remain at home by the fireplace. Leila was on her winter break from lecturing at the university, and she’d been urging him all morning to cancel his appointment in London.

“It’s letting up now,” he told her, examining the leaden sky. “The forecast is good for the rest of the day.”

“But why do you need to see this foolish little man at some computer place, for God’s sake?”

“Because he’s paying me,” Rand answered with a sigh. “The Cold War is over and there’s not much work for a retired cryptoanalyst.”

“You were much more than that, Jeffrey.” She liked to remind him of his days as Director of Concealed Communications for British Intelligence. Perhaps she felt it was good for his ego.

“In any event, it’s off to London on the eleven-ten. That should get me to Paddington Station in plenty of time to meet Sillabus for lunch at his club.” He kissed her quickly on the cheek. “Home for dinner or I’ll call.”

The railway journey took only twenty-two minutes, and even with the blowing snow they were on time. It was a short walk from Paddington to the club. Leila and Rand had met Harold Sillabus at a publisher’s party back in November, and he’d forgotten the man until he phoned. He wrote instruction books for computers and computer programs, and he wanted to hire Rand for a little job, he said.

Sillabus greeted him in the lobby of the club and led the way to a spacious dining room. “Terrible weather,” he muttered, “but I don’t have to tell you that. Someone told me that Londoners hate January and February, with these thick white skies and dreary days.”

“The snow is almost a relief,” Rand agreed. “At least it brightens things up a bit.”

Sillabus was not a Londoner and neither was Rand, born in Paris of British parents, though both men had spent many years there. They talked for a few minutes about the city before the short man cleared his throat to indicate it was time for business. A waiter arrived, as if on cue, to take their order.

“You see,” Sillabus began, “I do these books on computer programs. I guess you know all about that with your government experience. I hear that the entire science of cryptography is now computerized.”

“I’ve been retired more than fifteen years,” Rand murmured. “Things change.”

“Could you solve a computer-generated cipher?” he asked.

“It’s not my specialty. Sometimes they take years to crack.”

“This has nothing to do with espionage. I suppose it’s more in the nature of a game. You’re probably aware that some books, especially reference works like dictionaries, have actually been transferred to disks so they can be read off a computer screen. More recently, a few classics and even modern novels have appeared on disks. I believe there’s an illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland, and even one of these new techno-thrillers, complete with diagrams.”

“I guess I haven’t kept up with the newest technology in publishing,” Rand admitted. “I’m just getting used to audio books.”

“Well, a British novelist named Garson Wolfe has published — if that’s the word for it — a new fantasy novel available only on computer disk. He’s selling it for one thousand pounds per disk, and to add to the enjoyment, if that’s the word for it, the novel can only be read once. The disk is programmed to encipher itself after a single viewing, or if someone tries to copy it.”

“You want me to decipher it?”

“Yes, or tell me how to do it. A little booklet with the secret would sell quite well to computer addicts and fantasy fans.”

Rand thought about it. “You’re willing to pay for this?”

“The price of a disk. One thousand pounds if you can bring me the key to the cipher this week.”

“With a bit of luck I’ll do better than that.” The waiter arrived with their food. “Do you have one of these disks back at your office?”

“Yes. I purposely haven’t played it yet so you could see how the enciphering takes place.”

It was a short walk back to Sillabus’s office after lunch. The wind had let up a bit but there were still flurries in the air. They’d just reached the entrance to the small office building when the short man seemed to see someone he knew standing by the corner. “Just a moment, will you, Rand? I need a word with that chap.”

Rand watched with interest as he approached a tall man who wore a fur-collared leather coat of a sort not often seen in London. Surely he was from one of the Eastern European countries, or at least his coat was. The two men spoke for only a moment, then Harold Sillabus seemed to wave his arms in disgust and walk away.

“Who was that?” Rand asked.

“Someone who thinks the Cold War is still being fought.” He led the way toward the door.

“One thing I almost forgot. Is there a camera store near here, or any sort of place where I might purchase a Polaroid camera?”

“I have one in the office, specially fitted to take pictures of a television or computer screen, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Rand smiled. “That’s it exactly.”

R. M. Kinder is the author of a number of published short stories including a collection entitled Sweet Angel Band, the winner of last year’s Willa Cather fiction contest. As far as we know, this is the author’s first suspense piece, a vivid and memorable depiction of the genesis of a chilling crime...

More than anything else, the five-year-old boy wanted to be touched, but he didn’t actually know that. He felt it, a longing that made him draw near to his mother whenever she stood or sat still, which was rarely. Then he would wait a few inches away and if she didn’t seem tired or angry, which he recognized again by a sense he was too small to identify, he would eventually lean into her, or sit by her feet. Once, when he had been able to sit near her for a longer time than usual, while she spoke with a visiting neighbor, he had gently taken her hand and when she did not immediately pull it away, he had been so overcome with a pleasant feeling that he had kissed the back of the hand.

“For God’s sake, Jeremy,” she had said, “that’s sickening.”

He sometimes thought of that day, and felt her words, and it made him keep his distance as he knew he was supposed to do. He knew never to approach her when someone else was in the house. She was a busy woman and he understood busy very well.

He learned to cherish every gift she gave, and he thought they were many. “My mother makes me eat breakfast,” he told another child at kindergarten, and then enumerated each item he had eaten for dinner the night before and for breakfast just that morning. He tested her sometimes, going outside without a coat, or leaving part of his milk, or not brushing his teeth, and he would hear, “Jeremy,” and feel relief that she loved him enough to notice. He would turn back to complete his part of the communion, mimicking the angry walk of other boys.

She liked him to read, and he made a bond with her that when his father was home and Jeremy was not to watch the terrible shows on television, he could stay in the room if his eyes were down. He had a small reclining chair which she had herself upholstered, and he would rest his elbows on the arms and hold the book squarely before him, reading only enough to respond if she were to ask him what he read, and faithfully turning a page every few minutes.

Sometimes his father said, “Jeremy, want to...” and completed it with things Jeremy might have enjoyed, a trip to the store, a walk, an ice cream. Sometimes Jeremy did go with his father, but along came the uncomfortable awareness of her at home alone, impatient, announcing when they arrived how long-they had taken. If she came, it was worse. He might at any moment do something terribly wrong, spill ice cream on his clothing or the floor, sit in a ridiculous way. He preferred the comfort of the little recliner, an arm on each side, his eyes focused on one world, his ears on another. Other children occasionally had babysitters, he knew, and he thought that strange, that parents would risk their child to just anyone, which his mother had never done and would never do.

He became very adept at looking at one place and being in another, at taking his love and pleasure from nooks and crannies no one else knew.

When he was eight, she doled out chores and freedoms, since he was a big boy now. He came home right after school and she would assign the next few minutes, to sweep the porch, carry out the trash, stack the week’s newspapers in the garage. She never gave him too much to do, and when guests came she would introduce him and he would hear his name in their conversation, what he did, how well he did it. She urged him to play and named the boys she liked, and he would straggle down the street, stand in some yard, join in some game. He played the way she would have wanted him to, neatly, fairly. She bought him a watch so he wouldn’t come home too early or too late.

When she touched or kissed his father, or just sat beside him, Jeremy would watch without looking, intensely, feeling himself there between them, in them, and fearing discovery so that he sat rigid until they separated.

“What’s wrong with you,” his father said once, and Jeremy couldn’t speak because he wasn’t back together yet.

As he grew older he learned what this was, this leaving of himself, and he practiced in his room at night. First, he tried only his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to withdraw his fingers as from a glove. When he succeeded, it was in a dream, and he woke panicked and sweaty because he had been unable to slide back in. But as he was whole, capable of touching the blanket and turning on the lamp, the fear eased and he flexed his hands to rest them. Each night then, unless he was tired, he withdrew more and more from himself. He never left his room though, even when he knew he could, that he could grip the doorknob and turn it and stand listening. He learned to do it even while he read, and then, much later, to let the other read. Sometimes they looked at one another, and he grew accustomed to that face shaped much like his father’s, to the dour expression much like his mother’s. “Can you talk?” he asked, and heard the simple, “Yes,” with which he himself would have responded. He approved of the grace and restraint of the other.

They talked. Not often, but enough so that Jeremy understood their desires were not the same. Jeremy could see no reason to leave this place, though he admitted they would have to some day. Once he fell asleep with the light on and woke in complete darkness to hear, “I want to go now. I can’t stay here any longer.” The voice was so terribly sad that Jeremy threw back the covers and stumbled toward the sound. He felt his hand taken and himself drawn near, and was so touched that he stood there embracing the other till he realized they had joined again. “Come back out,” he said, but nothing happened. “Please.” He lay down and closed his eyes. “You don’t have to be ashamed,” he said. “Not with me.”

Each night now he woke to sobbing and he whispered reassurances that they would leave.

“When?”

“Soon,” he said. “I have to think where, how.”

“We just leave. I could, go now. No one would know.”

“No. Don’t. You can’t go without me.”

“But I can. I did.”

Jeremy turned on the light. The other was seated across the room, heavier, a dark stubble on his cheeks. He glanced quickly at Jeremy and then at the floor.

“I went into the hall one night. Tonight I went outside.”

“Out of the house?”

“Into the garage.”

“You didn’t.”

“Your father backs the car in.”

“Promise me you won’t do it again. Promise.”

“I won’t.”

“You won’t go, or you won’t promise?”

The other didn’t answer. He stood, and his height surprised Jeremy, who watched himself move toward the bed slowly, and lean down close and fade inside. “Answer me,” Jeremy said to the empty room.

Jeremy taped the door shut and fought sleep to hold the other in. But some mornings the tape was broken and he knew from his own exhaustion how far he must have gone.

“Are you slipping out at night?” his father asked. “You look like you’ve got a hangover.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course he’s not slipping out. He wouldn’t do that. Would you?”

“No,” he said. He woke that night to find his bedroom door open, and he rushed into the hallway whispering, “Get back here. Get back here now.” His parents’ door was open and he stepped inside, saw the shadow in the chair across the room. He didn’t dare speak, didn’t dare look toward the bed. He gestured, pleaded with his mind, backed out quietly when the other stood.

“What were you doing?” he said, when they were back in his room. “My God. In their bedroom. What if they had wakened?”

“Let them. Do them both good.” He lay down where Jeremy usually lay. “I don’t like them, you know.”

Jeremy stood quietly a moment. Then he lay down, too. “I know,” he said. “I wish you did, but I understand.”

Jeremy could do nothing to keep him from his parents’ room. He would wake, aware of danger, to hurry to the hallway so he could be nearby if they awoke. The other was coarser now to Jeremy, and seemed larger even than himself. He said terrible things, sometimes using Jeremy’s own lips.

“I could kill them,” he said once, in a soft voice. “And no one would know.”

“I would.”

The other laughed with Jeremy’s voice.

Jeremy knew when it was going to happen. In the kitchen his eyes were caught by the glint of knives; outside, by stones. When he tied the newspapers in the garage, his hands braided the twine thicker, knotted it. “Oh don’t,” he whispered.

“I need to leave,” he told his mother.

“What do you mean, leave? Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”

“I mean leave the house. Move away.”

“When the right time comes, I’ll help you do just that. But that’s a year or two in the future.”

He took hammer and nails from his father’s tool chest, put the nails in his pocket, the hammer in his waistband. He put them in his dresser. “Shut up,” he said.

When dinner was over and his parents sat in the living room before the television, he went to his room and closed the door. He pushed and tapped the nails in. Every now and then he would kick the door lightly to mask a final drive of the hammer. It still took a long time.

He had to leave, but he didn’t know how.

He heard them go to bed. He didn’t undress or turn out the light, but he got under the covers. He kept his eyes open, but it didn’t work. He tried to hold the other in, then pull him back. He threw his arms around the thick chest and tugged, but was shaken off. The hammer was taken up, the nails jerked out wildly, and Jeremy raced down the hall, finally even yelling, “Stop, stop, for God’s sake stop,” but there was nothing he could do. He wasn’t big enough or strong enough. He was thrown out of the room and the door shut in his face. When it opened again, he didn’t need to see what was in there. He had heard it. He followed himself through the kitchen, into the garage. “Come back,” he said. “Come back.” He stood there a long time. Then he went in the kitchen and wiped up the floor and folded the rag neatly on the washer. He took his father’s keys from the wall hook and returned to the garage. He started the motor. He lay down in the seat to wait for the other to return.

When the murder victim is the life of every party, a hail-fellow everyone appears to like, the problem, series sleuth Denver Styx discovers, may be not too many suspects, but none at all...

The night before the murder there had been a party. As Denver Styx tried to remember details of it, Lieutenant Horn prodded him from time to time— Which guests were there when he arrived; how did new guests act when they arrived; what gestures did they make? Denver was not sure the prodding was helpful. He preferred to present the facts in his own way, but the detective had something special on his mind and Denver was forced to go along with him.

He looked around the lieutenant’s utilitarian office and found little in it to stimulate him, few touches of civilization. Horn’s assistant sat writing down every word that was said, like a studious but unimaginative undergraduate taking notes on his lectures.

“Sam Tarn crashed the party at about ten o’clock,” he reported. “He and his wife had obviously been drinking and they just barged right past Fine.”

“He didn’t invite them in, then?”

“On the contrary, when he answered the door he said, ‘I’m sorry, Sam, but I have a few friends over tonight. Come back another time.’ ”

“And what happened then?”

