EDITORIAL NOTES

Friday, April 1, 2011

EDITOR’S NOTES

The Art of Murder Murder is not a pretty picture. As a moral issue, it may be black and white, but in a world less stark, the circumstances often paint a more nuanced image. Motivations add emotional...

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EDITORIAL NOTES

EDITOR’S NOTES

The Art of Murder

Murder is not a pretty picture. As a moral issue, it may be black and white, but in a world less stark, the circumstances often paint a more nuanced image. Motivations add emotional tonalities; the players involved add color and vibrancies; method orders the composition of the canvas. And the literary representation of murder allows us to . . . enjoy a horrendous crime at an artistic remove.

You might go so far as to say that reading mystery stories is cathartic. One or two little murders (or seven, such as we have in this issue), discretely captured in well-written tales, will provide hours of relaxing, engaging entertainment. Such artistic mayhem can even be delivered right to your door every month when you take out a subscription to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine!

LINDA LANDRIGAN, EDITOR

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JOHN R. CORRIGAN is the author of the Jack Austin series of pro-golf mysteries (Out of Bounds, 2006). Once a city newspaper reporter, he now teaches at Connecticut’s Pomfret School. This is his first published short story. This issue features the sixth installment of MIKE CULPEPPER’s Trollfarm...

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EDITORIAL NOTES   FICTION

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The Lineup

JOHN R. CORRIGAN is the author of the Jack Austin series of pro-golf mysteries (Out of Bounds, 2006). Once a city newspaper reporter, he now teaches at Connecticut’s Pomfret School. This is his first published short story.

This issue features the sixth installment of MIKE CULPEPPER’s Trollfarm series, which began with 2009’s “The Icicle Judgment.”

Booked & Printed columnist ROBERT C. HAHN also reviews mysteries for Publishers Weekly and the New York Post.

DOUGLAS GRANT JOHNSON has worked in the movie industry as a screenwriter, producer, and director. His last story for AHMM was “No Trouble At All” (July/August 2010).

ELAINE MENGE grew up in Louisiana and is a former English professor at the University of New Orleans. Her story “Scavenger” appeard in the July/August 2009 issue of AHMM.

PERCY SPURLARK PARKER divides his time at home in Las Vegas between the slot machines and his word processor.

GIGI VERNON , a university reference and digital services librarian, writes academic history articles when not writing mystery stories.

CHRISTOPHER WELCH has firsthand experience of both the art and legal worlds, having been a playwright and an attorney. He lives in Rhode Island.

FICTION

FICTION

FORGOTTEN MAN

GIGI VERNON

Art by Edward Kinsella III I’d never squealed on anyone, though I’d had more chances than most blokes, and I had no intention of starting now, even though the guv’nor, my American boss George Carston,...

SHOOTER

JOHN R. CORRIGAN

“I’m still a shooter,” Pete Peters said to me. “They made me into one when I was eighteen.” It was fifteen degrees outside in early December. We were drinking Jack and Cokes in Jumpers Bar on Main Street in Darlington, Connecticut, which is just east—but a full tax bracket—from Hartford and its...

THE ART OF ENMITY

CHRISTOPHER WELCH

Art by Ron Chironna Not much happens in the Berkshires’ art scene during the winter. Except once in a while an artist gets murdered. Even that doesn’t happen very often. Academic symposiums and panel...

SWEET THING GOING

PERCY SPURLARK PARKER

Officer Bob Rycann climbed out the back of the squad car adjusting his uniform. He’d driven deep into the alley, the night shadows covering his activities. He looked around to see if he could detect any onlookers, but the shaded windows of the surrounding buildings were as dark as the alley itself....

THE PARROTT CANNON AFFAIR

DOUGLAS GRANT JOHNSON

Art by Linda Weatherly Everyone agreed the cannon was on the roof. It had somehow gotten from its accustomed place next to the flagpole and onto the roof of the Augustus V. Millbank Administration...

THE WITCH-COUPLE

MIKE CULPEPPER

Art by Tim Foley In those days, many people in Iceland knew some magic. Some had learned the Sami art of finding lost things. There were those who knew words that kept away elves and trolls and others...

LOST IN A STRANGE NEIGHBORHOOD

ELAINE MENGE

Travis pumped the pedals like a wild man. A fever powered him. The fever of triumph. Today he’d kept up with the younger guys for the first time, even in this cold. During cooldown, his breaths condensed so visibly in the evening air, he felt himself going gleefully cross-eyed at the sight. Since...

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FICTION

FORGOTTEN MAN

GIGI VERNON

Art by Edward Kinsella III

I’d never squealed on anyone, though I’d had more chances than most blokes, and I had no intention of starting now, even though the guv’nor, my American boss George Carston, deserved it. And not because I’d lost my job, no. Far worse.

There we stood in New York’s Bowery Mission breadline. Unlike the rest of us, the guv’nor wasn’t humiliated, head hanging, shoulders hunched, shuffling to stay warm; he was roaring drunk again on bootleg he’d managed to beg, borrow, or steal. To the tune of the American national anthem, he sang lyrics of his own creation.

The way he carried on, I needn’t have worried about squealing. Sooner or later he’d get himself nicked. “Mr. Carst—George, give it a rest!” I ordered. “You’re going to get us thrown out of the queue.”

Exaggerating his alarm at my reprimand, he recoiled into a woman behind him who reeked like she’d bathed in hamburger grease.

She shrieked and slammed into a skinny, hatless and coatless fellow. He reached around the woman and smacked Mr. Carston. “Millionaire boy, do us all a favor and get out of line. So there’s more for the rest of us, see?” He bared his horsey, crooked teeth in a grin.

I intervened. “I apologize for my mate. He’s had a bit too much. We’re as down on our luck as the rest of you.”

The bloke repeated my words, aping my accent, badly I must say, then pushed my chest in challenge, trying to dislodge me from my spot. “What are you? His English butler?”

With a sloppy and charming grin, Mr. Carston slurred, “What-if-he-is?”

“Couple of pansies.” The man flailed at us both.

My left connected with his jaw. Down he went onto the pavement in a sprawl, then bounced up even angrier.

From out of nowhere, a stocky, blue-coated copper inserted himself between us. “That’s enough, lads.”

“Officer,” Mr. Carston said respectfully, and hiccupped.

I don’t suppose even his own mother would have known George Carston now, his face bearded and smudged with soot, his clothes stained, rumpled, and torn. I held my breath both hoping and fearing the peeler would recognize him.

For a moment it seemed like he’d oblige. He surveyed Mr. Carston severely.

Unable to stop myself, I moved in front to block his view. “We lost everything in the crash, sir,” I said. “We’ve nowhere to go and nothing to eat.”

Instead of pegging Mr. Carston for the criminal he was, and hauling him off to the slammer, the copper let us off with a warning. “Then behave yourselves, do you hear? The sisters have got their hands full without your malarkey.” Then he sauntered off, whistling and twirling his nightstick.

I wanted to call him back, “Here’s an arsonist and murderer!” and hand over Mr. Carston, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Even though I kept a nickel in reserve for that very reason.

It was my own bleedin’ sense of loyalty that stopped me. I’d been saddled with it since childhood in a London orphanage, through soldiering in Her Majesty’s Army, and serving as a footman in a Sussex country house. Years of butlering for an obscenely rich and wildly successful American speculator, George Carston, had done nothing to shake it.

It must have been a couple of weeks after Black Tuesday—it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re tramping—that I drove up the long sweeping curve of the drive to find Mr. Carston watching his Long Island mansion burn, a revolver in his hand.

I’d never seen him with a gun before, but he hadn’t been himself since the crash. Since then he’d been drunk, and so had his wife. I never cared much for Mrs. Carston, but he adored her, had bought the mansion for her, in fact. Lately, she’d been kicking up row after row. The best butlers acquire a deaf ear to private conversations, and I was a very good butler, if I say so myself. All the other servants had been fired three days earlier, and that morning, when I’d left on my day off to reluctantly and discreetly seek alternate employment, the only occupants of the house had been me, Mr. Carston, and his wife.

I braked and tumbled out of the borrowed Model T, not even bothering to cut the engine or shut the door.

A loud rumble like a howitzer transport startled me, and then into the headlights stampeded a herd of panicked horses from the stable adjoining the house. At the last instant, they swerved and galloped into the dusk.

My voice shaky with dread, I asked, “Where’s Mrs. Carston, sir?”

He was so blotto he could hardly stand, his knees kept trying to buckle and his feet wouldn’t stay put. Tears started running down his face, and he dropped the gun in the withered grass of the unmowed lawn.

I knew then, though I couldn’t believe it. Sickened and dazed, I left the Ford’s motor running and walked away, back down the drive, toward town, my only possessions the clothes on my back and the eight dollars and sixty-eight cents in my wallet.

I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Mr. Carston following. He staggered and lurched like a mindless monster, a Frankenstein, his eyes black wells of horror in the darkness. I’d seen plenty of mates like that in the trenches. Shell shocked they called it when they locked them up in an asylum with the other nutters.

He followed me into Manhattan and to the Bowery’s seven cents a night flophouses, and he’s been following me ever since. He’s been drunk ever since too. I know I should have bleedin’ turned him in the first chance I got, but I couldn’t. We landed in it together, and right or wrong, like it or not, you don’t let your mates down.

In no time we’d run through my money. There was no work to be had, and meanwhile more jobless men arrived every day. Then it was Skid Row, and the beds in the YMCA when we could get them, and sleeping in doorways or under the Manhattan Bridge when we couldn’t. When the nights grew colder we took refuge along the waterfront with the hobos in their camp of shanties—their jungles, they called them.

The hardship of the hobo’s life came easily to me, and the camaraderie too. Must’ve been my institutional upbringing. It was a jolly sight better than the trenches. And the guv’nor . . . did he even realize where he was or what he’d done?

Rain drummed on the cardboard that served as my shanty’s roof, and my worries and the night’s chilly damp kept me awake. I heard a distant shout, and then Mr. Carston ducked inside, a mackintosh slung around his shoulders like a cape.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

Drunk, he muttered, “What?” and wilted onto our bedding of newspapers to sleep. A moment later there was a bellow and a weight crashed on top of us, collapsing the shanty and burying us.

I squirmed out and found Pinks, an old Negro from our jungle, screaming, “Sonofabitch!” and beating the guv’nor under the cardboard.

I pulled him off.

“That low-down thievin’ rascal done stole my trenchcoat,” Pinks said, drunk, but not as drunk as the guv. “Right out from under me!”

The rest of our jungle woke, and Fosterman, Dug-loon, R.R., Mr. Smith, Pete, and some of the newcomers gathered around to see what the commotion was.

R.R., who had a long Old Testament beard and was generally looked up to as our captain, pushed Pinks aside. He dug through the rubble, stripped the mackintosh away, and handed it back to Pinks.

On the ground, Mr. Carston curled up into a ball and groaned.

“He’s a bum,” R.R. pronounced. Bums—hooch-crazy drunks—were despised by all true hobos.

“What-if-I-am?” Mr. Carston muttered.

The rain pelted down, soaking us. Shivering, Dug-loon, Fosterman, and Pete went back to bed.

R.R. stood over the guv and said in his disappointed manner, “George don’t contribute nothing. Don’t bring nothing for the pot. Don’t do a blessed thing for anyone but himself.” He reached down and pulled the guv up. “George’s gotta leave on account of thieving. He’s no longer welcome.” He pulled a matchstick out of his pocket and extended it. “Go build your own fire.”

On his feet, Mr. Carston swayed and blinked at us, grinning sloppily, oblivious that he’d just lost the jungle’s protection and aid.

In the past few weeks, I’d learned a lot about the jungle’s rituals which reminded me quite a lot of the trenches. You didn’t kip from your mates, and you shared what you had, no matter how little.

What was I supposed to do? You can’t kick a man when he’s down and retain your self-respect. It’d be like hurting a child or a dog. But that doesn’t mean I was bleedin’ happy about it. “If he goes, I go,” I said slowly.

“That’s a real shame,” R.R. said, regretful.

“Naw, you stay, Will. We like you,” shy Mr. Smith said. “We like you a whole lot.”

“I like you, too, Mr. Smith, but I can’t desert the guv’nor. Not now.”

“Don’t never even share his liquor neither,” Pinks grumbled. “And he’s got cash too.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We lost everything.”

“I seen it.” Pinks tackled Mr. Carston, tore off a shoe and sock, and triumphantly waved some bills. “You was thinking he got his moonshine from the hooch fairy? Or the Salvation Army whiskey line?” He cackled and slapped his thigh.

The rest of us, me included, stared openmouthed. He’d had money and he’d let me panhandle change and stand in breadlines? Resentment tightened my throat.

I looked at R.R., Mr. Smith, and Pinks for a long moment—faces grimy and lined with outdoor living. They’d taken us in, shared their campfire and pot, and he—we’d betrayed them.

“What’d you say now, Will?” R.R. asked with a sorrowful half smile. “The matchstick don’t apply to you. Gonna stay with us?”

Unwillingly, on George’s behalf, I took the match from R.R. “I guess not.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pinks sneak off, bills clutched in his hand, and I tore off after him.

In a huff, I gathered up our belongings and stalked away, so angry at myself for going along with the guv, I couldn’t bloomin’ speak. He didn’t even notice. I found a doorway protected from the rain for us, huddled down, and waited for the dawn.

I must have drifted off. Next thing I knew, a warehouse owner nudged me with his boot. “Hey, mister. Move along.”

Mr. Carston was gone, but I wasn’t too worried. He must’ve gone in search of more liquor. He’d be back. Somehow he always found me.

It’d stopped raining and I made my way to Mr. Zero’s soup kitchen for a handout of sandwiches and coffee, then cleaned up and shaved as best I could at a public toilet. Futile as it was, as I did first thing every day, I made the long trek to the Midtown employment agencies for domestic help. No one was hiring servants. Afterwards, knackered, I rested my aching feet on a bench in Central Park while I read yesterday’s Post plucked from a rubbish bin. An editorial on unemployment that talked about the “forgotten man” caught my eye, but didn’t hold my attention. I turned the page, and my stomach lurched when I saw the headline THE BUTLER DID IT! and an old blurry photograph of me.

My face burned with shame. Were there any peelers about? No. I looked around expecting people to recognize me and raise the alarm. But no one took any notice of another out-of-work bloke dozing in a sitting position to avoid arrest for vagrancy.

Tweed cap pulled down over my eyes and chin buried in my coat, I stuffed the newspaper in my pocket and hurried down a less exposed side street. A crowd of fifty or so men blocked an intersection. Must’ve been the promise of a job, a couple of hours work for two or three men unloading a truck or carting away junk. I squeezed into the throng and read.

The article described how Mr. and Mrs. Carston had been shot and their house torched. A new witness, our former housekeeper, had come forward claiming I’d always despised Mrs. Carston and that I’d sworn vengeance after she fired me. It was balderdash, of course. The housekeeper was known to embellish to no end if it shone a spotlight on her.

My pulse raced. Even my bloomin’ loyalty had its limits. I wasn’t about to take the fall for George Carston. I couldn’t wait for him to come to his senses. I had to find him now.

Always the way, isn’t it? Neither hide nor hair to be seen. Back in the Bowery, Mr. Carston wasn’t in the usual places—the benches under the Manhattan Bridge arch depicting the buffalo hunt, Chatham Square, the Brillo factory warehouses.

I paced the streets figuring I’d eventually cross his path or he’d cross mine, but I didn’t. He didn’t.

At the jungle, I showed R.R., Pinks, and Mr. Smith the article and explained my bleedin’ predicament. Mr. Smith was anxious for me, and Pinks, who’d never learned to read, spat his disgust.

“He ratted you out,” R.R. said, mournful and quiet. He squeezed my shoulder.

I shifted and he dropped his hand. “Mr. Carst—George? No, it wasn’t him, but I need to find him.”

Like good trench mates, they didn’t waste time asking unnecessary questions, they just put their shoulders to the task and went off to search.

Pinks knew most about Mr. Carston’s habits, but even he didn’t know where the guv’nor obtained his bootleg. Pinks himself often resorted to a twenty-five-cent bottle of smoke—poisonous wood alcohol sold at local dime stores for medicinal use, but the guv hadn’t sunk that low yet. His bottles held genuine moonshine whiskey which he must have obtained from a blind pig—an illegal pub.

Blind pigs and speakeasies survived because they paid off the local police and kept a low profile as private clubs, with unmarked doors, passwords, and secret knocks. Finding them, the right one, might not be easy.

Pinks guided me to the ones in the Bowery. The bouncers wouldn’t let us so much as step inside. “Get outta here, you stinking bums!” But they were willing to answer a question or two outside if we kept our distance. They knew George all right, but none of them had seen him that day.

I resumed my pacing and Pinks returned to the jungle. The guv must have another source, outside of the Bowery. Someone or some place from his life before Black Tuesday? I thought hard, sifting my memory for snatches of conversation I’d tried not to overhear. Names, dozens and dozens of names—bankers, college chums, brokers, politicians, scions of old New York families, and bootleggers that I wasn’t conscious of remembering. It took me all afternoon to sort through them. Absently, I stepped in a pothole full of rainwater and soaked my foot, and then it came to me. Gilderman the bootlegger. Mr. Carston, I realized for the first time, had financed the man’s business.

I returned to the blind pig near the Bowery armory and asked the bouncer, “Ever heard of a joint run by Gilderman?”

He was a man of few words, his head oversize like an ox, with large eyes and thick lips.

“Just tell me where to find it and I’ll be on my way,” I pleaded. “I won’t tell anyone. Who’d listen to me anyway?”

He thought about it, slow as treacle, then relented. “He’s got a place in Harlem at 135th and Seventh in the basement.”

By the time I arrived it was dark. There was nothing secret about the joint. The entrance was marked with its name in neon, THE PARLOR, an awning, and a doorman as elegant as any on Park Avenue. A chauffeured car pulled up and two flappers climbed out and sashayed inside. I waited for a pause in the arrivals, then approached. The uniformed doorman, with enough gold on his shoulders to be a general, took one look at me and guffawed. “You have got to be kidding.”

“Please. I’m looking for someone. George Carston.”

“Never heard of him. Now get lost.” He pantomimed a good-natured kick.

“You haven’t seen a bum who’s friendly with Gilderman?”

“That sorry boozer’s your pal? No offense. Didn’t know that was his name. Around back.” He hiked a thumb toward an alley alongside the building, then shoved me aside to get the door for a woman in a swishing satin gown.

The alley was dark and stank like a latrine. After a few steps the light from the streetlamp ran out, and I couldn’t see anything. “Mr. Carston?” I called.

A side door banged open, and someone propped it. Out of the kitchen poured light, steam, and the salivating smell of seafood.

I spotted the guv’nor sitting on a wooden packing crate.

“Good evening, Will,” he said, and took a pull from a bottle. Several more bottles, unopened and full, huddled around his feet.

I seemed to have caught him between binges. He was fairly sober, more like his old self before the crash. The shock knocked me off balance, and I reverted to our former roles. “There you are, sir. I’ve been looking for you. Let me help you up, sir.”

“I’m quite comfortable here. Care to join me?” He extended the bottle, in one of his characteristic generous and democratic gestures.

It disarmed me, always had, the way he could so easily and casually treat me like an equal. I’d only known British aristocrats and officers who’d been bred to think they were better than everyone else. A rush of renewed affection for him warmed me. “Thank you, sir, but I’ll pass on the drink.”

He retracted his hand quickly like he regretted the offer and was relieved I refused. He gulped more booze, watching me over the bottle.

Should I let him drink himself into oblivion, then ring the peelers, anonymously giving them the real story and his whereabouts? That was the irresponsible way out, wasn’t it? I couldn’t. I pulled up another crate across from him and sat, so I could speak man to man. “The fire and Mrs. Carston. You’ve got to tell the police what happened, sir.”

His eyes grew moist and he blinked. “You know I never fought in the Great War. I was too young to be called up.”

Not knowing what to make of the abrupt change of subject, I found myself falling back on my domestic service training, which wasn’t much different than the soldier’s drill, and answered noncommittally, “Sir.”

His hands showed the tremors, and the bottle shook. “You were at the Somme?”

“Yes.”

He regarded me and I regarded him. He seemed to want me to say something, so I said, “It was no picnic.”

“But you managed.”

“Had to. Wasn’t much choice, was there?”

“You must have killed a lot of Germans. How many, would you say?”

Ah, now I understood his train of thinking. “Not something I care to think about. The Jerries were just blokes like us, following cock-and-bull orders from their own brass. I’m not proud of any of it.” The memories made me furious. The bleedin’ waste of it all, and my own part in it. Being such a bleedin’ loyal soldier.

I gently tugged the bottle from his grasp before he had a chance to drink more. “The police, sir.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“No, sir, of course not,” I said soothingly, “but they’d like to talk to you.”

“Can’t we just forget about it?”

So he did remember. “I know it must be painful, sir,” I said cautiously, “but you see, I’m being blamed for it.” I handed him the newspaper.

He glanced over the article. “Well, we can’t have that, now, can we?”

“No, sir,” I said, surprised and heartened.

The peeler on duty came around the police station counter. “Get along with you now. The drunk tank’s full. Try the Salvation Army.”

I explained.

He looked us up and down skeptically. “That’s quite a tale you’re spinning just for a hot meal and a night on a jail cot.”

I showed him the newspaper.

Still skeptical, he stepped to a phone mounted on the wall, cranked it, and asked an operator to be connected with a Long Island precinct. An abrupt, muffled conversation ensued. He rang off and turned to us.

“Care to take a seat, Mr. Carston? The lads from the Seventh are on their way.”

We didn’t wait long. Four men in uniforms and a pair of detectives in bowlers arrived breathless. They must have hung up, jumped in a car, and, sirens blaring, raced into Manhattan. The detectives resembled each other so much they could have been brothers, both short and stout with tired, doughlike faces.

They introduced themselves as Detectives Farrel and Leon and shook George’s hand.

“We assumed you were dead, Mr. Carston,” Farrel said. “We didn’t find a corpse, but no one’s seen you since the fire. It’s good to be wrong for once.” He turned to me. “You’re the butler?”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t offer to shake hands with me. “Thought so. Recognized you from the photo.”

They led us to a windowless room filled by a wooden table and chairs bolted to the floor that reminded me uncomfortably of an officer’s trench dugout. The two detectives sat on one side of the table, leaving us no choice but to sit opposite them.

Leon said to me, “Now, son, tell us about that night.”

I was hardly Leon’s son, but I obliged.

Farrel scribbled while I talked. I tried to read upside down, but he shielded the page with his pudgy hand like a schoolboy hiding his exam answers. When I finished, he looked at his partner and lifted an eyebrow. Something passed between them before they turned unflinching gazes back on me. “Why didn’t you come forward at the time?”

“It was none of my affair. That was for Mr. Carston to do,” I said.

George began to cry, silently, pressing his fingers over his eyes, and the room filled with the stench of boozy tears.

Detective Leon dug out a wadded-up handkerchief from his breast pocket and pushed it into George’s hand.

George pressed it against his mouth, trying to stifle his sobs.

The two detectives leaned back, got out packs of coffin-nails, and lit up. They sat silently smoking, eyeing him and me, patiently waiting for George to get hold of himself.

Embarrassed for George, my face reddened. “I wonder if I might be excused now that I’ve told you what I know?” I asked, getting to my feet.

Farrel motioned me back down.

Coughing in the fug of smoke, I sat.

Detective Leon stepped out and returned with two cups of water and placed them in front of George and me.

After a time, George quieted and he said, his voice hoarse, “It was an accident. She didn’t mean to.”

“She?” Farrel asked.

“My-my-my wife Judy. It’s all my fault.”

In bits and pieces his story came out. They’d spent that last day arguing and drinking. Mrs. Carston was beside herself over their financial losses and threatened to divorce George if he didn’t go along with her plan. She wanted him to set fire to the house and use the insurance money to rebuild their fortune. He fled to the deserted servant’s quarters below stairs. She got a revolver from the gun room. Later, when he came upstairs for more liquor, the house was in flames. He picked up the phone to dial the fire department. She fired. He ran. She pursued him, emptying the chamber of bullets, but missed. Furious, she charged him, and beat him with the revolver. He wrestled it away from her. They fell and she hit her head on the corner of a table. “She didn’t mean it. She wasn’t herself.” George inhaled trying to control fresh sobs.

Relief washed over me. I don’t know how I could have imagined he killed her.

“What made you think she was dead when you left her?” Farrel asked, deadpan, impossible to read.

“There was blood everywhere. You mean she wasn’t . . . ?” A trembling hand went to George’s forehead.

“Then she’s alive?” I asked hopefully.

Farrel squinted at me. “No.”

George howled and began pulling at his hair, trying to tear it out.

The two detectives observed George, their faces expressionless.

Before George harmed himself, I grabbed his hands and pried them loose. “Then how did she die?” I asked.

George buried his face in his hands, and rocked himself soundlessly.

Instead of answering, Detective Leon asked me, “What can you tell me about this gun room?”

“It was used for weekend fox hunts like those hosted by the English aristocracy,” I said. “Mrs. Carston was a great Anglophile.”

Leon nodded slightly as if I’d confirmed what he knew. “And what kinds of weapons were kept there?”

I took a moment to inventory it in my memory, then told them.

“You’re familiar with guns yourself? From your military training in the war?” Farrel asked.

A chill of foreboding went down my back, and I nodded slowly.

Things weren’t so different in America after all. The peelers just wanted to nail someone for the crime, and they didn’t much care who the poor bloke was, as long as it wasn’t someone like George Carston who, even broke, had powerful connections. So they pinned it on me, their only other suspect.

George sent one of his lawyer associates to represent me pro bono. The bespectacled chap was none too happy about it. He was always hurried and fidgety with me, and avoided meeting my eyes.

At our first meeting, he set me straight. Judy Carston had regained consciousness and escaped through the flames to the back terrace. There, she’d been shot in the face. The weapon used, a rifle from the gun room, had later been found in the ashes, any fingerprints burned away.

“Obviously someone else was in the house,” I argued.

With a curt shake of his head, the lawyer said, “Not a chance. It was just you and him.”

No matter how hard I tried, and I tried very hard, I couldn’t see Mr. Carston pulling the trigger. He never fancied guns, and he’d been completely besotted with his wife. The gun room, the stable, the fox hunts, and me, the English butler, had all been for her.

I don’t know whether the guv’nor stuck up for me or not. I’d like to think he did after all I’d done for him. I never saw him after that day in the interrogation room. He didn’t attend my trial. Every time I requested he be called to testify in my defense, my lawyer, eyes shifty, brushed me off. “Not a good idea.”

The lawyer saved me from the electric chair. After the sentencing—twenty to life—I asked him for the thousandth time, “But how did the horses get loose?”

With a long-suffering sigh, he repeated, “Mrs. Carston freed them.”

“No, if she had, everyone would’ve known it was arson,” I argued, “and she never really cared about horses anyway. Had to be someone else, someone who loved horses. One of the stable hands must have secretly stayed behind to tend them. He released them so they wouldn’t burn to death, then punished her for her cruelty. He’s the killer, whoever he is.”

