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AHMM, June 2012
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Mystery/Crime

Dell Magazines
www.dellmagazines.com

Copyright ©2012 by Dell Magazines

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Cover by Jerome Kleine/Gettyimages.com

CONTENTS

Department: EDITOR'S NOTE: CRIME TIME by Linda Landrigan

Department: THE LINEUP

Fiction: THE SELLOUT by Mike Cooper

Fiction: THEA'S FIRST HUSBAND by B.K. Stevens

Fiction: CUPS AND VARLETS by Kenneth Wishnia

Fiction: LAST SUPPER by Jane K. Cleland

Department: MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH

Fiction: THE POT HUNTERS by David Hagerty

Department: BOOKED & PRINTED by Robert C. Hahn

Mystery Classic: AFTERNOON OF A PHONY by Cornell Woolrich, Selected and Introduced by Francis M. Nevins

Department: THE STORY THAT WON

Department: COMING IN JULY 2012

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

Department: EDITOR'S NOTE: CRIME TIME
by Linda Landrigan

Join us in toasting John C. Boland, for as we go to press, we learn that his story “Marley's Revolution” (June 2011) is a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. The Edgar Awards banquet in New York City and the Malice Domestic convention in Bethesda are two of my favorite events on the mystery calendar. I enjoy them because I get to catch up with old friends and meet new ones—and appropriately, this issue also features a nice balance of the familiar and the new.

One new name this month—Mike Cooper—is actually the writer our readers know as Mike Wiecek, and “The Sellout” features the same nameless accountant featured in Cooper's new financial thriller, Clawback. Another name you'll know, but not (until now) through our pages, is Cornell Woolrich; Francis M. Nevins explains in his introduction to this month's mystery classic, “Afternoon of a Phony.”

We welcome back Jane K. Cleland, who introduces a precocious teen sleuth in “Last Supper.” Dave Hagerty returns with “The Pot Hunters,” a tale also featuring a teen, but set on the Navajo reservation a hundred years ago. B. K. Stevens delivers a chilling, and perhaps cautionary story, “Thea's First Husband.” And Kenneth Wishnia brings us another adventure of Rabbi Ben-Akiva and his comrades-in-exile in “Cups and Varlets,” set in 16th century Poland.

—Linda Landrigan, Editor

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: THE LINEUP

Jane K. Cleland is the author of the Josie Prescott Antiques series. Her latest novel is Dolled Up for Murder.

Shamus Award-winner (as Mike Wiecek) Mike Cooper is the author of the financial thriller Clawback.

David Hagerty is a former newspaper reporter who is now completing his MFA and is at work on a novel.

Robert C. Hahn reviews mysteries for Publishers Weekly and New York Post.

Retired law professor and novelistFrancis M. Nevins is a two-time Edgar Award winner for his critical work, including Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die. He's written numerous stories for AHMM and EQMM, as well as edited anthologies.

B. K. Stevens's e-novella, One Shot, a humorous fair-play whodunit, was published by Untreed Reads. Her story “Interpretation of Murder” (AHMM, December 2010) won a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society.

Kenneth Wishnia's novel The Fifth Servant was an Indie Notable selection, winner of a Premio Letterario ADEI-WIZO, and a finalist for the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: THE SELLOUT
by Mike Cooper

* * * *

Art by Edward Kinsella III

* * * *

Now, the subway station, that was sharp thinking. A decade after 9/11 the MTA still hadn't installed its fancy new cameras. So unlike any other crowded, public space in Manhattan, the Fulton Street C Line platform was free of electronic surveillance. It was a nice solution for a total-deniability-type meet-up.

The kind my clients always seem to prefer.

Boyd Ecker must have forgotten about the freezing temperatures, though. He stood under icicles hanging from broken ceiling panels, kicking chunks of ice onto the tracks, arms folded and shivering.

“The cars are heated,” I said when I walked up. No handshake offered, but that might have been because we both wore gloves.

“I'm not going anywhere.” His distressed leather jacket was cut for style, not warmth. “Let's get this over with.”

Not the most polite opening, considering he'd called me, but once your net worth crosses into ten digits, you don't have to worry about glad-handing the help.

“I need an audit done,” Ecker said.

“Sure.”

“I mean, fast.”

“Okay.”

I waited. We looked at each other. Ecker was at least five years younger than me, late twenties maybe. He had to be incredibly smart—or lucky—to have topped out last year's private equity rankings.

“I got your name from Nigel Grayling,” he said finally. “What did you do for him, exactly?”

Okay—lucky, not smart. “If you hire me for something,” I said, “do you want me talking about it afterward?”

“No.” Pause. “Right. Never mind.”

An icy breeze rose from the tunnel, followed a few seconds later by a C train, the windows flashing past us as it slowed. Passengers jostled off and on, adjusting hats and scarves.

“I'm closing a deal,” Ecker said when the crowd had trickled away to the escalators. “Selling one of our portfolio companies. It's a good exit for us, especially considering the economy like it is.”

“Congratulations.”

“It's not done yet. There's a, well, a complication.”

Of course. “Why don't you tell me about it?”

“Spin Metal Technology.” He shrugged deeper into his coat. “They're a specialty manufacturer in Indiana. We acquired them two years ago, rationalized operations, and now we've got a buyer. The closing is next week.”

“But . . . ?”

“Last quarter's financials. Spin Metal's staff gave us internal numbers three days ago.” Ecker's mouth tightened into a thin line. “The income statement's fine, but cash flow fell off a cliff. Something's wrong.”

“Hmm.” I had to wait while a loud, scratchy, unintelligible message played over the station's PA. “Does it matter? Call the figures preliminary, or just bury them as nonmaterial. Let the buyers worry about it when they find out later.”

“They're Swiss.” Ecker squinted in distaste. “Have you ever dealt with the Swiss? They go over our books like army ants. This will totally kill the deal.”

“So send in a forensic platoon from Ernst & Young and sort it out before closing.”

“We tried.”

Aha. The interesting bit, at last. “They couldn't find it?”

“The CEO's people obstructed them. Not openly. I had a team there from Chicago for fifty-six hours straight, and they couldn't find a damn thing.”

“Let me guess—some sort of computer problem, slowing down the accounting software? And maybe one of the A/P clerks out sick? And they'd recently moved offices, so critical files were in a different building? Like that?”

Ecker almost smiled. “Exactly.”

“You want this solved before the buyers see the statements.” Why he called me was now clear. “You need an expedited audit.”

“If you capture a terrorist, and he's not telling you where the nuclear bomb is, you don't read him his rights and call Legal Aid. You make . . . him . . . talk."

“Okay. Waterboard Spin Metal's CFO. Got it.”

Ecker raised his hands in a shooing gesture. “Don't tell me anything,” he said. “I don't want to know. Just get the answers. I don't care how, and the sooner the better.”

Rich, desperate, and under the gun—really, Ecker was a perfect client. “Let's talk fees for a moment,” I said, feeling good. “Then get me some background to read on the plane, and I'll go straight to the airport.”

* * * *

It's a small niche, though a necessary one, especially in economic times as difficult as these. Straightforward accountancy is all well and good. But sometimes you need someone packing a P226, not an HP12c, if you know what I mean.

My own background? Military, of course, and I can't say much more about it. When I got out, most of the guys I knew were going over to Blackwater, but I wanted something quieter. Benefits paid for some college, I took the CPA exam because a girl I knew was doing it, and I just kind of drifted into this. If I had a logo it might be a green eyeshade crossed by a nine-mil.

But I don't.

When I landed at O'Hare, snow was falling and the sky was dark. Renting a car and driving down took another two hours. I found the plant with the car's GPS, no trouble, and sat for a few minutes, watching.

The company occupied a long, two-story building of cinder block, the exterior walls stained by rust from exposed metal. A single tractor-trailer was backed up to a four-bay dock on one side. In the distance, blurry through light snow, Inland Steel's abandoned towers poked into lowering skies. It was just past four p.m., and the second shift began to emerge—men walking out with lunchboxes and heavy coats, headed for their cars.

I could go straight in, but senior management had shown themselves clearly willing to stonewall. A little recon first seemed like a good idea.

So I waited until several vehicles exited the lot about the same time, then swung in behind them. The neighborhood was industrial, half deserted. With one main avenue running east-west, it was predictable that they would go the same way.

Nor was it a surprise when three of the cars pulled off, a mile down the road, at a low building with neon in the windows. baltic tavern, glowed the sign, and the flock of vehicles out front was mostly motorcycles.

In twenty-degree snow. We were in America's industrial heartland, all right.

The Spin Metal employees had a table inside, and it was easy to join them. I was dressed like they were, I had a pitcher, and you know what?—people really are basically friendly.

I didn't even have to lie much.

“Spin Metal, huh?” I said. “I heard of them. Filter equipment, something like that?”

“Centrifuge machining,” said one of the employees, a balding musclehead in a Colts sweatshirt. “Don't know for how much longer, though.”

“Business is bad?”

“What are you, a banker? Yeah, business is bad. The whole damn economy is bad. People'll be eating each other in the streets soon.”

“You're a fucking moron.” The second guy had a full beard, half gray, and longish flyabout hair. He looked like Moses calling down manna. “We're getting steady orders. They even hired up some last month. The Chinese'll notice someday and eat our lunch, but that hasn't happened yet.”

“Clayton's worried.” John Clayton, the CEO. Ecker had kept him on after the acquisition.

“Naw.”

“Then why is he selling out? Tell me that.”

“Selling?” Ecker had sworn the deal was totally secret.

Moses ignored me. “Because that's when you get top dollar, of course. Wait until the company's hurting and they'll gnaw you down to bone meal.”

If Clayton had any sense, he'd put Moses on the negotiating team. “How do you know you're on the block?” I asked.

He snorted. “They don't tell us nothing, but when a bunch of guys in suits show up and spend two days studying the line, well, we can rule out the OSHA inspector, you know?”

“Would your boss do that?”

“In a New York minute,” said the Colts fan.

The company had just over a hundred employees, according to the backgrounder Ecker had given me. Small enough for everyone to know everyone. Spin Metal wasn't GM, with separate entrances and bathrooms for executive management.

Moses disagreed. “Clayton's all right. But it's not him calling the shots anymore. We got bought out a couple years ago, some vulture fund back east. They just want to flip it.”

“Who's the buyer? Not the Chinese, I take it.”

“No.” The third guy thought that was funny. “Sounded like Germans to me.”

“Well, if you got bought once already, it probably doesn't matter. You'll keep on making, whatever, centrifuge rotors— it'll just be the next owner banking the profits.”

“No, no, not this time.” Moses drank off half his plastic stein. “They're taking the whole plant. The machines.”

“Really?” I didn't have to pretend bafflement now. “Why?”

“Guess they need it over there in Germany.”

That didn't make much sense. Germany had the best machine shop base in the world.

Of course, Ecker had said the buyers were Swiss. “Are you going with them?”

The third guy laughed again. “Yeah, sure.”

“Naw,” said Moses. “We're gonna be over at DWD, standing in line for unemployment with everyone else.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

The Colts fan stood up. “Gonna get a bacon burger. You all want anything?”

When he'd wandered off to the bar, Moses shook his head. “I'm not looking forward to losing the job,” he said. “But at least we got a pension, and that's more than most around here.”

“Thanks to Clayton,” said the other. He looked toward Moses, the conversation moving away from me. “I was talking to Jenny up in Accounting, you know her?”

“Sure. The redhead.”

“She says we got nothing to worry about—Clayton's been squaring the pension reserves. Making sure we're covered no matter what.”

“Huh.”

“It's true.”

“Believe it when I see it.”

“Clayton's on our side.” He looked at me. “He used to fight mixed martial arts, you know that?”

“Really?” Not your typical route to senior management.

“True,” said Moses. “Light heavy. He was ranked in the UFC. I saw him lose a couple times, down in Lafayette and at the fairgrounds.”

“He won more than he lost.”

“And he had the sense to get out before too many concussions piled up.”

Clayton began to sound more interesting than Ecker's backgrounder had suggested.

“And now he fights for you,” I said.

“Huh,” said Moses again. “He could run for mayor with that line.”

The Colts fan came back with food. I stayed a while, had some nachos, finished one scant beer. At six it felt like time to go.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Things generally work out.” Moses shrugged. “I'd hate to see them sell, though. Hell, we could run it better than they could.”

“Who knows?” I said. “The sale could still fall through.”

* * * *

John Clayton was in his office, waiting for me. Ecker had called ahead, telling him one more auditor was coming in to check the books.

“There's nothing to find.” He was big—at least six inches over my five ten—rawboned, and lean. When we shook his hand was blunt, with hard calluses across the knuckles and along the edge. “Business ebbs and flows. We have a full order book and receivables are steady. What's the problem?”

We didn't sit down.

“The problem is that free cash flow declined by twenty-seven percent in Q4—”

“Those E&Y kids went through our accounts and didn't find a penny out of place.”

“—which is even worse year over year, since you usually see net cash inflows in December. Customers clearing their books, I assume.”

“What can I tell you?”

The office was modest, even by Rust Belt standards: pinewood desk, vinyl-topped credenza, and a shabby loveseat-and-armchair set around the coffee table. Clayton was on the second floor, up some open-tread metal stairs, and he had a big window overlooking the machine shop. The floor looked empty at this time of evening, the line quiet.

“Let's start at the beginning,” I said. “I understand you make high-end centrifuge components. Gas permeation. For what—medical devices?”

“No. Industrial applications. Blood filtration, you need smaller machines.”

“Big customer list?”

“Average.”

And so on. This was getting us nowhere.

“All right.” I found my carrier bag on the floor and stooped to pull out Spin Metal's last 10-K, their annual SEC-mandated financial report. “I had some time on the flight.”

“Oh?”

I held out the printout, which was half an inch thick. “Footnote thirteen, sub-para four. ‘Retirement provisions.'”

Clayton took the document but shrugged. “Public information.”

“If the acquisition goes through, you walk away with fourteen million dollars.”

“It's not all cash.”

I looked at him. “Oh, come on, you can do better than that."

He had the grace to appear embarrassed. “The board's compensation committee makes those decisions.”

“Uh-huh.” I crossed my arms. “So you're covered. What about your employees?”

“They're a crucial part of our company. Frankly, the acquirer would be nuts to let them go. It would take years to build up a skilled workforce again.”

Right.

When I was in the service, I knew some OGA personnel—you know, CIA, but we couldn't call them that. One was a “deception detector,” supposedly trained to recognize the subtlest signs of lying. After a few months running interrogations he invalided out with bad PTSD, but that's another story. Anyway, he taught me some things to watch for.

Clayton's eyes went left during that last sentence, then back to staring straight at my face. One hand tightened on his pencil. And there was that “frankly.”

Lights and siren. I sighed.

“It's true, then,” I said. “Ecker's selling the equipment right out of the building.”

Long pause.

“I really couldn't say.” Clayton handed back the 10-K. “I'm not part of the negotiations.”

I wanted to like the guy. His workers seemed to. But I hate wasting time.

“I'm not a Big Six accountant.” I stepped forward and smashed my elbow into his floating ribs, right below the heart.

Oops, he was trained. That blow would have dropped anyone outside Seal Team Six, but Clayton just grunted and swept my arm aside. In the same motion he pivoted, raising one foot.

Lightning fast, but all reflex and reaction—he wasn't thinking, yet. I took the kick at an angle on my shin and slashed back, knocking him off balance. He hit the edge of the coffee table, wobbled, and I punched him as hard as I could below the breastbone, open hand.

Jesus, he still wasn't going down. It took two more strikes and a kick to the groin before he finally collapsed onto the floor, gasping and glaring.

“Don't get up.” I was breathing hard myself, so I pulled out the Sig. “Believe me, I'm taking no chances.”

“What do you want?”

“Six hundred and ninety-eight thousand dollars. Where'd it go?”

“Fuck you. There's thirty bucks in the petty cash box.” Clayton seemed to be tough guy at a molecular level. “And you can have all the tool steel you can carry.”

“Fine.” I considered, not long. “All right, call your managers in.”

“Everyone's gone home.”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “While you're still in the office, burning the happy-hour oil? I'm absolutely positive there's some junior VP down the hall, watching your doorway, afraid to leave before his boss does. Get him in here.”

Clayton just glared.

“As soon as he comes in,” I said, “I'm going to shoot you. Something bad but not necessarily fatal—right chest, maybe, or a kidney. Then I'm going to point this at your eager beaver and ask him where the money went. Think he'll tell me?”

Popular media to the contrary, you generally don't get to be CEO if you're stupid. Clayton thought about it, and decided he might share after all.

“I did it for my workers,” he said, and you could almost hear the violins. “They built this company, not me. I got guys been here for thirty years. And now Boyd Ecker's going to scrap the place? Fuck him. I'm just making sure he doesn't asset-strip the pension fund before he cashes out.”

“Hmm.” That actually made sense. Decades of free-market rule had eliminated just about every check on such behavior, and the buyout kings had lost all shame at eviscerating retirees. Not only was it easy, and more or less legal, to scoop up all their savings on your way out the door, it was positively something to boast about.

“I don't understand why E&Y couldn't figure that out you were shifting funds to the reserves, though,” I said. “Seems kind of obvious.”

“We disaggregated the reporting on the balance sheet.” A note of pride in Clayton's voice, there. “Spread it out across multiple subaccounts. We kept the actual transactions at nonmaterial levels and buried them just about everywhere.”

It works every time—get someone bragging about their accomplishments, they'll tell you everything. Clayton even showed me some of the journal entries he'd used, calling them up on the screen of his office PC.

“So here's the problem,” I said, when we were done. “You hoodwinked the first auditors, but Ecker's buyer won't be satisfied. They'll want to know exactly what happened before they're willing to go through with the deal.”

Clayton shrugged. “Let Ecker tell them. These entries are completely justifiable. The markets the way they are today, if we didn't build up our reserves we'd be looking at lawsuits by the barrel.”

“Maybe so, but every penny you shifted is a penny off the firm's value— and a penny less than Ecker will be closing the sale for.”

“So what?”

I had to admit, Clayton had a point.

“He won't be happy,” I said.

* * * *

On the way out I had Clayton show me the accounting office. The lights were on, and a young woman sat working a stack of invoices, frowning at her computer.

“Didn't know you were still here, Jenny,” Clayton said.

“Almost done.”

She had red hair, check. I nudged Clayton in the side—he winced, so I guess I did some damage after all—and he introduced me as one more auditor from Ecker's team.

“Just a few loose ends,” I said. To Clayton: “Thanks for your help. We'll talk tomorrow.”

We stared at each other until he got the message and left. Although he said goodnight to Jenny, I doubted he went any farther than, say, the next office. I didn't mind if he had his ear pressed to the wall, though. No secrets, right?

I'm like a ray of sunshine, illuminating everywhere I go.

“Mr. Clayton explained to me all about the pension reserves,” I said. “I don't think there's a problem.”

“I should hope not.” She seemed a little anxious.

“In fact, he was probably just being extra scrupulous.” I smiled.

“Um . . . maybe?”

“I mean, it might look bad if he was shifting money to increase his own pension—”

“Oh, no!” Jenny shook her head vigorously. “John would never do that. Anyway, he's on a defined-contribution plan. The pension is only for the union.”

“Ah. Indeed.”

I asked about the order book, and she confirmed that the pipeline was filled for at least five months. Impressive, in this economy.

“It's a shame, but the buyers are going to lose all that business,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Apparently, they just want the line. The machines. They've already had some logistics people in here, figuring out how to pack everything up and ship it out.”

Interesting. I wondered if Ecker's buyer might be a competitor, eager to shut down a more successful rival.

“Do you know where it's all going?”

“Europe, I think. They're German, you know.”

We talked a while longer, but Jenny had little else to offer. When I stood to go, she hesitated, then blurted out, “There won't be any problem, will there? With the pension accounts?”

“No, probably not.”

“Because John, he was just trying to do what's proper.” She seemed eager to convince me. “He even had another expert in here beforehand, to advise how to do the transactions exactly right.”

“Oh?”

“He wants everything in perfect order.”

“As it seems to be.” I nodded. “Thank you for your time, Jenny.”

I hadn't asked if she was in the union, too, but it was possible—barriers between crafts had mostly broken down, and the local shop would probably be happy to organize anyone, if management allowed. So Jenny might have had some concern about her own retirement money.

But she seemed most interested in convincing me of Clayton's good works.

“Your boss did the right thing,” I said.

“Yes.” With some fervor. “He always does.”

Maybe it's the nature of my job, but I tend to see top management at its worst. After all, someone eager to hire my skill set—well, they're not going to keynote the next business ethics seminar, you know? Clayton, by comparison, walked on water. It was almost disconcerting to see how much his employees admired him.

Halfway down the hallway he caught up with me.

“Learn anything?” he asked.

“You seem to be CEO of the Decade,” I said. “When Spin Metal is sold, what's next?”

“Don't know.” He shrugged. “Something will turn up. You going to tell Ecker everything's clean?”

“Looks that way to me.”

We even shook hands at the door. When I got to my car, he was still standing there, a silhouette in the light, watching me go.

* * * *

In the deep dark of night, the Star Wars “Imperial March” blasted me awake.

My ringtone, what can I say? The phone was in its charger on the nightstand, next to my head.

“What?” My voice was groggy and hoarse.

“DID YOU SEE CNN THIS MORNING?”

Ecker.

“No. What— Jesus, it's four a.m.”

“All I want to know is, who leaked?” he shouted. “I send you out there and one day later—not even twenty-four hours!—it's all over the front page!”

“Front page” being a metaphor, of course, since no one actually reads news anymore. Ecker didn't calm down, but eventually I pieced the story together from his disjointed tirade.

A scandal. Apparently the Swiss buyers had been outed in a money-laundering probe by the German central bank. The Germans had been going full bore after tax evaders for a few years now. They'd more or less created an open market in stolen bank data from havens like Lichtenstein and Switzerland, buying the records from hackers and insiders and using it to prosecute German citizens who'd been hiding their money abroad. Anyway, when they turned over this particular rock, they discovered that Ecker's counterparties were, among other shady dealings, laundering drug money for the claque of generals running Burma.

Or, as they were generally referred to in AP wire reports, the “murderous Myanmar regime.”

Not good clients, in other words. Ecker's deal was now dead in the water.

“I don't know what Nigel Grayling was thinking! So much for your discretion!”

I put up with this for a while, then reminded Ecker that a Southeast Asian junta was one thing, but I knew where he lived, and he really ought to be more polite. The call ended on a poor note.

I couldn't go back to sleep, of course. As dawn slowly lightened the sterile motel room, I thought about my assignment—about Spin Metal and its collapsed sale.

Who was going to pay me now?

* * * *

When I got back to New York, Ecker hung up on me three times and told the doorman to refuse me entry when I went to his Upper West Side co-op. A week later I finally cornered him in the parking garage on Cedar Street where he left his Audi S5 during the day.

It was past seven in the evening, and he was coming from the office, dragging an oversize legal briefcase no doubt full of filings related to Spin Metal's latest moves. Twenty feet away he hit the remote and the Audi's lights went on with a beep.

I waited until he was at the door, then slipped from my hiding place beside the next car down and put the Sig to his throat.

“You haven't been taking my calls,” I whispered.

He didn't scream, which was considerate. A minute later he was in his car's back seat, kneeling uncomfortably on his hands, head bent down from pressing against the roof. I sat in front, holding the pistol on him, at a safe distance.

Overkill for threat mitigation—Ecker was hardly a serious danger—but it humiliated him, which I thought might facilitate our conversation.

“Your lawyers have been opposing the buyout,” I said. “With excessive vigor.”

“So you were behind it.” He glared.

“Hey, it's not my problem you were trying to sell a proscribed item to an outlaw regime.”

“The export regulations are totally hazy on that—”

“Gas centrifuges, for industrial applications.” I shook my head. “Even if you get all your news from the Daily Show, you'd know that means one thing and one thing only—uranium enrichment. Iran is an international pariah for building the same kind of plant.”

“This has nothing to do with Iran.”

“No, of course not. You were trying to sell a turnkey operation to Myanmar. That's much better.”

“The Swiss never told me anything about that,” he muttered. “Anyway, no one hired you to be nuclear-nonproliferation cop. All I wanted was to know why the cash flow hiccupped.”

“Because Clayton was skimming it into the pension reserve.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Here's what I can't figure,” I said. “Was he going to kick some back to you?”

Ecker peered up at me from his uncomfortable position. “What?”

“It was obvious. Even the auditors should have caught it. You can break a million dollars into a blizzard of minor transactions, but they're always going to roll up somewhere on the statements.”

“Don't know what you're talking about.” But the denial was half-hearted.

“I think they did catch it,” I said. “And you figured it out. Clayton was filling up the reserves, all right—because he planned to raid them himself, when the Swiss deal collapsed and he brought in his own LBO.”

Ecker didn't say anything.

“You kept yelling like I had something to do with leaking the Swiss connection.” I waggled the gun barrel at his face. “But it happened just a few hours after I got there. You didn't want to kill the deal. I know I didn't do it. That leaves one guy.”

After a long pause, Ecker said, “He double-crossed me.”

Oh, that felt good. I don't care, no matter how convinced you can be of someone's guilt, nothing beats the moment when they come out and confess. “You were right, and I was wrong"—are there any more satisfying words in the English language?

“Clayton had his own buyers lined up,” I said. “Probably one of Spin Metal's competitors, but it doesn't matter. And just to sweeten the deal, he planned on draining the pension fund—right after he topped it off. Too bad about the workers, but I'm sure Indiana has some job training available.”

“You can't prove any of that.”

That made me smile. “Boyd, Boyd, Boyd. I'm not in the proof business.”

I don't know when Clayton had been planning to tank the Swiss deal, but once I showed up, everything had to be accelerated. The buyer's actual intention would have become obvious, perhaps when they studied the plant, and Clayton must have figured he could be a hero twice—once for stopping Myanmar's A-bomb, and once for bailing out Spin Metal with a white knight. The pension raid would have happened under cover of darkness.

Fourteen million plus the accrued retirement savings of hundreds of employees. Money to make even the most beloved CEO turn his head.

“But you're no dummy, either,” I said. “I think you wanted a piece of the bonus Clayton was assigning himself, and you were using me as pressure. How much did you demand?”

“You have no proof.” The record seemed to be broken.

“Listen up.” I was tired of the conversation. “The employee buyout is best for everyone.”

And it was. It had taken a union vote, but Moses was every bit as sharp as I'd thought, and when I laid it all out for him, he had no trouble putting the pieces together. The pension reserves, now flush—thanks to Clayton—and of course owned by the employees, were adequate to finance the takeover. The white knight faded away without making a public bid, presumably to avoid any reflected glare from the Myanmar debacle. Clayton was kicked out, minus his golden parachute, which went back into the kitty as well.

Really, it was a win-win-win . . . except for one minor matter.

“I'm not going to take a penny from Spin Metal,” I said. “They deserve a chance to run their company by themselves. Without you and Clayton skimming off the profits, they might even make it.”

“Rah, rah.”

“So it has to come from you.”

“What?”

"My bonus.”

“Your— Forget it!”

No need to describe the next half hour. When we finally resolved our negotiations, and I'd confirmed the online bank transfers, I even drove Ecker to the hospital.