“Tarn gave a sort of happy whoop and shouted, ‘A party! We’re in luck, Dolly. There’s a party.’ And the two of them swept in past Fine and into the living room. They knew more than half the guests and went about hugging and kissing them as if they hadn’t seen them for years.”

“One of the other guests said they added life to the party,” Horn suggested.

“You could put it that way. We had been having an animated conversation about trends in modern art. Tarn and his wife put a stop to that. The whole affair became a lot more boisterous than it had been before.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“I guess in a way I did. I would have preferred to go on with the discussion we had been having. There were some very intelligent people there, some of whom I’d met for the first time. They had provocative and well-informed views. The evening had been turning into one of those rare stimulating exchanges of ideas.”

“Highbrow?”

“I suppose so.”

“And Sam Tarn wrecked it.”

“He didn’t exactly wreck it. He interrupted it. He changed the whole tenor of the evening.”

“Had you met him before?”

“I had met both of them on a few social occasions informally, not to speak with at any length. I also dealt with Sam in a business way. I’d never met either at a party before. It was a revelation.”

“Did you like him?”

“I liked him the way one likes a large friendly dog with muddy paws.”

The detective laughed. “So you enjoyed the party even after Sam Tarn interrupted it.”

“He was entertaining. At one point he lined up twelve wineglasses on the table and poured different levels of wine into them. Then he played tunes on them with a spoon. He pulled it off quite well at first, clowning around to get just the right level in each glass, filling the glass to the full and drinking off the excess. He played ‘Mona Lisa’ on the glasses. Then he and his wife sang while he played. They spoiled the whole thing by putting some very objectionable lyrics to the song. He wound up with a flourish that cracked two of the glasses and shattered a third. His wife thought it was hilarious.”

“But Fine did not.”

“No, he certainly didn’t. He apparently had been anticipating something like that. His wife mopped up the mess while he restrained Tarn, who wanted to snatch the tablecloth off with one quick flip and leave everything on the table as it was. He claimed to have performed that trick successfully on stage at a children’s program. Fine wasn’t about to let him try it with a wine-drenched tablecloth and a table full of fine china and crystal.”

The detective looked over his notes and made a brief addition. When he resumed, it was with a definite objective. “Did you see any conflict between Fine and Tarn?” he asked.

“As I said, he tried to keep Tarn from coming in and he restrained him from pulling off the tablecloth.”

Horn waited.

“I suppose,” Denver continued, “that you are referring to what he said about his wife?”

“That’s it. What did you hear?”

“Others were closer than I was. What I heard from halfway across the room was Fine saying, ‘Keep your hands off my wife.’ ”

“Were those his exact words?”

“Yes.”

“But that didn’t break up the party?”

“No. It continued for more than an hour after that with Tarn clowning around as before.”

“You were the last to leave the party. Any special reason?”

“When the other guests began to leave, Fine asked me to stay until he got rid of Sam and Dolly Tarn.”

“Did he say why he picked you?”

“He didn’t have to. I’m young and athletic. Most of the rest of the guests were middle-aged and sedentary. Dr. Bell must be in his late sixties. Also, some of the others were friends of Sam Tarn.”

“Did you have any trouble getting rid of him?”

“Not real trouble. Sam was still rarin’ to go. As Thackeray put it:

No, he and Dolly didn’t want to leave, but Fine told them to go, that he and I had things to talk over.”

“Did you?”

“We talked for a while about the way Tarn changed the whole tenor of the party. Fine promised that sometime we would pick up the discussion where it had been interrupted.”

“Thank you, Professor Styx. You have been most helpful. You may go now.”

The detective rose and shook hands. Denver paused before leaving. “Do I gather that you suspect Fine of murdering Sam Tarn?”

“I would if he didn’t have an alibi. He seems to be the only person with a reason for killing Tarn. Everyone else liked him.”

“Yes, he had a way with him.”

As the adventures of Acting Sergeant Maynard Bullock enter their twenty-fifth year, the daring spirit of the bungling mountie is undiminished. To Bullock, who can find excitement guarding the flowerbeds in front of the Parliament Buildings, an encounter with the legendary Athanatos and his submarine The Sea Monoceros is all in a day’s work...

“Actually, it’s more slate grey than blue. And more like pound cake than bread,” explained the old woman, fingering the clasp of the purse that lay across her knees. “Pound cake’s leap to glory, some call it.” As she spoke, her sad brown eyes turned from the man in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Recreation Association windbreaker sitting across from her to wander over the ample, well-lit lobby of Ottawa’s National Archives Building. “I’m telling you this now so you won’t be surprised when you see it.”

Acting Sergeant Maynard Bullock ran a knuckle across his neatly trimmed moustache to mask any hint of a smile: “Thanks for being up front with me, Miss Bright.”

“Nor, as I said, does it give you happiness,” she insisted. “Unless you’re cockeyed enough to think being young means happiness. Oh yes, small amounts do reverse the aging process. And yes, when you reach your desired age regular maintenance doses will keep you there. That’s all we claim.” She touched her cheek. “I use the preparation myself.”

“I’d never have guessed you were over a hundred and fifty years old,” said Bullock.

“Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes modestly. “But it is expensive. Which is how I got into the selling end.” She gave him a quick look. “That isn’t illegal, you know. Youth isn’t a controlled substance. At least, not yet.” She paused and said, “Well, shall we get down to business? Did you bring the money?”

Bullock produced the thick roll of bank notes with a forced casualness. He hadn’t been able to go to Mountie Bunco for marked bills, not after last year’s little snafu involving the Stoner ransom money and a howling snowstorm. (Blast all cheap locks on cheap suitcases everywhere! And blast the newspapers for reporting the story!) Fortunately good old Mavis, his wife, had come into a small inheritance, one earmarked for paying off the mortgage. This was the money Bullock now handed over, confident he’d get it back into their account before it was missed. Then, mustering his most gullible smile, he asked, “Run it by me again, Miss Bright. This twenty thousand gets me a half share in your upcoming purchase of the stuff with a street value of...?”

“...a hundred thousand dollars,” said Miss Bright, wearily. “You’ve got me in a bind. Dr. Athanatos only deals in fifty-thousand-dollar lots. All I’ve got is thirty.” She drew an envelope from her purse, and ran her thumb across the bills inside before adding Bullock’s money to them. “Some of my fixed-income customers have had to increase their doses. They say Athanatos is watering the stuff.” She sealed the envelope with her tongue and stuffed it back into her purse, adding, “Maybe he is. Anyway, I’ve had to extend them credit. What else could I do, considering the consequences? Oh, not just the heartburn. That’s only the first danger sign.” The woman looked at Bullock gravely. “Deprived of their usual dosage they’d start ageing faster and faster until they burst into flame. Poof, just like that. From the friction, you see.”

“Ah,” said Bullock.

Miss Bright nodded. “Spontaneous combustion. Dickens is full of the stuff, which means, I suppose, that Athanatos was around in those days, too.” Gathering up the paper shopping bag at her feet, Miss Bright rose. “I have to run,” she said, buttoning her green raincoat. She turned to go, then stopped. “Stupid me,” she said, taking the envelope from her purse again. “I forgot we agreed you’d hold the money as a token of good faith.”

Bullock took the envelope she offered him, making no sign he knew it only contained cut up paper.

“Until tomorrow morning at eight, then, at Fenians’ Bend,” said Miss Bright. “My niece Stella and I will be there. I know you’ll come. If a body can’t trust a Mountie who...?” Here Miss Bright frowned and tapped her chest with a most ladylike fist, as though experiencing discomfort. Then she hurried away.

Bullock watched her go solemnly. But inside he was agloat from ear to ear. He made no move until she reached the street. She mustn’t know she was being followed.

Outside, the morning was brisk and grey. He hung back as she hurried across the broad expanse of Wellington Street. When she turned southward, he stepped out after her. He’d spotted her as a con artist right off the bat when she’d approached him yesterday among the flowerbeds on Parliament Hill. He’d strung her along hoping she’d lead him to the sophisticated gang of Gypsy cons known to be working the old pigeon-drop scam in the area. It’d be a much-needed feather in his hat to nab the lot of them single-handed.

Still, Bullock had to admire the detail Miss Bright brought to her cock-and-bull story, even working in Dr. Athanatos, the legendary Canadian health-tonic manufacturer whose Peacock Island Brand Soup of Youth had made him millions. Bullock had first come across Athanatos in one of those wonderful turn-of-the-century adventure tales for boys featuring Canada’s aviation pioneer Buzz Haycock who, in a single Niagara afternoon, became the first man to fly over the Canadian Falls and go over the American Falls in an airplane. And none of those books had been more gripping than Buzz Haycock and the Behemoth Queen, recounting the daredevil pilot’s flight to the top of the world, drawn by rumors of a German staging area for an armada of stealthy isinglass dirigibles. Instead Haycock discovered a honeycomb of island caverns, the haunt of giant Ice Worms. And he encountered Athanatos and his futuristic submarine The Sea Monoceros, come to hunt the terrible translucent creatures with an electric harpoon rifle of his own invention. In spite of the man’s somewhat shady reputation, Haycock had come to enjoy those dinners in the craft’s glass-walled conning tower while the violent Arctic weather swirled outside and his host’s slavish crew doubled as a baroque music ensemble. However far those discussions over brandy and cigars ranged, they always returned to the age-old question: does happiness make men good or does goodness make them happy. (By godfrey, thought Bullock, they don’t write books for boys like that anymore.)

Up ahead, Bullock saw Miss Bright turn into a drugstore. He followed after her, humming casually, and locating her head above the display counters in the far corner, he drifted toward the humorous greeting cards, meaning to wait for her over a chuckle or two. But he’d scarcely begun to browse when there was a flash of light from Miss Bright’s direction. Bullock looked up to find a few wisps of smoke where her head had been. Bullock shouldered his way through the customers stampeding for the door and reached her aisle. It was empty. But on the floor in front of the antacid section he found a small cone of smoking ashes and the charred remains of a green raincoat. He poked through the ashes with his pencil, uncovering part of a brown shopping-bag handle and what looked like the metal clasp of Miss Bright’s purse. Bullock scratched his head. Then he shook it. No, by godfrey, he couldn’t buy spontaneous combustion. It was a trick to throw him off her track. Bullock ran out onto the street. But Miss Bright was long gone. With good old Mavis’s money. Bullock took out the envelope and ripped it open, meaning to curse the worthless contents. But the envelope was filled with bank notes, his twenty thousand and Miss Bright’s thirty! He blinked and rushed back to the pile of smoking ashes. Good godfrey, was this really the poor woman’s earthly remains? Had she really been as old as she’d said? Did the Blue Bread of Happiness really work?

By identifying himself, Bullock got the worried young woman at the register to give him a broom, dust pan, and a large paper bag. Then he swept what was left of Miss Bright into the bag. Any official report he made on this right now would get him laughed off the force. He was lucky there was a technician at Forensics who owed him a favor.

As those of you who were with us in 1991 for the reprinting of the Golden Thirteen will know, an Avram Davidson story was one of the thirteen winners of the worldwide short-story contests EQMM ran between 1945 and 1956 and resumed for one year in 1961. Mr. Davidson is also a recipient of an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America and a Hugo award from the World Science Fiction Convention. From his home in Washington state, he continues to be active in both the mystery and science fiction fields, often writing pieces like the following, to which you’ll have to give a little thought...

The sign on the door said FINGERPRINTS.

Captain Luper was standing in the doorway.

The files were kept next door nowadays, in the Annex, but old Luper of course wouldn’t move and so they had to come over and check routine matters out with him.

It had been Captain Luper’s habit, as far back as anyone was able to remember, that he would stand in his doorway and ask of the world at large, “Any coffee?” The Police Officers’ Association had been known to receive complaints such as that it was not a police officer’s duty to be at some higher-up’s beck and call: but, always, someone went and got the coffee.

And now here came Sergeant Novak with one of the new men on the force. “Captain Luper.” Luper didn’t look at him. After a minute he said, “Yeah, whaddaya want?” His eyes were like oysters.

“Captain, this is Kovacs, Jerome T. for Theodore, one of the new—”

Luper turned and walked back into his office. Sitting next to the desk with the paper folded was Old Tim Flint, retired, but always coming back. Luper said, “Who you got in the third?” Tim said he liked Ranger. Luper snorted. “Ranger, Ranger. That palooka.”

“Yeah. But look who he’s racin’ against.”

Luper said, “Whaddaya want, Novak? — Kovac, Novak,” he said, pronouncing the names the same. “All the bohunks in the state tryin’ ta get on the force. What’s a matter, the coal mines close?”

Novak gave a polite little laugh. Kovacs said, “Excuse me, Captain, it’s pronounced Ko-votch.”

This time Luper looked at him. For a long while. Then he said, “You want it pronounced Ko-votch, you spell it Ko-votch. Whaddaya want—”

Novak said, very quickly, “Well. Homicide? Om. This old woman? Mrs. Fisher? Found D.O.A. in her home, 33-A Lombardy? Multiple contusions, lacerations, and—” He stopped. Luper was looking at him.

“He thinks I don’t read the reports,” Luper said.

“Oh I know you read the reports, Captain, it’s the—”

Old Tim said, “Look who he’s racin’ against. Corvette and Stamina. Corvette, I lost five on him before I retire, even. Ready for the glue factory. And Stamina, STAMina, for cry-sake, is a mudpuppy. You see any rain today, Lupe?”

