Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

Kindle Edition, 2012 © Penny Publication

Crowd Pleaser

LINDA LANDRIGAN, EDITOR | 120 words

This month’s issue is packed with reader favorites. Steven Gore, Shelley Costa, Bob Tippee, and Kenneth Wishnia all return with stand-alone stories of justice, betrayal, ambition, and suspense. (It is a pleasure to welcome back Mr. Tippee after many years.) Moreover, some of our most popular series check in with new installments. We are delighted to present new tales featuring I. J. Parker’s medieval Japan sleuth Akitada; John C. Boland’s Cold War–era spy Charles Marley; Loren Estleman’s World War II–era squad the Four Horseman (a series unique to AHMM!); and John H. Dirckx’s Detective Inspector Cyrus Auburn who reaches a professional milestone in this outing.

For readers picky about their murder and mayhem, this issue is sure to please.

Linda Landrigan, Editor

DEFENDER OF JUSTICE

STEVEN GORE | 3873 words

Art by Hank Blaustein

Stuart Levine looked through two layers of glass at Maurice Hicks sitting cross-armed in a metal chair anchored to the jail floor. The nearest was bifurcated into rimless lenses; the farthest, a shatterproof pane that protected San Francisco public defenders from their clients.

“Did you choose me?” Maurice asked in a familiar lisp. “Or was it just chance?”

During his twelve years in the office, no other client had asked Levine those questions. They’d merely accepted the wool-suited person who sat across from them as their lawyer, just as they’d accepted the doctor at the county hospital and their parole officer and their mother’s live-in boyfriend, and considered none of them any more trustworthy than the housing project elevator that wrenched them upward each night toward an uncertain welcome.

Levine stared at Maurice’s broad forehead, imagining it an internal theater screen showing a vintage cartoon: Levine racing to the office early that morning, tearing into a stack of new files, then holding up Maurice’s and sniffing it like a freshly picked rose. The caricature, as Levine acknowledged to himself, was merely his own projection, for he doubted that even as a child playing with crayons at his kitchen table, Maurice had ever imagined himself in bloom.

While Maurice waited to learn whether it was choice or chance that had once again brought them together in this interview room, Levine grasped for the first time what the office’s case assignment system really was: an inverted lottery in which the winners were paid to participate, and the prizes, in ascending order, were the harebrained, the wicked, the insane—

Levine stumbled at the end of the analogy, but regained his rhetorical feet when he realized he’d won the grand prize: Maurice, a hybrid containing strains of each.

“It was just luck of the draw,” Levine finally said, shrugging his shoulders and keeping not only his musings, but also his memories to himself, including the one of them sharing the defense table three years earlier.

Because Maurice had claimed back then that he’d been hearing voices when he killed the woman, Levine requisitioned six thousand dollars of the county’s money to purchase the only available psychiatric defense: command hallucinations. It was a condition so improbable many experts in the field—even those who trafficked in repressed memories and in satanic cults that sacrificed lambs and toddlers—doubted it existed. But Levine wasn’t troubled by its improbability, for his hometown juries rivaled LA’s in their dexterity in overcoming the implausible, the fanciful, and the far-fetched in order to deliver on their idiosyncratic notions of justice.

Against Levine’s advice, Maurice had refused to set foot on the diagnostic path toward the psych ward, for he believed beyond a reasonable doubt the meds would silence the voices, the shrinks would toss him back to court, a jury would convict him, and a judge would imprison him for the rest of his life. So even while his inner voices screamed at each other like feuding neighbors, Maurice resolved he’d go home, as he always had, to his mother, or his auntie, or his grandmother, or whoever it was that day who pitied him too much or was too terrified to shut the door in his face.

A month after Maurice’s arrest, and without psychotropic intervention, the voices ceased commanding. Instead, they began chanting Who can we pin it on? Who can we pin it on? It was a plea Maurice had adopted from his cellmate who’d whispered it each night in prayer before drifting off to sleep, and then again each morning when he awoke in the jail’s sunless dawn.

The mantra soon insinuated itself into Levine’s life as a choral accompaniment to his pre-trial night sweats. But it wasn’t until the eve of jury selection that his legal muse stepped into the footlights and announced on whom the murder could be pinned.

Fortunately, like everyone else in San Francisco except Stuart Levine, it hadn’t crossed the mind of the victim’s ex-husband that he needed an alibi.

Two months later, Who can we pin it on? was laser-etched into an oak plank and presented to Levine at the office’s annual Defenders of Justice dinner.

A not-guilty verdict in a first-degree murder case was a rare thing.

Finding someone else to pin it on, even rarer.

And justice, Levine knew, was rarest of all.

Through the assault-proof glass, Levine surveyed Maurice’s upper body just as he would a crime scene, for concealed under biceps draped by an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit lay the hands accused of fatally stabbing O. G. Leonard thirty-six hours earlier.

“Let me see them,” Levine said, pointing back and forth between their hiding places.

Maurice held them out like a child showing his mother he’d washed before dinner. They were bruised and scabbed.

“It doesn’t look like a whodunit,” Levine said.

Maurice tapped his ear. “I was hearing voices.”

“What were they saying?”

“Get money.”

Levine bit his lower lip and stared up at the ceiling, a performance for his client, for there was no exculpatory evidentiary slot in which he could jam that fact. After a few moments, he shook his head and looked back at Maurice.

“That sounds more like greed than like a command hallucination,” Levine said.

“But I thought O. G. was my dad.” Maurice’s voice rose, then plateaued. “My father molested me when I was six, and I just wanted some cash like all them Catholic kids got.”

For a half second, Levine wasn’t sure which of Maurice’s strains had taken the lead: the harebrained or the insane; then he realized his answer would be the same in either case.

“That’s a different kind of father,” Levine said.

Maurice cocked his head and furrowed his brows. “I been wondering about that.”

Levine grasped at the thread of mitigation. “Did your father really molest you when you were six?”

“A shrink sorta hypnotized me once,” Maurice said, his lisp washing the words. “That’s what came out. He said it was some kinda depressed memory.”

“Repressed . . . repressed memory.”

Maurice grinned. “Not anymore.”

Levine smiled to himself. Maurice had once again shown he could be an amusing and engaging human being, at least when he wasn’t out killing other ones.

And intelligent. Maybe too intelligent.

Levine wondered whether Maurice wouldn’t be so crazy if he weren’t so clever.

“What do you say we ask the court to send you under 1368 for a competency evaluation?” Levine said.

Levine was comfortable speaking in penal code sections because Maurice had proven the last time around that his mastery of the mental health provisions of California criminal law equaled that of most of the attorneys in the office.

“Maybe we can use it to set up an insanity defense.”

Maurice’s eyes went vacant as he considered the suggestion. He bit his lower lip and rubbed his right thumb against his left palm.

Levine gave him a push. “At least we can use it to buy some time.”

Maurice’s eyes refocused and his face brightened. “You mean until we can find somebody to pin it on?”

“That may take awhile.” Levine made a show of looking around the jail. “Lots of bad people in here. There are better places for you to hang out until we decide on a defense.”

“Then I’ll give it some thought. I probably can do a little time inna psych hospital. They got all kinds of new meds.” Maurice raised his eyebrows and offered a conspiratorial grin. ”Lots of new stuff you can’t get on the outside.”

Levine joined the conspiracy with a wink, and then said, “I’ll ask an investigator to go out to the scene to see where we stand before we decide for sure.”

Maurice shrugged his understanding, then pointed a lacerated finger at the soiled manila folder on which Levine’s hands rested.

“That my old file?”

Levine nodded. “In case history was repeating itself.”

“I know that one.” Maurice’s face became as earnest as a third grader on show-and-tell day. “It’s from Groucho Marx. It was in Bartlett’s Family Quotations. We had a raggedy old one in the library at the youth authority. He said things happen the first time as comedy and the second time as farce.”

“Actually, it’s Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. It was Karl Marx. And it’s the first time as tragedy.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Maurice’s dreadlocks jiggled as he giggled. “That’s what happens when you hear voices.”

Maurice quieted, then jutted his jaw toward the file. “It got the shrink’s report?”

“We’ll need a new one.”

“If history is repeating itself, maybe we can just change the date.”

“They don’t let us do that. It’s the rules.”

Maurice frowned as if unsure whose side Levine was on. “I thought D.A.’s were the ones who believed in rules.”

“Both sides believe in them,” Levine said. “P.D.’s are just people who can’t be D.A.’s because they feel guilty all the time about things they’re not responsible for.”

Maurice squinted with one eye, then scanned the riveted sheet metal framing the glass partition. After a few seconds, he looked back at Levine.

“If I go 1368, maybe you better come along too. We can play volleyball and do group therapy and try out some new meds.” Maurice grinned again. “Well, me anyway.”

Levine enjoyed tagging along with the office’s investigators, especially when they voyaged into neighborhoods where Starbucks and Trader Joe’s still feared to drop anchor, but he tried to stay in the background. He recognized that too many years spent cross-examining witnesses had atrophied his ability to solicit information from those whose escape wasn’t blocked by a court bailiff.

He also liked working with Paul Washington, a retired SFPD homicide detective now double-dipping in the public defender’s office. Levine found comfort in working with the ex-cop because he never seemed to feel the need to believe in anything. It was, in Levine’s mind, a mature counterweight to his own juvenile need to believe in something, no matter how transitory.

Levine had once believed in his clients’ innocence, but that only made trials unbearable. Even worse, a few weeks after the cloud of defeat had lifted, or the rare afterglow of victory had faded, a thought would plague him, even nauseate him. It accused him of having spent his entire career in a sandbox, embracing the illusion that the fictional defenses he argued in court were actual, not merely real in their consequences.

More recently, Levine had convinced himself that justice was in the process, not in the verdict: that legally pursued means really did justify the ends. That way, pinning Maurice’s last murder on an innocent ex-husband was actually justice, maybe even Justice. And Levine knew he either had to believe that or else sign up for volleyball and group therapy and, perhaps, some meds he couldn’t get on the outside.

“Paul, I need your brain for a couple of hours,” Levine said in a call to Washington as he walked down the front steps of the Hall of Justice. “It’s about Mo Hicks.”

“Who’d he stab?”

“Why do you assume he stabbed somebody?”

“It’s been about three years,” Washington said without inflection. “When I was in the homicide unit I figured out his inner voices were on a timer.”

Levine dodged a homeless drunk staggering past, then asked, “How is it you always seem to discover the quantum of predictability in a universe of chaos?”

“You’ll have to ask my grandmother. It may be the residue left after you distill religion out of a Southern Baptist. Who was it?”

“O. G. Leonard.”

“O. G. . . . O. G.” Washington’s tone suggested he was pursuing a fact that would reveal the meaning of O. G. Leonard in their lives. Finally, he said, “We can’t take it. Conflict of interest. We’d be going against an old client. I’m pretty sure the office was representing O. G. on an aggravated assault.”

“Death resolves all conflicts,” Levine answered with feigned gravity. “Surely you’ve been on this side of the fence long enough to have grasped that little nugget. Anyway, if we conflicted out, it would look like I was afraid to risk my streak as a Defender of Justice.”

“I’m not sure a single not-guilty verdict counts as a streak.”

“Let’s just say . . .” Levine fell silent as he grasped for words to tell himself what he currently believed, but they escaped his reach, so he settled on the self-mockery that was always at hand: “Let’s just say it’s as much of a streak as it was justice.”

Forty-five minutes later, Levine and Washington stood on a trash-strewn Bayview Hunters Point sidewalk and inspected blood spatter left to be washed away by overdue spring rains. Neither looked up, but both knew that eyes surveilled them from the second-story windows of the faded Victorians across the street.

“You get a look at the police report?” Washington asked.

Levine pointed toward an abandoned cargo van that had been reborn as a homeless shelter.

“It claims Maurice was lying in wait down there. He came up behind O. G. and stabbed him in the back. There was a struggle and Maurice kept wailing until O. G. stopped moving. The uniforms rolled up in time to snag Maurice as he was running away with a knife in his hand.”

“He make a statement?”

“Only that he was hearing voices. The police took him for a psych evaluation, and then back to the jail because he refused to talk to the shrink.”

“Keeping his options open?”

“In an insane sort of way.”

Washington inspected scuff marks on the sidewalk. “Why do the detectives think Maurice snuck up and stabbed O. G. from behind?”

“Because it fits their theory.”

Washington looked up. “What theory is that?”

“That Maurice got away with murder three years ago and spending less than a decade in the California Youth Authority for the one he did in his teens wasn’t exactly justice.”

Washington paused for a moment, then squinted over at Levine. “You think the D.A. will charge special circumstances for him lying in wait and try to put him out of action permanently?”

Levine nodded. “But I don’t think he’ll ask for death, just life without parole. Even he understands it wouldn’t be a good use of taxpayers’ money trying to execute a lunatic to avenge the death of a scumbag.”

Washington walked twenty feet down the sidewalk, eyes focused on a trail of maroon droplets. He inspected a bloody handprint on a peeling green picket fence, then knelt and peered under overgrown shrubs. He rose, brushed off his suit pants, then returned and stood close to Levine.

“Looks like the crime scene people missed a second knife,” Washington said. “There’s one caught in some branches with what looks like dried blood on the blade and handle. It’s probably O. G.’s. I’ll take a photo, then put it in an evidence bag.”

A moldy and sour odor wafted from just upwind of Levine’s left shoulder.

“You guys cops?” a voice asked.

Levine turned to observe three layers of grungy jackets shrouding the body of a skinny, seventy-year-old homeless man. Face lined and reddened by sunburn. More gums than teeth. Scratched and chipped glasses. Overalls stiffened by grime.

“No,” Levine said, “we’re not cops. Public Defender.”

The old man stuck out his palm. “Got some spare change?”

Washington shook his head.

Levine reached into his pocket and handed him a dollar.

“You hear about a guy getting killed here the night before last?” Washington asked.

“O. G. It was O. G.” Each “O” sprayed stale burrito breath toward Washington and Levine. “He got in a guy’s face. Somebody not from around here.”

“What about?” Levine asked.

“Something stupid, probably. I didn’t hear that part.”

“What part did you hear?” Levine winced as he heard his tone of cross-examination propel the question toward its target.

The old man grinned. “Only the fuck-you-you-son-of-a-bitch part.”

“Who said that?”

“O. G.”

“What happened next?”

“O. G. takes a big swing at the other guy.” The old man swung his right arm roundhouse-style. “Like that.”

“Anything in O. G.’s hand?” Washington asked.

Adrenaline surged through Levine’s body. He didn’t care about the answer. Washington had already found the second weapon.

“Too dark,” the old man said.

“Then what happened?”

“A lot of punching and grunting. Then they dropped to the sidewalk. I couldn’t see nothin’ after that. But I heard the new guy say, ‘O. G., you shouldn’t a hadn’t a done that.’ Then there was a bunch more thumping. Then it got quiet.”

Levine felt lightheaded as he always did when daylight burst into the muggy, dark tunnel that was a homicide case. He glanced over at Washington, whose nod acknowledged that a special-circumstance-life-without-parole-murder had just collapsed to a winnable self-defense. Levine knew then that his streak, short as it was, would continue, and justice—maybe even Justice itself—would again be served.

A cool breeze gusted up the street from the bay. Levine watched a Taco Bell wrapper swirl up into an erratic flight down the blood-spattered sidewalk. A chill shuddered through him as the crinkled paper came to rest between the van’s flattened front tires. It felt arctic in its depth and radiated outward from an emptiness in his chest, rather than inward from the wind against his face. He looked back and forth between the old man and Washington and saw that neither had joined him in the sudden winter. For them, it was still spring.

“Where you been living?” Washington asked the old man.

“In the Rescue Mission when I can stand the company.” The man tilted his head toward a brush-strewn lot down the block. “In them bushes when I can’t.”

“And the night before last?”

“I wasn’t in the mood for company.”

Washington pulled out a business card, wrote a note on the back, then handed it over. “Show this to Mr. Patel at the Melrose Inn. He’ll give you a room for tonight. I’ll come by before checkout.”

The man looked down at the dollar in his hand, then grinned up at Levine.

“Not exactly the federal witness protection program, is it?”

Levine gazed up at the descending second hand on the courtroom clock as he walked from the defense table toward the prisoner’s box. The rotating metal sliver seemed to morph into a knife freefalling toward its target as Paul Washington’s voice rose up inside his brain:

Maurice’s voices are on a timer.

“Line 54, ” the clerk announced. “Hicks, Maurice. 187PC, Special Circ.”

Levine felt the marble tiles beneath his feet turn to muck. His legs weakened. The file folder in his hand softened with sweat—and in that moment he understood the end toward which the judicial means were now aimed.

In a thousand days, more or less, but as inevitably as the tides ebbed and flowed with the circuit of the moon, he and Maurice would once again stand together in this place, and another human being would lie drained of life on an autopsy table in the county morgue a hundred yards away.

Levine slogged the final steps, then came to a stop facing Maurice standing behind the low wooden barrier, his wrists cuffed to a waist chain.

The slap of paper against wood behind him told Levine the clerk had handed Maurice’s file up to the judge.

“I went out to the scene,” Levine whispered to Maurice, succumbing to the pressure of his client’s childlike expectancy, not knowing how his next sentence would begin or where it would take him.

Levine felt the judge’s gaze painting crosshairs on the back of his neck. His forehead warmed. He licked his dry lips. He again looked up at the clock. He felt his hands clench as if grasping for magic words that would prevent the second hand from completing its orbit.

The judge fractured the moment. “Mr. Levine, are you representing the defendant?”

Levine turned toward the bench, and bought himself time with the currency of legal exchange: “Yes, Your Honor. Stuart Levine appearing for Maurice Hicks. May I have a moment with my client?”

Levine watched the judge inspect Maurice, knowing what he was seeing: dreadlocks matted, jumpsuit soiled and wrinkled, face revealing the first vibrations of an emerging mania. The judge looked back at Levine and smiled as if to say, “Just get it done before your client goes berserk and the bailiffs have to wrestle him back to the holding cell.”

Levine again faced Maurice. He heard his own breathing, like an updraft levitating him from the floor. He felt himself hovering, poised in that centripetal moment between past and future—and stopped the clock:

“We’ve got no one to pin it on.”

Maurice’s eyes turned wild at the image of being caged in a maximum security prison, the rest of his days spent fighting off demons, most imaginary nighttime hallucinations, but others as concrete as a tattooed skinhead sharpening his toothbrush into a dagger in the next cell.

Levine leaned in closer, his voice still low, but now intent and conspiratorial.

“How long can you make it last in a locked ward if I can get the judge to send you 1368?”

“The rest of my life,” Maurice swallowed hard, “if I have to.”

Levine stepped to the podium, and with the same conviction with which he accused an innocent ex-husband of murder, said:

“Your Honor, my client is incapable of understanding the nature of the proceedings and is therefore unable to assist in preparing his defense. I’d like him sent 1368.”

The judge glanced over at the deputy district attorney. “Any objection?”

The D.A. opened his folder. Levine prayed to a God in whom he didn’t believe that the prosecutor would agree once he spotted the words “hearing voices” in the offense summary. Levine watched his eyes scan the page, then stop.

“No objection, Your Honor.”

The judge glanced down at the top of the clerk’s head. “Give me a date in six months.” He then looked over at the bailiff. “You don’t need to bring in the defendant if he still isn’t competent, just forward the report.” The judge made a note in the file, then flipped it closed. “Let’s move on to the next case.”

“Line 55 . . .”

“Hey, Stuart. Hold up.”

Levine turned at the sound of Paul Washington’s voice cutting through the roar of the traffic on the nearby freeway, and then waited at the crosswalk. The investigator’s approaching figure was lost for a moment in the glare of an orange and yellow sunset shimmering off the Hall of Justice windows behind him.

Washington began speaking two steps away. “What do you want me to do with the old guy in the Hicks case?”

“Let him go back to the bush he crawled out from.”

“You sure you don’t you want to depose him and preserve his testimony? Another cold winter and he might not live long enough to testify for Maurice in his trial.”

“There’s never going to be a trial.”

Washington drew back. “It was textbook self-defense. He was going to walk. If I was still in homicide, I might’ve cut him loose myself.”

Levine gazed into the distance, backtracking in his mind, trying to locate where he’d turned onto the path he’d followed after he climbed out of the sandbox that had been his career and slammed the door to the psych ward from which Maurice would never emerge.

Washington searched Levine’s face, then shrugged. “I don’t get it. What about you being the Defender of Justice and all that?”

After a few moments of silent struggle, Levine located the signpost marking the fork in the trail. He wasn’t at all surprised he’d missed it, for it had been written by an all-too-familiar hand in invisible ink. He looked back at Washington.

“Let’s just say I didn’t want to ruin my streak.”
Copyright © 2012 Steven Gore

STRANGLE VINE

SHELLEY COSTA | 6813 words

Okemah, Oklahoma, June 3, 1911

I don’t see him first thing. Or even second thing. And when I do see him, I don’t recognize him, he’s just that much too far upriver in the boat. Me, I’m standing downriver from the bridge, where it all happened not even two weeks ago, still looking for their shoes. Hers and L. W.’s. It’s not that I think I’m likely to find them—they might have been stolen, or they might have been left back at the farm in Dark Town and then stolen—nothing lasts long around here, I’m noticing—but every day after school, where Mama teaches fifth grade, I come back to the bank of the Canadian River and I look.

I have a good long stick I use for pulling at anything that looks like a shoe out there not too far from the riverbank. Sometimes I think my heart will break all over again if I don’t find those shoes. But then sometimes I think it’ll break if I do. I only know for sure I have to come. It gives me something to do because when you’re twelve and the whole place is run by the devil it’s really all you can do.

If those same worn-out shoes I saw on Laura and L. W. every day are all I, Josie Templett, can save, I figure at least it’s something. It’s early June now, and the bank manager walks to his job managing the First National Bank like nothing ever happened, only I notice he got a new suit from the Sears Roebuck catalog like maybe he needed something clean and new, and the McLaren bay horse and wagon that brought them here—brought all of us here, really, that night two weeks ago—sits hitched outside the hardware store just waiting for its next load, its next delivery. But this time, maybe something different from humans. That might make a nice change. And the women whisper and just beat the rugs harder and argue longer over the clotheslines because when the whole place is run by the devil, that’s all they can do.

And Ella Joy Darnley has cuts and bruises, which Mama and me notice, but then we live next door to Sheriff Darnley and his poor wife. And that silly parson, just days after it all happened, was redder in the face than usual, and delivered that week’s sermon on charity and forgiveness and your brother’s keeper—nothing new there—in a voice so loud he nearly choked on his own spit, and then he acted like he had done his job. He slammed the church door shut behind the last few to leave. The Knights got together at the lumberyard to plan the annual ice cream social, that’s what they said, but we all knew it was to get their stories straight, in case somebody comes around to ask, some reporter, or that traveling magistrate, who must have got lost. And the jail got swept out with no more care than usual, because this here is Okemah, Oklahoma, and nothing ever happens here. Nothing except love mischief and horse thievery and shoplifting and whatever the slick strangers breezing through town try to talk you into buying or believing.

But then there he is. Floating, not moving, in a skiff half in and half out of the water. I can hardly make him out for sure there, the sun casting the shadow of the bridge over that upriver patch of riverbank. Suddenly I hear a cow lowing somewhere close. Somewhere through those woods on the far side is a pasture and just a regular day for cows. All they have to worry about at nightfall is whether they get back to the barn all right.

I set down my stick and head toward the skiff, keeping the bridge between me and the sheriff, because Tom Darnley isn’t the kind of man who appreciates being taken by surprise. Which in some ways, I see as I sidestep a water moccasin coiled on a little rock pile half out of the water, is how all the trouble started. Trouble is what they call it at the five and dime, and Damn Foolishness is what they call it at the bakery. Righteous Vengeance is what they call it at the lumberyard, and the Regrettable Incident is what they call it in the sheriff’s office, in case anyone takes notes or cares. Looks like no one does. Except for me, who drags the Canadian River for shoes. When I’m full under the bridge, a wagon crosses over, the driver clicking at his horse to giddyap, haw, giddyap, like hellhounds are in pursuit. I hope they are. I truly do. Because now I know you can’t tell the good folks from the bad.

It’s Darnley, all right, there in the rotten old skiff someone left tied up at that bend in the river and never came back. From the cover of the bridge, I secretly watch him for a few minutes, just to see whether he moves. He doesn’t. But I’d sooner trust the water moccasin with its still, black eyes open than I would Tom Darnley with his blue eyes shut. At least with a snake you know what you’re getting. I slip out from my cover and get closer, close enough to see the man sprawled on his back in his sheriff’s uniform, his mouth hanging open, his hat upside down on the river bank.

One of his big hands lies across his chest like a kid’s, his beefy fingers half curled. Is he sleeping? The other hand hangs half out of the boat. One knee is bent, and the other leg is twisted at a funny angle. Is he dead? Could be he’s dead. But from what? No gunshots, far as I can tell. And here in Okemah, firearms is just about as creative as they get. These are impatient folks out here, Josie, said Mama one time, soon after we had moved from Philadelphia for a new life after Papa died from the consumption, and guns suit them.

I get up close to the sheriff and look him over. I know about you, mister, I tell him in my head. Clean shaven, hair cut so close you can’t even tell what color it is any more, the barrel chest pulling at the shirt buttons, the cowhide boots he makes Ella Joy polish out on the back steps, sometimes her eyes so swollen shut I don’t know how she can see what she’s doing, the thick white scars on his neck he claims he “sustained” in a bar brawl with a Creek Indian with a skinning knife, over a woman—Mama says here’s where he swaggers—but pretty much everyone knows it was a mill accident when he was a boy. No one will say, though, because the last man who laughed the truth at him had both his legs broken one moonless night on his way home from Dugan’s Bar.

I see the worn black holster at his hip. And the gun. And the badge that’s too much in the shadow of the bridge to gleam. And the empty bottle of Jim Beam that has slipped to the bottom of the skiff. I think he’s dead and I raise my arms and spin, I actually spin here on in the riverbank in my blue cotton dress and high-button shoes. The stones churn and rasp under my feet, and my circles get wider as I find the sunlight there on the bank of the Canadian River. Daylight and scrub and a dead sheriff and a blot of blue—it’s the bridge—all go soft in the tearful blur of my spinning, where anyone passing on that bridge can see, but nobody does, because here I am, crying for Laura and L. W., finding something better than lost, soaked shoes. Finding the devil dead in a rotting skiff with great gaping holes in the bow.

I hear a sound, a deep rumble, and look up to the bridge, shading my eyes, expecting another wagon, or maybe a shiny new Model T, just other weak good people finding their way across the land God left behind, but there’s nobody crossing, and I turn to the skiff. The chest, that chest, rises and falls, and even in a half-death of drink a hand flies to its holster. And all of a sudden I am back in the chicken coop, back in that coop where it all started, and all I can do is crush my whole arm against my mouth to muffle the sound of the cries I truly don’t think I can stop.

Last May 21

I tore up the road to Dark Town on my bike, leaning hard over the handlebars, spitting away the dust from my lips. I hollered something I thought sounded like a Creek war whoop as I passed Laura and L. W., making their way home in their wagon pulled by Gorgeous the mule. As I wheeled by them in the bright sunlight, L. W.’s teeth shone in his friendly black face, and he yelled “Haw!” to Gorgeous like we were racing, him and me, and his mama, Laura, started to half stand, worried about whether I was paying attention.