“No proof,” the lawyer said.

“The personnel records burned, yes, but there’s got to be a witness or other evidence.”

Apparently deciding his debt was satisfied and my free services had come to an end, he refused to appeal.

The Big House isn’t so bad—regular meals, a clean bed, a steady job in the prison laundry. A far sight better than the trenches, and I haven’t given up on my appeal. To pass the bleedin’ time, I think about horses.

The thing is I never knew any of the stable hands. Not really, not by name. The stable was outside of my bailiwick, and its staff didn’t take their meals with the upstairs household servants. Occasionally I’d glimpse them out in the paddocks, stroking and whispering to the horses. Now I lie awake in my bunk and dredge my memory for names I might have overheard and forgotten. But that’s only half the battle, because names or not, it’ll be nigh on impossible to find them, won’t it? Those blokes are jobless now, riding the rails and drifting around the country looking for work. But find them I will. Somehow. Maybe the bleedin’ guv’nor will help.

Copyright © 2011 Gigi Vernon

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FICTION

SHOOTER

JOHN R. CORRIGAN

“I’m still a shooter,” Pete Peters said to me. “They made me into one when I was eighteen.”

It was fifteen degrees outside in early December. We were drinking Jack and Cokes in Jumpers Bar on Main Street in Darlington, Connecticut, which is just east—but a full tax bracket—from Hartford and its insurance money.

I’d seen Pete only sporadically for fifteen years, whenever he was home on leave. Now he was out of the Marines and had called me at work to say he wanted to get a drink. I’d told Annie I’d be home late and to kiss Maggie goodnight for me.

“You’re not a sniper anymore,” I said. “You’re out.”

He took a drink, then twirled the glass in his hands, watching the ice cubes spin as if they were days gone by.

“You don’t stop being a shooter, Timmy. Doesn’t work that way. Either you can do it or you can’t. And if you can and do, after a while it consumes you.”

“Sort of, you are what you do?” I said.

“Everything you say is a question,” he said.

I pointed to the day’s Hartford Courant. “It’s what I do.”

“I know. But being a sniper is more than just what you do. It gets in your blood. You wake up thinking about it.”

“Wishing for it?” I said.

“No. Thinking about it. There’s a difference. You can taste it, and it’s a bad taste.”

We’d only been in Jumpers twenty minutes. I was realizing Pete had called because he needed someone to talk to. He knew I was editor of the Courant’s Sunday edition. Usually, a newspaperman is the last person people want to talk to.

“What else did you learn in fifteen years as a Marine?”

“You asking about job skills?” He shrugged, stared at the TV above the bar. The Celtics were up ten against the Jazz. “You know what it takes to be able to lay in wait for a guy to walk out of a building, and then . . .” He extended his thumb and forefinger, pointed his finger at me, and let his thumb fall. “I got hurt and took the Medal of Honor and a one-way ticket the hell out of Iraq. Me, with a Medal of Honor? After what I did over there? Doesn’t take a hero, just takes a certain . . .” He didn’t finish.

I didn’t push it. We had time, and the Medal of Honor might make a nice Sunday feature.

I tried to infuse a little optimism into the conversation. “You served your country.”

“There was a white-haired sergeant named McIllroy. The guy said he was from Connecticut too. Was impressed by my shooting scores. Took me aside, asked if I wanted to be a sniper. I was eighteen. It had to be better than the crap they had me doing. I said, sure. Then he says, ‘I bet you’re from a small town, bet you hunted a lot.’ I say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘dropping an enemy of the United States be the same as dropping a deer. No different. Both give you a rush,’ he says.”

Pete paused, took a long drink after he said that. Not one to quench a thirst, but a drink of necessity.

“I was eighteen. What did I know? Now I’m out, and I jump whenever somebody slams a car door.”

I drank, trying for casual. My light Sunday feature was losing its luster.

“The bitch of it all is that I’m still a shooter, Timmy. That’s all I know how to do. Wait, point, and . . .” He dropped his thumb onto his forefinger again. I didn’t like him pointing at me when he did that. “I can say this: I never miss. It’s all I’ve done for the past fifteen years.”

I was the only guy in the place wearing a tie. The front door opened and an icy gust hit my back. The bartender was a blonde, maybe twenty-three, wearing tight jeans and a tighter T-shirt.

“Think she’s into ex-military?” Pete asked, motioning at her.

She was at least ten years younger than he. I hadn’t been in a bar in close to a year, hadn’t tried to pick anyone up in one in nearly a decade.

“Got any job leads?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Can’t concentrate long enough to make it through a damned interview.”

We’d hunted together every fall until we graduated high school. I’d taught him to shoot a rifle. I’d been a sophomore at UConn studying journalism when Pete had come home with a Class-A “sniper” tab on his uniform, a receding hairline, and a look of seriousness I’d not seen in my world of feature articles, hangovers, and afternoon classes. In the years since, I’d gotten married, had Maggie, and worked my way up at the Courant. Pete had done two stints in Iraq.

“Seem to be doing pretty well for yourself,” he said. “House, wife, kid, job.”

I shrugged.

“I had eighteen confirmed kills in Iraq.”

I’d been about to drink but put my glass down.

“It’s not like shooting a deer,” he said. “Nothing at all like that. I can’t get it out of my head.”

I didn’t know what to say. I managed only, “If you ever need anyone to talk to . . .”

“I got a lady at the VA. But it’s not working.”

“It’ll get better,” I said. “Keep talking to her. You’ll work through it.”

He shook his head. “Not that easy,” he said and finished his drink. “There’s only one thing that’ll clear my head.”

That night I lay in bed thinking of Pete’s ice twirling in his glass, his pale blue eyes focused on the cubes. And I remembered how things had been when we were kids. Darlington was different then, and so were we. My old man was the school district’s business manager; Pete’s father was a mechanic at O’Malley’s Used Cars.

One cool November afternoon we were in the woods about a mile west of town garbed in orange hunting vests. Sixteen years old, hunting together. I had a Winchester .30-30; Pete had a .30-06 with a scope. We’d flushed a buck, then tracked it three miles from the road. Dusk was nearing. I was in front and stepped over a fallen tree, when the lace of my right boot caught a limb. I fell and my .30-30 went off, a blast followed by the hollow thudding of the round entering the forest’s dirt floor. I didn’t feel the pain at first. Pete screamed and pointed at my foot. It took him forty-five minutes, but he carried me out of the woods that day.

The wound healed, but the memory never left me. I could have bled to death that afternoon. Dehydrated and exhausted, Pete missed two days of school afterward.

Moonlight streamed in through the curtains. The old radiator in our bedroom hissed, drowning out Annie’s quiet, steady breaths. I watched her sleep, remembering what Pete had said. I did have it pretty good: a wife who loved me; a five-year-old daughter who adored me; and the Sunday editor’s job. Middle class never looked better.

Pete had joined the service right after high school because he had few other options. An all-conference middle linebacker is not an all-state one, and no scholarship offers came. He’d applied to the State Police Academy, but at eighteen he’d been neither ready nor qualified. The mill had closed its doors and taken its jobs to North Carolina by then. It was the few, the proud, or the unemployment line for Pete.

Now he was back and struggling badly.

“What time did you get home?” Annie asked the next morning when I yawned after my second coffee.

I told her.

“How’s Pete?” she said. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

“Probably wouldn’t recognize him. He’s lost weight, and his hair is graying.”

“Where’s he staying?”

“Motel on the east side. He’s looking for an apartment. He’s not doing too well.” I looked carefully at Maggie. She was eating, lost in her own thoughts.

Annie looked at me, poured milk into Maggie’s cereal, and raised one brow.

“He’s living with a lot of guilt,” I said. “I think it’s eating him from the inside out.”

“How can something eat a person?” Maggie asked.

“It can’t,” I said. “I was telling Mommy a joke.”

“You grew up with him.” Annie drank her coffee and stared into the mug. I always knew when she was contemplating something. Her eyes narrowed; crow’s-feet lined the corners. We’d met at UConn. Now she was the counselor/behaviorist in Maggie’s school district. “Can you do anything to help him?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you should try,” she said.

That day, I called Pete from work and said I’d buy him dinner at Jumpers at five thirty. When I showed on the dot, he was already there. Three empty shot glasses stood before him. Alone at the far end of the bar, he was unshaven and glassy-eyed.

“What time did you get here?” I slid in next to him.

“Four.”

“Two thirty.” This, from the bartender. Not the blonde twenty-something. This guy was balding, in his forties, with a shaved head and barbed-wire tattoos on bulging biceps. “Says he’s running a tab. Better be good for it.”

“I told you,” Pete was indignant. “I’m good for it. I got a friggin’ military pension.”

“Oh, well,” the bartender said, “I know all about those. Why do you think I’m serving drinks to guys like you?”

Pete just looked at him.

“Look, no more hard stuff,” the bartender said. “Just draft beer from now on.”

“You my mother?” Pete said, but his voice had lost its bite. His eyes were still on the bartender. His head was tilted, thinking about the pension.

The bartender asked what I wanted. I said a draft.

Jumpers was nearly empty. SportsCenter was on the TV over the bar. BREAKING NEWS flashed across the screen, and the picture went to a football injury update.

“We’re fighting a war in Afghanistan,” Pete said, “and that’s considered breaking news? Want to see breaking news, should’ve followed my ass the last three years.”

The bartender set a Heineken coaster in front of me and put my glass of Bud Light on it.

“Tell me about the last three years,” I said.

Pete shrugged.

“I’d like to hear it.”

“You mean that?”

“Yeah.”

“I killed people.” His eyes were set on the empty shot glass in front of him. “Eighteen people.”

“You’re a national hero,” I said, wondering if he heard the doubt in my voice.

“No. Not a hero. More like a coward.”

The bartender brought Pete a draft. “This is on the house. Just get out?”

Pete nodded.

“How many years in?”

“Fifteen.”

“Iraq?”

“Two years. Afghanistan for three.”

I was an outsider watching and listening.

“Now what?” the bartender said.

Pete shrugged.

The bartended nodded. “Been there, man.” He walked away.

“What did you mean by ‘coward’?” I said.

“I should have stood up to McIllroy. I only questioned him once. Should’ve stood up to him.” He looked away then and stared at the TV. I knew he’d go no farther.

At the door, Pete said, “Thanks for dinner. I owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me a thing,” I said. “In fact, I still owe you for carrying me out of the woods.”

“No.” He turned toward his car and said over his shoulder, “And thanks for listening.”

That night, after dinner and after Maggie was in bed, I went back to the paper and spoke to the night editor, Mick Rowe. I enjoyed being at the paper at night. Like most newspapermen, I’d started out manning night desk, the three-to-eleven shift.

At ten fifteen P.M., deadline had come and gone. Most of the newsroom desks were vacant, desktop screens black, thin white reporter notebooks closed. Then like a sleeping giant awakening, the presses began to rumble with the morning edition. The scent of hot ink wafted in through the back door.

Mick Rowe was in his early forties. He’d been a war correspondent for the Boston Globe before coming home to Darlington to care for his sick mother. I carried him a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and sat in a straight-backed chair next to his desk.

“This a bribe?” he asked, taking the coffee.

“Sure is.”

“Good start. What do you want?”

I told him.

Mick’s phone call came at 1:17 A.M.

“This isn’t good,” he said.

I got out of bed without waking Annie and took the cordless downstairs to the kitchen.

“Ever hear of the Karbala incident in Iraq?”

“No.” The overhead light reflected off the Formica countertop.

“I covered it for the Globe,” he said. “The liberal papers called it ‘the Karbala Massacre.’ A group of Army infantrymen retaliated against Iraqi noncombatant civilians for an IED attack that killed one of their fellow soldiers.”

“IED?”

“Improvised explosive device. The infantrymen were at a roadblock, a checkpoint on the outskirts of Karbala. The IED killed one soldier. Allegedly, a group of eight others went to town and shot fifteen people, mostly women and children, to get even. Everybody involved was investigated, but nobody went to jail. Charges were dropped for most. Murder one was changed to involuntary manslaughter for the triggerman.”

When he said “triggerman” something moved in the pit of my stomach. “No one’s in jail?”

“None of the Iraqis would come to the U.S. to testify. Tim, the name you gave me is front and center of this thing. The triggerman was First Sergeant Pete Peters. He’s named in the report I had my buddy fax to me. I left it on your desk. Peters was dishonorably discharged. I think his superior is still pushing for a court-martial or a civil suit.”

I wondered if additional punishment could be pursued after a soldier was discharged.

“I thought he got a Medal of Honor,” I said.

“Would have. He saved a guy’s life over there. I don’t know how or what he did. But then the Karbala thing went down. Major Sonny McIllroy was the officer who filed charges two weeks after the shootings. He was the unit’s commanding officer. They were his men, but he wasn’t with them when they did it. Retired a decorated officer six months ago.”

The next morning, I told Annie all about it.

“You looking into this as a reporter, or as a friend?” she asked.

I drank some coffee and redid the knot in my tie. I usually went to work tieless and wore a sports jacket. Jeans and loafers rounded out my repertoire.

“Not sure,” I said. “This story was supposed to be different—Darlington resident returns home with Medal of Honor. That would’ve been a great Sunday feature, but the story’s different now.”

“Much,” she said and went back to her appointment book to see which students she’d see and when. She paused every now and then to write something on a legal pad.

I poured a bowl of cereal for Maggie, put it on the breakfast counter, looked at the white milk container, and thought about Pete Peters shooting children.

The fax was on my desk as Mick Rowe had promised. I closed my door and read it immediately, all seventeen pages. I didn’t read as a journalist, which perhaps gave me an answer to Annie’s question. I wasn’t reading for facts. I was looking for something to disprove what Mick said the previous night.

There was nothing in the report to make a rational person question the charges brought against Pete.

In fact, my mind now ran to what Pete had said, Not a hero. More like a coward.

Why?

I needed an answer, not as a journalist, but as a guy who—at least once—had known Pete and had still wanted to call him a friend.

He was asleep on the bar when I arrived. The floor was sticky, and the whole place had the sweet smell of schnapps.

The blonde was there again. She wore gray sweatpants with the waistband folded over and leather moccasins.

“He got here at eleven. Started right in,” she said. “Had four shots of whiskey, maybe six beers. I told him to slow down, but he didn’t want to.”

“You overserved him.”

“Hey, don’t try to pin this on me,” she said. “He’s your friend.” She moved down the bar.

It took me twenty minutes, but I finally roused Pete. I ordered burgers for both of us and plenty of coffee.

“You started drinking at eleven?”

He shrugged.

“Tell me what happened in Karbala.”

“How do you know about that?”

My turn to shrug.

He sipped his coffee. “Let’s make these Irish coffees.”

I shook my head. “Pete, I’ve known you a long time.” I put the fax on the bar.

“How’d you get that? It’s got the seal on it.”

“Is it true?”

“You shouldn’t have that.”

“Is it true, Pete?”

“Yes and no.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Told you about McIllroy already,” Pete said.

He’d spent the last fifteen minutes throat clearing. It was six P.M. Burgers had come and gone. He was on his third coffee.

“McIllroy took me with him. And when he fell, he made sure I did too.”

“What’s that mean?”

“He picked me. Made me, so to speak, into a sniper. I was a good shot. You know about that.” He smiled then. It was the first hint I’d seen of the old Pete. There was pride in his eyes. “Got my first deer at twelve. Got one every year after that.”

“I’ve seen you shoot one from a hundred and fifty yards, in the wind. We were sixteen.”

“I remember,” he said. “That was a good day. I was a Marine for fifteen years—I guess I still am. I don’t know if you ever stop being one. Well, McIllroy brought me with him, basically wherever he went. And I got promoted. It seemed pretty good.”

The after-work crowd started arriving, and conversation swirled around us. Mostly construction workers, although two suits sat near the door, drinking soda.

“When Iraq started,” Pete continued, “no one was enlisting, so we all knew we were going over there. Wasn’t too bad at first. At least we knew what to expect because McIllroy was our commanding officer and we trusted him. Or we thought we knew what to expect. Then something happened over there . . .”

I’d interviewed enough people to know to give him space. I sipped my coffee casually. Pete turned away and wiped his eyes. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes were wet.

“There’s one little girl I think about every night. I don’t sleep, Timmy. Can’t. I’m scared to. When I do, I see her face. No older than Maggie.”

My five-year-old’s freckles and blue eyes flashed before me.

“I see her just as I pulled the trigger,” he said.

At that moment, I hated him.

“The therapist calls it post-traumatic stress. She can call it whatever she wants. I’m losing it, man. I know I am.”

The blonde walked over with the coffee pot. “Feeling better?”

“Go to hell,” Pete said.

“Pete,” I said, “relax.”

The young waitress moved off, looking at him over her shoulder.

“Nobody knows what it’s like. Not you. Not her.”

“Why’d you do it? That’s what I don’t understand.”

“Me either,” he said.

“McIllroy gave the order?”

“Of course not. He’s not that dumb.”

“You just did it? Went in and . . .”

“No. You got no idea what it’s like over there. I can’t understand about ninety percent of what the Iraqis are saying. A woman opened the door. Somebody yelled ‘gun.’ I was the point man. I fired. She went down and there was a little girl standing there. I don’t know what happened, Tim. I can’t forgive myself, so I don’t expect anyone else to forgive me. But I kept shooting. At first, people said the gun jammed, but it didn’t. I just couldn’t stop. I was scared, so I just fired.”

Women and children. Maggie.

“The charge was involuntary manslaughter,” I said.

“Shouldn’t have even been that,” he said. “We shouldn’t have ever gone in there.”

“Why’d you go?”

“That’s where it gets gray. Someone said they knew where the IED had come from. So we all went in, but I was the one who fired.”

We were quiet. The Celtics pre-game was on the TV above the bar.

“Therapy isn’t working,” he said after a while. He stared into the mirror before us, his eyes set hard on himself. “I’m already disgraced. Got nothing to lose.” Then he looked at me. “You still Catholic, Timmy?”

“I guess. Don’t go to church much.”

“I’m not,” he said.

He looked away.

Annie kissed Pete on the cheek when we entered the house. I said Pete would be spending the night with us. She knew something was up and said she’d make up the foldout couch downstairs. Pete thanked her.

“There are leftovers in the fridge,” Annie said, and went downstairs.

We turned in early. In bed I told her what Pete said in Jumpers.

“ ‘Are you still Catholic?’ Is he suicidal?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I brought him here. Didn’t want to leave him alone.”

“How much did he have to drink?”

“A lot.”

“Was he drunk when he said it?”

“Maybe. But it wasn’t the booze talking. He’s a lost soul right now.”

“He needs professional help.”

“He’s getting it.”

“He really killed those people?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus,” Annie said. “He was the best man at our wedding.”

“He’s always been one of my closest friends, one of those guys you don’t have to see often to know he’s there for you.”

“People change, Tim.”

“And maybe he has, but what bothers me is I don’t think he had a choice.”

“People make their own decisions, choose their actions.”

I didn’t answer. As usual, Annie hit the issue’s central nerve.

I still didn’t know if I was pursuing the story as a newspaperman or a friend, but the next morning I made the phone call. I dialed at precisely eight A.M. I figured retired Major Sonny McIllroy would appreciate punctuality. Except his wife said he was golfing and told me to try back around eleven.

I did. McIllroy’s voice made me believe he still had a military haircut, wore creased shirts and slacks, and did pushups religiously.

“This is my cell phone,” McIllroy said. “Who is this, and how’d you get the number?”

I told him who I was. I decided he didn’t need to know about the fax on my desk.

“What’s the Hartford Courant want with me?” he asked. “I’m on vacation here.”

“I was hoping you could clarify a story I’m working on. It’s about the Karbala incident.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“About a year ago. Are you saying you don’t remember it?”

“I’m saying it’s over. And it’s not something I care to discuss, especially with the Hartford Courant. I live in Connecticut.”

I knew he did. And I knew where.

“Staying in Florida all winter?”

“I’m in Arizona. And no, I’ll be home in a week.”

“What was First Sergeant Pete Peters’s role in Karbala?”

“Peters? He shot them all. He disgraced the Marines.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Have to ask him that. Look, my wife is calling me for lunch. I’m retired now. All that is in the past.”

Not for Pete, I thought, wondering what it was like to live with a little girl Maggie’s age haunting you every night, to have her blood on your hands.

“Why did Pete Peters shoot those people?”

“What’s this story about anyway? You should be talking to the Marines’ media-relations people.”

“I’m going to a primary source. Why did Peters shoot those people?”

“Have to ask him.”

“I have. Who gave the order?”

“No one. No one in their right mind would order the killing of civilians.”

“Even when one of his own soldiers was killed?”

He didn’t reply.

“Keep in touch with Pete Peters? He’s not doing well.”

“I bet he isn’t. He’s got the blood of fifteen people on his soul.”

“He alone in that, Major?”

“Is this going in the Hartford Courant? What did that crazy bastard tell you?”

“Who sent those soldiers in there?”

He hung up.

I left work early and drove to the Midnight Moon, a motel on the east side of town. East Darlington had become infamous for bank heists in recent years and for a drive-by during which a Catholic priest had been killed. When I went to the motel’s office, the guy at the desk asked me how many hours I wanted a room for.

I told him who I was there to see.

No recognition.

“The guy just got back from Iraq,” I said.

“Oh, the guy with the guns? We got a lot of problems with him,” he said, as he led me to Pete’s room.

It didn’t take long to see why they had problems with Pete. He had an AK-47 on the floor, a 9mm on the small round table, and the .30-06 he’d once used for hunting.

The room hadn’t been updated since the seventies. The shades were drawn, and only the overhead light above the circular table was on. The room smelled terribly. If there was a cleaning service, the guns probably scared them off.

“Can’t hunt in Darlington City limits,” I said, forcing myself to smile.

He didn’t say anything. He was sitting propped against the headboard.

“Can’t use an AK-47 either,” I said.

“It’s not for hunting.”

“What’s it for?”

“Protection.”

“Where’d you get it?”

He shook his head.

“Who started the rumor about where the IED had come from?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“You don’t know or you’re not saying?”

“I have an idea.”

“Why would McIllroy do that?” I asked.

“How do you know I think it’s him?”

“Tell me why he’d do it.”

“I don’t know. But I might ask him.”

I looked at the AK-47. “That all you’re planning to do?”

“Look, Timmy, why don’t you go home?” He took the remote off the pillow next to him and clicked on the TV.

We were sitting in a dark room dominated by the scent of body odor, surrounded by a rifle, a machine gun, and a handgun, watching The Price is Right. Pete had been my best friend as a boy, the best man at my wedding. He’d served his country. And his life had come to this.

“I mean it, Timmy, go home and forget you were ever here. And I don’t think we should meet for beers anymore.”

“That’s fine,” I said and walked out.

A week later, I was at my desk when a story came across the AP wire titled RETIRED MAJOR SHOT DEAD IN AVON. I read it twice. Major Sonny McIllroy had left his home at ten thirty the previous morning to walk his dog. He entered a wooded bike trail and was shot to death. State Police referred to the murder weapon as a “high-powered rifle.”

Pete’s phone call came before noon. “I need to see you,” he said.

I walked into Jumpers at seven thirty. He was there, drinking coffee.

I sat down beside him. “What’s up?”

The blonde bartender brought me a coffee.

“See anything interesting on the news today?” he asked.

“Don’t watch TV news. I’m a newspaperman.”

“You’re a friend, first and foremost.”

“Yeah?”

“You know what I mean.” he said.

“Sure.”

“Sonny McIllroy is dead,” he said.

I nodded.

“You know why I asked you to meet me?”

“Pete, your secret’s safe with me, if you’re worried about that. Like you said, I’m a friend.”

“Timmy, I didn’t do it.”

I drank some coffee and looked at the TV. “Fine with me.”

“I mean it. Jesus Christ, I didn’t do it. I don’t want you thinking I did.”

“Got an alibi?”

“My therapist. Soon as I heard about it on TV, I went online to see what time it happened. I was at the VA when he got shot.”

I didn’t say anything. I took out my wallet and tossed three dollars on the bar, but I didn’t put my wallet away. I took a picture of my daughter Maggie out, and I looked at it. I could feel Pete’s eyes on me.

“There’s something else,” he said.

I sipped my coffee, my eyes never leaving the picture.

“He was shot with a .30-30. And you weren’t at work yesterday. I called.”

I closed my wallet and returned it to my hip pocket.

“I’m just a newspaperman who used to hunt,” I said.

He’d forgotten about his coffee now. And neither of us noticed the surrounding noise.

“That little girl’s death isn’t only on you, Pete.”

“Seems like it is,” he said.

“I know,” I said, “but I talked to McIllroy.”

The light reflected off the bar. Pete’s eyes looked very blue.

“You once asked me if I knew what it was like to lay in wait and then shoot someone,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

I offered my hand to him.

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he took it, and we shook.

Neither of us spoke again, and I stood and walked out.

When I got home, I kissed Maggie goodnight.

Copyright © 2011 John R. Corrigan

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FICTION

THE ART OF ENMITY

CHRISTOPHER WELCH

Art by Ron Chironna

Not much happens in the Berkshires’ art scene during the winter. Except once in a while an artist gets murdered. Even that doesn’t happen very often.

Academic symposiums and panel discussions at the art museum happen more often. They’re deadly in their own way but don’t lead to police investigations as often as they should.

The police opened a real investigation, a murder investigation, after his girlfriend found Marty Levin’s dead body. Marty was an artist, a sometime friend of mine, and he had been on a panel discussion the day he died. As part of a symposium. At the Crafts College Art Museum. During Art Festival Week in Craftsbury. All the cultural tombstones. What was inconvenient was that they found the body behind our house.

Sandy and I came back from dinner and discovered police cars outside our home, all of them with rotating red and blue lights, and an ambulance and a fire truck with them. I never found out why the fire truck was there. I also never found out why the police didn’t telephone either one of us. It wouldn’t have been hard to do and seemed an elementary courtesy after a dead body has appeared on your property.

The police were all state troopers, some of them in their vaguely operetta-like uniforms, and two of them in plain clothes. They were polite enough, but no one would call them chummy.

“Your place?” asked a man who identified himself as a detective captain.

“It is,” I said. “Our place.” Sandy didn’t say anything.

“Come with us,” one of them said. “We want you to identify the deceased.”

The deceased was lying on the ground behind our house where my gallery is and just in front of a small guesthouse. The deceased had bled into the patches of snow left behind by a fragile January thaw. The deceased was Marty Levin. The blood came from a wound near his forehead. I had never seen the body of a person who had been killed before, not in a traffic accident, not in a fall, and certainly not by a gunshot. The lifelessness of Marty’s body diminished its reality; it had lost most of its resemblance to the living being I knew and seemed more like a wax replacement. There was a pizza box not far from the body. It was a strange token of ordinary life. Sandy turned away.

“Do you men live here?” Yes. “Together?” the detective asked. We did. “Unmarried?” Unmarried, not even to one another though this was Massachusetts. “Children? Either of you?” None.