Luper said, “Aaa.” He cleared his sinuses and spat in the spittoon.

“Well, they, uh, Homicide didn’t turn up nothing. Or nobody. So, om, Captain Blaine, he thinks—”

“Captain Blaine thinks. Last time Captain Blaine had a thought he took an aspirin and it went away.” Sergeant and new man didn’t say a word. Flint sighed, coughed, scratched his armpit, shook his head, shook his folded paper.

“Stamina,” Tim Flint said. “Corvette.”

In the silence a buzzing was heard. A fly thudded against the window.

“All right. The File Number Eight, then, right?”

“Right, Captain.” Novak looked slightly relieved. “They all been checked out, Captain. And, om—”

“And?”

Somewhere downstairs a drunk began a loud litany of curses. There was a slight sound. The noise stopped.

“Humpty Smith was in the hospital, Jack Garbet went to his sister’s in Cairo Illinoise last month and hasn’t come back, Larry Macmar was in Murrey’s Bowling Alley the whole night watching the turnament, Robert Smith, he—” Again the sergeant stopped abruptly.

Old Tim looked up, smiling. “Robert Alfred Smith? the smokey? Yeah? You remember his sister, Lupe.”

“Naa.”

“You don’t remember his sister, Lupe. Aaah, come on. You remember his sister, Lupe. Nanny Smith. She was at, uh, Number Four School with yune me, couple classes behind. She had a head, Nanny Smith, she had a head shape just like a lemon. Lemon-head Nanny Smith, we use ta call her.”

Novak said, “Yeah, well, she died last night, Lieutenant Flint. See. And her brother, Robert Smith, he was there the whole time with the whole family at the home. So that lets him out.”

Captain Luper took from his drawer a small packet of small cigars with plastic holders already attached to them. He took one out, then he shook his head very slightly, then he slipped it back in the box and put the box back in his drawer. “Okay, okay, who’s left?” he asked. He sounded a little bit tired.

Timmy’s face showed surprise. “Nanny Smith died? Lemon-head Nanny Smith? She died, huh. She died.” After a moment Flint said, “Rest her soul. She was at Old Number Four School, with yune me, Lupe.” Shaking his head, he slowly returned to his paper.

“And so the only one unaccounted for, and we picked him up right away and check him out and he hadn’t got no explanation of his whereabouts, like, just, like, he said, he was just, like walking around. And he didn’t see anybody and nobody saw him. So we lettum go, a course, and been keepin’ a eye on— Oh. Uh. Sorry, Captain. Stanley L. for Lewis Pine. Is the only one left in the Eight File. So, om, Captain Blaine, he—”

Luper nodded. Muscles jumped in his grey cheeks. “He thought. Yeah. Gimme the package.” For a while there was only the sound of Captain Luper’s shuffling through the records. Then he began to separate them into piles on the desk. Then he began to talk, almost to himself.

“Drunk and disorderly. Drunk and disorderly. Fourteen-year-old girl, parents changed their mind, wouldn’t press charges. Breaking and entering. Attempted assault of an officer, lawyer got him off. Bob Baimbridge, you wouldn’t believe the pull that one had. Attempted second degree A. and R., she wouldn’t press no charges, either. Complaint from old housewife on Williston Street: loitering and looking in— Nol-pros. Attempted...” His voice died away. He began to count. “—and seven. And eight,” he concluded. He shoved the records away from him. Sergeant Novak gathered them up.

“Well.” Captain Luper didn’t exactly look cheerful. But he looked more alert. “Stanley L. for Lewis Pine. That ballbreaker. He had his chances. Eight of um. You understand the procedure, Officer Kovacs.”

The new man nodded. “Yes, Captain. It’s been explained to me.”

“You got the warrant.”

They nodded. “Yes, Captain.”

A note of irritation in Captain Luper’s voice. “Well, what uh the two a ya waitin’ for. Christmas?”

“Yes, Captain. Uh, no Captain. Thanks, Captain.” The two men turned and started out. Old Tim Flint looked up and guffawed. A faint movement that served for a smile tugged at the corners of Captain Luper’s large, loose mouth. Novak clicked his tongue and gave his head a reproving jerk. Kovacs blushed.

“Well?”

Embarrassed, apologetic — “The prints. Yeah. Oh yeah, Captain. We forgot about the—”

Luper waved the sergeant’s hasty comments away. “What about the prints? Huh. New man on the force, pronounced—”

The new man said, “We pull his prints, Captain. And we go over to where the dead woman, to uh, 33-A Lombardy. And we plant them.”

Captain Luper nodded, dismissed them with an abrupt move of his hand. He pulled out his desk drawer as they left, took up the little packet of cigars once more, and once more shook his head slightly. Then he got up and moved towards the door.

“Corvette and Stamina. Uh-uh,” said Old Tim. “In the third, Lupe, I like Ranger.”

Captain Luper stood in the doorway. He stretched. Then, looking at a spot on the wall opposite, he said to the world at large, “Any coffee?”

If the plan proposed in this new story by Donald Olson seems an “absurd caprice” to its participants, we should point out that it is not too dissimilar to a program we know to have been part of the course work of at least one university’s Sociology department during the 1970s, though fiction in this case is still wonderfully stranger than truth...

“You do know,” said Nobbs, “how risky this could be.”

“In what way?” Bair’s coolly superior tone mocked his colleague’s timidity. They’d never been close, and now, having said their goodbyes to the director, they waited in an atmosphere of mutual disapproval for the car that would take them and three other junior staffers from the Center to the station.

Nobbs fingered the sealed envelope identical to the one Bair had been given shortly after donning the clothes they now wore and which added to their discomfiture, castoffs donated to one of the Center’s charities, but too shabby for even the neediest of the poof.

Nobbs leaned closer. “Suppose one had an accident. Got run over or hit on the head and lost one’s memory. One might never be identified. Didn’t you say you’d never been fingerprinted either? God, I feel positively naked without a wallet. No credit cards, no driver’s license, nothing.”

“But that’s the whole idea,” said Bair drily, although personally he’d rather be seen naked than in these disgraceful rags. It seemed to him an absurd caprice, this brainchild of the director’s which required each of the staff members to live anonymously and without funds (except for the five dollars each had been given) for a month, among the lowest strata of society, in a strange town, the director’s theory being that without firsthand experience of how the deprived lived, one couldn’t fully appreciate the importance of one’s work at the Center for Advanced Humanitarian Studies.

Bair had lived and worked at the Center for six months, recruited by the director himself, who had been deeply impressed by Bair’s discovery, of a formula for the processing of a vital nutrient derived from the soybean.

Bair and Nobbs didn’t exchange another word. In truth, Bair was ashamed to be seen talking to Nobbs, whose skinny physique added a note of authenticity to his rags. Bair felt confident that he himself didn’t look half so seedy to others as Nobbs looked to him. He wondered where Nobbs was being sent; they’d all been sworn to keep their individual destinations a secret. When Bair opened his own envelope, the name inside meant nothing to him; he’d never heard of Grimley, Ohio.

Not until he changed buses at Cleveland did anyone choose to share a seat with Bair, and the looks of the young man who did made a disagreeable impression on him; he wore a white leather jacket and a falsely disarming smile; his raggedy black hair reeked of oil. The bus was no sooner on the road than he asked Bair for a light, and when Bair couldn’t oblige him, he pulled a book of matches from his own pocket and, wholly unabashed, asked Bair where he was headed.

“Grimley,” said Bair.

“Same here.”

This unlikely coincidence left Bair faintly uneasy, coupled as it was with a sense of his own self drifting away. His eyes grabbed at signs and streetlights and trees as they flashed by, each seeming to pluck away a tiny particle of himself.

“So why you goin’ there, man?”

Bair’s emotions were too confused for him to project a proper show of indignation. “I have business there.”

“Me too.” He gave Bair a more intense look, squinting his dark, liquid eyes and spitting a feather of smoke into the blue-rinsed hair of the woman in front of him. “A stranger, y’know, he ain’t gonna know where the action is, y’know what I mean, pal?”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Bair noncommittally.

“Well, buddy, I’m the boy can tell ya where the action is.”

Bair, in his innocence, preserved through forty years of a solitary, sheltered life, discerned something so authentically evil about his seat companion he was thrilled to his toes and madly eager to learn precisely what sort of “action” the youth was hinting at. He giggled nervously.

At this, the young man once more whipped out the book of matches, ripped the cover in two, and with a stubby pencil wrote on the back of one piece: Call 488-0898. Ask for Deuce. With a sly wink he handed this to Bair. Before slipping it into his pocket, Bair noticed the matchbook came from a place called the Wing-Ding Club and showed pink bubbles tumbling over the rim of a cocktail glass.

“Deuce,” said Bair. “A nickname?”

“Yeah, ’cause my last name’s Wilde. This Deuce is wild, man.”

Presently the young man got up without a parting word and walked to the front of the bus and sat down with a booted blonde who might easily have been an habitué of the Wing-Ding Club.

This enlivening encounter occupied Bair’s mind for the rest of what proved a tiresomely uneventful trip; moreover, the meeting had served to demolish any lingering illusions that he still projected the image, despite his rags, of a man of substance; he began to feel like a bum. He didn’t like the feeling at all.

Colorado resident Suzanne Jones began writing mystery fiction in 1985. Her short tales of suspense often find the protagonists pitted not only against others, but against themselves...

Dana had forgotten the matches. She rocked back on her heels and the familiar feelings swept over her: the irritation, anxiety, self-loathing. She stared at the gas stove. How could she have forgotten the matches? How stupid of her. In her mind, she followed that twisting road down the mountain the six miles into town. She sighed and stood up from the last of the boxes she had been unpacking. There was a price for solitude. There was a price for everything. Her fingers closed on the vial of pills in her pocket, and she measured her feelings against the need for their relief. Not yet.

She thought she remembered a cabin within walking distance. She had seen a car turning into a driveway as she drove herself carefully along that steep road, looking for the place that would be her home during the summer session. She couldn’t face repeating the ordeal of that drive so soon. She would walk. It was late afternoon, but there were still too many hours between her and sleep. Besides, “Exercise is one antidote for depression.” That was her doctor, Goldman, speaking. A calm, quiet, confident voice that verged on smugness. All right. She would walk.

The air was a little cold and thin this high above the town. So clean. It pleased her to walk along the dirt road that ran along the top of a steep cliff and then between the small pines and scraggly brush, the ground beneath them still streaked with the last snow of spring. There were, besides the steady crunch of her own footsteps, the cries of birds and an occasional rustle in the brush. Not snakes, like in Texas, it was too high for them. Just some small creature, startled by her approach, as startled as she.

She saw the mailbox now with “Keller” lettered inexpertly in bold strokes on its side. Dr. Keller, she thought. She had been told the chairman of the English Department had a cabin on the mountain, a place he went to in the summers, from which he would emerge only a couple of times a week to do seminars, a place where he would work on his publications for the Modern Language Association. It wouldn’t hurt her to meet him. In fact, it was desirable. She had been accepted into the doctoral program in English, but except for her stepsister Jane, she knew no one in the department. She had been accepted largely because of James’s recommendation. James, with his clever hands and very Catholic wife and two children.

Thunderheads were starting to build over the mountain and patching the road with light and shade. There was a freshening in the air. Rain was on the way, and soon large heavy drops began to dimple the dust in the road. She hurried, reaching the front door of the cabin as it began to rain with a violence that promised to spend itself shortly. A man appeared at the door.

“Dr. Keller? I’m Dana Greystoke—”

The rain drove her against the door.

He unlatched it and pushed it open for her. He was tall and thin, late forties or early fifties, with just the appropriate amount of gray to look distinguished in his close-cut dark hair. His eyes were large and brown, and now looked at her with what she took to be irritation at her intrusion.

She glanced about the room. The fireplace was larger than the one in her cabin, and the floors were stone instead of carpeted plywood. There was a large bookcase on the wall next to the fireplace and a carton of books on the large, heavy table near the window.

She stammered through her explanation and her request for the matches. The rain hurled itself against the window.

The man dug in his jacket pocket for the matches. He was formally dressed for the mountains, she thought, even to the tastefully striped tie.

“You’re the girl from Texas, aren’t you, the one James Rollins sent us? Medieval’s your field, isn’t it?”

She nodded. She wanted to leave almost as much as he seemed to want her to, but the violent rainstorm made it almost impossible to do so. Foolish to leave and awkward to stay.

“I don’t suppose the storm will last long,” she said uncomfortably.

“No, it should blow itself out soon,” he agreed. He seemed to resign himself to having to deal with his uninvited guest. “Here, have some sherry. It’ll warm you.”

She had noticed the bottle and two glasses. “A colleague dropped this off earlier,” he said. “Let me get you a clean glass.”

He disappeared into the kitchen. She heard the sound of running water. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, curling her fingers around that vial, comforting herself. The rain pounded furiously against the window and hammered the roof. She drifted to the box of books to see what it was that he took with him to the mountains, half hoping it was something nonscholarly. She took up a slender volume, worn, old. Letters in faded gold winked up from wrinkled leather and across centuries.

“Be careful with that,” he said sharply.

Startled, she almost dropped it.