I heard her talking me down about dang fool tomboys who tear around on dangerous machines like reckless savages, but I knew it was because she loved me. Standing tall on my pedals where the road dipped down, I bumped along and turned, fingertips just grazing the handlebars, blowing them kisses and pushing my red hair out of my face as Laura fell back against the wagon seat, fanning herself.

Laura Nelson worked their farm alone since L. W.’s father, Roster, ran off before the baby was born three months ago. Laura shoed the mule, boiled the laundry, plowed the small field, and built the new coop when the chickens got to be too many, but she still thought young ladies—leastways, young white ladies, she said—shouldn’t go tearing down dirt roads on bicycles. It seemed to me she was hogging all the fun for the girls down in Dark Town. When she came to town to clean for my mama, she thumbed through the latest issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, amazed by the pictures of lingerie hats you could make if the laundry didn’t have to get boiled, or the vegetable silk hosiery fine ladies got to wear when they weren’t shoeing the mule, or the Lotil hand cream you could buy for skin smooth as a baby’s backside, which came in handy after a day behind the plow.

Mama sent away for a jar of Lotil and gave it to Laura for her last birthday. Laura cried and rubbed a bit of the white cream no bigger than the size of a tiny pebble into her rough and beautiful black hands. She liked it so much that when the baby came she named her Lotil because she liked this word for a cream that was soft and sweet smelling and came from far away. Maybe Lotil the baby would get to go someplace far away from Okemah. Maybe it would bring her white luck.

I got to the farm first, just ahead of Gorgeous, who was suddenly acting lively. The Nelson farm wasn’t much of a farm, pretty much dirt and scrub and a patch of field that Laura and L. W. planted just for their own keep, but it had been homesteaded by Laura’s granddad, a freed slave, so the land held her. She kept the shacks in good repair and the harvest canned, pickled, and root-cellared. She kept an eye on L. W., who she called her “slow and dutiful boy,” because he was fifteen which, as she put it, the Good Lord knows is the age of devilment. As far as I could tell, both the Good Lord and the devil were matters of no great concern for Laura, who was too busy to pay much attention to either, although she liked using them in her conversation.

There was a dappled horse whinnying softly in what Laura called the barnyard, that space between the chicken coop and the cabin, the reins flung loosely over the branches of a buckbrush. I set down my bike and crossed my arms, waiting to see who was creeping around the Nelson place while Laura and L. W. were off in town. As their wagon caught up to me, I heard baby Lotil fussing, and turned to see Laura’s eyes looking sharply around her property. She stepped down out of the wagon, holding a hand out, palm down, to L. W. and me, which was as good as telling us to stay put.

Just then a man appeared around the far side of the plain little cabin. He caught sight of us and headed our way. It was the deputy sheriff, name of George Loney, and I admit I felt relieved. Not just because he was one of the handsome fellas in Okemah—pretty much all that took was regular features and ears that lay flat against his head—but because he always brought little gifts like flowers he picked himself or—from what I could tell, hiding behind our curtains—what looked like frosted cupcakes to Ella Joy whenever he snuck into the house next door to ours, which was pretty reliably when her husband Tom Darnley was off on a sheriff’s call far out in Okfuskee County somewhere.

Mama and I would just give each other looks, thinking George Loney might just as well go pitch a tent in a grizzly’s den for all his life was worth if Tom Darnley got wind of the gossip. But the deputy genuinely seemed to like poor Ella Joy, which was more than we could say about her husband, who crowed around town how much he loved his fine sweet girlie wife the beauteous Ella Joy. Even I know there’s something wrong when you can’t tell the difference between love and hate, and I’m just twelve.

George Loney came over to us, swiped off his uniform hat, and gave us a small smile. Miz Nelson, he said.

Laura’s lips barely moved when she said, Deputy, because I knew for a fact she didn’t want any white man on her property for any reason whatsoever because, as she once told me and Mama, their fun ain’t fun and their serious is deadly.

Ma’am, we got a report of stolen goods here at your place.

Laura said with some spirit, Who told you that?

I don’t rightly know, but the sheriff told me to check it out.

Exactly what are these stolen goods, Deputy?

Saddles, saddlebags, said the deputy, rifles, canteens.

Laura Nelson set her hands on her hips. Does it look to you like I’m putting together some kind of army out here?

No, Ma’am, it does not.

Go have your look around, Deputy. And if you find my flat iron that went missing a month ago, you just let me know.

After George Loney disappeared inside her cabin and L. W. guided Gorgeous slowly back to the shed they called the barn, Laura stood very still in her yard. I could tell we were both watching a little bird hopping from branch to branch in the locust tree at the side of the road, backlit by the sun. Hard to tell what it was, exactly, until it started to sing, and then I knew it for a warbler, with that sweet falling song that sounds like two birds singing. It’s beautiful, Laura, I cried, because I was twelve years old and my heart was lifted by things like small birds and Lotil’s curly eyelashes and the Winslow’s roller skates I knew Laura was saving her pay from my mama to buy L. W. for his next birthday.

I passed Lotil to her, and Laura looked sorrowfully at her baby girl. Ain’t enough beautiful anywhere in this world, she said with a shiver.

We left it, Laura and me, that I’d come help myself to eggs on Tuesday after school. Which was why I was inside the chicken coop that afternoon. I had ridden my bike over the rough yard to the far side of the coop, where I let it drop into the switch grass, and I figured Laura and L. W. were hacking at kudzu around the field at the far side of the cabin. Kudzu was what Laura called strangle vine because it grew thick and wild and cut off the light and air from everything else that wanted to grow, if you didn’t stay after it with a hatchet and no mercy. With a quick look at the eastern sky, where the clouds were darkening up, I let myself into the chicken coop, which was empty except for white speckled eggs.

I never minded the smells of the coop, or the feathers that floated up when all I did was get close and breathe on them. I had brought a basket from home, lined with clean rags to keep the eggs safe on the ride back, as safe as I could, but I always lost a couple. I had just pulled two fine eggs out of the straw when I heard hooves outside in Laura’s yard, peeked out between the slats of the coop, and saw Deputy Loney. He slid easily off his dappled gray and flung the reins back over the same buckbrush he had used a few days ago. I watched him stand kind of uncertainly there in the yard for a few moments, heaving a sigh, like maybe he didn’t want to be back, but that’s why they called it work. The sun was low over the road to Dark Town, three miles off, and the deputy wiped his brow, pulled back his shoulders, and started off in no hurry to find Laura.

Suddenly, I heard a sound off to the side of the coop, something coming through the thin woods. A horse snorted. I had to crane my neck to see through different slats, to see what was happening off to the side there. Something that didn’t want any attention was coming closer. Then I saw him. It was the sheriff, no denying, leaving his fine chestnut horse back in the trees. As he moved silently closer to the yard, I kept losing him from slat to slat, and it was hard to see what his face could tell me. When I saw him step just into the yard and saw a rifle in his right hand, I started to gasp and clamped my hand over my mouth. Tom Darnley braced his legs, raised his rifle, and called out: George.

From my hiding place, where I didn’t draw so much as a breath, I watched the deputy turn around, and the very last thing he did in this life was to manage an unsuspecting half smile for Ella Joy’s husband who shot him dead—two crack shots, his body jerking back before it fell—there in Laura Nelson’s yard. Then the sheriff whipped the rifle underhanded in the direction of the body. I only just saw the blood spreading on the deputy’s shirt front before I lost sight of anything, anything at all, for maybe a minute, as good as blind, my eggless hands shaking out in front of me. When I could see again, I heard cries, heard Laura and L. W. running closer from out back, the sheriff nowhere in sight. The horse in the woods—gone.

When Laura saw the deputy, she stopped dead in her tracks, her arm holding back L. W., who ran into her. Then her head reared back, and she scanned the skies, stricken, for the truth that was too long in coming, and her shoulders dropped hard and she shrieked. I was trembling all over, my fingertips on my face like they were checking to see whether life was possible inside this chicken coop if death and betrayal was that close to me just outside. And I saw in that moment that Laura was right. Ain’t enough beautiful anywhere.

I stumbled, wailing, out of the coop with my basket, which was when Laura and L. W. found me, and we grabbed each other and all life was infernally slippery then like the greased pig contest at the county fair every summer. I clutched at her arms. It was the sheriff, the sheriff, I’ll tell them all, I’ll tell everybody what I saw, I cried, and it was Laura who first heard the combined sounds of horses and Model Ts coming at a pretty good clip, not too far off.

The chickens were squawking and flapping all over the yard, but nowhere near the red-stained body lying still in the dirt that never changed, whatever happened. L. W. held up my bike, his deep sad eyes on me, when his mama said, there’s time to tell them all later, later, baby, and now you get on home, through the woods, and don’t let them see you. You’re faster than any cyclone I ever knew, so just go fast now, you’re my own Josie cyclone, you hear?

She stroked my hair when I should have been stroking hers, but I believed her when she said later, and I fell on L. W., who taught me cat’s cradle and huckle buckle beanstalk and blind man’s buff, which wasn’t too much fun with just two so we usually ended up laughing and falling out in the dirt, which always seemed more the point than groping around with a blindfold. Only then as he shoved my bike at me, which he pointed into the woods, he looked older than practically anyone I knew. And there were two streams of tears on his cheeks, which show up better on a black face than a white. Then I disappeared into the woods, my basket slung over my handlebars, just as the horses and cars pulled up at Laura’s and men swarmed the yard.

I heard someone shout, There’s George, oh shit, he’s shot dead.

And Tom Darnley’s voice over everybody’s, I knew there’d be trouble with these niggers, glad I asked y’all along—

Coulda been the both of you layin’ there dead, Tom.

Only wish poor George had waited for me.

Now, Tom, this ain’t the time to go thinkin’ about—

That there’s the weapon.Grab them niggers!

And over all of them, I heard Laura’s fierce cries, My baby girl! Let me get my baby girl! And as I got deeper into the woods I knew there was no good place for Lotil Nelson, not crying by her little self alone in the empty cabin, and not keeping company with her mama and brother, wherever in creation they were headed.

Mama gave me soup while I told her what I saw, her slim fingers drumming the table. I could tell from her eyes that she was paying very close attention, and I kept sputtering the soup, what with the crying I couldn’t help. That night I slept in her bed, and we lay in each other’s arms in our matching white dimity nightgowns she had paid Laura to make us by hand. Mama felt a little bony to me, like she needed more happiness or potatoes in her life, not these troublesome Okemah fifth graders who only talked tough about protecting what was theirs, like that was anything at all out here in a dust bowl that no improvement can change, but I didn’t want to cry about that too. I had enough just then with L. W. and Laura.

Through the gap in her curtains, before I drifted off, blubbering something about baby Lotil, I saw Mama’s green eyes wide open and staring in the moonlight slanting through. Her hairpins were sticking up here and there out of her hair she had worked loose, hardly noticing, while I told her everything. She had barely said a word all evening, just shushing me and clucking at me while she thought.

The next day she put on her best teaching shirtwaist dress in pale yellow and went down the main street of Okemah, collecting the gossip. When she came back, she told me the Nelsons were in the jailhouse at the end of town, that the sheriff was laying around the tale that when Deputy Loney returned to check out the matter of stolen goods again, one of the Nelsons—thought was, L. W.—shot him dead, and that the circuit magistrate was making his rounds and was due in Okemah sometime week after next, which was what everyone was righteously waiting for, including the Nelsons. There was some talk about niggers getting too above themselves in these parts and some talk about poor handsome George Loney who was such a good family man, now leaving a wife and three young ones, shot down in cold blood in the line of duty, which is every true citizen’s unholy nightmare.

Mama actually got in to see Laura and L. W., stepping around Sheriff Tom Darnley, who made sure to block her way just enough with his barrel chest that she was forced to touch him as she went. She had seen this behavior in mean dogs, she told me, and knew what it was. Laura and L. W. were in separate cells, what with just cracked slop jars and rough cots, L. W. silent and sorrowful, clutching the ragged jail pillow, and Laura quietly nursing baby Lotil, whose little hand tried to land peaceably on Laura’s cheek. No, said Laura, we don’t need anything, Audra, just the magistrate. The magistrate will see it for what it is, she went on, nodding kind of serenely in complete confidence. And then we’ll be needing our Josie.

Let the law sort it out, was what Mama told anybody on the street over the next two days, when she overheard whispers about high time we go clear out Dark Town once and for all and who’s to say our pure womenfolk are safe from these vicious creatures ain’t fit to be in polite society. Mama asked one group of whisperers exactly what polite society they were referring to, but then they sniffed at her, spat something about maybe she’s not fit to teach their precious young, and moved off.

By that evening the whispers ended and Deputy George Loney was being mourned loudly in every place from the Okemah Baptist Church to Dugan’s Bar. Loney was now the finest, the holiest, the tallest, the crackest shot, the tenderest father, the steadiest drinker, the best angler, whistler, and spitter west of the damn Mississippi. And by that evening Laura and L. W. were lawless, dangerous devils responsible for lightning strikes, failed crops, and every personal disappointment suffered by a white person west of the damn Mississippi.

After dark we mistook the deep and sudden quiet everywhere for folks coming to their senses and turning toward home in shame at their idle talk. But then we heard trouble down at the far end of Okemah, near the jail, near the lumberyard where usually the worst that got planned were shivarees and ice cream socials. Mama stepped out of our house and looked far up the street. Except for a dim light in Ella Joy’s, all the neighbors’ houses were dark. A stray dog slunk past in the other direction, bouncing lightly on silent feet, its scrawny head pointed out of a town where maybe he could no longer trust the scraps. Suddenly, Mama told me to go grab my basket, and I hurried up the street behind her, trying to keep up.

Outside the jailhouse the electric globe lights were bright and the double doors were standing wide open. From there we watched distant lanterns swinging through the moonlit night, jostling along the road in their wagons, headed west out of Okemah, toward the Canadian River. Except for the thin, far-off voices singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” you might have mistook the lantern lights for eyes of nighttime animals out hunting, doing their business in the dark. And maybe they were.

I followed Mama up the steps into the jailhouse, which was empty except for the old, bald jailer, name of Broome, who had ropes looped loosely around his wrists and ankles, sitting there in a chair tipped back against the wall. He was reading the latest issue of Feed News. Mama looked quickly around at the empty jail, eyed the doorway to the cells, and took a deep breath as Broome looked up at her. Then she said an extraordinary thing. I’m here for my baby, she declared.

What baby you talking about, Miz Templett?

The one Laura Nelson’s been minding for me. Where is she?

Broome sat up in his chair and leered at her. That black baby ain’t yours.

Mama shouted, Are you telling me I don’t know my own child? Now where is she?

It plumb belongs where the sheriff and the others took the other two, only I expect they’ll be back for it. And he gave her a dark look. Only next time they won’t bother to go so far out of town.

Mama disregarded the jailer and strode down the corridor to the cells. There, in the cell that had held Laura, baby Lotil was fast asleep, swaddled in blankets and tucked as far underneath the rough cot as Laura could get her. We scooped her up, blankets and all, set her in my basket, and headed out. Hey, called Broome, you two are stealing the property of the Okfuskee County Sheriff’s Department, same as a chair or a slop jar, which is punishable—

Go to hell, snapped Mama. We rushed around the corner to the livery stable, roused the stable boy, who was one of Mama’s fifth graders, and paid him to hitch a good fast horse to a buckboard. When he was done, still complaining about long division being the devil’s work—Mama told him he really has to look past long division to find the devil’s work—we climbed up, my heart pounding as I huddled over the basket, and he handed up a lantern he didn’t even charge us for, then let go of the bridle. We set out in the dark, alone on the road they had traveled, Laura and L. W., Mama driving the horse as fast as she knew how.

As bats swooped silently around us, jerking after a meal, I set Lotil’s basket between my feet and held up the lantern, not daring to ask Mama where we were going. I thought the sheriff was moving the Nelsons to another jail in another town, away from all the godforsaken talk about setting fire to Dark Town, somewhere they would be safe until the magistrate came and I could tell what I saw of the murder—somewhere none of us would have to be afraid of Tom Darnley ever again when they slap him in chains for the cold-blooded murder of his deputy. I wouldn’t even let myself wonder why I even thought it made sense for the killer to be protecting the very people he set up to take the blame for his deed. I wouldn’t even let myself wonder why the very people of Okemah who were calling the Nelsons bloodthirsty unchristian monkeys would be riding along with the sheriff and his new deputies while they transferred them.

The road winded under thick overhanging tree limbs and as we got close to the bridge over the Canadian River I heard an owl hooting, out of sight of slingshots and buckshot and the dark beliefs of the group. Ahead, in the dark, were lanterns—some swinging, some still—and thin voices singing Long as earth endureth, men the faith will hold—Kingdoms, nations, empires, in destruction rolled. I felt alarmed. What’s going on, Mama? She pulled back on the reins and left the buckboard lurched half off the road. Is it a prayer meeting?

As we climbed out of the buckboard, me grabbing the basket with baby Lotil, we heard other, stronger voices shouting commands. And then there were a few moments of absolute stony silence—as if every soul except me and Mama and Lotil was safe in bed back in town and not out here in the strange night. What followed was a loud wail—Laura. It was Laura, wailing, and my skin crawled. And up went a rush of voices, a great shout of satisfaction, whoops, shots fired up into the moonlit sky.

We climbed down through the bushes, pushing aside branches, stumbling over roots, until the ground leveled out on the banks of the Canadian River. A few townspeople holding lanterns were scattered along both sides of the river, a slow and dark and winding thing in the Oklahoma night, but the crowd was writhing like a single, strange creature up on the bridge in the pale moonlight. The singing started up again, more voices joining in, although few seemed to really know the words and were left mumbling out of tune, and I could just make out the sheriff in the thick of the crowd, his arms crossed, barking directions while others were grappling with a struggling woman.

Laura.

And then I spied L. W. and swallowed a shriek as Mama clutched my arm hard. We struggled along the riverbank with our baby basket, pushing past the wife of the owner of the lumberyard, annoyed I stepped on her hem. Pushing past the assistant bank manager. My L. W., my huckle buckle cat’s cradle blind man’s buff L. W., his hands tied behind his back, was dangling from a rope strung off the bridge. Laura’s slow and dutiful boy had come to a stop in the moonlight. They had pulled down his pants, which were crumpled around his naked feet. Some shadows were hanging over the bridge to get a better look. And I knew then there was just the smallest sliver between life and no life at all and the only thing that pushes those two things apart wasn’t anything I was ever going to find here.

And I swear my heart flew up to her there where we watched Laura struggle against the noose pushed down over her head. Mama screamed Laura’s name, holding up baby Lotil, whose eyes were blinking awake, as high as she could. And then Mama screamed her name again. And I swear in that moment Laura stopped struggling and wailing for L. W. who would now never get those roller skates to skate him away from the world of whites and she faced out, looking toward us in the shivering night. Mama held up baby Lotil for her to see. Held her right up. And me and Mama and Laura and baby Lotil were the only ones perfectly alive and still in the light of all those scattered lanterns, and I needed to believe in those seconds before several hands lifted her into the air, she saw.

As the singing crowed Onward then ye people, join our happy throng, Laura was flung off the bridge and once again that roar of satisfaction went up loud in the godforsaken night, like an unnatural waterfall flowing up, up to whatever dark place it came from, as Laura’s weight against the noose snapped her neck. In her calico print dress, with her good and capable hands at her sides, like L. W. before her, she finally came to a stop.

In the glare of light from the lanterns and the moon, Laura’s mouth was closed and set, and her brow was wrinkled, like she was studying hard on a problem. Maybe about how to attack that kudzu. Or whether baby Lotil would find some white luck and get a different life—or even just a life. Or maybe my Laura was studying hard on wickedness itself, and for that she’d require more time than she was getting.

The first day afterwards, Mama waited for the law or the Odd Fellows, who like to keep things orderly, to cut them down, but none came. The second day, Mama waited for just common decent folk to cut them down, but none came. Which is not to say the bridge didn’t draw a crowd of gawkers, women in white dresses with parasols, men with starched collars, and a photographer who set up his box camera just a little ways downriver and motioned with his arm for them all to gather round more closely over the place where the corpses hung, so no one’s left out. On the third day, me and Mama got two men from Dark Town to come help with Laura and L. W. Pretty soon traffic would start up again on this bridge over the Canadian River, but for now there was only us, and I ran halfway across and went down on my knees.

Grunting, I sawed the ropes with a skinning knife, saw one of the men wading into the river, swiping sweat off his head with his forearm, muttering how I shouldn’t be looking at poor L. W., it wasn’t decent. As Mama worked a pikestaff to pull Laura’s body closer to shore she told him that anyone looking at L. W.’s pants is paying attention to the wrong thing. The men agreed to bury them on the Nelson farm and Mama offered them Gorgeous and the chickens, which the men appreciated, and then Mama suggested that the Nelson farm might make a good home for a new family. The man who mentioned about L. W.’s pants halfway smiled when he said something about there being a whole passel of strangle vine at Nelsons’ place but it’s just a matter of keeping on top of it, for sure, elsewise there’s no light or air or rain gets through.

Me and Mama watched as they loaded the soaked and swollen bodies of Laura and L. W. Nelson into their wagon, and I started to cry, pushing my fists against my own chest, howling about their missing shoes. As the wagon bumped its way back up to the road, I yelled I’d make it right, I swore I’d make it right, I’d tell that magistrate whenever he got here what I saw. I swore I’d tell.

There’s no making it right, said Mama, holding my arms and making me look her in the face.

But we know what happened!

We’ve got two dead Negroes and a little white Yankee girl. We’ve got nothing they care about.

But, Mama—

We’ve got nothing.

June 3

I pull my arm away from my mouth and stand listening to the sounds here by the Canadian River, remembering Laura’s studying expression, the last on her face in this lifetime. I’m studying, too, listening to the vireos call back and forth to each other out of sight high in the hackberry trees, and I’m studying the wheep of a call and the hollow hammering of a woodpecker. There is just a little breeze now, fluttering the leaves of the skunkbushes that have their own soft song on this very last day I can look for Laura and L. W.’s shoes before we leave Okemah for good, me and Lotil and Mama, who has arranged for the man worried about me and L. W.’s pants to take us all the way to Tulsa in Laura’s wagon, pulled by Gorgeous, who will get us to the train bound for Philadelphia just fine. I know I’ll never find those shoes. I am resigned.

The cows, wherever in their sturdy ways they are, have moved on while I stand here studying Sheriff Tom Darnley half dead with drink in the rotten skiff that belongs to nobody anymore. I think about Ella Joy who I hardly recognized the day after the deputy died, her arm in a sling and a patch of her blonde hair pulled clean out of her scalp. And I think about George Loney who might not have been the truest husband this side of the Mississippi but who called Laura “ma’am” and had no reason to think he wasn’t turning unarmed toward a friend that day in Laura’s yard.

And I think about the hymn singing and the lanterns held up that night so nobody would miss a thing, that thing the photographer was now selling around town as picture postcards to send to your friends and family in other places to show them about Oklahoma law and the latest fashions. And I think about the eggs hitting our windows after it got around we cut down what Mama’s fifth graders called “them niggers.”

But mostly, as I study just how big those gaping holes are in the skiff holding the sheriff, and just how far away the deepest, fastest part of the Canadian River is from where I’m standing, I think about kudzu. I really do. And I see my Laura with a hatchet, keeping after the strangle vine that keeps out all the light and air and rain from everything else that grows. I untie the long strong rope pulled taut that holds the skiff to the trunk of a black walnut tree set well back from the water. Then I loop the end around the low-hanging branches of a buckbrush close to the riverbank, just to be sporting, wondering while the vireos sing to me whether I’ve done enough studying.

We’ve got nothing, Mama told me after we cut them down, but I find myself sorely doubting that. Then I dig my feet in hard at the bow of the skiff and I set to work, putting all my strength into slowly shoving the sheriff out on the river.
Copyright © 2012 Shelley Costa

BIG ROCKS, LITTLE ROCKS

BOB TIPPEE | 3046 words

Reston Boyle surprises me by saying, yeah, he’ll let me buy lunch, both of us knowing it can’t be anything fancy on account of we’re volunteers, not the big-shot political donors we feed off, and everybody’s got more work than time. I’m thinking that’s something, Reston and me suddenly with so much in common. So we meet at Jody’s, a deli across from headquarters where workers on the reelection campaign of Senator Jonathan Tewell go when they’re too hungry for McDonald’s and too broke for anything better.

“Good man, Tewell,” I say just for conversation while we shake hands, Reston looking me over like always, with hair a little grayer than the last time I saw him but the rest of him taut as ever. He’s wearing gray slacks and a navy blazer over a white shirt and tie striped with blue and gold. I don’t think he owns anything else.

“Good man,” he says.

We hit the line early so it’s not too long, chicken Caesar salad for Reston, pastrami on rye for me, two coffees. We find a table by the front window where we can watch colleagues hustle in and out of headquarters with briefcases and armloads of flyers, young mostly, younger than Reston and me. We talk about how close the race is, God knows why. And only two months before the election.

“Larry West calls it throat-cutting time,” I say.

“Who’s Larry West?” Reston asks, forking a chunk of white meat dripping dressing, studying it, eating it. How can he not know who Larry West is? Larry West is into everything. Larry West gets things done. Then I remember.

“Right,” I say. “So are you, like, investigating the other side, scraping slime off walls, that kind of thing?”

Reston shrugs. “Whatever the senator wants.”

I chuckle. “Shouldn’t be hard,” I say. “Everybody knows Victor Angleton doesn’t keep a padlock on his zipper.”

Reston laughs. He works on his salad. He finishes his coffee.

When we’re both done I say, “Anyway, we’ve both got more important things to worry about than whatever might have happened between us in the past.”

“Getting Senator Tewell reelected,” Reston says.

I smile. We shake hands.

Only one thing can keep me from staying late at headquarters, working the phones, being a real person asking other real people to vote for Jonathan Tewell, not some recording like the Angleton campaign uses, the cheap phonies. Her name is Ellen Bixby. We meet at Arnie’s, for old time’s sake. We kiss—my lips, her cheek.

“Remember?” I ask after guiding her to the table farthest from the door, behind the bar, quiet.

“After we saw The Bourne Identity,” she says. “You loved it.”

A leggy barmaid in shorts cut for deep water, barely old enough to sell drinks by the looks of her, glides over, lights the candle, and removes the RESERVED sign I made sure Arnie put there an hour earlier.

“Remember after?” I ask.

“Whiskey sour,” Ellen tells the barmaid.

“Scotch neat,” I say.

The barmaid sways away—old enough, now that I’ve had a closer look.

“Thanks for driving over,” I say.

Ellen studies me with eyes that can melt iron, blonde hair short and layered, perfect like always. She doesn’t smile. “You said you had something to tell me.”

I clear my throat and lower my voice into the register I use for importance. “Remember I told you I’ve been volunteering in the Tewell campaign?”

She nods. The drinks come. She sips. I speak.

“Looks like it’ll turn into something permanent.”

I lift my drink like I’m toasting her, take a sip, and watch her over the rim of the glass. She watches me watch her, expecting elaboration. I set down my glass, waiting her out.

She yields. “I don’t think anything’s permanent in politics.”