They looked us over, their faces betraying no expression whatsoever. “Do you own a handgun?” the detective captain asked. We do not. No handgun, no rifle, no shotgun, no cap pistol. Their expressionless examination of us suggested doubt, but maybe I was just feeling paranoid.

“Where have you gentlemen been this evening?” Gentlemen in the inflection he gave it sounded like a code word.

“Having dinner at the Red Hawk Inn.”

“When did you get there?” I told him. “And you were there together until you left?”

We were, but . . . Some of the servers knew us and saw us; the bartender knew us and saw us, but could any of them say for certain that neither of us left after ordering, or after finishing the salad or the entrée? The Red Hawk is not far from our home, less than a mile. Could anyone there say for certain that one of us hadn’t gone home, used a gun we didn’t own and gotten back in a few minutes?

Nope, probably not.

The detective suggested we might not want to leave the area until they completed their investigation.

Not only had I never previously seen a body that had been killed, I also had never previously been suspected of the killing. I doubted Sandy had, either.

Marty was an old friend of mine and our guest, sort of. He wasn’t staying in the house, though there was plenty of room. He was staying in a semi-insulated two-room cabin in the back. He smoked, and if he was going to smoke he could deal with inadequate space heaters for a few days. So could his girlfriend, Renee. Marty didn’t care where they stayed. Renee did, and let us know it in her sour way by conveying dissatisfaction. She was good at that. Mostly she wrapped herself in a blanket, came into our house, and watched television.

I didn’t understand what Marty saw in her except that she was around twenty-five, which was twenty-five years younger than Marty. Renee had dark hair that she kept carefully in place, she had no sense of humor that I could discern, and she was practicing to be overweight. She had a cell phone glued to one ear when it wasn’t in her lap so she could text message someone. She had no compunction about using the phone in the middle of what seemed to be a conversation or a meal. She spelled her name without an accent mark where the accent mark should have been and came from someplace where they didn’t have accent marks. She might have killed Marty out of annoyance or because he didn’t take her out to eat on a Wednesday evening.

After the afternoon’s contentious symposium at the museum, she and Marty had gone for drinks somewhere, then came back and ordered a pizza. Marty had sent her to pick it up. I was surprised she agreed, but she did. Maybe she’d insisted on the pizza. When she came back, she found Marty’s body on the gravel path just outside the guesthouse door. She had barely enough presence of mind to phone 911 before she ran into the guesthouse and collapsed.

She was still there when the detectives finished with us and was still borderline uncontrollable. She was sobbing and couldn’t speak coherently. We let her stay in a bedroom inside the warm house that night. The police put their own padlocks on the guesthouse, but we would have let her sleep inside anyway. Several policemen didn’t sleep at all that night. They sat outside in a state police car, watching the guesthouse. I guess they were watching the guesthouse. Maybe not.

The police let her leave late the next afternoon. That surprised me. They even let her take the car she and Marty had driven to Craftsbury, but only after signing enough paperwork to take out a second mortgage on the Eiffel Tower.

The symposium weekend included a retrospective of Marty’s work. An opening reception at the museum had followed that afternoon’s confrontational, belligerent symposium on the Future of Twenty-First Century Art. Several panelists there were certain what the future shouldn’t hold and told the rest of us and each other loudly and forcefully. I didn’t understand their confidence.

Afterwards, the retrospective opening was in the large, central space of the Crafts College Art Museum, named after a long-deceased worthy who had contributed some attractive watercolors to the college many years before. Marty’s work had nothing whatsoever to do with watercolors, now relegated to two side rooms. Marty’s work didn’t have much to do with anything except itself.

Marty was a conceptual artist. His work was “non-retinal.” Non-retinal meant that the work didn’t appeal to the eye but to something else, to the imagination, maybe, or to a quasi-philosophic idea of what art should be. It certainly did not try to be visually attractive. Attractive was outside the pale. There didn’t even have to be a “work” to qualify a concept as art, but Marty produced installations that had a physical presence, though the presence often seemed gestural and mysterious.

He had broken the hall up into several exhibition spaces. In one of them, Marty had stretched twine of various thicknesses from the top corner of a white panel to the opposite corner at the bottom, several strands of twine per panel.

“How do you like it?” asked Sandy. I didn’t answer right away. “Neither do I,” he said.

It was not that I didn’t like it. Liking it doesn’t have much to do with anything. As with so much else in the art world, it challenged my quaint idea of what “art” should seem like, and that was the point of it. My greatest fondness is for French rococo art, paintings, drawings, sculpture—not a favored style at the moment. It is highly retinal and distinctly non-conceptual unless you’re Mme. de Pompadour.

“It’s unusual, isn’t it?” said Dolly Burch. “Not something we’d usually exhibit . . .” Dolly was a museum trustee, a woman of warmth and clear-headed convictions. “All that carrying-on at the symposium this afternoon! At least it made me look at Mr. Levin’s work again.”

“And?”

“And . . . I’ve looked at it again,” she said and smiled. “Perhaps Egan Swift was not altogether foolish.”

Egan Swift. Egan Swift was a famous figure in the art world and a longtime resident of Craftsbury when he wasn’t in New York City finding artists to savage. He’d had a lengthy, vociferous career as an art critic, and—in his own estimation—as a philosopher of art and aesthetics, whatever aesthetics is. In his view, a view stated more and more sharply over the years as his influence ebbed, art of any value stopped in 1962. Period. Everything that came afterwards—pop art, op art, minimalism, you name it—was novelty art and belonged on the shelves at FAO Schwarz, not in museums.

It would be fair to say that Egan Swift and Marty Levin agreed on nothing at all. Whatsoever. Not even where the sun rose every morning, and their disagreements were strenuous and unpleasant. Egan showered scorn on Marty for not recognizing that the sun rose where generations of artists and critics had seen it rise in the long, western cultural tradition: in the north. For Marty, that was enough to make him assert, in angry invective, that only yesterday’s fools could not recognize that it now rose in the south, so get used to it. They did not have what a sane person would call discussions, and they were the two central panelists at the afternoon’s symposium. Everyone there should have worn hazmat gear.

They were a good match, Marty and Egan. Same generation, same background, same friends, if either of them had any friends left. They were both opinionated, combative, and they both drank far too early and far too long. The difference was that Marty smoked and Egan dressed like a Ralph Lauren country squire.

And they both wrote vituperative articles for art magazines. More than one of those articles was an attack on the other man, covert or not so covert. Many of the rest were dismissive attacks on artists who produced work—who dared produce work!—that belonged to a style or genre that fell outside the approval of the man writing the diatribe. That was easy to do.

“There were several people from the press here for the symposium,” said Dolly. “From New York. I wonder what they made of all the rancor.”

“That’s why they came up here in the dead of winter. Another chance to see two battered pit bulls go at each other.”

“Then they got what they came for, didn’t they? I met Marty’s wife. She seemed quite pleasant. Angry, I thought, but pleasant.”

Renee? Pleasant? Nah. Besides, Renee wasn’t his wife.

“Alice something . . .”

Ah! Alyse. Alyse really was Marty’s wife. Still. Probably. And she was pleasant when she wasn’t around Marty. Marty has that effect on people. “I’m surprised she was here,” I said.

“They’re married, aren’t they? But perhaps that’s reason enough for her to stay away.” Dolly laughed quietly.

“Barely married. They’ve been divorcing longer than they were married, fighting over a property settlement.”

He and his preceding wife had fought bitterly over support and property as Alyse looked on. Marty threatened to move to the Seychelles Islands, to West Irian, to the moon, anywhere to reduce the support he had to pay and the property he had to relinquish. Maybe Alyse anticipated the same treatment. Maybe Alyse was tailing him to nab his passport when he wasn’t looking.

She wasn’t going to find him at his retrospective, though. For his own Marty-ish reasons he had decided to forego the opening. His life might have lasted longer if he’d bothered to attend.

The sound of commotion and voices came from another part of the room, out of our sight, but one of the voices was loud and unmistakable: Egan Swift had bothered to attend, and he’d made his entrance. A moment later he lurched around the corner, holding a half filled glass of white wine, part of which he’d sloshed onto his shirt. Egan was not a small man, and his imposing presence amplified his imposing voice.

“His career’s in the toilet! Worthless!” he said, more or less to us.

His timorous wife, dressed in her conventional shades of taupe, followed Egan at a respectful two-step distance. She smiled tentatively and seemed as she always did to be on the verge of flinching.

“Good evening, Dolly. Hope the museum hasn’t laid out much money for this display! Self-indulgence!” he said loudly and slowly. “Well! We’re not allowed to say that it’s not art these days, but what is it?”

He downed the last of his wine and gave the plastic glass to his wife. “I can’t bear this without assistance.” She disappeared with the glass. “Toby,” he said, shaking my hand, “and Sanders. I thought you’d be home preparing to explain French literature to an impatient world. Have you enjoyed this display of pointless post-post-modern interior decoration?”

“You are incorrigible, Egan,” said Dolly. “And quite audible.”

“Incorrigible? What’s to correct? And everyone here will wind up thanking me for my insight. You’ll see. The museum will receive grateful letters.”

“I’m certain we’ll receive letters,” said Dolly, “particularly after this afternoon’s festivities.”

“Art is a serious subject, Dolly. Kitsch, cleverness, fraudulence are themselves not important, but their devastating effect on art is. And those who know the difference need to defend it at every opportunity.” Which he did. He went out hunting for the opportunities when they didn’t show up on their own.

Sandy and I asked Egan and the mousy missus to come to dinner with us. She wanted to; he didn’t. “Too much work. Make straight the way of the culture. What’s left of it.”

She seemed disappointed. “But . . .” she said.

“Margaret! We don’t need your help.” They didn’t come with us.

We went to the Red Hawk, Sandy and I, unaware that Marty Levin was murdered while we ate. It was a grotesque thought.

* * *

On Monday morning the detective captain asked us to visit his office.

“Should we have a lawyer with us?” Sandy asked me. I didn’t know. It didn’t seem possible to me that anyone could suspect either one of us of anything worse than negligent hospitality. I telephoned Bess Nicholson anyway. Bess was a lawyer, a friend, and a calm voice.

“He does?” she asked. “I’m not surprised. After all . . .” but she didn’t finish the sentence. “I can’t help you, though. I’m sorry, but I can’t, and I don’t feel comfortable discussing the reasons.”

She couldn’t talk to us? “Is there someone else we should call?”

“Toby, really, I can’t. It’s . . . I just can’t.”

Now what? I couldn’t make sense of her refusal.

Even though it was still Art Festival Week, it was also Monday, a day when no art gallery is open, especially not in January. We could go to meet the detective captain, a twenty-minute drive from Craftsbury, but we did not leave when we planned to leave. Ranger appeared at the door, looking for a place to stay.

Ranger. The handful of art galleries around Craftsbury had been asked to hold exhibitions of work by festival participants or by artists who had some local connection. I was asked to make room for an exhibit of work by a young artist, so to speak, named Ranger. Just Ranger. He probably had a longer name, and Sandy knew what it was. I didn’t much care. Ranger had taken a course from Sandy at Crafts College in the year before Ranger dropped out of college, fled to New York City, and became a rebellious force among Brooklyn-based artists.

He came from Prince Edward Island, making him the only fringe-neo-punk, rebellious, disruptive artist from Prince Edward Island I’d ever heard of and, so far as I could tell, anyone else had ever heard of. He may have been the only person of any description at all I’d met from Prince Edward Island. But who knows? Maybe I’d met a lot of them who kept their origins to themselves.

He sat on the symposium panel, but his participation scarcely rose to minimal. Between Marty Levin and Egan Swift and their rantings, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise and didn’t seem interested in trying. Finally he stood up, announced that the two of them and everyone else in the room were worthless fools, and stomped out.

Now he needed a place to stay, and his right arm was in a sling.

“Dislocated shoulder,” he said. “Happened a long time ago. Just pops out sometimes. Forget about it.”

The college gave him a place to stay for the symposium. A murder investigation afterwards was a different story, and Ranger was on his own. Yeah, sure, he smoked. Yeah, sure, he’d smoke outside. We said yes. He assumed we would because he had his backpack in his left hand.

“How long have you known Mr. Levin?” Detective Captain Romano asked us.

“A long time,” I said.

“How well did you know him?”

“How well? Give me some possible answers. I hadn’t seen him much recently.”

“Previously? Three years ago, for example?”

“The same, Officer.”

“And you?” He turned to Sandy.

“Barely knew him. Met him four or five times when we were in New York. That’s all.”

“He’s never visited you in Craftsbury before?”

“Not since I’ve been around.”

“No romantic relationships?”

“Romantic relationships? With Marty Levin?” asked Sandy. “Are you kidding?”

I gathered he wasn’t. He contemplated the answer without saying anything then asked me, “Did you know anyone who was angry with him?”

“Officer, Marty Levin is no longer speaking to more people than I’ve met in my entire life.”

“Why?”

“He alienates everyone who disagrees with him.”

“Did he alienate anyone in Berkshire County?”

“His ex-wife, Egan Swift. Probably others. I wouldn’t know.” In the summer, when people from New York come up here, the county’s crawling with people Marty’s alienated. In January there are a lot fewer. “Marty has—had—strong views.”

“Art’s just blobs of color on paper, pieces of string hanging from a ceiling or strung around a wall,” he told me one night after he’d been drinking, or maybe it was one noontime. It could have been either one. “That’s all it is. Personal expression? Who cares about personal expression? Mark Rothko’s psychiatrist? His mother? Who cares?! Aesthetics? I mean, what an idea, aesthetics! Everything just is what it is. That’s all, and these culture tsars, Egan Swift and his art magazine mafia, trying to tell us what everything means, and how everything has to have meaning . . . I don’t care about meaning! ‘Creating art’ never means creating something. People just have to see! They have to look and know they’re looking and understand that they’re looking and hope that they’re seeing. That’s all any artist does. Everything else is pandering, like the Impressionists. Like the Abstract Expressionists. There’s nothing left to say in art. Nada.”

Except, apparently, for twine on white panels.

Marty also attacked Ranger, but I didn’t mention Ranger to Detective Captain Romano. I probably should have.

“Are you gentlemen missing anything from your house since the death of Mr. Levin?”

“Don’t think so.”

“The Hope Diamond,” said Sandy.

Detective Captain Romano didn’t respond. “From the guesthouse?”

“How would we know?” I asked. “It’s padlocked.”

He looked at me, expressionless as always. He nodded. “Forensics needs to examine it again.” Did he want to see if we’d slip up and tell him we’d managed to get inside? Maybe to cover our nonexistent tracks?

“When was Marty shot?” I asked.

“Why?”

“We were at the college museum in the evening. Several people were there who knew Marty. I thought . . .”

“Not long before the first troopers arrived at the scene.”

“Ah.” We were dismissed. He didn’t want to know who was at the art museum. He didn’t want to know about Renee or Alyse. We gentlemen were no use to him.

As we were leaving, I turned back and asked, “Officer . . . the gun that shot Marty, what caliber was it?”

“Why do you want to know the caliber?”

“I don’t, really. Would it have much recoil?”

He scrutinized me before answering. “Don’t know. Might. Might not.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Nine millimeter,” he said.

When we arrived back home, Ranger was not in the house. His backpack was, though, and he soon appeared at the back door, his right arm still in its sling. He didn’t have a shirt on. His torn T-shirt was wrapped around his left wrist. It was January. His scrawny body was covered with tattoos, but they probably didn’t keep him warm.

“Didn’t take long, huh,” he said.

“What did you do to your wrist?” asked Sandy.

“I fell on some stones or something. Slate, maybe.” He looked at us without blinking. “I was chasing a rabbit.”

Which made more sense for Ranger than it would have for most people. Ranger painted rabbits, little fluffy rabbits, some brown, some white, some in psychedelic shades that haven’t evolved yet even in rabbits. He painted the rabbits, except the psychedelic ones, without apparent irony. They were just there, and they were cute.

He also painted naked young men and women, post-adolescent but just barely, engaged in semi-sexual entwining, all arms and legs. Et cetera. They were not X-rated, but they were not calendar art, either. Unlike the rabbits.

“I like rabbits,” he said.

Marty Levin did not like rabbits, and he did not like what Ranger painted and what Ranger’s cohort painted. In Marty’s view, it was all retrogressive, personal, representational art, degraded by introspection and meaning. These qualities were anathema to Marty. He did his best to subvert two major shows in Manhattan by whatever the art movement it was that included Ranger, and the scheduled shows quickly disappeared.

We bandaged Ranger, which left him with one useless hand and one semi-useless hand. It might have been hard for him to light a cigarette, but at least he could still smoke. He probably couldn’t paint, though, rabbits or lubricious twenty-one-year-olds.

He may have been chasing a rabbit, but that wasn’t how he cut his wrist. He cut his wrist breaking open a window in the back of the guesthouse. I didn’t figure that out until later.

That evening the fragile January thaw crept out to sea. Behind it came thin, windblown snow, fine and lasting. I could hear the oil burner groaning in the cellar, using dollar after dollar of fuel oil. Soon snow would cover the dim, brown patch just outside the guesthouse where Marty’s life had bled away.

Ranger was resigned to eating dinner with us, improvising with a knife and fork despite a painful wrist and painful shoulder. Afterwards he clapped headphones to his ears, retired to a guest room occupied two nights earlier by Renee, and slipped into a world beyond the intrusions of people like us. Sandy went back to whatever arcane literary project occupied him, and I paid bills. The doling out of tasks was not necessarily fair.

In the middle of the evening, knocking at the side door interrupted our off-kilter domesticity. When I opened it, I saw Alyse standing there, a scarf pulled over her hair. She looked like the little match girl who had wandered into the New England cold.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

“Sandy’s here . . . What do you mean?”

“Anyone else?”

“Ranger.”

“Ranger? I don’t . . . Can I talk to you?” She spoke very hesitantly.

“Come on in.”

She came in. “Hi,” she said finally and managed a faint smile. “I’m sorry . . . I mean, it’s late, isn’t it? I know it’s late. You must . . . I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“Bothering you. And Sandy.”

She took off her damp scarf. “This is mysterious,” I said.

“Is it?” she asked. “I’m sorry.”

“You said that. How can we help you?”

She looked around and didn’t want to answer. “I’ve never been here before . . . I need something,” she said in a small voice. “Marty . . .” I waited. “He had something of mine. A piece of paper.” She turned toward me and tried to smile. “I really have to have it. Bess said . . .”

Bess? “What is it?” I asked. “Where is it?”

“It’s about some things I owned. Jewelry. Other things. He kept them. He’s an awful man. He does anything he wants. He doesn’t care about anyone else! I hate him, hate him!” She stopped abruptly. “The paper just says . . . I don’t know . . . Bess told me on Wednesday about self-help . . .”

Self-help? What did self-help include? A bullet in the head?

This conversation was requiring a lot of effort on my part to fill in the blanks. “And you think it’s here?”

“Maybe not in here. Out back.” I scarcely knew what to make of what she said. “I was going to . . . I mean, try to . . . But there are all those lights on now.” The police asked us to keep the outdoor lights on all night—to keep owls away, I thought. Owls and Alyse. “Will you come with me?”

“You think it’s in the guesthouse?”

She nodded again. “Maybe it’s not a paper,” she said. “Not printed—”

“But the guesthouse is padlocked. By the police.”

She seemed startled. “Still?” she asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Can we check?” She was adamant. We checked. It was. “In the back?” she asked. “Is there anything . . . ?” She disappeared around the side of the building. I didn’t know why I was standing in blowing snow watching her try to get into a building the police had sealed.

She reappeared. “How come that little window is broken?” The only little window was high up in the little bathroom. All the others had storm windows on them. I don’t know what they’re made of, but they don’t break. “Can you help me get up to it?”

“Self-help’s one thing. Breaking into a sealed building’s another. The police can help find what you’re looking for tomorrow.”

“No. Just hold the ladder. I’ll climb up.”

The ladder? What ladder? The ladder that had apparently moved itself to the back of the guesthouse?

“Alyse,” I said, “Stop. I’m not going to get myself arrested for breaking into my own property like that guy down in Cambridge.”

“He was black. You’re not black.”

I’m a “gentleman,” I thought. No telling what gentlemen might do with their unbridled behavior. “Where are you parked?”

She left, reluctantly. I guess she left. I didn’t see her again that evening and the lights stayed on around the guesthouse. She said she’d be back.

“Was that Alyse Levin?” Sandy asked when I came inside. “What were you doing?”

“Trying to break into the guesthouse. We weren’t the first.” I told Sandy about the ladder and the window.

We went upstairs. Ranger reluctantly took off his headphones and reluctantly talked to us. “Yeah,” he said. “Guy was a douchebag. Total.” He started to put the headphones back on.

“Wait a minute,” said Sandy.

“He was a douchebag so you tried to break into the padlocked place he’d been staying? What sense does that make?” I asked.

Ranger shrugged. “You were looking for something, weren’t you?” Sandy asked. Ranger didn’t answer. “What were you after?”

“He’s a douchebag. He doesn’t get it. He’s an evil person. Everyone really hates him. He writes stuff and does stuff.” He reached for the headphones again. “He deserved what he got.”

“You are not an easy house guest,” said Sandy. “No pancakes for you in the morning.” Ranger shrugged again.

“How did you dislocate your shoulder?” I asked for the second time in two days.

He stared at me. “I fell. After the symposium.” This time he clapped the headphones to his ears and turned away.

We weren’t the police. We couldn’t coerce him into talking or whatever the police do to suspects. He didn’t need a lawyer with us or Miranda warnings. He could have used a little more civility, but I’m not sure civility has much place in Ranger’s world.

“Is there anyone left who wants to get in there?” asked Sandy when we went back downstairs.

“We’ll find out if there is,” I said. We did.

Ranger drove away the following morning before the police arrived, taking with him his iPod and headphones but not his backpack. I’m not sure how he managed to steer his car.

The police were curious about the broken window. “You didn’t notify us?” asked Detective Captain Romano.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to.” He looked at me with a combination of scorn and muted anger that I hadn’t seen since my father caught me and some friends incinerating Japanese beetles in lawn mower fuel. I thought he wanted to take my bicycle away for a few days.

We went inside the guesthouse. “We’re done with these things,” he said, indicating a cluster of stuff in front of a chair.

Of course they were done. There was nothing left to do. They’d slashed open the lining of Marty’s valise, his computer bag, and his travel kit. They’d kicked the contents into a pile and stacked the useless bags next to it. His laptop was under the bags. The rest of the place seemed undamaged except for the bathroom. Glass from the broken window had shattered on the floor and, worse, into the toilet bowl. I wondered how we could get Ranger to clean the mess up.

“How did this happen?” asked the detective.

I surveyed the debris. “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t know whether he believed me or not, but I didn’t care. I didn’t know why I was shielding Ranger; at the moment I would have been pleased if the police carted him off.

I didn’t understand what had happened or why, and I didn’t understand what was happening now. I was being used, we were, both of us, used and disregarded, our home and our lives a convenience—or inconvenience—for Marty’s killer, for Alyse, and for Ranger, and either one of them might have been the killer. It didn’t matter to any one of them how they affected us. I would not let this continue if I could help it, and I intended to try. The state police were no help. They dismissed us as “gentlemen.”

When I said all this to Sandy, he said: “Stop with that ‘gentleman’ stuff! Let it go! You’re a crazy old man. What do you want them to call us?”

“Mr. Bridgman, maybe, and Mr. Lisle. ‘Sir’ would also do. And I’m not much older than you are.”

“Ten years. That’s plenty.”

I opened the Bridgman Art Gallery that afternoon, and I was very busy. No one bought anything. That wasn’t why anyone was there. They came to gawk at the place where the man had been killed. They looked around the gallery politely then went outside and pointed and scuffed the ground with their feet to see if they could uncover any traces of blood under the new snow. My sense of being used did not improve. I should have sold tickets.

My gallery had acquired an unexpected identity. The kids of today’s visitors could drive by forty years from now and tell their friends, “That’s where some painter or something was murdered. The place was owned by a guy named Tony, but he was eaten by polar bears.”

In the middle of the afternoon Egan Swift appeared. He was in a jocular mood for Egan Swift. Maybe he had a thermos of something strong in the car. “Well!” he said. “Your business is booming.” He wanted to go outside and view the murder site too. There were people in front of him which he found annoying, but he went anyway, peered around, ignored the other people, and came back. He didn’t scuff at the frozen soil. He looked around the gallery and managed to mutter “nice, nice” at several things he saw. “How do you stay open in a world of junk art?” he asked. “Non-art?”

“I don’t handle non-traditional art very often.”

“We have to fight back,” he said. “Fight back!” We? I wasn’t ready to sign up in that battle. Was I guilty of apathy? Of irresponsibility? Did I have to take sides as an ethical human being when both sides overstated their own virtues and the other’s witlessness? I didn’t think I did. Culture wars don’t lead to anything but self-righteousness and bad feeling. I had other plans.

“Last minute,” he said, “but why don’t you and the scholar come to dinner this evening? I’m certain Margaret would love to cook for more than me, and you must want . . .” His voice trailed off.

I had other plans for the evening too. “Art museum committee meeting. Evaluation of Saturday’s symposium. Sandy and I are both going.”

“Another time, then,” he said.

“It was an easy invitation to make,” I said to Sandy after I closed the gallery. “He knows we’re going to the board meeting.”

“Not we. You. I have to go over proofs for the Comp Lit Review article. They want it back tomorrow.”

We had a drink, though Sandy’s wasn’t strong enough to blur his mind that was correcting proofs of an article, which was mind blurring to begin with. Academics! Yikes.

“Why’d the police slit open Marty’s bags,” asked Sandy. “Do you think they were looking for drugs?”

“I didn’t ask, and they didn’t tell. After all, we’re—”

“Stop!” said Sandy. “Just stop.”

“I want to know what’s going on, but I don’t want it to include drug deals. That’s outside my expertise.”

“Murder isn’t? I want to find out who the murderer was by reading it in a newspaper.”

“And the police left his clothes and things behind. Why’s that?”

“And his computer.”

“And his computer. I think it’s bait,” I said. “I think they want someone to come back for it. Maybe that’s why they let Renee leave so easily.”

“And what happens then? We get killed when the killer comes back, but the police can figure out who did it? When did we volunteer for that?”

I swirled the scotch in my glass; ice cubes clinked against each other and against the glass. “Do we know whether Ranger’s right shoulder is really dislocated?”

“You could go upstairs and find out. He came back an hour ago.”

The board meeting was a much too civilized appraisal of an uncivilized brawl. We were in Craftsbury. No one was interested in questions about art theory. Everyone was very interested in questions about propriety. My mind wandered.

It wandered to the aftermath of Marty’s murder and mainly it wandered to the pile of clothes and the computer. The bait. No one had any use for Marty’s soiled, tattered clothing, or if anyone did, I didn’t want to know about it. But the computer . . .