“It’s rather fragile. I suppose I shouldn’t cart them about, but they’re rather valuable, you know. I don’t like leaving them. That’s the most valuable of the lot.”

“It’s lovely,” she said, conscious of the inadequacy of the statement. She was holding in her hands a piece of time, an eighteenth-century edition of The Canterbury Tales. She had heard of Keller’s rare-book collection. James had said with a sneer that it was the most distinguished thing about him. But that was probably James’s envy and jealousy of someone more highly regarded than himself in the field.

He handed her the sherry. It was smooth and had the slightly sweet taste of nuts. She was appropriately intimidated, she thought. His rare old books, his fine wine, his disturbing masculinity.

“To curly-haired girl graduate students,” he said and raised his glass.

He seemed to relax a little with the sherry. He listed some professors at Texas whom she knew and some others whom she knew only by reputation. She wondered how much he knew about her involvement with James. That he knew something she was sure. Her little affair had certainly been noised about. Discretion was not one of James’s virtues. Nonetheless, her credentials were sound. She had done very well in the master’s program — despite James, not because of him, she knew. Sleeping with department heads was anathema to graduate careers. She had mostly escaped the consequences, largely because she had published a monograph on Chretien de Troyes, an accomplishment which was sufficiently rare among master’s candidates to distinguish her from the field, and also because her late father was a past president of the MLA. The man tactfully did not mention her father.

The rain continued. One glass of sherry became two.

The rain continued, and he built a fire.

His hands, when, finally, they were on her, came as a relief. She didn’t have to talk to him anymore, to deal with his suspected sarcasm, to have the things she said measured and judged and found shallow and wanting. Now there was only the fierce communication of flesh, which released her from the obligations and obsequious regard of their respective stations and intellects.

What terror she had first felt in James’s presence she had once confessed to him in bed, and he had laughed. “No more than age when confronted with the endless procession of youth, of bright, eager minds like cannibals come to consume the graying flesh of our intellect.”

When she came to herself, there was a stinging in her throat, then at her eyes. She was almost fully dressed, lying on the bed. And she was alone. The smoke was coming up from the bottom of the door, leaking through the sides of the door and crawling lightly up the wall.

She coughed and called his name, but there was no response. It was becoming harder to breathe, but some innate caution made her lay her hand flat against the door rather than try to open it. It was warm, and she drew back as if already burned.

More smoke came rapidly now, surging under the door. There were two windows set high and narrow in the wall at the back of the room. They were painted shut. The armchair in the room was too heavy for her to lift. Moving quickly, she tore apart the bed and seized one of the slats. She smashed one of the windows, but that seemed to pull more smoke into the room.

She climbed onto the chair and pulled herself over the bits of broken glass in the window frame and fell headfirst to the muddy ground.

At first she lay stunned, unable to move, but the fire at last had possessed the room, and the heat made her get to her knees and scuttle crablike away from the burning house into the wet trees.

She felt the impact and saw the ball of flame roil upward as though it were a solid mass before the explosion almost deafened her. She lay quietly for a time in the wet grass, an injured animal, and then became aware of the cuts stinging her arms and hands and of the long tear in her side. She got to her feet and began to walk as quickly as she could to the road.

The rain had stopped. Behind her, far down the mountain and over the ringing in her ears, she heard the faint sounds of sirens slowly building in intensity as the vehicles worked their way up the switchbacks.

She lowered herself into the deep, old-fashioned tub despite the pain and let the hot water wash the blood away. She carefully did not think now, but treated her wounds tenderly, with a consideration she seldom gave her own body. The familiar red welts on her wrists were themselves nicked, but not reopened. She was not badly hurt. The long tear in her side was shallow, little more than a scratch, and had stopped bleeding.

When she no longer could keep the memory of what had happened from her, she took one of Dr. Goldman’s pills and lay down.

Before she fell asleep she made herself think over and over again: “I did not start the fire. That was not my fault.” She carefully clung to that thought until she lost consciousness.

When she awoke, she had a panicky moment of dislocation. The unfamiliar, water-spotted ceiling, the strange room, the rough blanket she had pulled over herself against the cold night air.

Then she remembered. The memory beat at her like one of her stepsister’s insistent children, demanding her attention. She remembered.

She felt little curiosity about what had happened to the man. He was dead, or he was not. She realized that she was angry with him. He had not tried to rescue her. She had been awakened by the smoke, not by any human cry. He had either died in the fire or left her there to die. All in all, she thought it would be better if he were dead; otherwise, she would have to see him again and deal with her anger and her embarrassment. She would not go to the authorities, for what could she tell them that would be of any use? Did she know how the fire started? No. The rest was nobody’s business but her own and Keller’s.

It was still a shock to read the headline in the local paper: English Department Chairman Dies in Fire. She felt less anger toward him dead. She felt she should be generous to his memory. Perhaps he had tried to save her. Perhaps she had been mistaken, and his dying cries instead of the smoke had awakened her.

She told no one, not even her stepsister. She still could see no purpose to it. She read the report in the paper several times, and found it to be substantially correct, if a little muddled as to sequence. The article made it sound as though there had been a propane leak that had caused the explosion and fire. The fire she knew had preceded the explosion, otherwise she herself could not have survived. How the fire had actually begun was a matter of indifference to her. An accident was an accident, and dead was dead. She saw no need to set the reporter right.

She did not attend the funeral. Her stepsister Jane did and reported that it was as well attended as might be expected at the beginning of the summer term. Jane said that Keller’s sister had been there but had not seemed to grieve overmuch.

Dana herself did not grieve at all but found Keller would not disappear easily, even so. He came to the edges of her dreams, his lean, tanned face by turns mocking her and berating her for her lack of feeling. On waking in her sweaty bed, she realized that she felt as abandoned by him as she had by James. Death was the ultimate abandonment. “Seduced and abandoned.” She was embarrassed to find herself holding such an old-fashioned view of an act between consenting adults. She knew she was more troubled by these feelings than by his death. She had scarcely known him. A few hours. Some pleasure. Much pain.

She and Jane were walking with Jane’s three small children in the open-air mall the day after the funeral. It was the afternoon of a lovely, soft, cloudless day. The mall was crowded as usual with musicians, acrobats, magicians, students, tourists, and townspeople. She let herself drift mindlessly, without conscious thought, over the smooth brick pavement, absorbing the sights, and the smell of hot dogs, fried foods, and incense, and the sounds: the music of the individual street players merging in mild disharmony, the throbbing of the drums of the Hare Krishnas who had taken one street corner joyously for their own.

She thought she heard someone call her name, and she looked back into the sun, shading her eyes, and thought she saw him: a shape, a momentary interruption of the light, sensed rather than seen.

“Are you all right?” Her stepsister was looking closely at her.

She could no longer see him. He was gone. But then he could hardly have been there at all.

“A new delusion,” Dana said uneasily. “I thought I saw Dr. Keller just now.” Her fingers curved about the vial of pills, yet she made no move to extract one. She felt none of the usual symptoms: the pounding heart, the constriction of her throat, the unfocused anxiety. She did feel shaken, because she thought she had seen him, her lover. Her dead lover whose mouth had the sweet taste of sherry on it.

And he had appeared so unexpectedly. That was what puzzled her. If she alone had been responsible for his creation, this phantom, he should have arisen from the miasma of her own fears and guilt. Not on a day on which she felt so calm, a day of lazy sunshine and sensuous comfort.

“Perhaps someone you saw reminded you of Jerry Keller. You know, the way he moved. The way he carried his head,” Jane suggested.

“I hadn’t known him that well or that long,” she said. “I’d scarcely met him.”

“Well, Jerry it wasn’t. It couldn’t be,” Jane assured her. “Dead he very much is. Dental records don’t lie.” Her stepsister patted her arm and reached with the other to corral one of her brood.

Dana realized she knew almost nothing about Jerry Keller: what kind of teacher he was, what kind of music he liked, where he lived.

So she found the house where he had lived. It was a medium-sized house on a lovely tree-shaded street in the west of town near the foot of the mountain that reared itself there in a series of short sandstone cliffs. The house was painted white and had two large expanses of glass, one on each of its two stories, to look out, she supposed, on the mountain.

Impulsively she climbed the short flight of stairs to the upper entrance and knocked. She knew Keller had little family, only the one sister, but Jane said there was some student who also lived in the house.

Dana had had the student pointed out to her during a class change as he walked through the hall in the building that housed the English Department. Now he opened the door of Keller’s house.

“Yes?”

She could see the marks of grief on his face, the shadows beneath his eyes. She judged him to be about her own age, maybe a year or two younger. He was as fair as she was dark, with bright, coppery hair, clear skin, gray eyes, and a beautifully shaped mouth.

She hadn’t thought of what to say.

“I was a friend of Professor Keller’s,” she tried. “May I come in?” Her own boldness embarrassed her, and she was afraid he would refuse.

He stepped back automatically, but a little hesitantly, as if he were trying to think of some reason she should not come in.

She looked around a living room of white walls and pale carpet. The walls, she saw, were hung with modem paintings, and there were, of course, the books. Bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling, the length of one wall, flanking the fireplace of stone, which had also been painted white. There were boxes stacked in the center of the room and flowers withering on the hearth. From the funeral, she thought.

“I’m just starting to help his sister crate up his things. You just missed her, by the way. She’s gone out to get more boxes.”

She nodded. “You’re Geoffrey White. I’m Dana Greystoke. Like Tarzan,” she added, repeating the tired line.

“You’re the girl from Texas. Dr. Keller would have been your advisor.”

She decided not to offer her condolences. She didn’t know if it would be appropriate to do so.

“It must be quite a job.” She indicated the bookcase with a nod.

“I don’t mind. It’s the least I could do for her.” He frowned. “I don’t know who’ll be your advisor now. I suppose Bennett will appoint someone. He must have recovered from his fit of ecstasy over Jerry’s death by now and be flapping his way back here as fast as he can. He had just left for Italy, you know, for the summer.”

“You don’t like him?”

“Mason Bennett? He’s a complete jerk. It almost killed him when Jerry — Dr. Keller — was appointed chairman this spring, when old Haliburton retired. They tossed him the bone of Director of Graduate Studies, but it was the chair Bennett wanted. Everybody knew that. I suppose now he’ll get it. They’ve already made him acting chairman. They did that even before they tracked him down in Venice.”

She was looking at the books as he spoke and now felt a coolness touch the hairs on the back of her neck. “That’s the Chaucer.”

“Don’t touch it. It’s very old.”

There were one or two others she thought she also remembered. But there was no mistaking that particular edition of The Canterbury Tales.

“That’s impossible,” she whispered. “They should have been destroyed in the fire.”

“He hadn’t brought his books up to the cabin yet,” the boy explained. “I found them here, boxed and ready to be taken up. I guess he hadn’t gotten around to it.” He looked at her. “How do you know about his collection?”

“I’ve seen it before,” she said. “At the cabin. I was there that afternoon, the afternoon of the fire. He was unpacking these same books.”

The boy jammed his hands into his pants pockets. “You were there? Nobody told me that.”

She shrugged a little guiltily. “I didn’t tell anybody. It didn’t seem important at the time. But I know I saw these books there. I held The Canterbury Tales in my hands.”

“That’s hardly possible, as you can see for yourself,” the boy said crossly. “He always took at least these eight with him up there every summer. But they were here the day he died. I put them out on the shelves again so his sister could see them.”

She could look at them no longer. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She stumbled from the house. When she got to her car, she looked back. The boy was watching her.

She sat on her stepsister’s inexpensive couch. Books and papers littered the coffee table. Her stepsister, divorced, had a fellowship and was teaching a writing class in the evening to help support herself and her children.

One of the children approached Dana shyly with a riddle. “How can you tell if a glass is half full or half empty?”

She shook her head.

“It depends,” he said importantly, “on if you’re filling or emptying the glass. If you’re filling it, it’s half full. If you’re emptying it, it’s half empty—”

“The optimist,” his mother pointed out, eager to impart a precept, “would say it was half full, the pessimist, half empty.”

The child, suddenly bored, darted away.

“He was almost hostile,” Dana said, resuming the conversation the child had interrupted.

“Geoffrey, you mean?” Jane lit a cigarette and waved the smoke away. “Well, the rumor had him head over heels in love with Keller, and more than a little jealous. That probably explains it.”

For a moment she wondered if Keller had reciprocated the boy’s feelings, shared the attachment. She supposed he had. The boy did live with him.

“I met Keller the day of the fire up at the cabin, and I’m certain I saw those books there. Why weren’t they burned in the fire?”

“Immortal works, right?” Her stepsister chuckled. “Okay, obviously they were taken from the cabin after you saw them but before the fire started. He must have taken them back to the house after you had gone, although that really doesn’t make much sense. Whenever Keller moved, he always took the gems of the collection with him. Everybody knew that.”

There wasn’t time for him to take them back to town and then come back to die, Dana thought, but did not say so to Jane.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she agreed.

Later that day, at the university, again without warning — she was sure she had not been thinking of him — Dana thought she saw Keller in the parking lot. She only caught a glimpse of a tall thin man, but she had the breathless certainty that it was he. By the time she could make herself follow him, he had vanished in the jumble of cars. The incident left her perplexed and uneasy. She was afraid that her grasp on reality, ever tenuous, was weakening.