In his car, of course.

Copyright © 2012 Mike Cooper

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: THEA'S FIRST HUSBAND
by B.K. Stevens

She had learned to brace herself against it. It happened whenever they met new people—sometimes at large social events connected to his firm, more often at the charity dinners and political fundraisers he'd grown so fond of attending. They'd be greeting clients from out of town, or sitting down at a table with an unfamiliar couple, or meeting the guest of honor in a receiving line, and that sly look she'd grown to know so well would come into his eyes.

“This is my lovely wife, Thea Hanover,” he would say, reaching out to shake hands. “And I'm Edward Hanover.” He would pause then, for three seconds. “I'm Thea's first husband.”

Usually, people didn't get it. Usually, they'd just look confused, and nod, and introduce themselves. But too often someone—usually, a woman—would be tactless enough, or innocent enough, to press for clarification. “Oh,” she'd say. “Then you're divorced?”

That was what Edward always seemed to be hoping for. He'd smile, and the sly look in his eyes would morph to delight. “No, we're not divorced,” he would say, and he'd pause again, again for three seconds. “I'm just a realist.”

Usually, people got it then. They'd look at her, and they'd look at him, and they'd get it. Most would just smile awkwardly and make some neutral remark. But some of the men would chuckle, and some of the women would give her a pained, pitying look.

She hated it. She'd asked him to stop doing it, a hundred times. “You make it sound as if I married you for your money,” she'd say, “as if I'm itching to move on. People will think I'm a gold digger.”

“It's just my little joke, Thea,” he'd say. “Don't worry about what people think.” Then, again, he'd pause. “And with a man my age, a woman your age—I'm just saying what they'd think anyway. And, of course, I do expect you to have another husband some day, when the time comes. You'll still have so much of your life left—I wouldn't expect you to spend all those years alone.” He'd turn to her then, and look at her hard. “And I don't expect you to move on too soon, no matter how much you might be itching to. Not considering the way things are settled.”

The worst part was that she hadn't married him for his money, not really. She'd married him, more or less, for love.

Even so, almost from the beginning, it had been hard. The first year or so was fine—not exciting, she'd never expected that, but pleasant and companionable, with his big new house to decorate and the fun of having a clothing allowance so large that she usually had something left over at the end of the month. As often as he could manage, he'd come shopping with her. He never begrudged her anything, always urged her to get more; he seemed to enjoy buying things for her, just as he enjoyed getting things for the house. But then, for no reason she could see, she felt him drawing away, seeming less pleased with her, less open. Before the second year ended, he was making the joke. Then he started bringing young men home.

Scott Crawford, a junior partner at Edward's law firm, was the first. Edward invited him to dinner but didn't ask Thea to cook, even though she liked to cook, even though she'd started cooking at her parents’ restaurant as a teenager and was at least as good as the personal chef Edward now shared with two other senior partners. Clearly, though, Edward didn't want Scott Crawford to see her as a cook. Before he left for the office that morning, Edward gave her instructions. She was to have her hair and nails done and to wear the red silk dress he'd special-ordered from the designer in Hong Kong. She was to wait upstairs until after Edward arrived with Scott Crawford, and then, while they were drinking Scotch in the great room, she was to walk down the broad, highly polished staircase and join them.

She played her part. He won't make the joke tonight, she told herself. It would be ridiculous—Scott Crawford obviously knows him already, so there's no reason for Edward to introduce himself. The men stood by the fireplace; Edward was pointing to the new Picasso sketch above the mantel, and Scott Crawford, glass in hand, was nodding in admiration. When she was halfway down the staircase, both men looked up at her, and Edward swept out his arm to take Thea in.

“At last!” he said. “Scott, this is my lovely wife, Thea.” He paused. “And I, of course, am Thea's first husband.”

Scott Crawford got it instantly; Thea could see that in his eyes. But he didn't comment, and didn't chuckle, and didn't give her a pained look.

At dinner, Edward told Thea about Scott's charity work. “His mother runs this remarkable foundation, Music Matters. It provides free after-school music lessons for inner-city young people. And on Saturdays, it brings them together for choral and instrumental groups. Scott coordinates the Saturday programs himself.”

“That's wonderful,” Thea said, smiling at Scott Crawford. He was about Thea's age, and nice looking—perhaps not handsome, not technically, but there was nothing wrong with the way he looked, and Thea felt glad about having him at the table, about being able to glance at him from time to time. “That must be very satisfying.”

“It is,” Scott said. “Those kids—week after week, they surprise me with what they can do, with how dedicated they are.”

“Maybe you'd enjoy getting involved in that, Thea,” Edward suggested. “I'm sure Scott could use some help on Saturdays—with making phone calls, and filing, and so forth. You could do that.”

I can do more than make phone calls and file things, she thought, but smiled. “You've always said you don't want me to work.”

“I haven't wanted you to work for a salary,” he said, “since there's no need for that, and since it wouldn't be right for you to take a paying position away from someone who does need it. But volunteer work—that's perfectly appropriate. After all, Thea, you can't do nothing but shop all day, every day.”

As if I've never done anything but shop, she thought; as if I didn't work fifty hours a week, more than fifty, until I married you. She smiled again. “That's true.”

“So, how about it, Scott?” Edward said. “Wouldn't you like to have Thea help on Saturdays?”

Scott looked at them, at the senior partner and his beautiful young wife. “Sure,” he said. “We're in good shape for volunteers right now, but we can always use more. If Thea's interested, my mother and I would be glad to have her help.”

So every Saturday, for the next five weeks, Thea joined Scott in the cramped office of the community center where the choral and instrumental groups met. They were never alone together for long: His mother would pop in often, and so would his sister, and his friends, and the wives of his friends. Usually, they didn't have any particular reason for popping in; Thea got the feeling that Scott had asked them to pop in, that they were popping in to make a point. But she enjoyed those Saturdays, enjoyed doing the simple tasks Scott found for her, enjoyed listening to the music groups practice, enjoyed chatting with the children when there was nothing left for her to do. On the fifth Saturday, when for once she and Scott were alone in the office, he turned away from his computer and smiled.

“How did you and Edward meet?” he asked.

She laughed. It was the first personal question he'd ever asked her. “Oh, I was tending bar at this place in the Flats. And he started dropping by, almost every night. I don't know—maybe he thought it had local color or something, but really it was just a dive. Anyhow, we'd talk, and he was so smart and funny; I liked listening to him. Then he asked me to dinner, and then—well, that's how it started.”

Scott nodded. “And he was already divorced?”

“Oh, yes,” Thea said. “For years and years. Did you know, he invited his ex-wife to our wedding? That seemed odd—it was such a small wedding. But she came, with her new husband. Well, not so new—they've been married for years and years, ever since the divorce. Anyhow, I talked to her after the ceremony. I thought she might be mean to me, but she was nice. She seemed really smart.”

He grimaced. “Another slick, overeducated lawyer. The world probably has too many of us.” He was silent for a moment. “I've been thinking, Thea. There isn't much for you to do here on Saturdays. You must be bored. How about coming on Thursday afternoons instead? I won't be here—I'll be at work—but you'd be a big help to the administrative assistant, Sharon. You'll like her. How does that sound?”

It sounded a little sad. She'd come to look forward to these Saturdays, to listening to the children play and sing, to spending time with Scott, who was always so nice to her. But she felt this was a good decision; for reasons she couldn't quite understand, she felt relieved. “Of course,” she said. “If I can help more on Thursdays, that's when I'll come. I won't come on Saturdays anymore.”

But Edward didn't like having her go to the center on Thursdays. After two weeks, he decided it was a bad neighborhood, and sooner or later someone was bound to snatch her purse. That was the end of volunteering for Music Matters. Over the next few months, Edward brought more young men home for dinner, young men who worked for political candidates he contributed to or charities he supported. Always, Edward offered them Thea's services as a volunteer; always, she found a way to say no. She was irritating him. She could see that, but she felt saying no was the smart thing to do.

Then, one morning at breakfast, Edward put down his newspaper. “You should get a personal trainer,” he said.

She pressed down her spoon, easing out another section of grapefruit. “I don't need one. I've got my spinning class, my yoga class—I go to the club every day to swim and work out on the machines. I weighed myself this morning, Edward. I'm eight pounds lighter than on the day we got married.” She knew being thin was important, even though he'd never said a word about it, even though she'd always been thin. After he'd started drawing away from her, she'd worked hard to lose those eight pounds, even though she hadn't needed to. She'd thought, somehow, it might help. It hadn't.

“Oh, I know,” Edward said. “And you look fine. But all my friends’ wives have personal trainers.”

So this was about having the things his friends had. She understood about that. She sighed. “All right. After Andre comes here for his sessions with you, he can work with me.”

“No. Andre works with men; he doesn't have much experience with women. And the gym downstairs isn't set up for you—the weights are too heavy. You should have a personal trainer at the club.”

Maybe she could use this. “You're right. My sister's wedding is barely three months away—I want to look my best for that. Maybe, if I lose five more pounds before the wedding, you'll think about—”

“This isn't about your weight, Thea.” Edward snapped his newspaper back into position. “And it certainly isn't about your sister's wedding. We've been over that. If you feel you must attend, you may, but I have no intention of going. I loathe Buffalo, and weddings bore me. Now, I've heard good things about a trainer named Tony; some of my friends’ wives use him. I'll set up a session for this afternoon.”

It was settled. At three o’ clock, she went to the club and had her first session with Tony. He was just her age—thirty-two—and he was magnificent. He was muscular, but not in an exaggerated way. His chin-length light brown hair was streaked with gold, so subtly that it must be natural, or at least expensive; and any attempt to find fault with his eyes, nose, mouth, or chin would just be silly. They met, five times a week, in a small room near the main gym. When Thea leaned over to touch her toes, his hands rested lightly on her hips, then moved down to close on her thighs; when she reached up to stretch, his hands followed the movement of her body, brushing softly against her breasts. He never said much. He didn't have to. By Monday of the third week, she wore a leotard instead of sweatpants, and she spent half an hour on her hair and makeup before heading for the club.

That was the day that he paused when she stretched, that his hands eased forward to cover her breasts, that he turned her around to face him and put his arms around her waist, drawing her close against him. She put her arms around his neck, tilted her head back, and closed her eyes.

“Excuse me,” a man said, opening the door to the small room. He was short and dark and wiry, with sharp little eyes and a jutting chin. “Oops—am I interrupting? I thought I had a session scheduled in here, but maybe not. Say, you're Thea Hanover, aren't you? Hi—I'm Paul Addison. I'm a friend of Edward's. Gosh—it's been a long time since I've seen you. Can I buy you a lemonade, or a green tea, or whatever they serve in that café downstairs?”

“Fine.” Thea backed away from Tony. Paul Addison—the name meant nothing to her, and his face didn't register. But Edward knew so many people; there had been so many introductions over the past three years, often so humiliating that she couldn't focus on the faces of the people she was meeting. Tony looked at her helplessly, then ambled off. Too bad—she'd been so ready, not necessarily for going all the way, though she'd taken note of two decent-looking motels on the drive to the club, just in case. Well, she'd be back tomorrow.

She slipped into her jacket and followed Paul Addison to the café, smiling as he bought her a cranberry juice. “It's nice to see you again,” she said, sitting down across from him in a bright orange booth. “I'll tell Edward you—”

“Don't do it, Thea.” He took a sip of his pomegranate yogurt shake and winced. He leaned forward, his arms folded on the table. “Not over a jerk like Tony Gleason. You handled the Scott Crawford situation real well—or maybe he handled it, maybe you just followed his lead. But at least you had enough sense to see the situation couldn't go any place good. You should've seen that this time, too—it's a lot more obvious this time.”

She grasped her plastic bottle of cranberry juice in both hands. Damn, she thought. Damn, damn, damn. “Who are you? How do you know about Scott?”

“Like I told you,” he said, “my name's Paul Addison. What I didn't tell you is I'm a private detective, and six months ago your husband hired me to watch you. So I watched you when you were with Scott, and I watch you when you're with Tony. I watch you pretty much all the time when you're not with Edward.”

This was it—the disaster she'd dreaded vaguely for months, though she hadn't been able to put a name to it until now. “Bastard,” she said, and started to get up.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the booth. “Think about it, Thea. I didn't have to tell you. I could've let you make a fool of yourself with Tony, taken pictures, and collected a fat fee. But I didn't. I decided to help you—to warn you. You know how Edward found out about Tony, why he wanted you to work with Tony? It's not because his friends’ wives use Tony. His friends’ wives are too smart to go anywhere near Tony. Tony's a whore, Thea. He plays up to rich women—to wives of rich men. He screws them, and then he squeezes them for money by threatening to tell their husbands. One wife stopped paying, and sure enough, her husband found out. Edward's firm is representing the husband in the divorce. That's how Edward found out about Tony.”

She pressed her hand against her forehead. Scott, Tony, all the young men who had come to dinner—was that why? But that's so mean, she thought. “He's been testing me,” she said. “But why? I've never given him one reason not to trust me.”

“You came damn close to giving him a reason five minutes ago,” Paul pointed out. “But it's okay. I stopped you before you crossed the line. He never has to know.”

“Not if I pay you.” Thea started to get angry again. “That's why you stopped me. Instead of paying Tony, I pay you.”

“Nah, you don't have to pay me.” Paul gave his pomegranate shake another try before pushing it aside. “Edward pays me plenty. As long as you don't actually screw anyone, this job could go on forever. And in lots of ways, it's easier than most jobs I've done. Not in all ways. I'll tell you the truth, Thea. In my line of work, lots of the jobs I do sort of turn my stomach. This one turns my stomach more than most. I hate to tell you, but your husband's a son of a bitch.”

“He's not.” Ridiculously, she felt tears coming to her eyes, and wiped them away with her fist. “He's nice. At least, he used to be nice. And then—I don't know why things changed. I don't know what I did wrong.”

Paul looked at her for a long time; she thought she saw real sympathy in his eyes. “I don't think it's anything you did,” he said at last. “I think it's what he did; I think it's who he is. His mother lived too long. Edward had to wait too long to be rich.”

She shook her head. “He's always been rich.”

“By your standards, sure,” Paul said. “By my standards, definitely. Successful lawyer, big practice—and his first wife made even more than he did. They lived pretty well. And when she left him for another man, she didn't ask for a penny. Lucky guy. But he didn't come into the real money until his mother died four years ago. By then, I think he felt entitled to—well, he's an interesting guy, I've spent lots of time trying to figure him out, but you don't want to hear my theories. The point is, I don't think all this has much to do with you. I think it has to do with his first wife cheating on him, and with him going a little overboard when he finally got his mother's money, and with him afterwards feeling like maybe he'd been a fool.”

She tried to fit all that in with the way Edward had treated her. The money part didn't make sense; Edward had always been rich. And the other part wasn't her fault. “I knew his first wife cheated on him,” she said. “I'm sure that hurt him, and I'm sorry. But I never cheated. I mean, Tony, yes, but that wouldn't have happened if Edward hadn't pushed me to—I mean, why did Edward do that? It wasn't fair.”

“No, it wasn't,” Paul agreed. “If you left him, I wouldn't blame you.”

She thought about that, not for long. “No, I don't want to leave him.”

“I figured you wouldn't. I know about the prenup. If you get divorced, you get just about nothing. If you stick it out, you get just about everything.”

“It's not just the prenup,” she said, though she had to admit she'd come to love living in that house, and not going to work, and having the clerks in all the stores be nice to her. But it was also not wanting to go to her sister's wedding as someone whose marriage hadn't worked out, after her parents had told her to be careful, after her sister told her flat-out she was making a mistake. And Edward could still be nice, especially when it was just the two of them, at night, when he could still make her feel so pretty and special. “I like my husband—I love him. I want to make things good again.”

“So confront him. Don't mention me—just say you figured out what he's been up to with Scott and Tony and the rest. Say you resent it, and he'd damn well better stop.”

Confront Edward? No. He'd make her feel stupid—he could always turn whatever she said against her. Or he'd get mad and silent, and that would be so unpleasant. She shook her head. “I can't. He's too smart—it'd be too hard.” She looked at Paul more closely. “You've really been watching me for six months? But I never even saw you before today.”

“That's pretty much the goal when you're watching someone.” He smiled at her, his sharp little eyes sparkling. “Thanks. You just paid me a nice compliment.”

“And you really don't want money from me?”

“I really don't. Like I said, in lots of ways, this is an easy job. Now that I won't feel like I'm setting you up, it'll be easier. I'll just keep following you around to all the fancy places you go, drinking espresso and every so often taking pictures of you doing nothing in particular. It's safe, it's pleasant, and Edward pays well—I got no complaints.”

She thought that over. “It sounds a little creepy.”

“A little,” he admitted. “But you'll get used to it. So, what'll you do about Tony?”

“I'll never see him again,” she said promptly. “I'll report him to the club for trying to take advantage of me. I'll tell Edward—”

“Let's think about this,” Paul cut in. “So far, I've been telling him there's nothing going on between Tony and you, that it's all sit-ups and jumping jacks and things like that. We're gonna have to account for the change—we're gonna have to work out a narrative. I should take pictures. And you shouldn't be wearing a leotard when I take them, and your hair shouldn't look so nice.”

Thea blushed. “What should I do?”

He pursed his lips. “Come to the club tomorrow. Wear sweat pants, pull your hair back, don't wear makeup. Tony won't care—it's not the leotard that turns him on. Lead him on a little. When he makes his move, smack him in the face, run out of the room, and go home. When you see Edward, tell him you're switching to another club, but don't say why. Act sorta upset, but just say you don't like this club anymore.”

“But you said you want to take pictures,” Thea objected. “Tony and I always work out in a private room, with the door closed. How can you—oh.”

“Yeah, I've got a camera set up. A bug too. How do you think I knew just when to barge in? Now, leading Tony on, acting upset for Edward—can you pull that off?”

Thea smiled slightly. “I had the lead in my high-school play, junior year. That's when I decided to drop out and head for Hollywood. I got as far west as Cleveland.”

“Then you can pull it off.” Paul grinned. “Afterwards, I'll call Edward, show him the picture of you smacking Tony, describe how shocked you were. Maybe he'll report Tony to the club, but I bet he'll let it go—he won't want to come that close to scandal. Well, that should work.” He stood up. “See you around, Thea.”

“But I won't see you,” she said, and felt a little sad. Paul could be crude, and he had strange ideas about Edward. But really, he'd been very nice.

The plan worked as Paul had predicted. She enjoyed smacking Tony. At dinner that night, Edward got exasperated when she wouldn't explain why she'd decided to switch clubs. When he came home the next night, though, he gave her emerald earrings. Paul must have done a good job when he made his report, she thought, smiling at herself in the mirror, admiring the way the emeralds complemented the traces of hazel in her eyes. Her matron-of-honor dress was pale green; she could wear the earrings to her sister's wedding, as fresh proof of how much her husband loved her.

She went about her business—shopping, working out at her new club, sometimes having lunch with wives of Edward's friends. It felt odd, knowing Paul Addison was watching her. But it didn't feel bad. It felt almost comforting. Ever since she'd married Edward, she'd often felt lonely. She saw lots of people, but they were all people she knew through Edward. She couldn't really talk to any of them. Paul felt like a friendlier presence, even though she never saw him. My guardian angel, she thought once, and felt embarrassed that it had occurred to her; but from time to time, she found herself thinking it again.

She hoped things would get better with Edward, now that she'd proved herself with Tony—or, at least, seemed to prove herself. He didn't seem any warmer, though, and he still cut her off whenever she mentioned her sister's wedding. The real test, she decided, would be the retirement dinner for Marty Thompson, a senior partner at Edward's firm. Everyone from the firm was coming, and there would be new people, too, Marty's out-of-town relatives. There would be introductions. If Edward doesn't make the joke, Thea thought, that means things are better.

She dressed carefully—the new earrings, of course, and an off-the-shoulder soft black dress with a demurely flaring skirt. She looked just the way Edward liked her to look—sophisticated, sexy in an understated way, more glamorous than the other wives but not showy. When she came downstairs, Edward lifted his eyebrows and said she looked nice. Maybe this would be a good night.

At the country club, Marty stood near the door of the banquet room, his chunky old wife standing next to him, wearing some drab powder-blue thing. His out-of-town relatives clustered nearby, along with half a dozen partners and associates from the firm; they all had glasses in their hands. Marty seemed to be handling the introductions himself. So this wouldn't be a test for Edward after all. Thea felt slightly disappointed, slightly relieved.

Marty waved broadly when he spotted them. “Folks,” he said, “this lovely young woman is Thea Hanover. And this reasonably well-preserved specimen is Edward Hanover.” Marty paused for three seconds. “Edward is Thea's first husband.”

All the partners and associates laughed—loudly, without reservation. The out-of-town relatives laughed, too, though some looked confused, not sure of why they were laughing. Edward's laugh was the loudest and lasted the longest. Then he shrugged, lifting both hands to shoulder height and spreading his fingers. “What can I say? I can't deny it—I'm a realist. Marty, you son of a gun.”

Willing herself to smile, Thea didn't let her shoulders stiffen too much. They all know the joke, she thought. Every single person in this firm knows the joke. Every single person knows it's all right to laugh at me.

Finally, someone else arrived, and attention shifted. She detached herself from Edward and found the bar. White wine, she thought. I should ask for white wine, take one sip, and then just hold the glass in my hand until dinner starts.

She asked for a double Bourbon, straight up, and walked to the window overlooking the river. She stared out at nothing and drained her drink. I hate him, she thought. He's a horrible person. I wish he were dead. I hate him.

Someone touched her arm, and she turned to see Scott Crawford. “I was thinking about you the other day,” he said. “Remember La'Sheka, that tiny girl who could barely hoist her cello onto the stage? She played a solo at the spring concert—it went very well. Afterwards, she came over to me and said, ‘I wish Miss Thea had been here. Miss Thea always liked my music.’ “

Coming on such a night, the unexpected sweetness of it made her want to cry. But the last three years had taught her self-control. She smiled. “What a nice thing for her to say. I hope the children don't think I lost interest in them.”

“No, I'm sure they don't think that.” He drank some Scotch and looked at her. “How have you been, Thea? How are things going?”

“Oh, fine.” She wished she had some new accomplishment to tell him about, some new interest to describe. But she couldn't talk to him about shopping or working out or going to lunch, and she hadn't been doing anything else. She never did anything else. “My sister's getting married in three weeks, in Buffalo; I've been very busy getting ready for that. How about you? Are you handling any big cases?”

He half laughed. “Nothing very big, nothing very interesting. Music Matters, though—that's thriving. We're thinking of starting two new groups, a string quartet and an a cappella choir. First, though, my mother has to raise money to pay the teachers. Well, if anybody can do it, she can.”

She was about to reply when Edward walked over, smiling placidly. “I see you two have found each other. How nice. How's that foundation doing, Scott?”

Did Scott flinch? Probably not—probably, Thea had imagined it. “Very well. I was just telling Thea we're thinking of expanding, if we can find the money.”

Tilting his head back, Edward laughed briefly. “That sounds like an appeal for a check. Happy to oblige. And if you're expanding, maybe you can use Thea on Saturdays again. How about it, Thea? Feel like doing something useful?”

“No.” Was it the Bourbon giving her courage, or the humiliation and anger and hatred? “There wasn't enough for me to do on Saturdays. It was boring. I could go on Thursdays. There's more for me to do.”

Edward frowned. “I told you, I don't want you to go to that neighborhood in the afternoons. And on Thursdays, Scott won't be there to protect you.”

“It's perfectly safe.” She turned her back on him. “Scott, please tell Sharon I'll volunteer on Thursdays again. I'll start this week.”

Clearly, Edward didn't like it. But he wouldn't stoop to arguing with her. During the following days, they barely spoke to each other. At breakfast, at dinner, they sat at the table and said nothing beyond routine inquiries and terse responses. As she ate, the sentences that had first come to her as she stood by the window kept going through her mind: I hate him. He's a horrible person. I wish he were dead. I hate him. The words became a mantra; it felt comforting to hear herself think them. Could Edward sense that something had changed, that she hated him now? Thea hardly cared.

On Thursday, she went to the community center, helped Sharon in the office, and purposely stayed later than usual, stayed until well after it had started to turn dark. She'd had to park two blocks away from the center, and she felt nervous as she walked those two blocks, feeling the sharp chill in the air, noticing how few people were left on the street, how unsavory those few looked.

And then a man wearing a hooded jacket stepped out of an alley and grabbed her, pulling her into the alley, shoving her hard against the brick wall of a crumbling building. She started to scream, but he struck her in the face, shocking her into silence, and tore her purse from her hand. When she tried to pull away, he hit her again and ripped her coat open, his hand on her throat now, reaching for the braided gold necklace Edward gave her for Christmas. He'll kill me, she thought. After he takes the necklace, he'll kill me.

But someone pulled the man away from her, punching him in the face and the stomach. The man in the hooded jacket punched too. The other man punched again, snatched her purse back, and let it fall to the pavement. The man in the hooded jacket ran away, and the other man ran after him.

Thea sank down sobbing, too terrified and exhausted to think about what had happened, clutching her purse to her chest, putting her hand to her throat to feel that the necklace was still there. The other man ran back, slightly out of breath, and crouched next to her, putting his hands on her shoulders. It was Paul Addison, the private detective.

“The bastard got away,” he said. “Are you all right, Thea? Did he hurt you?”

She stared at him blankly. My guardian angel, she thought; this time, the phrase didn't embarrass her. “Thank God he didn't get my purse,” she said, “or my necklace. Edward would've been so mad.”

Paul chuckled. “That's one hell of a thing to be thinking about at a time like this. Can you stand up? Here, let me look at you. You sure you're okay?”

He pulled her coat together and rebuttoned it, smoothed her hair back from her face. She looked at him gratefully. “I'm fine. Thank you, Paul. I'll never be able to thank you enough. And can you please not tell Edward? He'll say that it proves he was right about coming here in the afternoon, that I—”

“Forget it.” He gave her a quick, warm smile. “Edward will never know. But you should pull yourself together before you go home. How about a drink? I know a decent place, not far from here.”

“That sounds wonderful.” He walked her to her car and gave her directions, and five minutes later she joined him in the bar—just one room, long and narrow and dimly lit, warm with the smells of onion rings and barbecue sauce. She felt instantly at home. Paul sat at a back table; he'd already ordered a double Bourbon for her, a gin and tonic for himself. She sat down across from him, smiling shakily.

“How did you know I like Bourbon?” she asked.

“Oh, I know lots of things about you.” He took a sip of his drink. “So, how have you been, Thea? How are things going?”

The same questions Scott Crawford had asked her. But this time, she felt she could tell the truth. “Things are worse. After you showed Edward the pictures of me and Tony, he gave me emerald earrings, really nice ones, and I thought that was a good sign. But then, at this party, he laughed at me—everyone laughed at me, like I'm some big joke. And he still doesn't trust me, and he barely talks to me.”

Paul nodded slowly. “Why did you marry him? You didn't love him, did you?”