“Right!” I say and take another drink. This is going well. “You’re always right. Nothing’s permanent. Anyway, there’s this guy—he’s into everything—the guy who recruited me. We’re meeting tomorrow. About an opportunity, he said.”

Ellen licks her lower lip and takes another drink. “The last opportunity you got this excited about almost put you in jail.”

“A misunderstanding,” I say and wave away the subject. “I’m thinking it’ll be in finance, with my experience and all.”

“Look, Bax,” Ellen says, cuddling her glass in both hands, looking down at it instead of up at me. “The reason I agreed to come over here is to tell you—well, I’m seeing somebody.”

This shouldn’t surprise me. Beautiful woman, technically unattached. The news kicks me in the gut anyway, probably because it comes straight from Ellen instead of the usual way, from some mutual friend mentioning it incidentally like everybody knows, in case I don’t.

“Hey,” I say, “that’s great.”

“His name’s Don Weller,” she says. “Owns a car dealership.”

This answers a question I didn’t plan to ask. I need to show interest. I ask, “New or used?”

Those eyes slash me like I said something wrong. Ellen starts to answer then stops herself and sighs. “So it’s a big day tomorrow,” she says, proving she’s been listening, making my gut feel better. “I guess you’ll either be off on a political career or back to selling insurance.”

Hearing Ellen say “political career” makes me feel like I run the world, makes me want her more than ever.

“I own the agency,” I remind her.

Ellen shrugs, her drink now down to ice cubes. “You’re a lucky man,” she says.

I say, “So I was thinking maybe you and I—you know, we had something special going—”

“I’ve got to go,” Ellen says, sliding out of her seat. “Thanks for the drink.”

“I’ll give you a call,” I say.

“Thanks for the drink,” she says again, leaving.

Larry West has told me more than once, beginning with when he recruited me, that he doesn’t exist. Doesn’t appear on any roster. Doesn’t talk to the press. Doesn’t draw a salary.

I asked him about that no-salary business once. “Politicians take care of people who take care of them,” he said.

He might not exist, but he’s everywhere: finding quick-draw subs when volunteers can’t work the phones because they have doctor’s appointments or PTO meetings and forget to call until fifteen minutes past way too late, or finding a bare-knuckles PR outfit to fix a rumor about Tewell owing tax money (untrue), or commandeering the only banquet hall in a nowhere town so Tewell can speak on short notice about farm policy and managing to make the displaced veterans’ group feel patriotic for rescheduling their awards dinner. Larry attends every policy meeting, reviews each of Tewell’s speeches, edits all press releases, and decides who meets anonymously with which reporter when something important needs to be leaked.

Larry works out of a cubicle that barely exists. It has a metal desk, two chairs, a laptop, and stacks of newspapers, nothing else—no landline phone, no nameplate.

“You’ve got what it takes, Bax,” he tells me, grinning, wrinkles framing his mouth and narrow, almond-colored eyes. He’s a bald former Marine with wire glasses and a voice that comes from deep inside a broad chest.

Sitting in the spare chair, I shrug and say, “I believe in what I’m doing.”

He nods three, four times, his standard gesture of approval. “Tough few weeks ahead,” he says. “Everything depends on advertising.”

I wait, thinking I could do advertising. I’d be better at finance. But I’m seeing it already: Bax Rogers, Advertising Director. Ellen would like it.

“Expensive,” Larry says, shaking his head. “Expensive as hell. Finance will get tricky.”

I nod. Bax Rogers, Finance Director. That feels better.

“Somebody’s got to keep track of the money,” Larry says.

“I’ve got experience,” I say. “I own an insurance agency—”

“I’m glad you brought it up,” Larry says. “That business a few months ago with the Insurance Commission, them saying you got cozy with a judge who likes plaintiffs and big settlements—”

“Went away,” I say. “No problem. They didn’t have a case. Happens all the time.”

“Make the press?” Larry asks.

I shake my head, thinking not even Ellen would have known about it if I hadn’t told her. I shouldn’t have told her.

Larry says, “‘Went away,’ you said.”

I get it. Reston Boyle joined the campaign and started talking. I don’t blame him. He got his hand slapped, learning the hard way not to chase fast rabbits down long holes.

“Every agent has clients file borderline claims,” I say. “Insurance companies always cry fraud. Why wouldn’t they? They don’t want to pay any more than they have to. So there was this company investigator, aggressive guy, wants to be a state prosecutor. He thinks he sees a pattern and comes after me. That’s all.”

Larry raises his eyebrows. “All?”

“All except he’s working on this campaign,” I say. “Reston Boyle.”

Larry chuckles and does his nod thing. “You okay with that?”

“Why not? He came after me and got nothing but a scolding from the commission. If there’s any raw skin it’s his, not mine. We talked. I bought him lunch.”

Larry looks at me over the tops of his glasses and asks, “Why’d the commission stiff him?”

I lean back and say, “He didn’t have a case.”

“You had help,” Larry says.

“So I made a few calls,” I say. “I didn’t need to. They didn’t have a case.”

“You had help,” Larry says again. “Let me tell you what I’ve got in mind.”

As he talks I think about Bax Rogers becoming a permanent member of the staff of Senator Jonathan Tewell: Bax Rogers, a former small-time insurance agent who dedicated himself to the campaign of a candidate he believed in, then to public service, then to the woman whose love he never gave up on, the woman who just needed to see what he could do. How will they make the announcement? Press release? Maybe a press conference? Either way, Ellen will be impressed.

It turns out, five weeks later, to be a press conference.

“Don’t miss it,” Larry said before he disappeared. It’s been two days now, and nobody’s seen or heard from him. His mobile phone’s gone dead. But the campaign’s humming like a boomtown bank, especially the advertising blitz. TV spots show Tewell with his family, Tewell speaking about individual liberty, Tewell standing on the steps of the Capitol lecturing reporters about free enterprise. The other campaign can’t keep up. A few of the skankier newspapers have run stories about sightings of a boozy Victor Angleton in clubs without his wife—but so far no disclosures about extramarital dalliance. Tewell’s been giving five speeches a day and sounding better than ever. Larry’s the reason everything’s going so well, and now he’s just disappeared. I guess he figures his work’s done.

I can’t sweat about Larry. My future’s set. A few days ago Larry told me this would be it, the biggest announcement of my life, details secret until the press conference. What’s important now is that when I stand after the senator makes the announcement and nod once, frowning like this kind of thing happens every day of my life, then quickly sit, I’ll know I earned it.

Only two questions remain: what my title will be and whether Ellen shows up.

I’m in a folding metal chair with a dozen other campaign hustlers on a platform of tear-down risers inside a shopping mall near headquarters. Know-it-all reporters huddle close with their notepads and recorders. Four cops perform unnecessary crowd control with bored looks and tough-guy postures. The crowd of thirty, maybe forty, is big enough. But it doesn’t include Ellen.

“Politicians all seem so—I don’t know—ambitious,” she said when I called two nights ago to invite her to the press conference.

“Big announcement,” I said. “I think you’ll like it.”

“Don calls them schemers,” Ellen said, stressing “Don” like the name is supposed to mean something special. She was playing the jealousy game—a good sign.

“Not Jonathan Tewell,” I said.

“Don says they’re all crooked.”

Acting irritated, I asked, “What’s a used-car salesman doing calling anybody crooked?”

She got huffy. I imagined her jerking her shoulders back and tilting her head, eyes in blister mode. “He owns the dealership.”

I softened my voice like a father. “It’s a used-car lot. I checked.”

She went quiet for a couple of seconds. “Well, he doesn’t have anybody investigating him for fraud,” she said.

I was ready. “Then he’s not trying hard enough.” And before she could respond I told her where and when the press conference would be.

The conversation went so well that I’m surprised she’s not here at the shopping-mall press conference. She hadn’t hung up on me. She hadn’t lectured me about playing loose with rules. She hadn’t complained about how much worry I caused her while Reston Boyle wasted time investigating nothing. She had stayed on the line and even said she might be here.

And with that she confirmed what I’d always believed: She can’t live without me.

My watch says it’s time for the press conference to start, but I know Ellen has another five minutes. A delayed start lets the senator make a hurried entrance with his handlers, looking like he’s swooping in between more important engagements. But a start more than five minutes behind schedule makes reporters cranky. I learned this and a lot more from Larry.

Reston Boyle cruises the crowd, looking casual, almost invisible, but alert, I know, watching everything—the cops, the crowd, the inattentive shoppers streaming by in the mall. Part of Reston’s job is security. The other part, Larry told me, is investigations. So I know how those stories about Angleton drunk without his wife turned up. Reston’s good. It must peeve him not to have found any bimbos yet. The polls are still even.

Reston and I are getting along. Larry brought him into meetings about my financial work. Security was important, he said.

The work was easy. Under the name of my agency I set up savings accounts at six banks with initial deposits of five to eight thousand dollars each—cash. Then I built up the accounts with deposits of similar amounts. The money came to me in metal briefcases in the trunks of rental cars to which keys would be delivered by courier to my apartment along with notes saying where the cars had been parked. I’d make the deposits and return the rental cars, six times a day for a while. Then I made a dozen or so transfers between the accounts, then to outside accounts specified by Larry in amounts he directed. I had to make sure, with internal transfers, that the accounts had enough funds to cover the outbound transfers. The accounting and cash-hustling filled my days for a couple weeks—and they demonstrated my financial skill.

“A political campaign’s like kayaking down one of those haul-ass rivers out West,” Larry had told me in that meeting when we talked about my opportunity. “You keep your eye on the smooth water at the bottom of the rapids and your ass away from the big rocks. Contribution limits are little rocks. Nobody cares. This is just about being careful. Happens all the time.”

Besides, I wondered, who got hurt? To anybody with any brains, Tewell was the right candidate, the only candidate. When Larry was recruiting me to the volunteer staff, Tewell had visited, in person, the little office in the crummy part of town where I, an insurance agent nobody ever heard of, met customers and did paperwork and paid rent on time most months, and invited me to join his campaign. He walked right in with a handshake ready and his silver hair looking more distinguished even than on television, and his eyes were dark and firm and warm, wrinkled just enough. He sat down in front of my desk and talked straight, man-to-man, a candidate to somebody in whom he saw potential, somebody who could learn to tell the big rocks from the little rocks, somebody who could become not just an important part of an important election campaign but also, I knew, an important member his permanent staff. At that moment, I knew I’d do anything to help this man be reelected. And I knew I’d get Ellen back.

And now, five minutes late and right on time, from behind the makeshift stage, Jonathan Tewell scurries amid sundry aides toward the podium, blue suit fitted to his gym-trim frame, red tie aglow against a shirt supernaturally white. He’s my candidate. He will win. I will be a member of his staff.

I watch the senator escape his coterie and position himself behind the podium, notes in hand. Then I return my gaze to the crowd and see her, Ellen, standing with her arms folded across her narrow belly to my right, nodding when I catch her gaze. As always, she makes ordinary clothes—in this instance white shorts and a white and green–striped top with no sleeves—dazzle.

This is perfect.

The senator begins to speak, acknowledging the tough race his opponent has run, thanking his campaign staff.

This is my moment, and Ellen is here to witness it.

The senator warms up with fuzzy words about the importance of sacrifice and its relationship to higher values. It’s too philosophical, if you ask me.

I watch the senator, but I’m thinking about Ellen, glancing at her, knowing she’s wondering how she’ll dump Don, the used-car guy.

“Sacrifice in service to value,” the senator says and pauses. It’s a Larry West line if I ever heard one, and it works. The spectators applaud. Reporters nod and scribble. The senator bows slightly.

Ellen is shifting her weight from one beautiful leg to the other, getting bored. Maybe now the senator will get down to business.

Instead he veers into something about “transparency” and “accountability,” and I glance at Reston Boyle, who’s standing left of the shallow stage, looking more confident than he’s looked lately, like maybe he finally turned up something solid about Victor Angleton’s past.

The senator wins more applause with babble about the importance not just of disclosure but also of action, and I’m thinking that since he’s in a philosophical mood maybe a few words about tireless toil would nicely introduce the announcement about the new member of his permanent staff. Ellen’s sighing now, and I’m afraid she’ll get bored and leave. I glance at Boyle. He’s smiling, unaware how off-message the senator is straying. If Larry West were here he’d be standing behind the crowd, spinning a forefinger in a speed-it-up gesture only the senator would notice.

Now my candidate, my soon-to-be boss, launches into even more boring philosophizing about aggressive enforcement of campaign finance laws, and I get a panicky feeling he’ll lose the attention of his audience, most tragically of Ellen, before he finally gets around to talking about me.
Copyright © 2012 Bob Tippee

CONFESSIONS

I. J. PARKER | 7746 words

Art by Linda Weatherly

Heian-Kyo: The Nineteenth Day of the Twelfth Month, 1026.

A stifled sob.

Akitada was not quite dozing. Rather his mind drifted on the waves of the chanting. He felt light, disembodied, immaterial. Candlelight flickered on the gold leaf of the statue of Kannon, the merciful, and on the beads of gold cascading across its chest. Was this Kannon male or female? Probably neither and both, as the priests taught. Behind the statue stood hell screens depicting the torments of the sinners, their colors shifting from brilliant red to obscure darkness.

Incense clouds hung above the rows of nobles, each in his black court robe and lacquer-stiffened black hat, each no doubt as dazed as he after hours of sitting stiffly through the official On-Butsumyo, the annual confession service celebrated in the Shishin-den, the main hall in the imperial palace.

The chanting of the priests and monks was beautiful. The leader’s voice was deep and resonant, and the younger monks’ as light and musical as songs sung by dancing maidens. This particular segment had lasted a very long time already, and yet they chanted on, apparently without breathing. Surely a man could not hold his breath for such a length of time? Ah, the bell was struck. And now they began the recitation of the Buddha’s names, dull and sleep-inducing stuff, except for the beauty of the sound.

He should feel pain after sitting still for hours, but the service had made him forget his own concerns. He had put aside thoughts of his own sins a while ago, and now simply sat in a pleasant dreamlike state.

Then the small sound intruded again.

It took an act of will for Akitada to turn his head. Nearby sat another courtier. He was the one weeping, perhaps had been weeping for a long time. His face glistened in the candlelight. He sat slumped over, and his shoulders shook. The hands resting on his knees trembled.

Why such grief?

What had this man done to cause such a public display of sorrow? And at such a formal official gathering?

Thoroughly awake by now, Akitada fished a tissue from his sash and surreptitiously slid it across. After a moment, the other man reached for it and dried his face. He looked ill, and Akitada felt a surge of pity for the stranger.

When the service concluded, the attendants got stiffly to their feet, arranged robes and trains, and found their places in the procession from the palace.

Akitada was among the last to emerge into a blindingly bright winter day. New snow had fallen overnight, and the sun shone. The world around him was brilliant. The intense blue of the sky met the white earth, and only the scarlet lacquer of columns and railings and the black figures of the officials broke the uniformity.

After hours in the dimly lit hall, Akitada blinked and took a deep breath of brisk winter air. His head cleared amazingly as he walked towards the palace gates. Outside the Kenrei-mon, the procession broke up, and someone touched his arm. It was the stranger who had wept during the service.

“You’re Sugawara, aren’t you?” he asked.

Seen more clearly, he was tall and thin almost to emaciation. Deeply tanned features with feverish eyes, hair that had turned white at the temples, and red-rimmed eyes all suggested that he was not only deeply moved, but also in very poor health.

“Yes, I am,” Akitada said with a bow, “but I’m afraid I don’t know your name. Have we met?” The rank ribbon on the stranger’s court hat made him upper fourth, well above Akitada’s station.

The other man looked at him fixedly as if he were weighing his character. “We haven’t met, but I know who you are. Kosehira is my nephew.”

Kosehira was Akitada’s best friend. Akitada tried to recall Kosehira’s relatives and failed to place this man.

The stranger said, “I’m Masatsune—not that anyone remembers me. Forgive me, but could you spare me a little of your time?”

“Now?” Akitada looked around at the snow-covered roofs of the Daidairi. The lines of officials had dispersed across the grounds, eager to return to their homes or offices.

“Yes. Could we walk a little? It feels good to be out in the fresh air again. I’m no longer used to court rituals with all that incense.” Masatsune walked with a limp. He really did not look well. Akitada was curious, but he had an ominous feeling about this mysterious uncle of Kosehira.

They passed out of the Daidairi and stood waiting to cross Nijo Avenue. Masatsune said, “I only returned yesterday. I’m afraid, during the Confessions service, I was overcome with memories. And grief.”

Akitada made a sympathetic comment, then asked, “Have you returned from service in the provinces?”

Masatsune shot him a glance. “I returned from exile.”

Akitada missed a step in his surprise, and Masatsune turned his head again. “Pardoned after twenty years,” he said, as if that explained anything.

They walked on. Akitada did not ask questions, but he wondered. A man of Masatsune’s rank condemned to exile for such a length of time? What could he have done? Treason was the most likely offense. Perhaps he had supported the wrong man in a political power play. But Akitada could not remember anything like that involving Kosehira’s family. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “Kosehira didn’t mention it.”

“Kosehira didn’t know. I simply vanished.”

“You vanished?”

“Yes. And now I’m here again. It’s very strange, I’m sure. Shall we go to the Spring Garden. It shouldn’t be crowded now, and I have a great desire to see the lake again. We could have a cup of warm wine in the pavilion if it still exists.”

The Spring Garden was a city block laid out as a strolling garden with a lake, fishing pavilions, and small islands one could row a boat to. The court frequently held gatherings here. Sometimes, the emperor brought his ladies, and music and entertainments lasted deep into the night. But never in the middle of winter.

“It still exists but it may not be open.”

“It used to be when I was young. For snow-viewing. It’s indescribably beautiful this time of year.”

Masatsune had sounded so wistful that Akitada submitted.

To his surprise, the gates stood open, the paths had been swept, and the scene was indeed magical. Snow softened the stark outlines of pines and made a crystal filigree of the bare branches of willows. Below, shrubs and stones formed a white landscape of soft hillocks and valleys. The lake was a sheet of polished silver reflecting pavilions, trees, and sky like a mirror.

They were the only visitors in the small, elegant pavilion on the edge of the lake. A waiter materialized, an old man with hair as white as the snow. He brought hot spiced wine, then disappeared again. They sat on reed mats, sipped, and looked out over the lake.

“I met her here, you know.” Masatsune’s voice was warm though his teeth chattered. “She was exquisite, but that was not what I loved about her. I fell in love with her kindness.” He turned feverish eyes on Akitada. “The great ladies of His Majesty’s household are rarely kind to pages, you know. They are haughty, or they tease, or they’re so withdrawn you cannot talk to them. She was not like that. She was as cheerful as a child, innocent and loving, and full of laughter. And later, when we became lovers, she was filled with a tender happiness.” He fell silent and sighed. “Forgive me. I have brought you here to finish my confession properly. Finding you beside me during the ceremony was like an omen.”

Akitada eyed him with concern. This frigid lakeside was no place for a sick man reminiscing about a past romance. “Are you feeling well? Shouldn’t we go somewhere warmer?”

Masatsune shook his head. “I suffer from a fever. Brought it with me from Kyushu. The cold feels good. I think I would fall into a raving fit in a hot room.”

“I’m sorry. Surely you should see a doctor. Such fevers are dangerous. You might die.”

Masatsune’s teeth chattered again. He took a deep drink of wine. “Believe me, I welcome death,” he said when he could speak again. “But before then, I must know the whole truth of the matter. You see, I’m responsible for her death. I brought you here because you work in the Ministry of Justice and solve crimes.”

Akitada gaped at him. “You killed her? But what can I do now? You have confessed and been sent into exile. The case has been closed for twenty years.”

“Not at all. Her death isn’t solved. Neither did I confess to her murder. I wasn’t tried for that. I was tried for malfeasance, a crime I was innocent of. I want you to find out what happened that night nearly twenty years ago. You see, I was drunk and don’t remember. For all these years, I’ve borne the guilt, the grief, and the uncertainty. The uncertainty was the hardest. In Kyushu . . . oh, if you knew that heat and disease-infested place, you’d understand why I wanted to come here . . . in Kyushu, I went nearly mad imagining the events of that night.”

Akitada looked at the cool and pure beauty of the lake, at snowcapped pines and glistening willows trailing their branches in the water. “Sugawara Michizane died in exile on Kyushu,” he said, “but I’ve never been there. I don’t want to see where he suffered.”

Masatsune sighed. “I was luckier, or stronger than your ancestor, and I survived, but I will not last much longer. The charge was trumped up, as was his.”

“What exactly were you accused of and why not the young woman’s death?”

Masatsune grimaced. “They couldn’t very well admit publicly that I had seduced the emperor’s favorite and then strangled her, so they hushed up the murder and tried me for something else.”

This was bad. Very bad. Akitada glanced at Masatsune’s profile, the fallen cheeks, the deep lines of physical suffering, the white hair at the temples. It was hard to tell how old he was. Twenty years ago, he might have been either thirty or less than twenty. A twenty-year-old might well be foolish enough to fall in love with an imperial lady. A man of thirty could not expect to claim that youthful spirits had carried him away. “What was her name?” he asked.

His companion shook his head. “I must not tell you that. I see you’re speechless at my offense. Believe me, I deserve your condemnation. But will you listen to my story first? When you’ve heard it, you can make your mind if you want to help me.”

Akitada decided to be blunt. “Help you? In what way? A case this old, and one that has been covered up by the imperial house? I’m not raising objections because your offense disgusts me or because I’m afraid to pursue the matter. I think it’s hopeless. You’ve suffered a terrible punishment and been pardoned. Let it be. Regain your health. Enjoy the winters in the capital. Start your life over.”

Masatsune sighed. “So you won’t even listen?”

Akitada looked at the drawn face and felt ashamed. “I will listen, but I cannot make promises,” he said reluctantly.

MASATSUNE’S CONFESSION:

I was only eighteen that year and a page in His Majesty’s palace. She was one of the empress’s attendants. We fell in love that summer day on this very lake. To my shame, I pursued her in the palace. I found occasions to come close to her, to squeeze her hand in passing, to send her looks across the room. I played my flute outside her room. Yes, I found out where she slept. I left poems, increasingly passionate poems. One day—one joyous, mad day—she answered. We exchanged love letters after that, and I tried to slip into her room and was almost caught. By then, I had been promoted to a position in the public works office and also served in the palace guard, and it was getting more difficult to see her.

Then I heard a rumor that His Majesty was showing her special attention. There is always gossip like that about women attending their majesties. A new concubine may bear an heir and become empress. I decided to buy a house, a secret, hidden house in Saga village in the hills northwest of the city. She agreed to come to me for a brief visit and asked permission to see her old nurse. I sent a carriage and driver and she joined me in Saga.

After we made love, we both realized there was no going back, and she stayed with me. She had one servant, an old woman who had served my family all her life. For a month we were very happy but also very much afraid. I carried out my duties during the daytime and spent the nights with her. They missed her eventually and a search was made.

They didn’t find us, but we were nervous and she cried a lot. I found ex-cuses to spend time with friends. I drank too much and passed out frequently, and when I did make it back, we quarreled. I soon wished her gone and my life the way it had been.

Then came a day when I woke outside my house after another night of carousing. I went inside and found her dead, strangled, and her clothing in disarray. I was horrified at what I must have done in my drunken state and fled to the guard barracks. I had reason to hide. The backs of my hands and my face were covered with scratches. She must have fought me, fought for her life.

They came for me a few days later. The charges were that I had taken bribes and falsified the accounts in the public works office. I was condemned to exile in Kyushu and taken away the next day.

It was a grim tale of the excesses of a spoiled youth. Akitada felt depressed. After a moment, he said, “I take it there was no investigation beyond that which led them to you? I don’t see how I can help you. Too much time has passed. Besides, neither you nor I can possibly undertake asking questions about her.” He felt rather cowardly as he said this and added, “Such a secret is too carefully guarded. I have a family, and you would be sent back to Kyushu.”

Masatsune shivered. Their wine had grown cold. “Yes,” he said dully. “Perhaps I had hoped that you might see the truth right away if I just told you what happened. I can see now it cannot be done.”

Now feeling also inadequate, Akitada pointed out, “How can I guess the truth? You don’t know for certain what happened. Your story isn’t complete.”

A pair of ducks, a male and a female, paddled past and peered at them with eyes like shiny black beads. On the opposite shore, the wind blew up a white mist of frozen snow.

Masatsune huddled more deeply into his court robe. “Thank you for listening. It was a kindness. It eased my guilt a little.”

It shifted the guilt to me, Akitada thought. “Is there anyone who might know more?”

“The woman who kept my house was old even then. She died soon after. I don’t remember the young men who were with me that night. They were strangers except for my friend Sasaki. I asked about him as soon as I got back, but no one recognized the name or remembered him. He may have died.”

“Your friend’s family?”

“The Yoshidas.” Masatsune sat up a little, a sudden hope in his eyes. “You will try to find out more?”

Akitada nodded.

On the pond, the ducks flew up, scattering frozen drops across the yellow reeds.

The Twentieth Day of the Twelfth Month, 1026.

The day following his meeting with Fujiwara Masatsune, Akitada woke up and wished it had all been a bad dream. His promise troubled him on so many levels. The man he met appeared close to dying and this cast a gloom over Akitada’s own life. He felt somehow constrained to help him. And then, the part of the crime Masatsune admitted to so frankly was no recommendation. He had dared to abduct and violate the emperor’s favorite. As if that were not enough, he had later abandoned the poor young woman to spend his time in drunken brawls. What must she have felt? Finally, Masatsune had been too drunk to remember that night. He had awoken outside his house, his face and hands covered with scratches.

Above and beyond that sorry state of affairs, Masatsune seemed to think that he, Akitada, could investigate a matter pertaining to the inner apartments of His Majesty, one which had been closed to external investigation.

And yet, Akitada had accepted the case.

He got up in a very glum mood, drank his tea and ate his rice gruel, and then set out for the Daidairi and the Ministry of Justice. Since he had risen to the position of senior secretary, he could arrange his day in his own way and draw on the assistance of a score of young clerks who spent most of their time checking on cases in the archives.

He told the youngsters to look up the case against Fujiwara Masatsune, official in the public works office, twenty years earlier. He wanted the precise nature of the charges as well as the names of witnesses and investigators.

Then he went to see Nakatoshi in the Ministry of Ceremonial. Nakatoshi had been his clerk many years ago and had risen quickly in rank and position. They had become friends over the years.

Nakatoshi was in and busy drawing up the list of promotions for the New Year’s announcements. He received Akitada eagerly, putting his work aside.

“What brings you?” he asked as soon as they had enquired about each other’s families.

“A curious case. You may not thank me for drawing you into this. Yesterday, after the confessions service, a certain Fujiwara Masatsune approached me and asked my help in clearing up an old murder.”

Nakatoshi frowned. “Masatsune? I don’t think I ever met him. Is he from one of the lesser branches of the Fujiwaras?”

“He’s my friend Kosehira’s uncle and has just returned from exile after spending twenty years in Kyushu.”

His friend sat up. “It sounds like trouble. I don’t think it’s something you want to pursue. Excuse me a moment.” Nakatoshi got up and delved into a series of document boxes, muttering under his breath. When he returned, he said, “Nothing. Whatever he did must have been so shocking that the case was closed quickly and his name was deleted from the official lists.”