Alyse wanted a document about her marital possessions. The document may have been on the computer, or she may have thought it was. Marty had damaged Ranger and Egan Swift in diatribes he wrote. They both loathed him, and either one of them would want to prevent a posthumous tirade. And Renee? Who knew anything about Renee? Could any one of them get a gun that shot a nine-millimeter cartridge? This was the U.S.A. Of course they could.

The museum board agreed that next year’s symposium participants would have to be screened very carefully, much more carefully than this year’s. Which pointed several fingers at me. Marty was my idea. The meeting droned on.

Suddenly I was afraid, afraid for Sandy. I didn’t know what was happening at home, but I had an overwhelming idea, and the idea scared me. I love Sandy; I couldn’t do without Sandy; I feared he was in danger.

I said something, I don’t know what, and left the meeting abruptly.

I expected to see an unexplained car in the parking lot, and I was right. I raced into the house, calling Sandy’s name.

No response. I ran upstairs. I couldn’t find him.

Ranger opened his bedroom door. “Where’s Sandy!” I yelled.

Ranger just shrugged. “Heard him a minute ago when I peed. What’s happening?”

I didn’t answer. “Wait!” said Ranger.

I ran downstairs and into the side yard. The lights were on in the guesthouse. I burst through the door.

“Mistake,” said Egan Swift. “Big mistake.” He was pointing a handgun at Sandy. It wasn’t a lady’s purse handgun. It was a good-sized automatic. Sandy was on the far side of the room. Egan gestured at me with his gun. “Over there,” he said. I went, and Sandy took my hand. “Touching,” said Egan.

“Crazy old man,” Sandy said softly and squeezed my hand.

Egan seemed distorted, a caricature of himself. The fine gloss of respectability, the cumulative mannerliness, and civilized, well-spoken restraint that came as naturally in Craftsbury as the change of weather, all this gentility had hardened into something else.

The computer was open on a table next to Egan. “Where’s the hard drive? Where’s the backup disk?” he asked.

“We don’t have one,” said Sandy. “I told you—”

“I didn’t ask you! I asked your friend!”

I said, “How would we get either one?”

“I don’t want to know how! I want to know where! Where, where, where!”

“We don’t—”

“I don’t believe you! The computer’s blank! The hard drive’s gone!”

“Egan,” I said. “I thought you were a good person—”

“There’s a greater good than Marty Levin, a much greater good! Good people have to protect it however they can!”

No one would call Sandy strong. No one would call him fearless. No one would call him dumb. He sat down in a chair and slid it toward the window as he sat.

“What are you doing?” asked Swift.

“Sitting down.” I saw why. I took a casual step in the opposite direction. Egan couldn’t point the gun at both of us. It might not matter, but it made life more difficult for him. Life and death.

“The police must have the hard drive.”

“What do the police want with Marty Levin’s hard drive? Answer me! They don’t care! You have it!”

“You’re crazy, Egan.”

“I am not crazy! The world is crazy! Do you know what’s being murdered? Do you? It is not Marty Levin! Marty Levin is one of the murderers! Art itself! Do you know that, gallery owner? Do you? Art! Culture! Mr. Scholar in your cocoon? Do you know that? Art and tradition and goodness! That’s what’s being murdered! And I will not stand by and let it happen! Those of us who still know what Western culture stands for have to act! Where’s the hard drive?”

“Why would we have the hard drive and not give it to you?”

“Because you’re fools! You don’t understand the stakes!”

He had a gun pointed at us. That was stakes enough for me.

“Move next to your friend!” said Egan.

Before I could move, I heard rapid running on the gravel outside. The door burst open and Ranger tumbled into the room, holding his right shoulder and yelping in pain.

Egan turned his upper body and pointed the gun at Ranger, lying on the floor. That was opening enough. I raced the few yards across the room and slammed into Egan. He tumbled backward, sprawling over Ranger like the victim of a ninth grade prank, but he held onto the gun. He tried to point it at me. He fired it. The bullet passed me and shattered some plaster on the ceiling.

Sandy was there. He stomped on Egan’s right wrist with his heel. Egan screamed. The gun spun a yard away, and Egan lunged for it. But I was quicker. I kicked it farther into the room and got hold of it before Egan could.

Egan didn’t think I knew how to use a gun, and he was right. I learned fast. It’s not hard. He came at me. I fired it twice. I wanted to scare him, and I did. The bullets didn’t hit him. They weren’t supposed to, and they didn’t have to. He fled.

“My shoulder’s killing me,” said Ranger from the floor.

The police arrived fifteen minutes later. They believed what we told them. There were three of us, after all, and even if they were inclined to doubt Sandy and me, Ranger was nobody’s idea of a “gentleman.”

Detective Captain Romano arrived after the state troopers. “Are you all right?” he asked me. I was—trembling a little but all right. “You were fortunate, Mr. Bridgman,” he said.

It was a start.

Copyright © 2011 Christopher Welch

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FICTION

SWEET THING GOING

PERCY SPURLARK PARKER

Officer Bob Rycann climbed out the back of the squad car adjusting his uniform. He’d driven deep into the alley, the night shadows covering his activities. He looked around to see if he could detect any onlookers, but the shaded windows of the surrounding buildings were as dark as the alley itself. It really wouldn’t have mattered anyway if he’d had an audience or not. He owned this part of town. He did what he wanted to do.

“Okay, Sally, get your rump moving.”

She scooted herself off the back seat, a pat here and there to her short blonde locks as she stood up. The body was still good, but too many men and too much booze had taken a toll. She wore a ton of makeup trying to hide the lines and crow’s-feet, but a ton wasn’t quite enough.

“Damn you, Rycann,” she said, rubbing her shoulder where he’d held her. “Why you got to be so rough? I’ll be marked up for a week.”

“Hazards of the trade,” he grinned. Then changed to a hard, forceful tone, and said, “Cut the act and get to work. I’ll be back on my last round.”

“You’re a real bastard, Rycann, you know that?”

“Yeah, people tell me all the time,” he said, reaching for her. She shrank back from him, but he was too quick, he grabbed her arm and pulled her close. “Just make sure you have my money ready.”

Her eyes watered slightly and her mouth became a stern red line. It was the familiar mixture of hate and fear he saw in all the whores and hustlers in the neighborhood. They hated him, but they were too scared of him to do anything about it. It was what he counted on, it gave him the upper hand, the control.

“Someday, Rycann—” She spat. “—someday you’ll get yours.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, getting behind the wheel and putting the squad car in gear. “In the meantime, get moving,” he ordered, then drove off, leaving her in the alley.

He really had a sweet thing going. There wasn’t a crooked deal happening on his beat that he wasn’t getting a piece of. From dopers to hookers, strong-arm punks to purse snatchers, they all jumped when he came around, they all gave him his share. Sally, Little Chuck, Cashew Tommy, Jan, Short Sister, Harv, and a dozen or so more were under his thumb. The key was fear and he knew how to use it.

He’d been assigned to the beat for almost four years now, and his safety deposit box had grown from day one. Another couple years or so and he’d be able to hang the badge up and get himself an island someplace. Well, maybe not an island, but he’d be well off for quite some time.

The next couple of hours were kind of quiet for him. There was a traffic accident, a minor fender bender, and he made sure he wasn’t the first responding officer so he didn’t have to do any paperwork. He rousted a drunk at Fig’s Bar & Grill, emptying the guy’s wallet before sending him on his way. Then he caught a guy slow-rolling through a stop sign.

“You’re suppose to come to a complete stop,” he said, when the guy rolled his window down.

“Sorry, Officer, I thought I did.”

“You thought wrong. License and registration.”

The guy behind the wheel frowned. He looked to be in his fifties, gray taking over his sideburns. “Look, can’t we do something about this?” he asked, going through his wallet. “I’ve already got a ticket I’ve got to go to court on.”

“Hey, I’m not a bad guy, but the law’s the law.”

“Yeah, but a little thing like a stop sign,” the man said, folding a twenty and extending it to him. “I haven’t caused any trouble. Why don’t you get yourself some dinner and let me go with a warning this time?”

Rycann cupped the bill in his left hand. “As I said, I’m not a bad guy.”

“I appreciate that, Officer.”

“But . . . I occasionally like to take someone with me when I go to dinner.”

Another twenty got cupped with the first one.

“And, I usually like to give a decent tip.”

A third twenty and he wished the driver a good evening along with a caution to drive safely.

He spotted Cashew Tommy on the corner by Luxurious Curls Beauty Salon, wearing a wrinkled, lightweight suit and no tie. He was leaning against a lamppost, the butt of a cigarette dangling from his thin lips, just the fuzz of a beard on his thin cheeks. When he pulled up to the curb, Cashew straightened suddenly, his dull eyes scanning in all directions as though in search of a place to hide.

All Rycann did was gesture with his thumb. Cashew flipped the cigarette butt to the sidewalk and meekly climbed into the back of the squad car.

“G-good t’ see ya, Rycann. Been lookin’ for ya.”

“You got my money, Cashew?” Rycann asked, looking at the little weasel through his rearview mirror.

“That’s what I wanted t’ talk ta ya about.” Cashew licked his lips. He was a grade-A loser, a penny ante bookie who barely broke even every time the ponies ran. There were dark, droopy bags under his squinty eyes, adding to his sorrowful appearance. “I’ve been running into a string of bad luck lately.”

“No more excuses,” Rycann said, pulling away from the curb.

“Hey, come on now,” Cashew whined, “ya got t’ listen ta me.”

But Rycann didn’t reply, he just sped up, hitting his Mars lights to get through one intersection, then weaving his way around to get to the back of Finstine’s Hardware. He got out and opened the back door so Cashew could exit.

“I let you slide last week,” Rycann said, pushing Cashew back against the squad car. “I want my money now.”

Cashew’s hands were trembling as he held them up in front of him. “Told ya, I’ve had a bad run. I’ve been paying out a lot.”

“But not to me, Cashew. I give you one pass and you think I’m soft.”

“No, no, Rycann, it ain’t that . . .”

Rycann slapped him, a right-handed swipe that rocked Cashew’s head back and brought water to his eyes.

“My money, Cashew.”

Trembling, Cashew reached into his pocket, taking out a fistful of crumbed bills. “This is all I got.” He handed it over to Rycann. As usual, there was a generous portion of cashew nuts mixed in with the money.

“Why the hell don’t you ever clean your pockets out?” Rycann asked, dumping the mess on the trunk of the squad car.

Cashew shrugged, his head lowered, and mumbled something to himself.

Rycann began the tedious task of separating the bills from the cashews. “The next time you give me some crap like this, I’m just going to put a bullet in you and dump you in the river. You got me?”

“Yeah, yeah, Rycann. I won’t do it no more.”

“Fifty-seven damn dollars, is that it?” he snapped, after he’d finished counting.

“Told ya, I been running in t’ some bad times.”

“Well, what are going to do about it?” he asked, getting close to Cashew’s face. He could smell the sweat coming off of him.

“Don’t hurt me, Rycann, please. Look, how about some information?”

“What kind of information?”

“There’s a new babe working the neighborhood. Says she wasn’t about t’ pay no cop off for her hard work.”

“She said that, did she?”

“Least that’s what I heard.”

“How long she been at it?”

“Week or two, maybe three.”

“And you’re just now telling me?”

“Figured it wasn’t none of my business.”

“Uh-huh.” Cashew wasn’t fooling Rycann. He’d saved the information for just this type of situation, something to keep Rycann from squashing him.

“Okay, for now. But you better not be steering me wrong on this.”

“I ain’t, Rycann. I swear.”

Alice was the only name Cashew knew her by. He said she worked out of a second floor rear apartment in the corner building across from Richard’s Playhouse Lounge, one of the busier nightspots on Rycann’s beat, and an ideal place for a hooker to set up shop.

He knocked heavily, rattling the door on its hinges. It would be all the better if she had a john in there with her, Rycann reasoned. Two payoffs were always better than one.

“Yes?” a delicate female voice replied.

“Police, Alice. Open up.”

The door was opened slowly, only about an inch, partially exposing a dark haired woman in a yellow negligee. And with a very little effort Rycann pushed the door open the rest of the way.

“What’s the meaning of this?”

“Cut the indignant act,” he said, closing the door behind him. “You know who I am and why I’m here.”

Her hair was so black it almost made her seem pale as it framed her face in an abundance of loose curls. Except for her large eyes, her features were dainty, doll-like. Her body was slender, yet ample, which was evident by the view offered through the thin fabric of the negligee. In the right setting she could command top dollar. Rycann briefly wondered how she’d wound up here.

“You alone?”

She said she was, but he checked anyway. It was a small apartment: Besides the bedroom and bath, there was just the kitchen/living room combination. Sparsely furnished, just a sofa and twenty-inch TV for the living room, a small table and one chair for the kitchen, a queen-sized bed in the bedroom. She didn’t live in the apartment. It was a place where she plied her trade.

His search had ended in the bedroom, and she sat on the side of the bed and crossed her bare, shapely legs.

“So, I’m breaking the law by being here alone?” she smiled.

“Something you ought to know about me, Alice. I don’t play games when it comes to my money,” he said, and slapped her across her face.

It wasn’t that hard, but she reeled back from the blow anyway. “What was that for?” she asked, rubbing her jaw.

“Just setting the ground rules. I’ll take three hundred a week. I’ll be by every Monday to collect. You’ve been operating in my backyard for three weeks now, so that’s nine hundred you owe me.”

“You out of your damn mind? There’re other places in this city I can work.”

“I’ll help you pack, but you still owe me nine hundred.”

She shook her head smiling, stood and came over to him. “Look, I did some checking before I moved in here. I’ve got a bottle of Red Label. That’s your favorite, isn’t it? Let’s say we open it and talk this thing over?” She ran a finger along the side of his face. “Three hundred a week is kind of steep, and that back pay garbage . . .”

Rycann thought, they always tried to trade their body for the money, but the way he played the game he wound up with both.

He knocked her hand away. “My money first.”

“You’re not that tough, Rycann.”

“If you want to be shown,” he said, reaching for her.

She came in fast, trying to knee him. He was surprised but more amused at her attempt to challenge him. He slapped her hard this time, rocking her head back. She screamed, clawed at him, her nails just missing his face. He slapped her again, even harder than before, and she fell back, hit the corner of the bed, and slid to the floor.

She sat there, her hair a mess about her head, one curl drooped down over her left eye. A thin line of blood began a slow descent from the corner of her mouth.

He took a step toward her and she raised a hand. “Enough. Don’t hit me again, you’ll get your money.”

They were the right words, more or less what he expected. She was beaten. He had won. Yet, he didn’t see the fear in her eyes. There was something there, but it wasn’t fear. She couldn’t be trusted unless he was in absolute control. It was something he would have to work on.

“I think I’ll make it four hundred a week.”

“Sure, okay. I got the message, you’re the boss.”

Still the right words, but where was the fear?

She stood, slowly wiping the blood from her mouth. “How about that drink now?”

“Yeah, okay.”

She stepped over to a nightstand and reached into the bottom compartment. The thought of her going for a weapon crossed his mind and he unsnapped his holster, but she turned with a glass and the bottle of Scotch in her hand.

“You take it straight, don’t you?”

“That’s right,” he said, taking the glass offered. It was the first drink he’d had that evening and the Scotch made a warm welcomed path to his stomach. Another good swallow and he emptied his glass, extended it for a refill. “Better keep a bottle around, I can always use a nightcap.”

“Whatever you say,” she replied, and still there wasn’t the slightest bit of fear in her expression. In fact, she was smiling again. Maybe she thought the rough stuff was over. Maybe he ought to slap her around a bit just to prove her wrong.

“Don’t think I’m forgetting about my money.”

“What money was that?”

“Don’t start getting sassy,” he said, starting to take another swallow, but the glass fell out of his hand and crashed to the floor. How the hell did he do that? His fingers just didn’t seem to want to work.

She was laughing out loud now, slightly weaving in front of him.

“Dumb bastard,” she shouted.

He managed a step toward her, then another, then his legs collapsed and he was on his knees, and there was gnawing pain erupting inside of him. He keeled over onto the floor and felt the vomit flow from his mouth.

She leaned closed to him, and he barely felt her breath on his ear as she spoke. “Cashew Tommy, Sally, Little Chuck, and some of the others wanted you to know the Scotch was a present from them.”

Copyright © 2011 Percy Spurlark Parker

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FICTION

THE PARROTT CANNON AFFAIR

DOUGLAS GRANT JOHNSON

Art by Linda Weatherly

Everyone agreed the cannon was on the roof.

It had somehow gotten from its accustomed place next to the flagpole and onto the roof of the Augustus V. Millbank Administration Building, where it sat precariously on the ridge. A crowd was growing and gawking. Here and there, a few voices could be plainly heard.

“How’d it get up there?”

“Huh! Ask me another!”

“Yesterday, it was right where I’m standing.”

“You sure?”

“I walk by here every day. It was right here in front of the pond.”

“Think ol’ Millbank has seen it?”

“For sure!”

“He just sits up there and worships his ancestors. About time someone tweaked his nose.”

“Maybe Houdini did it.”

“I don’t believe in magic.”

“No other way that cannon got up there overnight.”

“Sat here, hasn’t moved an inch since the college got it donated from the army back in ninety-two,” announced an elderly professor who had just joined the crowd, now close to a couple hundred students, most of whom should have been in the first class of the day.

“Who could do something like that?”

“You’d need a crane to get a heavy thing like that up there.”

“You hear about old Duckworth gettin’ shot last night?”

“Yeah, now where we gonna get good booze?”

“It’d take some kind of engineering genius to put that up there.”

“I say they used one of those new Zeppelins.”

“A Zeppelin? In your hat!”

“What’s a Zeppelin?”

“Where you been living, the Stone Age?”

Sam Kane and his buddies Jerry and Luke walked slowly though the crowd, listening to bits and pieces of excited conversation. Each wore slight smiles and chuckled silently whenever one happened to catch another’s eye. They stopped where they could look back and take in two splendid views of the cannon.

The first was of the cannon itself, sitting astride the roof ridge on one side of the bell tower of the administration building. The other was an image of the building and the cannon reflected between the lily pads growing in a shallow pond in front of them. It was in the right spot to be a reflecting pool but it was really just a murky, unkempt pond, known among the students as the Botany Pond because it was the place of choice to get samples for microscope slides.

They also had a nice view of the small, empty patch of concrete on the other side of the pond. On one side of the patch was a large stone plinth inset with an ornate bronze plaque attesting that the old cannon had served in the Civil War under Colonel Augustus V. Millbank, the founding president of the college. The cannon had indeed been there when the building janitor finished cleaning and locking the building at nine thirty the evening before.

“I’ll bet ol’ Millbank is up there steamin’ right now,” Luke said, eyes on a third floor corner window of the administration building.

“Has to be,” said Jerry.

“Some fellow over there said it was engineering geniuses that did it,” said Luke.

“Engineering geniuses,” Jerry said, and laughed. “Yeah, that’s us.”

“But no one will ever know how we did it,” Luke said.

“Or who,” said Jerry. He paused for a moment to look at the cannon. “Shoot, maybe we were too hasty with that oath.”

“We have a pact gentlemen,” said Sam. “No second thoughts, that was in the oath. Who did it, or how we did it, never to be revealed, even in our memoirs.”

Luke punched Jerry on the shoulder.

“And don’t you forget it.”

“Okay, okay,” Jerry said, raising his hands in surrender, “it’s just that being up all night does things to your brain.”

“Was the gag worth it, Sam?” Luke said.

Sam didn’t answer, and Jerry noticed he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Sam? . . . hey . . . what’s with the glum face all of a sudden?” Jerry said.

“Isn’t over yet,” Sam said. “We’ve still got to put it back tonight. If that works, then . . . I don’t know . . . even if Millbank knew who did it, he’d never understand why.”

“Well,” Jerry said, “it wasn’t right, leaning on you all year like he did.”

Sam stared at the crowd, still growing opposite the pond.

“And this is turning out to be bigger than I thought,” Sam said. “If there’s trouble both of you could be in the soup too,” Sam said.

“Huh!” Luke said. “Not to worry, ol’ pal, I wouldn’t have missed this.”

“The secret’s safe with me, fellas,” Jerry said. He paused once more to admire the cannon sitting on the roof. The sight was worth a deep breath, and he sucked it in. “It’s the berries! Ain’t life a ball? They’ll be talking about this for the next fifty years.”

“Or longer,” said Sam, remembering how to smile again.

“Not much talk about old Duckworth getting shot last night,” said Luke.

“A couple of fellows over there were wondering where they’re gonna get real booze now that he’s gone,” said Jerry. He nodded toward the opposite side of the pond.

“The Roadhouse, I suppose,” said Luke.

“Fellows,” said Sam, “we ought to be getting some shut-eye if we’re going to be awake to put it back tonight.”

“Yeah, suddenly, I feel like I could sleep for the next couple of days,” said Jerry, giving in to a yawn. “How about we do it tomorrow night?”

“No. The longer we wait, there’s more chances someone will climb up to the roof and figure out how we did it.”

“Yeah, get some sleep,” said Luke. “In case you’ve forgotten, it’s dangerous up there in the dark.”

“It’s got to be tonight,” said Sam, giving in to a yawn himself.

“Time to fade,” said Luke. He waved and walked away.

“I think Connie just spotted you,” said Jerry. He tilted his head in the direction Sam should look.

A striking brunette was walking quickly toward him, trailed by a few admiring looks from more than a few male students.

“Remember, not a word, even to girlfriends,” said Jerry.

“My lips are sealed,” Sam said. “Well, hello, Connie.”

“Hello,” Jerry said. “Gotta run.”

“Bye, Jerry.”

Connie turned to Sam.

“My, but aren’t we all looking pleased with ourselves this morning.”

Sam used a yawn to wipe away any traces of a smile that might have betrayed him.

“I thought you might have called last night,” she said.

“Um . . . I was sort of busy . . . studying. Finals next week, you know.”

“And you missed your first class.”

Sam yawned again and looked at his wristwatch.

“Gosh, look at the time. So did you.”

“Oh, I went, but only two others besides myself came to class. The teacher called it off. He’s over there gawking at the cannon like everyone else.”

Connie looked up at the cannon. Sam smiled when he thought she wasn’t looking.

“You know, if I wasn’t looking at it, I wouldn’t believe it. I wonder how it got up there?” She turned to look Sam in the eye and caught the tail end of the smile. “No wild ideas?”

“There’s plenty of wild ideas over there.” He waved his hand toward the students still hanging around. “Not my job to figure it out.”

A car stopped in front of the building entrance. A reporter and photographer with a camera got out and started to look around.

“I think we are about to be famous,” he said, hoping to change the subject. “Another exciting day on campus. Hear about the shooting last night?”

“Someone said he was one of the janitors.”

“Yeah, nice old fellow is what I’ve heard . . . I guess he was a real fixture around here. It wouldn’t surprise me if he cleared more bringing down good liquor from Canada than he made as a janitor.”

“Who would do something like that to him? And right on campus.”

Sam shrugged, didn’t say anything.

“I know . . . not your job to figure it out,” she said, tapping him a good one on the shoulder and interrupting a really good yawn. The yawn abruptly over, he looked at his watch and gave her a wink and a quick peck on the cheek.

“See you later, okay?”

She watched him trot off through the crowd, then glanced once more at the cannon. Yes, she thought, he looked entirely too pleased with himself to be innocent. Jerry, too, for that matter.

“There’s never been anything like this since my grandfather was invested as the first president of this college,” said Albert V. Millbank, the current president. He was standing at the window of his office where he usually stood to admire the cannon.

“Yes, sir. One of our janitors being shot down is rather unusual,” said his son, Philo V. Millbank.

“Not the shooting! The cannon!”

Albert V. Millbank raised his eyebrows and stared at his son who, except for the lack of a beard, bore a marked resemblance to a distinguished gent in a large oil painting on the wall behind Albert V. Millbank’s desk. The younger man—younger, but nevertheless in his early fifties—was dressed almost as formally as his ancestor in the painting.

“Yes, sir. But Mr. Duckworth was—”

Albert V. Millbank waved his son’s statement away.

“Not our concern. The police will sort that one out, bad as it is. But we’ve got to put a stop to this kind of campus shenanigans. Graduation is just two weeks away, and it’s already disrupting everything.”

Both glanced at the students milling around on the lawn below the window. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the subject of their conversation. The photographer was setting up his camera and tripod in the spot the cannon had stood. He was aiming his lens at the roof.

“This prank is striking at the heart of everything this college stands for. Find who is responsible. An example must be made.”

“Yes, sir,” said the younger man.

“There’s history in that cannon. My grandfather, your great-grandfather, was one of the army advisors to Robert Parker Parrott, who invented that cannon at the West Point Foundry in 1861. Did I tell you the company he commanded used them in the War Between the States?”

“Yes, sir. I remember.”

“And this . . . couldn’t have come at a worse time. Some members of the board of regents have been talking about the need for new leadership here. Insane idea. My father and his father . . . our family, our heritage . . . are the foundation of this institution.”

“So you’ve said, sir.”

“I’ve expected someday you should step into my shoes. We could name a building after you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve got to find some way to get it down from there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And quickly. Without doing it any damage.”

“Yes, sir.”

Albert V. Millbank turned back to face the window and clasped his hands behind his back.

“Awesome cannon, for its time,” he said.

“Wake up, Sam!” an out-of-breath Jerry said. “We got big trouble.”

“Mmmf . . . what . . . the cannon fell off the roof?”

“Ol’ Duckworth, the fella who was shot last night—”

“We already heard . . .” Sam turned over and buried his face in the pillow.

Jerry grabbed Sam’s shoulder and shook it vigorously.

“It’s Luke! He’s been arrested for shooting ol’ Duckworth last night.”

“Impossible,” Sam said. Awake now, he arose and sat on the edge of the bed. “Luke was hiding in the attic of the administration building since six o’clock last night.”

“Well, the cops got him.”

“He couldn’t have done anything like that. He let us in right after Duckworth locked up and started walking home. He was with us until this morning when we watched everyone sunburning the roofs of their mouths.”

“When I came back to our apartment, one of the fellows told me what happened. He said a couple of the cops were sort of loose with the lips, saying how they’ve got a witness who saw Duckworth shot down last night. Says he was shot from a passing car, about a block from the women’s dorm. And their witness says it was Luke’s Speedster and Luke was driving it and doing the shooting.”

“Couldn’t have. He has an alibi.”

“Yeah, and we’re it.”

“It’s a frame-up.”

“While I was there, a couple of cops were still there searching his room and his car. They found a gun under the driver’s seat of his car.”

“I can’t believe Luke owned a gun. Somebody put it there.”

“Obviously.”

“How long ago did they arrest him?”

“Must have been an hour, hour and a half ago.”

“They arrested him that long ago, and no one’s looked us up? You know what that means?”

“Yeah, I’d guess Luke’s just clammed up, not saying where he was last night. If he told the cops where he was, they’d already be looking for us to back him up.”

“And Millbank would already be knocking on our door expelling us.”

“Luke’s a pretty straight-up fella. He’s the kind of guy takes a pact like ours very seriously. He probably sees an oath as an oath.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I dunno. I’m just telling. You’ll figure it out.”