She drove with her usual care up the steep mountain road, but in her eagerness to put the blackened ruin of Keller’s cabin behind her, she took the curve beyond it too quickly. When she tried to slow down, the brake pedal went all the way to the floor without any effect. As the car started to skid across the road, she panicked and turned the steering wheel hard away from the steep drop. The rear end broke free, spinning the car around, and slamming it into the side of the mountain.

She was unhurt. She had not been going very fast. She sat with her forehead against the steering wheel and tried to catch her breath and slow the beating of her heart. She got shakily out of the car to survey the damage. The left rear fender had been badly dented by the impact. The familiar self-loathing seized her. Now she had wrecked the car.

She left the car facing the wrong way, crumpled against the road-cut, and walked the distance remaining to her cabin, where she found that the telephone book was five years old, and partly as a consequence, she had to make four calls before she got someone to agree to tow the car to town. She then went back to the car to wait for the tow truck. While she waited, she wondered what would have happened if the brakes had quit on her way down the mountain.

After a long forty minutes, the man from the garage arrived with a tow truck, crawled under her car, said her brake line was damaged as well as the rear fender, and he didn’t know what else. He said he would have their mechanic call her with an estimate in the morning.

As she watched the car being towed away from her down the mountain and the shadows deepening along the road, she felt herself begin that mindless slide into the anxiety she wanted so to control. The mundane activities of contacting the garage and dealing with the tow truck operator had preoccupied her, but now she was alone again and unable to stop the conviction that was growing within her: He had tried to kill her.

Jane would now be teaching her evening class, but she had to tell someone. It occurred to her that she knew almost no one in the town. She needed to talk to someone who had known Keller. Either the dental records were wrong and he was still alive, or there was some thing that was stalking her.

“I think I saw Keller today,” she said into the telephone.

There was a silence at the other end.

“Why are you doing this?” Geoffrey asked.

She could hear the anger in the student’s voice.

“I think he must still be alive. There must have been some mistake in identifying his body. I think I have seen him twice, and he’s trying to kill me. He tampered with the brakes of my car.”

Her voice sounded high pitched and unconvincing even to her.

“There couldn’t have been any mistake. Jerry’s dead,” the boy said. “You think you’ve seen him?”

“I’ve seen someone — something — that looks like Keller. I’m not making this up. Someone did try to kill me — just now.”

She knew she was losing his willingness to believe in what she was telling him — however much he might want Keller to be alive. And what if he wasn’t alive?

“Can you come up here?” she pleaded. “I’m in the cabin just up from his, the one with the green roof. I’m afraid he’s coming after me.” She was unable to keep from adding, “What if he thinks I should have died with him in the fire?”

“Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

“Please,” she said. She did not want to be alone after dark. “I’m frightened of him — of whatever it is. You were his friend—”

“I have a cousin in the sheriff’s office. He can stop you from harassing me—”

The police. She knew with a chilling certitude that they would think her mad. But she had hoped the boy, because he loved Keller, might listen to her. And perhaps he could stop whatever it was from killing her.

“Please,” she repeated. “Please come up here. See him for yourself—”

The line was dead in her hand, but he had not hung up. Something was wrong with the telephone. She stared at it in frustration. She had to make the boy understand. He had to understand. There wasn’t anybody else.

She went to the window, turning off the light so that she could better see out into the night to where the road ran beneath the pale moon. There was no wind, and it was very still. She could hear none of the sounds that had become so familiar to her during her sleepless nights. She thought the quiet unnatural as she watched the shadows mass along the road.

She made herself concentrate. Now she was afraid of those pills in her pocket. She had to think clearly. The compromises she was making between her perceptions and those of others were breaking down. The gulf between what was real to her and what was real to others seemed to her to be widening.

Still, real things, measurable events, were occurring and would continue to occur outside her mind, regardless of her perception of them. The brakes had been damaged. That was fact: objective, verifiable reality. She had run over nothing in the car that she could remember, no curb or stone. She could think of no way the brakes could have been damaged by accident.

Had she really seen Keller? She thought she had, but that was not a fact. Suppose she hadn’t seen Keller but had seen someone who looked very much like him. But why would this someone try to kill her?

She tried to calm herself to stop the awful pounding of her heart. She really did not believe in phantoms except those of her own making, her own imagination. What she had told the boy she knew was nonsense born of her desperation. She had seen no perturbed spirit. This was a creature capable of physical acts. A man then. A man who must have a very practical reason for wanting her dead.

She thought of the riddle. When is a box half empty or half full?

Then she knew. He had not been unpacking those books as she had assumed. He had been packing them.

There was a sound at the back of the house as the glass in the door gave way.

She could identify him. And she was bound to see him again. And again.

“I read somewhere that killing a person was far easier than killing a duck. I have not found it so.”

He switched on the lamp at the desk. It lit his face from below, distorting the fine cheekbones and throwing his eyes into shadow. “You’re hard to kill. Not like Keller. He was easy.”

She was almost relieved to see him, proving to herself that he was real and not some spectre of her mind. “You couldn’t bear to burn the books, could you? Dr. Bennett, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a thief or a vandal,” he said mildly. “Those books are irreplaceable. After I set the fire, I used Keller’s keys to let myself into his house in town and left them there on my way to the airport.” He stepped closer. In the light from the lamp she could see the old-fashioned straight razor in his hand.

“I thought you’d died in the fire, my dear. You should have, but when I returned from Italy, I discovered they had found only Keller’s body in the ashes. You were the only one who knew I was there that afternoon. Fortunately, you naturally assumed I was Keller. His body was in the other bedroom. Poor timing, my dear.” He smiled sadly, she thought. “You wouldn’t think you’d be so hard to kill...”

She felt a perverse pride in that, and it was that pride that impelled her past him.

He seized her before she could reach the door. He caught her about the waist and swung her toward the bathroom.

“No, don’t!” he said. “Let me ease you into that Good Night.” His mouth was close to her ear. “You wanted it once — I have seen your wrists—”

“No!” she cried. She hadn’t meant it. They all told her she hadn’t meant it. They told her that the serious ones cut the tendons. The really serious ones make their slashes lengthwise and to the bone.

She felt the blade, the cold, the sting, and the bite of it as he drew it across her wrist.

He forced her to her knees with the weight of his body, over the edge of the old-fashioned tub.

His hands were slippery with her blood as he grappled with her. He was too strong for her, but she fought on stubbornly, unwilling to make it easy for him. She felt the blade slide across her other wrist, and she groaned, and then screamed at him.

She heard the door splinter open, and she had a chance to glimpse Geoffrey’s pale face, and then there were others, and hands upon her, lifting her and binding her wounds.

After a time she lay again in a white, orderly place. The nurses came and went on rubber soles, but clattered dishes and trays and dropped enough things to assure her that they at least thought that she would remain among the living.

In the night, when they moved like aquarium fish through green light, she allowed herself to think of her demon lover. She felt only a little anger now, and something akin to pity for the waste of so much knowledge lacking in wisdom. Then she found herself thinking of James, but not with so much pain. It was as though she were merely bruised now and even that was healing. The intense feelings of shame and loss were lessening, fading. In their place was a little sadness, which, as she thought on it, seemed more like peace.

You call me “Evil Captain Bligh.”

  Don’t dump me, I implore!

The salty brine that chills my spine

  blows many miles from shore!

A crew should never mutiny.

  Your leader — do you hear?

Is making hasty plans to be

  the Captain of the Year!

I’ll give you extra rations, men.

  I’ll lay aside the whip.

You’ll never walk the plank again.

  We’ll sail a jolly ship!

I’ll grant you hours of leisure sport,

  with grog in every jug,

And women when you get to port,

  and gold and gifts and—

   G

      L

         U

            G

Though we have already published two short stories by Betty Rowlands, we include now her first work of fiction, a story that won the Sunday Express-Veuve Cliquot short story contest in 1988, and was published that year in the U. K...

It was a perfect summer afternoon in rural England. Birds sang, roses bloomed, couples sipped champagne and strolled beneath stately trees; well-bred laughter echoed across velvet lawns. Outwardly, the scene was idyllic, but to Nicholas, leaning on the parapet of the stone-flagged terrace overlooked by the magnificent southern facade of Lensbury Court, the all-pervading sense of opulence was as acid eating into the soul. By rights, he thought gloomily, he should be the owner of a property such as this. And as he brooded on his own dismal financial situation, there formed in his mind a simple proposition: since Great-Aunt Honoria was the sole obstacle between him and his inheritance, Great-Aunt Honoria would have to go.

Honoria Stacey’s industrialist husband had bequeathed her a vast fortune. Now eighty-five and in frail health, she spent most of her time in her rambling mansion flat in West London, attended by McPhee, a dour Scotswoman who had been her companion for many years. Nicholas was her sole surviving relative but, sadly, she had never shown him any particular affection. On the contrary, she was contemptuous of his lifestyle and scathing about his disinclination for work. For his part, however, he prided himself on his tolerant nature. He bore no malice. From the moment he learned of the untimely demise of his one remaining second cousin, he devoted himself heart and soul to the welfare of his elderly kinswoman.

It was disappointing that his attentions were so little appreciated. Despite his frequent visits and assurances of devotion, to say nothing of money that he could ill afford spent on flowers and chocolates, Honoria treated him with a blend of suspicion and parsimony. None of his hints about the inadequacy of his means evoked so much as an offer to pay for the taxi that brought him regularly to her door. Still, when she was in a good mood, she let it be known that she accepted him, albeit reluctantly, as her natural heir.

While his fellow guests drifted and gossiped around him, Nicholas considered possible ways of disposing of Great-Aunt Honoria. He might beat in her brains with a blunt instrument. There had been a number of reports in the press recently of elderly people being attacked in their homes and robbed of their possessions. If he were to ransack the place and pinch a few things it would seem like burglary — but the noise would inevitably bring the cat-eared McPhee rushing to the scene and he’d be caught red-handed. His stomach turned over at the unintended double meaning; he always became queasy at the sight, or even the thought, of bloodshed.

Strangulation seemed on first consideration to be a distinct possibility. He visualized his hands locked round Great-Aunt Honoria’s stringy throat and the sensation was not unpleasant. He dwelt on it for a while before dismissing the idea as impractical. Despite her age and her dicky heart — her doctor was always warning him that she might pop off at any minute and he had been living in hopes for some considerable time — Honoria was a spirited old bird, quite capable of putting up a struggle and bringing McPhee flying to the rescue. Suffocation with a pillow in her sleep? That would mean being a house guest, and since she never invited him to spend a night under her roof, smothering would also seem to be out.

Shooting he dismissed without a thought. He had no gun and in any case firearms terrified him. Also, there would be the same problems with noise and blood that had made him reject the blunt instrument. It was all very difficult.

“More champagne, sir?” A waiter was tilting a bottle above Nicholas’s empty glass. “Sir Wilfred will shortly be proposing the toast.”

Nicholas took a long swig of the cool, dry wine. That was good. The fellow had said something about a toast — what was the occasion? Ah, yes, Emma Lensbury’s birthday. He hardly knew the girl, but he’d been invited as a friend of a friend. A crowd of them had been driven down in a specially chartered minibus that morning, which was just as well as he’d never have made it on his own. He’d spent most of the journey with his eyes closed, still a bit hung over from the previous evening. A pity; he wasn’t really doing justice to a first-rate vintage champagne.

It was while he was contemplating the dancing bubbles in his glass that he found inspiration. Poison! On his next visit to Great-Aunt Honoria he would take a bottle of her favourite wine and slip in a dose of something lethal. It would, of course, have to be tasteless, without smell, and completely invisible. Almost immediately, however, his brain hit another snag. He knew hardly anything about poisons. Ratsbane and weed-killers, so he’d read somewhere, had painful and protracted effects on their victims. Apart from the off-chance that if Honoria were taken violently ill she would be rushed to hospital, where there was a good chance of her being resuscitated, he didn’t like to think of the old trout writhing in agony. He had a certain grudging admiration for her and he would prefer her end to be peaceful — but he’d like it to be soon.

He caught the waiter’s eye and got another refill. His brain always worked better after a few drinks. His host, in a rambling and interminable speech, was urging the company to wish his little girl a happy birthday. Nicholas applauded and hear-heared with everyone else. He drained his glass and held it out for more.

The solution to his problem came in a flash. Sitting in the bathroom cupboard in his London flat was a small bottle of something a medical student pal had given him long ago when a favourite dog was dying. He couldn’t go to the vet because he already owed him a packet, so his pal managed to get hold of something that could be administered in milk. Old Rex would just drop off to sleep and never know a thing, the chap had promised. As it had happened, Rex had died naturally that very day and the bottle was never opened. Once or twice, Nicholas recalled, he’d thought about chucking it out or giving it back, but somehow he never had. Now he knew why. Fate had intended it for Great-Aunt Honoria.

A painter by training, Liza Cody began her fiction writing career during a particularly cold winter when her studio was too cold to use. Perched in front of the fire, she produced, in longhand, the first book of the Anna Lee mystery series, a book that won the John Creasey Memorial Prize in Britain, and received an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writers of America. Five further Anna Lee novels followed, all critically acclaimed. The story with which Liza Cody makes her debut for us is as distinguished as her longer fiction. It was written in 1988 and is currently being produced for BBC radio, but has never before been published in this country...

Let me tell you something: on a hot day at Fantasy land life can be hell for King Kong. You have to wear long johns for the itching, and by the end of the day they’re soaked. I lost pounds on sunny days. Not that it showed. A woman my size has to lose stones for it to make any real difference.