“I thought I might.” She took a long drink. It felt wonderful to be this honest with someone. “I liked him, anyhow. Before we were married, we had some good times. He was funny—not crude, like so many guys, but witty, you know?” She paused and took another sip. “And I was tired—tired of living in crummy apartments and never being able to buy nice things, tired of working so hard day after day and still being broke before the end of the month. And I was tired of being with men who said they loved me and wanted to marry me but just sponged off me and then dumped me without paying me back. Edward seemed different—he was different. I wasn't crazy about him. But all the men I'd been crazy about turned out to be such losers. I thought Edward and I could just be nice to each other, and it would be all right.”

“But it hasn't been all right.” He met her gaze directly. “You could leave him. Forget the prenup, forget the money. Just leave him, and find someone who can appreciate you.”

Was Paul talking about himself? Was he asking her to leave Edward and come to him? For thirty seconds, she let herself think about it; it felt exciting. She liked Paul but didn't know if she could love him, and she couldn't see giving everything else up, not for a man who might turn out to be no different from the others. She shook her head. “I don't think that'd be smart.”

“Probably not,” he agreed. “Well, I'm glad I could be there for you today.”

“Yes, thank you for that,” she said. “If you hadn't been—oh, my God. So you were waiting outside the center, the whole time I was there?”

“No, most of the time I was inside. It gets pretty cold waiting in my car. Besides, I had to keep an eye on you, so I could tell Edward you weren't doing anything nasty.”

That made her wince. “But how did you get inside? After the children arrive, Sharon locks the doors.”

He shrugged. “Any private detective worth his salt can get past pretty much any lock. And the center doesn't have a security system—not enough worth stealing, I guess. Security systems are tough. The one at your house, for example—I got a look at that one time when Edward had me come over to make a report, and it's top of the line. I couldn't get past that. I'd have to know the keypad code.”

Why had he mentioned that? Suddenly, she didn't feel so comfortable with Paul anymore. She finished her drink. “I'd better get home. Thank you, Paul.”

“No problem. Say, you're going shopping tomorrow, right? Still looking for the perfect wedding gift for your sister? What do you say we have lunch? “

“That sounds nice,” she said, “But what if someone's watching?”

“Hey, I'm the one who's watching. And I'm not telling Edward a thing. So, lunch tomorrow?”

He'd saved her purse, maybe so much more than her purse. How could she say no? She said yes, and the next day she said yes again, and then they were meeting every day for lunch or drinks. He urged her to talk about Edward, and she told stories about him, laughing at him, not feeling guilty when Paul joined in. “He's so vain about his looks,” she said. “And really, for someone his age, he does look good. He wants to stay in shape, but he won't go to a club—I think he doesn't want to compare himself to younger men, more muscular men. So he's got all this equipment in the basement, and he works out just about every night, sometimes until after midnight.”

Paul chewed on his Reuben. “What sorts of equipment?”

“Oh, every kind. A treadmill, free weights, a stationary bike—”

“Free weights? Those can be dangerous.”

“Well, he doesn't use them unless his personal trainer's there to spot for him. His name is Andre. He has the funniest accent; I don't know if it's French, or what.”

She told two amusing stories about Andre, but Paul didn't seem especially interested. “Edward seems sort of paranoid,” he said, more or less out of nowhere.

“I guess,” she said, confused. “He must be, if he's so worried about me cheating on him.”

“Yeah, there's that. And that fancy security system he has. Is that because he has all those paintings?”

“He does have a lot,” she said. “He likes to show them off when people come over.”

“I bet,” Paul said. “So, he's vain. I bet he chose his birthdate for the keypad code, didn't he?”

He shouldn't ask that, she thought. I shouldn't answer. But she couldn't help laughing. “Even worse. I suggested using our wedding date—we'd just been married, and I thought it'd be romantic. But it had to be all about him.” Stop talking about this, she told herself, though she had an inexplicable urge to tell him the rest. “We can't meet for lunch tomorrow. I'm leaving for Buffalo.”

“I know,” he said. “I'm going, too—Edward wants me to make sure you don't screw any old high-school sweethearts.”

Even at my sister's wedding, she thought angrily. He doesn't trust me to be decent, not even there. I hate him. He's a horrible person. I wish he were dead. I hate him. “That bastard,” she said.

“That sums it up,” Paul agreed. “But I won't embarrass you—you'll never even know I'm there.” He reached across the table, resting his hand on hers. It was the first time he'd touched her since he put his hands on her shoulders after saving her from the man in the hooded jacket. “Do you ever think about it, Thea? Do you wonder what it would be like if you came back from Buffalo and Edward just wasn't there? Do you wonder how it would feel if you had that whole house to yourself, if you were free?”

For just a few seconds, she let herself think about it. Then she shook her head. “That isn't going to happen.”

“Of course not,” Paul agreed. “So, you said the keypad code had to be all about him. His social security number? The date he graduated from law school? I bet it's really funny. Come on, Thea. I could use a laugh.”

Paul's hand was still warm on hers. To be free, she thought. No more tests, no more cold silences, no more jokes. “The date he made senior partner.” She heard herself say the words and felt cold clear through. She pulled her hand away. “I have to go,” she said, and left. I didn't tell him the numbers, she thought. He doesn't know when Edward made senior partner. And we were just joking around.

That night, she asked Edward, again, if he'd come to Buffalo—not that she'd enjoy having him with her, just that it would feel good to go to her sister's wedding with an escort. But Edward wouldn't give her that small pleasure. She'd have to go as a woman whose husband didn't care enough about her to take her to her sister's wedding. In the morning, she packed carefully—her most expensive dresses, her nicest shoes, the emerald earrings and her other best jewelry in a cloth case she could carry in her purse. Edward was too busy to drive her to the airport, so she took a cab. And Paul will be there, she thought. It would be almost like having an escort—an escort no one could see, but an escort all the same.

At the baggage claim in Buffalo, Thea's sister waited with her fiancé and two cousins. They had balloons and a pink and purple welcome sign; when they spotted Thea, Ginny and the cousins made a run for her, shrieking, and enveloped her in hugs. The fiancé, whom Thea hadn't met before, held his hand out awkwardly; but when Ginny slapped him between the shoulders and called him an idiot, he grinned, embracing Thea quickly and kissing her cheek. He was a mechanic; Ginny had told her that he'd been saving his money, that he'd made the first payment on his own shop. Ginny would manage the convenience store attached to it, making the coffee and doing the books.

They scooped Thea up and took her to her parents’ house, where her mother was frantically making potato salad for the rehearsal dinner but paused to take Thea in her arms, look deep into her eyes, and say she looked too thin. Her father came in from raking the backyard and insisted on carrying her suitcases up to her old bedroom, where a cot was crammed against the wall. She'd have to share her room with Aunt Maria from Rochester, he said; more aunts and uncles and cousins would be sleeping in the den, the basement, even the dining room. Everything was crowded and crazy and loud and lovely; Thea breathed it in like life. She hung her expensive dresses in her cramped old closet and unpacked her lingerie and jewelry into the beat-up bureau under the mirror, still studded with cut-out magazine pictures of actors and singers she'd once adored.

At the rehearsal, everything went wrong: People argued and yelled and stamped in and out of rooms, and in the end it was fine. When they left the church, Thea thought she caught a glimpse of Paul in a car parked down the street, but she couldn't be sure. The rehearsal dinner was, of course, held at her parents’ restaurant. Wearing the red silk dress special-ordered from the designer in Hong Kong, Thea tended bar, chatting with old friends, flirting openly with one of the high-school sweethearts who had inspired her husband to hire a private detective. By ten o'clock, she'd kicked off her high heels and put on one of the pairs of the slippers her mother always kept stowed behind the bar. By midnight, almost everyone had gone, and Thea sat at a back table with Ginny, eating beef on weck and drinking Bud Lite, confessing how miserable she was.

“Then end it,” Ginny said. “My God, Thea! You're only thirty-two. That's way too young to give up on love, to give up on happiness. Just come home. You don't have to move in with Mom and Dad if you don't want. Wayne and I have an extra room. You can stay there until you find a job and can afford a place of your own. Maybe you could go back to school.”

Thea shook her head. “Too boring. Too embarrassing. Too hard.”

“Fine,” Ginny said. “No school. But you can't just keep drifting. Not this time. You can't just let things happen and hope they'll be okay. For once, you have to actually do something. Do it, Thea. Walk away and start over.”

Could she really do that? Maybe. But something nagged at her. It was much too late, but she went to the ladies’ room, pulled out her cell phone, and called Edward.

“Good heavens, Thea,” he said. “It's almost one o'clock in the morning. Why are you calling so late?”

“Because I want you to come here,” she said. “I want you to come to Ginny's wedding. You can find a flight that leaves in time. Or you can leave right now; you can drive here. That'd be better. Please, Edward. I really, really need you to come to Buffalo. I don't want you to stay in Cleveland, not even for the rest of the night.”

“That's ridiculous,” he said. “Why is this so important to you all of a sudden?”

Because the private detective you hired has been flirting with me, she thought. Because I told him the keypad code, and I think he's going to come into the house while I'm out of town and kill you. But explaining all that would be so hard, and Edward would be so mad. “I miss you,” she said.

“You must be drunk,” he said. “Go to bed. I'll see you Sunday night.”

He hung up. She held her cell phone in her hand and gazed at it. I tried, she thought. I really, really tried.

She slept in late the next morning, shutting out Aunt Maria's snores, then went downstairs in her bathrobe to linger at the kitchen table, indulging in a makeshift brunch of eggs and chicken wings, potato salad and bratwurst. Aunts and uncles and old friends came and went; she chatted with them lazily and allowed herself an occasional half glass of wine. Finally, she went upstairs and showered, blow-drying her hair expertly, slipping into her pale green matron-of-honor dress. She reached into her top bureau drawer and took out the cloth jewelry case.

The emerald earrings weren't there. She stared at the case, picked it up and shook it, probed it with her fingers. Then she grabbed her purse and emptied it out on the bed, shaking it, pulling out the lining. No. The earrings hadn't fallen out of the case; they weren't hiding in her purse; they simply weren't there. All her other jewelry, yes—but the emerald earrings were gone. She looked down at the bed where Aunt Maria from Rochester had slept after Thea had insisted on taking the cot herself; she thought of the aunts and uncles and cousins crowded into every spare space in the house. One of them, she thought. But which one? She couldn't say anything to any of them, not without accusing all of them; she couldn't say anything without ruining Ginny's wedding. She'd just have to let it go. When Edward realized the earrings were gone, he'd be mad. She'd have to weather that.

Or maybe not, she thought for an instant; but she shut the thought out, put on her pearl earrings, and got to work on her makeup.

The wedding made her weep with happiness, and with envy. Thea had always been the beautiful sister, and Ginny had always been the plain one; everybody had always said that, and Thea had always denied it but known it was true. Today, seeing Ginny in her long white dress and lacy veil, holding Wayne's hands and looking so happy, Thea felt Ginny was the beautiful one. I want that, Thea thought. I want to be happy like that. When I get to Cleveland, I'll tell Edward, and I'll pack whatever he'll let me keep and come back here. I'll stay with my parents until Ginny and Wayne get back from the Finger Lakes, and then I'll move into their spare room and find a job. When they left the church, she looked for Paul again, for the parked car where she might have seen him yesterday, but the car wasn't there.

Wayne's parents had insisted on splitting the costs for the reception. It was a grand affair at a downtown hotel, with a lavish buffet and a live band. Once, after dinner, Thea thought of calling Edward again. I could tell him about Paul, she thought, and say I want a divorce; those two things together might make him come here, or at least put him on his guard. But he'd probably just say that she was being ridiculous, that she must be drunk; he'd definitely be mad. It's fine, Thea told herself. Nothing's going to happen. Edward's fine. She danced until two o'clock in the morning, kept dancing until long after Ginny and Wayne had driven away for their three-day honeymoon.

On Sunday morning, Thea ate half a pancake, packed, and flew to Cleveland. She took a cab to the house, called out to Edward as she opened the door, and heard no response. She lugged her suitcases upstairs, called out to him again, and heard nothing. She drew her breath in sharply and sat on the bed for five minutes, her hands clasped. Then she walked down to the basement. He lay on the smooth, sloped wooden bench, the steel bar holding the free weights crushed down on his throat. His pale, dead eyes stared up at her.

She looked at him for a long moment. He actually did it, she thought. My God. She didn't know how to feel. Slowly, she walked upstairs and dialed 911.

That wasn't the end of it. After the funeral, the police came back so often that she decided she needed a lawyer. She thought it over for ten minutes before calling Scott Crawford. Yes, he said. He didn't usually handle this sort of case, but he'd take this one if she wanted him to, if the police were making her uncomfortable.

From then on, Scott was with her every time she met with the two detectives who didn't seem to like her very much. Edward had died not long after midnight on Saturday. Yes, the detectives knew she'd been in Buffalo then; they didn't need to see the pictures of her dancing at the wedding reception. But the detectives also knew other things. They knew about the prenup. They'd talked to Andre, and they knew how often he'd warned Edward about never using the free weights unless Andre was there to spot for him. The detectives knew about Tony too. They'd talked to several people who worked at Thea's old club, and they'd gossiped about Tony's reputation, about how she and Tony had worked out in a private room with the door closed, about how she'd shown up one day in a leotard before dropping out of the club abruptly.

The detectives had also talked to Tony, and they hadn't been impressed. He'd been at a bar that Saturday night, he'd said, until he'd gotten a cell phone call around eleven o'clock, from a man claiming to know what he'd been up to with an ophthalmologist's wife, threatening to tell the husband unless Tony met him at midnight in a park near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Tony had driven there and waited nearly an hour before going back to the bar. The detectives traced the call to a phone booth in Beachwood but couldn't find anyone to confirm that Tony had been anywhere near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that night.

The detectives also knew Edward had joked about being Thea's first husband, and they knew how upset she'd seemed after people laughed at her at Marty Thompson's retirement dinner. And, somehow, they knew about the emerald earrings. They'd spoken to the jeweler; they knew how expensive the earrings were, and they found it odd that Thea couldn't account for them, that she'd never reported the theft. Thea explained about the house being full of relatives, about not wanting to ruin Ginny's wedding by accusing people. The detectives took notes but didn't seem to understand. Scott understood. He understood everything. He shot sharp challenges back to the detectives during all the interrogations, defusing their questions with sarcastic incredulity. After they left, he patted her hand and told her not to worry.

Finally, after nearly two months, the detectives stopped coming; after another month, Scott asked her out to dinner, and they had a wonderful time. He asked her out again, and again; once, they had dinner at his mother's beautiful house, and Scott's sister was there and was very nice to Thea. Often, Thea and Scott met for lunch; sometimes, they went to plays or concerts; once, he made dinner for her at his penthouse apartment overlooking the lake, and she stayed for the night. After that, they often spent the night together, either at his apartment or at her big house with all the expensive paintings. She started volunteering at Music Matters on Saturdays again, and she and Scott laughed and talked and had a nice time.

Always, every time her phone rang, she flinched, expecting it to be Paul; but he never called. Another three months went by. Maybe Paul got scared off when he saw the police come back so often; maybe he'd decided it would be too dangerous to try to make contact with her. She stopped flinching when the phone rang. She thought she was probably in love with Scott, and that he probably loved her. She was very happy, just waiting for the question. We'll get married in Buffalo, she thought. We'll have the rehearsal dinner at my parents’ restaurant.

And then her phone rang, and this time it was Paul. “Hello, Thea,” he said. “I've been thinking about you. I've been thinking we should get together.”

She was sitting down, but even so she had to grip the edge of the desk to steady herself, to keep the room from crashing down around her. “Hello, Paul,” she said. “Actually, I don't think that would be a good idea. I'm seeing someone else, and—”

“Oh, I know about Scott Crawford. I don't think he's the right man for you. Say, did the police ever track down those emerald earrings? The ones Edward gave you, the ones you lost in Buffalo?”

Any private detective worth his salt can get past pretty much any lock, she remembered. Friday night, when we were at the rehearsal dinner, when Paul had been in Buffalo watching her. “No. The police never tracked them down.”

“That's good,” Paul said. “If they ever showed up in Tony's possession—under a loose floorboard in his apartment, say, or under a tomato plant in the garden at his parents’ house, or in a pawnshop where the sale could be traced to him—that'd be awkward. And I'm sure Tony was smart enough not to keep any pictures of you two together, of you in that leotard and him with his hands all over you. It'd be awkward if pictures like that showed up too. So, let's have dinner tonight. We can meet in that bar where we first had drinks, after I saved you from that man who attacked you.”

You set that up, she thought, realizing it for the first time. You set everything up. “I'm having dinner with Scott tonight,” she said.

“Break it off.” It wasn't a suggestion. “I'll see you at six, Thea.”

She never had dinner with Scott again. But it wasn't too bad. Edward had thought movies were stupid, but Thea enjoyed them, and Paul did too; they went to many movies. Even when they weren't movies she'd have picked, it was better than going to dinners where people spoke to her only because she was Edward's wife. They also went to Cavaliers games, and Paul talked about getting season tickets for the Indians next summer. Edward hadn't let her cook for him, but Paul did, and he said her lasagna was the best he'd ever had. He decided to open his own private detective agency and needed two hundred thousand dollars. She thought that maybe that was what he really wanted, that he'd leave her alone now. After she gave him the money, though, he moved his clothes into the house. Everything seemed settled. It'll be all right, she told herself. He's nicer to me than Edward was—and if he decides I need to be watched, he'll just do it himself.

He offered to have the wedding in Buffalo, but that didn't feel right to her, not with Paul. They'd do it in City Hall, they decided, just the two of them, and then they'd fly to Florida and go on a cruise. Paul had always wanted to go on a cruise. She thought about buying a new dress for the wedding but decided her light blue suit looked good enough.

On the first night of the cruise, they found themselves seated at a small, round table with a middle-aged couple from Atlanta. Paul reached across the table to shake the man's hand. “I'm Paul Addison,” he said, “and this is the lovely Thea Addison.” He paused for three seconds, turned to Thea, and smiled. “Thea's my first wife.”

Copyright © 2012 B.K. Stevens

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: CUPS AND VARLETS
by Kenneth Wishnia

* * * *

Art by Hank Blaustein

* * * *

We have a tradition that only he who lacks knowledge is poor.

—Talmud (Nedarim 14a)

* * * *

When the Angel of Death darkens your doorway with his icy shadow, you must take great care to cover all the mirrors with heavy cloth or turn them to the wall, or else the dead man's spirit might mistake one of the mirrors for a window and end up lost in an endless hall of mirrors and wander it forever, trapped in a left-handed world of everlasting confusion where it will be easy prey for the spiteful demons of Gehenem. Or so I am told.

And because the malekhamoves marks off a man's last moments on Earth by letting a drop of bitter gall fall from the point of his sword into the dying man's mouth, you must also make sure to empty out all the pitchers and basins with any water left in them, because a wayward drop of the deadly gall might have fallen into the water.

And that's the origin of the expression, To kick the bucket.

So it was a very serious matter indeed when a careless housemaid tossed a washbasin full of dirty water out a second-floor window and nearly soaked us with God knows what foul and offensive liquid.

My Christian companion jumped back, raising the hem of her cloak just in time to keep it from being ruined. My boots weren't as lucky.

I was accompanying my partner-in-exile down the ulica Zydowska, the Jewish Street—or in common speech, Jew Street—to her rooms near the tannery on Kleine Gerberstrasse, a fetid alley nearby that was all she could afford at the moment. We had just come from the services for Shvues, and she was bombarding me with her usual array of questions about our beliefs and customs, especially the untranslated portions of the mystical Zohar, and why it compares the seven weeks from Pesach to Shvues to the seven days that a menstruating woman must wait before she can purify herself in a ritual bath. Not an easy subject to talk about with a foreign woman in the divided Polish-German city of Poznan. So I told her that the Shvues services she had just witnessed form the annual celebration of the Giving of the Torah, when the shul is filled with early spring flowers and, like a young wife preparing herself for her husband's embrace, we celebrate our immersion in the cleansing “waters of Torah.”

“So why do you read from the Book of Ruth on this day?”

“For the same reason.”

My master and teacher, Rabbi Judah Loew, would probably say that the seven-week period marked the beginning of our exodus from slavery just as Ruth made a spiritual exodus from idolatry to monotheism as she crossed the wilderness from her native land of Moab to her future home—and her future husband—in Judea.

But before I could answer more fully, my boots got soaked with what I sincerely hoped was merely the refuse from someone's piss pot.

The maid disappeared from the window. But we could hear a company of servants running from room to room, slamming doors, gathering crockery, and clomping up and down the stairs. This time I stepped back as the front door flew open and the housemaid flung a bucket of filthy water into the gutter running down the middle of the street.

I stopped the door with my arm before she could slam it in my face.

“What do you think you're doing?” she asked. A life of hard labor had carved deep lines in her face, which was flushed red with exertion.

“Inquiring into a possible death, I expect.”

Some of the color drained from her face, as if I had accused her of violating a sacred law of some kind.

“Who are you?” she asked, squinting up at me.

Kassy answered for me: “You may not know his face but you certainly know his name, for this man is none other than Rabbi Benyamin Ben-Akiva, special assistant to the new head Rabbi of Poznan, the great Rabbi Loew himself, who saved the Jews of Prague from an army of enraged Christians intent on burning down the ghetto.”

“Ah! Then it is surely a blessing on this holy day that you happened to be passing by at just this moment,” she said, waving us inside. “Come in, Rabbi Benyamin, come in, Miss Whoever-you-are.”

“My name is Castava in my native Czech, but the Germans call me Kassandra.”

“Ach! Who gives a damn what the Germans think?” said the maid with a toughness that's typical of these big city women.

“I was all alone when I found him—may God protect you from such things!” said the maid, appraising me from head to toe as if I were a sprightly young stallion at the horse market. “A fine, eligible bachelor like yourself, Rabbi Benyamin.”

I caught a twinkle in Kassy's eyes as she stepped in ahead of me, her skirts twirling around her ankles as her curiosity propelled her forward. I planted my boot on the threshold, kissed the tips of my fingers, and raised them to touch the mezuzah on the doorpost.

Then my fingers froze. The mezuzah was out of kilter, pointing toward the street. Thinking it might have slipped out of place, I tried to pivot it back toward the house, but it didn't budge. I looked closer. It was nailed into place facing the wrong direction.

“What kind of fool nailed this up?” I said, louder than I should have.

“Oh, the master had the houseboy do it,” said the maid, her face cracking. “Oh, my poor master!”

Kassy drew the woman close, stroking her coarse gray hair and offering words of comfort as the maid clung to her, shaking and dampening Kassy's long cloak with tears.

I was still stuck on the mezuzah. I guess there were plenty of ignorant Jews in the world. Though to be fair, the ignorant goyim outnumbered us and did a lot more damage.

When my thoughts returned to the world around me, Kassy was giving me a black look for upsetting this helpless old woman. I stood accused, once again, a coarse blunderer unfit for the world of women. But then she raised an eyebrow and her bright green eyes flitted toward the room above, and I understood her unspoken message.

As I climbed the creaky stairs, knowing that I was approaching a solemn place of death, I couldn't help feeling relieved that Kassy wasn't really angry with me.

The master's bedroom was dark, with heavy curtains shutting out all but a sliver of daylight. A cluster of gold and silver semicircles hung low to the ground in the center of the room, catching a bit of the light, and as my eyes got used to the darkness, the remains of a bedside supper for two took shape and form. The luminous rings and curves resolved into silver plates and spoons, a polished wine jug, and what appeared to be solid gold wine cups. But the fire in the hearth had long since died and the room was ice cold.

So the old man's spirit had been given plenty of time to flee the scene. I threw open the curtains, letting the cool gray light of the early Polish springtime flood the room.

I approached the master's bed, mindful not to touch anything, since a familiar fluttering in my gut was telling me that something deadly, whether of this world or the World to Come, was present in this room.

The dead man's half-opened eyes were milky and opaque, fixed on the red velvet canopy above the bed, and his fist clutched a handful of velvet curtain in a death grip. Bits of silvery residue clung to his lips and a trickle of silver-flecked wine, dried to a glittering red stain, had dripped from the corner of his mouth into his graying beard stubble and onto the silk pillowcase.

“Looks like Reb Schildsberg knew what he was drinking,” said Kassy.

I turned. Kassy was bent over the table, examining the remains of the unfortunate soul's last meal, her brownish blonde hair hanging loose around her face, just a few inches above the leftover peas on the tainted dinnerware.

“Take a look at this.” She beckoned to me with a crooked index finger.

As I drew nearer, I could just make out traces of a powdery silver residue clinging to the rim of one of the gold wine cups.

The master's cup.

The other cup contained a few drops of red wine, but otherwise appeared to be free of metallic adulterants.

“How could someone slip that much poison into a man's drinking cup without him noticing it?” I wondered.

“It probably wasn't meant to poison him.”

“Then what—?”

Kassy folded her arms across her chest and looked right at me.

I took in the scene—an intimate dinner for two, with candles and wine and closed curtains, and the victim still dressed in his nightshirt.

“A love potion?”

“Either that or something to increase the heat of passion, or else to help a hoary old man achieve—well, you know,” she said, picking up a polished spoon and scraping some of the silvery residue from the golden cup.

“Using powdered silver? Are you sure?”

“I'm afraid that a good number of incompetent or simply fraudulent alchemists have poisoned their customers with elixirs containing quicksilver, antimony, and other heavy metals.”

She held the spoon up to the light and examined the crumbly wine-and-metallic-powder compound.

“If only I had some of my tools with me,” she said with a sudden onrush of bitterness.

Kassy had been forced to abandon her practice and flee from her homeland with little more than the clothes she was wearing, a few tattered books, and whatever implements she was able to salvage on the road to Poznan after her apothecary shop in Prague was set upon by enraged zealots who were convinced that she was guilty of the most hateful and egregious crime of witchcraft.

So she knew what it was like to be the target of mass hysteria. It was one of the things we had in common.

“What is it?” she said, looking up at me, the light catching the green speckles in her eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“Something you feel about this situation,” she said. “Something instinctive. Tell me what it is,” she prompted.

I don't know how she picked up on it, but something had been bothering me from the moment we had set foot in this house.

“You said his name was Schildsberg?”

“That's what the maid told me. Why?”

“It's just—that's not a typical Jewish name.”

“You're telling me you think he's not a Jew? Just from his name?”

“There are other signs as well, but there's only one way to find out,” I said, crossing over to the bed. I hesitated out of respect for the dead, and a primordial fear of the particularly harsh consequences of violating a prohibition dating back to the days of Noah.

So I asked the dead man's spirit to forgive me, then I pulled back the sheets and confirmed my suspicions.

“He's not Jewish.”

“Are you serious?”

“This man is not Jewish.”

“And here I was thinking all men were the same down there.”

“He does not bear the mark of the covenant,” I said, covering up the body as best I could. “And even if he did, as Rabbi Yohanan said to Resh Lakish, not all fingers are alike.”

“And where is that written?”

“Babylonian Talmud, tractate Niddah, folio 66a.” She always wanted to know the exact sources of my Jewish wisdom.

“You're telling me I don't know about the male member, Rabbi Benyamin?”

“You don't have to call me that when we're—”

“I know, I know. When we're not in public.”

Our eyes fell upon the dead man, and I tried to imagine the scene that had unfolded here during the nighttime hours—the clandestine visitor, the candlelight dinner, the anticipation of carnal pleasures enhanced by herbal concoctions, followed by a dreadful moment of realization that something was very wrong.