Sam was silent for a moment, then fell back heavily on the bed.

“Two weeks before graduation,” he said, “and it’s blown up in our faces. Jerry, I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”

Albert V. Millbank still stood looking down at the empty concrete pad. Only a few students lingered to continue their speculations. The reporter and photographer who had arrived earlier were gone, along with another pair who arrived only a few moments after.

“I don’t like to think how we are going to get the cannon back down. A heavy crane is going to be needed and it’s going to cost hundreds of dollars. And where we’ll find one that big this side of New York City, I don’t know.”

His son, Philo V. Millbank, joined him at the window.

“Something as big as this, sooner or later the pranksters will brag about it. We’ll hear.”

“I don’t want to wait for that. I want them now. Pranks indeed. I’ll see them expelled! I’ll see they’ll never get in another college!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tomfoolery like this . . . and at a time like this. I suspect two of the new members of the board of regents have been talking to some of our staff.”

“Are you sure?”

“Some of the board are still loyal alumni. There will be a meeting. As early as several weeks from now. It would help if we had some movement in donor pledges. Like that one from the moving picture fellow . . .”

“Andrew Kane.”

“Yes, that one. He mentioned some property he might donate to the college. He was very vague, and he’s postponed it several times. I’ve taken the trouble numerous times to mention it to that son of his—his name is Samuel—but it’s not done any good.”

The two were silent for a moment.

“I’ve just spoken to the head custodian,” Philo V. Millbank said. “He claims there’s no way that cannon could have been moved to the roof overnight. He thought I was joking. Probably still thinks so.”

“Hasn’t he seen it?”

“When I found him, he was busy with one of his men repairing a broken water line in one of the dorms. He’d been there most of the night. With Duckworth dead, he says he’s short of help.”

“Get him over here. Now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And see if he thinks the old roof beams are going to be damaged by all that weight. This building is seventy years old and that cannon must weigh at least two thousand pounds.”

“Yes, sir.”

The younger man left the room. He was gone for no more than a minute when he came through the door again, without knocking.

“There’s been a development, sir.”

Albert V. Millbank turned to face the door.

“About the cannon?”

“No, sir. About the murder of the custodian, Mr. Duckworth. The police have made an arrest.”

“Good, now perhaps we can concentrate on finding who put our cannon up on the roof.”

Sam was trying to retreat deeper into his pillow.

“I let Millbank get to me, Jerry. All year, he’s been finding occasions to mention some property my father said he might donate to the school. Then he sends my dean after me, and he said they might have to look into my transfer credits, but hinted they wouldn’t if I could help hurry the donation along . . . the whole thing was bogus. They already looked at my records when I came last fall. There’s nothing wrong with any of them.”

“I thought that was a little underhanded, myself. You tell your dad about that?”

“I did. My dad told me he pretty much had Millbank figured out from the start. I guess the donation was to sort of grease the skids to get me enrolled here in the first place. I know he intends to do it, but what’s the hurry? I don’t know, maybe there’s complications in the title to the property, and straightening it out takes time.”

“So, what are we gonna do?”

Sam sat up again.

“Jerry, we may be carrying that solemn pact business too far. This is serious. There was nothing in the pact that said one of us had to go to jail rather than—”

“Are you saying we go and give ourselves up?”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder what Luke would say.”

“He’s probably saying ‘get me out of here!’”

“Cops’ll find out who really did it, and they’ll hav’ta let Luke go.”

“What makes you think they’re going to do any more looking? You said they’ve got a witness, and they’ve got Luke. They’ve got all they need. What are the chances they’ll keep looking unless we tell them where he was?”

“C’mon, Sam, the prank of the century, and you want to give it up already?”

“Maybe Luke’ll come to his senses and spill the beans . . . that’ll settle it. This morning, you were the one who thought we might have been too hasty with that oath.”

“I was half awake and that was sleepy talkin’.”

“Jerry, look, having a little fun with Millbank and his heritage is one thing, getting even for trying to pressure my father through me—well, that’s another thing, but this is serious. Somehow the pact doesn’t seem so important anymore. We can’t just let Luke hang out there like last week’s washing.”

“We do that, we’ll be out of here so fast we won’t even see the doorframe when it goes by.”

“I could leave you out of it. I’ll tell them it was just me and Luke. If I can’t get into another college, I’ll just have to go to work in the family business. All I’m going to college for, when it comes down to it, is to postpone that as long as possible.”

“Lissen, Sam. We can’t waste this. There’s gotta be another way. We can fix it.”

“I wish we could, but I sure don’t see it.”

“You’re the genius. You figured out how to get that cannon onto the roof.”

Sam and Jerry engaged in a little eye-contact jousting for a few seconds. Sam lost when he looked away.

“Okay, if we were going to try something,” Sam said, “we’d have to start with the witness. Who is it, says Luke shot the old fellow?”

“The cops who took Luke away didn’t mention a name. I checked the morning paper on the way over here. There’s a story about Duckworth, and it mentions a witness but gives no name. They go to press too early to have any mention of Luke’s arrest.”

“The cops obviously know. But if we ask them, they’ll want to know why we want to know, and we open the whole thing up.” Sam paused, considering. “You know what the big problem is going to be—if we find this mystery witness—what do we do, say ‘please change your story, get our pal out of jail’?”

“Like I said—”

“I know . . . I’m the genius who—”

“So, we do a little lookin’ around, find out who this witness is, and maybe we’ll find out why he’s accusin’ Luke of being where we know he wasn’t.”

Both were silent for a long moment.

“I think I know someone,” Sam said. “He might know who this witness is, and if he doesn’t know, he probably could find out.”

“Now we’re cookin’, Sam. It’d be nice if we could get Luke sprung before the paper comes out tomorrow. Maybe even keep his name out of the papers.”

“That might be asking a lot.”

“Be nice if Luke was able to help us put the cannon back tonight too. Don’t forget, he’s the only one of us who dared to actually go out on the roof.”

“Okay, look, I’ll admit, the idea of looking around does sort of appeal . . . but if we strike out, I think Luke is more important than any oath we made.”

Jerry didn’t respond.

“I’ll get at it right away,” Sam said.

President Albert V. Millbank was seated at his enormous desk. He was looking at the ceiling, as if afraid the cannon would crash through it at any moment. Philo V. Millbank was seated across from him.

“I have just remembered a rumor about that Kane boy,” Albert V. Millbank said, turning his attention to his son, “the one whose father pledged some property to the college. I seem to remember there was some rumor of an incident with a fire hose on the campus of—”

“Nothing in the rumor mill about him or anyone.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to upset things, at least before we can finalize the donation. His father was not specific about what the property is. A few weeks ago I had our attorneys look into properties his company owns. They promised to have their report finished by now.”

“I could call them and see if they have anything yet.”

“Do that. Hopefully we can get that business concluded soon. It would be good to have it finished before the next meeting of the board of regents. You know, go in with a large donation in hand.”

“But if the Kane boy is responsible?”

“If that young man is responsible, he’s out, property or no property. And anyone who helped him. Whomever it is, we could even look into having the perpetrators arrested for theft.”

“Father, they—if there were more than one—didn’t steal it, they just moved it.”

“I think the county prosecutor would see it my way. I won’t have my family’s heritage besmirched in this way.”

“Actually, Father, I’ve been thinking . . . I don’t see how any number of students could have moved that cannon to the roof over one night. It has to be someone . . . something else.”

“I’m sure there’s more to it than we know. One of our physics professors thinks it’s perhaps some sort of marvelous new invention. Somewhere on the edges of science. Of course, you have to take whatever he says with a bit of caution. He also thinks there’s something to this fanciful notion going around that we can split the atom.”

“Father, when it’s known, I think it’ll be something as simple as one of those new lighter-than-air machines. We should be checking to see if one of those has been stolen.”

“How could anyone steal something that big? Where would you hide it? Do you suppose the cannon prank could have had anything to do with the shooting of Duckworth?”

“The police don’t think so.” Philo V. Millbank rose to leave. “I’ll make that call to the attorneys.” At the door, he turned. “Duckworth’s been here since your father was president. Perhaps we should have retired him years ago.”

“Nonsense. He was handy to have around. Best delivery system in the world. Put in your order, a week later you would find it in the drawer of your office desk.”

“I think he was popular with the students for the same reason.”

“Best source of real scotch on the East Coast. Must have had some sort of pipeline up to Canada. With him gone, where’ll we get good liquor?”

“There’s always the Roadhouse on the other side of town.”

“The Roadhouse,” Albert V. Millbank said, and after a moment, added, “such an unsavory place.”

In answer to a summons, a detective rapped on the doorframe of the chief’s office and entered when invited. The chief spoke first.

“What’s happening with the kid we arrested for the Duckworth shooting?”

“He ain’t talkin’.”

“Still?”

“Except for ‘I didn’t do it,’ not ’nother word. An’ I mean not ’nother word.”

“We need a confession when I meet with the prosecutor in the morning.”

“We’ll keep tryin’, but the kid won’t open his mouth, even t’ admit who he is. Just says ‘didn’t do it’ an’ then starts fallin’ asleep.”

“Are we sure we’ve got the right kid, the one the girl named?”

“Oh, yeah, a roommate pointed him out when we picked him up.”

“What about the revolver you found in his car?”

“Wiped clean except for two prints on the barrel. Not the boy’s. But it’s the same caliber as the ones the doc took out of Duckworth.”

“That does it, then. What does the kid say about it?”

“Says, ‘didn’t do it,’ and falls asleep.”

“I’ve already got pressure to sew it up some way so we don’t need the girl’s testimony. Or the gun, either, maybe. Put the screws to him, if you need to.”

“Chief, this ain’t Chicago, where they hang ’em by their heels over a balcony.”

“You’re not listening. I’ve got pressure. I’ve already had a preliminary meeting with the prosecutor. He’s getting pressure. Now, you’re getting pressure. Get him to agree to plead and we won’t need a trial. I want a confession on my desk by the end of the day.”

The detective looked toward the ceiling.

“You know what I want. Do it!”

The detective nodded his head, but it was neither a yes or a no movement.

The telephone rang as the detective left the room.

“Yes?” The chief listened for a few seconds. “Put him through.” He listened for a moment. “No, sir. Nothing that would tie the boy to the Roadhouse.” He listened again. “I’m sure we can keep that kind of speculation in the background . . .” A brief listen. “. . . yes, or out of it.” Another brief listen. “Not a problem.” He hung up the telephone and glared at the door the detective had just gone through.

The staff of the school newspaper operated out of a single cramped room in the basement of a building designated officially as the Gregory V. Millbank Building, and unofficially as the Old Classroom Building.

When Sam got there, the office was locked. Through a glass panel in the upper half of the door, Sam could see the lights were off and the room was vacant. He was about to turn away when he noticed several cards taped to the glass. There were four cards, one for each of the student staffers. The cards included telephone numbers and class schedules of each. Sam examined the one labeled TED CASWELL. It indicated he might be found in a class that, according to Sam’s wristwatch, had just started on the second floor of the same building.

A few seconds later, Sam spotted Ted through the glass in the door. He considered waving or somehow trying to attract his attention and motioning him to come out. But that might attract the attention of the professor, instead. He checked his watch again. There was almost a whole hour to wait. After a few seconds’ thought, he boldly opened the door and stuck his head through the opening.

“Emergency telephone call for Ted Caswell!”

Sam leaned back so he was mostly out of view from inside the room, but held the door ajar. Ted stood. The professor glanced at Ted and nodded.

Halfway into the hallway, Ted spotted Sam.

“What’s—”

Sam held a finger to his lips and made a hurry-up-follow-me gesture. The next classroom was empty and the door was open. He walked in and waited for Ted to join him.

“What’s the emergency, Sam? There’s no phone in here.”

“Relax, Ted. There’s an emergency, but not on the telephone. You have any details on the shooting of the old janitor last night?”

“You called me out of class to ask me that? What’s so urgent—”

“I heard the cops have some sort of witness—”

“How about waiting for the paper to come out on Monday?”

“That’s five days away. It’ll be old news by then.”

“We’re a weekly. Everything we publish is old news.”

“Look, I heard the cops have a witness who claims he saw it happen. Who is it?”

“Why not ask the cops?”

“Do you think they’d tell me? I’m just another student. But I thought an outstanding, aspiring reporter like you would know somehow.”

“What’s your interest?”

“Well, it’s just that . . . the cops have arrested Luke Brandon.”

“If you know that, what’s more to know?”

“Whoever their witness is, he’s lying. Luke didn’t do it.”

“You know something the cops don’t?”

“Look, Luke’s just a friend. I don’t think he did it. Be a pal.”

“Is there something going on here an outstanding, aspiring reporter ought to be aware of?”

“No . . . I mean, I’m just trying to figure out why someone would accuse Luke, who is a guy who would think three or four times about swatting a fly.”

“Yeah, su-u-u-re. Okay . . . cops put a lid on it. They aren’t saying. And there’s a state legislator who called our faculty advisor, who informed the editor this morning that we weren’t to print any details about the witness. Nor are we to waste any time looking for any details.”

“Journalism 101.”

“Exactly. So I called my uncle who works for the daily here in the city. He says their paper has had some pressure to keep the witness’s name out of print.”

“Journalism 201.”

“So, a couple of us, we just nosed around. Even if it’s only a weekly college tabloid, it is a newspaper and we who run it aspire to be real newsmen.”

“I’m proud of you, Ted. You’ll go far.”

“Well, their witness isn’t a he. They’ve got this student, Joyce Flinders . . . she’s walkin’ home from an evening at the library, it’s about nine forty-five, Duckworth is on the sidewalk across the street. About a block from the dorm, a car wheels around a corner, stops by Duckworth, shots ring out, Duckworth falls dead, the car roars off, and the Flinders dame, she says she saw it all.”

“And, she describes Luke’s car?”

“Yeah, an’ describes watchin’ Luke empty his gun into the old guy.”

“If it comes to trial she’ll have to testify.”

“The Flinders dame is not only the daughter of a state legislator, but her family is big money in this state. I think her pop probably figures by the time it comes to trial, Duckworth was so unimportant nobody’d be paying any attention, even the papers. Meanwhile, they’ll try to keep her name out of it as long as possible.”

“Ask yourself this: What reason would Luke have for shooting the old guy?”

“Heck, isn’t any real secret. Half the students on campus know Duckworth was the best source of good freelance booze in the county. Maybe he shorted Luke on a booze buy, or gave him the wrong stuff, I don’t know.”

“Luke didn’t use the stuff, Ted. What other business could he have had with the old guy?”

“Well, my uncle is pretty tight with one of the city cops. He says Luke isn’t talking. Not word one. If he’s innocent, you’d think he’d come up with at least some half-baked alibi. Wouldn’t you think?”

* * *

After Ted left, Sam sat trying to get his thoughts away from sleep and figure what he ought to do next. A few moments later, the class bell rang and the hallway was filled with students. Connie was one of them, and she noticed Sam through the open door. He was leaning back with his eyes closed. She walked into the room and sat next to him.

“Catching up on your sleep?”

Sam sat up and stifled a yawn.

“I was just thinking.”

“Deep thoughts?”

“No. Actually I think I was sleeping.”

“Sam, I didn’t know you had a class around here.”

“I was, um, just in the neighborhood.”

“So was I. I have a class in this very building.”

“And you went to this one.”

“Yes, and a strange thing happened. A few minutes after the class started, some fellow interrupted, yelling, ‘Emergency telephone call for Ted Caswell.’”

“That would be a strange thing.”

“Yes, it would be, and it was. Who’s Ted Caswell? I’ve seen him in the class, I mean I saw him get up and leave, but we’ve never been introduced.”

“Looking for a new boyfriend?”

Connie poked a finger in his chest.

“I know it was you out there in the hall. What’s going on?”

“He’s just a fellow who works on the campus newspaper. Do you know a girl named Joyce Flinders?”

“You looking for another girlfriend?” Connie gave him a good hard look in the eye, then relaxed when he raised his hands in surrender.

“Okay, I know her to speak to, but . . . know her? I know her well enough, I’ve never wanted to know more. And she has fast friends. I’ve heard she’s been carrying a torch for a fellow who works over at that Roadhouse.”

“She claims to be a witness to the shooting last night. She says it was Luke who did it. Cops picked him up this morning.”

“Luke? I’d rather believe the Statue of Liberty went for a stroll in Central Park.”

“She says she was coming back from the library and saw it happen.”

“Joyce Flinders? In the library? I doubt if she knows where the library is.”

“That’s the story she’s telling the cops.”

“Someone said her grades are close to failing. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was her folks’ influence . . . make that, um, money that was keeping her in school.”

“That sort of thing goes on?”

“Don’t patronize me, Sam. Last fall, the paper had an article about her father buying new curtains for the Millbank Theater.”

Sam stood, feeling a little refreshed.

“Thanks, Connie.” Sam leaned close and left a quick kiss on her cheek. “You’re the top! Gotta go.”

“Wait!” Connie started to rise, but sat again after a few seconds. He was gone before she had gotten to the questions she really wanted to ask. Like how did Sam and his buddies get Millbank’s cannon onto the roof. She had already decided they were the ones who put it up there.

Sam joined Jerry on a bench near the entrance of the Evangeline S. Millbank Student Cafeteria.

“It’s Joyce Flinders,” Sam said.

“Ah, Joyce Flinders,” Jerry said.

“You know her?”

“Never met her, but I know Luke dated her a couple times last year. Said later it should have been never. He thought she was only interested because his family comes from money. Slick lookin’ dame, no brains.”

Sam snapped his fingers.

“Didn’t she run for prom queen last winter?”

“Yeah, but she lost when she couldn’t qualify in current events. She thought Mussolini was the chef at the Roadhouse.”

Sam related his conversation with Ted, including the calls Joyce’s father had apparently made. He also recounted what Connie said about Joyce.

“Well,” Jerry said, “we both know Joyce didn’t see anything of the kind.”

“We really ought to be going in and telling the cops where Luke really was. Ted said the last he’d heard, Luke isn’t saying anything. Why isn’t he spilling it and laughing in their faces?”

“Well, he took an oath, just like you and me.”

“Or maybe he’s waiting for us to come in and get him sprung.”

“Maybe, but let’s turn over a few more rocks first. If Joyce has been seeing somebody who works over at the Roadhouse, that’s a little suspicious right there, you ask me.”

“Okay, I guess I could at least go look up Joyce Flinders. Tell her what I think.”

“Just like that? Tell her what you think?”

“It’s what those private dicks in those gangster movies would do. My father’s company made a couple of them last year. Warner Brothers has been cranking them out. They’re very popular.”

“You’re not the hard-boiled type, Sam. Maybe offer her a screen test if she’ll change her story.”

“That would be unethical, I think.” Sam looked at his watch. “The next class break is in twenty minutes. I’ll check the schedules and see if I can just happen to run into her. Do you know any of the girls over at the dorm?”

“There’s a couple who’d still admit knowing me, I guess.”

“Be nice to maybe pick up a little more on this Flinders girl.”

“I could talk to ’em.”

“The day’s growing older,” Sam said through a yawn.

“We’d best shake a leg, then,” Jerry said, through a yawn of his own.

* * *

Sam spotted Joyce Flinders as she was coming out of what was known as the New Classroom building, built only twenty years before, in 1912, but officially unnamed as yet. He caught up to her as she was passing a large bronze statue of Jerusa S. Millbank, the first dean of women at the college, and the daughter of Augustus V. Millbank.

“You’re Joyce Flinders, right?”

She stopped to look at Sam.

“Sorry to hear you had a sort of rough experience last night.”

Joyce hesitated.

“My name is Sam Kane, and—”

Joyce squealed.

“Oh! I’ve heard, well, all about you. You’re the one whose father owns that movie studio.” She pronounced the word movie as if it were twice as long as it was.

“Well, he runs it.” Sam shrugged. He wanted to back up a step, but didn’t.

Joyce turned on the smiles, moving closer, touching him on the arm. “Why haven’t we ever met before?”

“Well, I guess—”

“I imagine, if a girl wanted to get into the movies, you’d be a good person to know.”

“I don’t know about that. I’ve never gotten anyone into pictures.”

“But you could. You’d know what a girl would have to do.”

He knew right away what this girl was getting at and did step back a bit.

“Lately, I’ve been staying as far away from that business as possible. Um . . . must have been something, seeing Mr. Duckworth mowed down like that.”

It took her a second to register the change of subject. Then she troweled on the despair.

“Oh, it was terrifying. Just terrifying.”

She reached out to touch him on the arm again. She left her hand there a few seconds longer this time.

“I never want to see anything like it again.”

“How did you happen to see it?”

“I was walking from the library, you know, back to the dorm. A car . . . Luke’s car . . . came around the corner and it slowed down when it came up to mister Duckworth. The driver . . . Luke . . . just leaned out and shot him, six times, then sped off.”

“Are you sure it was Luke’s car you saw?”

“Well sure, it’s that flashy new car he has. No one else on campus has one like it. And he just shot the poor man down in cold blood.”

Sam took a deep breath and tried to put on the same hard-boiled manner he had seen on the screen.

“Look, kid, Luke wasn’t there.”

“Of course he was . . . how other could I see him?”

“Listen, Luke has an alibi, and you didn’t see him at all, and pretty soon the cops are going to be wondering why you’re saying such things about him.”

“Why, no such thing! I saw him—”

“He wasn’t there. I think you know it. Why are you doing this to Luke?”

“I’m not talking to you anymore.”

She walked away quickly. Very quickly.

Sam walked into the drugstore across the street from the main campus entrance. There was a good afternoon crowd. He passed a large, professionally painted show-card advertising a new item: The Cannon Sundae. Someone, he thought, had moved pretty quickly to get it up there and on the menu. He paused for a few seconds to watch the soda jerk finish a couple of them. It was a sundae dish piled high with three large scoops of ice cream with a thick peppermint stick laid across the top and a couple of big gingerbread cookies stuck into the sides for the wheels. Sam started a smile but it quickly turned into one of reproach at the way things had turned out.

He turned away from the counter and continued to a back booth where he found Jerry with an empty sundae dish, sucking on a peppermint stick. When he saw Sam, he smiled and removed it from his mouth, flicking the end of it with his little finger, as if knocking the ash off a good cigar.

Sam slid into a seat. Jerry spoke first.

“How did it go with the Flinders dame?”

“For seeing someone gunned down right in front of her last night, she seemed awfully cheery.”

“I take it she’s not budging. Did you offer her a screen test?”

“I had the feeling it wouldn’t have taken much more than a promise of one and she’d have thrown herself at me.”

“And you didn’t let her do it?”

“It didn’t seem the right thing to do.”

Jerry looked at Sam for a moment, with an expression that said it might have been the right thing to do.

“Well, we know she’s lying,” Jerry finally said.

“She got plenty upset when I told her she was lying.”

“Came right out with it, huh?”

“I tried to play it a little tough. It didn’t work.”

“Sam, ol’ pal, I don’t think you handled that very well. Is it too late to offer her a screen test in exchange for changing her story?”

“I don’t think that would work now.”

Jerry shrugged.

“I, on the other hand, have had a modest success.”

“You’ve learned something from your old girlfriends?”

“A few of them, amazingly enough, are still on speaking terms. The night of the shooting, a couple of them saw Joyce Flinders being picked up around seven o’clock by someone in a maroon breezer. The top was up, so they didn’t see who it was. But they pretty well described a maroon Buick coupe with a tan canvas top. Remarkably similar to a car I’ve seen a couple of times parked in the rear parking lot over at the Roadhouse.”

“It might be interesting to know who drives the breezer.”

“I was thinking the same. Especially since one of the girls—her current flame was hanging around when we spoke, and he said, on rare occasions, he’s been a customer of Duckworth. He said he went over to do a little business with him one evening a week ago, saw a maroon breezer drive off. He also said Duckworth seemed a little preoccupied as they transacted their business.”

“Do you think it was really that maroon car Joyce saw?

“Be interesting to know, all right.”

“Maybe I could go over there and look around. If it’s there, I could ask who the owner might be. It would be good to ask Duckworth’s neighbors about it too. Maybe someone else has seen that car there.”

“Cops ought to be doing all that.”

“You call on his neighbors. I’ll pay a visit to the Roadhouse, check on the car.”

“You ever been there, Sam?”

“No. I just know where it is.”

“Stay away from the hard-boiled stuff over there.”

The Roadhouse was set back from the highway, in an area that had been carved out of a surrounding woodland. It was as attractive and well cared for as a country estate and, except for the parking areas that surrounded the low rambling building, looked as if that’s what it was.

A small gatehouse stood at the end of the lane, and an attendant stepped to its door and quickly waved Sam through without stopping.

It was the slow time of the afternoon, between the lunch crowd and the early dinner crowd. Sam had his choice of about half the parking spots in the lot. He chose one that gave him a good view of the part of the lot that wrapped itself around one side of the building. From there, he had a glimpse of a sharp-looking Buick convertible coupe parked in the rear of the lot. It was the right color. He walked back to the attendant at the gate.

“That maroon coupe back there, the Buick,” Sam said. “Nice car.”

The attendant came out but didn’t glance at the nice car. And he didn’t speak.

“Kind of unusual. I don’t think it got that color from the factory.”

Again, the attendant didn’t speak.

“Actually, I’ve seen it around, and if I knew who owned it, I’d ask if he might be willing to sell it.”

The attendant finally spoke.

“This here ain’t no used-car lot. You here for a meal, or to buy cars?”

He tossed his head in the direction of the front entrance and walked back inside his little domain.

Sam shrugged and walked to the entrance. Once he was inside and out of sight, the attendant crossed the lot to Sam’s car. He opened the driver’s door and reached for the little holder that was wrapped around the steering column. He examined the document inside and scribbled a note in a small notebook. Finished, he returned to his post where he picked up a telephone handset and pushed a button.

A few seconds later, he said, “Lemme talk t’ Bert.”

The dining area was actually several connected rooms, laid out so that tables and banquettes offered a high degree of privacy. There was, of course, no bar. Sam chose a booth close to a window that looked out on the rear parking lot. Between a couple of cars, he could see the maroon coupe was still there. He sat for a moment, considering the hostile response by the parking lot attendant, and asking himself whether there was any other way to find out who owned the breezer. He considered simply taking down the license number and trying to trace the owner through state license records. But he didn’t know how to do that and figured it could easily take days, time he didn’t have. Or if it could be done that way at all by a citizen. While he was contemplating this, an elderly waiter approached to take his order.

That taken care of, the waiter hesitated.

“Will there be anything else you’d like, sir?”

It took a moment for Sam to understand the waiter might be asking for his drink order.

“It’s a little early for me,” he said, remembering a line from a movie he’d seen. “But I’ve been admiring the car of one of your patrons. I think he’s a regular here. If I knew who owned it, I’d make him a nice offer.”

“Which car is that, sir?”

“The maroon convertible coupe in the rear parking lot.”

“I don’t see such a car,” the waiter said without looking out the window. He turned and headed to the kitchen.

Sam glanced toward the window. The maroon coupe was still there.