I’m not complaining. If you take all the facts into consideration, I was lucky to have the job. The facts, of course, are my face and figure.

I was always going to be tall. When the accident happened I was thirteen years old and already five foot ten.

It’s no handicap to be tall. There are plenty of models and basketball players over six feet. But after the accident I began to eat, for comfort really, and you can’t comfort yourself to the extent I did without putting on a lot of weight.

King Kong, at the beginning, was supposed to be a man. But I got the job because I was the only one who fitted the costume. King Kong is a star. I hadn’t even applied for King Kong. No, my hopes were pinned on Hettie Hamburger, one of the cafeteria troupe. But at the last moment, only a couple of days before the grand opening, they switched me with Louis.

Louis, they said, was a little too limp to make a convincing King Kong. “All the rehearsal in the world won’t turn that nancy into a plausible monster,” the artistic director said. They think just because they can’t see our faces we can’t hear what’s said about us. But we can.

“What’s that hulking great hamburger doing at the end of the line?” he said, when he came to inspect the cafeteria. “You can’t have a threatening hamburger. It’ll put the kiddies off their food.”

I thought it was the end for me. If you fail as a hamburger there’s not a lot of hope left. But the artistic director, thank heaven, had a little imagination. “See if she can get into K. K.,” he said.

I could. “Terrific,” the artistic director said. “Dynamite. Put her by the gate for the opening. She’s a natural.”

We opened very successfully, with me and the Creature from the Black Lagoon welcoming the crowds. The kiddies screamed and giggled as I lolloped around growling. They wanted to stroke my fur and have their pictures taken with me.

I can’t tell you how lovely this is for someone like me. Without a monster costume no one wants to take my picture at all, and the kiddies cross the road rather than come face to face with me on the pavement. I love kiddies, but I’ve got to be realistic. It’s unlikely I’ll ever have any of my own. Children are frightened by disfigurement and it’s one of life’s little ironies that they have only come to love me now that it’s my job to frighten them. I’m a wonderful monster, if I do say it myself. Who would have thought that someone like me could succeed in show business?

But it isn’t like that for everyone. My friend Cherry, for instance, used to get very depressed. “I’m a dancer,” she used to tell me. “A good dancer. Well, quite a good dancer. Not a bloody hot dog. It’s an insult, even if I am over thirty.”

She’s over forty, actually, but she’s right: she’s still very pretty in spite of being a little on the plump side. It’s a shame to hide her in a hot dog.

“I’ll give that agent of mine a piece of my mind,” she used to say, “you see if I don’t.” Well, maybe she did or maybe she didn’t. The only thing I know is that two years later she’s still a hot dog, and a good one at that. She says the tips are getting better all the time. She doesn’t positively enjoy the job the way I did, but she doesn’t complain much anymore.

Performers at Fantasyland divide up quite neatly into Freaks and Food, and I think it’s fair to say that of the two, the Freaks are happier in their work. They are the entertainers and the extroverts.

But they are quite territorially minded, too. I had a jungle, about half an acre of mixed conifers and rhododendron bushes with a climbing frame artfully disguised as creeping vines. You wouldn’t catch Godzilla in my domain. He roams the area around the gift shop, while the boating pool belongs to the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Of course, some of the Freaks work in teams. The Tingle-Trail is a miniature railway ride which begins in the Black Forest with the Werewolves in their various stages of transformation and ends in a graveyard with a stunning display by the Zombies, the Undead, and a pair of Bodysnatchers. There are twenty-three employed on the Tingle-Trail alone, and they have to work to a strict timetable.

The others give improvised performances. We all perfected the art of lurking and popping up unexpectedly. It is a delicate balance: shrieks of shock and surprise are the signs of a job well done, but you don’t want to scare anyone into a heart attack. There have been accidents, and we learned to watch out, especially for grandparents. The kiddies are pretty resilient; they want to be terrified. But the grandparents can be rather more fragile.

Although we rarely witnessed each other’s performances, there was a lot of respect around for the way each of us coped with our working conditions. I’d say, for instance, that the Mummy had the most difficult job. The Egyptian Tomb is a maze and a maze is claustrophobic. The Mummy was one of those men who could make something out of nothing. He stayed very still, and when he moved it was almost imperceptible. It was as if he was playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with his audience. He terrified his visitors slowly and subtly and I must say that of all of us, he was the one I admired most.

Mummy used to sing with the Scottish Opera until asthma ruined his career. He was an enormous man, but unlike me he did not work out with weights. He didn’t have to: physical strength was not part of his act. Timing was his forte. I wish I had seen him on stage — with that size and presence, coupled with his sense of timing, he must have been quite electric. Mummy was an artist and an outstandingly gentle person, so we all felt his humiliation personally.

It happened late one June evening. The ticket office had been closed for an hour and the last visitors were trickling away. I had come down from my climbing frame and was beginning to make my way over to the dressing room when a pack of teenage boys burst out of the Egyptian Tomb and chased each other to the exit. I noticed with alarm that one of them was waving a piece of burning cloth.

Fire is something we were all trained to look out for, and my first thought was that a member of the public might be trapped in the maze. I rushed in, calling for the attendant to turn on the house lights. I did not know the tomb very well and I could not waste time running around in the dark searching for a fire extinguisher.

I found Mummy on his back, his costume slashed and his feet smouldering. Smoke and shock had caused an asthma attack. He was in a bad way.

I put the fire out immediately. But it was difficult to get his head-piece off. I had to free my own hands first. My King Kong costume is not designed for dainty work and I wear huge furry gauntlets. We were in a confined space and Mummy is a big man, but I managed at last. His lips were turning mauve.

An asthmatic finds it difficult to breathe lying down. I should have propped him up straightaway. But his costume was stiff and bulky. Luckily an attendant arrived and together we managed to pull apart the intricate system of Velcro and zips that held it together.

Mummy was not badly hurt. His feet were scorched and that was about all. But I could not help thinking about what it must have been like for him trapped in his own tomb, imprisoned in his winding sheet.

The costume had been the provocation. Apparently the boys had wanted to unwrap Mummy. They had become angry and violent when they found they couldn’t.

As I say, what we all felt most keenly was the humiliation. Nosferatu put it best. “It’s the role reversal,” he said. “They aren’t supposed to frighten us. We’re supposed to frighten them.”

That made me think. “But it’s all an illusion,” I said.

“That’s right, K. K.,” said Nosferatu. “It’s all in their minds that we can frighten them, so they give us the power to frighten them. Once they stop playing their parts we can’t play ours, and shebang! — it’s all over.”

It was a conversation I kept remembering in the days that followed. A local newspaper got hold of Mummy’s story and from that time on our public seemed to change.

For one thing, there weren’t so many little kiddies. I suppose the parents and grandparents were afraid of exposing them to hooligans. And there were definitely more hooligans. Incident followed incident. Charley, the Fly, had his wings torn off. Godzilla’s tail was hacked to pieces with carpet knives. A gang of youths tried to electrocute the Bride of Frankenstein. We were being persecuted.

How strange, I thought. Because when you go back to most of the original stories, we monsters only became monstrous to defend ourselves against human persecution. King Kong is a good example. Kong was only trying to defend the tiny creature he loved and that’s why a lot of people leave the movie feeling sorry for him. This is because King Kong is not a horror film. It is a romance. Not many people understand that. But they feel it. And it was always an important aspect of my characterisation to combine King Kong’s raw power with tenderness. It wasn’t difficult: I think I’ve mentioned already that I love little kiddies.

No one could call Cherry the motherly type, but even she missed the children. “I don’t know, K.,” she said. “If I’ve got to be laughed at, I’d rather it was the little ones than these spotty jerks. They just don’t know how to have a good time without hurting someone.”

How right she was. Again, it happened in the evening. They came, five of them, just as my last visitors were leaving. They had hair so short you could see the tattoos on their skulls, and their trousers were tucked into army boots.

They ran in, beating down the rhododendrons with their sticks, yelling, “Where’s the freaking monkey?”

I stayed where I was on the climbing frame. I hoped my little family would escape quietly and go for help. But they stood there transfixed. There were three small children, I remember, all under seven. Their mother was with them, and the old man was probably her father. Very sweet, they had been, taking pictures of me holding the smallest child with the two older ones on either side. I didn’t want them to come to any harm.

Fortunately the hooligans hardly noticed them. They clubbed the base of the climbing frame with their sticks. They tried to shake me off.

“Hoo-hoo-hoo!” they screamed. “Come down and we’ll give you some nuts.” I didn’t move. They could shake that frame all night and it wouldn’t budge.

“We’ll give it some nuts all right,” they said. “If it won’t get down and fight like a monkey, we’ll drag it down.”

They swarmed up my frame. They swung on my ropes. I went from level to level to avoid them. If only the family had gone for help — if only the hooligans had been stupid — I might have got away with it.

But it only takes one with a bit of intelligence to organise the other four into a dangerous unit. He was small. He was neat. He had clear blue eyes that blazed with excitement. He was one of those lads who love a challenge. My agility on the climbing frame was a challenge. It became a competition he wanted to win.

He set three of them to drive me to the edge of the frame. The other he put on a rope. As I prepared to haul myself up to the next level, he sprung his trap.

“Now!” he screamed.

The lad on the rope swung. I saw him. coming but there was nowhere to go. He hit me like an iron pendulum and I flew off the frame and went crashing to the ground. The others dropped on me. I thought my back was broken.

They sorted themselves out soon enough. “Let’s see the bastard,” the leader said. “Get his freaking mask off.”

They tore King Kong’s face off mine and threw it into the bushes.

“Christ!” they said. “Bloody hell! Look at that.”

The little children, who up till then had only been crying, started to scream.

I can hardly bear to remember what happened, next. I suppose it reminds me too painfully of the past. You see, after the accident, after my face healed, my mother decided that it would be best for me to have plastic surgery to put things right. So I went back into hospital where they broke my cheekbones again and tried to rearrange my eye socket. But something went wrong. It does sometimes. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Maybe I rejected my own tissue.

My mother had begun hopefully but after the failure it became harder and harder for the doctors to comfort her. In the end, she took my little sister and went north to Scotland and I never saw her again. It was a relief in a way. Because as she became unable to stand the sight of my face, I became unable to stand the sight of hers. Well, not her face, exactly, more the expression on it. I don’t have to look at myself, but I do have to look at the people who are looking at me. I know I am a fright, and when people look at me they become ugly too.

The last line in the movie King Kong is: “ ’Twas beauty killed the beast.” Well, in my experience, it’s the other way round. When even the prettiest people look at me they become horrible, so the beast kills beauty.

The little kiddies screamed.

The lad with the clear blue eyes said, “God! No wonder it wears a monkey suit.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before I throw up.”

I got up. I couldn’t find my mask. I took off my gauntlets. I hit him on the side of his handsome head, and when he was down I dropped on his throat with all my weight.

You know, sometimes you find a piece of backbone in a tin of salmon, and when you get it between your teeth it breaks with a soft crunching sound. It was as easy as that.

I shouldn’t have done it. I was bigger than him. He was only a kid really — not a child anymore but not grown-up either. But at the time it seemed to me he had taken away everything that was mine. All I had was an illusion anyway — the illusion of being a monster. You can’t kill someone for that. It just isn’t enough.

The funny thing is how nice everyone was about it — even the police. “I understand,” everyone kept saying. They look at my face and they say, “I understand,” as if my face tells them everything, as if a disfigured face clearly explains an ugly action. Even the doctors, who are educated men and should know better, think it was years of taunts and rejection that drove me to murder. My solicitor tells me he’s sure the court will accept a plea of self-defence. “They’ll understand,” he says confidently.

What if I tell the court I just lost my temper? Suppose I tell them, as I’m telling you, that my face doesn’t represent me any more than yours does you? My face is an accident, but I am responsible for my actions. A sad life and an ugly face do not make me any less responsible for losing my temper, do they?

Perhaps they really think I’m King Kong, that I’m not quite human. Just as they feel sorry for King Kong, because although he’s a monster he seems to feel human emotions, so they feel sorry for me. If they really thought I was human they’d deal with me the same way they dealt with that man who murdered his girlfriend last month because she threw a plate of baked beans in his face. They don’t tell him they understand.

But look on the bright side. Fantasyland has a new regulation now and teenagers are not allowed in unless accompanied by a little child. Apart from that, Cherry says it’s business as usual. She says it’s not the same without me though, and she doesn’t think the man who took over my job will last the summer.

“He complains like anything on sunny days,” she told me last time she visited. “He’s got eczema and the itching drives him crazy.”

Cherry should know. Life can be hell for a hot dog, too, on a sunny day. You don’t have to be King Kong to suffer.

The authenticity of Anne Wingate’s police stories is a legacy of the seven years she herself spent in law enforcement before taking a PhD. in English literature and pursuing her dual career as professor and writer. The author now lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and four children...

When you see an FBI agent and two detectives coming in the door of the police station, you figure they’re working on something.

At least, I did, and I said, “Hi, Steve.”

For a minute he looked as if he didn’t even recognize me — no wonder, in this dumb uniform, and after all, I knew he was here but he didn’t know I was here. He’d had no reason to know. But it had only been seven months, and after a moment his eyes focused on me and he said, “Lorene?”

Then he stopped, so suddenly one of the detectives bumped into him, and said, “Are you working here now?”