Nakatoshi looked worried; Akitada almost laughed. “I’ll tell you what he did, or didn’t do. In confidence,” he said, and recounted Masatsune’s confession.

When he was done, Nakatoshi shook his head in amazement. “Dear heaven! Twenty years ago? He must be getting on. We’ve had two other emperors since then.”

“He’s a sick man who looks older than he is, and yes, the regime changes would account for the pardon.”

“It doesn’t make this any less dangerous. There’s little they can do to him, but you are an entirely different matter if you stick your nose into such a case.”

“I know. I’ll be careful. Anyway, can you help me find his former best friend? His name is Yoshida Sasaki. He was about the same age and also served in the palace guard.”

“That I can do, but I beg you to reconsider. Perhaps speaking to this Sasaki will not bring the fury of the imperial house down upon you, but every new person you talk to may tell another. It isn’t safe.” Nakatoshi gave him a pleading look.

“I know. If you want nothing to do with it, I’ll understand.”

“Oh, I was thinking about you.” Nakatoshi disappeared, and Akitada stepped onto the veranda outside Nakatoshi’s office. It overlooked one of the many courtyards between buildings and galleries that made up the various ministries and bureaus of the Daidairi. This one was severely plain, its gravel covered with a blanket of snow marred only by the small tracks of birds. He wondered how they found food here, but then he saw a small earthenware bowl beside the door. A few grains of rice clung to it. Nakatoshi had been sharing his morning gruel. As Akitada stood there, a flutter of wings brought two sparrows that landed on the edge of the veranda and looked hopefully up at him.

Nakatoshi found him watching the sparrows, who in their turn watched him and the bowl beside the door. “I see you met my little friends,” he said with a smile. “I’m enormously flattered that they come to visit me.”

“You feed them,” said Akitada with a snort of laughter. Startled, the sparrows flew up to the roof.

Nakatoshi chuckled, then said, “I found some information.”

They went back inside and Nakatoshi spread some documents across his desk. They sat side by side, reading.

“It’s as I thought,” Akitada said. “Sasaki and Masatsune both served as pages in the palace and then joined the guard. So where is he now?”

Nakatoshi drew out another document. “That was a bit of a mystery. You see, the year after Masatsune went into exile, Sasaki disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Akitada had visions of another murder, also covered up.

“Yes, but I took a guess. Most of the time when an official or an officer disappears from the annual rosters, he’s taken the tonsure. And here he is.” He pointed to an entry.

“He’s a monk called Enchin? How clever of you. And where might he be now?”

Nakatoshi smiled broadly. “Not far, as it happens. He’s at Ninna-ji.”

“That’s close to Saga where the murder happened.” Akitada rose. “Thank you. I knew you could find him. I can’t wait to talk to him.”

“Be careful. They say monks gossip even more than ordinary people. And Ninna-ji has close ties to the imperial family.”

Akitada reached Ninna-ji some time after the midday rice. He was on horseback and had enjoyed the ride through the snowy countryside and the forests that surrounded the temple compound and monastery. These were built at the foot of a hill in a particularly beautiful spot not far from the capital. Perhaps for those reasons, Ninna-ji was the temple where retired emperors and imperial princes sought the religious life. Ninna-ji’s abbot was an imperial prince, but Akitada had no business with him. He asked the monk at the gate for Enchin.

They took him through grounds as beautiful as the Spring Garden in its snow cover. Here, too, the paths had been swept. Here, too, the snow covered and smoothed out all sharp lines. Had the past obliterated all traces of the crime in the same manner? This was an austere beauty, with the dark wood of the temple buildings starkly outlined against the snow. Perhaps this setting promised a clearer separation of guilt and innocence.

He was shown into a visitor’s room in one of the large halls. There he waited. After considerable time, the door opened and a tall monk entered. He looked at Akitada, placed his hands together and inclined his head, then seated himself.

So this was what had become of the young guard officer who had caroused with Masatsune twenty years ago?

Enchin was a tall man, but he had clearly put on flesh. Unlike Masatsune, he appeared to be in excellent health. His head was shaven, of course, but his features seemed smooth and unlined for a middle-aged man. And while he wore the traditional dark robe, it was of good material, warm, and soft looking. His stole was pieced together from pieces of silk, and his rosary was made of beads carved from pale blue quartz. Ninna-ji clearly attracted a gentlemanly sort of monk.

But that thought was perhaps unfair.

“It’s Lord Sugawara? How may I be of assistance?” asked Enchin in a soft voice when Akitada had not spoken.

“Forgive me for staring,” said Akitada. “I didn’t know what to expect. I only just learned of your background and that I would find you here.”

The monk raised his brows. “Really? Someone has remembered me?”

“Yes. Your friend Masatsune.”

The heavy lids opened for a moment only. “We abandon all attachments when we come here. Surely you knew?”

“Yes. But the past isn’t so easily wiped out. In your former life your name was Yoshida Sasaki and you served at court?”

Enchin raised a hand. “Do not pursue the past.”

“Fujiwara Masatsune was part of your past. He has asked me to find answers to what happened to him.”

Silence. Enchin sat staring into the distance. His rosary moved through his fingers.

“I found you quite easily.” Akitada ignored the monk’s detachment. “And I’ll tell Masatsune where you are. He wants to see you again.”

Enchin’s beads stopped moving, and his gaze wavered. “Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your unguarded thoughts,” he murmured.

“Is Masatsune your worst enemy?”

“No, I’m my worst enemy.” To Akitada’s surprise, Enchin’s eyes filled with tears.

Akitada waited but nothing else happened. Then he had an idea. “Today is the second day of confessions. Masatsune confessed his sins yesterday. Have you confessed yours?”

Enchin released the beads and put his face into his hands.

“Don’t you think it’s better to admit what you did twenty years ago? The Buddha teaches that we should conquer lies with the truth. You took refuge here twenty years ago, but you have not conquered the lies. Make truth your refuge. There is no other.”

“Yes.” Enchin lowered his hands and brushed away some tears.

CONFESSION OF THE MONK ENCHIN:

When we get old, we bear the burden of our youth. I took the tonsure to escape a life of desires. Nothing leads a man’s life astray as much as love for a woman.

Masatsune and I were as close as two young men could be; we were like brothers, but we loved the same woman. He dared touch the forbidden jewel, while I merely dreamed. Because he trusted me, he boasted about his secret, and my affection for him turned to hate. Not enough that he had taken her, he soon regretted his rash act and blamed her for his sin. This, too, he shared with me. My hatred consumed me, as did my wish to rescue her from an intolerable situation. Alas, it was no unselfish desire.

I took to following him after our drinking bouts, hoping to find their hideaway. Several times I lost him, but one night he finally led me to a house. He was very drunk, so drunk he kept falling off his horse. At one point, he tumbled all the way down a gully. I thought he would stay there, but he climbed back out and got on his horse again. When he reached a large country house between Ninna-ji and Saga, he dismounted, opened the gate and took his horse in. He barred the gate, and I left him there and went home.

The next morning early I went to the palace to report his crime. I heard later they arrested him and was glad. But the next day they came and told me I made a foolish mistake; the Lady Tokihime had been with her nurse and died there of smallpox. I did not believe them. I knew I had destroyed my friend and caused the death of the woman I loved.

Enchin bowed his head to pray. Akitada thought bitterly that far from uncovering the truth, he had learned nothing but the poor lady’s name. He was more in the dark than before about what had happened to her.

After a while, the monk looked up. “I’m glad you came. I did not have the strength before. Perhaps now I may also beg Masatsune’s forgiveness.”

“He’s very ill, you know,” Akitada said evasively. “A fever he contracted in exile. He’s afraid he killed her in a drunken stupor, and this troubles him a great deal. Can you assure him that he did not do it?”

Enchin gave Akitada an uneasy look. “I don’t know what happened that night, but I’ve always had a suspicion. That is what has troubled me all these years.”

“What suspicion?”

“I reported them to the woman in charge at the Palace Attendants Office. She would have told others.” He paused and fingered his beads. “Someone may have decided it was best that she died and he disappeared,” he added in a low voice.

Akitada felt a cold shiver run down his back. Enchin suggested that Lady Tokihime’s murder had been ordered by the palace.

“Did you see anyone near the house that night?”

“It was nearly dawn, and the house was deep in the country.” The monk studied his beads as if they might hold the answer. “I’ve thought about this. I didn’t pay attention, but there might have been someone near the house. Perhaps I felt a movement, or just a sense of another presence. It was probably a cat or a badger.”

“I’m told Masatsune feared punishment would find him.”

Enchin nodded. “He had been afraid for days they would come for both of them.”

“You both spent time drinking in wine shops. Could one of your drinking companions have followed you? Did Masatsune tell his secret to anyone besides you? Could you have been overheard?”

“No. We were alone when he told me. And after that, he was always very careful. Besides, the men we drank with were strangers.”

“That doesn’t eliminate them.” Akitada sighed. “You’re sure you saw no one else on the road that night?”

“I don’t remember anyone. Not until I rode home. By then, dawn was breaking and I saw both pilgrims and laborers walking to Ninna-ji. That summer they were rebuilding the Golden Hall.”

Akitada thanked him. “If you should recall anything else, no matter how irrelevant it seems, will you let me know?”

Enchin nodded.

Having come this far, Akitada decided to have a look at the house where the murder had happened. He mulled over the situation on the road.

Enchin might be quite right that someone in the emperor’s service had decided the young woman must die. With Masatsune out of the way in Kyushu—he had been dispatched with unusual speed—her parents and her old nurse could be managed easily. Akitada doubted they were still alive, but in any case, they would have been sworn to secrecy. The death had been hushed up; that much was clear.

That left an outsider who had discovered the secret by accident. Unfortunately, Enchin had not been helpful. His feeling that someone had been lurking near the house might be no more than a trick of the imagination.

After a short ride along the wintry highway, Akitada found the house. It stood by itself well outside Saga village, was in poor repair, and looked abandoned. The fence was leaning, the gate had been barred by nailing rough boards across it, and no smoke rose into the chill winter air. Still, a trail of footsteps led to the gate. Forest had closed in from both sides. The shrubs and trees were bare now, but impassable hummocks of snow marked the wilderness. A feeling of emptiness and silence had settled over the place.

It was getting late—already the setting sun left deep purple shadows on the snow—and Akitada had to get back. As he was turning his horse, he heard the rhythmic clinking of metal and stopped. Several black crows started up from a tree, shaking clouds of snow from the branches and breaking the peace with raucous protest. Around the curve of the road appeared a mendicant monk.

He must have been tall and well built once, but now his figure was very thin and he appeared bowed under the weight of his straw hat. The tinkling sound came from his staff; it had iron rings attached to its top and marked him as a homeless monk wandering the highways of the land and begging his food from farmers and townspeople.

This one looked more ragged and dirty than most. He had let his hair and beard grow, his clothes had holes that showed the flesh of his arms, and his legs were wrapped in rags. Akitada felt inside his sash for alms.

The monk ignored him. He turned off the road and approached the house. When he reached the barred gate, he knelt and made a deep obeisance. Then he began to chant in a cracked and disagreeable voice.

Puzzled, Akitada watched. The house was clearly uninhabited. Had he left the tracks? But why beg there? Was he demented? Wandering monks were frequently a queer lot.

Eventually, the monk got to his feet again and came over. He raised his wooden bowl in a dirty hand. “Alms, for the Buddha’s sake,” he said in his rough voice, a demand rather than a request.

Akitada dropped some silver into the bowl. The contrast between this man and the refined Enchin was shocking. The beggar had weather-beaten features, filthy hair and beard, and a broken nose. He also smelled bad.

“Why do you pray in front of an empty house?” Akitada asked.

“All is emptiness,” the monk growled and shoved the silver inside his ragged robe. “It makes no difference to Buddha.” He turned and walked away, the rings on his staff jingling with every step.

The searches made by the junior clerks in the ministry produced no details about Masatsune’s charges or the circumstances of his trial. His sentence was given: exile in Satsuma Province on the island of Kyushu. Since both climate and conditions were very harsh there, it had amounted to a death sentence.

Akitada next went to see his friend, Police Superintendent Kobe.

“I could use some help with a possible crime,” he told Kobe.

Kobe grinned. “When and where did this ‘possible crime’ occur?”

“Umm, twenty years ago. Near Saga.”

“You must be joking.” Kobe laughed, then called a constable anyway and told him to check the case files in the archives. “It may take a while,” he said. “Sit down and tell me about it.”

But Akitada was already on his way out. “Not yet. Maybe when I know a little more.”

His next visit was to Masatsune.

The noble exile was staying with a Fujiwara cousin. The cousin looked unhappy, but he led Akitada to a backroom of his mansion, where Masatsune half reclined against an armrest. He was covered with bedding and shivering as on the day before in spite of the large brazier that made the room overly warm. Seeing Akitada, he cried, “You’ve found him!”

Akitada sat down at a little distance from the brazier and loosened his collar. “Yes. He’s a monk by the name of Enchin and resides at Ninna-ji.”

“So close?” Masatsune struggled out of his covers. “I must go there. I must speak to him.”

“I suggest you write him a letter and ask him to come here. His health is better than yours.”

The other man subsided. “Perhaps,” he said weakly. “Will he come?”

“Yes. He too has a confession to make.”

Masatsune’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean . . . ?”

“No. Not that. He betrayed your secret. He followed you that night and says he watched you fall down into a gully that night. Could the scratches on your face and hands have happened then?”

Masatsune brightened. “Good old Sasaki! Yes, why not? I didn’t know.”

“What happened to the old woman who was supposed to look after Lady Tokihime?”

Masatsune flushed. “So you found out her name.”

“Not too difficult. What about the servant?”

“She must be long dead.”

“Could she have told someone?”

That shocked Masatsune into a rare display of animation. “Hotoke had served my family all her life. She was absolutely loyal.”

“In that case, where was she during the murder?”

“She was in her eightieth year and nearly deaf. It was night. I imagine she was asleep. In any case, I didn’t see her when I found Tokihime.” He covered his face at the memory. “I fled and never saw her again.”

“What about your neighbors, or the people who lived in Saga?”

“I made sure I had no neighbors and Saga was a mile away.” Masatsune dismissed the matter with a wave of a hand. “We were hiding from the world.”

Akitada was becoming irritated by his languid manner. “Someone knew about you. If it wasn’t the palace, and we accept Enchin’s word that he didn’t kill her, it must have been a stranger. Had you or Lady Tokihime been troubled by any visitors?”

Masatsune blinked. After a moment, he said, “I was only there at night, but she was afraid. She said eyes were peering at her from the garden, and that some goblin was looking over the top of the fence. I thought she imagined all of it. That fence couldn’t be climbed, and the gate was kept barred.”

“There must have been deliveries.”

“I suppose. I wouldn’t know how they got food. My old servant would have dealt with that, and she wouldn’t let anyone past the gate.”

The man had confessed to having left a young woman of rank in the care of a single aged, deaf companion, a fact that almost certainly had cost her her life. Yet still Masatsune showed no understanding of his callous behavior.

More uneasy than ever, Akitada returned home and saddled his horse.

Saga had grown prosperous because it offered lodging to travelers on the busy highway to the capital and the great temple Ninna-ji.

Akitada stopped at a roadside eatery where he saw other horses tied up. In spite of the chilly air, several men sat outside on benches, eating and drinking. He went in, found the usual open fire with the kettles hanging over it, and cooks and servers busy feeding a small crowd. The customers noted his clothes and made room for him near the fire. He ordered a bowl of noodles and some wine. Both were good and he ate hungrily. When he was done, he asked to speak to an elderly woman who had been working in the back, chopping vegetables and washing bowls.

This odd request caused some consternation, but she came willingly enough, knelt and touched her head to the dirt floor.

“My name is Sugawara,” he told her. “I’m an official from the capital.”

“This humble one is named Okatsu. How may I serve the honored gentleman?”

Her speech was tinged with the local dialect and Akitada asked, “Have you lived long in Saga?”

“All my life, Your Honor.”

“I want to ask you about the abandoned house outside town on the road to Ninna-ji. Why is it empty?”

She rolled her eyes. “A ghost lives there. Nobody goes near it.”

“But only yesterday I saw a monk praying there. Perhaps you know him?”

The eyes rolled again. “Oh, that’s Goro. He always prays there. Every time he passes.”

“Why? The house is empty.”

“Who knows? Goro doesn’t have good sense. He’s given it all to the Buddha.” She chuckled.

“You know him well, then?”

“Oh, yes. He’s been here for many years now. They say he had a good business once but lost it gambling. That’s why he left the world and became a monk. He’s a holy man.”

“A holy man?” Akitada remembered the repulsive character he had met.

She nodded. “Oh, very holy,” she said firmly. “A man must be very holy to live like that.”

“Ah, yes. And where would I find him now?”

This surprised her a little. “Most people don’t go near him,” she said. “He’ll be walking about town, or maybe he’s at Ninna-ji. Sometimes he stays there.”

Akitada thanked her, paid, and got back on his horse. Goro was not in town, but someone had seen him on the road to Ninna-ji the night before. Akitada returned to Ninna-ji.

It was the final day of confession services, and people were arriving to rid themselves of the sins of the past year. Akitada asked the monks at the gate about Goro. As he had hoped, they knew him here. One of them directed Akitada to the kitchen area.

And there he found the mendicant monk at a rain barrel. He was making efforts to wash himself.

“You’re called Goro, aren’t you?” Akitada said, riding up beside him.

The monk turned his head and looked up at him without much enthusiasm. “Who wants to know?”

“We met yesterday. In front of the deserted house near Saga. Do you remember?”

“So?” He made no effort to be pleasant to the man who had given him a very generous gift only a day before. Instead, he glowered at Akitada from sunken eyes.

Somewhere a bell rang. Goro looked in that direction and ran wet hands through his greasy hair and beard, combing them into some order. “Confession service,” he said. He dried his hands on his robe and trudged away.

“Wait,” Akitada called after him. “If you’re confessing, why not confess to the murder you committed in that house?”

Goro stopped. His back was to Akitada; he did not turn or answer. The bell rang again.

“You killed a lady there, didn’t you? Twenty years ago? That’s why you stop to pray at that house every time you pass.”

Goro turned slowly. “Who sent you?”

“No one. Or perhaps it’s your karma. Your fate followed you like a shadow for twenty years, and now it has caught up with you.”

The ragged figure sagged a little. Goro’s sunken eyes closed. “Like a shadow. Yes, I knew it was there. Always. I heard its steps, and it breathed down my neck.” He fell to his knees in the dirty snow and uttered a hoarse cry: “What comes out of you, will come back to you.” Then he raised his hands and clasped them around his scrawny neck and squeezed until his mouth gaped and his eyes started from his head.

Akitada slid from his horse. He grasped Goro’s wrists, trying to loosen their iron grip. They struggled for a moment, then the monk gave up the fight. He let his arms drop, took a gasping breath, and let it out in a long moan that might have been a dying animal’s.

“Will you tell me what happened?” Akitada asked after a moment.

GORO’S CONFESSION:

When I was still in the world, I had both bad luck and good. I was very poor, but I had good health and a strong body. I worked as a laborer and was smart enough to find me a rich wife. She was the only daughter of a rice merchant in the capital. I did my duty by her: five children in five years. When her father died, we got the business. I was a man of leisure then, and I spent my days and nights with bad friends and the women of the town. I drank and gambled and lost the money, and we had to sell the business. My wife turned into a shrew and blamed me when I couldn’t find work. I stole things to feed the kids and got good at it. Then I took to robbing travelers on the road. My wife knew, but she liked nice clothes and gold. She wanted more and more.

One day, I worked the Saga highway and found a rich man’s house that looked empty, but the fence was too tall and I left. The next night, I went back with a ladder and started looking around the place, but an old crone almost caught me, and I left again. Finally, the third time, I got lucky. I got in, and crept into the house. All was still and dark. I moved quietly, but suddenly a woman screamed. She frightened me, but I asked her nicely to be quiet and give me some gold and I’d leave again. When she carried on, I had to grab her. I was strong back then, and I must have been a little rough because she went limp and when I let her go, she fell from my hands. I found a lamp and lit it. When I saw she was dead, I was afraid. I’d never killed anyone. I just took a robe and a fan and got away from there as fast as I could.

My wife was very pleased with the robe and fan. She didn’t care that I’d murdered the lady, instead the fiend told me to go back for more. I left her and my children, and I walked away into the night. I knew then life was a lying dream and I abandoned the world.

Goro still knelt when he was finished, hunched into himself, his greasy head bowed.

Akitada did not know what to say this time either. Confession was a form of cleansing, of purification of the soul, but none of the three men had felt better after sharing their guilt. Neither did Akitada know whose guilt was the greatest. This man before him was a thief who had committed the actual murder, but was his sin greater than that of Masatsune, who had also taken what was not his, used and abused it, and then discarded it? That what he had taken had been another human being had troubled him less than the danger of getting into trouble. And what of Sasaki? He had betrayed both his best friend and the woman he claimed to have loved to madness, knowing full well that a terrible punishment awaited them. And this he had done out of revenge because he could not have the young woman. Compared to these two noblemen, Goro had merely been reckless: reckless in choosing a greedy and unfeeling wife, reckless in gambling away his wealth, and reckless in strangling to death a young woman as he tried to stop her from making noise.

What terrified Akitada most, however, was that all three had seemed predestined to do what they did. Was this the will of the gods? Or was it due to their upbringing? Perhaps something in each man had made him act the way he did. Karma.

“What will you do now?” Akitada asked the miserable figure in the snow before him.

Goro barely moved. “Nothing. Pray. Wait.”

When Akitada returned to the capital, he saw Kobe first and, duty-bound, he told him of the confessions. “Will you arrest Goro?” he asked when he was done.

Kobe looked at him bleakly and then away. “Would you?”

Akitada shook his head.

His next visit was to Masatsune. He found him in the company of the monk Enchin. The two men sat together, and the contrast between them struck Akitada again. Masatsune would never be well again.

They looked at him expectantly.

Akitada did not bother to sit down. He delivered his news curtly: another man had killed the Lady Tokihime. Without waiting for their questions, or expressions of relief and gratitude, he walked away.

This year’s confession services had done nothing for his soul.
Copyright © 2012 I. J. Parker

Author’s note: This story was suggested in part by “Sannin Hoshi” (“Three Priests”), an anonymous folktale from the sixteenth century.

MARLEY’S WINTER

JOHN C. BOLAND | 2669 words

The ferry from Calais had diverted for reasons no one explained, and when Charles Marley debarked at Folkestone, the English seaside town was already pulling in its sidewalks. He lost twenty minutes asking about a train to London, of which the last had departed before the ferry’s unexpected arrival. The hotel he found lacked a dining room, and the nearby restaurants—only two—had closed after tea because it was the off-season. He might find a Cornish pasty down on the beach, said the woman who ran the hotel.

He put his small suitcase in his second-floor room and came downstairs.

He was trembling. Low blood sugar, his wife would explain. He had left her in Paris, where around eight o’clock she would meet someone from the British embassy for dinner. He refused to think beyond that. He had a meeting of his own the next afternoon in London with a Russian.

It was cold outside the hotel, and when he found a cement stairway down to the beach he was grateful for his overcoat. He walked a hundred yards in the dusk toward the lights of an amusement park. There was a circular, domed arcade, a wooden roller coaster, a couple of other attractions hidden in fog that had come up from the channel. None of the rides was operating. When he hesitated at the door of the arcade, he could no longer see the town up the hill on his left or the water below the shingle beach on his right. He wasn’t given to whimsy—he had been a case officer for eighteen years and believed only in literal things—but he had known people who might have felt that the channel was asserting a claim on the land with these thin, quick tentacles of fog. Marley wondered if his Russian contact had that sort of bent. It was a national character weakness, poetic, dramatic, knowingly false.

The woman at the hotel had been right. He found a stand in the arcade building that sold chips and Cornish pasties. Both were grease soaked and cold. While he circled the arcade, past the penny-pusher machine and mechanical games, only two other customers shared the bleak space.

“Aren’t you from the ferry?” the man in the tweed coat asked him. He had come straight over from the penny machine, so his approach hadn’t startled Marley. His accent was American. His face was pale and resigned, without the peevishness of a tourist who has found himself in a dismal place. A businessman might not expect his travels to be comfortable.

The man looked down at the coppers still in his hand, three of them, as if he’d forgotten their use. “I’d hoped to get to London this evening,” he said. “Have a look at the museums before I fly home. You were on the ferry, weren’t you? When she started rolling, I thought I was going to be sick.”

“It was rough,” Marley agreed.

“And then we come here instead of Dover! I heard there was some sort of labor action at Dover.”

“That would explain it.”

“They never think of people on a business schedule. My name is John Pettis.”

Marley offered the name on the passport he was using. Neither man moved to shake hands.

“It’s getting foggier outside,” Pettis said. “I took a look out just a minute ago.”

“Then I think I’ll head back now,” Marley said.

“Where did you find a room?”

“The Leas.”

“Oh, that’s a coincidence,” Pettis said. “Too bad they don’t have a dining room. And I can’t say much for the plumbing.”

In the half hour he had spent inside the domed arcade building, the fog had consumed the beach. It took Marley a while to find a stairway back up to the road, and when he found it he walked on past it another twenty feet and stood in the shrouded darkness, his back against the stone retaining wall, and listened. When ten minutes had passed, no one had come after him. Pettis might play the penny machine until they turned out the lights. Or he might know better than to follow another man into the dark.

There was a television in the hotel’s sitting room, and four other guests occupied easy chairs and watched a comedian in a wig and housedress pretending to be prime minister. Marley recognized three of the passengers from the Calais ferry, two women who were traveling together and a much older man with a white mustache who had a cane propped against his knee. The fourth person, a woman, occupied a wheelchair and had the air of a permanent resident whose routine had been disturbed by the visitors.

“Hello,” said the old man, looking away from the television. “I’m Buchsman. These are—” His glance jumped to a middle-aged woman and a younger woman. “—Mrs. Muir and Miss Porter, fellow castaways.”

Marley stayed where he was, at the edge of the room, and repeated the name he had given Pettis.

“Going on to London?” the old man asked.

“I was planning to.”

The man sucked his teeth. “I’m in no hurry. It will be there tomorrow. Or not, in which case what do I care?”

“Shush,” said the woman in the wheelchair.

The only telephone was beside the tiny registration desk. It wouldn’t do. Marley went back outside and climbed two steep blocks toward the center of town. The fog hadn’t reached here, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it had: The streets were empty, the buildings unlighted, the sense strong that he had wandered onto a shabby theatrical set. He fed tokens into a phone and dialed the number he had for Siminov in London. The answer came not in Russian but in bloatedly cheerful West Country English. “Evening! May I help you?”

Marley hung up.

He called a different number, in the Belgravia section. Eight years ago, Charles Marley had had Popper under his wing. Now the younger man was moving up. As London station chief, Larry Popper was touted for deputy director of operations once the Reagan crowd left office, unless someone managed to poison his career. Popper’s wife answered the phone, and Marley waited until the hesitant, sexless male voice came on. “Charles?”

“Siminov isn’t going to be available tomorrow.”

And what was that evidence of, the younger man would wonder. Could he even assume Marley’s information was correct? But he wouldn’t ask if Marley was sure.

“I called his flat and there seems to be a new tenant,” Marley said.