A few minutes later, longer than it should have taken, Sam thought, a different waiter, this one about Sam’s own age, dropped his order on the table and departed without a word. Sam glanced at the plate. He’d ordered a deluxe burger that was a specialty of the place. What had been placed before him consisted only of an overtoasted bun and a curled, greasy, overcooked patty. Nothing else. Oh, there was a piece of lettuce about as big as a silver dollar, but it looked like it was left over from the day before yesterday. Definitely, he thought, not fulfilling the reputation of the Roadhouse. Or of the price he remembered from the menu. Sam watched the waiter walk back to the kitchen. Just before he went through the door he paused for a quick glance back at Sam. Although their eyes met for just a second, it was a neutral look, and Sam couldn’t read anything into it.

Sam dropped enough money on the table to cover the price he remembered from the menu, but not enough to cover a tip. He was wasting his time thinking he could discover anything about the owner of the maroon breezer.

When Sam approached his car he briefly noticed someone was sitting in the passenger seat of the car parked next to his, but his mind was on the afternoon fast melting away and his own lack of ideas about what more he could do. The smart thing was going to be to talk to the cops.

He had his own car door half open when the passenger door of the next car opened behind him. Almost at the same time, a hand clutched his shoulder and spun him around.

“Your name Sam Kane?”

“Ye—”

Before he could finish the word, a fist slammed into his stomach and he was struggling to breathe. It felt like he’d been hit with a cannonball from Millbank’s cannon.

“My car ain’t for sale. An’ you ask too many questions for your own good.”

Sam fell to the ground.

“You hear me?” It was the waiter who had delivered the burger, and he nudged Sam’s ribs with his foot. Well, more than nudged.

Sam winced and nodded. He was still not breathing well enough to speak.

“And you stay way away from Joyce Flinders. She told me about you badgering her. You keep away from her and you keep your nose outta things ain’t nunna your business.”

He nudged with his foot again. Harder.

“You hear?”

Sam managed a nod. At the same time, he saw a glint of metal being slipped into the waiter’s pocket. He knew what it was. Brass knuckles. He’d seen them used as props in one of his father’s pictures. But those were made of rubber. This one was really fat. And not made of rubber.

With a huff of contempt, the waiter walked away leaving Sam lying on the ground. As he tried to rise, a big car entered the lot and pulled to a stop next to the waiter.

“Hiya, Bert! Your pop in?” the driver called out.

Sam raised his head enough to see he was talking to the waiter.

“In his office, where else?” the waiter said, and continued walking back to the building. The car continued to the rear parking area.

A moment or two later, Sam managed to stand and painfully climb into his car. When he glanced at the attendant in the little gatehouse, he saw the man had his face studiously buried in what looked like the Police Gazette.

He sat, tried to get his breath back, and asked himself what insanity had made him think he could go traipsing around like one of those detectives in a gangster picture. On the other hand, he’d found out the name of the owner of the maroon breezer. His name was Bert. And after overhearing what little he had, it didn’t take much effort of imagination to conclude he might be the son of the guy who runs this place.

Sam put his car in gear and slowly drove away, asking himself why the detectives who did all that fancy fighting in the movies didn’t seem to feel some of what he was feeling just then. Well, he knew why. Stunt fellows pulled their punches. But they ought to at least act hurt, he thought. And, he decided, he could give lessons.

He had barely turned onto the main road when a line of four big, black, Lincoln sedans approached and screeched into the driveway of the roadhouse.

He stopped at the side of the road and watched as the lead car slowed to let off two men in business suits and fedoras who quickly invaded the little gatehouse. It and one other car continued on to stop in a shower of gravel in front of the main entrance. The other two cars continued to the rear of the roadhouse. Men in business suits and fedoras swarmed out of the cars and ran inside. Agents from the Bureau of Prohibition, Sam thought. They were in all the papers lately. These were as heavily armed as the cops in the movies.

Sam put his car in gear again and pulled away. He smiled, wondering what the relationship might have been between Duckworth and the Roadhouse.

Philo V. Millbank, sitting across from Albert V. Millbank in the latter’s office, was looking at some notes he had made.

“I’ve just gotten off the telephone with our counsel. Their written report will follow by mail, but I have the essentials on properties Kane’s company owns in the East. There are only three. The company owns the ground on only two of his theaters, both in Queens, and a quite large industrial property in New Jersey.”

“Did he have any opinion on which of these he might have been considering giving to the college?”

“The theater properties have screens that are doing well. He thinks the New Jersey property is the most likely one. They’ve used it little since the company moved its operations to California a dozen years ago. The last time was about two years ago, when they made some sort of historical picture in the East.”

“Does he have any estimate about the value?”

“He does.” Philo V. Millbank passed his notes over to his father.

Albert V. Millbank looked it over and smiled. “We need that property by the next meeting of the board of regents,” he said. “Do you think Dean Reynolds can call the boy in, have one more try to get the boy to, shall we say, nudge his father a little?”

“Reynolds wasn’t happy about doing it the last time. He says the boy caught on right away that the whole graduation review was highly unusual and pointed out that his grades and credits were not only solid, but pretty much straight A’s since his freshman year. And he had a copy of our documents accepting his transfer credits. He told him if he wanted to talk to his father, he should call his father.”

“Sounds a little impertinent to me. His father is very difficult to reach.”

“I don’t think Reynolds will do it. He may even be one of those talking to—”

“Call the boy in. I want to see him. If cajolery won’t work, I’ll come up with some excuse to disqualify his graduation unless he cooperates.”

“Right away, sir.”

“Reynolds will regret this too.”

Sam pulled up in front of a small apartment house and tapped the horn seven short ones. Shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits.

Jerry walked quickly out of the front door, climbed into the car, and paused for a second to stare.

“Jeez, Sam, you okay? For a guy who wasn’t one of Duckworth’s customers, you look like you’re about half-seas-over.”

“The breezer,” Sam said after a deep, still painful breath, “belongs to a fellow named Bert. He’s a hot-headed punk . . . and I think he’s the son of the fellow who runs the Roadhouse.”

“Ah. Things fall into place.”

“Yeah.”

Sam recounted his adventure, including the invasion of the Roadhouse by what he presumed to be a flock of federal agents.

“Is it too much of a stretch,” Sam said, “to think there might have been some bad blood between Duckworth and the friendly folks over at the Roadhouse?”

“The old fella couldn’t have been moving that much, compared to the Roadhouse.”

“What if he was moving better stuff than the Roadhouse could reliably get?”

“Could be. I sure never heard anyone complain about Duckworth’s merchandise. I talked to a couple of his neighbors. About a week ago or so, one of them saw Duckworth on his front porch, waving his arms at a young fella. Couldn’t hear clearly, but the neighbor was sure what he saw was a big argument.”

“That could have been Bert.”

“Yeah, and he also remembers a maroon convertible coupe parked at the curb.”

“Let’s say the Roadhouse, in the person of Bert, was putting pressure on the old guy . . . Get your stuff from us, share your source, be a wholly-owned subsidiary, whatever, take your pick. So, being only one guy, and having no son like Bert, how does the old fellow push back? All it would have taken is one anonymous phone call from Duckworth. I think I saw the result of that sort of thing this afternoon.”

“But Duckworth was killed yesterday. How would the people at the Roadhouse know he’d dropped the nickle?”

“I got the sense that Bert is just dumb. I don’t think he’s smart enough for anyone to send him out to—as they say in the movies—rub anyone out. It may have been just a spur of the moment thing. Maybe he just wanted to impress Poppa, or his poppa’s friends, or even his girlfriend. We know he picked her up a couple of hours before. Joyce seems like someone who is after a thrill a minute. Whatever, maybe she just went along with it, like it was some kind of lark.”

“I could believe that,” Jerry said, “so where does that leave us?”

“Not much closer to getting Luke out of jail.”

Jerry sat thinking for a moment.

“Okay, you were right all along, Sam. We’ve got to get Luke out of there, and quick. So, right now, we go over, talk to the cops. Tell ’em where Luke was, an’ what we think.”

“No.”

“No? This is getting too big. We’re over our heads here.”

“I’ve known that all day.”

“And Luke’s still in the middle of it.”

“Look, on the way back from the Roadhouse, I was thinking this over. There were a lot of federal agents piling out of those Lincolns. Probably as many as in the whole police force in this little college town. It made me think of something that’s never occurred to me before. When you think how much booze the Roadhouse must move around here, and within the city limits . . . you’ve got to think the cops must be looking the other way a lot.”

“You’re right. I’m surprised the citizens of this town don’t rise up in protest.”

“Come on, I’m serious, Jerry. I’m wondering how happy the cops are going to be if we show up over there with tales of how Luke was helping us move the cannon and by the way it was really someone—maybe one of your friends—from the Roadhouse. How diligent are they going to be about following up anything we’ve come up with? Coming from us, it’s just blue sky. And maybe it’s something they don’t want to hear.”

“So what do we do, organize a jailbreak? I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

“Driving back, I had an idea. There’s a way, maybe we can break Joyce’s story. She’s the reason Luke’s over there.”

“Is it as complicated as moving the cannon up on the roof?”

“Probably. You want to sit still while I tell you?”

“Okay, I’m sitting still. Tell.”

Jerry sat still for a moment while Sam laid out the highlights. When he was finished, he smiled.

“So, do you think it’ll play in Peoria?”

“Oh, yeah.” Jerry said.

“The thing is,” Sam said, “we’ve got to have some help on this.”

“Uh . . . how much help?”

“One person. It has to be a girl who sets it up. I think I can get Connie to do it.”

“That’s makin’ it more complicated.”

“Well . . . unless you want to dress up in drag—”

“Whoa . . . not me, pal.”

“We need Connie, then. You couldn’t be in two places at once, anyway.”

“She’ll want to know what’s going on.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if she already suspects.”

“Luke’s going to be disappointed.”

“Luke’ll have to understand there might be a greater good here. The gag will be safe with her.”

Jerry finally nodded.

“Okay,” Sam said. “I’ll go find Connie.”

Long shadows stretched across the lawn on one side of the Drucilla S. Millbank Women’s Residence Hall, reminding Sam that the day was almost over and time was getting short. Very short.

“Do you actually think you can make this insane idea work?” Connie said.

“We made the cannon float up onto the roof,” Sam said. “This can’t be any harder than that.”

“I suppose you’ve thought how easy it would be to simply march in and explain what the three of you were up to last night?”

“Yeah . . . that would be easy, if I thought that’s all it would take. But it may not be as simple as that.” He told her about his encounter with Bert, the Roadhouse raid, and his suspicions about how it had been able to keep operating. “It would also likely put the kibosh on any expectations any of us have of graduating a couple of weeks from now. If this doesn’t work, though, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll try to leave Jerry out of it if I can.”

“That’s noble.”

She was silent then, looking anywhere but at Sam. At last, she turned to him.

“If I’m in, I’m all the way in. How did you do the cannon?”

A pause.

“You have to know that, too, huh?”

She studied him for a moment. The effects of his beating hadn’t worn off, but she thought he looked more than beaten.

Defeated, she decided.

“Sam, what are you doing here in college, anyway?”

It took Sam a long time to answer.

“I guess I’m putting off as long as I can, going into the picture business.”

“And, you’re graduating in a couple of weeks.”

“I was thinking of going on for some kind of masters degree someplace, and—”

“So, you’re fiddling around with college, pulling off these insane stunts. What you are, Sam, is you’re bored. And you must have been bored for a long time. You told me what happened with the fire hose that got you kicked out of—”

“I’ve mostly kept my nose clean all year until—”

“Is going to work at your father’s studio such a terrible thing?”

The question was unexpected.

“Not terrible, no, but . . .”

After a pause, “But what?”

“Well . . . since I was little, it was always assumed I’d go into the picture business. I’ve followed my father around stages and locations all my life. It’s how I grew up. I’ve had private teachers. I’ve watched pictures being made. It was fun to watch a lot of different things happening, a lot of people getting everything ready. They even let me help—sometimes—but mostly I just watched, and then I’d see their work all come together in front of the camera . . . when it does, they make magic happen. One thing I learned is, there isn’t anyone on any crew on the lot that doesn’t have talent coming out his ears, and there isn’t one that isn’t a lot smarter than me. My father would probably put me to work doing something where I’m totally incompetent. I’d just make a silly fool of myself.”

“I take it back.” She gave him a softer look. Thoughtful. “About being bored, I mean . . . I think you’re also a teeny bit scared.”

He looked at her. A moment later, he shrugged, accepting.

“Come on, Sam, maybe the feeling is just butterflies.”

He didn’t answer.

“There were no butterflies when you were putting the cannon up there?”

A shallow nod said there were.

“Maybe there’s supposed to be butterflies.”

He tried to smile.

“But now, you’ve got yourself in a real mess.”

“Yeah, and there’s no one to blame but me. On the other hand, if we hadn’t done it, Luke probably wouldn’t have an alibi.”

Connie considered that.

“Okay, let’s say I can see how using it would be a problem. I propose a trade.”

“I’m at your mercy,” he said.

“How sweet. Would I have to take that silly oath thing?”

A pause.

“I trust you. Only, give us a chance to put it back. Then I’ll tell you how we did it.”

“I’ve got to wait?”

“We’re running out of time . . . but think of the anticipation. After it’s all put back, maybe it’ll be more satisfying.”

“You’re a philosopher too. Do we have a deal?”

“Yeah.”

He leaned over to plant a kiss on her cheek, but she raised her hand to stop him.

“After I find out the how. That’s the deal.”

A sigh.

“Okay, deal.”

Connie looked at the watch on her wrist.

“Okay, let’s get busy.” she said.

* * *

It was magic hour. After sunset, but not dark enough for the streetlights to make a difference. Soft light and no harsh shadows. Tall trees lining both sides of the street in front of the Drucilla S. Millbank Women’s Residence Hall made a canopy that left pools of more intimate darkness along the street.

Sam, waiting at one end of the street, soaked in the atmosphere and thought it was the perfect setting to pull it off. He remembered a cameraman who had loved this time of day. Of course, you couldn’t shoot whole movies with this kind of light because it lasted only about ten minutes. Fifteen, tops.

The butterflies in his stomach started the little dance they always did at times like this. Connie had called the feeling just a teeny bit scared. She was right, it was the same dance of the butterflies he felt when he thought of going to work for his father.

A movement down the street interrupted his thoughts and reminded him what he was there for. He watched Connie walk confidently through the shadows and up to the entrance of the women’s residence hall. Doesn’t look a bit scared, he thought.

After a brief pause at the door, and a glance around the street, she entered. Two girls, lost in giggles, were huddled around a telephone on a small table in the foyer. Connie picked up a magazine on another table and glanced through it until the two were finished with their call and headed for the front door. Looking around to make sure she was alone, she took a note out of her purse and used a handy thumbtack to attach it to a message board hanging on the wall by the telephone table. A moment later, she spotted another girl coming up the walk and arranged to run into her as she came in the entrance.

“Do you know Joyce Flinders?” Connie said.

“Yeah, so what?”

“There’s a message from her boyfriend on the board over there. I’m in a really big hurry right now or I’d take it up. If you’re going up, would you mind taking it to her?”

“I’m not going up, and why should I do her any favors?”

“Please, it sounded urgent.”

A second’s hesitation.

“Okay, sure,” the girl said with a smile that turned down at the corners.

Connie left, but hesitated outside the door just long enough to see the girl rip the message from the board and head for the stairs. A moment later, she was standing under a tree a short distance away. About five minutes later, Joyce hurried out the front door, still adjusting a small, stylish hat on her head. Connie timed her movements so she could join Joyce when she reached the sidewalk. Both nodded and walked close to each other for a few steps.

Two gunshots and their smoky plumes erupted in their direction from some bushes on the corner of the building. Both stopped in their tracks.

“What was tha-a-a-t?” Joyce squeaked.

Another shot rang out as another smoky blast flared in their direction.

“Quick, get down!” Connie said as she tried to pull Joyce aside and onto the lawn.

Joyce shrieked. Her hat went flying as they went down.

Two more shots came from the bushes.

A few seconds later, there was the slam of a car door and the sound of a car starting. A few seconds after that, a car blasted out of a side street, motor screaming and tires screeching.

“Wh-wh-what w-w-was—” Joyce cried.

“Gunshots, is what it was.”

“G-g-g-gun sh-sh-shots?”

Joyce shuddered and started to sit up as running footsteps approached from the direction of the corner.

“Stay down!” Connie said.

The running came closer

“Hey!” said the runner. “You two okay?”

“I think so,” said Connie.

“I saw it all,” the runner said. “Someone emptied a revolver at you two and then jumped in his car and drove off.”

“Are you okay?” Connie said to Joyce.

Joyce was shaking, beyond intelligible conversation, trying to sit up.

“Let me help you up,” said the runner. “It’s okay, he’s gone.”

“Did you see who it was?” Connie said.

“It was too dark. But I got a good look at his car. Maroon Buick coupe. A breezer.”

At the mention of the color, Joyce shrank back to the lawn.

“I didn’t get his license. Too dark.”

“M-m-maroon?” Joyce said.

“Maroon breezer. It’s safe now. Let me help you up.”

The runner helped both girls to their feet and Connie helped Joyce brush off grass and leaves. The runner picked up a hat from the grass.

“This belong to either of you?”

“It’s hers,” Connie said.

Joyce looked at the hat, eyes wide. The hat was made of some kind of finely woven straw, and the runner was holding it with his finger stuck through a hole in the brim.

“Looks like a bullet hole,” the runner said. He showed the hat to Joyce.

“A b-b-b-bullet?” Joyce said.

Connie put her arm around Joyce’s shoulders to help calm her shuddering.

“Looks to me like somebody tried to shoot you right here,” the runner said. “You have any idea who might’ve wanted to kill you?”

Joyce looked at the hat for a long moment before she tried to speak.

“Y-y-y-yes! I-I-I n-n-need t-t’ g-get t-t’ th-the p-p-p-p’lice!”

Sam and Jerry were sitting in Sam’s car across the street from the police station. In front of the entrance, in addition to a couple of city police vehicles, were a couple of Lincoln sedans that could have been among those Sam had seen that afternoon. Two dark-suited men with snap-brim fedoras paced up and down the sidewalk nearby.

“I wonder what the Bureau of Prohibition fellows are doing here?” said Jerry.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if they were asking how a place almost openly selling booze, like the Roadhouse was, could get along without coming to the attention of the local authorities.”

Luke emerged from the front door by himself and started walking in the direction of the campus. Sam started the engine and drove alongside.

“Need a lift?”

“Hey, fellas!”

Luke smiled and hopped into the back seat.

“They didn’t offer you a ride home?” Jerry said.

“After they gave me a little sack with all my things in it, everyone pretended I wasn’t there.”

“You don’t look much worse for the wear.”

“Wasn’t in there even a whole day.”

Sam stopped the car and pulled to the curb. He leaned over the seat back and looked at Luke.

“Luke, I want you to know I wouldn’t have held it against you if you had gotten a lawyer and told them where you were and what you were doing.”

“Hey, after swearing that oath? Certainly not. I have confidence in the wheels of justice.”

“Well, the wheels of justice didn’t spring you out of that jail,” said Jerry. “Another of Sam’s brainstorms did.”

“Well, spill the beans. I’ve been sort of curious, wondering what happened. All I know is what I overheard. Someone said Joyce Flinders showed up at the police station, all shook up and babbling about how her boyfriend was trying to kill her.”

“We figured out it was her boyfriend who shot Duckworth,” Jerry said. “He’d been seen with her that night, so Sam made up a little drama. Connie arranged to send her a phony message, like her boyfriend had phoned and left it with whoever answers the phones in the dorm lobby. Connie gets another girl to take it up to Joyce so she doesn’t make the connection. The note tells her to meet her boyfriend on the corner at eight thirty. She comes down a few minutes early, it’s just getting dark, she heads for the corner. By plan, Connie just happens to be walking along at the same time. Right away, firecrackers go off behind some bushes, smoke looks like a gun going off, Connie is there, pushes Joyce to the ground, saving her life, making her believe there’s real bullets flying around. Sam drives off in his car, making it look like a getaway.”

“And,” Sam said, “just then, Jerry, who’s been setting off firecrackers in an old megaphone, runs up asking if she’s all right, saying he just saw the shooter run to a car and take off. He describes her boyfriend’s car, and she blows her wig. It wasn’t in the plan, but Jerry, thinking on his feet, saw a hat on the ground, guessed it was Joyce’s. He poked a hole in the brim as he gave it back to her, told her it was made by one of the bullets and right away she sees the light. Her boyfriend wants a witness dead. She goes to the cops, and here you are.”

“A-plus to both of you,” said Luke. “And to Connie.”

“Uh, Luke,” Sam said, “there’s something we have to tell you . . . Connie’s in on the cannon gag.”

“She’s in?”

“It was part of the deal to get her help in the shooting gag and getting you sprung.”

“There’s no one else?”

“No, just Connie.”

“It’s okay, Sam. Connie’s not the sort to tell.”

When Sam saw Jerry nod his agreement, he started his car and put it into gear.

“You fellows have anything on for tonight?” said Sam.

Albert V. Millbank was standing by his favorite window, looking at the cannon, now restored to its pad three stories below. Five minutes before, he had been standing on the pad itself, caressing the cold steel of the cannon, making sure it was not a mirage. A large number of students, also making sure it was not a mirage, were clustered around the cannon. Most should have been in class ten minutes before.

Philo V. Millbank entered the room. He had just come from checking out the cannon himself, making sure it was not a mirage.

“Do we know how it got back down there?” Albert V. Millbank said, turning to greet him.

“No, sir.” He moved to his father’s side before he spoke again.

“The head custodian has finished his plumbing repairs, and has finally made his examination of the roof. There is no damage. He did say that dust and other debris had been disturbed in the bell tower, which provides access to the roof. But there is nothing to indicate how that cannon could have been moved onto or off the roof. He said it’s mysterious.”

“Yes. Mysterious. They not only do it once, they do it twice.”

“It’s like sticking a thumb in your eye. Twice.”

Albert V. Millbank raised his eyebrows and glared at his son.

“Such a common way of putting it. I’m dismayed.”

Philo V. Millbank shrugged and cleared his throat. He held up a folded newspaper.

“I’ve just read the morning papers. The incident in front of the women’s residence hall night before last . . . the Flinders girl, who is one of our students, came forward and implicated the real suspect in the Duckworth shooting. The same article reports that the Bureau of Prohibition received, quote, an anonymous tip about the Roadhouse, a major source of illegal liquor for local residents, including many students at the college, end quote. It also mentions Duckworth’s, well, extracurricular activities on the campus.”

“This will not sit well with the board of regents.”

“The reports mention the Flinders girl had been seeing a lot of the son of the fellow who runs the Roadhouse. She says he was returning her to the dorm when he spotted Duckworth walking home after his nightly rounds. In front of the girl, he emptied a revolver into him, then together they cooked up the story that implicated the other boy. The Roadhouse boy, he’s a pretty wild one. They think he was just showing off.”

“More likely he was eliminating the competition.”

“Another report says the Prohibition agents found the fingerprints of the manager’s son on the bullet casings still in the revolver that was planted in the car of the other boy. The local police somehow overlooked that. They think it was the gun used to shoot Duckworth. The agents also matched two of the fingerprints on the gun to the girl. Speculation is that she was the one who hid the gun in the other boy’s car. She may be charged as an accessory.”

Albert V. Millbank made a sound that could have been a snort.

“I expect her father’s attorneys and a few well-placed telephone calls will take care of that. By the way, we’ve received a letter this morning from the Kane boy’s father. The property he’s donating is about a fourth of an acre, and has an address in Hoboken, New Jersey. Transfer of title to take place the day after graduation ceremonies.”

“How did our attorneys miss that possibility?”

“It is held in his wife’s name. Her maiden name. It seems it was originally owned by her family and was never owned by his company. Evidently they operated a nickelodeon out of it in the early days. It’s where the company got its start. The building has been vacant for years. Our attorneys think that it is a white elephant and that they’re tired of paying taxes on it.”

“It’s probably worth something.”

“It’s a slap in the face.”

“He never did specify what property it was.”

“If that son of his is responsible for the cannon affair, I’ll withhold his diploma regardless.”

“Father, I’ve come to think we are never going to know who did it.”

Albert V. Millbank turned abruptly to stare at his son.

“That would be most disappointing.”

Philo V. Millbank waited to see if there was going to be more. When there wasn’t, he changed the subject.

“I suppose we should start advertising for a replacement for Duckworth. With as many out of work as there are these days, I expect we’ll have several hundred applications.”

Albert V. Millbank managed a slight smile.

“Do you think Duckworth had any relatives with the same Canadian connections?”

* * *

The cannon, surrounded by a crowd of students, sat serenely in its accustomed place on the concrete pad in front of the Augustus V. Millbank Administration Building. If it could be made to fire, its shot would pass between the heads of Sam and Connie who were seated on a bench on the far side of the Botany Pond. Sam was momentarily uncomfortable because he was looking almost directly into the barrel of the weapon. He quickly looked away to watch Jerry and Luke filtering through the crowd, soaking up the speculations flying about. After a moment, he turned to look at Connie.

“You did good with Joyce last night. Thank you.”

“I think I know what you mean about the butterflies.”

“You do?”

“I was terrified the whole time that I couldn’t make it work.”

“You didn’t look it. How did you feel when it was over?”

“Pretty good.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“The anticipation is over too.”

“Anticipation?”

“Okay, Sam. A deal’s a deal. How did the cannon get up there?”

Sam heaved a mighty sigh.

“The cannon was never on the roof. It was a magician’s trick.”

“What?”

“A couple of years ago my father, well, his company . . . produced a period picture. It was summer vacation, I was following my father around, watching what’s going on. But it was shot in the East and when it wrapped, all the props and costumes were stored in the old studio lot the company still has down in New Jersey, close by where Edison used to make his pictures. The picture was a flop, but I remembered—”

“Hey! You’re telling me your life story again. What’s that got to do with the cannon on the roof?”

“It was a Civil War picture and the cannon was one of the props. I remembered there were about a dozen of them stored down there. All made of balsa wood.”

Connie laughed. Sam shrugged.

“The fake cannon came apart easily. It was no problem hauling the pieces up by rope from the bell tower. Luke was out on the roof and put the pieces together. Neither Jerry or I had the guts for that. Last night, we took the pieces down the same way. If we hadn’t gotten Luke out of jail, I don’t know what we’d have done.”

“That’s all there was to it? You just borrowed it?”

“We had to paint it to match Millbank’s cannon. It wasn’t an exact match for his cannon, but with the real one gone, I guess everyone wanted to believe it.”

Connie started chuckling, but managed to calm down enough to ask one more question.

“What did you do with the real cannon, tie it onto a balloon?”

“We moved it about twenty feet. Right over there. See that third lily pad from the left?”

Connie looked at the pond and back to Sam as if he had lost a marble or two. Or three.

“Last fall, Jerry was on one side of a tug-of-war over the pond. He discovered that, in front of the cannon, it was a lot deeper than it was on the ends.”