Wasn't ordinary coupling stimulating enough?

Kassy broke the silence: “I've heard of Jews occasionally trying to pass as Christians when they need to flee in times of danger, but why on earth would a Christian pretend to be a Jew? Unless he's hiding from some trouble with the authorities.”

“There are better ways to hide from trouble with the authorities than posing as a Jew, I can assure you.”

My eyes were drawn once more to the glittering trail of spittle running down the man's chin. Some of the particles looked positively crystalline.

And that second cup of wine.

I imagined the effects of the wine rippling out, my thoughts skipping across the surface of the rich red liquid like a well-thrown pebble dancing across the waves, divorcing objects from their names and rearranging the frozen tableau before me in the manner taught to us by the eminent mystical scholar Abulafia three centuries ago, before the great expulsion from Spain.

It was my strongest desire to share what I knew, to explore all those centuries of wisdom with this newcomer to our faith, this Protestant believer who was so full of questions, this wise woman with whom I shared the road of exile, this newcomer to Poznan just like me.

All this in search of a solution to the riddle, Who was this man, and what had he done that made pretending to be a Jew seem like the “safe” course of action?

“There are many outsiders,” I began, “who believe that the Jews possess otherworldly knowledge that can be redirected toward profitable enterprises. Perhaps they have heard of our skills at manipulating the letters of the Torah in order to find new meanings hidden in the holy text, and they imagine that we are just as skilled at manipulating the four metals—”

“Gold, silver, copper, and lead. Yes, what else?”

“That we know the secret recipe for invisibility—”

“Just one? There are a quite a few, you know.”

Her face, with its broad Slavonic features, suddenly seemed distant, as if the air between us had solidified.

“Of course none of them work,” she said, the side of her mouth crinkling up into a wry smile. The unseen barrier between us evaporated, and for a split second all was right with the world. “Same as with all the love potions,” she added.

“Right. But that doesn't stop snake juice peddlers and other charlatans from preying on people's weaknesses. Pretending to be a master of the Kabbalistic arts could keep an unscrupulous man clothed and fed for many years.”

“You think this was a failed experiment in Kabbalistic fakery?”

The other wine cup, again.

“The only question is whether it was by mistake or by design. And the best way to answer that is to find out who this mysterious nighttime visitor was.”

“Oh, I doubt that she was all that mysterious.”

“She appears to have taken considerable pains to keep her identity a secret,” I said.

“Nothing can be kept secret in a house full of servants. The maids know everything. They can practically hear through the walls.”

I snapped out of my theoretical reverie. What if someone had been listening to us? My overly casual conversation with a Christian woman could easily be turned against me by unsympathetic listeners.

But Kassy was already out in the hall.

“Time to speak to the servants,” she called out to me, before rushing down the stairs.

By the time I caught up with her, she was questioning the laundress just outside the kitchen.

“Oh, no, Miss Kassy. I've never listened at the keyhole,” said the laundress. “That would be like eavesdropping on a priest hearing confession.”

“I see,” said Kassy, her eyebrows knitting together in thought.

“Can I go now? I've got to hang up the laundry.”

“Yes, you can go.”

“Danke schoen.”

The laundress curtseyed quickly, then raised the basket of wet linen she'd been balancing on her hip and hefted it out the back door, nearly tripping over a young boy who was polishing a pair of boots on the stairs. They seemed to be in an awful hurry to clean up the place, which is understandable when visitors are expected, but it wouldn't be my first priority under the circumstances.

I followed Kassy into the kitchen, where the old housemaid, whose name was Mrs. Gromatsky, was washing dishes, while the cook was mixing up some batter in an earthenware bowl.

“Do you have a butter pan?” said Kassy.

“What size?” said the cook, stirring a bowl of cheese filling that nearly matched the pallor of her skin. She had dark sorrowful eyes, and wore her plain brown hair wrapped in a tight bun.

“The smallest one you've got.”

“In there,” said the cook, pointing at a cupboard with her chin while she poured some golden yellow batter into a frying pan.

Kassy fished around in the cupboard until she came out with a heavy iron skillet no bigger than her hand.

“And we'd better send for the authorities,” said Mrs. Gromatsky.

“No, wait.”

That got me a suspicious look from the house servants.

“The Christian authorities can be rather, um, single-minded in their pursuit of justice,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

“You cannot delay such a matter,” Mrs. Gromatsky insisted, as the cook expertly flipped a couple of pancakes.

“Very well.”

And so the houseboy was dispatched to fetch the authorities. Not too quickly, I hoped.

“The authorities are more reasonable here than in Germany,” said Mrs. Gromatsky. “Well, some of them are. The parliament is a complete mess, of course, but that's another matter. You can buy any man's vote with a pot of vodka and a pinch of salt in that awful place.”

Kassy slipped in between Mrs. Gromatsky and the cook, and placed the tiny butter pan on a back burner. Then she took the residue-caked spoon and tapped it against the iron rim of the skillet a few times until the silvery paste slid into the pan.

“We need to ask you about the woman who visited your master's room last night,” said Kassy.

“I never saw her. The master ordered me to bed, and he opened the door for her himself.”

“Was that unusual?” I asked.

“Do you have any idea what she might have wanted?” said Kassy.

“What they all want,” said Mrs. Gromatsky. “Love potions, or else they want their fortunes told.”

“Reb Schildsberg claimed he could tell their fortunes using the Kabbalah?” I asked.

Mrs. Gromatsky was too busy scrubbing a copper pot to answer me. The cook spooned some cheese filling onto three flat pancakes, then folded up the blintzes, pinched the flaps together, and laid them in the pan.

“Why? What does that mean?” said Kassy, spreading the silvery paste around the butter pan as casually as if she were heating oil to fry blintzes.

“No true Kabbalist would ever claim to be able to predict the future,” I said. “It is not for us to know. The Mishnah teaches that whoever reflects upon such things would be better off if he had never been born.”

“Keynehore,” said Mrs. Gromatsky, spitting on the floor between my boots. Well, most of it went between my boots.

“Damn it, this isn't working.” Kassy grabbed a cloth and removed the pan from the fire. “Don't you have anything smaller?”

“Well, there's these—” Mrs. Gromatsky removed a tiny key from the folds of her apron and unlocked a drawer that was practically hidden beneath the countertop. It was full of precision metalworking tools: long, thin files, delicate clippers and tongs, and a couple of three-inch wide smelting pans.

“My, my,” said Kassy. Her eyes met mine.

“Will that do?”

“Yes, this will do nicely,” said Kassy, removing one of the smelting pans from the drawer, as the cook placed a couple of perfectly formed blintzes on a plate and sprinkled them with powdered sugar.

Kassy concentrated on transferring the half-melted paste to the special pan, while Mrs. Gromatsky set out a couple of plates of blintzes with sour cream for us.

Kassy questioned me with her eyes.

I told her that it is our custom to eat dairy foods on Shvues, even in a house of mourning, because when God first called to Moses in the wilderness of Midian, He said He would lead our people out of Egypt to “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

She took the smelting pan off the fire and studied its contents, which had separated. Part of it had burned to a crust, the rest was thin and watery.

“I don't know what it is, but it's certainly not silver,” she said.

Mrs. Gromatsky and the cook nudged me aside to gawk at the strange half-burnt lumps, so I chose that moment to step out of the cramped kitchen and help myself to a foretaste of the Promised Land.

So I had a mouthful of cheese blintz when a heavy pounding shook the front door. For a brief terrifying moment, I thought they had come for me. My hand found the hilt of my short-bladed knife, but before I could unsheath it and get into more trouble than I could handle, Mrs. Gromatsky had unlocked the door to let in the houseboy, and framed in the archway stood a captain of the guard with four armed pikemen.

“We've been looking for a woman who fits her description,” the captain announced, pointing at Kassy, and charging her with possession of illegal counterfeiting tools. And before I knew what was happening, the pikemen barreled in to seize her, knocking over the stack of pots in their haste and sending a few earthenware dishes crashing to the floor, even though Kassy offered no physical resistance. But she did use her tongue, castigating them for arresting her on such flimsy circumstantial evidence, while Mrs. Gromatsky yelled at them for ruining her dishes.

I swallowed hard and struggled to be heard over the noise, until finally I had to shout, “Kapitan!”

The captain turned to face me, the curse on his lips evaporating when he noted the authority of my manner and decided that I might have powerful connections. He had steely gray eyes, a square Teutonic face, and blond hair that hung nearly to his shoulders, brushing the carved eagle claw ornaments on his dress plate armor, while the foot soldiers’ armor was made of plain tanned leather. I appealed to him in the name of King Sigismund, and when that didn't work I tried to reason, cajole, and even beg them to set Kassy free, insisting that Rabbi Loew would vouch for her good name.

“Then I suggest that you send for him,” said the captain, and they carted her off to the stockade.

And here I was thinking that Kassy might be safe from persecution in the somewhat more tolerant Kingdom of Poland. Now I felt like a man wearing his best Shabbes clothes who suddenly needs to sift through a pile of manure in search of a lost penny. But it finally gave me somewhere to start.

I gave the houseboy my last German kreuzer and told him to seek out Rabbi Loew as fast as he could and alert him to Kassy the Bohemian's arrest. It was nearly ten groschen in Polish currency, and I wasn't on the public payroll yet. But who thinks about money at a time like this?

Then I cornered Mrs. Gromatsky as she was sweeping up the broken dishes.

“Where can I find some thieves in this town?”

“Try the City Hall.”

“I mean some real ganefs—cutpurses, whoremongers, coin-clippers—”

“Those paskudnyaks? All I can tell you is that the big crooks used to gather down by the Water Gate, but now most of them work on Wall Street.”

I grabbed my soft hat and set off for the ulica Muma, or Wall Street, so named because its back end lay in the shadows of the fortifications that formed a ring around the old city.

“Be careful,” Mrs. Gromatsky warned. “If one of those varlets kisses you, you better count your teeth.”

* * * *

The man who went by the name of Reb Schildsberg had lived in a large town house near the corner of Zydowska and Kramarska Streets, the informal borderline between the Jewish and Christian quarters, only a few steps from the main square. But the sun was low in the sky and the fog was already rolling in, and the thought of what they might do to Kassy after nightfall made me quicken my pace toward the southwestern part of the old city.

And nobody tried to stop me and ask what I was doing.

Despite the urgency of my mission, it was still a relief to leave Germany behind and be able to move about freely without having to wear that cursed Jew badge on my chest like a bright yellow target. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to breathe the air of freedom.

Or at least partial freedom. Because life in Poznan was no paradise for the dark-eyed People of the Book. For the past seven decades, the city fathers had issued one anti-Jewish decree after another, imposing strict limits on commercial and residential expansion to control the size of the city's Jewish population. And while there was no wall around the ghetto, as there was in other places, that just made it easier for the Christian mobs to attack us, prompting a number of royal proclamations that made the city council directly responsible for our safety, which helped a bit, God save King Sigismund III.

But a couple of years ago (1590 on the Christian calendar), a suspicious fire had torn through Jew Street, killing more than a dozen people and reducing an untold number of sacred Torah scrolls to ashes. The wealthiest merchant in Prague, Mordecai Meisel, had lent the Jews of Poznan ten thousand gildn to help them recover from the disaster, but the facades of many fine houses still showed the scars, like black claw marks left by some ravening creature emerging from the depths, its talons coated with pitch.

The tenements gave way to the vast Market Square, dominated by the enormous Ratusz, the Town Hall rebuilt in the Italian style after the fire of 1536. It dwarfed the humble Rozany Targ, the rose market, the only spot of color on this gray day. But I found the old weighing house far more interesting than the opulent Ratusz. With its street level Romanesque archways and high peaked roof, it resembled the Old-New Shul in Prague where Rabbi Loew had delivered some of his most incendiary sermons.

I crossed Water Street, which ran east to the famous Water Gate down by the river, and turned the opposite way, heading west toward Wall Street.

As the main square receded, the streets narrowed, drawing their seductive arms around me and nearly blocking out the sky. The houses grew thin and crooked, and the alleys between them ran wet with offal. Men stood in dark doorways offering to sell everything a man's heart desires at remarkably low cost. But somehow I chose not to purchase a cloak that would have rendered me impervious to weapons, or a potion that attracts gold, and I even turned down a number of opportunities to perform the generative act with any one of a dozen members of a tribe of slatternly women lining the foggy pathway like gaily painted milestones leading to the murky lights of a tavern.

Water dripped somewhere in the darkness as I approached the heavy wooden door.

The dank air filled my nostrils. And before I had taken three steps inside the tavern, several pairs of powerful hands grabbed me from behind and held me, while another pair of hands found my knife and took it from me.

A couple of flickering torches mounted on the eastern and western walls provided the only light, and I could just make out a row of scurvy-looking patrons against the bar, leaning back on their elbows and enjoying my plight. A couple of women tittered, their teeth glistening in the pale light.

The knave who had relieved me of my weapon strolled past the motley row of liquor-soaked lips buzzing with Polish and German thieves’ jargon, and handed my knife to a man standing behind a high-backed chair at the head of a long table. All I could see of him was a leather doublet and black leggings; his face was shrouded in darkness.

He turned the knife in his hands, no doubt noting its lack of jeweled ornamentation, and tested the blade against the edge of his thumb.

“I thought Jews weren't allowed to carry weapons,” the man said.

“I believe you'll find that the length of the blade is within the legal limit,” I said.

“I see that we have a law-abiding subject here,” he said, drawing more giggles from my shadowy female audience.

“Please—” He gestured to the seat at the foot of the table.

My captors marched me over and forced me to sit in the wobbly chair. They stepped back, remaining on either side of me with their arms folded and their weapons at the ready.

Their leader resumed toying with my knife, holding it by the blade and slapping the handle against his palm.

“Tell me, Jew, which king is the best in the world?” he asked.

“That's easy: a dead one.”

It was the standard answer to an old riddle, but it silenced the titters like a choke chain.

“The men in this land must learn to watch their words,” the leader said, pacing back and forth. “For certain words are like the heat that radiates from a glowing coal, which though unseen, may still harm you. You don't have to touch a red-hot coal to know that it can burn you, right?”

“I once did.”

The air in the tavern grew still and close, except for the faint sound of water dripping from a leaky tap.

A pair of crossed swords mounted on the wall to my left gleamed faintly in the torchlight, but I'd probably be cut down by three different hands before I could pry one of them loose.

So I continued: “As a child. I wanted to see how hot a coal was, so I touched one.”

A couple of women cringed and murmured things to each other that I did not catch.

“But I bet you learned a valuable lesson.”

“Apparently not,” I said, trying to keep the wobbly chair steady.

That set off another round of murmurings, expressing either awe at my bravery or astonishment at my foolishness. Or both.

“And what do you want from us?”

“I'm looking for a woman who's involved in a counterfeiting operation.”

I'd like to say that a collective gasp sucked the last bit of air out of the room, but it was worse than that. As if on cue, women bared their nails and concealed weapons came out of hiding.

The leader planted his fists on the tabletop and leaned into the light like an actor stepping downstage to address the audience. His hatchet-thin face looked even more gaunt due to the bushy eyebrows and black triangular beard casting deep shadows in the hollows of his cheeks.

“We've already heard that a foreign woman was arrested on a charge of counterfeiting, and that she was seen in the company of a tall Jew newly arrived from Prague.”

So they already knew. I should have figured on that.

“But I see that you are a perceptive man,” he declared. “Then you should know that any unauthorized use of the king's likeness is an insult to his royal position. And that the charge of false coining buys you a quick trip to the gallows.”

“It is the same with Jews,” I replied. “Since it poses a danger to us all, anyone who is found to be doing business with coin-clippers and thieves is punished by being cut off from the community.”

“Not good enough,” said the leader, pushing off the table and resuming his vigorous pacing, which I somehow found more threatening than his eagle-eyed stare.

He dug into his purse, slapped a coin on the table and slid it toward me. It skidded to a halt within an arm's reach of me. I leaned forward and immediately recognized the square, curly-tipped cross dividing the coin into four equal quarters. A Spanish gold doubloon, worth more than thirty silver dalers, nearly a hundred zlotys in Polish coin, or three years’ salary for a lowly servant like me.

“It's fake,” the leader said. “And the law says I'm supposed to cut it up and bring it to the royal mint. So why do I still have it in my possession?”

“Because you want to get ahold of the person who passed it to you.”

He held his peace and looked at me, smiling without warmth.

“She claimed that she represented the Fuggers of Frankfurt.”

“Well, that can't be true because the Fuggers are based in Augsburg,” I said.

The corners of his mouth grew sharp.

“You certainly seem to have the knowledge,” he said. “But why should we help you with this?”

“To be honest, I don't know.”

Something that might have been a chuckle escaped from his throat, and he resumed pacing.

“A few years ago, Prince Albertus of Krakow employed some foreign magicians who claimed they could turn a pound of lead into a pound of gold.”

“That's impossible. Every alchemist knows that it takes gold to make gold.”

“Prince Albertus eventually came to the same conclusion, and had the thieves banished from his castle. But I heard that they ended up in Prague, reportedly making gold for Emperor Rudolph II.”

The thought struck me like a bell. Suddenly the leader turned and said, “Here's your knife back,” and flung it at me. But the trajectory was a bit short and it planted itself quivering in the tabletop before me, missing the edge (and my vitals) by about three inches.

I didn't flinch.

That seemed to satisfy him.

“If it's a counterfeiter you're after, you're in the wrong place,” he said. “We don't risk the noose for a bag of false coins.”

“No, I'm sure you only supply legitimate services.”

“But we can give you the name of someone who does.”

* * * *

I found her in the back room of a goldsmith's shop on Wet Street, wearing a loose red skirt and a tight-fitting bodice with red-and-black straps that exposed her smooth flesh from shoulder to shoulder, with a generous expanse in between. Her silky black hair was held in place by a golden headband, and matching star-shaped jewels dangled from her ears like a pair of radiant suns. There was a fierce intelligence in her eyes, but also an adamantine hardness which suggested that her mother wit leaned more toward the devious than the curious kind.

She didn't look anything like Kassy.

And she didn't notice me peering through the curtain because she was too busy leaning over the goldsmith's shoulder, watching intently as the older man polished a gold bracelet, pumping his foot in a steady rhythm to drive the buffing wheel round and round. The noise had covered my entrance.

The goldsmith kept the wheel spinning as he held the bracelet up to check the patina, then returned it to the buffing wheel. The woman's eyes sparkled like a child discovering the secrets of life's mysteries.

The goldsmith checked the bracelet's polished surface again, and let out an exasperated snort.

“You see? It's already turning red.” His foot hit the floor and the wheel began to slow.

“So don't put in so much copper next time.”

“Fascinating process, isn't it?” I said, pushing aside the curtain.

The old man jumped, but the woman's opal blue eyes burned with a lustful power and her eyebrows stood out like a pair of sharp sickles against her pale skin.

“Yes, I've always been captivated by the alchemy of metals,” she said smoothly, her bright red lips dancing the tarantella before collapsing into a tight, voluptuous bow. “How you can mix a couple of lowly elements like copper and tin to produce a glorious alloy of bronze.”

“Or in this case, how you can mix copper and silver to produce something that can pass for gold, at least until somebody rubs it too hard, or so I hear.”

“There's nothing wrong with making jewelry that looks like gold. You don't actually think this is a solid gold headband, do you?” she said, pulling the crescent-shaped band from her hair and holding it out for me to touch. Her waist curved waspishly, the gold and silver jewelry jingling on her wrists.

“Well, that's the tricky thing about this profession,” I said, stepping aside and inspecting the workbenches as if I had all the authority in the world to do so.

I went on: “These iron filings and grinding wheel, this pile of metal shavings and powders—these are all perfectly legitimate tools in the hands of a jeweler. But in the hands of a counterfeiter—”

“You better watch your tongue, Jew,” said the woman, her blue eyes smoldering with hatred.

“Why should I watch my tongue? I'm not the one facing a death sentence for violating the dignity of His Majesty the King.”

Her body seemed to compress, like a serpent coiling to strike. “How would you like to be found floating facedown in the River Warthe?”

“I'd much rather have you tell me what you know about the death of Reb Schildsberg.”

“That won't be necessary,” said a commanding voice behind me.

Damn, it was easy to sneak up on people in this room.

The captain of the guard was standing in the archway, legs apart. A dozen men armed with pikes and halberds were lined up in the hallway behind him, blocking the main escape route, and Kassy was slipping through them unimpeded. I glimpsed Rabbi Loew's gray-bearded profile through the gauntlet of pikes and helmets. He must have secured Kassy's freedom by his word alone. Even among the goyim, he had that kind of clout.

“Francesca! No!”

I spun around.

The woman he called Francesca had lunged sideways and grabbed the pile of metal shavings and powder in her fists, and when the pikemen rushed to seize her, she tried to swallow the evidence by stuffing it into her mouth.

Then suddenly her throat seemed to tighten and her face turned ruddy red and soon she was dry gagging, pink and silver spittle on her lips, and then she was turning purple, her hands clawing at her throat, till at last her eyes rolled back and her knees buckled.

“Verdammt—!”

“Na Boga—!”

“Nieszczesny dniu—!”

“Alle Teufel—!”

The pikemen swore in a mixture of Polish and German and the captain had to shout at them to seize the fleeing goldsmith, who began laying the blame on Francesca, Reb Schildsberg, and half the population of Wall Street before they got the iron cuffs halfway around his wrists.

Kassy sprang forward, unhindered by the guards, and grabbed Francesca's chin, pinching the hinge joint as hard as she could, and forcing the young woman's jaw open so she could pour the contents of a vial of black liquid down her throat. And in this manner she got the woman to retch up most of the foul silvery matter.

Streams of it ran down her chin and all over her fine outfit, forming a glittering puddle on the floor.

“Don't just stand there, fetch some water for her,” Kassy said.

The captain stood his ground while the sick woman's chest rose and fell like a wounded bird that we had just rescued from the bloody claws of a cat.

But eventually her breathing slowed to near normal, and the captain ordered one of his men to ladle out some water from the rain barrel out back.

The rest of us stood around like perfect models of ineffectiveness while Kassy prepared some herbs and boiled them in the water from the barrel. After letting it steep for a few minutes, Kassy asked me to help prop up the woman's head so that she could drink the cup of restorative tea that she had prepared for her.

And suddenly Francesca jerked forward, fell onto her hands and knees, and disgorged everything that she had consumed in the previous twelve hours. Thick rancid streams of yellow and black liquid mixed with semi-solid chunks of red and white. I think I even saw some green peas in there from the night before.

“Eighteen years in the galleys . . .” Francesca coughed and spat, her voice barely above a croak, her face hanging low, her silky black hair streaked with bits of silver and bile.

“Your punishment will be considerably worse than that, I can assure you,” said the captain.

Kassy's eyes cut sharply into him, but he didn't take any notice of her.

“He sentenced my father to eighteen years in the galleys,” Francesca repeated in a low whisper.

“Who did?” Kassy asked.

“Who do you think?” she said, pushing herself off the floor and squatting on the cold hearthstones, stirring up a cloud of cinders. “Who do you think runs this filthy operation?”

The goldsmith pleaded with her to keep silent.

“You keep out of this,” the captain warned, and turned back to the woman. “Surely you are referring to Herr Schildsberg?”

Francesca let out a sick laugh.

“All right. Who really runs it?” said Kassy.

The goldsmith tried to drown out Francesca's words with howls of protest until the sergeant-at-arms threatened to slap him across the mouth with an ironclad fist.

The woman finally raised her eyes from the mess she had made.

“Father Glemp.”

“Who's he?”

Now it was the captain's turn to laugh skeptically as Francesca turned to face Kassy and said:

“He's the priest at St. Bogdan's Church.”

* * * *

A pair of the captain's men took the goldsmith in for questioning, while we followed the rest of the squadron as they marched their shackled female prisoner past the Ratusz and the flower market, toward a church at the end of a lane the Germans called the Ziegenstrasse, which was aptly named, since the closer we got to the river, the more it smelled like a wet goat.

“How did you find us so quickly?” I asked.

Kassy bit her lip, which she often did when she was gathering her thoughts. “Even a woman with Francesca's resources couldn't possibly expect to pass a significant amount of false coins into circulation without arousing suspicion.”

Rabbi Loew nodded in agreement.

“Nor was there any trafficking in false coins where you expected to find it, among the thieves and lowlifes,” she said.

I grudgingly agreed.

“So it followed that I needed to look for a go-between who knew something of the law and the ways of men, who was able to travel to and from different parts of the city without attracting undue attention, and who had something no one else could offer the bandits—namely, the ability to give them refuge and sanctuary. Who else but a priest could pass undetected from the poorest slums to the parlors of the rich?”

“And of course, no one would suspect a priest,” said Rabbi Loew.

“Not that such an accusation could ever come from my lips,” Kassy interjected. “A Hussite stranger in these lands? Absolutely not,” she added, as we arrived at the church in question.

Its stones were blackened and pitted with dirt and moss, and its sharply angled cornices and gargoyle-shaped rainspouts gave it the appearance of a crouching bird of prey.

The captain ordered one of his men to pound on the heavy wooden door with his halberd. When no one answered, he gave the word, and the guard used the blade of his halberd to pry open the door without too much damage to the lock.

But I bet no one expected to be greeted by the sight of Father Glemp in his spotless white collar and fine black cassock, surrounded by a retinue of armed guards. When he saw who we were, the priest waved them off, and his personal bodyguards stood down.

Father Glemp smiled and greeted the captain and explained that there had been a number of break-ins lately, mostly thieves looking to rob the poor box, but that some fanatical Protestants had recently dared to threaten his personal safety.

The Polish guards cursed the fanatical Protestants, while the captain dismissed the priest's need to explain anything. He had the prisoner brought forth, and indicated that we three newcomers to the city were responsible for her arrest, and for a moment the priest looked at me the way a shipwrecked sailor looks at the blank expanse of sea around him, not fully understanding how the waves had washed all the ink off the map that was supposed to guide him to safety.

“Ask him to show you where he keeps the gold,” said Francesca.

“Forgive us, Father,” said the captain. “But the law says that we must act to verify—or refute—the prisoner's claims.”

“Of course, Captain. You are only doing your duty,” said the priest, chilling me with his smile. “Come this way. We have nothing to hide.”

He gestured for us to follow him up the nave toward the altar.

“Then how come the vault is always locked and you're the only one who has a key?” said Francesca.

The priest sighed, as if he were indulging the ill-bred child of a wealthy parishioner.

“Is it such a novel concept to keep the money for the poor under lock and key?” he asked with a gleam in his eye, as if he were sharing a private joke with the captain.

He led us down the stairs to the crypt and removed a heavy ring of keys from his waistband. He unlocked the iron grille, and had two of his men push open the massive door with a rusty metallic creak.

“There!” Francesca said, pointing to a dented strongbox on a middle shelf. “The false coins are in there.”

It certainly showed signs of having been opened recently, since unlike the rest of the crypt, its surface was completely free of dust. But the priest's manner was far too relaxed and accommodating to support the idea that the box contained anything incriminating.

He opened the box and handed it over to the captain.