I started to say yes, but before I quite got the words out one of the detectives growled, “Come on, Hallett,” which didn’t sound too friendly to me, and Steve and the detectives went on.

I headed for the master room to sort out my paperwork, angry tears stinging the back of my eyes. Seven months ago I could have said, “What’ve you got?” and he’d have told me and we’d have talked it over. Or, more likely, he’d have said, “Lorene, come help me with this, would you?”

It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, and no use reminding myself that life isn’t usually. Then I’d been a detective myself, four hundred miles away, but Allen had been transferred, and after all, I was Allen’s wife even if I was beginning, off and on, to wonder if I really wanted to be. So I’d come here, too, and started over as a rookie in this two-bit department, doing routine door-shaking and writing parking tickets, because I was the first female officer this small town had had and they didn’t know what to do with me, never mind that it had been eight years since I’d written a parking ticket or shaken a door.

And to really top things off, Allen and I wound up divorced after all and he’d gone off somewhere else, leaving me stuck here with this Mickey Mouse job and no way at all to go home and no use anyway, they’d filled my slot by now.

And Steve... well, if he hadn’t been married, it would have been very nice to know Steve was here, because let’s face it, he’s an interesting guy, but he was most thoroughly married and the FBI frowns on its agents playing around.

So I went on sorting parking tickets, and never mind the tears in my eyes. Policemen can cry in uniform if they want to. Policewomen can’t.

“Lorene?”

“Sir?” I answered mechanically, before looking up at Sergeant Collins. Detective sergeant, not uniform sergeant.

“Do you know Stephen Hallett?”

“Yes, sir, why?” Was there some reason why I shouldn’t?

“What do you know about him?” Collins sat down companionably on the corner of the table, but his posture was anything but relaxed.

“What do you mean, what do I know? I know a lot of stuff.”

“Tell me some of it.”

“Well, he’s a super-good investigator, one of the best I ever met from the FBI. I mean — oh, you know, most of them don’t really—”

“Investigate. I know. Go on.”

“He’s a nice guy. By that I mean when he’s tired and cross he makes sure whoever’s around knows he’s cross because he’s tired, not because somebody did something. But he doesn’t get cross much.”

“What about his personal life?”

I shrugged. “He’s married. So was I, then.”

“What kind of marriage?”

“Why on earth do you want to know that?”

“Because two hours ago he called 911 and said, ‘You better send somebody out here. I think I just killed my wife.’ And we did, and he had. Now, what kind of marriage?”

Numbly, I bent over to pick up the ticket book I seemed unaccountably to have dropped on the floor. “Okay,” I said, with, I suppose, some vague hope that telling the truth would help him, “okay, okay — kind of marriage. They — I don’t know, Steve isn’t the sort of person to go around crying on people’s shoulders, but I had the feeling it — just wasn’t working, not as a marriage anyway. The only time he said anything to me, we were talking one day and he’d just lost one in court that he should have won, and I said he must have had a lousy jury. And he said he wished Evelyn would say that, but she’d probably just say he was stupid, so he wouldn’t tell her about it at all. And one day — the guys were talking. We had a series-type rapist, and you know how guys talk, and they’d forgotten I was there. Steve said the rapist was getting more than he was. So I said since he was married he ought to be able to solve that problem, and he sort of grinned, but his eyes looked — funny.”

Sergeant Collins looked at the table, and then he got off it and quit trying to pretend we were buddies. “You like him?” he asked, standing straight beside me.

“I like him.”

“Even if he did kill his wife?”

“I don’t know that he killed his wife.”

“He says he did.”

“I still don’t know that he did. Why did you come tell me this anyway? I’m no detective, not here, not now.”

“Because,” Sergeant Collins said, “he says he’ll sign a rights waiver and tell what happened if he can tell you, and only if. Will you get a statement from him?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll tape-record it. Be sure you understand that. Just because he’s your friend doesn’t mean—”

“Look,” I flared at him, “I’m not going to cover up for him and he knows it and he wouldn’t ask me to. And if you feel that way, you’d better sit in on it.”

“Not necessary,” Collins said. “But what I’m afraid of is — he’s smart. You know that. And I’m afraid he’ll on purpose blurt out something as soon as you go in, because he knows you, and then turn around later and claim he wasn’t advised of his rights. So I told him, and I’m telling you, that if either of you says one damn word to the other, even if it’s just hello, before I get that tape recorder turned on, you go right back out the door. And I want the rights waiver signed before I leave the room.”

“You should have already got it signed,” I pointed out not very politely.

Collins sighed, deliberately audibly. “We got one at the scene. But I don’t want him to be able to claim later he was too shocky to know what he was signing. So we get another one signed now.”

“Right,” I said, wondering why he was sounding so belligerent to me. I hadn’t done anything, after all... But then I stopped wondering and followed him into the little interrogation room that looked just exactly like the one at home. Steve was sitting in that straight chair that’s always reserved for suspects, the chair that’s not quite uncomfortable, but certainly not quite comfortable either.

He looked just the way he always looked, his coat neat and his tie straight, but his eyes when he turned toward me seemed almost as empty as his holster. Don’t speak, I reminded myself, but impulsively I reached for his hand. He looked startled. Then, with a long shuddering sigh, he leaned forward, pulling me toward him, burying his face in the blue serge of my shirt. Unexpectedly, I found my hands on his shoulders.

Dragging my hands away, Sergeant Collins caught him by the left shoulder and shoved him back into the chair. “Take off your gunbelt,” he ordered me curtly. “Put it in my office.”

“Right,” I said, seething inside. What did he expect, that Steve was going to grab my pistol and use it to escape? But then I glanced at Steve and realized that was exactly what Sergeant Collins expected, and Steve realized that even if I didn’t. So I walked out the door and into the small office next to it, took off my black basketweave belt, wrapped it around my still-holstered revolver, laid it on Sergeant Collins’s desk, and returned, to smile at Steve with one corner of my mouth. He lifted an eyebrow at me and tried to smile back, but he kept both hands on the table, quite still.

The tape recorder was running now. Sergeant Collins gave the date. “Offense, homicide,” he said. “Victim, Evelyn Hallett. Suspect, Stephen Hallett. Interviewer, Policewoman Lorene Taylor. Now, go ahead.” He shoved the rights waiver over to me. Apparently I was in charge of getting it signed. He hadn’t mentioned that before.

I looked over at Steve, wondering how I was supposed to handle this if I was also not supposed to say one word until after the rights waiver was signed, and then I slid it on over to Steve. He looked at it, looked at the tape recorder, and looked back at me.

This was assuming the proportions of surrealism. It was some kind of bloody awful, rotten joke. Steve and I together had read people their rights; we’d worked together on a lot of cases. In a town just big enough to have two or three federal agents, but not big enough for a regular field office, the federal agents rely on local police support. I hate this, I thought bitterly, and then reminded myself that Steve undoubtedly was hating it a lot more. So I made the little speech, winding up with the usual “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”

Stupid question. This guy had a law degree. “Yes, I do.” Very formal. Steve’s voice, the first time I’d heard it in seven months, oddly husky, but with his usual strength.

“Do you wish to give up the right to remain silent?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then sign right there, please.”

Sergeant Collins signed under Steve and then departed, closing the door very quietly. I wondered who he thought he was kidding. I’d already noticed that the “mirror” in this holding room was a window from Sergeant Collins’s office, and Steve certainly knew it, too. Anybody who didn’t realize Sergeant Collins was putting that window into use — well, that person hadn’t been in police work as long as I had.

But of course I had to pretend I didn’t know it, and so did Steve. “What happened?” I asked.

He closed his eyes, swallowed, reopened his eyes. “I killed Evelyn.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He paused, as if to think about it, and his voice sounded rambling as he began to reply. “I’m six foot three. She’s — she was — five foot two and ninety-five pounds... I don’t know why, Lorene. I shouldn’t have — I shouldn’t have needed to.”

“Did you need to?”

“I guess I must have.” The voice wondering as well as wandering. “I did, didn’t I? So I guess I must have needed to, or at least I thought then I did.”

I know how to question prisoners. You don’t show any impatience, you take as long as it takes, you ask questions right — but this wasn’t just any prisoner hauled in off the street, this was Steve. “Look, darn it,” I said, “I don’t know anything at all about this except they told me to come in here and take a statement from you, and Steve, you ought to have sense enough to know I’m confused enough as it is. Now, will you for cryin’ out loud tell me what happened?”

He jumped as if I’d awakened him from a half-sleep, and tears began to form in his eyes as if only his daze had kept them at bay. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I... look, I’m sorry, Lorene, I just — they’re out there at my house, the crime-scene people, and — Evelyn’s just lying there and they say they won’t move her for hours, and I never worked a killing for cryin’ out loud, but how they can just leave her — and they brought me up here and — and — they won’t even put a sheet over her, and I... I quit loving her a long time ago but I did love her once— It’s Evelyn, and she’s dead — like that — and they won’t even cover her up.”

“You’re not there to see it.”

“But I know.”

“All right,” I said. “I have worked killings, and I wouldn’t move her yet either. And I never covered up a corpse in my life, unless it was outside. You’ve worked crime scenes. To them this is just another crime scene. Now will you please tell me—”

“All right. All right.” Oddly, reminding him it was just another crime scene seemed to calm him a little. “I was working on a— You don’t need to know that.”

Bureau security, even now, I thought irrelevantly.

“Anyhow, I was working and I called my office to check in and they said Evelyn wanted me to call her, and I did. She asked me to come home for lunch. I didn’t know why. We hadn’t been getting along very well, and we’d agreed, oh, a year or so ago, that when I got transferred she’d just stay there. The only reason she changed her mind and came with me after all, when I did get transferred last month, was she’d lost her job about then and thought maybe she could find one here. Did you know I was here?” he asked irrelevantly.

“Yes. I saw you three weeks ago.”

“How come you didn’t yell at me or something, when I didn’t see you?”

“Why should I?”

He looked hurt. “I thought we were friends.”

“Then how come you didn’t know where I went?”

“I was out of town for a trial,” he said. “And when I got back, I... when I got back I went in the detective bureau and was talking to people and you weren’t there and I figured you were on leave or something. But you kept on not being there. And then I asked Ransom where you were and he said, ‘Gone.’ I said, ‘Gone where?’ and he said, ‘She’s not with us anymore.’ He acted like he didn’t know where you went. Or didn’t want to tell me. And so I shut up. I’d have found out if I needed to, but I didn’t, and I figured if you didn’t tell me you must not want me to know. So—”

He shut up suddenly, tightening his lips together, as if by doing that he could stop the slow drip of tears from his eyes.

“I wanted you to know,” I said, afraid even that was saying too much. “But right now—” I nodded to the tape recorder.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Today. Right. She, uh, she thought she could find a job here but she didn’t. At least not yet.”

“Go on.”

“So I didn’t know why she wanted me home for lunch.” He shook his head. “That doesn’t connect, does it, Lorene? What I mean is, she didn’t love me, she didn’t even like me anymore, so why the hell did she want to have lunch with me? But I had time, and so I said okay. When I got there she was lying on the couch; that was nothing new, she’d been doing that a lot lately. She said, ‘Hi, Steve,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Evie,’ and I turned around to lay my pistol on top of the bookcase just like I always do first thing when I get home, and then when I turned back toward her she had a pistol in her hand.”

“Yours?”

“No, I don’t have but the one. I don’t know where she got it from. I’d never seen it before. I asked her what she was doing and she said — real conversational, like she was telling me what the weather was — she said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ So I thought she’d been drinking again — she’d been drinking a lot the last few months, claiming it was because she had a headache, like there was anybody in the world could drink that much and not have a headache — and I said, ‘I’ll come back later when you’re sober,’ and I started to head for the door.”

“Without your gun.”

“Yeah. Like that would really make any big difference. How often do I need a gun? So I started to head for the door, and she shot at me.” It was evident the memory was still more startling to him than frightening. “That’s the only time I’ve ever been shot at. She missed, of course. She’s... she was — a very bad shot. I’d tried to teach her, back before we got married.”

“Where’d the slug hit?”

“I didn’t notice. Somewhere high to my right, I think.”

“Too scared to notice?”

“Too startled. I didn’t have the time to get scared till later. You know.”

Of course he was right. I did know. “Then what?”

“Then of course I asked her why she did that, and she said, ‘You aren’t leaving this room.’ I asked why again, and she told me. In... in somewhat thorough detail, only none of it made sense.”

“In what way?” He shook his head instead of answering, and I said, “Steve, you’re going to have to tell me.”

“She said—” He shook his head again. “Look, I told you we weren’t getting along. And so we weren’t sleeping together. And I’m not saying it was all her fault but it damn sure wasn’t all mine either. Things like that just happen. That’s why divorce courts stay full.” He paused; I wondered if he’d decided that was all he was going to say.

The pause continued, and I said, “I know. I’ve been in one myself lately. Go on.”