“Are you compromised?”

Charles Marley watched the dead street. Nothing. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“Folkestone. The trains aren’t running and—”

“I’ll send a car. Although . . .”

“That’s not necessary.”

The “although” had tipped his decision: no, no car. He finished Popper’s thought. Although . . . if the Russians had gotten to Siminov, why would they bother with a case officer who no longer had an appointment to keep?

Walking down the hill to the hotel, Marley looked at one answer and felt a thrill of importance. If Siminov had been a plant, there was an answer. But why lure him from Paris to England? Why lure him anywhere? If the Russians thought they had a score to settle, why would they be subtle?

He opened his topcoat as he entered the hotel, though it was not warm inside. There was a snug bar to the right, beside the sitting room. John Pettis and one of the women travelers stood beside the bar. The woman was middle-aged, with a pointed jaw and the kind of eyes that might go with an acid tongue.

“This is Mrs. Muir,” Pettis said. “Mr.—”

“We’ve been introduced,” the woman replied. She held a small glass half full of something clear. “John says you’re both Americans, which means that I’m going to reach home before either of you. By tomorrow—”

Pettis interrupted, warned Marley, “If you have any secrets, be careful. Mrs. Muir works for Fleet Street.”

“I don’t have any secrets,” Marley said. “What sort of reporting do you do?”

“Economics,” the woman said. “So I can’t tell you about Princess Di.”

Pettis raised a hand, fending off the thought. He asked Marley, “What work do you do?”

“My company publishes books,” Marley said. He mentioned a name they would recognize, where his cover was more than skin deep.

“What’s your role?” Muir asked.

“I try to acquire them.”

“Crime stories? I prefer crime stories when I have my shoes off.”

“We publish memoirs and politics mostly. You’ll have to excuse me—long day.” Marley went up to his room, which was at the front. It hadn’t occurred to him, when he was on the street, to call the apartment in Paris. Now he was tempted to go downstairs and try. He knew she wouldn’t be there—would have left already to meet whoever he was—and if he tried phoning now he would try every hour until dawn. That would break him completely. As it was, being half broken, he could function, though it occurred to him, as he sat looking down on the street, that he wasn’t thinking clearly when he told Popper not to send a car. He had no reason to spend the night in this place, except to see if Siminov’s people had sent someone after him.

So why had he said no?

In Paris the small publisher—a man of short stature who oversaw a sparse list—had been enthusiastic about Siminov’s memoirs. It didn’t hurt that Marley mentioned financial assistance from a foundation that barely existed except on paper. The foundation had supported publication of a number of anti-Soviet books in Europe as well as providing capital to a literary magazine that only occasionally strayed into politics but was believed, for reasons no one quite understood, to be pro-American. The small publisher, whose taste in novels had never made him wealthy, argued that the foundation should budget a reasonable amount for advertising Siminov’s book. “There is no point in printing copies for the warehouse,” the man pointed out.

“Of course,” said Marley.

“So we should discuss an amount for that,” said the publisher. And they did, and Marley let some more money go, which he didn’t care about. The book would be published in Paris, by a small but reputable literary house, and there would be a British edition and perhaps one in the U.S., but that really didn’t matter. People in Europe would have more evidence of Moscow’s repression, in this case of writers. Siminov claimed to have known Pasternak and Rybakov first hand. “They were bendable,” the old Russian’s letter said.

So the book might cause a literary stir, as defenders of the maligned Soviet writers rallied in newspapers and monthlies—not that it would matter. Little of what he did mattered, Marley suspected, but he did it anyway. It told him something about the state of the conflict that in place of KGB colonels queuing to double he was dealing with second-string novelists with scores to settle. The fact the Russians had let Siminov emigrate told him they knew he was harmless.

His apartment in the not-so-chic Fourth was empty. Larry Popper had introduced him to her while everyone was in Washington. “Pretty girl, a little difficult,” was all that Popper had told him about the young woman. He had discovered for himself that she was vain and, unrelated to the first fact, didn’t love him. But by then he was in love with her, and he became a little more so with every betrayal, which told him something about himself. Speaking of scores to settle . . . Larry had no idea.

The cold in the second-floor hotel room kept him awake. He was huddled at the window when a car drove up in front of the hotel and disgorged two passengers. The woman from Fleet Street, a scarf over her head, came out from under the portico to meet them. All three passed out of his sight into the hotel. Marley glanced at his watch. Three-twenty A.M. He remained by the window, not caring if his room was their destination. He listened for sounds in the hall and on the stairs, but it was as if fog had swept in and silenced the building. In several minutes the woman came out and opened the boot of the car. The two men brought John Pettis’s body between them and put it out of sight. The men climbed into the car and drove off. The woman came up the hotel steps. Marley left the window and got ready for bed. He had recognized only one of the men, from London station. He was in his pajamas when there was a tap on the door. He ignored it and climbed into bed.

In the morning the woman who called herself Muir couldn’t keep the pleasure off her pointed face. “You’re supposed to finish the trip to London,” she said. “We’ll share a cab to the train.”

Feigning surprise, Marley said, “Orders from Fleet Street?”

Muir busied herself with a bag. The younger friend she’d picked up was nowhere to be seen. Had she been stage dressing, Marley wondered, or an accidental bonus?

They didn’t speak during the train ride.

“You should be glad we got that one off stage,” Popper said. He had adopted all the airs of a City banker except for the bowler hat. “Freelancer, you’d never have guessed he was Dutch, would you?”

They were having lunch in a small room Popper thought it was amusing to call the Drones Club. It had no windows, just a new-looking blond table and eight chairs, fabric-covered walls in a pattern that resembled nothing in nature, sandwiches and chips from a nearby shop.

“I wouldn’t have guessed he was anything but Russian,” Marley said. “Why did they send him after me?”

“They lost a man in Berlin in August.”

Marley had been in Berlin in August. “I was in deep cover,” he pointed out. “And I didn’t kill anyone.”

Popper shook his head. “Who knows who put the idea in their heads?”

Protesting, perhaps, when no one had accused him.

“What about Siminov?” Marley asked.

“They put him in the river. Unfortunate.”

“Yes,” Marley agreed. “Do we have a manuscript?”

“As a matter of fact, we do. You can take a copy back to Paris with you.”

Marley watched the younger man. He thought: He couldn’t view me as a rival, could he? Because, Marley knew, he couldn’t possibly stand in the way of Popper’s advancement. The man might or might not get the deputy director job, but it wouldn’t turn on anything Marley was or did. Retiring Pettis surely boosted Larry’s chances, proved he was capable on the operations side, though Mrs. Muir might deserve some of the credit.

Marley left the building, forcing himself to believe Popper hadn’t fed him to the Russians.

But he understood: He hadn’t mattered. It had been the Dutchman who had to be lured into the field, who had been important.

He felt a stab of joy when he phoned the apartment from Gare du Nord and his wife answered and told him to hurry, they could have dinner in the neighborhood, she missed him so. He made himself believe that too. What did he really know about her habits—all surmise, built on fragments of observation; as the London station chief would point out, he knew nothing that was necessarily true. The Metro took him only so far, and then he had to walk along the busy evening streets. It was, if possible, colder in Paris than it had been along the channel, but there was no fog. He found himself wishing he had been brave enough to leave the Folkestone hotel one more time the previous evening, before Muir had done her work, inviting the Dutchman to come out into the fog with him. He wished he had done that, regardless of how it might have turned out. He held an imaginary conversation in the fog, and for some reason the assassin’s voice was a woman’s.

“You must be very unhappy to risk coming out like this,” she said.

“I am,” he replied.

But then, who would have killed whom? He couldn’t answer that. They both were looking for release or neither would have been out there. Which of them would have found it? Marley looked down the boulevard, but he couldn’t see the lights of his building.

Copyright © 2012 John C. Boland

THE ELEVATOR MAN
A FOUR HORSEMEN STORY
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN | 5123 words

Art by Andrew Wright

John Barrymore had shed blood at the California Hotel.

Then again, maybe not. After destroyers and DeSotos, lurid legends were Detroit’s major export.

If the story was true—and an old report at Receiving Hospital of the release of one “Jack Smith” with minor facial lacerations and twenty-three stitches in his right arm was one point in its favor—he was the only guest of his stature ever registered there.

Naming the hotel for the home of Hollywood had failed to attract the glamorous horde the original owner had counted on. When Mary Pickford or Buster Keaton came to town, they generally stopped at the Pontchartrain, or accepted the hospitality of one of the auto pioneers in Grosse Pointe.

Barrymore may have holed up in the California to elude private detectives hired by his wife. A woman named Ruby LaFlor was booked for soliciting there the same night, it was rumored, the star of Don Juan drank too much and walked through the Art Deco glass door of the shower in his suite; but if the events were connected, the publicity value was doubtful.

In any case, that was twenty years in the past. If anyone could shed light on the affair it was Hank, the elevator operator. The hotel staff insisted that the men who’d built the shaft in 1915 had taken his measurements before making the car.

Dan McReary wasn’t curious enough to ask Hank because their average conversation ran four seconds and varied not at all:

“How’s it going, old-timer?”

“Good as can be expected, punk.”

These exchanges always left the detective third-grade feeling privileged. As far as he knew, the gaunt old man never opened his mouth in the presence of any other member of the Racket Squad. He sat stonefaced on his low stool with his gaze straight ahead and his fist on the lever, wearing what was likely the same brass-buttoned tunic and pillbox hat that had been issued under Woodrow Wilson. From year to year nothing changed, except the length of hair growing out of his big pendulous ears and his license in its frame on the elevator wall, renewed on the same day annually.

“What about it, Sarge?” McReary asked once. “Ever get a rise out of old Hank?”

Sergeant Canal worked his cigar, a lonely channel marker bobbing in the sea of his big Slavic face. “I got a grunt out of him when I gave him a portable radio last Christmas. I figured he’d want to keep up on the war, but I never saw it again. Probably sold it on the black market. Now I think about it, it might’ve been just a burp.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like to be reminded. Maybe he lost a grandson or somebody overseas.”

“His great-grandson would be too old even for the Civil Defense. I think he ran Lincoln up to his box at Ford’s Theater.”

“You know that doesn’t make sense.”

Detective Burke, the biggest man on the detail when Canal wasn’t around, chuckled from the bed he was stretched out on in shirtsleeves and stocking feet. “Canal never would’ve made citizen if he didn’t take the test next to a smart Mexican.”

“I was born here, you Irish SOB. Some of us got birth certificates.”

“What’s it say next to Father: ‘Player to be announced later’?”

Canal shrugged and took out his resentment later on a suspect in a rape.

The California strained a budget already drawn thin by absent department personnel, scattered from Guadalcanal to the Black Forest. The skeleton crew left behind to maintain order patched up the cigarette burns in its uniforms and cannibalized junkyards to keep official cars rolling. Automobile manufacturers were too busy building warplanes and submarines to replace the aging vehicles on the road.

But Sergeant Canal, detectives Burke and McReary, and Max Zagreb, their lieutenant, considered the expense necessary. Cases broke more efficiently without meddling from the brass at 1300 Beaubien, police headquarters. When requisitions were slow, they pooled their paychecks to make rent.

“This time when the bean counters come through, let’s add room service,” Burke said. “I’m sick of running out for liquor.”

McReary poured a cup of chicory from the pot. “Of all the gall. I’m the one does the running. The clerk in the store on the corner thinks I’m a soak, and I never touch the hard stuff.”

“Boo. And while I’m at it, hoo. Go cry in your Orange Crush.”

They were the Four Horsemen in the press. The pro-administration Detroit News used the term in the heroic sense, while the reform-conscious Free Press thought it appropriate to a quartet of barbarians. Hearst’s Times straddled the fence. Police Commissioner Witherspoon wanted to be mayor and was waiting for a consensus before deciding whether to disband the squad. The fate of the four’s draft exemption rested on the outcome.

“Although God help Omar Bradley when that bunch ships out,” Witherspoon confided to his cronies at the Athletic Club.

McReary didn’t pursue the Hank subject, and eventually forgot about the discussion. As the youngest Horseman with the least seniority, he had his hands full running errands for the others when he wasn’t contributing to their impressive arrest record. When not much was happening in Europe and the Pacific, they sometimes managed to shove World War II below the fold.

It was the elevator man himself who stirred his memory.

One day—it was around Thanksgiving, McReary recalled later, because Perry Como was still singing about autumn leaves, but the department stores were already filling up electric trains and monkey-fur coats—the car came to a sudden stop between floors, with a shudder and a clankity-clank that sounded ominously like a severed cable flapping free: JUNIOR DETECTIVE DIES IN FREAK FALL was the headline that flashed to mind.

But the elevator didn’t drop. Hank let go of the lever, which was pushed all the way around to stop. He looked at his passenger with a glint of life in his matte-finish black eyes.

“Near wet yourself, there, young feller. Five floors ain’t nothing to old Betsy. Her sister took fifteen in Frisco in ought-six and they put ’er right back on the line with a fresh coat of paint. Not that the six folks that died appreciated it.”

“You were in the quake?”

“No, I missed that one. But us lift jockeys know all the stories. I could curl your hair.”

McReary lifted his hat to show his young bald head.

A bony shoulder lifted and fell, but the material of his uniform stayed shrugged. “Think what you save on Brilliantine. I wanted a minute of your time. Betsy’s slow, but she ain’t that slow. The poor schnook you’re working over upstairs won’t notice you’re late.”

“You got the wrong idea, old-timer. That kind of police work went out with bathtub gin.”

“Says you. I can fetch you a jug in ten minutes. I seen them jitterbugs go up full of vinegar and come back down two hours later spittin’ blood. You can’t pull the wool over these eyes, nor get out of me what they seen. A good elevator man is like a priest, only without the dog Latin.”

It was more words than he’d heard the old man speak since before Pearl Harbor. “So what’s the scoop?” McReary asked. “Selling raffle tickets on a turkey?”

“You mean a pigeon bloated up with water. Government drafted all the turkeys and sent ’em overseas in cans. I’m offering you a cut of a million.”

“A million what, card tricks?”

“Simoleons, you fresh punk. Maybe you can’t use it. Maybe you already got a million stashed in the box that twenty-dollar suit came in.”

“Eighteen-fifty, from J. L. Hudson’s basement. And it came in a paper bag.” He pointed at Hank’s uniform. “I guess that’s gold under the green on those buttons.”

“I didn’t say I had it. I know where I can get it, but I need help. I don’t trust them monkeys you work with. You got an honest face. What are you doing Sunday?”

“Taking my mother to church.”

“See what I mean? Good boy. Swing by my dump after you eat her fried chicken. Beer’s on me.” He gave McReary an address on Gratiot and started the elevator back up.

“A million, no kidding?” Lieutenant Zagreb lit a Chesterfield and grinned, tilting it toward the squad room ceiling. McReary had gone there when his boss didn’t show up at the California.

“I know it’s a joke, L.T. I want to hear the punch line, but somebody should know where I am Sunday in case I don’t check in. I can handle the old guy, but if he’s shilling for somebody with a gripe against the squad—” His smile was uncertain. “Anyway, if I told Canal or Burke, I’d get the horselaugh. You’re the only one doesn’t treat me like Andy Hardy.”

“Swell, Mac. Ring me at my place around six. I’ll be polishing off a can of cranberries. You don’t call by quarter after, I’ll send in the marines.”

“On the level, what’s he up to?”

Zagreb scratched the fine sandy hair on his big brainy head. “Probably wants to sell you some swampland in Florida. The Ambassador Bridge is already spoken for.”

“As long as it’s jake with you we talk.”

“Just don’t drag the squad into it. All the commish needs is one good excuse to put us all on a troop ship.”

The apartment was a sawed-off shotgun flat on the third floor of a building Buffalo Bill and the Wild West had paraded past in 1883: one long, narrow, barely furnished room with a Murphy bed and in the kitchen area an icebox and a hotplate. Hank, nearly unrecognizable in a worn twill shirt, baggy slacks, and suspenders, his white top-thatch exposed, pried the caps off two bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and sat down opposite his guest at a folding card table. “Salt?”

McReary looked at the shaker, said no. The old man shook some salt down the neck of his bottle and swirled it around. “How was church?”

“Long. How do we split up the million?”

“Hold your horses, son. I don’t get no company. Let’s chew the fat a little.”

The detective saw he was in for it, drank beer, sighed. “So tell me about Barrymore.”

Hank grinned, swigged, belched. “Hell, that wasn’t Barrymore. It was John Gilbert. He was on a cross-country bender after Garbo dumped him at the altar. Ancient history for a sprout like you.”

“I’m not as young as you think. Gilbert washed out when talkies came in, didn’t he? Squeaky voice.”

“So they say. I ain’t been to a picture show since Rin-Tin-Tin. How come you ain’t in uniform, strapping boy like you?”

He adjusted to the subject change. “I made detective.”

“I mean in the war.”

“I’m fighting it right here. Essential service.”

“Don’t get sore. Me, I’m a pacifist. I voted for Debs twice because I believed him when he said he’d keep us out of the last one. But I knew Roosevelt was a liar. When he said if he was reelected no American boy would die on foreign soil, I knew we’d be in this one up to our hips in a year. That’s when I stopped paying taxes.”

“You haven’t paid taxes for two years?”

“They padlocked my house. Why else would I put up in a rathole like this? That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

McReary sat back cradling his bottle in his lap. “I can’t help you, old-timer. That’s federal. I can barely fix a parking ticket.”

“I know that. I don’t care about the house. They can have it, leaky pipes and all. It’s what’s in it I care about.”

He hesitated with beer raised, then thumped it down, rose, and unscrewed the lid from a sugar canister on the counter next to the hotplate. McReary, who was unfamiliar with the Midwestern custom of salting one’s beer, wondered if his host was going to sweeten it as well. But the canister was stuffed with papers. Hank rustled among them, found what he wanted, and sat back down, spreading the item between them on the table.

His guest didn’t touch the paper. It was about the size of a typewriter sheet, yellow and dog eared, and tattered at the seams where it had been folded in quarters. It was bordered in filagree, and the bold print near the top was faded but still legible:

THE HENRY FORD MOTOR COMPANY

McReary smiled. “Congratulations. You own a share of stock in Ford.” The old man had delusions of grandeur.

“We’ll come to that. I bought it from Henry himself back in ought-one. It was in the bar of the Russell House, a hotel you never heard of on account of they tore it down before your father was born. Henry didn’t drink, but he had a glass of mineral water to celebrate starting up. How we got to talking I don’t remember: Times was friendlier then, you struck up acquaintances with strangers. Also, I was drunk. Celebrating, too, you see. My pa had died, miserable man, and I’d sold the fambly farm for a nice piece of change. I wound up buying a thousand shares.”

“A thousand—?” This time it was McReary who set his beer down without drinking.

Hank, lost in the past, didn’t appear to notice. “Don’t you think I didn’t kick myself when I sobered up. I tried to stop payment on the check, but it was already cashed.

“Well, time passed, and I didn’t hear anything more about Ford Motors. Not for seven years, till he come up with the Model T. The rest I guess you know. He’s the richest man in the world now, and I reckon I’m the richest you’re likely to share a beer with.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, no matter what you think. That’s no Cadillac you’re driving up and down the California.”

“You’re a smart young feller, I seen that right off. Keep your mouth shut while them apes you work with are jabbering. Soak everything in. See, I had a steady job by then, working the elevator at the Pontchartrain, which was where that auto crowd hung out in their hunnert-dollar suits, puffing two-bit cigars. Smelled like burning money. That wasn’t for me. I was married, had a boy. Figured I’d sit on them shares and have something to leave him with to remember his old pa when I was six feet under.”

Hank sighed rackingly, pain showing in the faded old eyes. “Life don’t always work out the way you planned. Little Hank grew up to be a philanderer, run out on his wife and baby boy in 1920 for a cooch dancer he met at the Vanity. The wife and the boy went to live with her folks in Indiana. I never laid eyes on either one of them again. The Ponch got tore down, so I moved to the California, and that’s the story on me.

“Except,” he added, leaning forward with his arthritic hands wrapped around the bottle; and McReary leaned forward also. “I kept sitting on that Ford stock. It had got to be a habit, you see, like old Scrooge counting his bucks and never spending a cent. I was a widower by then—influenza took my Maggie—and there was nobody left to please by throwing in with the idle rich. Fred, that poor little boy whose pa deserted him, was going to get a nice surprise come his twenty-fifth birthday.”

McReary drained his bottle in one slug. He wanted another, but didn’t ask. He needed to stay alert.

The suspense grew. The old man sighed again, subsiding in his chair, and the sound was like all the bereaved of wartime America and Europe moaning in concert. His face collapsed into a thicket of wrinkles. He looked as old as Canal and Burke thought he was.

“I got the telegram first of the month. I never knew my daughter-in-law cared that much, but I guess under the circumstances she had to keep busy somehow. Fred bought it at Midway. Japanese torpedo caught his destroyer amidship. All hands lost.”

“Hank, I’m sorry.”

The elevator man rubbed his eyes, looked at his hand, showed it to his guest. “Pipe that. I’m all dried up like a squoze-out lemon. I never got to know the boy. It’s the idea of him I miss. Like saving up for a shiny new bike in a store window and then you find it’s sold. What the hell. I might as well be rich. What else have I got?”

“You don’t need me to cash in your stock.” McReary thought, nodded. “Oh. That’s what’s locked up in your house.”

“Only reason I had this one is I carried it around for luck. But I ain’t had none lately.” He folded the certificate and put it in his shirt pocket. “The feds are too busy stopping Third Column counterfeiters from busting the value of the dollar to follow up on foreclosures. They just stuck a padlock on the door without taking inventory. You and me are the only ones know what’s inside.”

“A million seems steep even for a thousand shares in Ford.”

“Not too steep for a man in charge. Years ago he near went broke buying back every share he could find so he wouldn’t be beholden to a soul. When he finds out there’s a piece of his company he don’t own, he’ll pay a dollar for a dime’s worth to snap it up. They don’t call him Crazy Henry just for laughs.”

“What are you going to do, break in?”

“Not me. Too old. You are.”

After he left the apartment, McReary used his call-box key to get Zagreb on the line. He heard Jack Benny on a radio playing in the background. The lieutenant asked if he could borrow a couple of hundred thousand till payday. McReary chuckled, but it sounded hollow. “No can do, Zag, sorry.”

“What was the deal?”

“The old guy wanted me to go in with him on the Irish Sweepstakes. He thought it was a sure thing if we bought fifty tickets.”

“Bet he figured he was the first one had that idea.”

“Anyway, the beer was free.”

There was a brief pause, then the radio got quieter. “Why so glum, chum? Don’t tell me you thought there was anything to it.”

“No. Some people just have funny notions about cops.”

“Comes with the badge. See you tomorrow, kid.”

Driving his cranky Model A home, the young detective felt a little bad about the way he’d turned down Hank’s proposition. He was still sore he’d been expected to commit burglary, for a cut of a million or a bus token, and risk a federal rap to boot; but the old man’s expression, and the pleading way he asked McReary not to tell anyone about their conversation, made him feel sorry for the lonely old soul.

He’d keep silent. It was a boneheaded plan anyway, and nothing would come of it.

The next day, and every workday into the new year of 1943, not a word passed between the operator and passenger. McReary stopped pitying him. The way Hank seemed to see it, behaving like an honest cop had made him as bad as the rest.

But things changed besides the weather.

At Christmas, McReary’s mother burst her appendix and spent six weeks recovering in Detroit Receiving Hospital. The third week of January, his favorite cousin wired him from Toledo for money to bail out her husband, who’d been medically discharged from the army after a jeep accident during basic training and now did all his fighting on a timber leg in gin mills. McReary’s savings dwindled. In the mail with the hospital bill came a letter from a government auditor telling him he owed taxes and penalties on undeclared income he’d earned moonlighting as an usher at the Capitol Theater.

The Bureau of Internal Revenue, he thought. How poetic. He stewed for a week, then went to the California Hotel when the Four Horsemen had no business there and rang for the elevator.

“What you do,” Hank said, handing him a beer in the apartment on Gratiot, “you use bolt cutters on the padlock. After you come out, you replace it with one from the hardware store. One Yale looks like all the others.”

McReary shook his head. “They’d smell a rat the minute their key didn’t work, and guess who they’d suspect first? If we’re going to do this, it has to be in such a way they never know it happened. If police work has taught me anything, it’s how to slip the latch on a window.”

“I didn’t know cops and crooks thought so much alike.”

“You would if you talked to one once in a while. The guys I work with are the best in the business. If they knew what I was up to, they’d have me busted down to civilian. Maybe not Burke; but he wouldn’t snitch an apple off a pushcart.”

“What changed your mind? Last time you was here I offered you a fifty-fifty split of a million smackers and you acted like I spit in your face.”

“I found out life’s a crock. If your grandson joined the army instead of the navy, wrecked a jeep instead of ate a torpedo, you and I never would’ve got past the elevator.” He smiled. “Too deep? Try this: I don’t want half. Just enough to put me back in the black.”

The old man’s mouth fell open. Then his jaw clenched. “That’s just dumb. It’s my property. I’d rather divvy it up with you than let Uncle Sam blow it on a private train car for some fat general.”

“That’s the deal, Hank. Otherwise, no dice.”

“Damnedest haggling session I ever heard of. See what I mean about war? It fouls up everything.”

They clinked bottles.

Dan McReary’s first venture into crime was anticlimactic. He’d gotten more thrills during the drive over, and that had been uneventful.

They went there in broad daylight; it was a working neighborhood on the southeast side, the risk of witnesses at home minimal, and poking around with a flashlight after dark would have invited attention. The house was old enough to have stood outside the original city limits along with a silo and barn, and needed everything, from shingles to paint to new windowsills. The government notice tacked to the front door glared white against the discolored wood.

He left Hank in the Model A, to blow the horn if he saw trouble coming, and went around back, where thirty seconds’ work with his pocket knife freed a latch from rotted wood. The window stuck, but he put his back into it and raised it far enough to crawl inside.

The place smelled of shut-up house and eau de old coot. He found the suitcase where it was supposed to be, shoved back in a bedroom closet hung with stale clothing, heaved it onto a single bed whose springs rocked and creaked, unbuckled the shabby leather straps, and opened it to look at the stacks of stock certificates inside, each bound with a brittle-looking rubber band. Then he fastened it back up and when he was satisfied no one was watching the window, he pushed the suitcase through it and followed it out. Resettling the latch and brushing away yellow wood exposed by his pocket knife took just a little longer than working it loose in the first place.

Hank was standing outside the roadster when he got back and put the suitcase in the rumble seat. The old man looked nervous enough for both of them. “Check it?”

“Sure I checked it. Get in. Patrol’s not due for ten minutes on this street, but those beat cops don’t always go by their watches.” He slid under the wheel, turned the key, and pressed the starter. The loose lifters knocked.

“Any problems?”

McReary sneezed. “Just the dust on my hay fever.” He blew his nose and steered away from the curb. “I know less about petty thieves than I did before. I can’t see what the shouting’s about.”

“You call this petty?”

“That’s just it. If stealing a million doesn’t give you a charge, why snatch a purse?”

In front of the apartment house he got out to carry the case upstairs, but Hank beat him to it. He hauled it out of the seat and stood on the sidewalk holding it with both hands. “Come on up and I’ll give you your cut.”