“We occasionally receive false coins in the collection plates,” Father Glemp admitted. “Perhaps the parishioners themselves are unaware of their provenance. In any case, we were about to do our civic duty and turn the coins in to the proper authorities, but there are so many responsibilities in this parish, so many hungry mouths to feed, so many poor souls who need a sympathetic ear, that I'm afraid I have let these languish here a bit longer than I should have.”

“You don't have to explain your actions to me, Father. I understand completely,” said the captain, handing off the strongbox to one of his underlings.

Despite the irons on her wrists, Francesca broke free from her captors and yanked a thick gray sheet off a workbench, revealing an array of tools for grinding, filing, and melting down metals.

“What about these, then?” she said, her eyes blazing as a couple of pikemen dragged her away from the bench. “Open those sacks, and you'll see what I'm talking about.”

The captain eyed the sacks under the bench, then his gaze shifted to the priest, who bowed slightly and gestured toward the sacks, as if to say, be my guest.

The captain nodded, and two of his men strode forward and dragged a couple of sacks out from under the bench and sliced them open. They were filled to the brim with luxurious objects—brass candelabras, silver tankards, and what I could have sworn was a solid gold monstrance for holding the most sacred object in a Catholic church—the blessed wafer of Holy Communion.

“For the poor,” offered the priest. “Friends of the church salvaged most of these items from the houses that were damaged in the great fire, but nobody ever came forward to claim them. A few of these trinkets were unearthed when the von Lembergs added a room to their house, and one kind soul donated a battered pair of silver drinking cups he found while digging a privy. We were planning to melt them down to remove the impurities and make it easier to transport the precious metals to the weighing house.”

“Of course, Father.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No, I believe you've given us all we need.”

“You're just going to let him go?” said Francesca. “He runs the whole cursed business! I'm just his servant. Sometimes his washerwoman, too, and believe me, I could tell you things. And he only pays me a lousy ten zlotys a year.”

In other words, less than a third of my meager wages.

The priest mumbled something about how untrustworthy and dishonest some servants can be, and the captain mumbled something about how true that was.

Francesca practically leapt through the air and tried to claw Father Glemp's eyes out, but the guards had put up with enough of her outbursts, so they wrapped a thick chain around her waist, pulled it tight, and cuffed her hands to it. Then they gagged her and carried her kicking and squirming up the stairs of the crypt to the sacred space above. But somehow she managed to spit out the gag and yell something about how Father Glemp had sentenced her father to eighteen years as a galley slave.

The pikemen balled up the gag and stuffed it deep into her mouth until she could barely breathe, while the priest explained in that long-suffering manner of his that Francesca's father had indeed worked for him at one point, but when he found the old man clipping the edges off the coins from the collection plate, he had turned him over to the proper authorities—and it was they who had sentenced the villain to eighteen years in the galleys.

“Yet you continued to employ his daughter,” said the captain, admiringly.

The priest made an expansive gesture. “Charity is boundless.”

The captain nodded his understanding.

Nobody took much notice as Kassy scooped up a sample of the silvery powder from the workbench and slipped it into a small leather pouch.

Everyone was watching Francesca as her body writhed and contorted and her face became inflamed with rage. But her words, whatever they were, went unheard.

I stood there speechless as the sounds of her struggle echoed about the vaulted nave, then died.

“Such a brilliant mind,” said Kassy, lowering her eyes.

“A brilliant mind who shamelessly misused her gifts,” said Rabbi Loew. “And brought nothing but dishonor to her family.”

“It's no fun being publicly gagged either, I can assure you,” she replied.

Kassy was unusually silent as we left the church and made our way back to Zydowska Street.

As the fog thickened about our ankles, Rabbi Loew shared his observations with us, his authoritative voice echoing through the empty streets as if he were pronouncing judgment in a court of law: “The thirst for gold often turns brother against brother. But when a man gives to charity, that piece of gold becomes a sacred object in the eyes of God, since it is destined to help heal the sick, or feed the widows and orphans in the poorhouse. And so it follows that anyone who dares to deprive the needy of such a holy treasure should be tried and punished in the same manner as a man who has committed murder.”

But Kassy wasn't listening. She was absorbed in a sort of standing-on-one-foot analysis of the metallic powder she had collected, taking a pinch of the stuff from the pouch and rubbing it between her fingers, feeling its texture, then bringing a tiny bit to her nose and carefully sniffing at it. Then she wet a finger and rubbed the powder around some more, and smelled that, recoiling. She stopped to wash her hands in a public fountain.

“Well, what do you make of it?” I asked.

“The only explanation that makes sense,” she said, “is that the man we know as Reb Schildsberg and a number of unknown accomplices were indeed working together in an unholy alliance to manufacture and distribute false coins using high quality materials—the same metals that are used in the Paracelsian tinctures and love potions and such like. But you and I know that no amount of gold will ever satisfy the limitless greed of a certain class of criminal, and someone working in that church's crypt began experimenting with cheaper materials, including arsenic, as far as I can tell without further study, and no doubt a number of other dangerous metals. The priest may be guilty of many crimes, but he may not have been aware that one of his servants was also using the materials to brew various potions.”

“So Reb Schildsberg, or whatever his real name was, drained the cup of his own free will, thinking it was his usual love potion,” I said. “But the metals in it were debased, and it killed him.”

Kassy nodded, but Rabbi Loew was more philosophical: “I doubt that we will ever know the full answer. The human heart is capable of atrocities that lie well beyond our comprehension. Even modern science has its limits. Hasn't the great Kopernicus himself admitted that his theories do not explain everything? Teach thy tongue to say ‘I do not know,’ and thou shalt progress, as Rambam put it.”

Kassy's brow furrowed as she asked for further explanation. So I told her that unlike the monolithic and intolerant textual practices of the Church hierarchy, the Talmud teaches us that there are many ways of interpreting a text, even a sacred one. We will never agree on the full meaning of a difficult passage of Scripture, since “the Torah has seventy faces,” as Rabbi Akiva taught, which does not mean that there are literally seventy ways of interpreting those passages, but rather that there are as many interpretations as there are Jews.

This discussion continued until we returned to Jew Street, where a sizable welcoming committee had turned out to greet us. The Jews of Poznanhad heard about our heroic efforts to clear an innocent woman's name and bring the true murderer of one of their own, the honorable Reb Schildsberg, to justice. And I became conscious of a number of matronly women appraising me with their hungry eyes and nodding with approval.

Kassy said, “I'm going back to my room to continue my examination of these powders. Want to come and watch?”

A group of chattering women blocked my path and besieged me with promises of lucrative love matches with their daughters.

Kassy was still waiting for my answer, and the way she stood there, so headstrong and defiant, her emerald green eyes fixed on me, transformed her into the living embodiment of the heroine whom we celebrate on this day, a righteous foreign woman who leaves her pagan ways behind and braves all manner of hardships to join the man whom God alone has chosen for her.

“You do me much honor, dear ladies, for which I am grateful,” I told the excited group of women. “But for the moment, I am committed solely to the pursuit of mystical exploration.”

And even as I spoke those words, a half-forgotten passage from the Zohar flashed through my mind, a profoundly mystical passage plumbing the depths of our souls and the riddle of our frailties, which suggests that our feelings shape our perception of the world around us, and that all human sensory experience is relative. And in that moment I knew that it was true.

Because I offered Kassy my arm, and we marched off together, neither one leading the other, into the gray and foggy night. And as we drew near her street, which reeked from one end to the other of the foul odor of the tanneries, I swear that it smelled like the finest perfume.

Copyright © 2012 Kenneth Wishnia

* * * *

Author's note: Thanks to Professors Robert Goldenberg and Robert Hoberman for their technical advice on traditional Jewish practices, to my father Arnold Wishnia for vetting the chemistry, and to SCCC students Aaron Bryant, Eric Ellsworth, James Giffen, Brian Ratkus and Alexa Wintenberger for their comments on an early draft of this story.

* * * *

Glossary:

Ganef: Thief.

Gehenem: Hell.

Keynehore: No evil eye.

Malekhamoves: Angel of Death.

Paskudnyak: (Slavic) scoundrel.

Rambam: Acronym for Rabbi Moyshe (Moses) Ben Maimon (1135- i1204), known for his rationalist approach to Scripture.

Shul: Synagogue.

Shvues: The holiday that occurs 7 weeks after Passover, celebrating the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.

Zohar: One of the major works of Jewish mysticism, written and compiled by Moses de Leon (Spain, late 13th century), and first published in Mantua (1558-60) and Cremona (1559-60).

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: LAST SUPPER
by Jane K. Cleland

* * * *

Art by Tim Foley

* * * *

I pinched myself real hard the way my used-to-be best friend, Jackie, taught me, and it worked, just like always—I stopped crying.

The police tape was still up. For three days now, walking from the corner where the Chappaqua Middle School bus dropped me off to the Morrisons’ house, I'd run past the spot where Tommy Jennings's body had been found, not wanting to see anything, not wanting to know. Today, even though my throat tightened and my mouth dried up, I paused to look.

Yellow and black crime-scene tape, just like you see in the movies, stretched around six orange cones positioned along the sidewalk from the hedge to the curb. Other than that there were no signs that a murdered man had laid there. No blood. No trampled flowers. No tire marks from a quick getaway. Nothing. Maybe that's why the police say Tommy had been killed somewhere else and his body dumped here. I sighed, then sighed again, then shuffled off toward the house, the place I lived now, the place I was supposed to call home.

Halfway up the walk, I heard a car and turned around. A black Caddy rolled to a stop just beyond the marked-off area. Burt Raleigh, co-owner of the restaurant where'd I'd fussed around last summer helping him and Tommy, his business partner, figure out how to use a graphics program to create their daily menus, was behind the wheel. He got out and stood for a moment, staring at the grassy area inside the police tape. Burt was short and round and bald, and he looked upset. His eyes never left the ground. He was frowning.

“Hi, Burt,” I called, heading back in his direction. “Are you okay?”

He looked around as if he wasn't sure where the voice came from. When he saw me, his brow smoothed out a little.

“Hi, Laney,” he said, giving my shoulders a friendly squeeze. “I just came to try to be close to Tommy, you know? It's a silly idea. I was here yesterday, too, just walking around. I even went to where his car was found, over at Seven Bridges Road. It's so empty there. No one around. Just woods.” He looked away, as if he were embarrassed. “I get no sense of him at all. None.”

“It's so hard,” I said just for something to say.

“Yeah, well, anyway . . . I'm sorry it's been so long since I've seen you, Laney. You look great—as beautiful as your mom, you know? You doing all right for real?”

“Thanks, Burt. I'm doing fine. I mean, the pain . . . I guess it never goes away, not completely, but over time—” I broke off. Mr. Adams, my grief counselor, said that just because someone asks a question doesn't mean I have to answer it. “I'm fine. So . . . I'll get to see you a lot if I can help out with the menus again this summer.”

Burt shook his head. “I'd say yes in a minute, Laney, but it looks like today's the restaurant's last day.”

“What?”

“I don't have the heart for it without Tommy. He was the frontman, greeting the guests, overseeing service . . . Without him. . . .” His voice trailed off.

“I can't believe it,” I managed. “It's only been two days.”

“I know.” He sighed. “It's a hard decision. We've owned the restaurant for almost twenty-six years, Laney. That's a heck of a good run, but I'm thinking that now is the time to move on—why not? We've had offers to buy the place for years. I'm close to retirement age . . . it's almost three years since my wife passed on . . . maybe I'll move to Vegas—you know how much I like it there.”

“What about Sally?” I asked. “I thought she loved working there.”

He sighed again. “Sure she does, Laney. We all do, but Sally says some nights she feels like she's been digging ditches, she's so tired. Time catches up with all of us. Sometimes you do things for your husband or wife even though you don't want to, because it's what they want, to please them, you know? The truth is that Sally and I have been ready to call it quits for years. It was Tommy who was holding on, and Sally said okay because she'd loved him. You'll see when you grow up and get married.”

“I had no idea,” I whispered. I reached my hand around to the back of my thigh and pinched. This time it didn't work. Tears filled my eyes.

“I'm giving everyone a week off,” Burt said, “starting tomorrow, hedging my bets, I guess you could say. I'll make a final decision over the weekend.”

“I'll miss you,” I said through a haze of tears. “I'll miss the restaurant.”

“Thanks, Laney. Things change, you know?”

“I guess,” I said, feeling my hands curl into fists. “Good luck, Burt.”

Burt kissed my cheek and said, “You, too, kid.”

I started off, dragging my feet along the sidewalk. A stack of daily special menus sat on the back seat of Burt's car. The last printing for the last supper, I thought. A Rocky Point Country Club blazer, with the matching tie stretched out on top, lay next to the menus. My teariness turned to for-real crying. It's just too much. Jennleigh's American Grill was my favorite restaurant, and now it was gone. It's so unfair. I kicked a pebble and it skittered onto the asphalt. Both Burt and Tommy had been in my life since forever. I'd hung out with them at the club pool, celebrated Burt's wins and commiserated over his losses after club casino fundraisers, and laughed at Tommy's slapstick humor at the club's biannual talent nights.

“Stop it,” I told myself, knowing I couldn't. Memory, my grief counselor said, was as irresistible as sleep.

As I entered the Morrisons’ big colonial and called hello to their live-in housekeeper, a nice woman named Esther I rarely saw, I wondered, not for the first time, who in the world could have wanted a sweet man like Tommy dead.

* * * *

I touched my mom's feathery dreamcatcher and my dad's shiny club tiepin, setting them spinning. I'd hung them on transparent filament from the window lock over my desk the day I'd moved in. In some fantasy book I'd read in the weeks after my parents were killed, the girl who could fly and kill dragons and things wore her dead mother's locket as a talisman to keep her safe. I'd liked that idea.

I watched as my dad's pin twirled and swayed, the gold shimmering in the late afternoon sun. Anyone could buy the navy blazer with the club's coat of arms embroidered on the pocket and the matching tie, but you could only get the tiepin as an award granted by board proclamation. Dad got his for helping the club get a zoning exception for the putting green. Tommy and Burt had each got one, too, at that same ceremony, for donating Jennleigh's catering services to the club's charity fundraisers. The three men had hugged one another and everyone else, as thrilled as if they'd just won a million dollars. Out of nearly seven hundred members, they were the only three to be honored that year.

I clamped my eyes closed, trying and failing to shut out the memory.

The three men had called one another by the tiny numbers etched into the wreath on their treasured tiepins. “Hey, one eighteen,” Tommy had greeted Dad, “how's it going?” And dad had replied, “Good . . . how about you, one twenty?” And then they'd laughed, reliving their joy and pride. And now they were dead, both of them. I picked up the photo of me and Jackie on horseback, the day we learned to post. Neither one of us could walk without limping for a week, I thought, laughing out loud. My laughing faded to nothing. Last January, Jackie's dad took a job in Utah, and boom, Jackie was gone. Another loss.

“I miss you, Jackie,” I said to the photo.

Vivaldi's Four Seasons, my mom's favorite ringtone, which I used because I love thinking of her, and which I'd discovered got way less lame the more you heard it, sounded on my cell phone, interrupting my reminiscing—a good thing, I knew. I looked at the phone ID display and recognized the number—it was Margot O'Neil, my mom's second best friend after Cindy Morrison, and she was calling from work.

“You ready for tomorrow?” Margot asked.

My sadness evaporated. When Margot had invited me to spend Take Your Daughter and Son to Work Day with her, I'd felt such a rush of relief I'd nearly toppled over. I'd been braced to be alone. Cindy and Karl Morrison were both scheduled to be on the road for work and I'd resigned myself to spending the day at school while everyone else went off with a parent. Instead, I'd get to go with Margot to her way cool job at the police lab.

“Am I ever!” I said. “What should I wear?”

“The rule is business casual—so leave your little black dress at home!”

“Does that mean no jeans?”

“Yup. Khakis are good. Or slacks. Or a skirt. And closed-toe shoes. And a collared tee or a blouse or a sweater. We'll lend you a lab coat.”

“A lab coat!” I said, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Awesome. What will I do all day?”

“You'll shadow me. We'll start with a morning staff meeting. The duty officer will fill us in about whatever transpired overnight. Then we hit the scopes.”

“Thanks, Margot. I can't wait!”

As I slid my phone onto my desk, I saw that Burt was still pacing along the sidewalk, back and forth, back and forth. Poor Burt, I thought.

My grief counselor had warned me that grief follows you everywhere, like a shadow. He said it's worse when questions remain. Like was the driver who hit my parents’ car so hard it exploded into tiny shards of metal that littered the highway for a hundred yards in every direction suicidal? Or was he just drunk? I understood his point. When you don't know things, you ask yourself the same questions over and over again, and no matter how often I told myself it was pointless and only made things worse, I caught myself doing it all the time.

I swiveled back toward Burt. From his somber expression, I knew that useless wondering was happening to him too. Who killed Tommy? he was asking himself. Why was Tommy in this neighborhood? Why had his body been left on the Morrisons’ sidewalk? Burt raised his shoulders and lowered them, up and down, up and down, trying to relax his muscles, I guessed. He shook his head as if he couldn't believe it, that it just couldn't be. I knew that look. It was dawning on him that he might never know.

* * * *

I read a chapter about Pericles, then went downstairs for a snack. From the French windows that opened onto the deck, I watched Gareth Sturbeck, Cindy Morrison's dad, Mr. S. to me, ride his lawn mower, heading toward the house. He lived in the renovated carriage house that had originally been built as stables way back sometime, like in the eighteen hundreds.

Long retired from doing something, I don't know what, at a corporation, Mr. S. was tall and lanky, with silvery hair. Esther said that she'd heard from the woman who came in to clean for him twice a week that he was selling off his investments, settling his affairs, she'd called it, speculating that he'd been diagnosed with a terminal disease and wanted to make things easier for his kids after he was gone.

“Country gossip,” Mom would have said, dismissing it out of hand.

Whether he was dying or not, I thought it must be horrible to be old and lonely. Sure, he lived next door to his daughter, but so what? Cindy worked for some hotshot shoe designer and was always traveling to China. Karl traveled a lot too. His job had something to do with alternative energy, like windmills. Which meant Mr. S. spent most of his time in his own house, alone. I could hear Mr. Adams now—"You're projecting,” he'd said when I'd brought it up last fall. I'd said it wasn't that, describing the near constant tension in Mr. S.'s jaw and the empty look I often saw in his eyes. The counselor had acknowledged that I was making a fair point—that just because I felt sad and empty didn't mean that Mr. S. didn't too.

Mr. S. saw me through the window and waved, and I waved back. He cut the motor, stepped off the mower, and headed in my direction, walking with a hitch in his gait, as if his hip was bothering him. I met him by a stand of lilacs not yet in bloom.

“Terrible thing about Tommy,” he said.

“Horrible,” I agreed.

“And hard to believe. I can't remember the last killing we had around here.” He shook his head. “Was that Burt I saw you talking to just now?”

I nodded. “He said he hoped to get a sense of Tommy.”

He shook his head again. “Did you hear anything Monday night?”

“No. Neither did Esther. Did you?”

“Nope. And I'm a light sleeper. There was no scuffle, that's for certain, otherwise I would have heard it for sure. The police brought me in for questioning, did you know that? They say that it doesn't make any sense that Tommy's body was randomly dumped smack dab in front of the carriage house. There's so much undeveloped land around, including where they found Tommy's car, down on Seven Bridges Road, they figure there's got to be a reason why his body was left here in particular.”

“Do you think it was some kind of message?” I asked, my eyes opening wide at the thought.

“Maybe . . . except if the message was intended for me, it missed its mark. That's what I told them, too.”

“What about Cindy and Karl?” I asked. “They're the actual owners, right?”

“Yup . . . but the body was left at the carriage house, not the main house. Plus, they barely knew him.”

“I don't understand how this could have happened,” I said. “Last night, the news said that Tommy had dinner at the club and was on his way home. It's unbelievable.”

“I heard that report, too. Sally stayed behind for a nightcap after he left. Some friends drove her home about an hour later. They say it's the first time Tommy ever left without her.”

“Yeah, they're together all the time,” I said, thinking of how Mom and Dad used to laugh about it, saying as much as they loved one another, no way would they want to be together 24/7 like Sally and Tommy. “Do they know why he left?”

“He told folks he had to get to bed because he had an early appointment, and according to today's news, he did. With his dentist. Looks like it's just a coincidence that the one time he leaves without her, he's killed.”

I sighed. “Did you know him well?”

“Yup.” He shook his head, looking sad. “Jennleigh's is like a home away from home to me. I've eaten dinner there a few times a week ever since Verna died ten years ago. That's a lot of meals. How about you?”

“I helped them with some computer stuff last summer. And I love their burgers.” I glanced toward the front. “There has to be a reason the body was left here. It doesn't make sense otherwise. You can't think of any other connection?”

“Well, I put down a little cash a few years ago when they hit a rough patch . . . but I don't see how that could figure into it. Killing Tommy wouldn't help me get my money back, even if I needed it, which I don't. Tommy and Burt had a partners’ agreement where if one of them dies, the other one gets everything. In any event, I wasn't pressing them to repay . . . I don't care about the money. I told Burt when I handed it over that I was investing to help keep one of my favorite places open. If I got a good return on my money, great. If I didn't, so be it. It has to be another coincidence. Just a sad, sad coincidence.”

“Have they said how Tommy died yet?” I asked.

“Yeah, the medical examiner just released his report.” Mr. S. paused for a moment."He was strangled.”

I reached a hand to my neck. “Strangled?”

“That's what they said. Hard to imagine. From some of the questions the police asked me, I gather they found a few fibers at the scene—silk.”

“Like from a scarf? It never occurred to me that the killer might be a woman.”

“Lots of men wear silk . . .” Mr. S. met and held my eyes. “I wonder how Sally's doing?”

“When I spoke to Burt just now,” I said, swallowing hard, “he told me he's closing the restaurant for a week and maybe forever. Tonight might be Jennleigh's last night.”

“You're kidding!”

I shook my head and repeated Burt's explanation.

Mr. S. looked into the middle distance for several seconds, then turned back to me and smiled grimly. “Since they have that partners’ agreement, Sally would have no reason to kill Tommy . . . and of course, she was at the club while he was being murdered . . . still . . . want to join me at Jennleigh's for dinner tonight?”

I tried to smile. “Yes,” I said.

* * * *

I waited at the curb as Mr. S. backed his car out of the garage. Standing at the marked-off edge of the crime scene, thinking how Burt had tried to channel Tommy, I realized that I hadn't eaten at Jennleigh's since my job ended at the start of the school year. When the Morrisons were in town, and wanted to go out to eat, they always chose the new Asian fusion place, not Jennleigh's standard American fare.

When we got to the restaurant, the line stretched halfway down the block.

“You hold our place,” Mr. S. told me. “I'll see how long it'll be.”

Within seconds, Dale Mackie and his wife, Allie, joined the line in back of me. I hadn't seen them since my parents’ funeral. I used to hang out with their daughter, Emma, sometimes. I called her Emster, not because she looked like a hamster, but because it's hysterical to say.

Emster was one of the many girls I no longer spent much time with. I didn't want to. Last fall, as if a switch had flipped, Emster became obsessed with boys and music. I wasn't, and after trying to act like I didn't think it was all beyond stupid for weeks, I gave up. I just wanted to be alone.

Mr. Adams said that was a natural reaction to overwhelming loss, and that it would pass. Maybe, but I doubt it. I don't think I'm in a temporary phase. I think I've changed. I think I'm now a grown-up girl who likes to be by herself and ride horses and read, and so what? It isn't like I do drugs or anything. I'm a loner, not a loser. Who needs friends anyhow? Friends move away. Friends become completely boring. Plus, I've learned that if you don't let yourself care about something, it doesn't hurt as much when you lose it.

I greeted Mr. and Mrs. Mackie and we commiserated about Tommy and Jennleigh's. I asked about Emma and they asked about me, and then I pointed to his chest and asked, “Is that what I think it is, Mr. Mackie?”

Dale grinned and fingered his club tiepin. “I just got it Monday,” he said. “It was a special moment, I can tell you that.” His smile wilted. “Tommy was there.”

Mr. S. came up and I introduced him to the Mackies.

“Sally says it'll be about half an hour,” he reported.

“How is she?” I asked.

“About how you'd expect . . . pretty down in the dumps, but putting on her game face.”

Before I had time to reply, Sally stepped out of the restaurant and started working the line, thanking each person or group for coming, and apologizing for the wait. She looked as put-together as ever. Her hair was twirled into a French twist. Her makeup was smoky and intense. Her black dress fitted her perfectly.

The Sally I'd known for years was bubbly and outgoing, but now, when she looked in my direction, I saw that her eyes were clouded, as if she was having trouble focusing, and her shoulders hunched forward as if she was having trouble straightening up. Poor Sally. She was losing her job in addition to losing her husband. I felt tears well in my eyes. I didn't want to think about how she must be feeling, but I couldn't stop. Raw, I thought. She must be feeling scraped raw.

When she reached us, she saw it was me and hugged me. I fought an urge to flee. There was no reason for us to be here for dinner. I didn't want a last supper. I didn't want to be part of the end of an era. She hugged Mr. S., too, then turned to the Mackies.

I leaned into Mr. S.'s ear and whispered, “Can we leave?”

He looked startled, but said, “Sure.”

We slipped out of line, and once we were in the car, I tried to explain why I'd wanted to go. “It's like stopping when you see an accident on the road,” I said, “not to help, but to see how bad it is.”

Mr. S. nodded. “I hadn't thought of it like that, but you're right. You're a smart girl, Laney. Sensitive too. I'm glad we left. Have you ever been to Roscoe's? They have pretty good burgers.”

That's where we went, and the burgers were terrific. The fries were, too. We had a good time, talking about what it was like when Mr. S. played shortstop for the Pawtucket Red Sox back in the sixties and how I liked to ride horses, Western better than English, and how we both liked to read. We didn't talk about Tommy or Jennleigh's at all.

Back home, Mr. S. walked me to the door and thanked me. “I had a great time, Laney. I know Karl won't be back until Tuesday and Cindy not till after that . . . want to go out for dinner again on Sunday?”

“Sunday's good. Sunday's great.” I sighed and looked away. “I hate being alone on Sundays.”

“Me, too. That's ‘cause it's a family day. You've got yourself a date, young lady.”

I grinned, relieved to have something to look forward to.

“Cool,” I said.

Later that night, with the duvet tucked under my chin, I watched as moonlit shadows of just-unfurling leaves stippled the floor. I couldn't sleep. I had coincidences on my mind. I knew coincidences happened, but from what I've seen, they're rare. It wasn't a coincidence that my parents died. It was a combination of cause and effect and bad luck. According to witnesses, without warning, the driver of a dark green SUV veered out of his lane and plowed into their sedan. Last Monday, Sally stayed at the club while Tommy drove home alone. Why? Tommy's body was left in front of Mr. S.'s carriage house. Why? I kept trying to think of logical explanations until finally the steady hum of katydids and crickets lulled me to sleep.

* * * *

“Here's the image of a footprint found at the Thomas Jennings’ crime scene that we released to the media,” Margot explained the next morning at the county police lab. Margot was petite, not much taller than me, with shaggy brown hair and green eyes.