“You pushed the cannon into the pond.”

“You’re pretty smart for a girl.”

That got him an elbow in the ribs.

“Nobody looked for it in the pond,” she said.

“Why should they? They could see where it was.”

Connie looked at the cannon again, shook her head, and smiled.

“We left a short cable attached to the back end of it, whatever they call it, left it underwater at the edge, so we just had to fish it out, hook on a longer cable, pass it around the flagpole, and pull it out with my car. It took less than a minute. We disconnected, I drove off and left Jerry and Luke to throw a few lily pads back in the water and clean it up.”

“You were lucky.”

“Yeah, but we checked on schedules, everything; after Duckworth locks up, there’s nobody on this part of campus all night. We rehearsed the whole thing last week.”

Connie was silently chuckling. Sam enjoyed a good yawn.

“I’ve got to go down to New Jersey next weekend, take the cannon and the cable back. I promised the watchman I’d take good care of the company’s property.”

“Do you have a lot of things down there you could use to pull off another prank like this?”

Sam propped his arm on the back of the bench, rested his head on the palm of his hand, and closed his eyes.

Connie waited a moment for him to answer. When he didn’t, she looked at him again.

“Are you sleeping?”

He began to stir.

“I was thinking . . .”

A big yawn.

“About another spectacular prank?”

“No. I was thinking . . . about how working in the picture business might be a little more, um, restful.”

She smiled.

“Good. You’ve come to your senses, then?”

Sam didn’t answer. After a few seconds, she nudged him with her elbow.

“Sam . . . remember? A deal’s a deal.”

She looked at him again. Asleep. Another nudge didn’t do any good, either.

Copyright © 2011 Douglas Grant Johnson

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FICTION

THE WITCH-COUPLE

MIKE CULPEPPER

Art by Tim Foley

In those days, many people in Iceland knew some magic. Some had learned the Sami art of finding lost things. There were those who knew words that kept away elves and trolls and others who used enchanted serpent-stones to help prevent disaster. But there were also people who used magic for evil purposes.

There was a couple east of the Trollfarm, near Helgafeld, who were said to practice night-magic. Their names were Ogmund and Agdis. They were old and bent and ugly to look at. Their faces were covered with warts and growths. They both had long noses and few teeth so, when their mouths were closed, their noses almost touched their chins. People avoided this couple and tried not to go near their house.

The year after the berserk feud, when the snow melted in the spring as elsewhere, dead horses were discovered. Then some cows dried up all at once. A young man was killed in a rockfall and his mother died soon after without a mark on her. People said it was a very unlucky year and spoke of uncanny events—lights moving out on the lavafield and the birth of deformed lambs and a two-headed calf. There was a great deal of talk about these matters and eventually someone said these happenings might be the result of curses or night-magic. Many thought of the witch-couple but no one spoke their name aloud. Finally, though, Ketil went to Thorolf to tell him what people were thinking. He had a peg-leg now, to replace the one the berserk had cut off, so people called him Ketil Tree-foot. Ketil took some others with him. They all thought someone had cursed them.

Thorolf brought them all into his house and ordered skyr and beer served to them. He noticed that many of them were wearing their best clothes, the ones usually reserved for Althing, so he knew they thought this an important matter. The men were agitated and ate little, but they drank all the beer that was served. They shifted about on the benches, muttering nervously to one another. Ketil looked around at them, and they quieted while he spoke. “It isn’t right that these things are allowed to happen and we do nothing about it. A young man and his mother dead, not to mention the horses!”

“Why do you think this bad luck is caused by night-magic?” asked Thorolf.

“Well, what else could it be?” said Ketil, and others murmured assent.

“A hard winter, perhaps, and a late spring. A careless lad, a woman struck by grief.”

“And the lights? The two-headed calf?”

Thorolf shrugged. “These are things we have seen before.”

“Perhaps we were cursed then, too,” said Ketil. People nodded. “Perhaps we should have done something about it then.”

“Perhaps we should quit spreading this kind of talk and tend to our farms,” said Thorolf. “I have often noticed that hard work leads to luck and good fortune.”

Ketil said, “Perhaps you should be more attentive to our needs.” He meant to suggest that he and the others might leave Thorolf’s godord and follow some other godi. The other men nodded. Their faces were hard as they looked at Thorolf, but he looked closely at each man and saw the lack of resolve there.

“There is no one harming you but yourselves,” said Thorolf. “If it were otherwise, I would certainly be defending you.”

So Ketil and the others left Thorolf, but they were unhappy and continued to grumble amongst themselves. Thorolf knew that he had to do something to quiet the gossip.

Thorolf called on Bjorn and Colm. “You are levelheaded men. Let’s ride out to this couple’s place and see what’s going on.”

They rode east toward Helgafeld for a ways. South, the land sloped gently upward into meadows that became divided where streams formed and flowed down to the river on the other side. North the land rose to the desolate lavafields. After they had been riding a while Colm said, “Haven’t we been here before?”

They looked around and thought they might be riding in circles. “How can that be?” said Thorolf. “We kept between the ridges always.”

So they marked the place where they were and rode east again. By and by they came upon the marker they had left. Bjorn began to be fearful. It was a bright sunlit day and warm, but Thorolf shivered. “Perhaps we should go back. It will be dark soon.”

It worried Colm to see how shaken Bjorn had become. He thought that they needed to do something now to put an end to witch talk before people became too frightened to move. He said, “I will ride up the hillside there ahead of us. You watch and see that I do not go wrong. Then when I am high up the slope, I will stop and watch you while you travel east and see what happens.” Thorolf gave his vigorous assent and Bjorn shut up and went along.

So Bjorn and Thorolf traveled east a long way without difficulty. Then they stopped and Colm rode along the crest of the hill south of them and watched as they rode. They traveled this way without any more problems and soon reached Helgafeld.

Ogmund and Agdis had built their house into the side of the hill. That was unusual, and dangerous, too, since a slide might bury the house or falling rocks crash through the roof that stuck out from the hillside. The farm seemed deserted. Long grass grew in the yard and the homefield was choked with weeds and dead grass. No dogs barked at the riders nor did anyone come outside to greet them. The place seemed lifeless. Thorolf dismounted and called out. He called twice before a voice came from inside the house. “Who is it?”

“It’s Thorolf, the godi.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to speak with you.”

After a few silent minutes, Ogmund came out into the yard. His eyes were unfriendly. Agdis followed him. The two old people looked much alike; they even had the same amount of wispy beard on their chins. If not for their clothing, you could not say who was Ogmund and who was Agdis.

“I’ll be frank,” said Thorolf. “There are some rumors going around about you, and I want to hear what you have to say about them.”

“We know about that,” said Ogmund. “Some fools say we practice night-magic and do harm to others, but we do nothing except keep to ourselves.”

“Perhaps that is the problem,” said Thorolf. “Why don’t you visit up at my farm so that people can see that you are ordinary folk?”

Colm thought that a poor notion since there was nothing ordinary about this couple’s appearance. He had often spoken to ugly or disfigured people and he noticed that, after a time, he became used to their faces, no matter how terrible they seemed at first. But he did not become accustomed to these two—in fact, their appearance became more frightful the longer he watched them. Ogmund’s voice was frightening, too, a low, droning moan that sometimes broke into a high screech.

“I don’t care what people think,” said Ogmund, “and I don’t want to go visiting.”

“We are all neighbors,” said Thorolf, “and we should get to know one another.”

“I don’t care to know the fools gossiping about me.”

“Perhaps, if you met them, the gossip would end. Anyway, some day you might need their help.”

“I will never ask for their aid.”

“The world can be a harsh place for those who are alone.”

“The world suits me well enough,” said Ogmund. And that was that. No words of Thorolf could move him. After a while, Thorolf gave up and they rode away.

“There are fools and then there are great fools,” muttered Thorolf.

Bjorn shuddered. “Did you feel it?”

“What?”

“The wind was from the west, now it is at our backs.”

“So the wind has shifted, so what?”

“No. I think it is we who have shifted.” Bjorn shuddered again.

Thorolf made a face and galloped on. The wind pushed at their backs all the way. Soon they were in familiar country not far from the river. Now the wind came from the west again. Bjorn was white and shaking. Thorolf said, “These are unpleasant folk but we have nothing to fear from them.” Colm nodded, but Bjorn wouldn’t answer him.

People kept talking about the couple, and Bjorn added to their talk. Now people began saying that they were weather-witches and blamed them when it rained too much or too little.

Gwyneth asked Colm, “Are these people hurting us?”

“No. They are ugly and unfriendly, but I think they are just people. They have grown old away from others and never developed cordial ways.”

Gwyneth nodded. “Perhaps they should be offered cordiality then, so that they may return it.”

“Thorolf tried.”

“Perhaps a woman should speak to Agdis.” Gwyneth set her mouth and Colm could see that she was determined to do something. He said nothing, but he felt afraid for her all at once.

Gwyneth went to see the widow Ingveld, who was a kind and thoughtful person. Together they put together a little basket of berries and cheese, a small gift that would not shame someone too poor to reciprocate. They gathered wildflowers to decorate the basket and set off east in a wagon.

Late in the day, the two women returned to the Trollfarm. Colm could see that they were very troubled. “Did you find the place all right?”

“Yes,” said Gwyneth, “we found it.” She said that Agdis had received them with harsh words, and when they offered her the basket, she slapped it from their hands. The berries flew from the basket and Agdis stamped on them, smashing them into jam. They picked up the basket and returned.

Ingveld asked to spend the night. She was afraid to be alone at her farm. Gwyneth made her up a place, and they sat around the fire, talking softly of pleasant things. The flowers in the basket had withered and turned brown, but no one spoke of it, since that sometimes happens with wildflowers.

Some days later, a yellow cloud blew along the river valley. It drifted uphill behind Ketil Tree-foot’s farm. Soon after, Ketil’s sheep began dying.

Colm went to Ketil’s place to see what was going on. Other men, including Bjorn and Thorolf, were already gathered there. A few dead sheep lay around; some had blood on their muzzles. The grass seemed to glitter, and Colm pulled some of it up. Tiny, needle-sharp crystals clung to the grass. Ketil led them over to a nearby pool where some small streams emptied. The water was a strange yellowish color; dead fish floated belly-up in the pool.

“It is time we did something about this!” said Ketil. Bjorn and some others agreed, and they began talking among themselves, working themselves up.

“You know what this is,” said Thorolf. “The yellow gas rises from volcanoes and condenses on the grass. Animals are poisoned by it.”

“And where did the gas come from?” yelled Ketil.

“From a volcano . . .” But Thorolf could not make himself heard over the shouting.

“There is no volcano doing this! It is sorcery!”

Thorolf motioned to Colm. “Ride to Helgafeld—if you can—and warn Ogmund and Agdis that there is trouble coming.”

Colm rode along the river, and when he got to a place opposite the lavafields, he spotted a yellow mist rising out over the rocks. He rode toward it and saw several fissures, long gaping slashes in the earth. Lava had poured out of the rifts and they still glowed red in places. Yellow smoke roiled up the gaps in the earth. All around, the bare rock was littered with dead birds. Colm did not ride any closer but continued on east.

He reached Helgafeld without any problem and rode up to the house.

“Go away!” someone shouted. Colm could not tell if it was the man or the woman.

“I have to tell you—”

“Go away!” They both shouted at once, but their voices broke at different times and it sounded to Colm like a cacophony of birds. He was going to call out again when Agdis backed out of the doorway. She walked backwards a few paces, then bent over and threw her dress over her head. She looked at Colm from between her legs. Her eyes stared wide and her lips were turned up in a huge toothless grin that, upside down, was an awful frown. Agdis came toward him quickly and Colm could not say if she was walking backwards or had somehow turned her feet on her ankles or her legs on her hips and was striding forward. The earth seemed to spin about him, and he felt himself hang upside down. His horse whinnied; Colm pulled at the bridle, but his horse went in a circle, and he still faced Agdis who was almost on him. He bolted forward, past her, and away.

Colm stopped fifty yards from the house and looked back. Agdis stood watching him. He saw her, a shrunken old woman, and was ashamed of his fear. “People are coming!” he shouted. “You should hide!” But Agdis went back inside.

Colm rode back along the way and waited. It was almost dusk when he saw the mounted men approaching. Thorolf rode up to him. “Are they inside?”

“Yes. They wouldn’t listen.”

Thorolf nodded. “We got lost again coming down here but this time I saw what happened. There’s a place that gets you turned around.”

Colm told Thorolf about Agdis. “It seemed to me that everything ran backwards and that she caused it.”

Thorolf said, “Well, I can’t say I’ve seen many people standing on their heads lately.”

“Even so, I think that is what she meant to do.”

“Do you believe she has that power?”

“No,” said Colm, “but perhaps she believes that she does.”

Thorolf nodded. “Well, perhaps she can make others believe in her power, too, but she is foolish to try.”

Colm said, “Did you see the yellow mist above the fissures?”

Thorolf nodded. “Oh yes. But these say that it isn’t natural, that Ogmund and Agdis must have done it somehow. It doesn’t matter that they have seen such things before.” He sighed. “Nothing now I can do. Sometimes a tooth must be pulled to save the jaw.”

* * *

Men gathered around the house set into the hillside at Helgafeld. Ketil Tree-foot stumped about on his new wooden leg. Anyone who gave him the opportunity soon heard a complete description of the berserk fight near Ketil’s sauna. He gestured at his leg and mimicked Svart’s moans and Snaekulf’s howls. He had quite the story now. Ketil didn’t speak of the berserk’s fate; that was for Gwyneth or Colm to do, and they kept quiet. People might find the notion of a killer-woman difficult to accept. Colm did not want to see Gwyneth the subject of gossip. People might say she upset the order of things and blame her in times of trouble. Colm looked about at the milling crowd and shuddered to think of it coming after Gwyneth.

Bjorn was over with Ketil now, waving his hands about as he described the fight and the killing of the twins who had come to the village to avenge the death of their cousin. He made certain to quote the witty dialogue he had with Thorolf about the well-struck blow. People laughed and he recited it again. He was very excited and jumped about like a young sheep at first grass. Thorolf came up to Colm. “Bjorn is getting very frisky,” he said.

Gerda thinks so, thought Colm, but he didn’t say it aloud for Gerda was Thorolf’s daughter. Still he smiled and Thorolf caught it. “Yes,” he said, “Gerda thinks so.”

“She looks good these days.”

“Yes. But I am a little concerned about Bjorn. I think he is losing his balance. Some days he is moody and other days like this.” He nodded at the man. Bjorn was gesturing wildly and shouting as he performed. “I don’t think Gerda can calm him.” He looked at Colm. “Perhaps he needs the words of a quiet friend.”

“Perhaps.” Colm nodded. “I don’t know what I can do, but I will try. I can’t stop this, though.” He waved at the crowd of excited people.

“No,” said Thorolf, “this is beyond helping.”

Colm heard a racket and looked west to see wagons approaching. Women from the area led by Gerda, Bjorn’s wife. A great shouting rose from some of the wagons, but one was quiet. Gwyneth was in it and Ingveld and Thorolf’s Marta. Colm rode over.

“Are they inside?” asked Gwyneth.

“Yes.”

“These people mean to kill them.”

“I know,” said Colm.

Gerda was pregnant and it took several people to help her down from her wagon. She looked about with shining eyes and stroked her great belly. She shouted commands at the other women; it was obvious she thought herself in charge of them.

People had arrived from other godords now. Many of them said that they, too, had suffered difficulties and had seen strange things in the last while. They all said Ogmund and Agdis were responsible.

A group of slaves stood off to one side. It was not for them either to interfere or to take part, unless told otherwise. For a moment, Colm envied them: They had no cares or responsibilities. He felt a harsh judgment forming in his mind, but then he saw the way the slaves were standing, tense and uneasy, eyes darting about. Once blood began to flow who could say where the killing would stop? After all, these slaves were no more part of the community than this old couple now being cast out.

Once Colm himself had been a slave and the boundaries of his world were the clothes on his back. Now he was a freedman of some stature, a farm owner and man of property expected to do his part in the community, asked to aid a friend who was struggling, looked to for advice and assistance. Colm looked at his neighbors rushing about, eyes wide with excitement. There were times he felt very much apart from these others.

The crowd swarmed about the doorway, but no one had the courage to go in. People yelled for the couple to come out but there was no sound from inside the house. It was getting dark and people began lighting torches and stone vessels of fat for light. Soon enough someone got the idea of tossing a torch onto the roof where it jutted from the hillside. It burned for a moment, then went out. People pointed at it, shouting that this was more sorcery! Someone poked a torch under the eaves and the thin rafters and brush that supported the turf began to catch. Soon the roof was smoking. People shouted and ran about, gathering fuel that they piled against the walls or throwing pitch and fat onto the roof. Smoke billowed from the smoldering house. Finally it began to blaze. The crowd cheered. Ogmund stumbled out of the doorway. Agdis was close behind. They were coughing. The crowd fell back, afraid of them, and watched them silently. The old couple’s eyes were full of smoke and they rubbed their faces. They bent over and spat on the ground.

Then the crowd surged forward and grabbed them both. Men pulled sealskin sacks over their heads so that the couple could not cast spells. Agdis was hauled away to one side, while some men wound a rope around Ogmund’s neck and strung it over the doorframe of his burning house. They pulled the rope tight and Ogmund hung in the doorway, hands clawing at his throat, feet kicking at the ground only a few inches below. Soon enough the old man strangled.

Now everyone’s attention turned to Agdis. They dragged her into the open and snatched the sack from her head. The old woman knelt on the ground, eyes darting about, mumbling. “She is cursing us!” Gerda yelled. “Stone her!” The women shouted and gathered up rocks. Agdis grimaced with her toothless mouth. The first stone hit her and she raised her arms before her face. The women pelted her and she collapsed in a heap, blood running from her forehead. The women closed in and crushed her skull with stones.

For a while people milled about, examining the corpses and discussing each other’s role in the deaths of the old people.

“Now things will go better for us,” said Ketil.

“Oh yes,” said Thorolf, “your herds will increase and the hay grow tall and rich. Fish will run so thick that you can cross the streams on their backs. All the girls will be pretty and the weather will be fine.”

“You mock me.”

“Not at all. I am agreeing with you.”

Bjorn was worried now, his excitement turned into anxiety. “Suppose she cursed us there while she died? Or he cast a spell while he hanged?”

“They died wordless,” said Thorolf. “Only screams.”

Bjorn said, “What of their farm?”

Thorolf said, “It is mine now. I will send my farmhand Adals to run it. He is newly married to the widow Braga and is very capable of making this farm produce well. We will help him build a new house. In time, he will buy this farm from me.” Thorolf looked around at them. “We shall all enjoy our prosperity. All of us together, here in our community.”

Copyright © 2011 Mike Culpepper

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FICTION

LOST IN A STRANGE NEIGHBORHOOD

ELAINE MENGE

Travis pumped the pedals like a wild man. A fever powered him. The fever of triumph. Today he’d kept up with the younger guys for the first time, even in this cold. During cooldown, his breaths condensed so visibly in the evening air, he felt himself going gleefully cross-eyed at the sight.

Since early September he’d joined the throng of bicyclists—Wednesday and Friday afternoons, sometimes Saturday mornings—on their training route along the curving, five-mile stretch of the lake road. Back and forth they’d go, until five became twenty, thirty.

He’d start with the lead group, but soon fall back, keeping company with the weaker sisters—the forty and over crowd, a few nicely toned women in the mix.

Forty-two isn’t twenty-something, he’d tell himself. Instead of giving him license to coast, the words egged him on. And today he’d made it, kept up with the young lions. He was on his way, would never be left behind again—at least, not for a long long time. He knew his place in the lineup now. In many other ways, he knew his place in the world.

He gave the handlebars a happy slap and sat erect, no hands, legs pumping, homeward bound. In his head he could hear the background music he deserved—an Olympic fanfare.

The first time he ever saw the other riders, he was astride his new titanium racer on a levee overlooking the roadway. There had to be at least fifty guys down there. They reminded him of a school of fish—sleek, silvered minnows, fanning out on the curves, then contracting, some at the end trailing off, those at the head, pressing forward, none wanting to be last, left behind, gasping for air.

Never lag or veer too far to one side: That’s where sharks pick you off, his first boss always warned, regarding investment strategy. Travis knew he’d be able to stay at mid-field from now on, behind the leaders and safely ahead of the losers.

He slowed, glided into a right turn onto a newly resurfaced avenue. What a smooth ride. He loved it. For today, his training run was over. When he reached home, dinner would be waiting. They ate early ever since he’d altered his work schedule, going in earlier so he could get home in time for training before sunset. He pictured Travis Jr. snugged up against the table in his highchair, the pressure cooker lid rattling, the kitchen warm and steamy. Daylight savings time ended the previous weekend, and now, not much past five, the sun was staging a bravura light show against the dim sky, granting a few wispy clouds a border of pinkish gold. Half an hour and the evening’s Prussian blue would bowl over, deepen, backdrop the stars.

He had to admit he was winded. What a workout, what a pace. He couldn’t wait to tell Jill, though he’d take care choosing his words. She liked his getting the exercise, but thought him obsessive about both work and play. “Remember, you’re not Lance Armstrong,” she’d say. “And get back before dark. I don’t like that route you take. The traffic. You never know who’s been drinking. I wish you’d—”

Her favorite phrase. What was it in this case? She wished he’d take his bike to the lake in the SUV instead of riding it there and back in rush-hour traffic along Wiser Boulevard.

He’d done that a few times to placate her. But putting the bike in the SUV, then taking it out at the lake, and hauling it back again was a waste of time, especially since the lake was only four miles away. Sure, he had to skirt a certain questionable neighborhood, taking busy Wiser to get there. So what? Though he had to admit, the thought of one of those cars running up his ass did make his calf muscles tense.

Now and then he considered not taking the roundabout way home, the route that avoided Azalea Gardens—that problem neighborhood. Maybe today he should give the shortcut a try. He’d studied a map, thought he’d located a slim connection—hell, maybe it was only an old cow lane—joining up that bad neighborhood to an artery near his own. If he could work up the nerve to enter Azalea Gardens, do a couple of doglegs in that helter-skelter maze of streets, he should reach a lane that would let him out the other side, and over what he imagined was an old wooden bridge—something like that—spanning the drainage canal that separated Azalea Gardens from the Sheridan Estates side. He’d chop a mile off the trip, and nearly all but a stumpy finger of traffic-packed Wiser Boulevard. Be home in less than ten minutes.

Was Azalea Gardens really such a treacherous place? he asked himself, his breaths now coming shallow and quick. He was on Wiser, hounded by pickups and SUVs more monstrous than his own. The turn-off street, if he decided to take it, was coming up fast.

Every few weeks you heard of a shooting in there, mostly drug-related. Or it was a domestic dispute, some genius of the male sex shooting, stabbing, or strangling his wife or girlfriend. His “whatever.” That’s the word his mother used to describe those relationships. Less often, a teenager or some kid not even into double digits would shoot another kid over an issue so incredibly stupid, no one could ever quite define it.

He’d driven through the area a year ago when he and Jill first put in the offer on the Sheridan Estates house, just to make sure that the less-than-savory neighborhood they’d heard about was effectively cordoned off from their own.

Azalea Gardens hadn’t looked terribly threatening that day. Of course, scores of basketball hoops with missing nets lined the streets. Several pick-up games were going on. He’d received dark looks from the long-boned kids who’d been genetically engineered, it seemed, to excel at that sport. He experienced a moment’s fear that his Land Rover would be blocked by their bodies, that despite its Fort Knox–like locks, he’d be pulled from his seat and forced through the hoop himself.

That day, he hadn’t been looking for a road that provided exit from Azalea Gardens and entry into Sheridan across the canal, but he was sure he remembered a rickety bridge over a canal. Some canal, somewhere. Pretty sure. That’s all he’d need to get through.

What bothered him most about the neighborhood was that it reminded him of the one he’d grown up in. Not the people in it, but the houses. That other neighborhood existed in another time, another town, two states over. White-painted clapboard, two-bedroom houses. Railroad tracks a block away looming over a drainage canal. It couldn’t exactly be said that his parents’ house was on the wrong side of the tracks, but he quickly understood that being that close to the wrong side wasn’t the right side either.

His mother was dissatisfied. “We don’t even have a foyer,” she’d fuss. From her he learned that no respectable home lacked a foyer. More important, no self-respecting husband and father would park his family in a tract house the likes of which, when you took two steps inside, you were already smack dab in the middle of the living room!

Though Travis had fun playing with the other kids in the neighborhood, he always felt that more than a whiff of shame clung to him simply because he lived there. It didn’t help that one of his most revered high-school friends once remarked, “You sure do live in the Styx.” Travis didn’t know then the Styx was a river in Greek Hell. A few weeks later he ran across the word in English class. He’d heard “sticks,” and wondered if the reference had something to do with poor building materials. Though he didn’t like his mom’s attitude toward their house, and didn’t like a quality in her that his father called snobbiness, he was determined that once he was a man, he would not bring up a family in the Styx, much less in a house built of sticks. He well knew what the Big Bad Wolf had done to that place.

Two sadly leaning blond brick pillars were coming up on his left, announcing Azalea Gardens. No way would he pass up the shortcut tonight. Travis Jr. was waiting. What could be so bad in there, anyway? A few restless teenagers shooting balls at a mangled hoop? A few mongrel dogs? He could outrace a dog. If a more vicious breed needed further instruction, he’d grab the pump attached to the bike’s frame.

He’d simply avoid any two-legged trouble—knife by so fast, no spur-of-the-moment bad guys would have time to think.

He sat upright, hands dangling as he pumped his legs down the subdivision’s main street, Azalea Avenue. Yards were seedy, unkempt. Mowing in general looked to be a semiannual event. The gardens touted on the entrance posts were nonexistent. Other than that, and the garish trim colors of pink and aquamarine—hues that had been florescent in intensity before wind and rain dulled them—the place looked innocent, bereft of inhabitants.

Piece of cake. What had he been afraid of all these months? He guessed he’d regarded Azalea Gardens as mapmakers of old did uncharted seas, full of bloody-toothed monsters, sea serpents showing off shiny green scales, and freakish island peoples with odd, threatening customs.

The creatures on those old maps were pure decoration. He’d read that recently. They signified the unknown. The mapmakers themselves, modern historians said, didn’t believe such creatures existed. Their maps were works of art, not seriously designed to orient you to the real known world.

In any case, Travis didn’t need a map.

He hit an intersection. Primrose Lane. Gliding on instinct, he hooked a left. Then, not too far down he’d take a right. Right? The streets were curvy, not gridded, he knew, since the neighborhood had been laid out along the contours of a snaking bayou. The bayou was gone, drained thirty years ago, so now the warren of streets—all named after flowers—looked eccentric for no good reason.

When time came to take a second right, Travis strained to read the street sign. Daisy Lane, it looked like. The letters were fuzzed with graffiti. No problem. He didn’t have to know street names; he just needed to keep moving in a northwest direction, find the drainage canal and the wooden bridge that would return him to civilization.