“I’ll wait for the cash. Two people showing up with shares to sell after all this time might make somebody suspicious.”

“Ain’t you afraid I’ll duck out on you?”

McReary grinned and opened the door on the driver’s side. “I’m a detective. Don’t you think I could track down the only millionaire elevator operator in the world?”

That night he thought he’d dream about being out of debt.

He didn’t dream. He didn’t even sleep.

At three A.M. he gave up, brewed a pot of ersatz coffee, and listened to a nasal-voiced radio announcer make guesses about what FDR and Churchill were discussing in Casablanca. There wasn’t enough caffeine in a carload of the wartime stuff to keep him awake, but when he tried again later all he did was tangle the sheets. At half past five he dressed and went to 1300.

Lieutenant Zagreb was already in the squad room, as McReary knew he would be, chain-smoking Chesterfields and going over the blotter from the night desk. Zag lived on work and was a professional insomniac. McReary hoped to keep his amateur status, which was why he’d decided to talk to his superior.

The leader of the Horsemen pushed his hat back from his bulbous forehead. “You’re up with the roosters or still out with the tomcats,” he said. “Those steamer trunks under your eyes could go either way.”

“I couldn’t sleep, L.T. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“The Krauts bombed London fifty-seven days and fifty-seven nights. Anybody can get used to anything. Pour yourself a slug from the pot. It’s the McCoy. Bought it off the black market.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be breaking up the black market?”

“All the more reason to snap up the inventory. We never fail.”

He got the coffee and pulled a chair up to the lieutenant’s desk. He sipped, but the real thing was wasted on him this morning. Now that he had Zagreb all to himself, he was more reluctant than ever to confide in him. These might be the last friendly moments they ever shared. But the others would be showing up before long, so he started.

Zagreb heard him out without interruption. He watched the speaker the whole time and his eyes never blinked. Burke and Canal were fond of saying that that basilisk stare had broken more alibis than everything else in the Third Degree combined. When McReary finished, he dealt himself a cigarette and slid the pack toward the detective.

“I don’t smoke. You know that.”

“Looks like I don’t know you at all. Jesus. Twist Washington’s tail in the middle of a damn war? You want to be gang-raped by a better class of con than we got in the state pen?”

“I could be wrong, but I think I’m in the clear with the feds. Not with me, though. Should I turn myself in?”

“That would make the sex consensual. You want to confess, see a priest. I’m short-handed enough as it is.”

“I stumbled, L.T. I disgraced the shield.” He took out his badge folder and put it on the desk.

“Pick that up before it scratches the finish.” Zagreb extinguished his cigarette in a burn crater. “You think you’re the only cop ever stepped off the curb? When I was one Vice I ate oysters every night in the Hotel LaSalle and never paid a cent. Everybody was doing it. That’s why a grand jury got convened. I drew thirty days’ suspension without pay, but it was just oysters. The brass with cash were arrested or canned or both. Canal was driving a prowl car, but he got caught up in the same net for delivering policy slips on his beat. He spent six months putting blisters on his feet in Paradise Valley. Burke— Oh, hell, what hasn’t Burke done?”

“I never knew.”

“Point is, we got it out of our systems. I wouldn’t play poker with either one of them for big stakes, but when we bust up a brawl in a beer garden I’d rather have them at my back than the hundred and first Airborne. You, too—if you’ve got this out of your system.”

McReary blinked; one of them had to. “Yes, sir! I swear on my mother’s life.”

“Better not, till she gets the roses back in her cheeks. And call me Zag, or Lieutenant, or L.T., or ‘Hey, you, jackass,’ but don’t call me sir. I work for a living.”

“Yes, si—Zag.” He picked up his folder.

Zagreb smiled for the first time in the meeting. “I’ll say this: You’re the only one of us who kicked over the traces for a cut of a million. What’s Ford stock look like?”

He described it.

The lieutenant’s lids flickered then. “‘The Henry Ford Motor Company,’ that’s what it said? Not ‘Ford Motor Company’?”

“I’m sure it was Henry Ford.”

“When did you say he bought the shares?”

“He said 1901. Why?”

Zagreb laughed. The sound of it and the sigh of his red face startled the detective. He’d heard his boss chuckle, snicker, let out a “ha-ha” when someone got off a good one, but this was as close to losing control as McReary had ever witnessed with anyone. Canal and Burke came in just as he was winding down.

“Let us in on it, Zag.” Canal took the slimy cigar stub out of his mouth. “We ain’t heard a good Pat-and-Mike story for weeks.”

“Watch your mouth, you hunky SOB,” growled Burke.

The lieutenant wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. “Just a history lesson, boys. Henry Ford finally hit pay dirt in 1908 when he built the Model T. Most people don’t know he failed the first time. If you’ve got stock issued in 1901 by the Henry Ford Motor Company, you couldn’t buy a stick of Blackjack Gum with it.”

“Lucky I didn’t buy any.” Canal put back his cigar.

The floor dropped out of McReary’s stomach. Then he heard someone else laughing. It was himself. He couldn’t have held it back with both hands.

Burke said, “Stop trying to butter up the boss. It ain’t that funny. What’s the palaver about, anyway? We’re left out. Zag don’t care about cars and you ain’t interested in history.”

McReary caught his breath. “I was hitting up the lieutenant for an advance. I’m busted flat.”

The next time the Four Horsemen gathered at the California, the detective could tell right away Hank had gotten the news, probably straight from Ford, the company if not the man. His expression was more sour than usual and his grip on the lever would strangle a rhinoceros. When their gazes met, he saw that Hank saw that he knew too.

“How’s it going, old-timer?” McReary asked.

“Good as can be expected, punk.” The elevator started up.
Copyright © 2012 Loren D. Estleman

WINDOW OF TIME

JOHN H. DIRCKX | 10793 words

For the occasional visitor to the Spaulding Tower Apartments, the open-cage elevator with its sluggish pace and ominous clanking embodied and enhanced the antique charm of the building. But as a focus for complaints by tenants, it easily outranked the unreliable heating system and the periodic hikes in the rent. The rent kept on climbing, not in proportion to the prestige of the locale but rather to the rising cost of maintaining security in an inner-city district where the tenants were best advised not to venture outdoors on foot after nightfall.

A little before ten o’clock A.M. on a chilly Monday in April, Ralph McConnahay parked in one of the visitors’ slots along the east side of the apartment building and made his way to the outer lobby. A uniformed guard at the desk went through the invariable rigmarole of phoning Conrad Sleate’s apartment on the top floor to announce his visitor and secure permission to send him up. Then he handed McConnahay a pen on a chain and invited him to sign in. Finally, he twisted a key somewhere below the counter to release the electric catch on the door that gave access to the inner lobby and the solitary elevator.

At eight stories this building scarcely qualified as a tower, but its early twentieth-century builder had declined to inflict the cacophony of “The Spaulding Building” on the citizenry. And so, even though structures of twenty and thirty stories now cut off the horizon to the southeast, a tower it remained.

McConnahay, his briefcase tucked under his arm, made the grinding ascent to the top floor with a dour, preoccupied air. His knock at Sleate’s apartment door elicited the usual “Come in” in a petulant, reedy whine. As always, the door was unlocked.

He found his host hunched at his desk in a window that overlooked River Park and, nearer at hand, a dreary expanse of abandoned factories and warehouses. Smoking a blue cigarette in a short amber holder designed to accommodate its oval shape, Sleate scowled at his visitor and the world with the saturnine leer of a chronic invalid who also happened to be a born misanthrope.

McConnahay unbuttoned his coat, sat down on a dusty plush sofa, and unlocked his briefcase.

Nobody had asked him yet if he wore silk pajamas or was afraid of spiders. But they were getting close.

The review board was forbidden by law to inquire about Cyrus Auburn’s ethnic origin, political affiliations, religious beliefs and practices, marital status, alcohol use, or psychiatric history. But they could plainly see that he was an able-bodied and highly presentable African American male in his mid thirties. And they all knew he was a bachelor, a devout idealist, and a top-notch police detective because they’d been his colleagues or superiors for several years past.

Too many years, it now seemed. Auburn had been eligible to apply for promotion after completing five years as a detective sergeant, but hadn’t done so. Now that he had spent seven years in that grade the Public Safety Administration had only two choices: promote him to detective lieutenant or discharge him.

Maybe that was why this session felt, at least to Auburn, more like a disciplinary hearing than a milestone in his career. Because the question why he hadn’t ever applied for promotion kept turning up in various guises. After all, even a couple of years ago his promotion would have been a virtual certainty in view of his seniority, his consistently superior performance, and his unfailing fidelity to the mission and ideals of the department.

An hour after the meeting broke up, with his lunch now doing a romping square dance in his interior, Auburn was still brooding over the question of his promotion as he shuffled papers on his desk. Surely it must be as evident to his colleagues as it was to him that he had been denied an executive temperament when such things were passed around—that he had an overly generous share of self-doubt, usually being able to see the other guy’s point of view at least as clearly as his own—and that he chafed and squirmed under regulations and protocol that he found irrational and counterproductive.

Above all, he detested personality clashes. He didn’t mind the occasional scrap with punks, felons, and other nasties, but conflicts with citizens, and especially the members of his own team . . .

Suddenly he realized that his immediate superior, Lieutenant Savage, was standing in the doorway to his office and had just asked him if he knew where Spaulding Tower was. Savage hadn’t been part of the review board. More protocol of dubious rationale.

“Dollinger’s got a homicidal shooting over there,” said Savage. “The victim’s Conrad Sleate.” Auburn recognized the name as that of a local gossip columnist whose writings everybody professed to loathe but nonetheless devoured regularly with perverse delight. “Apparently this just happened within the last couple hours. No suspects yet. I already called the coroner’s office, and I’ll send an evidence tech as soon as one is available.”

It was a day of sharp wind, with billowing gray clouds and intervals of cold raw sunlight. Traffic in the downtown area was just thinning out after the noon-hour scramble. Whenever Auburn traveled this particular route, it seemed like a trip backward through time as he passed by scenes representing various stages of his past life—his grandmother’s house, John Mellon High School, the deli where he’d worked while in his teens, the vaguely remembered house, now a firetrap falling into ruins, where he and his family had lived until he was six.

Meanwhile he reviewed what he knew about Conrad Sleate.

In his column entitled “Local Affairs,” which appeared every Tuesday and Friday, Sleate practiced a brand of journalism that was as yellow as mustard. If a news item elsewhere in the paper noted the retirement of a civic leader, Sleate’s treatment of the event was sure to suggest that the man had been fired for incompetence, if not fraud or embezzlement.

In commenting on the centennial of a local firm, he couldn’t resist mentioning that it had employed blacks in strictly menial positions until a landmark civil suit in 1977. If a business was closing down, Sleate contrived to alienate all concerned by castigating the workers for forcing the company into bankruptcy with their outrageous demands, while nonetheless implying that mismanagement at the top was ultimately at fault for the failure of the business.

The title of his column carried a hidden meaning for regular readers, because his specialty was affairs of the heart, chiefly those involving straying spouses with public images as models of integrity, prominent physicians with very private practices, and churchmen who had forfeited all hope of canonization. He was a master of double entendre and innuendo, of the discreet wink and the knowing nod. Although few could resist the temptation to scan his columns for titillating tidbits of scandal, the majority of his readers found him crude, arrogant, and revolting. Which, as any journalism major can tell you, is precisely the sort of thing that sells newspapers.

The Spaulding Tower stood, grim and grimy, amid similarly aged and neglected structures. With heavy grilles protecting all the ground floor windows, the place looked more like a jail than an apartment building. The masonry needed tuck-pointing. The terra-cotta detailing was beyond restoration. Signs in two of the barred windows announced a vacancy and gave a phone number.

Auburn parked on the street near Patrolman Fritz Dollinger’s cruiser and, with collar turned up against the wind, jogged along the refuse- littered sidewalk to the entrance of the building. In the outer lobby, garish fluorescent lighting and a few pieces of clearance-sale vinyl furniture clashed with old-fashioned wood paneling and brass trim. A flush of enveloping warmth and a faint hiss of steam reminded him of Saturday mornings spent at the downtown library during his high school years reading tales of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Thorndyke.

Dollinger was conferring with a uniformed guard at the security desk.

“You all by yourself?” asked Auburn, as Dollinger came away from the desk to meet him.

“Yes. The other guard is upstairs making sure Sleate doesn’t come back to life. She’s the one who found him.”

“Just two guards on duty?”

“One patrols inside the building while the other signs visitors in and out. They change off every hour. This one,” he added, with a barely perceptible tilt of the head, “thinks he’s still running a Marine platoon.”

The man at the desk, squarely built, rugged, and about Auburn’s own age, pretended to be deeply engrossed in some papers. He wore a gray uniform and a cap but no sidearm.

“What agency?”

“No agency. The first- and second-shift guards work for the building management. At midnight, after this outer door is locked, a night watchman from Spahn Merchants’ Security takes over.”

“So what happened?”

Dollinger led him to the desk. The guard, introduced as Gordon Overbeck, stood to attention and made his report in the robotic jargon of a character in a cop show on the late-night reruns.

“At approximately one ten p.m. I received a call from Officer DiPalma to the effect that she had just found the tenant of Apartment Eight B dead.”

“How did she call you?”

“Cell phone.”

“Dead inside his apartment?”

“Yes, sir. While on routine patrol she found the door of the unit open and loud music playing on the radio. When she entered the unit to investigate she found the tenant seated at his desk, dead, with a gunshot wound to the head. I called Public Safety and advised DiPalma to stay at the scene until relieved.”

“When was the last time you saw Sleate alive?”

“I’ve never seen him.”

“Never? How long have you been working here?”

“Nine weeks. Since ten February.”

Two tenants, a man and a woman, emerged from the inner lobby and ogled Dollinger’s uniform with arched eyebrows as they passed the security desk on their way to the street door. Overbeck gave each of them a sober, tight-lipped nod.

“I did talk to him twice on the phone this morning,” he continued, “to announce visitors.” He turned a clipboard around so that Auburn could read the top sheet, which was headed guest register. W. R. McConnahay had signed in at ten and out at ten thirty-five. Gayle Van Till had signed in at eleven forty-five and out at twelve. Theirs were the only names on the register.

“Do you know these people? I mean, have they been here before?”

“The first one’s from the newspaper. He comes every Monday and Thursday morning. The second one was here once before.” He paged back through the sheets on the clipboard and found that Van Till’s previous visit had occurred on the preceding Thursday afternoon.

“She didn’t stay long today today,” remarked Auburn. He studied the register more closely. “Looks like a different handwriting where she signed out.”

Overbeck glanced at the sheet. “That’s DiPalma’s writing. Sometimes visitors forget to sign out, especially when they leave by the back door, which is closer to the parking lot.”

A man of fifty with thinning blond hair and a thickening midriff emerged from the inner lobby. “Aaron Fernsall,” he announced to Auburn and Dollinger. “Thanks for not using the sirens.” He paused to get his breath. “I was just up to Sleate’s apartment and my own guard wouldn’t let me see the body. That’s okay—I understand fully. And approve fully.” Had the death of a tenant put him into this slightly giddy mood, or was he always like that?

“Are you the owner of the building?” asked Auburn.

“Okay. Full disclosure time.” Fernsall cleared his throat and went through an extensive repertory of slapstick gestures. “I own one-eighth of the building and get free rent and utilities. In return for which I collect the rent, sort the mail, and change light bulbs for the clueless.”

“How many tenants in all?”

“Okay. There are twenty-eight units, four on each of the eight stories except the top and the bottom, which have only two. Five units are vacant right now, including one on the top floor. That makes twenty-three tenants of record, including yours truly. How many bodies we’ve actually got on board at any given moment . . .” More hammy gestures.

“Are your units condos?”

“No, sir. Each apartment is leased on a standard one-year contract.”

A delivery man parked a hand truck loaded with groceries next to the desk and signed in while Overbeck called a tenant to announce his arrival.

“Could we maybe move a little farther from the public eye?” suggested Fernsall.

He used a key to admit Auburn and Dollinger to the inner lobby. The floor was carpeted here and the lighting more subdued, except above the mail rack next to the elevator.

Fernsall led them to the office, which adjoined his own apartment.

“Could I get a complete list of the tenants from you?” asked Auburn.

“Sure. Give you a printout in five minutes with apartment numbers, Social Security, home and business phones, and dates of first occupancy.”

“That would be a big help, but there’s no hurry. What can you tell me about Sleate?”

“If you’ve ever read one of his columns, you know about as much as I do. He hardly ever left his apartment, and I’ve probably talked to him face to face about five times in the past eight years, which is how long he’s lived here.” Fernsall was clicking icons on a computer screen. “Stuffy, self centered, sarcastic.”

“Problems between him and other tenants?”

“Not that I know of. Like I said, he stayed put up there, and the only other apartment on the top level has been empty for a couple years. The rent’s higher because they’re penthouse units, and it’s a long ride in the elevator.”

“Have you been here all morning?”

“Yes, sir, and all night, for that matter.”

“Did you or anybody else hear anything in the building that could have been a gunshot? Just to help fix the time . . .”

Fernsall chuckled almost hysterically. “Lot of shooting going on around here lately,” he said. “You wait a minute and you’ll hear it for yourself. Billy the Kid and Jesse James just staggered back from lunch.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We’re remodeling a vacant unit on the seventh floor. The carpenters use some kind of a gun to drive nails into the concrete. Stands your hair on end till you get used to it.”

Auburn, who had held a construction job for several months between dropping out of college and entering the Police Academy, knew exactly the sort of cartridge nailer he was talking about.

“Anybody else in the building this morning besides tenants? Housekeeping or maintenance people?”

“Housekeeping does the lobbies and the stairs on Tuesday and Thursdays. Maintenance contractors only come in when we need them.” Fernsall lifted two pages from the computer printer and handed them to Auburn.

“Thanks. That helps.” He folded the list of tenants, put it in his pocket, and turned to leave the office.

“Hey, okay if I come up with you?” asked Fernsall.

“We’ll ask you to stay away from the scene until an evidence technician has gone over it,” said Auburn, and immediately wondered if he had achieved a suitable tone of authority for a prospective police lieutenant.

While Auburn and Dollinger were waiting for the elevator, Overbeck admitted Nick Stamaty, the investigator from the coroner’s office, to the inner lobby. Stamaty shifted his field kit and camera case and straightened his windblown hair. “Didn’t see the van outside,” he said. “You chaps here alone?”

“The coast is clear for the moment,” Auburn assured him. Stamaty correctly interpreted this to mean that the evidence technician from Public Safety had not yet arrived to complicate his examination of the scene.

When the gong rang they crowded into an open brass cage, which climbed from level to level at the dragging pace of an overloaded freight elevator. Each drew his own foreboding conclusions from the shrill grating and the series of metallic thuds that accompanied their passage.

On the top floor they stepped into an austere and chilly passage filled with the pungent reek of stale tobacco smoke and the blare of a radio. A young woman wearing a uniform like Overbeck’s stood at parade rest with her back to an uncurtained dormer window. Auburn and Stamaty showed identification, but Officer DiPalma, recognizing Dollinger, was already unlocking one of the doors that faced each other across the passage.

Inside Sleate’s overheated apartment the stench of cold cigarettes was stronger and the radio was louder. Auburn recognized the habitual bleat of one of the announcers on the local public radio station as he lisped the names of an Italian composer and a French pianist. Nobody touched the radio. If the killer had turned up the volume to cover the sound of a gunshot, that knob might bear a crucial fingerprint.

The room they had entered from the corridor wore the forlorn and inhospitable appearance of a crusty old bachelor’s sanctum. Pieces of furniture that might have been antiques but were probably just old lay in shadow, except where the glare of the early spring afternoon flooded in at a dormer window like the one outside in the corridor. On a big mahogany desk in front of the window, a litter of papers half concealed a pen holder, a candlestick telephone in old ivory with gilt trim, and an ashtray overflowing with blue, pink, green, and yellow cigarette butts.

The body of Conrad Sleate, looking fragile and wasted, lay back in a heavily padded chair drawn up to the desk. Even in death he seemed to have struck a pose of effete egotism, his eyes half open, his lined face set in a defiant scowl, his chin jutting forward with its small goatee poised like the tip of an artist’s brush. A single bullet wound in his left temple had hardly bled and showed no contact charring or powder tattooing.

Stamaty put down his field case just inside the door and started taking pictures. Dollinger left to resume patrol duty.

The guard looked in from the corridor. She was an athletic twenty-five—rugby, not badminton—with shingled, licorice-black hair, coffee-brown eyes, and a wannabe-sultry Latin look.

“Can I get a statement from you, Ms. DiPalma?” asked Auburn.

“Tonia. Sure. I had just started my one o’clock rounds. We ride the elevator up here to the top and then take the steps down from floor to floor, checking doors, looking for burned-out exit lights, sniffing for gas leaks, watching for people who don’t belong here . . . But we’ve never checked the door of this apartment because it was never locked during the daytime.”

“Were you acquainted with the tenant?”

“I talked to him once, about six months ago, when we had a fire inspection.”

“So what happened this afternoon?”

“As soon as I got out of the elevator I heard the radio and I found this door open.”

“Wide open?”

“About like it is now. I could see from outside that he was lying back and not moving. I stepped in just far enough to see the gunshot wound and be sure he was dead. Then I came back out here in the hall and called the other guard on my cell phone. We don’t carry weapons, and for all I knew, the killer was still in there. After Officer Dollinger got here we went through the whole place looking for a weapon and being sure nobody was here.”

“Did you touch anything inside the apartment?”

She twitched her head in a brief sign of negation as if the question were so impertinent as to be beneath her notice.

“Did you sign in a Gayle Van Till around noontime today?”

“Overbeck, the other guard, signed her in right before he went on his lunch break, but I saw her leave by the back way.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“No, but I knew who she was because she was here one day last week.”

“Anything unusual about the way she acted today?”

“No. I only saw her for a second.”

“Do you leave the building for lunch?”

“No. We take turns eating in a staff locker room on the main floor. Do you need me here for anything else?”

“Is this other apartment locked?”

“Yes. It’s vacant.”

“Can I ask you to unlock it too? Our evidence tech will want to look around in there. You’ll be on duty till when?”

“Four.”

Stamaty was making a scale drawing of the room on graph paper. In a corner, almost within reach of the desk, stood an ancient cabinet of imposing dimensions. Its twin doors of inlaid wood were swung wide open to reveal a capacious interior with dark green shelves of thin-gauge metal. Decades of use had rubbed the paint away from the edges of the shelves, which were now conspicuously empty except for traces of dust. Auburn examined the cabinet door fastenings carefully. He possessed a set of professional lock picks but didn’t carry them on duty because he didn’t want to be faced with the temptation, day in and day out, to use them under inappropriate circumstances. He had nonetheless acquired enough proficiency at opening locked desks and cabinets to recognize that this one would have offered no difficulties to a practiced and determined operator.

By now the room was flooded with the honking winds and squawking viols of a baroque ensemble. Suddenly, from somewhere below them, three sharp detonations in succession resounded at intervals of a couple of seconds. Stamaty, a former police officer, froze in his tracks.

“Don’t panic,” said Auburn. “That’s a cartridge nailer. I hope.”

Stamaty had already gone back to his drawing. “I saw their truck in the alley.”

Auburn began a tour of the apartment, scrutinizing everything but touching nothing. A grungy kitchen where the aroma of gourmet coffee nearly overwhelmed the smell of cigarette smoke, a sybaritic bedroom with a plasma TV, a second bedroom with the radiator turned off and dust everywhere half an inch thick. What had been intended as a formal dining room now served as a storage space for odd pieces of furniture, piles of old newspapers, and carton upon carton of Sir Walter Pastel Ovals.

There were unmistakable indications that somebody had searched the entire apartment within the past few hours.

A door led out from the dining room to the roof, or at least to a section of it delimited by a parapet of brick and stone. Auburn stepped out into a buffeting wind to examine the penthouse area, of which Sleate had apparently made little or no use. The only signs of prior human presence were a pair of rusty iron garden chairs and the ruins of a wooden structure of some kind that had once been erected against the outside wall of the apartment.

He followed the parapet from that point around three sides to where it ended at a battery of air-conditioning condensers, beyond which stood the enclosure for the elevator machinery. Across a wide gulf he could see a similar rooftop space outside the other eighth-floor apartment. Travel between the two spaces would clearly have been impossible except for Batman, Spider-man, or some similar creature of fantasy.

Down below, the wind shook traffic signs and whipped waste paper along the gutters. A parking lot for tenants, its spaces protected by a corrugated metal roof, occupied the northern part of the block. In a blind alley almost directly below him he saw Stamaty’s van parked behind the construction workers’ truck. From a second van that had just joined the row, a man emerged whom Auburn recognized immediately, from a hundred feet straight up, as Kestrel from the forensic lab.

Even if his identity hadn’t been obvious from his driven manner as he gathered equipment at the rear of the van and his pogo-stick gait as he started for the building, the fact that he stooped down in mid-career and picked up something from the ground was a dead giveaway. Kestrel was a compulsive sample collector. In fact, he probably owed his vocation to a little boy’s yearning, never outgrown, to be at one with his environment by carrying around big chunks of it in his pockets.

Auburn stepped inside and closed the door tightly against the wind. “Hey, Nick. You better prepare to reconfigure your parameters.”

Stamaty, in shirtsleeves and rubber gloves, was kneeling next to the body of Conrad Sleate. “I assume that means Kestrel is on his way up.”

“You assume correctly. At least maybe he’ll turn off the radio.”

“Sure, after measuring it and weighing it and phoning in the serial number to the FCC.”

Moments later, Kestrel entered the crime scene by thrusting his nose in through the doorway as if testing the atmosphere and then following it in. He put down a heavy kit and unslung his camera. “Weapon?” he asked, by way of greeting to Stamaty and Auburn.

“Not here.”

“Anybody check at the bottom of the chute?”

Auburn had noticed a metal hatch in the wall next to the elevator labeled SECURELY BAGGED PAPER TRASH ONLY—NO GLASS, PLASTIC, METAL, FOOD, OR HAZARDOUS WASTE.

“Not yet.”

“The weapon could be down there.” Kestrel still stood just inside the doorway, rubbernecking to get his bearings. “Also some or all of the articles out of that cabinet. Somebody here hard of hearing?”

Without waiting for a reply he stepped to the wall and with a deft tweak of his toe loosened the plug of the radio cord in its outlet. Above the sudden silence they could now hear the wailing of the wind and the hiss of the steam heat.

Stamaty, whose jurisdiction as a representative of the coroner began at the skin of the deceased, quietly gathered up his paraphernalia and abandoned the field to his opposite number from Public Safety.

Auburn had always gotten along with Kestrel, who was also a sergeant, by giving him plenty of room and not taking personally his bitter jibes and autocratic style. Just now he was wondering what it would be like to outrank this compulsive and iron-willed individualist.

The vague rumble of remodeling activities now audible on the floor below, and the occasional uninhibited scream of a power saw, reminded Auburn that he needed to interview the construction workers. In the corridor he met J. C. Pulfresh, a local attorney notorious for his outlandish courtroom antics and tasteless advertising, just getting off the elevator. Auburn would have recognized him even if the two of them hadn’t wrangled a few times in court because Pulfresh’s ruddy complexion and sagging jowls decorated the back cover of every telephone directory in town.