We sat on metal bar stools in front of a huge black microscope. “We thought there was a chance someone might recognize the markings, but so far, no one has. Even though the marks are indistinct, they're unusual. Do you see those interlocking circles? Can you see how the tread pattern fades away at the heel?”

I fiddled with the dial, bringing the image into focus. “Yes . . . I see what you mean. Can't you enhance the image in Photoshop or something?”

“I wish . . . but no. You can't enhance what isn't there and we can't add what's missing.”

“Was whoever the shoe belongs to walking on his toes?”

“Not necessarily. Maybe the ground was harder in that spot. Or maybe he stepped on a sheet of paper that blocked his heel from touching the ground. We can't know why. We focus solely on what.”

“So the footprint is worthless?”

“Maybe, maybe not. When the police find the killer—or at least when they find the person who dumped Mr. Jennings's body—we can compare that person's shoes to this partial print. In other words, it might help build a case, but it's unlikely that it will solve the case. Capisce?”

“Capisce.”

“So, if you were me, what else would you do?”

I thought for a moment. “Can you tell anything from the dirt found in and around the footprint? Maybe the person who left the print brought in dirt from somewhere else.”

“Good idea. When I tested it, I learned that all the dirt is local to the area. There's no clay, for instance, or sand, that might indicate an outside component. What else do you want to know?”

“I heard on the news that there were some silk fibers found at the scene. What color are they?”

“Mostly red, but there's some kind of pattern in the fiber. We don't have enough material to identify it.”

“Is it from a scarf?”

“How can we tell?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“Me, either. It's the same as the footprint . . . once we have a silk item, like a scarf, we can compare our fibers to it, and if they match, that will help build the case, but until then—” She shrugged and flipped open her palms. “—we've got nada. For all we know, the silk is from Mr. Jennings's sheets.”

“He slept on silk sheets?” I asked, intrigued.

“Apparently not, but I had the detective check it out.”

“I see what you mean. You can't guess.”

“Not exactly. We guess—in the jargon of the business, we say we make working assumptions—all the time. What we don't do is treat an unvalidated assumption as fact.”

“What about ties? Tommy always wore a tie.”

“Not that night, he didn't.”

“How's it going?” Mitch Rogers, Margot's direct supervisor, asked, stepping into the lab. He was tall and broad, with short red hair flecked with gray, and a thick red mustache.

“Great,” Margot said. “Laney's a real whiz! She's asking all the right questions.”

“Margot makes everything easy to understand,” I said, embarrassed at the praise.

“Good, good. That's what I like to hear. So, I've got to brief the mayor in an hour . . . What can you tell me?”

Margot led me down a short hallway, past her cubicle, into a conference room.

“Hang tight,” she said, “I'll be back in a flash.”

“Okay,” I said, looking around.

The off-white walls were scuffed. The tabletop was cheesy-looking fake wood. The chairs were mismatched. Maps of the county lined the walls, along with color photographs of the county's mayors, the governor, and the president. One of the maps was labeled “topographical,” and I wondered what that meant. I sat down, then stood up again, then sat back down. There was nothing to do. I yawned. I had books in my backpack, but I'd left it in Margot's cubicle.

I walked to the door and looked up and down the corridor. No one was visible. From somewhere far away, a phone rang, and I heard a cheerful voice say hello, then okay, okay, then nothing. I stepped back inside. I pirouetted around for awhile, pretending I was a for-real ballerina, then realized how stupid I'd look if someone saw me, and plunked back down at the table.

“Boring,” I said aloud.

I pretended I was a lawyer like Dad. After a few minutes, I ran out of things to say to my make-believe client, and walked to the doorway again. Peeking out, there still wasn't anyone in sight. I stepped into the hallway and quick-walked to Margot's cubicle. I grabbed my fun book, an Agatha Christie, saw my iPhone and grabbed it, too, then scooted back to the conference room.

I looked up topographical, then checked my Gmail account. Only junk. For awhile after Jackie moved, we'd e-mailed daily, sometimes more often, and we'd talked every day before school and after dinner. Then she started telling me all about her new friends and this boy named Zac and I knew she'd crossed over to the dark side and was now as boy-obsessed as Emster. I zipped over to Facebook. Nothing interesting.

I popped over to the club's Web site to see if they'd posted any photos of Dale getting his tiepin—if they had, I knew for sure that Tommy would be in the photos and I wanted to see him again. They had. They were good ones, too. Dale standing alongside Allie and Emster. Dale posing with Burt and Tommy, all three men in full club regalia, beaming. Dale and Allie standing with Tommy and Sally. I stared at Tommy's smiling face for several seconds, then touched the screen as if I could touch his arm. Sally's smile looked forced, like she'd stubbed her toe just before the photographer told everyone to smile.

After several seconds, my mouth fell open and I gawked. I touched the photo to enlarge it as realization after realization ricocheted in my head like pinballs.

“Okey, dokey,” Margot said when she returned a minute later. She must have seen something in my eyes, because her expression changed. “What is it, Laney?” Her voice was low and urgent.

“You said before Tommy wasn't wearing a tie.”

“That's right. He wasn't. Why?”

“There were two club tiepins, though, right? One was in Tommy's coat pocket, or maybe in his car, and the other was at the crime scene.” I glanced at Tommy's photo. Tears stung my eyes. “I'm right, aren't I?”

She paused, her eyes fixed on my face. Her eyes revealed her astonishment. “I can't answer that.”

“I know who killed Tommy,” I whispered.

“Who?” She raised her hand like a traffic cop. “No, don't tell me. Don't say another word.”

She used the phone mounted on the wall to call Mitch and asked him to join us before meeting with the mayor.

As soon as he stepped into the room, she repeated what I'd told her.

“Go ahead, Laney,” Mitch said. “Explain.”

I didn't say anything. I didn't want it to be true. I didn't want to tell. Mitch waggled his fingers, signaling that I was to hurry up.

“Did you see this picture?” I asked, sliding my iPhone across the table. “It's from Monday night. Tommy's wearing his club blazer and tie. That's what made me realize what must have happened. Tommy always wore a tie. Always. It was his thing.”

Mitch looked at the photo, then back at me. “I don't know what you're driving at, Laney, but whatever it is, it's sounding like it's out of my lab's jurisdiction. I'm going to call the detective handling the case.”

He had his BlackBerry to his ear before he was out the door.

* * * *

Detective Wayne Jackson looked and sounded more like a Texan than a New Yorker. He wore brown lizard cowboy boots and he spoke with a twang. He looked friendly, with an easy smile and a relaxed, I've-got-all-the-time-in-the-world manner. We sat at his desk in the squad room.

It was my first time inside a police station. The room was big and open and noisy, with four metal desks lined up against one wall and a row of file cabinets against the other. A huge bulletin board packed with notices was mounted by the door alongside a water cooler and a dusty fake rubber tree plant. Detective Jackson's desk was the third one back from the windows.

He explained that he needed permission to talk to me, so he called Mr. S. and got Cindy Morrison's hotel number in Shanghai. I glanced at the time display on my iPhone. It was eleven ten a.m. That meant it was eleven ten p.m. there. Detective Jackson called and woke her up. After explaining the situation and listening for a minute, he thanked her and handed me the phone.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” I said, feeling uncomfortable with Detective Jackson listening in.

“I wish I was there, Laney. Are you going to be okay talking to the police?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, then. I'll call you around seven tonight your time.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Bye.”

Detective Jackson replaced the receiver, then led the way down a corridor and around a corner. He opened a door with a shiny gold “3” on it. The room was small and rectangular.

“I need to check on a couple of things. Will you be all right here for a few minutes?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, hoisting my backpack onto the table. “I've got books with me.”

I couldn't read. I couldn't sit still. I paced. The little room was fifteen steps wide and eighteen steps long. I felt teary one minute and mad enough to hit something the next. Tommy's death was so unfair. All he'd wanted was what he had—Jennleigh's. He was killed because he wouldn't retire. All I wanted was what I'd had too. My parents were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if there's anything more unfair than that, I don't know what it is. Mr. Adams says there's lots of unfair stuff in life, which doesn't make me feel better at all.

Detective Jackson came back in the room with a uniformed police officer, a woman with curly black hair and dark blue eyes he introduced as Officer Halson. He sat at the head of the table She sat next to him, across from me, and smiled.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Laney,” he said. “Let me tell you what—”

There was a knock on the door and he called come in. Another uniformed officer, this one an older man, said a Mr. Sturbeck wanted to see me. Mr. S. poked his head in, saw me, smiled, and stepped in.

“Hi, Laney,” he said.

“Mr. S.! I didn't know you were coming.”

“Cindy and I decided we'd feel better with me here keeping you company.”

“Thanks,” I said, and touched his arm.

He sat next to me and patted my hand.

There was another delay while they got Cindy's official permission for Mr. S. to stay in the room, then Detective Jackson switched on the video recorder and a red pinprick-sized light came on. He listed all our names, summarized his two conversations with Cindy, stated the date and time, then asked me to repeat what I'd told Margot and Mitch at the police lab.

“You said you know who killed Tommy,” he said when I was done. “Who?”

I didn't want to say. I hated being here. I hated knowing. My stomach clenched and I thought maybe I was going to be sick. “Maybe I'm wrong.”

“Maybe you're not.”

“It's okay, Laney,” Mr. S. said. “Tell them what you know.”

I didn't say anything, and after a few seconds, Detective Jackson smiled like he wasn't mad at me for stalling, and said, “How about if you start at the beginning.” He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, elbows out. “You saw Tommy's photo. What about it caught your eye?”

I looked at Mr. S. He patted my hand again and nodded encouragingly.

“Tommy was wearing a tie in the photo, but not when you found his body. I knew that meant someone took it.”

“How come?”

“Why else wouldn't he be wearing it?”

“Maybe he took it off.”

I shook my head. “Not Tommy. The only time I ever saw him without a tie was at the pool or while he was playing tennis or something.”

Detective Jackson nodded and tapped his pen on the table for a few seconds. “Tell me what you think happened starting from when Tommy left the club.”

“As soon as Tommy left, Burt followed. Somehow Burt got him to stop driving, maybe just by waving him over. They argued.”

“What about?”

“Money. Burt wanted to sell the restaurant and Tommy didn't.” I looked away, then back. “Burt's a gambler and my dad told me that if you gamble, you lose. It's not if, it's when and how much. I think Burt was in trouble. Gambling trouble.”

The detective nodded. “So they argued . . . then what?”

“Their fight went from words to shoves and stuff. In the scuffle, Tommy ripped Burt's tie and his tiepin fell off. I bet the silk fibers you found at the scene match Burt's tie. And I bet you found his tiepin.”

“You asked the lab technician if we found two tiepins. How did you know there were two?”

“Were there?”

“We'll be releasing the information to the media soon, so I can tell you ... yes ... one was found in Tommy's car, under the brake pedal. The other was in his fist. How did you know?”

“I saw Burt pacing around the place where Tommy's body was found. I thought he was looking for something. He told me he wasn't, that he was just upset.” I shook my head. “He lied to me. He looked me in the eyes and lied.”

He nodded, not surprised. I guess he was used to people lying to him.

“He was looking for his tiepin,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“What else could it be? The one in the car is Tommy's. The other one is Burt's. He was desperate to find it because he knew that if you found it first, it would lead you right to him.”

He looked at me blankly. I glanced around the room. Everyone looked mystified.

“They're numbered,” I explained. “The designer etches the number into the wreath. My dad got number one hundred eighteen. Burt has one hundred nineteen. Tommy got one hundred twenty.” I sighed and shook my head. “At some point, maybe right away, maybe not until the next day, Burt realized his own tiepin was missing, and he's been looking for it ever since.”

He turned to Officer Halson. “Call the lab.”

She nodded and left the room.

He looked at me, half-smiling."Let's hear the rest of your theory, Laney. Burt followed Tommy. They fought. Tommy ripped Burt's tie and got hold of his tiepin. Then what?”

My eyes filled again and I brushed aside a tear. “Burt strangled Tommy,” I said, and choked. Mr. S., squeezed my arm. I took a deep breath and continued. “Then he took Tommy's tie. I mean, he couldn't just breeze into the shop and buy a new one, you know? By throwing Tommy's tiepin on the car floor, he set the stage so you'd think Tommy had lost it days or weeks earlier. That was pretty smart, don't you think?”

“Why did he move the body?” Detective Jackson asked.

“Probably he was afraid that there'd be some kind of forensic evidence that might connect him to the crime, like hair or skin particles, or those silk fibers or something. I think Burt drove his own car to Seven Bridges Road, which can't be too far away from the murder scene because he walked back. Then he drove Tommy's body to Mr. S.'s carriage house using Tommy's car, left the body there, and drove Tommy's car back to Seven Bridges Road. Maybe he wiped his fingerprints off the steering wheel, maybe not—after all, they're such good friends, they're certain to have been in one another's cars all the time.” I looked up. “Then he drove himself home.”

“Why leave the corpse at the carriage house?

“Probably to confuse things. Mr. S. invested some money in the restaurant, so Burt probably thought you'd consider him a suspect.”

Detective Jackson leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the tabletop, thinking. After a moment, he looked at me straight on and cocked his head. “And you figured all this out just by looking at a photo?”

“Well, I knew things, too, like Burt wanting to sell the business, and that he gambled, and that Tommy was refusing to cooperate, and that the tiepins could be traced.”

“And that Tommy always wore a tie. You're a smart cookie, young lady.”

I felt my cheeks grow warm. “Thanks, but I don't think that brains are involved so much as just knowing things . . . I mean why would you notice that Tommy wasn't wearing a tie? Who pays attention to what isn't there?”

“I'll tell you what I want you to do for me, Laney,” Detective Jackson said, smiling as he turned off the video recorder. “Hurry up and finish school. Then come apply for a job.”

* * * *

“So you're saying Burt dumped Tommy's body here to try to implicate me?” Mr. S. asked.

It was Sunday. We sat in Mr. S.'s kitchen having a drink before heading out to dinner. Mr. S. had mixed himself a cranberry and seltzer. I was having a lime Coke.

“Right,” I said. “Leaving the body here didn't work real well though, did it? I mean the police never considered you an actual suspect, did they?”

“I don't know about that. They sure asked me a boatload of questions.”

“Just before I came over here, I heard on the news that Burt confessed. He took a plea deal. Aggravated assault, I think they called it, negotiated down from manslaughter. The reporter said he could be out in as little as three years.”

“Three years sounds like nothing, doesn't it? Still, not having to sit through a trial will save poor Sally a lot of angst.”

“Angst . . . that means depressed, right?”

“Not exactly. It's more like depression, dread, and anxiety all rolled into one.”

“I don't think Sally has angst. I think she organized the whole thing and planned to double-cross Burt in the bargain.”

Mr. S. stared at me. “Come again? You think Sally conspired with Burt to kill Tommy? That's an out-of-nowhere thought.”

I shrugged. “She was fed up to her eyeballs with Tommy refusing to sell Jennleigh's.”

Mr. S.'s brow creased. “Where on God's earth did you get that idea?”

“I made it up, to connect the dots.”

“That's what I figured. What else did you make up?”

“Just that Burt and Sally decided that if Tommy wouldn't agree to sell the business that night, Burt would kill him, and that Sally stayed behind at the club to give herself an in-case-it-came-to-that alibi.”

“But why do you think she's involved?”

“Did you see her photo from that night? She looked all tense. Sally never looks tense. Something was up.” I shrugged. “Anyway, that's all I made up. Everything else is real. The news said that Burt will never see a dime of the money from selling the restaurant because you can't profit from a crime. So guess who's walking away with the whole shebang? Sally.”

“You think she got Burt to confess?”

“Uh-huh. Probably she convinced him that with all the circumstantial evidence—his tiepin found clutched in Tommy's hand; the footprint, which matches shoes in his closet; and the torn tie, which I can't believe he stashed in a drawer, I mean, really, how stupid is that?—he was a goner anyway. ‘Take the deal and I'll give you half when you get out,’ is what I bet she told him. Ha, ha. As if.” I shrugged again. “I can't prove it or anything, but that's what I think. I don't believe in coincidences, so her staying behind had to be explained somehow. This is the only explanation that makes sense.”

“Laney, you have a diabolical mind.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Doesn't that mean devilish?”

“Sometimes. I meant it as a compliment—fiendishly clever.”

I smiled. “Cool.”

I finished my Coke and slid the glass onto the table, then turned to stare out the window into the twilight. Another Sunday almost survived. We used to play games on Sundays. Risk, my dad's favorite. Scrabble, my mom's. And Boggle, mine. When I turned back, Mr. S. was looking at me.

“I have some angst, Mr. S.”

He rattled the ice in his glass, saw it was empty, and stood up. “Me, too, Laney. Me, too. But I know something that's almost guaranteed to help chase it away, at least for awhile. Dinner with a good friend. Ready to go?”

“You bet,” I said, carrying my glass to the sink. “So how'd you end up as a shortstop, anyway?”

Copyright © 2012 Jane K. Cleland

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Department: MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH

* * * *

Copyright 2012, Smit/Shutterstock.com

* * * *

CROSSING THE ROAD WAS GOING TO BE AN ISSUE

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 “June Contest,” and be sure your name and address are written on the story you submit. If you would like your story returned, please include an SASE.

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Fiction: THE POT HUNTERS
by David Hagerty

Aditsan sat under the shadow of Tsé Bit'a'i. The great butte of the winged rock rose nearly as high as the clouds, protruding from the landscape like a lone tooth. It gave the only shelter from a desert sun that burned the landscape red. Far around on the wide plateau, his aunt's sheep grazed on scrub brush. He contemplated sending out his dog to round up the herd, but the heat combined with a persistent cough left him feeling weak and frail. He lay back on the prickly rock and gazed off toward the far horizon, daydreaming about the raids and battles his elders had described.

A growl from the dog alerted him that a lone rider approached, a Bilagaana with the Stetson hat and deerskin vest of a cowboy. He was long and lean, with a face burned nearly as red as Aditsan's, but his squint suggested discomfort in the desert. The rider pulled up, with the sun directly behind him, creating a burst of light around his head.

“Speak English?” the man said.

Aditsan nodded but said nothing.

“That's good, ‘cause I don't know Navajo. My name's Will Griffiths. What's yours?”

The railroads that pushed across the Southwest and into the New Mexico territory had brought many Bilagaana emissaries. First were the traders and miners who sought wealth in the Wild West. Then came the missionaries who wanted to remake the Indians in their own image. Later came the tourists who wanted to experience firsthand the beauty and barbarity of Indian Territory. Aditsan had met many of these as they spread out across the reservation and even spent half of his dozen years under their tutelage. He had learned to use two names for everything. His tribe, the Diné, were called the Navajo; his hometown of Tsé Bit'a'i was called Shiprock; even his name had to be reinterpreted.

“People call me Abe,” he said.

“Well, Abe, I'm hoping you can help me. See, I'm looking for a great kiva buried near here, but I've been traveling two months now and can't find a thing.”

Aditsan was intrigued. Not in many years had he traveled to the ancient kivas that lay buried under heavy sand drifts several day's ride from his family's hogan. Though familiar to him, they seemed foreign in ways that were exciting.

“I can show you a place,” he said.

* * * *

Ten days of riding brought them to a circular depression in a sand drift at the edge of the reservation. They set up camp—Will in a white canvas tent, Aditsan with a bedroll of blankets given to him by his aunt—and built a hitching post for their horses. A few days later, they rode into the nearby village of Bis Dah Cleets, which the Bilagaana called Two Grey Hills, and hired three Navajo men with promises of coffee and a paycheck later.

Many days of excavations proved them right about the great kiva that lay buried there. Just below the sand's hard crust they found a ring of mud brick and desiccated wood taller than a man. With pails and hand tools, the men cleared away debris that had accumulated for centuries. They were looking for pots, gourds, tools, anything that may have been left behind by those who once lived and worshipped there. However, the few artifacts they unearthed—a chipped pot painted white and black, and a small mat of woven yucca that might once have been a sandal—were fragmented or broken.

One day, the cowboy approached the boy as he sat beneath a butte as shelter from the sun.

“Abe, come here. I need you to translate for me.”

Will had retained the boy not for his muscle but for his English. Six years of education at an Indian School in Fort Collins had made him bilingual. The persistent cough he developed there had also made him thin and weak. Although he was dispatched each morning to a cave which collected water from an aquifer, the boy did no labor on the excavation.

“Somebody's been stealing from me,” Will said.

Will stared down at him with eyes that seemed to change in the sunlight from blue to green to brown, like a river reflecting what was around it. Never before had Aditsan seen someone whose appearance shifted so, and it made him uneasy.

Will led the boy across the mudflats to the kiva, where the three Navajo men pulled apart stones by hand, walked twenty paces, and replaced them into rows and columns like Spanish soldiers lined up for an attack.

“Ask them what they've done with the pot.”

When they heard the boy speak, the men set down their stones and wiped their dusty hands on the thighs of their deerskin pants. They all contemplated the question as though translating the words themselves and looked away in the direction of the sun as though seeking the phrases to respond. The first to speak was Klah, whose long, slim muscles made his arms look like rope. He pointed at the boy with his left hand.

“You would not say that to us if we were alone,” he said in his own language.

Because Aditsan was weak and not yet a man, the laborers hated that they had to take orders from him, even if they knew the words were not his but the Bilagaana's. The others stared in silence until Aditsan spoke again.

“He expects an answer.”

The next to speak was Niyol, who looked in the direction of the wind. It blew his long, black hair behind him, despite the rag he wore twisted around his forehead. Being the oldest, he was more patient with the boy.

“There is nothing here worth stealing.”

Aditsan looked out to the round shape of the kiva, whose low stone walls were now visible on one side. Following its line he could see that it would be fifty paces across. From what his mother taught him, the boy knew Niyol was right.

He explained all this to the Bilagaana, but the cowboy shook his head no.

“They don't get it. The things buried here are as great as anything the Greeks or Romans made. They've got to be saved.”

Aditsan was surprised the men had agreed to dig at all. This place belonged to the Anasazi, the enemy ancestors of the Diné. Of course they all knew of its existence, had passed it by many times, and had been told of other, even larger ruins by their elders. Always they were warned not to stay, that spirits of the dead lay buried there. Before he left home, Aditsan's grandmother had given him a necklace of juniper seeds as protection. The other men agreed to dig in the kiva only because they thought no bodies would be buried there.

“If these pieces are stolen, they'll be lost forever. No one will know where they come from. Tell them that.”

The boy translated to the workers, knowing it would make them angry.

“If anything is missing, it is because others come here at night,” Klah said.

He stood from the pile and walked toward where the sun would fall.

“No,” the Bilagaana said. “Nobody else knows about this place. Look around. Do you see anybody?”

In two cycles of the moon no one had passed. Once, a young girl on horseback had stood upon the hill far away and watched them work, but she had not approached nor returned.

“Those pots have been here hundreds of years waiting for someone to find them.”

The boy didn't bother to translate, knowing that the men viewed time differently than the Bilagaana, not as something that can be measured or counted.

Finally, the third of the workers, who was called Tse for his rocky solidity, replied.

“If he believes we are thieves, we should go.”

He walked to where their bedding was rolled up, threw a blanket across his shoulders, mounted his horse, and waited for the others to follow. The cowboy eyed them, his face unreadable in the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, then walked to his tent and withdrew a rifle, holding it at his hip in the direction of the Navajo. They ignored him, finished packing, and mounted their horses. The boy considered following the men, but sensing that they were angry and that he was a proxy for the cowboy, he decided to stay. He watched the horses stumble through the thick dust until the men were far enough away not to hear.

“Calling them thieves is an insult.”

“Stealing from me is a bigger insult.”

“How do you know they were stealing?”

The Bilagaana sat down on a boulder and lay the rifle next to him.

“Last night I heard something moving through the camp.”

Aditsan thought back to the restless night he had endured and how to respond.

“It may be a ringtail or . . .” The boy tried to recall the English name from his lessons in school. “. . . a kie-o-tee.”

The cowboy clenched his teeth and shook his head no.

“This morning, the bricks were moved. No animal would do that.”

He walked to the tent and began removing his food, stuffing it in a saddlebag.

“Will you follow them?”

“What for? They're not coming back.”

“They were afraid of being arrested.”

“By who? There's no law in this territory. Look around. Do you see Pat Garrett?”

The boy did not know who this meant, but could see that Will was angry, and walked back to the shade of the mesa. A few minutes later, he awoke to see the cowboy standing over him.

“Come on,” Will said.

“Where?”

“To find those pots.”

* * * *

For two days, they rode into the sun toward Gallop, past rocky outcroppings that lay like cow dung on the landscape. They stopped only to sleep and eat their ration of cornmeal and jerky. The cowboy never spoke except to direct the boy over sand drifts and cracked mud. Even where he knew the path was incorrect, the boy said nothing. For they were not friends, despite the weeks they had spent together.

Although he'd been born under the shadow of Tsé Bit'a'i, at the age of six Aditsan was taken away by Bilagaana missionaries to the school at Fort Collins. For the next six years he had studied with them: English, blacksmithing, and, most importantly, Christianity, for the missionaries told him that he “needed to be saved,” though he did not understand from what. They dressed him in a soldier's uniform, cut off his hair, and beat him when he tried to speak his own language. They sat him at desks next to Utes and Hopis, historic enemies of the Diné, and treated them all as though they were of the same tribe. They even changed his name to Abe, after President Lincoln, because they could not pronounce his given name, Aditsan, which meant listener.

When he was twelve, and had not seen his family for three years, Fort Collins was converted to a high school focused on agriculture and mechanical arts. The missionaries offered to let Abe stay on with them, but as a teenager Aditsan longed for freedom. He left the school in April 1910, by their calendar, and walked back to his home at Naat'anii Nééz, following the ruts of the wagon trails that had transported him six years earlier. Unsure of the way, he stopped at every intersection and used the sun as his guide; after ten days he reached familiar ground. Along the way, he picked up a rattling cough that bent him over double and left him breathless.

His family welcomed Aditsan back like the prodigal son in Luke, redressing him in deerskin clothing hand-stitched by his mother and a chief's blanket woven by his aunt, which he kept with him always thereafter. Despite these garments, he experienced the same displacement at home as at school. The hogan where his family lived felt smaller than he remembered, a low earth mound built over bent tree limbs with barely enough room for all five of them to sleep, and nothing like the dormitory of bunk beds where he'd lived at the Indian school. Other Diné who had not lived off the reservation looked at him with suspicion because of his short hair and cough. The only work available was watching the flock of Churro sheep that his aunt kept for her weaving. After six years of strict scheduling at the school, the boy found it tedious standing outside in the endless sun. Under the shadow of Tsé Bit'a'i, he daydreamed about the battles and raiding parties described by his elders.

So when the cowboy rode into town seeking a navigator and translator, the boy had been captivated. He explained to his family that he would return shortly, that they needed the money the cowboy was offering, and that the isolation would give him time to recover from his illness.

Now, plodding through arid desert, the boy wondered when he would see his family and home again. They passed by flocks of sheep and lone horseman who stared silently after them. Fields of dry corn grew near the few sources of water. Stray dogs snarled as they approached, then followed them for miles. In the distance, Aditsan saw smoke rising from the chimneys of hogans.