“Have you?” He looked briefly interested at that, and then continued. “She was saying it was all my fault — all my fault she always had to work even when she didn’t want to, and that wasn’t true. I make a decent living and she didn’t have to work, but she always said she wanted to, and for the last couple of weeks she’d been mad all the time because she couldn’t find a job she wanted. And she said it was my fault we don’t have any children. Okay, when we first got married we were both still in school and we didn’t want a family until that was behind us. And for the last couple of years, well, you don’t acquire kids by spontaneous combustion. Look, I’d have been ready to have children, but not the way she was drinking, and we weren’t sleeping together and she didn’t want to anyway. But there were about three years between, and I don’t know why she didn’t get pregnant. Maybe one of us was sterile, I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t anybody’s fault. It could be my problem, it could be hers, but guessing at it is stupid. I really always thought it was because she was so thin; she never would eat right, and she ran all the time, it was like she was living on Scotch and air, but that’s beside the point.”

“You’re saying she was anorexic?” I asked.

Steve shrugged. “Anorexia, bulimia, how should I know? I never saw her vomiting on purpose, but I didn’t see her eat very much either. I mean, we could go out to dinner at the nicest restaurant in town and she’d order thirty dollars’ worth of steak and lobster and eat three bites. Five, if I twisted her arm. I mean verbally. I wouldn’t really— Oh, you know. That kind of thing. And the drinking — I knew she was depressed. I got her to go to a doctor and he put her on some kind of antidepressant—”

“Prozac?”

“No, just some sort of — I don’t remember, it ended with ‘ine.’ He said it would take about three weeks for it to work. She took it three days and flushed the rest down the toilet. Said she hated to take stuff.”

“So she was depressed and she wouldn’t do anything about the depression. And she was drinking heavily.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “And she — she’d been acting like she hated me, like it was all my fault she felt like hell. Well, it wasn’t. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t know what she wanted. It wasn’t my fault she fought with all her friends until she didn’t have any left. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t get along with her parents and didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I couldn’t make her take antidepressants. I couldn’t make her stop drinking. I couldn’t create a job for her when there wasn’t one. If I tried to take her out — dancing, or movies, or something — she wouldn’t go.”

“And that’s the background,” I said.

“That’s the background,” he agreed.

“So getting back to today — she started spewing out all this stuff, and you said you were going to leave and come back when she was sober, and she shot at you, and then?”

“And then — she was pointing the gun at me, and I could see that she was cocking it again — she didn’t need to, it was double-action, but I guess she wasn’t strong enough to fire it double-action, and I tried to take it away from her and I got hold of her hand and the gun went off and she went limp and there was blood everywhere—”

He was trained to deal with emergencies. But this was his own personal emergency, of a kind no one ever expects to have to deal with, and he was shaking all over.

Making my voice as impersonal as possible, I asked, “Was the gun still in her hand?”

“Yes, and she was still breathing, so I tried to call an ambulance and the phone was dead, so I ran next door to get the neighbors to call an ambulance, but they weren’t home, so I had to run around to the resident manager’s office and I guess I should have told her to call the police, but I didn’t even think of it, I did it myself—”

“Reporting Evelyn already dead.”

“Lorene, with that much blood—”

“All right, go on,” I said, this time wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.

“So then I ran back to the apartment to see if I could do anything about the bleeding before the ambulance got there, and she was dead.”

“What kind of gun was it?”

“A twenty-two. A crummy little R.G., I think. I saw it when we were fighting over it. I never looked at it afterwards — I didn’t want to — but I’m pretty sure it was an R.G.”

“Steve,” I pointed out, “that’s not murder. If it happened the way you said—”

“I never said it was murder. I said I killed her.”

“I’m not even sure of that, from what you’ve said. Anyway, let me get a typewriter in here and let’s get it down on paper. Do you mind if the sergeant sits in?”

“Not now.”

“Then why didn’t you want him to start with?”

“Because I knew he wouldn’t believe me. You might. And the reason — it doesn’t make sense to me, so why should it to him? And if I started crying — Lorene, I knew he was going to watch and listen anyway.” He looked bitterly at the one-way window. “But if I started crying at least I wouldn’t have to look at him watch me.” Not totally unpredictably, he did start crying then. “I just wish I’d known she hated me that much — she talked about it, but I thought at least half of it was talk — there should have been something I could do, even if it was only get the hell out of there—”

“Steve,” I said, “she could have left if she’d wanted to. Couldn’t she?”

“Yeah. She had money. She had charge cards. She could have found a job in a bigger town, easy. And — I wouldn’t have gone chasing after her to bring her back. And she sure as hell knew that.”

Writing under his own name and three pseudonyms, Reginald Hill combines genres with great originality and success. The Patrick Ruell novels, with equal dashes of romance, espionage, and adventure, are practically a genre unto themselves, while the Dalziel and Pascoe detective novels under his own name have a distinguishing philosophical slant. Running through almost all Reginald Hill’s work, however, is a thread of humor and a touch of bawdiness that make him a continual delight to read...

Alice had been baking jam tarts. If there was one thing Alice could do really well, it was bake. If you wanted another thing she could do really well, you were in trouble. But she was certainly a great baker.

I smelt the tarts even before I entered the kitchen after my morning walk. I always took a morning walk when I stayed at Rose Cottage, not because I liked the exercise but because it gave me a chance to get rid of Alice’s breakfast out of my Times. Normally I’m a Mirror man, but a tabloid’s no good for concealing a breakfast. Alice’s jam tarts were superb, but her fried eggs defied description. Or dissolution, as I had discovered after an unhappy half-hour trying to flush one down the loo on my first visit the previous summer. So I had had to seek other methods of disposal and now the countryside round the village of Millthwaite was littered with caches of Alice’s fried eggs.

I could, of course, merely have rejected the breakfasts, but Alice was a very touchy person. She distrusted me on principle, as she distrusted all men who showed an interest in her poor widowed niece, Sally. But if distrust ripened into dislike, I was finished. So I praised the breakfasts and ordered the Times whenever I came to Millthwaite.

I stood and looked at the tarts cooling on the kitchen table. There were two dozen of them, intended, I surmised, for the Women’s Institute Fete that afternoon. I breathed in the rich seductive smell of warm pastry and hot jam. And I was tempted.

Why a man as eager to be liked as I was should have let himself be tempted is hard to explain. All I can say is four-and-twenty looks pretty like an infinity of tarts, and also I was very hungry. After all, I’d had no breakfast.

I picked one up. It made a single delicious mouthful. I had a second in my hand when I realized I was being observed.

Standing outside the window was the monster, Lennie. His wavy jet-black hair curled down over his brow, almost hiding the cold grey eyes which I felt rather than saw staring at me accusingly. At five years old, Lennie gave every promise of becoming as morally unscrupulous as his father.

I smiled reassuringly at him and offered him a tart. He was, after all, Sally’s son and the apple of Alice’s eye and I would do well to keep in his good books. But the little monster shook his head and said, “Fete” — or it might have been “fate.” Either way, it sounded like a threat.

With a sigh, I reached into my pocket and found it was empty, an all too common discovery of late. I had never realized how much our little contracting business depended on my partner, Leonard, until he fell off the scaffolding. I had tried to keep Sally’s share up at the old level, as I didn’t want Alice to get a sniff of my inefficiency, but it left me perpetually short.

Young Lennie didn’t have the mien of a child ready to be fobbed off with promissory notes. Debating what was best, I glanced idly round the kitchen and my eyes fell on a fifty-pence piece in a saucer on the shelf behind the cellar door. I picked it up. Lennie brushed his black locks aside to get a better view, and when I lobbed it through the window he plucked it out of the air like an on-form slip fielder. Then he was gone.

Just like his father, I thought as I went upstairs. You didn’t have to spell things out for him.

I met Sally coming out of the bathroom. She liked rising late when she could, which was useful to me as it meant I could breakfast alone. Sally was almost as sensitive on Alice’s behalf as the ancient beldame herself, and I wouldn’t have cared for her to catch me at my sleight of hand with the Times. I’d never thought of Sally as a particularly “loyal” person; in fact, as far as Leonard went, my experience had pointed quite the other way. But it turned out that she was a scion of one of those old blood-is-thicker-than-water bucolic families and after Leonard’s death she hadn’t hesitated to accept Aunt Alice’s invitation to come and stay till she “got herself sorted.” I had done all I could to help Sally bear her tragic loss and would have done a great deal more, but her sojourn at Millthwaite had somehow reawoken a whole ocean of sleeping Krakens, notably a sense of family and (worse still) a sense of propriety.

No, she hadn’t gone off me, she explained, as I tried to arrange a tryst in her bedroom on my first visit, but it wasn’t right, not here, in Aunt Alice’s house. And when I suggested what Aunt Alice might care to do, our relationship almost came to a close there and then. Left to herself, I had no doubt that in the end she would marry me. But Leonard’s death hadn’t left her to herself. It had left her to Lennie and to Alice and I wasn’t about to get my share without their express approval.

There was, besides, a more comfortably mercenary motive. Alice’s small fortune (“in the funds,” would you believe?) was going to come Lennie’s way, via his mother — but not if she rushed into a foolish second marriage. And even after three visits to Millthwaite, my suitability was still very much under scrutiny — and (though it hurt to admit it) not only by Alice!

Sally looked very fetching in her nightie and I couldn’t resist giving her a passionate embrace, which she permitted only because we could hear Alice in the hall below trying to make contact with the idiot girl who looked after the village’s tiny telephone exchange. My own recognition of the need for caution couldn’t survive such close contact with that soft flesh and I was trying to maneuver Sally back into the bathroom when Alice’s voice rose sufficiently to penetrate even the drumbeat of hot blood in my ears.

“Constable Jarvis!” she bellowed. “That’s who I want! No reply? What if I was being assaulted? — No, I’m not! I’ll try later!”

She slammed the phone down as I descended the stairs, having abruptly abandoned my assault on Sally much to her surprise and, I hope, disappointment.

“Anything wrong, Alice?” I asked casually.

She regarded me with distaste. She was a big-boned, grey-haired countrywoman in her late fifties and anger turned her face a greyish-purple and drew the sides of her mouth down till they almost touched her chin.

“You didn’t eat any of my tarts, did you?” she demanded.

No one in his right mind would have admitted it at that moment.

“No!” I said emphatically. “Are some missing?”

“Four,” she said.

Four! I’d only taken two! The monster, Lennie, must have returned and taken the others. How like his father, to add theft to blackmail!

Without compunction I suggested, “Perhaps Lennie helped himself?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “The milkman’s money’s gone from the shelf, too. He’d not do that.”

But you still asked me! I thought indignantly. What a world it was where children received more trust than their elders. Especially a child whose criminal inheritance stood out like a love-bite on a nun.

“No, I know who it’d be,” she continued grimly. My blood chilled. “I saw that tramp, the one they call Old Tommy, hanging around earlier. He kept going when he saw me, he knows there’s nothing for the likes of him at my house. He must have come back through the kitchen garden later. I’ll get Jarvis after him as soon as he bothers to answer his phone.”

So saying, she picked up the telephone once more.

I went through the kitchen, avoided the temptation of the depleted but still heavily loaded tray of tarts, and strolled out into the morning sunshine. It seemed like a good time for a walk. If I could have spotted young Lennie, I’d have invited him along, not because of his sparkling conversation but merely to have him out of the way when P.C. Jarvis arrived. But he was nowhere in sight, so I had to be content with making myself scarce.

Not that there was much to bother about. I’d seen this tramp, Old Tommy, pretty frequently on my egg-disposal expeditions along the country byways and he looked a natural suspect for all petty crime in the district. So I strolled along enjoying the warm sunshine, the lush green fields gilded with buttercups, and the warbling of innumerable birds. Even the distant pop of a shotgun as some unsentimental farmer tried to cut down on the warbling seemed to blend in with the overall rich sensuous pattern of Nature.

The pattern became a little threadbare round the next corner. There, sitting in the hedgerow like a pile of household rubbish dumped by a passing vandal, was Old Tommy. Some tramps are picturesque at a distance. Close or far, Tommy was revolting. Such skin as could be seen through the layers of rags and the tangles of lank gingery hair was a mottled grey, like moldy bread. He was stuffing some sort of food he held wrapped in an old newspaper into the mouth which doubtless lay beneath the beard and he didn’t even look up as I passed. I would have ignored him also if it hadn’t been for a sudden shock of recognition.

That was no ordinary food he was eating! That was one of Alice’s solid fried eggs!

Surely a man could get no lower than this? I stopped and shared the horror of his degradation.

Now he looked up and acknowledged my presence.

“I would appreciate a little more salt,” he said. “If you could manage that one morning.”

Now my shock was doubled, or even trebled. He knew who I was! No wonder I’d seen him so frequently on my post-breakfast trips. Whenever I was at Millthwaite, it must have been like room service to him!

But worse still was his voice. This was no mumbling, half-witted derelict, but an educated man. The Times wasn’t just a container — he was holding it the right way up and reading the grease-stained news.

“Watch it, mate!” I blistered. “I’ll have the law on you.”

I daresay he looked surprised beneath the hair.

“What for?” he said. “Stealing your breakfast? You shouldn’t leave it lying around in ditches, should you? Now push off, will you, I want to get on with my paper.”

So saying, he opened it wide and I observed the words “Rose Cottage” scribbled plainly on the front page. If Jarvis questioned him about the money and the tarts, not only did he have the articulacy to defend himself, he had the evidence to support a counterattack. If this got back to Alice, her fury would be formidable.

I could see that there was little profit to be gained from arguing with Old Tommy. Threats weren’t going to work and I lacked the wherewithal to bribe him. In any case, as I’d found with young Lennie, bribery only got you in deeper. So with an affection of indifference, I began to retrace my steps.