“How did you know he was dead?” he asked.

“I didn’t know till I hit the security desk downstairs. You’re not thinking suicide, are you? Because that thing about scorpions stinging themselves to death is a myth.”

“Did you have an appointment?”

“For two o’clock. When I heard he was dead I came right up to take charge of his papers and personal effects.”

“You’ll have to talk to Stamaty about taking charge of anything. A homicide victim’s remains and personal effects become the property of the coroner until identity and cause of death have been established.” Pulfresh knew that perfectly well, and Auburn knew that he knew it.

“ID is no problem. I can take care of that right now.” He made as if to push past Auburn toward the open door of Sleate’s apartment.

“I’ll have to ask you to remain outside here until our evidence technician has finished going over the scene. Let me get Stamaty out here to talk to you.”

Inside the apartment Kestrel was dislodging clumps and clouds of ageless dust from radiator enclosures in a vain search for the murder weapon. Auburn found Stamaty in the bathroom cataloguing a vast collection of medicine bottles.

“Pulfresh is out in the hall, Nick,” he said. “He wants to take charge of Sleate’s effects.”

“He tries that on me at least once a year. Funny how few of his clients die in their beds.”

Pulfresh was examining the view from the dormer window and humming in a minor key. He offered Stamaty one of his fat and highly mobile hands, which resembled the flippers of a seal. “You won’t find a driver’s license,” was his opening remark, “because he never had one.”

“What can you tell me about his health?” asked Stamaty.

“His health? Rotten, according to him. Been at death’s door for years but hated doctors. Swallowed tons of herbal garbage that he bought from mail-order houses. Smoked like a volcano and ate like a fruit fly. Hey, I’d like to get hold of all his papers as soon as possible.”

Stamaty knew not only the rules of the game Pulfresh was playing but also all the moves and countermoves. “On behalf of the next of kin?” he asked.

“There’s no next of kin. I’m the executor of his estate, according to a will he made a couple of years ago. Notice I said executor, not administrator. That means I’m not a legatee. Not that his estate amounts to more than five or ten grand.”

“Something special about those papers?”

“Well, you figure it out. My main job as Sleate’s legal counsel has been keeping him out of court the past twelve years.”

“Somebody seems to have solved that problem for you. But whoever did that cleaned out his files, except for the dust.”

Auburn took the stairs rather than the elevator down to the seventh floor. In the process he ascertained that access could be gained from the stairway to at least the top two levels without a key. The apartment unit directly below Sleate’s had been gutted to the bare concrete and was now being reframed with steel studs. Sheets of drywall, rolls of insulation, and spools of wire were piled shoulder-high in the middle of the living room.

Fernsall hadn’t been kidding when he said the carpenters had staggered back from lunch. Both were slightly lit, and they behaved as if they were auditioning for a nightclub act. Even the news that a murder had been committed that morning on the floor above didn’t put much of a damper on their clowning.

The one with a mustache like a wind-tumbled haystack assured Auburn that they probably wouldn’t have heard a cannon going off upstairs. “I wear earplugs, and my buddy’s deaf ’cause he can’t never find his earholes to put the plugs in.”

“Hey, Orrie, I can hear you running your mouth pretty good right now,” retorted his partner from the top of a ladder. “Don’t mess with me . . . this here saw is as sharp as a hammer.”

Auburn asked about the cartridge-powered nail gun.

“We don’t use no cartridges,” quipped the one on the ladder. “You have to be twenty-one to buy ’em.”

“All we got,” explained the one on the ground, “is that peenoomatic nailer over there in the corner. This here thing that looks like a Harley without no wheels is the compressor, which if it was an alligator you’d be missing an arm or a leg by now.”

Auburn could certainly not see, among a jumble of tools including several power saws and drills, anything resembling a cartridge nail gun.

They said they’d been working here since nine a.m. and had been absent from the building on their lunch break from noon to one. Although Auburn suspected the roundness of these numbers, he nonetheless recorded them as the best approximation to the truth that he was likely to get. They had heard no gunshot or loud music from above, or any other direction. They had never heard of Conrad Sleate and had never been to the top floor of the building. They had no keys to any part of the building, not even the apartment they were redoing.

As he rode down to the main level, Auburn looked at the list of tenants that Fernsall had given him. Twenty-three suspects, including Fernsall himself, at least in the sense that any one of them could easily have gained access to the eighth floor of the building and thus to Sleate’s unlocked apartment. Interviewing them all would take many hours, and background checks on all of them would cost the department well over two grand. These were upper-level decisions of the type for which he currently needed the approval of his supervisor but that, as a lieutenant, he would have to make for himself.

The last tenant to move in had been there for almost a year. Most likely the killer was someone who had gained access from outside. The disappearance of Sleate’s files suggested a victim of his vitriolic pen, maybe even someone he was blackmailing, unless the gutting of the cabinet had been a blind. In that case those papers might well be at the bottom of the trash chute, along with the weapon, as Kestrel had speculated.

Fernsall, still working in the office, informed him that the trash chute ended at a locked room in the basement, which was emptied every Thursday by a waste disposal service. He took Auburn down for a personal inspection. This being Monday, the accumulation of plastic bags, two of which had burst open on impact, was considerable. After a cursory examination, Auburn decided to leave the task of sorting this mountain of rubbish to Kestrel.

Before leaving the building he checked all four entrances. Each tenant’s apartment key unlocked the door between the outer and inner lobbies and the rear entrance from the parking lot. The two side doors were strictly fire exits, and opening them activated alarms.

From his car Auburn called headquarters to request basic information on W. R. McConnahay and Gayle Van Till, Sleate’s two visitors. According to the city directory, Weldon Russell McConnahay lived with his wife and two teenage sons in the posh Harmony Heights district, and was employed at the newspaper as assistant features editor. Van Till, single and independently wealthy, held an executive position on the local Board of Elections. No wanted notices or outstanding warrants had been posted against either of them.

Since Sleate had still been alive when Van Till had signed into the Spaulding Tower just before noon, Auburn started with her. After parking back at headquarters he hiked, with an Arctic tailwind, the block and a half to the offices of the Board of Elections. Although very little seemed to be happening there today, he was kept waiting for about twenty minutes before being admitted to a large, bare, chilly office where Ms. Van Till was punching computer keys as if she were crushing potato bugs. Without makeup or jewelry, she had the bleak, battered, indomitable look of a medical missionary on leave, or maybe a retired high-school principal.

Auburn showed identification. “I believe you had a meeting with Mr. Conrad Sleate around noon today?”

“Correction. I had an appointment with Mr. Conrad Sleate at noon today.” Ms. Van Till’s voice possessed the unsettling timbre of a dental drill with a faulty transmission.

“May I ask the nature of your business with Mr. Sleate?”

She glared at him as if he had asked her favorite flavor of ice cream. “I guess you can ask. Our business is private and I don’t see why I should discuss it with you or anybody else outside of a courtroom. Why are you asking?”

“Because Mr. Sleate was found shot to death an hour or so after you left the building.”

“Well, I didn’t shoot him,” she said, without turning a hair. She extended both hands in front of her, palms up. “Bring on your paraffin, or whatever you use nowadays to check for powder burns. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even see him.”

“Can you explain that?”

“He didn’t answer his doorbell. He didn’t answer my knock. His radio was blaring so I called him on my cell phone. I heard his phone ringing, but he didn’t answer. Exit Gayle.”

“What about last week when you went to see him? Did you get in then?”

“Sure I did. But he didn’t have his ghetto blaster cranked up then.”

“Before you went up to his apartment today, did the guard at the desk call him to tell him you were on the way?”

“Sure he did. That’s their idea of running a maximum security residence.”

“Sleate answered his phone then. Yet a few minutes later he didn’t answer when you called him on your cell phone. Didn’t it occur to you that something might have happened to him?”

“The main thing that occurred to me was that I was missing my lunch while that old muckraker was sitting in there puffing purple cigarettes and making himself deaf . . .”

Behind the harsh, jagged façade, Auburn was beginning to glimpse the outline of a lonely, vulnerable woman with a quirky sense of humor. “Did you sign out when you left?”

“Come to think of it, I didn’t. I went out the back way instead of going through the lobby again. Pretty suspicious behavior, huh?” Although she didn’t seem in the least concerned that she might be charged with murder, she did loosen up slightly as to her business with Sleate. “He was going to write a column in support of a pet project of mine. Nothing to do with the Board.”

But that was as far as she was willing to go—outside of a courtroom.

From the Board of Elections Auburn proceeded on foot to the newspaper office, this time with a headwind that made his sinuses hurt. He found W.R. McConnahay in a glass-walled cubicle dominated by a computer monitor the size of a billboard. Throughout their interview the images on the screen kept jumping from one configuration to another as editors in other cubicles made additions or changes.

The assistant features editor, portly and phlegmatic, registered his astonishment over Sleate’s death by repeatedly shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite accept the news. “That’s going to make a major change in my life,” he said. “When my present boss moved up and I inherited his position, I also acquired the duty of visiting Sleate twice a week to pick up the copy for his column. I’ve been there at ten A.M. every Monday and Thursday, winter and summer, for the past six years.”

“Isn’t it a little unusual for an editor to visit a writer at home?”

“A little. This branch of journalism has always been sort of a cottage industry. I mean, the nature writer lives and works twenty miles out in the country, the health columnist is a starving resident who puts together her stuff in the doctors’ lounge between deliveries, or autopsies . . . You get the idea. But they e-mail their copy to me.

“Sleate didn’t own a computer and he wouldn’t put anything in the mail. And he never left the building because of his health problems, which may have been mostly in his head for all I know. But the paper couldn’t afford not to play by his rules, because he kept our circulation up during the lulls between political scandals and international crises and increases in the price of gasoline. He wrote out his drafts in pencil and submitted his copy in peacock blue ink. Always as legible as print, always within two or three words of a round eight hundred, and he never missed a deadline.”

“Did he seem his usual self this morning?”

“His usual scrawny, sickly, cynical self. He may actually have managed a smile, sort of like a python with a full stomach, as I was leaving, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

“Was anybody with him in the apartment when you left?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“There’s a big cabinet in the corner next to his desk.”

“I know it well,” nodded McConnahay. “Always wide open and crammed with little bits of gossip and scandal about everybody in town.”

“When he was found dead early this afternoon, the cabinet was empty.”

McConnahay resumed his slow, persistent head shaking. “There’s material for a couple years’ worth of columns gone west. If you could put your hands on that stuff, you could whittle down your list of suspects to a couple thousand people.”

“Did he get negative feedback—threats—from the public about his columns?”

“I’m sure he did. All his mail came here, and I usually had a bundle of it to deliver to him, but I never opened any of it.”

“He lived in an apartment building with guards . . . never went outside. Did you get the idea that he was afraid of something, or somebody?”

“Absolutely not. He didn’t even lock the door of his apartment, at least when he knew I was coming, because he was too lazy to get up and let me in. Nobody scared that guy. And nobody impressed him, either. If he was presented to the president or the pope he’d say something like, ‘I’ve been following your recent career with considerable interest . . . but hardly with approval.’”

On leaving McConnahay’s office, Auburn went to the newspaper file department in the basement, where an old high-school classmate of his was in charge. For years they had carried on a sham feud, renewed at each of Auburn’s visits. As soon as Auburn appeared at the counter, the bitter raillery began.

“Hey, Auburn, you better either get your hair cut or break down and buy a hat. You look like a turkey trying to fly backwards in a typhoon.”

“You’re a real hoot, Hansen. But did you ever think how much more work you could get done down here if you’d stop putting happy dust up your nose every five minutes?”

When they had both run out of breath and inspiration, Auburn got around to requesting access to Conrad Sleate’s “Local Affairs” columns for the past several months. During the three-quarters of an hour that he spent there skimming scum and filling file cards with notes, it repeatedly occurred to him that as a lieutenant he would probably seldom have occasion to visit this dusty cavern. But his farewell to Hansen lacked none of its usual venom.

Auburn spent his last hour at the office, and three more at home, doing Internet research on tenants of Spaulding Tower and people and institutions that Sleate had assailed in recent columns. At eleven o’clock that night the local news anchor called the late gossip columnist an “investigative reporter,” which Auburn thought was about like calling a suicide bomber a selfless idealist.

Tuesday morning’s paper contained, instead of Conrad Sleate’s usual column, a terse announcement of his death and an exquisitely ambiguous eulogy, signed by W. R. McConnahay, of this “tireless seeker-out of secret shames and purveyor of painful truths.”

Shortly after morning report, Records sent Auburn a batch of background probes on the people he’d interviewed yesterday, as well as one on the slain purveyor of painful truths. As expected, the security guards at Spaulding Towers had spotless records. Both had military histories, Overbeck with the Seabees and DiPalma in the Naval Reserve. Besides her full-time job at the apartment building, DiPalma worked three evenings a week as a personal trainer and self-defense instructor at a women’s health spa.

Aaron Fernsall, who owned one-eighth of Spaulding Towers and sorted the mail, had managed retail stores and fast-food outlets with integrity, if not with conspicuous success, before undertaking his present venture. Kermit Banks and Orrin Enyeart, the comedy team who were remodeling the apartment directly below Sleate’s, owned their business, were licensed and bonded, and had been publicly honored a couple of years ago for volunteer disaster-relief work.

W. R. McConnahay, Sleate’s editor, was one of those citizens who can live in a community for decades without ever deviating far enough from the rut of normal daily existence to leave a trace on the timeline of human history. At least no one knew anything to his discredit.

Some energetic soul in Records had downloaded an intriguing piece of background information on Gayle Van Till. After reading a few lines of it, Auburn remembered with a rush the furor she had created about a year and a half ago by advocating that drivers make a practice of running yellow and even red lights when there was no cross traffic, and no police cruiser in sight.

Her argument went something like this. A driver who brakes suddenly for a yellow traffic signal risks being struck from behind by a less observant or less conscientious driver. Although guilty of no traffic offense, a person who has been rear-ended in such circumstances may be penalized for obeying the law by being marked as accident-prone.

Whether or not the police investigate the collision, and even when no insurance claim is ever filed for the necessary repairs, a record of the accident somehow finds its way into a national data bank. Automobile insurance companies pay hefty fees to gain access to those data. If you get rear-ended more than once within a given period, your insurance premiums will go up and probably stay up.

The conclusion was obvious to Van Till: It’s cheaper to take a chance on getting a ticket by running a yellowish red light, especially when traveling a high-volume highway that’s crossed by a deserted rural side road, than it is to brake and risk paying the penalty in inflated insurance premiums for the rest of your driving years.

As Auburn had good reason to know, Van Till held strong convictions about the privacy and confidentiality of personal information. Her real purpose was to promote legislation prohibiting the collection and transmission of data on innocent parties in traffic collisions. But her strategy backfired. The insurance lobby, augmented by the data-bankers, had thus far squashed any hope of legal control of the practice. That left Van Till looking like an irresponsible crank campaigning for wholesale violation of well-established traffic laws. Although severely censured by police authorities and even threatened with official muzzling, she stubbornly continued her crusade through media blitzes, largely at her own expense.

Auburn went through the stack of file cards he’d filled with notes at the newspaper file room yesterday. Sleate had commented on privacy issues twice in recent weeks, but it wasn’t altogether clear that he agreed with Van Till’s position, or she with his.

While Auburn was updating his computer file on the Sleate murder, Stamaty phoned from his office in the courthouse across the street. “Another strike in the county typing pool, Cy,” he announced. “The report Doc Valentine dictated last night on Sleate’s autopsy may not exist in hard copy until after we both retire. I thought I’d call and give you the high spots.”

Auburn picked up a pen. “Ready when you are.”

“One hollow-point thirty-two-caliber lead pellet plowed through Sleate’s brain stem like an eggbeater. No powder tattooing or scorching of the skin or hair, but lots of emphysema.”

“Are you trying to tell me this guy with a hole in the side of his head smoked himself to death?”

“Pathology lesson, Cy. We’re talking subcutaneous emphysema, not pulmonary. Pockets of gas under the skin around the wound plus no powder marks equals a point-blank shooting with an air gun.”

During the ensuing brief silence, Auburn remembered Gayle Van Till blithely offering her hands to be tested for powder traces.

“That’s really the whole story,” said Stamaty. “I’ll send you a copy whenever the pool thaws out. The bullet’s on the way to the state. Lab reports are pending.”

Auburn went to books and the Internet to refresh his memory about air guns. They were highly favored for target competition because their kick was less erratic than that of a firearm. Also, though far from silent, they weren’t nearly as noisy as weapons with explosive charges. They had never been popular for either hunting or homicide, nor were they even subject to legal regulation in most jurisdictions. But although air rifles and air pistols usually took ammunition smaller than .32 caliber, accidents with them often proved lethal.

Around eleven that morning Kestrel sent him a preliminary report on the investigation of the crime scene, including the empty apartment across the hall and the trash room in the basement. Kestrel had found no weapon, air-powered or otherwise, and no usable latent fingerprints. The even distribution of dust in the vacant apartment made it unlikely that anyone had entered it for several weeks. Although, with one exception, the trash room contained nothing but trash, the catalog of it filled seven pages.

The exception was a nearly new wooden pencil that Kestrel had found lying loose among the plastic bags at the bottom of the chute. It was of the same premium brand as the half dozen pencils lying on Sleate’s desk, and like them, it had been sharpened with a knife. Unlike them, it bore teeth marks.

Teeth marks. As often happened, Auburn couldn’t decide whether Kestrel had given him too much information or too little. He called the lab.

“What’s the deal with this chewed pencil?” he asked.

“Not chewed,” said Kestrel, as if Auburn had misquoted an article of the Constitution. “Bitten—once. Somebody held it clamped in his teeth with the eraser outside.”

“Or her teeth.”

“No. Unless maybe a female gorilla. This biter had a big mouth with big teeth in it.”

“Any idea what this female gorilla was doing with one of Sleate’s pencils in her mouth?”

“Not my field,” replied Kestrel, without a trace of humor. Humor wasn’t his field either.

When Auburn had finished putting all the available data into some kind of order, he sketched out a timetable of events yesterday morning at Spaulding Towers.

The carpenters started working on the seventh floor at nine A.M.

W. R. McConnahay arrived for his regular appointment with Sleate at ten and signed out at ten thirty-five.

At a quarter to twelve, Van Till arrived for a meeting with Sleate that, according to her, never took place.

DiPalma saw her leaving the building at noon, around the time the carpenters broke for lunch.

The carpenters came back at one o’clock.

At ten past one DiPalma, starting her regular rounds on the top floor, found Sleate dead.

Assuming that McConnahay had really left Sleate alive, that Overbeck had really talked to him just before Van Till went upstairs, that Van Till had really failed to gain access to the apartment, and that DiPalma’s story was strictly true, the murder of Conrad Sleate must have taken place while Van Till was on her way up in the elevator. A pretty narrow window of time.

Every Tuesday all Public Safety officers with the rank of lieutenant or above vanished for a protracted lunchtime conference with the chief. Auburn caught Savage just minutes before he had to leave for the conference.

Over the years they had evolved a comfortable and efficient working relationship that enabled them to communicate without waste of words. Because time was short they stood in the doorway of Savage’s office instead of sitting down. Auburn briefly reviewed the salient features of the case.

“Given the security setup over there,” said Savage, “this is obviously not a simple robbery. Whoever got to Sleate had an interest in grabbing his files as well as in snuffing him. Which is why I like your idea of blackmail. The killer didn’t have time to sort through the files to find whatever he wanted to destroy, so he took everything with him in order to go through it at his leisure. You think he searched the whole place?”

Auburn nodded. “So does Kestrel.”

“Which means he may not have found what he was looking for. The stuff from that cabinet must have made a mighty big bundle.”

“Which nobody saw him walk out with.”

“Maybe it’s still in the building someplace. Better check those other empty units. But searching the occupied apartments is out of the question because no judge this side of the Rio Grande would issue that kind of a warrant.”

Savage signified the end of their meeting by switching off his office lights. “Keep working the motive angle and look for a break in the security over there—somebody with a key they shouldn’t have, somebody posing as a delivery person. But since that other apartment on the top level apparently hadn’t been entered, we can probably postpone calling in Batman and Spider-man for questioning.”

As Auburn was on the way back to his office, a thought struck him out of the blue—Why had Savage never nudged him in the direction of promotion, much less groomed him for it? Was it because he didn’t want to lose control of a docile and dependable flunky, or because he just didn’t see Auburn as officer material?

Batman, Spider-man . . .

Auburn needed to clear his head of vanishing bulky bundles, narrow windows of time, and female gorillas that bit pencils once. He accessed a computer site that presented, in varying degrees of detail, a composite satellite view of the entire surface of planet Earth. As he scrolled down on Spaulding Tower, the focus improved steadily until he reached an altitude of two hundred sixty meters above street level.

The photo on the screen, dated three years back, showed a substantial structure resembling a greenhouse on Conrad Sleate’s portion of the roof. Auburn phoned Aaron Fernsall.

“That’s exactly what it was,” said Fernsall. “A small greenhouse. A tenant had it built out there before my time. Sleate never used it, and a couple of years ago a storm kicked the daylights out of it.”

“I saw some pipes. Was this place heated in the wintertime?”

“Oh, no, nothing that fancy. Just a cold-water line. The runoff went into the gutter and downspout along with the rain.”

During lunch Auburn mulled over the implications of this latest line of inquiry. Although at first it had seemed to him to have no possible bearing on the murder of Conrad Sleate, a vague hunch was now trying to mature into a firm conviction. When he got back to his office from the canteen he found that the sky had turned as dark as if the sun had already set, and the wind was rattling the window in its frame. But instead of abandoning the expedition he had by now decided on, he just added a high-powered flashlight and a windbreaker with a hood to the list of necessary equipment.

The guard on the desk at Spaulding Tower Apartments was a stranger to Auburn, a finicky stickler for law and order with graying hair. Even after showing identification, Auburn had to explain why he had turned up at the apartment building at that particular moment in grubby civvies with a tool carryall slung over his shoulder. And when he had made the desired explanation, the guard informed him with unmistakable satisfaction that Sleate’s apartment door now had a lock bar on it.

Auburn assured him that he had brought along a key to the lock in question. “Is Mr. Fernsall in this afternoon?”

“I’ll check.” While the guard was phoning, Auburn glanced at the register. Only two visitors had signed in since J. C. Pulfresh yesterday afternoon. With considerable effort he deciphered the upside-down signatures and with no effort at all he memorized the names.

Fernsall was in this afternoon, and all upset about the adverse publicity Sleate’s murder had created. “Not much of an endorsement for our security arrangements,” he groused.

“So have you replaced your guard staff?”

Fernsall looked blank for a moment. “No, no, this is just DiPalma’s day off. If Chilcomb’s at the desk, Overbeck is patroling somewhere.” He wiggled a hand in the direction of Auburn’s bag. “What, uh . . . ?”

“Just an idea I had about that greenhouse. The remains of it, anyway. I have a key to the lock bar the other officer put on the door of Eight B, but if the door is locked as well . . .”

Fernsall called Overbeck’s cell phone and arranged for him to meet Auburn on the top floor. “I’d come up with you myself but I’ve got the heating people coming to look at the boiler. Again.”

When the elevator shuddered to a stop at the eighth level, Auburn found Overbeck waiting for him in the corridor in an alpaca jacket of vaguely military cut. Before they entered Sleate’s apartment Auburn had a question for the guard.

“When you called Sleate yesterday to announce that Gayle Van Till was here to see him, did you actually talk to him?”

“Yes, sir. Otherwise I wouldn’t have sent her up.”

“What’s the possibility that it was somebody other than Sleate on the line?”

Overbeck’s only reaction to the novelty of the idea was a longish silence before he answered. “Actually, I guess it could have been somebody else. All he said was ‘Yes?’ when he answered and ‘Okay’ or something like that when I told him his visitor was here. I talked to him on the phone almost every day because he had a lot of visitors, but, like I told you yesterday, I never saw him face to face. Yes, I’d have to agree it could have been somebody imitating his voice.”

Overbeck unlocked the door to Sleate’s apartment and Auburn disconnected the security bar that Kestrel had left there. The heat in the apartment had been turned down, or maybe off, and the tang of stale smoke seemed more pungent than ever in the dank, chilly atmosphere. Now vacant and lighted only by the lowering, overcast sky, the whole place wore a forlorn air.

Auburn put down his bag and unbolted the door that led out to the roof.

“You going to need any help out there?” asked Overbeck.

“Possibly. There’s a piece of pipe out there I want to get loose.”

“Pipe?”

“Black pipe. Two inch ID.” He turned back the flap of his tool tote and pulled out two pipe wrenches, a large screwdriver, and a flashlight.

“One winter I worked construction,” he said. “One godforsaken, record-setting winter. When it got too cold to work on the roof I went inside and helped the plumbers. I didn’t learn much, but I do know that you can’t run water through black pipe.” He lifted a propane torch out of the bag and laid it on the floor.

Overbeck asked the obvious question.

“The pipe is painted black,” explained Auburn, “to show that it’s iron instead of galvanized steel. It’s okay for gas or compressed air, but if you use it for water or steam, it rusts through in less than a year. So why is there a big piece of black pipe out there where there used to be an unheated greenhouse?”

He opened the roof door to the rush and squawk of the wind. Overbeck followed him out to the place where a few weathered planks bolted to the brickwork represented almost the only traces of the greenhouse. Clamped to the wall between them were a few odd lengths of pipe, including a black one a yard long and as big around as a man’s wrist. Auburn tackled this with one of his wrenches, but quickly found that it wasn’t threaded into anything at either end. All he needed to free it from its clamps was a twist or two of the screwdriver.

Fitted snugly inside it was a cylinder of clear hard plastic. Even without using the flashlight they could see that it was crammed with papers—handwritten letters, yellowed newspaper clippings, photocopies of legal documents, and, at one end, a bundle of fifty- and one-hundred dollar bills.

An ominous metallic click, clearly audible above the whistling of the wind, made Auburn look swiftly back over his shoulder. Funny he hadn’t noticed before what a large mouth and large teeth Overbeck had. The pistol he’d just pulled out of his jacket and primed or cocked looked like a prop from a James Bond thriller, with a grip like a heavy-duty cordless drill and a muzzle like a flamethrower.

Overbeck’s left hand took possession of the plastic tube while, brandishing the weapon with unmistakable intent, he drove Auburn back toward the low parapet. “Like they say, you want to watch that first step.”

Auburn’s windbreaker was zipped up to his chin. In the three quarters of a second it would take him to unzip it and draw his own weapon, Overbeck could plug him, bulldoze him over the parapet, or both. He had a fleeting vision of a velvet-lined case containing a pair of lieutenant’s bars being presented to his grieving parents, along with the flag that had covered his casket at the funeral attended by his comrades-in-arms in full dress uniform . . .

In desperate circumstances such as these, the self-defense instructors at the Police Academy had urged their students to “unleash the killer instinct that’s inside every one of us.” Auburn had long doubted that he possessed such a thing as a killer instinct. But since he didn’t care to pick up a case of subcutaneous emphysema and all the inconveniences that went along with it, he now put his mind seriously to the business of disarming and disabling his assailant.