At the village of Dibé Bito', Aditsan hoped they would stop to rest, but the cowboy merely nodded to the Diné as they emerged from their hogans and coaxed his horse onward. Outside the settlement, they turned toward the setting sun and began to climb into mountain passes stripped of vegetation. Their horses plodded ever slower and stumbled over loose rock slabs and cracked clay. The air smelled of pinyon, even as it froze in Aditsan's nostrils.

Near the top of the Narbona Pass, they stopped to camp for the night. Running low on food, the boy collected yucca leaves and pinyon nuts for himself, while the cowboy made a fire of desiccated wood and grilled a rabbit he'd shot earlier in the day. The boy offered to share some of his yucca flower with the cowboy, but Will waved it away.

“I can't eat your kind of food,” he said.

“It tastes like potato.”

The Bilagaana shook his head and prodded the fire, which blew smoke into Aditsan's face and made him cough until his lungs and throat ached.

“Where do we go?” the boy said.

“Crystal. I know a trader there who can help us get back those pots.”

The boy remembered a town called Tonits'ili where his aunt sometimes sold her rugs. He had been there only once, since she usually dealt with other traders in nearby Naat'anii Nééz.

For the first time, Aditsan began to wonder if he could trust this Bilagaana. He knew nothing of the cowboy's origins, and when asked Will would change the subject. The cowboy never mentioned his family and used the word wife only once in a reference to things past. Religion seemed to play little part in his outlook. Though he wore a cross about his neck, he offered no prayers to it. Wealth seeped from him like rain running off a plateau. He didn't work but had limitless cash for supplies and labor. The only thing about which Will spoke with fondness were the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and the even greater civilization of Chaco Canyon. These ancient sites, which had been dug up by Bilagaana over the past thirty years, were the “heritage of a great culture” that needed preservation, he said.

* * * *

That night, not even his heavy, wool chief's blanket could keep Aditsan warm or stave off his coughing. Winds blew over the ridge unchecked by the few, thin trees and carried great storms of sand that coated him. By morning Aditsan felt exhausted, yet the cowboy saddled his horse at dawn, waiting wordlessly as the boy slowly packed. When they were underway, the boy tried to keep himself awake by cataloging all the plants he knew: prickly pear, which he ate but hated, rabbit brush, which his aunt used in dying her rugs, sumac berries for smoking, and the violet flowers of the bee plant.

Descending to a plain, the boy saw through the pinyon trees a low, flat building like the dormitories at his old school. As they drew closer, he saw a Bilagaana standing in front who dressed like the cowboy, with a broad white hat, a deerskin vest over a white shirt, and heavy boots. He waved to them with his hat and called to Will by name. After tethering their horses, this stranger shook Will's hands and lead them inside.

The building's main room was long and cluttered with everything a man could want for sale: metal pots and cans with food in them, wooden boxes with arbuckles ground coffees burned into the side, tools to shoe a horse, or kill a man, hanging from overhead. The place smelled of tanned hides and tobacco smoke, though a piece of smoldering sage in one corner confused these scents. The entire building—from the floor to the ceiling to the waist-high counter that ran the length of the room—was made of wood beams. Above the counter hung a wood sign with j.b. moore's crystal trading post burned into it like the brands put on cattle. Two Diné men stood in front of the counter speaking to another Bilagaana about a saddle. They traded offers with long pauses in between.

With a wave, the Bilaganna led Will and Aditsan to another room in back where more blankets and rugs than the boy had ever seen sat stacked in piles as deep as his waist. The patterns were unlike anything he'd seen his aunt weave. They made his eyes hurt with whirling figures, slashes like lightning, and diamonds of every size. The boy knew then that the Bilagaana must be the Naalyehe ya sidahi his aunt talked about who sold Diné blankets and rugs far away.

When they were alone, the Naalyehe ya sidahi turned to them and removed his glasses.

“What brings you two all the way out here?”

His face showed neither mistrust nor want but merely curiosity.

“Two days back, I found out that three guys I hired were stealing from me. Things that any museum would be proud to own.”

The boy didn't correct the cowboy and say that so far they had found only fragments.

“Why come here?”

“They weren't like us. They were Navajo. The things they stole, they wouldn't be of any use to them. They must have taken them to sell.”

The Naalyehe ya sidahi tipped his head to one side as though angry. No one likes to be called a thief, Aditsan thought, not even by association.

“I still don't understand.”

“You're the only one who could move things like that.”

The Naalyehe ya sidahi raised his eyebrows and pursed his mouth before speaking.

“Even if I were offered such things, what makes you think I'd take them? My business is in rugs.”

Will bowed forward as he spoke.

“I know that, but they don't. That's why I thought maybe you'd tell me if they stopped in.”

The Naalyehe ya sidahi turned his back and ran his hand over a rug longer than he was tall. It was similar in pattern and color to Aditsan's shawl, a chief's blanket striped in black, white, and blue, though it looked more worn, like it had survived several generations.

“There's no market for antiquities,” the Naalyehe ya sidahi said. “This blanket? I've been trying to sell it for three years. Nobody will take it, even when I tell them it goes back to before Bosque Redondo.”

“Are you saying those boys were here?”

“I'm saying forget about anything they took. Nobody wants it but you. Whatever you found, there's more just like it buried nearby. This place grows off old, broken pots.”

The cowboy shook his head no.

“You don't understand,” he said. “Those weren't just any pots. That site is historic.”

The Naalyehe ya sidahi turned around and faced the cowboy, then looked to the boy. Though his accent was poor, with the wrong intonations in pitch and emphasis, the trader spoke in the boy's own Diné language.

“Do you know a Sani in Toadlena?”

Aditsan nodded yes, having heard of him before from his aunt.

“Go ask him. If anybody knows what happened to your pots, it's him.”

* * * *

Although they followed a different path, the trip back across the Chuska Mountains was no easier. The heights were as great, and the distance even farther. Again they camped below the pass, eating canned tomatoes and beans that they'd purchased at the trading post. After they lay down, a light snow soaked the boy's blanket and threw him into paroxysms of coughing that kept him awake much of the night. By morning, the snow veiled the path. His only navigational tool was divots worn by other travelers, but this often failed him when the trail traversed smooth rock faces. They became lost many times, and Will seemed impatient, his horse stamping its hooves as the boy dismounted to look for cracked mud. Eventually, the cowboy lead himself, racing forward and back until he located hoof prints.

“It must be them,” he said.

He pushed on without stopping until, as daylight faded, they emerged onto a flat plain with a sparse gathering of traditional hogans. Most were barely distinguishable from the landscape, low mounds made of sticks and mud. One stood out, though. It was an eight-sided box built of timbers, with a pitched roof and a narrow window. The cowboy walked his horse straight to it and entered through the deerskin doorway. Seeing no choice, the boy followed.

Inside, sitting on a wood crate, was the Sani with a face cracked and baked like the red rock of the desert. The old man wore traditional clothing—a dense blanket of browns and grays wrapped around his shoulders, a headband twisted and tied at the back, and a large silver necklace with an oval, turquoise pendant—and extended a traditional handshake to the boy, their palms barely touching.

It was as the Naalyehe ya sidahi had said: “more a museum than a store.” Unlike the trading post, there was no food or tools for sale. Stacked around the walls on low shelves made of mud brick were wedding baskets, rugs, silver jewelry and clothing. In one corner stood a shelf of ancient pottery, white slip with black designs painted over the top. The cowboy squatted in front of the pieces, turning them over in his hands and feeling their insides, before speaking.

“You've got a great collection,” he said.

He looked back over his shoulder at the Sani, who nodded.

“Where'd you get so many pieces?”

The Sani stared toward the floor for several seconds before answering.

“People bring me things they wish to sell.”

“I hear there were some pots found out on the eastern end of the reservation not too far back. Looked like these.”

He nodded toward the wall containing the pottery collection.

“Anybody bring you anything like that?”

The old man shook his head.

“How about those there?” The cowboy pointed to the wall. “You know where they come from?”

The Sani looked up with an indecipherable expression.

“Who can say?”

The cowboy walked in a circle around the hogan with his arms crossed, his toes dragging the dusty floor as though excavating what lay buried there. For a moment the boy thought that he would kick the shelves and destroy all the pottery. Instead, he picked up an olla and held the large vase close to his chest like a baby.

“Things like these need to be protected. A museum will make sure they last forever. Here—” He looked around as though taking in the small hut for the first time. “—they may not last a year.”

He was so tall that his head hit the roof where it met the wall. When he moved toward the center of the hogan, he looked down over both the Diné.

“These things have lasted many generations here and will so for many more,” the Sani said. “What good will they do to anyone in a mu-see-um?”

The cowboy shook his head and turned to go, still clutching the large pot to his chest. Over his shoulder, he spoke.

“I'm keeping this one until the others are returned. Tell those thieves no one will pay them more.”

He walked outside, and the boy heard him unhitch his horse before he called.

“Come on, Abe.”

The boy waited for the sound of the horse's footfalls to trail off before speaking in his own Diné language.

“Sani, I'm sorry for bringing him here. I didn't know he planned to steal from you.”

The old man nodded but kept silent.

“I can bring you others. I know where the pots he wants are.”

The old man nodded again and waited.

“I hid them in a cave where the water runs deep in the earth.”

Aditsan waited for some counsel from the old man, but hearing none, continued.

“What can I do with them? The Bilagaana believes they were stolen. If he finds out it was me who took them . . .”

He could not imagine how to finish the thought.

“Why did you take them?” the old man said.

The boy hesitated as though considering his motive for the first time.

“The Bilagaana only wanted to possess them. He wants to carry them away from here as they did with me.”

The old man stood slowly, walked across the hogan with a limp, and reached for something that hung from a stake on one wall. As he turned, the boy saw that it was a club with a stone head fixed by leather twine to a curving handle of white antler.

“Take this.”

Aditsan accepted the club and felt its weight, the balance of the head with the shaft. He even dared to swing it once through the air. When he tucked the club into the waist of his pants, it was concealed beneath his chief's blanket. He shook hands with the Sani and pushed aside the deerskin flap at his door to see the cowboy waiting fifty paces away. The Bilagaana kept his back turned, but the pot he had taken was lashed to his saddle. From his posture, which was erect and rigid, the boy sensed he was angry. Aditsan mounted his own horse and followed as the cowboy led him away from the village.

The cowboy rode a few strides ahead toward the darkness over the mountains, never looking back to check on the boy. Several times, Aditsan looked over his shoulder as the village receded from his sight, then at the cowboy, and finally at the pot.

The boy coaxed his horse to a trot with a stab to its ribs. Even when he pulled even, the cowboy stared straight ahead as though Aditsan were not there. The boy thought of his time in Fort Collins, of the missionaries who had trained him to speak English, of the trading post and its supplies, of his parents back in Tsé Bit'a'i, of the people who once worshipped at the great kiva, and of the distance between them all.

When they were deep into the shade of the junipers, he allowed his free hand to slip to the smooth bone of the club. He ran a finger along the pointed head and then tightened his grip on the handle. In his chest, his heart pounded at twice its usual rate, as if the club were a gun that might explode in his hand, unbidden.

Copyright © 2012 David Hagerty

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Department: BOOKED & PRINTED
by Robert C. Hahn

The means of mirth are as varied as those of murder, and this month's authors illustrate the wide variety of approaches open to the humorous mystery writer.

* * * *

* * * *

Tim Dorsey's fifteenth novel featuring Serge A. Storms, Pineapple Grenade (Morrow, 25.99), once again finds the manic Serge busy meting out extreme justice in elaborately quirky and amusing ways. Serge A. Storms careens through the state of Florida almost always accompanied by his stoner friend Coleman, who aids and abets him to the best of his impaired ability. Serge delights in Florida's history and is fond of providing lengthy discourses on esoteric factoids while lamenting the modern “improvements” made in the name of “progress.”

But Serge's most endearing quality is his willingness to avenge all the stupid, irritating, irresponsible things people do to annoy him. Sometimes the crime is serious—carjacking, for instance—and sometimes laughable, such as littering. Sometimes it's merely boorish behavior that compels Serge to action, such as that of an airline leaving passengers to wait on the tarmac in an indefinitely delayed plane. Regardless, Serge's response, though sometimes deadly, is always inventive and almost always hilariously fitting.

In Pineapple Grenade, Serge decides with his usual insouciance to be a spy and so simply declares that he is one. After all, Miami is “the diplomatic capital of America” with sixty consulates within a two-mile radius.” He then walks into the consulate of Costa Gorda—a small South American country whose reform president is being secretly undermined by clandestinely funded rebels—and uttering only a few confusing words, walks out believing he's been hired.

Naturally Serge attracts the attentions of two competing CIA station chiefs who each suspect the other may be working with him. The confusion is compounded by political mastermind Malcolm Glide who, despite having no official position, controls, among others things, the head of Homeland Security. The secret of Glide's success is simple: He's discovered that in America, “it isn't enough to disagree with your opponent anymore. True patriots hate their f—ing guts!”

Dorsey's frenetic style and hyperbole won't appeal to everyone, but his satire is sharp, his barbs hit dead center, and the inventiveness of Serge's mayhem is so outrageous and ingenious that chuckles and belly laughs keep the pages turning.

* * * *

* * * *

Lisa Lutz's investigative family, the Spellmans, is always in the throes of domestic troubles, either their own or that of their clients, and they collide in spectacular fashion in Trail of the Spellmans.

Lisa Lutz introduced Izzy (Isabel) Spellman and her quirky family who operate Spellman Investigations in San Francisco in The Spellman Files in 2007. Her debut effort was an immediate success as it garnered nominations for Anthony, Barry, Dilys, and Macavity awards. Her fifth entry in the series, Trail of the Spellmans (Simon and Schuster, $25), is the best yet as both the professional interests of the investigators and the personal relationships amongst the Spellman's collide in spectacular fashion.

The firm was purchased by patriarch Albert Spellman and matriarch Olivia Spellman who have operated it for thirty-five years. Izzy, now thirty-four, has been working for the firm, not always to its benefit, since she was twelve; sister Rae, a junior in college, works for the firm part-time, while the eldest child, David, is a lawyer and chooses not to work for the family business. Demetrius Merriweather, who served fifteen years in prison for a murder he didn't commit, was rescued by the Spellmans and now works for them although he is more like a member of the family than an employee.

Lutz creates a double helping of puzzling and amusing mysteries in this madcap gem: Olivia's sudden spate of outside interests including a book club, pottery, yoga, Russian, crochet, and cooking classes; a rupture between David and Rae, which neither will talk about; and an inexplicable developing friendship between irascible (and prejudiced) Grammy Spellman and black, ex-con Demetrius.

Three Spellman Investigations cases are also ongoing simultaneously: Adam Cooper hires them to follow his sister, Margaret Slayter wants them to follow her husband, and college student Vivien Blake's parents want them to track their daughter's behavior. Early on Izzy warns the reader “Surely all three cases will become ensnared and converge at the end. But don't get ahead of yourself.” Good advice because as the stories unfold there are surprising and delightful treats in store.

Lutz successfully employs unusual narrative strategies that, in lesser hands, often feel mannered, such as Izzy's asides addressed directly to the reader, or the frequent footnotes that give the air of a term paper. Here, such techniques seem fitting as the as the quirkiest Spellman narrates the activities of her quirky relatives and their clients.

* * * *

* * * *

Lois Winston takes a gentler approach in her second Anastasia Pollack crafting mystery in which the magazine columnist once again finds herself embroiled in murder in Death By Killer Mop Doll (Midnight Ink, $14.95). Lois Winston introduced crafts editor Anastasia Pollack in last year's Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun.

Anastasia lives with her mother-in-law Lucille Pollack, a confirmed radical and rabble-rouser, and thanks to her recently deceased husband, she is saddled with plenty of debts and not much income. She also has sons, fourteen-year-old Nick and sixteen-year-old Alex, to contend with. The arrival of her name-burdened mother, Flora Sudberry Periwinkle Ramirez Scoffield Goldberg O'Keefe, ups the domestic thermostat into dangerous regions. Flora is as conservative as Lucille is liberal, and the two clash constantly. Flora, who trades in husbands like automobiles, brings with her her latest conquest, Lou Beaumont, a TV producer.

Anastasia scoffs when Flora tells her that Lou is going to make Anastasia and the staff at American Woman the focus of his TV talk show You Heard it Here First. But it is no joke, as Trimedia, the conglomerate that owns American Woman, also owns the TV network that produces Lou's show.

While the TV show sounds like a good and profitable idea, there are immediate issues—opposition from the show's twin hosts, Vince Alto and Monica Rivers and a clause in the Trimedia contract that requires the magazine staff to appear on the show without additional compensation. That leaves Anastasia and her co-workers, food editor Cloris McWerther, editorial director Naomi Dreyfus, decorating editor Jeanie Sims, and fashion editor Tessa Lisbon ready to revolt. Add in Lou's bizarre assistant producer Sheri Rabbstein, who really runs the show, and the recipe for disaster is almost complete.

The murder of the show's producer is the final ingredient. Suspects include the show's unhappy hosts and the conscripted and unwilling magazine staff, including Anastasia whose cleverly constructed mop doll is found with the body. Anastasia once again plays the unwilling sleuth pressed into action by circumstances beyond her control as the crafty murderer strikes again.

Winston plays the oil and water relationship of Flora and Lucille for plenty of laughs and provides intermittent craft instructions for creating mop dolls while letting Anastasia shine as a risk-taking investigator investigator who doesn't always know when to quit.

Copyright © 2012 Robert C. Hahn

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Mystery Classic: AFTERNOON OF A PHONY
by Cornell Woolrich, Selected and Introduced by Francis M. Nevins

The Father of Noir

Of all the authors who excell at turning our spines to columns of ice, Cornell Woolrich is the supreme master of the art, the Hitchcock of the written word, you might say. In novels such as The Bride Wore Black, Phantom Lady, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes, he created the literary sources that would be adapted into the kinds of movies we now call “film noir.”

Woolrich was born in New York on December 4, 1903, his mother the daughter of a Russian Jewish émigré and his father a Latino of Canadian and English descent. His parents split when he was three and he stayed in Mexico with his father, but he returned to New York to live with his mother when he reached high-school age. In 1921 he enrolled in Columbia University but quit in his junior year after his first novel sold to a major publisher. That novel, Cover Charge (1926), was a Jazz Age chronicle in the vein of his literary idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in the late ‘20s, Woolrich moved to Hollywood to work as a staff writer for First National Pictures. But the Depression put an end to Jazz Age stories, and Woolrich was forced to reinvent himself, which he did with a vengeance. He returned to New York, lived in an apartment in a hotel with his mother, and between 1934 and 1948 wrote eleven novels and well over a hundred short stories and novelettes. The trademarks of his new style are present from his first crime story, “Death Sits in the Dentist Chair” (Detective Fiction Weekly, August 4, 1934): a bizarre murder, a race against time, the invasion of nightmare into the characters’ everyday experience, casual police brutality, intuition that passes as reasoning, and headlong suspense. He will always be identified with tales of suspense and terror set in nightmarish cities; his most powerful fiction presents a despairing view of the human condition.

“Afternoon of a Phony,” first published in Detective Fiction Weekly (November 14, 1936) and never reprinted till now, is something of a departure for Woolrich: a charming, clever, and bizarre whodunit with a Jersey Shore setting. A con man arrives at a seaside resort only to be mistaken by the local cops for the great sleuth from Trenton they've sent for, and Clip Rogers steps smoothly into the role of investigating a woman's death in one of the town's vacation hotels. The story becomes unmistakably the work of Woolrich when the culprit, motivated by lost love, takes center stage and for a page or two becomes a deeply sympathetic character; ironically, he remarks that the impostor Rogers has more humanity than any other cop he has ever encountered.

Woolrich was the Hitchcock of the written word, but until now not a word he wrote has ever appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. After 1948, his torrent of words slowed to a trickle, and by 1956, when AHMM first hit the stands, the master of suspense fiction was in the sad last period of his life, which ended with his death of a stroke on September 25, 1968. During those final two decades he wrote very little and almost every story he managed to finish was published by Fred Dannay, a longtime supporter, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Now in 2012 a Woolrich tale appears here. About time, yes?

* * * *

Afternoon of a Phony

Cornell Woolrich

Clip Rogers, also known as Real Estate Rodge, also known as High-Pressure Harry, also known as—but look it up yourself in the records—stopped his hired car (his for the next sixty minutes) in front of an imposing construction job which was clamorous with riveting. It was imposing not so much because of its height or breadth, but because of the quality of the materials being used. Its two-story skeleton was fashioned of steel beams, painted scarlet, of the kind that are usually used only for the tallest skyscrapers. The trim around its base was polished basalt. The mound of bricks that lay in the street waiting to go into the upper facade were bisque, with a high glaze, the best grade obtainable.

Clip swept his arm at it with an air of proprietorship, turned half around in his seat to face the two parties in the back of the car. “Nifty, eh?” he remarked, addressing the more conspicuous of the two. “Nothing like seeing it for yourself, is there? Well, how about it, Mr. Hemingway, think you'd care to come in on it with me? Tell you what I'll do. I'm very hard-pressed for ready cash right now, I've been financing the thing single-handed so far, and as you can see I've spared no expense. It'd be a crime to have to stop now, when it's within an acre of completion. Rather than approach the banks for a loan and pay the exorbitant rates of interest they'll soak me, I'd be willing to cut somebody in on it outright, and keep it in private ownership. Five thousand dollars—and a half-interest in it is yours.”

Mr. Hemingway, better known as Philadelphia Slim (because he was very fat and badly wanted in Philadelphia), looked judicious, one might even say cagey. “I don't know,” he hesitated, “it's a little bit out of my line. Now, my friend Mr. Jeffreys here, goes in for that sort of thing more than I do. He's cleaned up quite a bit in his home town buying property at foreclosure. What's your opinion, Mr. Jeffreys?” he asked deferentially.

Mr. Jeffreys’ two main characteristics were an air of unmistakable prosperity and an air of even more unmistakable childlike innocence. Crash knickers, howling golf-stockings, and well-fed, he was the perfect prospect. His and Mr. Hemingway's acquaintanceship dated from the hotel lobby twenty-four hours before. He was down here for a well-earned rest. Mr. H. was down here to put over a big deal. It was quite a coincidence the way he and Clip Rogers had run into each other awhile ago, right while Mr. Jeffreys was with the former.

Mr. Jeffreys’ opinion seemed to be one of almost uncontrollable eagerness. He nudged Mr. Hemingway to go ahead, even tried to wink knowingly at him without Rogers seeing it. He was what both of them would have described as “hot.”

But Mr. Hemingway was careful to appear only tepid.

“I haven't got that much money in ready cash,” he drawled. “I could let you have a check—”

“I've got to have the money this afternoon, or the offer's withdrawn,” his partner said. “I've got an obligation coming due that has to be met—”

The lamb between the two wolves looked unsuspectingly from one to the other. “I have twenty-five hundred with me,” he burst out. “Would you consider letting me have a quarter-interest in the building for that, Mr. Rogers?”

Mr. Rogers’ eyes sparkled a little; outside of that, he appeared quite reluctant. “That's letting it go for nothing,” he said sadly. “You'll get your investment back out of the first month's rentals, alone. I suppose it's better than having it taken away from me, though.

“Of course, I've known Mr. Hemingway here for years, but you're practically a stranger to me—”

“I can vouch for Mr. Jeffreys,” spoke up Mr. H. quickly. “He's one of the leading citizens of Jonesville, Indiana.”

“Johnsville, Illinois,” corrected Mr. Jeffreys.

“Well, in that case—” condescended Mr. Rogers. “I have the deed all drawn up, in my pocket. It just needs to be signed.”

“If you'll come back to my room at the hotel,” said Jeffreys excitedly, “we can cinch the thing then and there. I'll have them turn the money over to me, they're keeping it in a the safe.”

Rogers and Slim exchanged the briefest of looks. The former cleared his throat. “I'd prefer to have this transaction kept strictly confidential for the present, Mr. Jeffreys. It would hurt my credit to have it known that I was in difficulties.”

“I won't say a word,” promised Jeffreys.

Rogers shoved his foot down, swung the car around slowly in a circle. Just as they were pulling away, the foreman of the construction gang went by. Rogers saluted him familiarly. “Everything coming along all right?” He let out the clutch without waiting for an answer.

The foreman stood staring after them, scratching his dome—a sight which Jeffreys missed seeing. “Who the hell was that?" he muttered to himself. “Blamed if I know him!”

Twenty minutes later by the clock, Rogers and Slim let themselves cordially out of Mr. Jeffreys’ hotel room with a great deal of handshaking.

“We'll wait for you downstairs in the lobby,” promised Slim. They waited side by side for the elevator to come up, in a sort of silent intensity. It showed up finally, and they descended without a word. They didn't linger in the lobby waiting for Mr. Jeffreys, as they had promised. They left the hotel quite briskly, as though they both had an important engagement somewhere else. They did have; it was Rogers who put it into words as they took leave of one another in an unlighted telephone booth several blocks away. “All right, here's your split, twelve-fifty. Now lam—before he finds out we've sold him a United States Government branch-post office! I'll see you in New York later in the week, you know where.”

They parted, Rogers made his way to the station, bought a ticket, looked all around him, and boarded an express just as it was ready to pull out. The clack of the wheels as the cars got under way was sweet music to him—the lullaby of the lam. He snapped his hat-brim in farewell to the resort they were leaving behind and made his way forward to the smoking-car. He selected a nice comfortable leather-backed seat, sprawled himself out in it, loosened the knot of his necktie, lit up, and looked about him. Apprehensively? Not a bit of it.

You didn't know Clip Rogers if you thought he ever took time off from making easy money the hard way. The busy little bees had nothing on him when it came to being industrious: He hated even to waste a train-trip from one point to another without at least trying to contact one sucker. This, of course, was a very short haul, not much more than a commutation-trip, and the prospects around him were a very crummy-looking lot.

He looked them over, took a stab at drumming up a conversation with the man across the aisle—just because he was the likeliest-looking—and got promptly and definitely squelched. He got up and went out to the washroom, just to give himself an excuse for changing seats and tackling someone else when he came back. While he was in there he took the opportunity of transferring his twelve-hundred from his inner pocket to a safer place, a little felt pouch stitched to his garter. Just in case.

His cuff had dropped over his shoe again, when somebody tried the door. Clip, of course, had it locked on the inside. The tryer didn't go away, kept trying as though he wanted in in the worst way. By the time he got in, Clip's coat was hanging up on a hook and he was very busy cooling off his hands and arms under the water-tap.

The interrupter was a very stocky man with a—just then, at any rate—light green face. He could hardly see straight. “I never could stand riding on a train, on top of ersters and beer!” he groaned blindly. He pitched his coat at the hook over Clip's, disappeared into the closet, and was too sick for a while to care whether school kept or not.

* * * *

Clip, to put on his own coat again, had to remove the other one and hold it up with one hand, while he got at his. This was putting him to a very strong temptation—and Clip tempted very easily. He spaded his hand deftly at it, then snapped it back again almost as though something had bitten him.

A detective-badge had come up in his palm.

He wouldn't have been found dead with the thing, but just then the trembling cabinet-door started opening once more. There was no time to do anything but fling the coat back over the hook. When he started shrugging back into his own, he still had that insignia of his hereditary enemies hidden in his palm, with no chance of getting rid it.