On the sidewalk ahead, a figure approached. A woman, he saw with relief. She was enveloped in long dark cloths. In a flash, he had her pegged: brought up in a black Baptist singing/swaying tradition, now faking this severe Muslim thing, getting revenge on Mama and/or Grandma, married to and at the mercy of some drug-dealing thug who never left the house without wearing his funny, spangled round hat and big sunglasses.

Travis slowed. Passing the woman, he waved to show that he was a good guy, not above saying hello. She returned a suspicious frown. Yeah, well, in these cyclist duds, he probably did resemble an eel on wheels. No guys around here would wear a helmet to ride a bike, either. His silver helmet wasn’t exactly a low-profile article, but taking it off presented problems too. His thick blond hair would immediately peg him as an outsider.

In the near distance he heard an unchained melody of teeth-gnashing, throat-ripping growls topped by crescendoing barks and high-pitched yelps of pain. Some group of warring dogs were having at it. Travis fingered his bicycle pump, clamped onto the bike’s framework. It could double as a club, if need be.

Still there, he confirmed.

The bike wobbled.

He’d caused the wobble. A chill, like a low-numbered, baby earthquake, traversed his body right down to the fingers on the curving handlebars. Now that he’d slowed his pace, the cold was creeping in. When he reached home, instead of sitting at the dinner table in the biker togs that always sent little Travis into hysterics, he’d opt for a hot shower first. Their showerhead was a miracle of hydrotherapy. He had stereo sound in there too. He’d push a button and hear his own top-ten favorite songs.

The wobble brought up another consideration. What if he got a flat? What if he went into a skid, fell, broke his chain?

His sweat was cooling him down too much. He felt on the verge of chattering teeth.

Pick up pace, he told himself. Instead, he slowed. Another odd-angled intersection was coming up. Though the desire defied good sense, he wanted to see the street’s name. The sign was just a pole—a skinny, headless creature—nothing on top.

Veer left, he told himself, slowing to check his intuition, spinning pedals backwards just to keep his blood circulating. He was almost sure this was the way. But he could see kids farther down the street he wanted to take, jumping in the air, hooting, basketball thrumming off the backboard. Riding past them felt risky. He continued straight ahead instead.

Without warning, two teens on skateboards darted at him, coming from the opposite direction. One flung out an arm as if to snag his handlebars. Travis swerved, maintained balance. The kid shrieked—a god-awful, piercing sound. Travis clenched his teeth.

“Let me out of here,” he muttered. In his tiny rearview mirror, he spied a new threat.

A hulking gray bomb of a car, some ancient, aggrieved Oldsmobile, was chewing up the asphalt behind him, its stereo mouthing off full blast. The bass beat pummeled the air like a monster jackhammer. The words were a chaos of foul clichés, but the strong monotonous beat, never wavering, was a study in sobriety.

Travis pulled over into the right gutter. He didn’t even want to know what kind of debris his tires were crushing. The car drew even. A guy in the passenger seat hung his head out the window. “Hey, pretty boy!” he chirped, his accent some variety from south of the border. “Hey, sweet biker babe—you lookin’ sweet enough to . . .”

Travis threw down his feet and turned the bike around beneath him with as much speed and aplomb as a cartoon character, then started grinding the wheels in the opposite direction. One backward glance let him know that the car was still sitting where he’d left it, thinking things over like an angry, stood-up date, its deranged muffler emitting ear-rupturing noises that would put the hounds of hell to shame.

Clammy all over, heart thudding, his deepest wish was no longer to seek a northwest passage, but to get back to Wiser Boulevard and its blessedly vicious traffic. The headless pole should be coming up on his left. That would orient him. Instead, the pole at the next intersection held an ordinary, graffiti-free sign: Pansy Lane.

His back arched as if to say “Huh?” “If only I had a map,” he said aloud. Talking aloud was reassuring. “As if I’d carry a map of Azalea Gardens on this bike. But you wish you had it, don’t you, Trav? Then maybe we’d find our way out of this godforsaken hell-hole.” He liked saying we, as if he wasn’t the only doomed sailor on this expedition.

Just ahead on his right, a yellow porch light flicked on. A large dark figure stood beneath it. The shape plopped down on the porch swing and began moving back and forth. Probably an old guy. At least this dude didn’t look threatening. Travis considered stopping and asking the man if he could tell him how to get out of Azalea Gardens; but nearing, he saw that the guy couldn’t be more than twenty. The young black man nodded his head in an exaggerated fashion, said, “G’mornin’.” The way he pushed his legs against the floor to make the swing go was weird, jerky. He might be on something, or maybe he was spastic, slow, or pretending to be.

Travis sped past without answering. He began to fear that his energy would flag. After all, he’d kept up with those younger bikers for over sixty minutes, then suffered a jolt of adrenaline thanks to the skateboarders and the kooky Hispanic joyriders. Now that the adrenaline was easing off, he felt shaky. He hadn’t eaten since noon. What if his legs gave out? What then?

What a nutty thought. Maybe he wasn’t Lance Armstrong, but he was strong, in his prime—or only a little past. His legs wouldn’t simply turn off as if powered by expired batteries. Still, a scary picture sprang to mind—of his having to get off and walk himself home, leaning against the bicycle like some old Pops crouched over a grocery cart for support.

He raised his chin, looked up at the sky. The Maxfield Parrish pink that had edged the clouds was gone now. So were the clouds. A general dimness settled on the closely spaced houses. How long had he been lost in this strange neighborhood?

“Lost.” He’d said it. The word took his breath away, made his knees feel even more creaky. He glanced at his sports watch. Had it been only seven minutes? Seemed like hours. Whichever, it only took a moment to get murdered.

He wished that idea hadn’t drifted in.

Lighten up, he chanted to himself. Little Travis was home, waiting. Jill. Dinner. That great showerhead, his shower stereo, and all of his things, his study; everything that made sense was waiting at home. He’d only made this one misstep, this one foolish lapse in judgment, banking on it that Azalea Gardens wasn’t the bogeyman, that no bogeymen could exist and thrive only five miles from his gated community.

The darker blue of evening now cloaked the sky. First dark. He’d give anything if the sun would change its mind and pop up again, do something really outlandish for the first time since Old Testament days, if only to give him another fifteen minutes.

He wouldn’t be surprised if his next assailant were an owl, swooping down to pluck out an eye. He wanted to go faster, but the road was a Swiss cheese of potholes. He squinted, tried to see as far ahead as he could. Were his eyes fooling him, or did it actually look brighter at the end of Pansy Lane? Could it be? He imagined the effect meant, possibly, that an open field lay just beyond Pansy Lane’s thick, canopying trees.

Travis breathed easier. Yes, the street led not to more scary, potholed streets with deceptively sweet flower names, but to a broad grassy easement just before the open drainage canal, a much smoother roadway running along its entire length. Across the canal, about a football field away, blinked the lights of Grassmere Point. Grassmere was the nice, but decidedly less exquisite subdivision that shielded Sheridan Estates from the rest of this benighted region. Now he just had to find a way to cross over.

Travis reared up off the seat, jogged his feet against the pedals with growing hope. Something was ahead, something bridgelike. Yes.

A moment later his smile vanished. A huge dog was down by the footbridge. He trotted away from Travis, but then circled back, head up, as if on the lookout for a new victim to dismember. Rottweilers and pit bulls were the dogs of choice in these parts. This one looked more like a rogue German shepherd, only bigger. Hell, it looked like a wolf!

The creature hadn’t seen him. It veered in the opposite direction again, like a prancing show horse with fangs. Travis hung back, traced lazy circles in the street, hoping the monster would move on down the canal and give him the chance to trundle his bike down there through the tall grass and cross the bridge. But the animal hauled around, guarding the bridge like a sentry.

Travis set his feet on the ground and gazed back toward Pansy Lane. At least in the open where he now stood, straddling his bike, a half moon was rising to lend some light. But the canopy of oaks from which he’d recently emerged looked menacing, a black tunnel. Many of the streetlights in Azalea Gardens, he’d noticed earlier, were broken. No way was he going back in there.

And this hellhound guarded the only exit. The aluminum pump hugging his bike’s frame now seemed a sorry weapon.

He glanced back at the Pansy Lane tunnel. Who knew what waited for him along those curving, nameless streets? He wasn’t even sure how to get back to Wiser, his starting place.

The dog pranced, wagging his nose in the air as if on the verge of picking up Travis’s scent, Travis’s fear. Well, sometimes fear was a smart reaction. Sure, he could zoom down there like some half-baked hero, confront that one-headed Cerberus, risking blood and guts, just to find the bridge caved in, useless.

Between a rock and a hard place. Home was so close, but oh-so-far away. Clichés abounded. And now his teeth really were chattering.

He lingered, glancing from the dog to the black maw of Pansy Lane. The lady or the tiger? In this case, both routes promised a tiger. He felt stuck, as if nothing could get him going either way. But something did.

The crazy bass pulsing was back, the enraged muffler now vibrating to a new meter of complaint. The Oldsmobile bomb careened onto the canal road. It was way down, pretty far away, but speeding toward him. Even the dog took note, swung its devilish head around. It seemed to crouch, shrink, smart enough to know the threat was real also for animals. And Travis, breaths coming fast, fled into the gaping black hole he swore he’d never reenter.

All was black on Pansy Lane, every bit as dark as Travis feared. He pedaled slowly, getting his eyes accustomed to the gloom. A car’s headlights raked across the shrubbery ahead and rounded the corner, coming toward him from the opposite direction. The lights were blinding. “Shit,” he said. But this car was without pulsing sound effects. It rolled into a gutter on the right. All four doors opened. People started getting out. A family. He felt eager to grant the emerging conglomeration of souls that heartening name.

Yes, a family. Not necessarily a coven of crackheads. He was certain. Riding past, he hunched over the bars, shriveling into himself like a snail that’s received a heavy dose of salt. The family might be perfectly harmless, might even help with directions; still, he veered away, petrified. Then, behind him, punching the air, came the traveling rap show, the gray Olds. If never before in his life, Travis needed asylum now.

Just ahead on his left he spied the porch with the yellow light, the large young man beneath it, still creaking back and forth in the swing. If Travis rode up to that porch, he might look as if he were visiting, might appear safely embedded in the community and thus not draw the Oldsmobile’s attention. He could pretend to belong while at the same time asking the guy on the swing for directions on how to get the hell out.

The car wasn’t going fast now. It crept along, sniffing the air like one of those creatures in monster movies, unwilling to pass up a single juicy victim. Now or never, Travis said to himself. He angled his bike over the sloping curb and cruised sedately up the front walkway.

The car throbbed several houses down, its chassis clanking as it explored the depths of every pothole.

“Hello.” Travis produced the most feeble, fake smile of his life. The object of his discourse nodded and gazed off into space. He wore a Lion King T-shirt.

Travis thought he might as well get down to business. “I need help,” he said, working to erase the panic from his voice. “I need to get to Wiser Boulevard. You know how to get to Wiser?”

“My name’s Geronimo,” the young man said. His smile was gentle, happy. Under the yellow light, his close-cropped hair showed several buzz-cut channels that reminded Travis of Peruvian petroglyphs.

“Nice to meet you, Geronimo.” Travis tipped a hand to his helmet and tried not to smirk at the crazy name. “But, about that street—Wiser. You know how I can get to Wiser, Geronimo?”

The young man tilted his head. Instead of answering, he asked, “What your name?”

“Uh—Joe,” said Travis. “I’m Joe. So, do you know how to get to Wiser, that big street with all the lights?”

The young man pushed the floorboards with his feet. He suddenly flung out a hand—in the wrong direction, Travis was sure—and said, “Wiser!” as if he’d accomplished some great feat. “Wiser, Joe!”

Travis knew he was talking to a child in a man’s body. That was okay, for now, since the Olds was still creeping up Pansy Lane, wilting every green thing within range of its killer bass speakers. Even if Geronimo had nothing to offer in the way of directions, it was a smart move to stay put, keep talking, as if he of the funny helmet and sleek racer togs had legitimate business in this ’hood.

“Wish I had a map,” said Travis, not caring how stupid the idea sounded, considering his audience. “If I had a map, maybe I could get out of here.”

Geronimo stopped pushing the floor with his feet. “Map?” His eyes showed a childlike interest.

“Yeah. Like a map of the world, to show me where I am, how to get out of this freaking place the fastest.”

Geronimo held up a finger. I got the thing for you, the gesture promised. He stood and disappeared inside the house, opening the screen door wide, letting it slam behind him. Glimpsing the interior, Travis noted this was indeed one of those houses without a foyer.

Rap lyrics ricocheted off the trees. “Hey, Motha’! Motha’?” The same guy who’d called Travis a sweet biker babe was shrieking out his window like some fool hopped up on helium gas.

Travis pretended deafness. He balanced on his seat, one foot on the step, his back to the street. He chose to maintain that pose, to resemble a marble statue. If a car door opened behind him, he’d be off that seat and inside Geronimo’s house so fast, the family’d swear it had another papoose.

Just as Travis’s nerve was about to fail, Geronimo reappeared. Triumphantly before him, he carried a globe of the world.

“I meant a street map.” Travis stretched his arms wide, as if opening a map of all the states in the union engraved with major highways and tributaries.

Geronimo’s head bobbed good-naturedly. “The whirl,” he said. “I got the whole whirl.” He spun the globe before Travis’s blurring eyes. As it slowed, Travis noticed a big dent in West Africa.

“I got the whole whirl.” Geronimo spun the globe again, then abruptly stopped it with his forefinger. “You are here!” he said with conviction. His finger landed on China. He spun again, slapped a finger against the world’s speeding belly once more. “You are here!” This time, his fingernail, perfectly crescented with a pale half moon, landed in the middle of the Pacific.

“You are here!” Geronimo tilted his glistening, channeled scalp toward his guest as if Travis should be pleased to find himself in such good company.

Meanwhile Travis was thinking: The sun’s moved clear to the other side of this orb. We’re on the dark side. Pitch. He gazed at a faded cloth that hung down from the top of the screen door on the inside, and thought: You were rich with color once. He sensed Geronimo’s mother or grandma might be standing behind that cloth, keeping an eye on her baby and the strange white man.

“You here!” Geronimo braked the world, then spun again, happy with the game.

Travis watched as slightly raised mountains rippled by. He nodded, mesmerized. The bass beat still bounced off the thick tree trunks behind him.

“Hey Motha’. Gimme that fancy bike, Motha’.” The voice cackled, then cracked, as if incapable of maintaining a serious threat. “Gimme that bike for Chrissmus, Motha’!”

Geronimo struck the globe another glancing blow. Continents flew by. Geronimo’s finger stopped the world again. “You are here. You here.”

“Yeah, that’s where I am.” Travis felt his voice was sounding in a different kind of air, in uncharted territory a million miles away from his family or anything he knew.

He rested his palm on the globe, touching Geronimo’s hand as he did. “This is where I am,” Travis said. “I guess I’m here.” Where that was, he didn’t know—a disquieting fact—but his legs had stopped shaking, and despite the growling engine behind him, his breaths were coming more evenly.

Travis spun the globe himself and watched the colors blur. In front of him, Geronimo was smiling and bobbing his head, glad to be of help.

Copyright © 2011 Elaine Menge

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© 2011, by Mark F. Russell Dead in the Water We will give a prize of $25 to the person who invents the best mystery story (in 250 words or less, and be sure to include a crime) based on the above...

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This month’s titles have a “ripped from the headlines” feel as they engage circumstances and issues that frequently dominate headlines. Andrew Klavan’s The Identity Man is set in an unnamed city that channels the destruction felt in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. T. Jefferson Parker’s The...

THE STORY THAT WON

©2004 Mark F. Russell The October Mysterious Photograph contest was won by Terrie Hoffman Curtis of Villa Gove, Colorado. Honorable mentions go to Sue Burton of Toronto, Ontario, Canada; James A....

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MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH

© 2011, by Mark F. Russell

Dead in the Water

We will give a prize of $25 to the person who invents the best mystery story (in 250 words or less, and be sure to include a crime) based on the above photograph. The story will be printed in a future issue. Reply to AHMM, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, New York, New York 10007-2352. Please label your entry “April Contest,” and be sure your name and address are written on the story you submit. If you would like your story returned, please include an SASE.

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BOOKED & PRINTED

ROBERT C. HAHN

This month’s titles have a “ripped from the headlines” feel as they engage circumstances and issues that frequently dominate headlines. Andrew Klavan’s The Identity Man is set in an unnamed city that channels the destruction felt in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. T. Jefferson Parker’s The Border Lords explores the porous borders between the United States and Mexico and the horrific carnage resulting from the drug trade. The all-too-familiar story of the felon released from prison on a technicality, legitimate or spurious, who then commits additional crimes is given a dark reading in John Lescroart’s Damage.

All three authors are successful veterans and readers’ high expectations will not be disappointed by these new offerings.

In THE IDENTITY MAN (Houghton Mifflin, $25), Andrew Klavan’s protagonist, John Shannon, is a thief, but a decent thief who’s already done two felony stints for burglary. When times are good he earns a living with his carpentry skills, but when work is slow and funds are low he reverts to crime and the thrill it provides. Until he makes the mistake of partnering with the wrong guy and finds himself framed on a murder charge.

On the run and desperate, Shannon meets the Identity Man, and the transformation of Shannon into Henry Conor begins, with no explanation and no assent from the hapless thief. New name, new face, passport, driver’s license, work history, references are all provided gratis. He’s even given a car, a small stake, a set of carpentry tools, and a new city.

Like New Orleans after Katrina, this new city is recovering from flood-—a perfect place for a carpenter, since the devastation has resulted in massive rebuilding efforts. This flood also covered over a number of crimes, and in the chaotic aftermath fraud and corruption found fertile soil. One crime that seems to get washed away by the flood is the murder of Peter Patterson by Police Lieutenant Brick Ramsey, whose career path has gradually twisted him from one side of the law to the other.

Klavan maintains the mystery of the Identity Man’s purpose as Conor gradually rebuilds a new life as a carpenter and craftsman, even finding a surrogate family in Frederick Applebee, his widowed daughter, Teresa Grey, and her son, Michael.

That the paths of Conor and Ramsey will cross seems inevitable, but how and with what results are elements that the inventive Klavan skillfully interweaves as Conor (and the reader) wait for the price of the Identity Man’s services to be extracted.

THE BORDER LORDS (Dutton, $26.95), T. Jefferson Parker’s fourth entry in a planned six-volume Border book series—following 2010’s Iron River—moves at a white heat pace from start to finish, as Charlie Hood of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department continues his overt and covert war against the drug and gun trade while on loan to the ATF Blowdown task force. The operation aims to cut off the flow of an extremely lethal silenced machine pistol called the Love 32.

And while Hood is very much present, this volume belongs to his friend, ATF agent Sean Ozburn, who has gone “deep undercover” as a gun and drug dealer to penetrate gang operations on both sides of the California–Mexico border. Ozburn has excellent cover as a meth and gun specialist with Aryan Brotherhood connections and a putative friend of the North Baja Cartel.

A year is normally a very long term “UC” assignment, but Ozburn has been undercover for fifteen months when he suddenly goes silent, with no contact for six days. His unusual silence is followed by something worse: He’s caught on tape dismantling a monitoring system just before three suspected assassins are slaughtered in a safe house.

With orders to bring Ozburn in and arrest him, Charlie Hood contacts Sean’s wife, Seliah, who describes Sean’s recent mood swings as he became increasingly disenchanted with the United States’ war on drugs and the weakness of the Mexican government. But it appears that during a stolen week with Seliah in Costa Rica something else changed in Sean, and after going back undercover Sean continues to change in strange ways as he pursues his new mission with desperate intensity. Hood becomes increasingly convinced that the trip to Costa Rica and Sean and Seliah’s contact with a man calling himself “Father Joe Leftwich” is a key to understanding what is happening to Sean.

Parker is a risk-taking author, and the descriptions of Sean’s behavior and symptoms at times make him seem like a supervillain or a superhero run amok in a way that strains credulity until Parker gradually reveals a credible explanation. Parker ratchets up both action and suspense while detailing the cost and carnage of the drug trafficking and its attendant violence. It is a considerable accomplishment, and even more impressive as Parker brings this latest Border novel to its shocking conclusion.

DAMAGE (Dutton, $26.95) is the sixteenth book in John Lescroart’s series featuring defense attorney Dismas Hardy, and his good friend Abe Glitsky, a Black, Jewish homicide cop in San Francisco.

Hardy has only a peripheral role in this novel, mainly serving as a sounding board for his friend Abe Glitsky when a newspaper scion is released from prison, having served only nine years on a rape and murder conviction. That conviction is finally overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, releasing Roland “Ro” Curtlee, a truly nasty character, from prison on ten-million-dollar bond pending a new trial—a trial that may never take place at all.

It doesn’t take long after Curtlee is released for the pressure, intimidation, and worse to begin. The chief witness against Curtlee in his first trial is murdered, though Glitsky and his crew can find no evidence to tie Curtlee to the crime. Then the new D.A., Wes Farrell, receives a visit from Curtlee’s parents, who remind him of their campaign contributions and the influence their paper, the Courier commands. Their pet columnist, Sheila Marrenas, starts weighing in with columns about the “injustice” of Curtlee’s long imprisonment and the police persecution of him. Curtlee is even brash enough to appear at Glitsky’s home while he’s at work—a subtle but ominous threat to his wife and child.

Lescroart succeeds in making Ro Curtlee one of the most despicable of villains—one who’s rich, clever, spoiled, and ruthless—while the police and prosecutors find their hands tied in myriad ways by laws, judges, and public opinion, until it appears that only extra-legal solutions can stop Curtlee’s depradations.

Lescroart’s fans will obviously get the most from this latest offering, but Damage should appeal equally to those unfamiliar with the series, as Lescroart builds suspense at a fast rate while exploring the difficult conundrums of justice in a free society, where the protections designed for the innocent can be used to protect the guilty.

Copyright © 2011 Robert C. Hahn

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THE STORY THAT WON

©2004 Mark F. Russell

The October Mysterious Photograph contest was won by Terrie Hoffman Curtis of Villa Gove, Colorado. Honorable mentions go to Sue Burton of Toronto, Ontario, Canada; James A. Knoop of Eastpointe, Michigan; Ila Winslow of Portland, Oregon; Stacey A. Alvey of Somerville, New Jersey; Cindy G. Brewer of Mt. Pleasant, Michigan; Paula Timpson of Venice, Florida; Richard Moriarty of Storrs, Connecticut; Michael C. Slack of Palo Alto, California; and Kathy Chencharik of South Royalston, Massachusetts.

OUT ON A LIMB

TERRI HOFFMAN CURTIS

Fiona steered the pickup down the highway and looked at her sister’s swollen eye and split lip. “What was it this time?” Fiona asked.

“I burned the meatloaf,” Lilly mumbled.

The truck hit a pothole, launching both women toward the tattered headliner.

“That’s nothing’ new,” Fiona said. “I mean, what was different this time that made you finally do somethin’?”

Lilly put her hands in her lap. “I found out I’m pregnant. I’m not bringin’ no kid into this world to a father like Harold. So, I smacked Harold with the fry pan, and that was that.”

“I know just the place up in Noland Gulch where the wolves and other critters will take care of everything,” Fiona said.

Suddenly, flashing red and blue light filled the cab of the truck.

“Shit,” Fiona said, slowing down to pull onto the shoulder.

Lilly turned and saw the sheriff’s car easing in behind them. She also saw that Harold had bounced out from under the tarp. “We are so screwed,” she whispered.

Fiona rolled down her window. The deputy leaned down to peer inside the cab.

“Hey, Mitch,” Fiona said.

“Fiona. Lilly.” Mitch stared at Lilly’s battered face and shook his head.

“Fiona, you know the rules about carrying a load in the back.” He handed her a red handkerchief. “You got more than a foot hanging over your tailgate. Take care of it, girl.”

Mitch walked back to his cruiser.

Copyright © 2011 Terri Hoffman Curtis

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ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE Editorial Offices 267 Broadway, 4th Floor New York, NY 10007-2352 Subscription Services (800) 220-7443 www.TheMysteryPlace.com Change of Address & Subscription Inquiries www.TheMysteryPlace.com Send your current mailing label and new address to: AHMM 6 Prowitt...

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INFORMATION

INFORMATION

Linda Landrigan

EDITOR

Emily Giglierano

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Susan Mangan

VICE PRESIDENT,
DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

Victoria Green

SENIOR ART DIRECTOR

Cindy Tiberi

PRODUCTION ARTIST

Laura Tulley

SENIOR PRODUCTION MANAGER

Jennifer Cone

PRODUCTION ASSOCIATE

Abigail Browning

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING,
BRAND LICENSING AND E-COMMERCE

Bruce W. Sherbow

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT,
SALES, MARKETING
AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Sandy Marlowe

CIRCULATION SERVICES

Robin DiMeglio

ADVERTISING SALES MANAGER

Peter Kanter

PUBLISHER

www.TheMysteryPlace.com

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INFORMATION

DIRECTORY OF SERVICES

ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE

Editorial Offices

267 Broadway, 4th Floor

New York, NY 10007-2352

Subscription Services

(800) 220-7443

www.TheMysteryPlace.com

Change of Address & Subscription Inquiries

www.TheMysteryPlace.com

Send your current mailing label and new address to:

AHMM

6 Prowitt Street

Norwalk, CT 06855-1220

Or e-mail us at:
customerservice@pennypublications.com

Back Issues

Send a check for $6.50 per single issue, or $9.50 per double issue (Add an additional $1.50 for delivery outside the U.S.) to AHMM at

6 Prowitt Street, Suite 100

Norwalk, CT 06855-1220

Please specify which issue you are ordering.

Subrights & Permissions

licensing@dellmagazines.com

Or fax inquiries to (203) 854-5962

Newsstand Sales

Dell Magazines, Department NS

6 Prowitt Street

Norwalk, CT 06855-1220

(203) 866-6688

retailsellers@pennypublications.com

Advertising Representative

Robin DiMeglio, Advertising Sales Manager

6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855

Tel: (203) 866-6688 x180 Fax: (203) 854-5962

printadvertising@dellmagazines.com

(Display & Classified Advertising)

ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE (ISSN:0002-5224), Vol. 56, No. 4, April 2011. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. Annual subscription $55.90 in the U.S.A. and possessions, $65.90 elsewhere, payable in advance in U.S. funds (GST included in Canada). Subscription orders and correspondence regarding subscriptions should be sent to 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Or, to subscribe, call 1-800-220-7443. Editorial Offices: 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352. Executive Offices: 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. © 2011 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. The stories in this magazine are all fictitious, and any resemblance between the characters in them and actual persons is completely coincidental. Reproduction or use, in any manner, of editorial or pictorial content without express written permission is prohibited. Submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. POSTMASTER: Send changes to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. In Canada return to: Quad/Graphics Joncas, 4380 Garand, Saint-Laurent, Quebec H4R 2A3. GST #R123054108.

Printed by Quad/Graphics, Taunton, MA, USA. 1/3/2011.

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