Although six sizes bigger than Auburn, Overbeck was clumsy, almost oafish, and like many before him he overestimated the advantage that a handgun gave him. Conrad Sleate, elderly and unsuspecting, had been an easy target. But it’s hard to aim a pistol accurately at a vital spot when one’s opponent is zigging and zagging and making sudden, violent, painful jabs with a large screwdriver at one’s own vital spots, including the eyes and the trachea. When Overbeck threw up his gun arm to fend off another swipe at his eyes, it was the last mistake he made. In an instant Auburn had both hands locked around that right wrist, and by hurling himself violently forward he knocked his opponent off balance. A pellet escaped from the chamber of the air pistol with a sinister ping and took off for the clouds. Overbeck crashed heavily against the edge of the parapet behind him.

By the time his vision cleared he was looking into the muzzle of a Smith and Wesson .38, which had something noisier than compressed air behind its six brass slugs.

A search of the utility shed behind Gordon Overbeck’s house uncovered a large canvas mailbag containing a pair of rubber gloves and apparently the entire contents of Sleate’s file cabinet—contracts and other legal documents, checkbooks, bankbooks, and a considerable quantity of cash, as well as a whole library of tittle-tattle, gossip, and scandal.

The bite marks on the pencil Kestrel had recovered from the bottom of the trash chute perfectly matched Overbeck’s robust dentition.

By the time Overbeck had been indicted by the grand jury and scheduled for trial, the city prosecutor had worked out a highly plausible scenario of his movements on the day Sleate had died. Between ten thirty-five that morning, the time McConnahay signed out of the building, and eleven, when Overbeck’s hour of patrol ended, the guard entered Sleate’s apartment on some pretext and shot him. Wearing rubber gloves, he emptied the file cabinet into the mailbag and did as much searching as time permitted.

When Gayle Van Till arrived for her appointment around noon, Overbeck, by that time covering the desk, only pretended to get clearance from Sleate before sending her up. She found Sleate’s door locked and his radio blaring to the max. During Overbeck’s next turn at patrol, between noon and one, he returned to the apartment, finished searching, removed Sleate’s papers in the mailbag, and dropped it down the trash chute for later transfer to his car.

Before leaving the apartment he stowed his gloves and probably his weapon in the bag. Rather than risk leaving fingerprints on the inside door hardware, he picked up one of Sleate’s pencils and, holding it in his teeth, used the eraser end to open and close the door. After repeating this maneuver with the hatch to the trash chute, he let the pencil drop from his mouth before the hatch closed. In recovering the canvas bag he apparently thought retrieving the pencil was an unnecessary waste of time.

Although this sequence of events fitted the known facts, the prosecution were unable to establish a motive for Overbeck. An analysis of Sleate’s papers, particularly the cache of blackmail materials contained in the piece of black pipe, disclosed nothing that had any connection with Overbeck. The obvious conclusion was that he had been hired to kill Sleate and purloin his papers.

In hopes of inducing him to finger the person or persons for whom he had acted, the assistant city prosecutor urged plea bargaining. During several conferences with police authorities and the prosecutor Overbeck was persuaded that he could expect nothing less than a life sentence. Eventually he cracked and disclosed who had hired him.

Some might have wondered, over the years, why Conrad Sleate, self-appointed custodian of public morals for the community, had never so much as mentioned the most notorious of local racketeers, swindlers, and all-around rotten eggs, Steve “Sticker” Preiss.

Overbeck supplied the answer.

Preiss had been paying the gossip columnist handsomely not to reveal certain incriminating information about him. Then one day he decided to pay a hit man to erase Sleate once and for all and take possession of his famous files. With the same resourcefulness that had kept him on the right side of prison bars throughout a life of crime, Preiss recruited a venal and amoral assassin whose occupational resumé enabled him to penetrate the security arrangements at Spaulding Tower by becoming part of them. Overbeck then proceeded to overcome Sleate’s habitual reserve by bringing his mail up from the rack in the lobby when he made his late morning rounds.

By the last day of Overbeck’s trial, Preiss himself was finally on the wrong side of the bars. Auburn was called back to the witness stand three times to clarify points of evidence. The prosecutor kept forgetting and calling him “Sergeant,” even though for this court appearance he was in uniform, which now included a brand-new set of lieutenant’s bars.
Copyright © 2012 John H. Dirckx

MARKET DAY

KENNETH WISHNIA | 2667 words

It was market day, and the streets were alive with hawkers of cheese, fruit, and even a few cuts of meat. The sky was clear and bright.

Karl Hoffmann stuffed the papers in a leather pouch and snapped it shut. Tiny dust particles swirled around him as the gray light filtered down through the floorboards above. He tried to button his shirt, but his hands were clammy and the buttons were thin and brittle. After all, the shirt had once belonged to someone with much smaller hands.

His wife Sofia reminded him there was still sweetness in the world when she took his hands in hers, warming them with her touch, and completed the delicate task of buttoning up his shirt.

He held her close, breathing in the scent of her hair along with the musty odor of damp cement that permeated their underground hiding place. He was still amazed by the strength that his young bride had shown during the past few months, doing everything possible to keep the two of them together while carrying their future child.

He wanted to hold her all day long and never let go, but the Dominican Father, l’Abbé Chalumeau, had come by that morning with more than the usual package of books concealed beneath the folds of his cassock so that the Hoffmanns would have something to read during the long daylight hours.

“I don’t mind the Flaubert and Appolinaire, but must you read Zola?” said the Father, complaining about Karl’s preference for a series of novels by that author, who was known for his fiercely anticlerical stances. They had chuckled over it for a moment, then the Abbé handed Karl the thick envelope and told him he had to take it to Madame Decroux’s place immediately, even though it was the middle of day and the sun was shining.

Less than twenty minutes later he was kissing Sofia goodbye and climbing the steps to the alley. As he was unlocking the bicycle, Madame Crenier stuck her head out the kitchen window.

“Monsieur Duffau!” she whispered hoarsely. “What are you doing out at this hour?”

He was carrying false papers that said his name was Georges Duffau, who lived at 33, Rue Diderot, Clermont-Ferrand.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It must be an emergency of some kind.”

“Well, be careful. I hear les poulets are going door-to-door asking a lot of questions.”

Just as long as they’re not getting any answers, thought Karl.

“Yes, I’ll be careful. Thanks for looking out for us,” he told her. Madame Crenier was much more than their landlady.

Karl swung his leg over the bicycle and pedaled away. He kept to the main streets because the side streets were crawling with patrols that were turning the factory workers’ neighborhoods upside-down searching for something or someone.

The last time there was a general roundup, their contacts had warned them in time and they were able to flee to the woods and hide out for a few days. But the next time?

Karl and Sofia had both heard the plane flying low over the city the night before. They knew it was one of theirs because they heard the Germans shooting at it. It must have been dropping supplies—tools, explosives, medicine—anything that supported the Resistance.

And now les poulets were scouring the city, looking for any kind of contraband, including books.

Madame Hermine, the fruit seller, scowled at Karl as he pedaled by, perhaps because Sofia always picked over her perfectly stacked pyramids of apples and plums in order to find the slightly bruised fruit so they could knock a few centimes off the price on the blackboard.

It was the darkest part of the war for them. In what seemed like a few short months, the Nazis had overrun half of Europe, from the coast of Brittany to the outskirts of Stalingrad. But there were pockets of resistance, especially in the broad swath of France run by a traitorous marshal who had no particular objection to working hand-in-hand with the Nazis.

As he reached the edge of the city, two German soldiers ordered him to stop. The dark-haired one lazily pointed his rifle at Karl’s gut while the blond-haired one held out his hand like a busy ticket taker at the local cinema.

“Vos papiers,” said the blond one in heavily accented French.

Karl handed over his identity papers.

The blond one flipped through the pages, turned to his comrade and said, in Swabian German dialect, “They could be handing me toilet paper and I wouldn’t know the difference.”

Karl had to press his lips tightly together to keep from laughing. He couldn’t let on that he understood German because it would raise too many questions. The soldier returned his identity papers without even looking at him closely, and waved him on.

Karl breathed more freely as he pedaled away from the city, which was nestled in the mountains of central France, toward the narrow lanes in the shadow of the five thousand–foot high Puy de Dôme. Even his neck muscles seemed to relax as he left the rigid cityscape behind for the glorious chaos of a forest in the Auvergne. The branches echoed with the sounds of birds beneath an azure sky just like in a poem—that is, if anyone was still writing poetry.

Sofia sometimes complained bitterly that they had been running for years, although they had never had to wear the hateful yellow stars because they left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power. It had taken them six years to learn how to speak French like natives.

But when the war broke out, the gendarmes rounded up all the undesirables and sent Karl to a French prison camp for being a German national. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the French authorities to realize that this Aryan-looking man with the hatchet nose was actually a German Jew—hardly the same thing as being a German—with a degree in French literature from the Sorbonne, and they released him on the condition that he join the French army as an interpreter. He enlisted on the spot, but when the French army was defeated in six weeks, he was captured and sent to a German prison camp for being a French national—and it was a good thing they believed he was French.

But those were the early days of the war, when the Germans were still trying to win over the people of the French colonies by releasing all the Algerian and Moroccan prisoners of war, claiming that Germany’s war with France did not involve them. So Karl and a few of his comrades wrapped white bath towels around their heads, smeared their faces and hands with axle grease, and trooped out of the prison with the other Moroccans, right under the guards’ noses because, he supposed, one black face looked just like another to the Master Race.

The memory of that moment brought a smile to his lips as he approached the turnoff to Madame Decroux’s farmhouse. It was almost too absurd to be believed, and of course, it would never happen like that today, not with—

His heart froze.

A Nazi staff car was parked in front of the farmhouse, and a high-level officer in a crisp black uniform was questioning Madame Decroux. The other man, the one in the dusty gray overcoat, must have been the officer’s driver.

Karl thought of turning back, but it was too late now. They had seen him, and he had no choice but to keep pedaling toward them and hope that the unwritten story of the next few minutes didn’t end in a puddle of red ink.

The kommandant studied Karl as his skinny tires crunched on the gravel. Karl swallowed and tried to breathe normally, but what man has ever been able to breathe normally while being closely watched by a hawk-eyed fascist with a Luger harnessed to his waist?

Karl’s cover story was that he was the math tutor for Madame Decroux’s children. He even had a set of blue-lined notebooks to support this, their yellowing pages filled with second-grade arithmetic problems. But when the kommandant asked for Karl’s papers, he studied the birth date and family information with great interest.

“What faith are you?” said the kommandant.

“Catholic, of course.” It said so right on his identity papers.

“Not one of those Protestant Huguenots of the region?”

“We are lifelong Catholics, Herr Kommandant.”

“And your father is Jacques Duffau, the bootmaker on the Rue La Bruyère?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful. I could use a new set of boots,” said the kommandant, whose boots were a little scuffed, but otherwise appeared to be in perfectly good condition. “Let’s go pay him a visit.”

Karl’s knees turned to jelly. His new identity had been created using the names and dates on the birth certificate of a child who had died at the age of one month more than twenty-five years ago. He had no idea if his surrogate father was still alive, and if so, if the bootmaker’s shop was still at the same address, or if he could even find the address easily, and, if he somehow managed to clear the first three hurdles, if the man who was supposed to be his father would figure out what was going on quickly enough and play along, or denounce him on the spot.

“Right now?” said Karl.

“That’s not a problem, is it?”

“No, no, of course not.”

“We don’t really have time, Herr Kommandant,” said the driver. Karl’s heart leapt at the slim chance that his voyage into the unknown might be called off.

“Certainly we have time.”

“But the colonel wanted me to have the car back by five so I could wash it in time for tonight’s gala. It’s a complete disgrace.” The driver’s overcoat and goggles were coated with dust from the provincial roads, and his boots were spattered with mud. The car was in roughly the same condition.

“That can wait,” said the kommandant.

“But the orders are—”

“I’m giving the orders right now, Corporal.”

“Yes, my Kommandant. But that address, Rue La Bruyère, it’s all the way on the other side of the city—”

They went back and forth like this for several minutes until finally the kommandant prevailed. He ordered Karl to get into the front seat next to the driver. Karl could barely feel his legs as he climbed aboard thinking, This is it. I made it this far. Now we’re going to be separated forever. Goodbye, Sofia. Tell our child I love him.

“Smell that?” said the kommandant, patting the seats. “That’s good German leather.”

“Is that what the smell is?” Karl murmured.

“Let’s see if your French leather is as good.”

But when the driver turned the key, the engine made a noise like a coffee grinder, and refused to turn over.

Karl couldn’t help hoping that by some miracle the car wasn’t going to start. But what were the odds of that? How many times had he wished for the opposite, gently coaxing a reluctant motor to life, and been rewarded for his efforts? A well-maintained car almost always started if the driver knew what he was doing.

The driver gave it more gas, but the engine kept grinding until it sounded like a wire brush on a washboard. Then he switched off the ignition disgustedly, got out of the car and opened the hood. A few minutes passed while a slow trickle of sweat pooled in the small of Karl’s back, which turned cold before the driver gave up and admitted that he couldn’t fix the problem.

“We’ll have to send for a mechanic.”

Karl got out of the car, his undershirt damp with perspiration, calculating how long it would take them to get a mechanic out to this isolated farmhouse, diagnose the problem, and possibly fix it. And he allowed himself to hope that by then it would be too late in the day for the kommandant to indulge in his taste for a fine pair of handmade leather boots.

The kommandant barked an order, and the driver popped open the staff car’s enormous trunk, revealing a stripped-down motorcycle. The Nazis were nothing if not well prepared. The kommandant had Karl help the driver lift the motorcycle out of the trunk and set it on the gravel. Karl agreed, wondering why he was helping them to speed his own demise. But they couldn’t possibly expect to fit three people on this, could they?

The driver parked his rear end on the motorcycle’s black leather seat, started up the engine with a diesel-fueled roar, and smiled for the first time since Karl had laid eyes on him.

“Some other time then,” the kommandant promised.

“Yes. Some other time.” Karl nodded obligingly.

The kommandant climbed on the back of the motorcycle and the driver gunned the motor. The motorcycle lurched forward, turned sharply to follow the curved drive, then shot off down the road, spraying dust and gravel behind them.

“Mon Dieu, that was close,” said Madame Decroux.

“What on earth were they doing here?”

“They were looking for me,” said a voice from behind.

Karl turned. A man stood in the doorway to the barn wearing a pair of coveralls that were streaked with dirt and dust, and Karl knew right away that he was staring at the pilot from the downed airplane just as surely as the Nazis would have known it.

“Captain Isnard,” said the pilot, introducing himself.

“Georges Duffau.” They both knew his name was false, and as they shook hands, Karl saw the partially stripped copper wires in Captain Isnard’s other hand.

“Let’s not stand here in plain sight, shall we?” said the captain.

They went into the farmhouse and sat down to a cup of weak tea and day-old bread with a thin layer of jam. Captain Isnard explained that he had been hiding in the hayloft and had seen everything through a crack in the siding. Even from that vantage point, he could tell that something wasn’t right, so he crept down the old ladder and crawled nearly twenty-five feet across open terrain, slid under the staff car and ripped out a couple of wires, then crawled back to the barn. The pilot had risked his life for the sake of a complete stranger.

“They would have shot you on the spot if they’d caught you,” said Karl.

The pilot shrugged. “You’d have done the same for me, right?”

For a moment Karl was speechless, overcome by emotions he hadn’t felt in months as a surge of warmth filled his chest—a resurgence of faith in his fellow man, resistance, and survival, and a renewed sense that this world might still be worth fighting for.

Eventually he did his duty and delivered the papers, and climbed back on the bicycle.

“Vive la France!” his comrades called out. Karl returned their salute, and a minute later he was on his way, pedaling back to the city, perhaps never to see the brave pilot again.

The moist forest floor was teeming with renewed life, the birds were gliding toward the horizon on an invisible updraft, and even the moss growing on the crumbling walls around the sad-looking graveyard hinted that as long as there is life, all is not lost.

But when he got back to the street where they had once found sanctuary, two columns of Vichy police were rousting Jews from the basements and garrets with the help of Madame Hermine, the fruit peddler. A small group of detainees huddled together, their faces pale and drawn in the late afternoon sun. Sofia was among them.

The landlady cursed Madame Hermine and the others for collaborating with the oppressors. “Vous-êtes pire que les Boches!” [*]

His first thoughts were for the future of his family. Oddly enough, his second thoughts were for the books they had left behind. Who would read them when they were gone?

Sofia was looking at him, trying to communicate something with her eyes. Did she expect him to abandon her and keep fighting for the cause of freedom, or stay by her side for the good of their child? There was no time to think. He had to act now.

In the end, Karl joined his young wife because he had faith that wherever they were going, at least they would be together.
Copyright © 2012 Kenneth Wishnia
[*] You’re worse than the Germans. Author’s Note: This story is dedicated to the memory of Konrad Bieber, and to all those who died so that we might live. Each day is a struggle to be worthy of their sacrifice.

The Lineup

BY LINE ABSENT
| 187 words

JOHN C. BOLAND’S pseudonymous novel Long Pig, by James L. Ross, was nominated for a Shamus Award for best P.I. novel in the paperback original category.

SHELLEY COSTA is the author of You Cannoli Die Once, the first book in a new cozy mystery series, published by Simon and Schuster Pocket Books.

JOHN H. DIRCKX is the author of many stories published by AHMM featuring Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn.

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN’S latest books are The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (Tyrus Books), a collection of stories and essays, and Burning Midnight, featuring Detroit P.I. Amos Walker (Forge).

2012 Shamus Nominee STEVEN GORE is the author of the new thriller Power Blind (HaperCollins).

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

I. J. PARKER’S novels set in medieval Japan are now available in electronic format through Amazon, including The Hollow Reed trilogy and Akitada and the Way of Justice, a collection of stories that have previously appeared in AHMM, including the Shamus Award winner “Akitada’s First Case.”

BOB TIPPEE is the editor of Oil & Gas Journal. His last story for AHMM was “Delicate Balance” (Nov. 1995).

KENNETH WISHNIA is the author of The Fifth Servant (William Morrow), which was an Indie Notable selection. PM Press is reissuing the first two novels of his Filomena Buscarsela mystery series.

MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH

BY LINE ABSENT
| 150 words

Copyright © 2012 sashagala / Shutterstock.com

New Wine in Old Bottles

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 “November 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.

BOOKED & PRINTED

ROBERT C. HAHN | 1151 words

A trip to the Mediterranean promises romance, sunny islands, good food and drink—and in this month’s selections, murder. The many cultures that rim the wine-dark sea lend color and spice to investigations on the Greek island of Tinos, in southern Italy, and in Gibraltar and Tangier.

Jeffrey Siger’s Target: Tinos (Poisoned Pen, $24.95) is the fourth to feature Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis, now head of Greece’s special crimes division. Kaldis is that rare creature, an incorruptible policeman in a very corrupt force, one who is willing to bend or break rules to get results and can wield force or reason with equal panache. Political minefields are an occupational hazard in Greece and Kaldis is adept at avoiding them, despite the best efforts of others to drop him into their center.

Tinos is a small island, just three times the size of Manhattan, with a resident population of about nine thousand. But it is the home of the famous Church of Panagia Evangelistria church, site of the miraculous icon of Virgin Mary, and the destination of many pilgrimages over the centuries.

The story begins with the execution-style murder of two men, who are found chained together and burned in their vehicle. A nearby note proclaiming “Revenge or Death” has disturbing echoes of Greece’s national motto: “Freedom or Death.” When the victims are identified and discovered to be tsigani (gypsies), Kaldis comes under political pressure to call it a clan-motivated killing and presume the killers have left the country.

With his wedding to the beautiful Lila Vardi, the pride of one of Greece’s oldest and wealthiest families, less than a week away, Kaldis is told to close the case before the wedding. With the help of Tassos Stamatos, chief homicide inspector for the Cyclades, Kaldis locates the brother of the victims in Athens, who tells them a strange tale about their clan being offered money to move to Tinos but not to cause any trouble there. Then a tense meeting with another gang leader brings word of a secret plot to rob the Panagia Evangelistria.

When Kaldis and his crew eventually get to Tinos, things heat up even more as they talk to islanders and learn about a mysterious man known as the “Shepherd” who pays very good money to incomers from the mainland so long as they have a job and stay out of trouble. But those who talk end up dead or disappeared.

Siger has cooked up a plot where not only the identity of the bad guys but also their ultimate aim remain in doubt until the end. Siger makes the most of Greek history and customs as well as the island’s rustic geography and unusual inhabitants. But tying all the elements together is the very intriguing investigator, Andreas Kaldis.

Conor Fitzgerald’s The Namesake (Bloomsbury, $25) is the third to feature Commissario Alec Blume, an American-born investigator based in Rome, who is an anomaly not simply because of his American birth but also because in a system both corrupt and highly politicized, he is neither. His third case begins when an innocent actuary named Matteo Arconti is kidnapped in Milan and executed before his body is dumped in Rome as a direct message and insult to someone who shares the victim’s name: Magistrate Matteo Arconti.

Magistrate Arconti tells Blume that he believes it’s his attempt to exert pressure on a mafia family called the Ndrangheta by approaching the wife of Agazio Curmaci that resulted in the execution of the other Arconti. Curmaci helps operate the family’s interests in Germany while his wife and son continue to live in his native Calabria.

Arconti attempts to recruit Blume but suffers a seizure in the process, and Blume makes a quick decision that sets him on a collision path with the Ndrangheta and, at times, his own conscience, as he attempts to bait Curmaci into returning to Italy where he is not protected by his German hosts.

Further complications ensue, including the unauthorized appearance of a mysterious German agent Winfried Weissman in Italy—a cause for concern as neither the Italians or the Germans are sure what Weissman’s mission is.

Fitzgerald’s story gains strength from his treatment of mafia families as highly structured organizations with their own rigid moral codes that co-exist easily with their willingness to commit horrendous crimes. Commissario Blume is dogged, patient, and self-reliant to a fault, as he battles both criminals and Italy’s system of government and law enforcement.

SHADOW OF THE ROCK (Bloomsbury, $25), Thomas Mogford’s debut novel, features Gibraltar lawyer Spike Sanguinetti, a tax specialist, taking on a totally different problem when an old friend, Solomon Hassan, is accused of murder in Tangiers. Shadow of the Rock doesn’t feature a lawman swimming against the tide of corruption but rather lawyer who has no experience with criminal law reluctantly becoming involved with a murder case.

Hassan tells Spike that he was seen drinking and arguing with a girl at a Tangier beach bar shortly before she was murdered and left lying on the deserted beach. The girl was his boss’s step-daughter. When Hassan learned that he would be arrested he grabbed his passport and managed to flee from Tangiers to Gibraltar.

Spike agrees to help Hassan only if he agrees to surrender his passport and turn himself in to Gibraltar authorities. Spike then agrees to represent Hassan to try to prevent his extradition to Tangiers—a decision that leads Spike to visit Tangiers and Hassan’s employer, Dunetech.

It doesn’t take long for Spike to realize that Hassan has omitted telling him a great many details about his relations with the murdered woman, Esperanza. Dunetech officials Nadeer Ziyad and security head Toby Riddell offer little help but explain Hassan’s role in the eco-friendly company promising to bring solar energy and new wealth to the entire country.

Spike encounters a disorienting blend of blandishments and cooperation from Dunetech and government officials alike, while at the same time his attempts to learn more about Hassan and Esperanza’s last night in Tangiers leads only to dead alleys. A trip to the Sundowner Club, for instance, the bar where Hassan and Esperanza argued, in turn leads Spike to a beautiful Bedouin woman named Zahra that prompts an attempt to kill one or both of them.

Spike is forced into a world of intrigue where much more than his client’s guilt or innocence is at stake, and he must quickly learn how to survive while surrounded by desert sharks in Mogford’s very promising debut.
Copyright © 2012 Robert C. Hahn

ALL POINTS BULLETIN: AHMM and EQMM are happy to welcome you to their new homes in the blogosphere: www.trace-evidence.net and www.some thingisgoingtohappen.net. • PBS premieres two new Masterpiece Mystery! programs: “Endeavour” and “Inspector Lewis” (available on DVD this summer). • Representatives from Dell’s four fiction titles will appear at the Brooklyn Book Festival, NYC’s largest free literary event, for author signings, giveaways, subscription deals, writers’ guidelines, and more. www.brooklynbookfestival.org. • Fall classes at the Crime Fiction Academy, the first ongoing program dedicated exclusively to crime writing in the United States, begin this September. More information available at www.centerforfiction.org/crimefiction.

THE STORY THAT WON
PERFECT JUSTICE
JOANN CORMACI | 276 words

The May Mysterious Photograph contest was won by JoAnn Cormaci of Hancock, Maine. Honorable mentions go to Lowell Bergeron of Iowa, Louisiana; Wayne Savicki of Wyandotte, Michigan; Brian Spencer of Aptos, California; Joe Adams of Burnsville, Minnesota; Patrick Harrington of Needham, Massachusetts; B. P. Gilewitz of Inverness, Florida; Dennis W. Allen of Garland, Texas; and Bill Iles of Danville, California.

The Newsprint, May 16th, Personal ad:

Missing, presumed stolen, Golden

Retriever, family heartbroken.

Reward for safe return. 555-5564.

“Sammie, that’s it! You shredded our couch, ate a hole in the wall, and scratched our furniture, all in three days! When Meg and I come back from our day on the boat, you’re outta here pal!”

“Yeah, you do that pal, but right now I’m enjoying your lunch of ham and cheese on rye and vanilla cookies. You won’t have time to miss it anyway!”

News Channel 85:

“This morning, two bodies, a man and a woman, were discovered washed up on the sand at Karma Lake. Their boat was also aground. Identification led police to the two fugitives wanted for murder in New Jersey last year. Examination of the boat showed a hole the size of a baseball on the bottom; it looked like an animal had made it. Also destroyed were the life jackets, which had teethmarks on them. Weather forecast after the break.”

After watching the news, Magic lay contentedly on his new bed, satiated after a special meal of steak and a big rawhide bone, happy he brought these two to justice. It took him three days to find his way home, but his love and devotion to his family showed him the way. Of course, a good sense of smell didn’t hurt either.

Information

BY LINE ABSENT
| 359 words

Linda Landrigan

EDITOR

Jackie Sherbow

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Susan Mangan

VICE PRESIDENT, DESIGN & PRODUCTION

Victoria Green

SENIOR ART DIRECTOR

Cindy Tiberi

PRODUCTION ARTIST

Laura Tulley

SENIOR PRODUCTION MANAGER

Jennifer Cone

PRODUCTION ASSOCIATE

Jayne Keiser

TYPESETTING DIRECTOR

Suzanne Lemke

ASSISTANT TYPESETTING MANAGER

Kevin Doris

SENIOR TYPESETTING COORDINATOR

Abigail Browning

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING,

BRAND LICENSING & E-COMMERCE

Terrie Poly

DIGITAL PUBLISHING MANAGER

Bruce W. Sherbow

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT,

SALES, MARKETING

& INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Sandy Marlowe

SUBSCRIBER SERVICES

Peter Kanter

PUBLISHER

www.TheMysteryPlace.com

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 Sales Department

6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855

Tel: (203) 866-6688 x442 Fax: (203) 854-5962

printadvertising@dellmagazines.com

(Display & Classified Advertising)

ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE (ISSN:0002-5224), Vol. 57, No. 11, November 2012. 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. © 2012 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 U.S.A. 8/6/12