The late sufferer looked a whole lot better. “They always send me on these out o’ town assignments,” he complained weakly, replacing his coat. Clip just nodded sympathetically, and when he left there, put the whole length of the train between them. On the way he was going to drop the badge overboard between-cars, and then thought better of it.

Why throw it away? It had its uses. It could come in very handy for a little plain or fancy shake-down, for instance, to liven up slack periods. Might get him a little graft from some barkeeper, a free show at some club, a free room at some hotel. On the other hand, it was very doubtful that that dick back there would finish out the trip without discovering his loss—and he'd know Clip was the only guy who could have taken it.

Clip was in no position, with his twelve-hundred bucks, to be at the receiving-end of a frisk, just then. So it was a case of doing without the thing, or take a terrific chance. But now that he had it, he hated to give it up without trying it out a little—like a kid with a new toy.

The train started to slow just then for one of its two stops and a sign reading “Wildmere” gandered in through the window.

And all of a sudden, he found himself out on the platform, and the train was powdering again in back of him. Which is one of the beauties of traveling without baggage. He turned and looked after it just in time to see one of the smoking-car windows way up front thrown open, and the head, shoulders and arms of the real owner of the badge shoved way out, gesturing wildly.

He'd either been too busy looking for his badge, or too all-in after being ill, or maybe he'd dozed off—but he'd missed his station.

If he'd run straight to the back platform instead of wasting time, he could have still jumped off and made it. But the line was electrified, and the cars picked up speed much quicker than a coal-burner. By the time he did join the tail-lights, he was just a speck way down the track, whizzing along at such a speed it would have been suicide to jump.

* * * *

II

It wasn't just idle curiosity that made Clip Rogers saunter up to the station-agent's window, although it was a grave mistake on his part to do so. He wanted to know just how much time he had in Wildmere before that dick got back here again from the other direction. He really didn't want any time at all here in Wildmere, but there wasn't anything he could do about it.

He couldn't go back where he'd just come from, because Mr. Jeffreys who had bought one of Uncle Sam's post-offices was there—and there was no other place the trains went from here. And there was no other New York train until seven, he knew that already.

He wasn't worried that the dick might telephone back long-distance and ask the local rubes to hold him. The dick couldn't be sure he'd actually taken his badge, and he certainly wouldn't crave publicity on the score of having had it lifted from him. Wouldn't that sound great: “A dip pinched my badge and jumped off the train with it, and I was carried past my station!” Not the best man among ‘em could have ever lived that down afterwards. The Associated Press would have spread it all over the country in one of those little space-fillers the newspapers pad out their back pages with.

The next question came from the agent before Clip could get out of reach, and it packed a wallop that lifted him out of his shoes. “You must expect to mop the blamed mess up in right smart order, inspector, seein’ as how you're already askin’ about the trains goin’ back?”

“Come again?” wheezed Clip Rogers.

He promptly did, which made it Clip's turn once more. “I don't know who you take me for,” he said frostily, “but your wires are crossed somewhere along the line.”

The agent flopped his hand at him reassuringly. “I won't say nothin’ to nobody, as long as you don't want it known who you are. But I know Sheriff Haskell was expectin’ you on that train, and I seed you was the only one got off—” His thumb hooked one of his braces. “I'd make a good detective myself, wouldn't I?”

“Just about,” was Clip's comment. He was dying to ask who he, Clip, was, but before he could, that took care of itself, too.

“Here's Haskell now, come down to meet you,” said the agent, and Clip turned to find himself the center of an admiring triple stare on the part of two constables and the sheriff.

The latter thrust out his hand at him. “Inspector Griswold, I'm Sheriff Haskell,” he beamed. “I'm certainly honored to meet you, sir!” (pump, pump, pump.) “When Capital City wired back they were sending the great Griswold to help us out on this, I couldn't believe my eyes!” (pump, pump, pump.)

Clip took his throbbing hand back again and said, eloquently, "Unh?"

One of the constables wet his thumb and extended it toward Clip's sleeve.

“Inspector Griswold,” he quavered, “no offense—but lemme touch you.” He drew his breath in reverently, “Think of it! The guy that put the great Gash-face Marrone behind the bars at State Prison—”

“That was the government,” said Clip truthfully, “not me.”

The second constable sighed like a sick calf. “I knew he'd be modest; all great guys always are. Is it true that Rat-eyes Houlihan committed suicide the minute he found out you'd been assigned to go after him?”

Clip wasn't the slowest guy in the world on the pick-up. He was in it now, so he was going to stay in it—at least until seven. “Nawr, fifteen minutes after he found out,” he corrected without batting an eyelash.

“I've got my car back of the station, Inspector Griswold,” offered the sheriff.

“Just call me by my first name,” said Clip, by way of finding out.

He did. “Thanks, Clarence, I appreciate that!” said the sheriff effusively. And he looked over his shoulder at the two constables who were following them as much as to say, “Isn't he swell, though!”

“That,” amended Clip, now that he knew the worst, “don't go for you two men.” There was such a thing as going to far. “Clarence,” he shuddered inwardly.

“Nossir, inspector, of course not, inspector,” they chorused submissively.

* * * *

He got in front next to Haskell, the two constables in the rear.

“Of course, the case was outlined to you before you left Capital City, so we don't need to go over—” began the sheriff as he pressed the starter.

“No, it wasn't. They wanted to, but I wouldn't let them,” cut in Clip promptly. “I like to tackle an assignment with my mind a perfect blank, no preconceived ideas about it whatever. I work best when I start from scratch. Riding on trains always makes me go stale, anyway, so I wouldn't let ‘em tell me a thing before I started.”

He saw the two constables nod at each other gravely in the mirror. “A very good system.”

“Then I'll just take you up there and let you form your own conclusions,” suggested Haskell.

Wildmere was a good deal bigger than he had taken it to be, not in a built-up city way, but in a sprawling countryfied way. The trees out-numbered the houses, but the houses kept on showing up just the same. “There” turned out to be a large resort hotel on the top of a hill, a rambling wooden structure painted dazzling white, with a veranda all around it and a young army of rocking-chairs lined up in triple rows.

“Everybody,” reassured Haskell as they drew up outside of it, “that was here at the time is still on tap, we saw to that! Season's over anyway, place was half empty. It's just that we were getting nowhere so fast, I decided to wire in to you people—”

Clip, who was in complete darkness, just to keep his oar in, took a stab at a remark that didn't turn out to be the dumbest one in the world after all. “Of course, the mere fact that you've got ‘em all bottled up is no guarantee; it might have been somebody from the outside, that didn't belong in the place at all.” And kept wondering to himself, “What the hell's up anyway—a Peterman job, a jewel robbery, a—”

“It is the most brutal murder we've had here in the hundred and fifty years of this town's history!” Haskell added in an undertone as he led the way up the veranda steps.

Clip Rogers stiffened and felt a chill go down his back. Enough of a sketch has been given of his activities to show that he was no plaster saint. But he had his code, and he stuck to it more unswervingly than many an honest man. He'd gypped and bamboozled and swindled, but he'd never taken a life. And it wasn't because he lacked the courage, either. To him murder was filthy, and he detested it. Give the credit where the credit's due. He used his brains to do his fast-work, and not at the point of a gun, nor nitro, nor a jimmy.

And, though he probably didn't realize it himself, it wasn't the easy money that kept him racketing as much as the actual excitement of carrying out the swindles.

He was a thrill-chaser on the shady side of the street, that was all. Just an old-fashioned adventurer in an up-to-date streamlined world. As he might have put it himself, he liked his crime clean.

“Brutal?” he corrected Haskell ironically. “I never heard of a murder yet that was gentle.”

* * * *

They went into a gloomy, old-fashioned lobby lousy with rubber-plants, each one of which seemed to have an old maid gawking from behind it at Clip. They would probably beat any underworld grapevine in existence when it came to spreading news, he figured.

“See if you can put the soft-pedal on who I am and what I'm here for,” he mouthed to Haskell. “I don't want it to get around; it cramps my style.” He wasn't taking any chances; there just might be someone in Wildmere who had once seen the real Griswold or a picture of him.

“Now where would you like to begin?” the sheriff asked deferentially.

“On the spot,” said Clip.

They went up in a mousetrap elevator to the third (and top) floor, accompanied by a hand-wringing manager and a pouter-pigeon of a desk-clerk. Both constables stayed below. They all went down a long hallway with a seedy strip of red runner in the middle of it, and around a couple of hairpin-turns, and finally stopped in front of a door numbered 310. Haskell unlocked it, and Clip went in and looked around.

The body had been removed, but the bed was a wreck, looked as though it had been drenched with iodine. On the mirror of the dresser, in cold-cream, a skull and crossbones were outlined, and under that two crosses. Nothing else was disturbed.

Haskell said, “She's over in the basement of our station-house; we haven't got a morgue here. If you'd care to come over and look—of course, we took pictures, like they do in the big cities.”

He opened a briefcase and handed Clip a group of macabre stills. He glanced briefly at the top one only. It showed him a dead woman sprawled on this same bed, mouth open, half of a building-brick balanced across her forehead.

“The other half had fallen to the floor beside the bed. We're sending them both in to Capital City, for fingerprints—”

“All that's passé,” Clip said, handing the pictures back. “I use psychology. Now go on, gimme the background, one at a time.” He flexed his finger at the manager. “Name, length of stay, habits, and so on.”

“She registered from New York five days ago, name of Doll Henderson, took this room and the adjoining one, with a communicating bath between, for herself and her little boy—”

“Where's the little boy now?”

“My wife's looking after him,” the manager said.

“All right, now you.” He signaled the desk-clerk with his head. “Any phone-calls, any visitors?”

“Plenty, and all from one guy. Fellow here that got stuck on her. They were out on the lake together all afternoon yesterday in an outboard motorboat. He called her again last night at midnight, just a little while before it must have happened—”

“Don't worry, we're holding him,” put in Haskell grimly at this point. “Been grilling him all morning, before you got here. He's trying to side-track us by saying that while they were out in the boat together she told him she had some mysterious admirer who would kill her if he caught her with this other guy—”

Clip tuned him out with a chop of the hand. “Who was the first one who found her?”

The clerk spoke up again. “I was, unless you count that poor little kid of hers—”

“Oh, the little boy found her first?”

* * * *

“He came downstairs to me at nine this morning, poor little devil, hair all neatly combed and face all shining with soap-and-water. He came up to the desk and pulled me by the sleeve. ‘Mr. Frost,’ he said in a scared little voice, ‘I can't wake Mom up; she won't answer me.’ I went back upstairs with him and found her, the way those pictures show her. Oh, it was ghastly, awful! Of course, the child didn't realize it even then; he thought somebody had been playing rough-house with her, that's all. Heartbreaking!” said the clerk sentimentally.

“Headbreaking, you mean,” said Clip morosely.

“But,” said Haskell impatiently, “you're withholding the most important fact of all from the inspector! The kid saw the man in the act of committing the crime! He was an eye-witness.”

“Now,” said Clip softly, “we're getting some place.”

“He had a nickel in his hand when he came down to me this morning,” the clerk shuddered. “On the way up he dropped it and went after it; that's how I happened to see it.”

“What's that got to do with it?” Clip asked.

The sheriff took up the spiel. “He heard a noise in his mother's room, some time during the night. He can't tell time yet on the clock, so that leaves us guessing. Anyway, he climbed out of bed, went through the bathroom, and looked in through the side-door, that one over there. He says he saw a man hitting his mother with a brick, and he said to him: ‘Don't hurt my Mom! What are you doing to my Mom?’ So the man turned around and answered, ‘You go back to bed, sonny. You're just dreaming this.’ And he gave him a nickel and pushed him back where he came from.

“So the kid climbed back in bed again and fell asleep, right on top of what he'd just seen! This morning he really thought it was a dream, but, of course, the fact that he still had the nickel clenched in his little fist proves that it wasn't.”

“What does he say the guy looked like?” Clip wanted to know.

Haskell shrugged discouragedly. “What d'ya expect from a kid of seven? First it was the boogy-man. Then it was the sandman. Then it was Jack-the-Giant-Killer. Every time we ask him, he hands us another. He's one of those youngsters with too much imagination, and he still thinks he dreamed it, anyway.”

“How about matching him up with this suspect you're already holding?”

“That was almost the first thing we did,” Haskell said. “We put him into a sort of impromptu line-up, along with the elevator boys here from the hotel and all the rest of the male members of the staff, and sure enough—he picked him out!”

“Did he say that was him?”

“No, what he did was stick his finger out at him and say, ‘Why did you do that to my mom? Now she won't talk to me any more.'”

Clip sank down in a chair and looked blank. “Well, if that's the case, why did you send to Capital City for me?"

“Because this guy, this Joe Fisher, has been able to prove that he didn't come near here all night last night! His younger brother's down with pneumonia, and he passed through the crisis in the early hours of this morning. We have the testimony of two disinterested people, the doctor in attendance and the trained nurse, that he hung around outside the door of the sickroom from the time he came in at twelve, after calling her up, until daylight. He was asleep on the sofa when we went there after him at half-past ten this morning.”

“Then, why,” Clip wanted to know, “are you holding him?”

“Because the kid picked him out of a line-up of ten people, without having been tipped off ahead of time what they were assembled for.” Haskell looked at him helplessly. “It's kind of a vicious circle, that don't make sense.”

* * * *

III

“Oh, there's plenty of loopholes in it, don't worry,” Clip assured him. “How far is the Fisher house from here? The doc and the nurse couldn't have had their eye on him every minute, if they were busy with a critical patient.”

“Well, we checked on that pretty thoroughly, and the longest stretch of not noticing him either one would admit to, was fifteen minutes at a time—at any time. It takes half an hour from there here, by car. He kept getting in their hair all night long; the doc even bawled him out several times.”

“Then the loophole's somewhere around the other side of the circle. How about sending the kid up here and letting me see what I can get out of him?”

"Here, in the same room?” objected the manager squeamishly.

“I thought you said he didn't understand what it was all about, even yet?” He shook off the blood-stiffened clothes and kicked them under the bed. “We don't have to have that staring us in the face anyway. Anybody got anything sweet?” The desk-clerk silently handed him a stick of gum from his vest-pocket.

In about five minutes the manager's wife came in with a little boy of about seven. He was a stocky little fellow, intelligent-looking, with a cowlick of ash-blond hair hanging down over one eye. He wore a white blouse, serge knickers, “sneakers,” fuzzy stockings, and had a sweatshirt or pull-over sweater thrown over his shoulders, tied by the sleeves under his chin. His face was all grimy and sooty, as though he'd been burrowing in the dirt.

Clip motioned everyone out except Haskell and the manager's wife, whose feminine tact he felt might come in handy. His own experience with youngsters was strictly limited.

“Aren't you ashamed to have the nice man see you like that?” the motherly woman was cooing. “You were so nice and clean just a little while ago, before you went out to play—Why won't you wash your face like a good boy?” she went on.

“I will wash my face!” the boy said in a reedy treble. “But I don't wanna wash it down in your bathroom, I wanna wash it up here in my own bathroom!”

“Hello, son,” purred Clip, crouching forward above his knees, “what's your name?”

“Jimmy,” said the boy.

“Like chewing gum, Jimmy?”

“I only like to lick the sugar off it.” He peeled off the tinfoil, stuck out his tongue, and began to strop the gum back and forth across it.

“Jimmy,” said Clip, “what was this man like that gave you a nickel last night, when you dreamed someone was hitting your mom?”

“I told you a million times!” said Jimmy impatiently. “He was big, tall man in a gray suit, with lots and lots and lots of freckles—”

“Joe Fisher to a T,” murmured Haskell behind the back of his hand.

Clip signed, as though he felt sorry for the poor motherless shaver. “Well, Jimmy,” he said, “you've certainly got a very dirty face for such a little fellow.” He took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket, reached for the boy. “C'mere and let's see if I can't get some of it off for you.”

But Jimmy reared back, dodged behind the woman's skirts. He seemed to be afraid of Rogers all at once, for some unknown reason. “I know how to wash myself!” he shrilled. “My mom showed me how ever since I was five!”

“Well, let's see you do it then,” Clip suggested genially.

* * * *

The kid seemed to have gotten into a bad temper, without cause.

“I don't let nobody see me do it!” he piped. “I do it when no one's looking!” He dodged out from behind the woman, swerving to get out of Clip's way, and fled into the bathroom, banging the door after him. They heard him slip the bolt on the inside. A minute later the second door, giving on the next room, had slammed and clicked. Water began to splash.

“He don't seem to like you," commented Haskell, raising his brows. “I got along dandy with him all morning.”

“He's been begging and pleading with me to let him come up here,” the manager's wife whispered. “He seemed to want to wash his face, but I couldn't get him near our bathroom!”

Clip had fallen strangely silent all at once, was staring at nothing lost in thought. His face began to harden, to set grimly in a mask of repulsion as he sat there. He went over to the locked door, finally, crouched down, and put his eye to the keyhole. He straightened up and came away again.

“What's he doing?” asked the woman breathlessly.

“He's hung a towel over the inside of the keyhole,” was the answer. The door had no transom.

Clip motioned to them to get out, then raising his voice so suddenly that the manager's wife jumped nervously, boomed out: “Let's all go downstairs and look around!” In a hurried whisper he went on, “You'd better go, both of you; this is going to be very unpleasant!” He ushered them out, stayed on the inside of the room-door. “No matter what sounds you hear coming from here, don't interfere. Watch that other door down the hall and don't let anyone out, not even the kid!”

Then he slammed the door noisily and cut himself off from them.

There wasn't a sound for the next ten minutes. The manager's wife beat a prudent retreat, but Haskell stayed within earshot out at the end of the hall, and had one of the constables sent up to lend him moral support.

At the end of the ten minutes there was a sudden crash of glass, as though somebody had broken a window between the two rooms, then an ear-splitting screech like a noon factory-whistle, followed by a hoarse exclamation from Rogers. “Got you now—”

Haskell looked whitely at the constable and breathed, “The killer must a’ been hiding in that bathroom all night and all morning! Looks like the kid knew, too. Somebody that won his confidence, most likely, and got him to keep his secret. Griswold must ‘a’ caught on just now—”

“But we was in and outa there a dozen times—” The constable took a step forward. Haskell motioned him back. “We gotta obey him to the letter; don't interfere no matter what happens, he said.”

The uproar continued unabated. Somebody tried to get out the nearer door and was knocked aside. There was a scuffling back and forth.

“Griswold” gave a sudden sharp yelp of pain, followed by a deeper groan. There was a momentary lull in the strife, as though he'd been badly hurt. The two out in the hall looked at each other ominously.

* * * *

Then the nearer door flashed open and the frantic little boy darted out, beside himself with terror. Foam-flecked like a mad dog, he darted between them before they could stop him and scurried down the hall. Sounds like a peanut-stand whistle came from him.

Haskell's knees were knocking together. “He's gone out of his mind with fright! They've driven him into convulsions!” he shuddered.

He threw open the door and looked in. “Griswold” had a gash down the side of his neck from ear to shoulder, pumping blood. An open razor lay at his feet. He had stripped a pillowcase from the bed, was ripping it into a hasty tourniquet. “Hurry up!” he breathed heavily. “Tighten this around me before I pass out! Just missed my jugular by inches—”

Haskell fashioned him a neck-cloth that nearly strangled him, but stopped the flow.

“Where'd he go?” the constable asked, coming back from the other room, where the woman had been slain.

Clip didn't answer. He went loping down the hall in the direction the kid had gone. They went after him. They caught up to him around the second turn of the hall, in front of the elevator. The car was down, but the shaft-door stood partly open; through the narrow slit the counterweight could be seen moving upward.

“Get down there, head that car off before it lands!” Clip rasped. The constable darted down the stairs, off to one side. Clip funneled his hands and boomed down through the opening: “Bring that car back, operator!”

“In the name of the law!” amended Haskell.

The counterweight reversed itself, the car-roof flushed upward. As it came abreast of the floor, Clip shoved the slide all the way out, gave the horrified Haskell a glimpse of Jimmy, the mad boy, crouched spitting on the roof, clasping the center cable with one hand.

“Hold it, that's high enough!” The ascent stopped, with the car-roof at waist-level. Under it were sprawled two women passengers in a dead faint.

Clip reached in, gave a yank, with his jaw-line set like concrete, the steel-thread cable twanged like a big harp-string, and little Jimmy came out squirming and kicking at the end of his long arm, held up by the scruff of the neck like a frothing little beast.

Clip carried him that way all the way back to the room, Haskell at his heels babbling, “What's got him—hydrophobia? What's he slavering like that for?”

Clip slammed the room door on the three of them, threw the clawing Jimmy bodily into a big easy-chair with one arm. “Hydrophobia, hell!” he spat out. “He's a forty-year-old midget I interrupted in the act of stealing a shave!” He's the murderer of that woman, that went around posing as his mother!”

Haskell nearly sat down backward on the floor.

“I'll get it out of him!” the raging Clip went on. “Take a flying leap at me with an open razor from the top of a dresser, will he? I'll make him talk! Get your shorthand pad, sheriff—” He stepped into the bathroom, returned with a tough leather strop. “Posing as a kid, eh? Well, here's where he gets a kid's medicine!” He stepped one leg up on the chair, pitched the “little boy head-down across his knee.

The two constables came in, goggled.

“Don't! Don't!” Jimmy pleaded. “That's the one thing I can't stand! I'll talk—but don't humiliate me in front of all these people!”

* * * *

Clip uprighted him again, dropped the strop. “I had a hunch that would get you,” he said softly. “Cigarette, fellow. No need for play-acting now any more.” He was genial once more, a man talking to his equal.

The diminutive figure sat there, puffing away, his lacerated self-respect returning little by little. “That's why I did it. I couldn't stand it any more. You don't know what it means to go through life like I am—”

“I've been around,” Clip murmured understandingly.

“We both worked in a circus, she on the trapeze, and me—for what I am. I fell in love with her, like a fool. Then when we lost our jobs, she thought up this lousy shakedown racket of hers, with me as her shill, dressed up like a kid. She picked guys with money, led them on, and then I wrote them blackmail letters and frightened them out of their wits, pretending to be her racketeer sweetheart out gunning for them. I didn't want to, I'd always earned an honest living until I met her, but I was crazy for her, I couldn't stand the thought of not being near her.

“She was always laughing at me. She forgot that we have feelings, too. And I was jealous of each one that came along, even though she was just playing them for suckers. I'd brought the brick up to the room myself yesterday afternoon, as part of the kid act. Then, when he phoned her late last night, it looked like what I'd been dreading—the real thing, and not a racket any more. So I said, if I can't have you, nobody can—”

“Sign,” said the sheriff.

The handcuffs wouldn't fit; he could have slipped his whole hand through them with ease. Clip shook his head at them quietly. “He'll be all right. Just get a pair of long pants for him before you take him out of here—and treat him like an equal.”

The midget flashed him a look of wan gratitude. “You have been around!” he murmured. “There's something awfully different about you from most dicks.”

“You'd be surprised!” Clip smiled to himself.

“I'll drive you down to Doc's,” said the sheriff. “Better get a couple of stitches taken in that neck of yours.”

On the way over in the car, he asked: “Of course, you're Griswold, so I'm not surprised. But how did you spot him so quickly?”

“In a million ways at once. He had the sweater looped around his neck to hide his Adam's apple, but I saw it fluctuate just the same when he licked the sugar off the gum. There were nicotine-stains between two of his fingers. He dirtied up the lower half of his face purposely, of course, to hide the fact that he needed a shave. He jumped back when I tried to touch his face, and he wouldn't use the woman's bathroom, only this one up here—because his razor was hidden in it somewhere. The cold-cream streaks on the mirror were too thin to be made by anything but an adult's pinky, and a man would only use his index-finger for that. Covering up a keyhole by draping a towel over the knob is too smart an idea for a seven-year-old. I crawled out on the ledge and when I took a hinge in the bathroom-window, sure enough he was standing up on a chair lathering away—”

“Well, Ins— I mean Clarence, we're certainly going to give you full credit for this!”

“Suppose you take credit for it yourself, and just leave me out of it altogether.” And when the doctor had finished stitching the gash for him, “Will it leave a scar?” he wanted to know.

“Apt to, but a little grafting later on can take care of that easily enough. Don't tell me a man like you is vain about your looks!”

“No-o,” drawled Clip, “but it don't pay for me to be too easily identifiable—in my line of work.”

It was five to seven when he took leave of Haskell, in back of the station, and a train from New York most probably bringing the real Griswold could already be heard approaching in the distance. The one bound the other way was in, and waiting.

“You just stay here where you are,” said Clip, “and wait for me, I'll be back in no time!”

“Then you're not taking this train—?”

“Just hold this for me!” He thrust the badge at him. “Give it to me when I come back.” And as he loped off through the station, he called back something that sounded like: “You won't know me at all. I'll look so different!”

Copyright © 2012 Cornell Woolrich

* * * *

Originally published in Dective Fiction Weekly, November 14, 1936. Reprinted by permission from the author's estate and the agent for the estate, Renaissance Literary & Talent.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: THE STORY THAT WON

* * * *

Copyright (C) 2012 Ke Wang/Shutterstock.com

* * * *

The December Mysterious Photograph contest was won by Janel Gradowski of Freeland, Michigan. Honorable mentions go to R. W. Morris of Strathmore, Alberta, Canada; C. Christine Campbell of Dryden, New York; Denise Zajkowski of Round Lake Beach, Illinois; Steven Kuehn of Mahomet, Illinois; Andrew Paterson of London, Ontario, Canada; Stuart R. Brynien of Brooklyn, New York; Bethany Linder of York, South Carolina; and Josh Zeller of Morrow, Ohio.

SOLDIER OF FORTUNE

JANEL GRADOWSKI

“It's going to take forever to check all of these.” Two hundred clay soldiers stood in front of Detective Glynn. The statues were priceless antiques and the museum curator had hinted dire consequences would result if any of them were damaged. “Hope you didn't have any plans for the evening.”

Sergeant Mumford shook his head as he slowly walked between the warriors. At a distance they looked like carbon copies. Up close he could see they cluthed an assortment of weapons and had slightly different facial expressions.

“The diamonds are stashed in one of these guys. Sounds like a hole was drilled in the bottom. We're going to have to lay them all down, one at a time.” Glynn gulped down the rest of his coffee. “Might as well get started.”

Mumford stopped in front of a soldier. He moved to the next statue, studying its face. A loud grunt echoed through the cavernous room. A museum worker struggled to position one of the clay figures on its back. Glynn examined its base and shook his head.

“Try this one next.” After the soldier was prone Mumford stooped to study it. There was a faintly discolored circle on the sole of the left foot. He tapped it. The thin patch crumbled. Even in the dim light the gems sparkled inside the hollow statue.

“How did you know they were in that one?”

Mumford handed the plasic bag, worth millions, to Glynn. “He's the only one smiling.”

Copyright © 2012 Ke Wang /

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Department: COMING IN JULY 2012

MARLEY'S RESCUE by John C. Borland

TIGHTENING OF THE BOND by T. R. Lawson

DEATH OF THE RANGE by Elaine Menge

And the 2011 Black Orchid Novella Award Winner

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Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (ISSN:0002-5224), Vol. 57, No. 6, June 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.

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