Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 6. Whole No. 856, December 2012

Golden Chance

by S. J. Rozan

S.J. Rozan has won nearly all of crime fiction’s notable awards, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, and Macavity. She’s best known for her Lydia Chin/Bill Smith private eye novels, the most recent of which, Ghost Hero (2011), won the Dilys Award, made the best-of-the-year lists for NPR and the Sun-Sentinal, and was called “another coup” by Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times. The New York author returns to EQMM with a story full of twists, set in Western China.

“Ah, my friend.” Mustafa Sadiq smiled beneath his thick moustache as the shop door opened and then closed on the midday brightness. He reached to switch on the electric kettle, watching the disheveled lump of a man the door had admitted peer into the dimness, carefully choose his route, and lumber through the cool shadows between the spice boxes.

“Quiet, your neighbors will hear you,” Lo Pen-wei grunted, reaching the rear of the shop where Sadiq sat. A small wooden chair creaked in complaint as Lo dropped his bulk on it. He drew out his handkerchief to mop the sweat from his brow, his face, his neck, and the backs of his hands. Holding the cloth at arm’s length, he creased his round face in disgust. “Where can I wring this out?”

“You’re in the desert, my friend, you’d best save it, you might need the water.”

“When I’m dying of thirst because you didn’t give me tea?” Lo scowled and shoved the soggy handkerchief back in his pocket.

Lo spoke, as had Sadiq, in the Uighur language. Detective Lo Pen-wei had been one of the few officers of the Public Security Bureau to study that language upon learning, four years ago, that he would be detailed to Turpan. His fellows’ position was that as all Chinese citizens, which included the Uighurs no matter what the Uighurs thought of that, were required to know Mandarin, there was no need to bother. Lo conceded that was true enough, and for official interviews and instructions Mandarin would suffice; but other conversations — for example, those he would be most interested in overhearing in the streets — would not be held in Mandarin.

“If such a small hospitality on my part can save the life of my friend, I am most blessed.” Sadiq spooned tea into a brass pot and poured in steaming water from the kettle.

“I’ve warned you about calling me ‘friend.’ ” Lo leaned heavily back in his chair. “Your neighbors will start to distrust you as much as they distrust me.”

“My neighbors know my politics. If they hear me call you ‘friend’ they’ll think I’m merely kissing your hand.”

“My hand?”

“All right, I meant your ass, but I was trying to be discreet. The tea will be ready in a moment. I was not expecting you quite so soon. My friend.”

“I’m trying to learn a new habit. To be more—” Lo stopped, then switched to Mandarin. “Your language doesn’t even have a word for ‘punctual,’ does it?”

Sadiq shook his head, answering also in Mandarin. “We have other virtues.”

“Yes, you do,” Lo agreed. “Many Uighur shopkeepers are hard-working and industrious. You, for one, keep long hours. In fact, lately you appear quite haggard, Sadiq.”

“I have three daughters, Detective Lo. The eldest, Qolpan, is already being courted, by a young student of minerology at the University in Urumqi.”

“A university student, that is excellent, Sadiq.”

Sadiq sighed. “It would be, if I could afford to make a wedding for them. I hope to find worthy husbands for all my daughters, but they have no dowries but what my labor affords them. I cannot be like a policeman, taking my ease in teahouses.”

“That is unfortunate. In a teahouse, in the shade of a grape arbor, one can play many fine games of Xiangqi. Though for a Han policeman,” Lo added wistfully, “it’s not as easy as one might wish to find a willing opponent.”

As Lo spoke, Sadiq was unlatching an inlaid wooden box. From it he removed the white linen Xiangqi board with its black lines and marked intersections, which he unfolded on the low table between them. Lo continued thoughtfully, “Of course, you Uighurs do have vices as well.”

“Have we?” Sadiq poured golden liquid from the pot into delicate porcelain cups. The tea’s astringent aroma threaded through the scents of cinnamon and cardamon already in the air.

Lo cradled his teacup and, eyes shut, concentrated on sniffing and then sipping the tea. With a satisfied smile he opened his eyes again and went on, returning to Sadiq’s language to say, “On the virtue side, one could count your tea. On the side of vices, I would list hotheadedness. I would submit as evidence the fact that a mob of young Uighurs vandalized an office of the Housing Commission overnight.”

“Did they?” Wooden Xiangqi discs clacked as Sadiq arranged them on the board. “The miscreants were caught, then? Identified?”

“No, of course they weren’t.”

“Then perhaps they were not Uighurs.”

“No, perhaps not. Or perhaps they were not young. Or not a mob. Ah! It was a lone Han auntie who broke the windows, scattered papers about, and spray-painted the walls. With slogans in your language extolling the eternal glory of Aliqqi the Hero.” Lo, who was playing red today and therefore opening, moved his right-side cannon to the second column. “I was called to the scene of the crime,” he continued. “Possibly because I’m able to read the slogans.”

“They didn’t say, ‘Long life to our glorious Chinese Communist Party’?”

“They did not.”

“Well, then, your logic cannot be faulted,” Sadiq admitted. He stroked his moustache in thought, then replied to Lo’s move in the classic way, by advancing the horse on the same flank. “Perhaps, being a man of such clear reasoning, you could make an argument to Commissioner Wu that would convince the Housing Commission to abandon its plans for the destruction of Aliqqi the Hero’s ancestral home.”

“I’m only a simple policeman.” Lo slid a chariot forward. “The housing commissioner doesn’t listen to me.”

“The housing commissioner appears to listen to no one. This is at the center of our complaint. The destruction of Uighur homes and streets—”

“—where everyone’s water comes from a single rusty pump—”

“—forcing us into high-rises—”

“—of three stories at most—”

“—disrupting our traditional family units—”

“—whose young women, as children, are betrothed to their cousins—”

“—all this we will accept because we must.”

“And because it comes with electricity, a housing allowance, and flush toilets.” Lo took another sip of tea.

“We are an ancient culture,” Sadiq shrugged, “experienced at taking the good with the bad.” He moved his advisor along the diagonal. “But in condemning the home of Aliqqi the Hero, Commissioner Wu has gone too far. This is a knife in the heart of my nation. The house of Aliqqi is the birthright of every Uighur. It is—”

“—a pilgrimage spot for young Uighur men and an important cultural symbol of Uighur pride. I know, I read that daily in your Uighur newspapers.”

“Do you also read that it stands barely within the city’s borders, on land of no possible use for new housing? Your water, your electricity, they don’t come near it. The Turpan Historical Preservation and Restoration Commission — on which, as you know, sit both Uighurs and Han — stated publicly just yesterday that it considers the condemnation of this property nothing more than wanton cultural destruction. Random viciousness on the part of the Housing Commission.”

“Commissioner Wu,” Lo replied, “is not a random man.”

“But he is a vicious one. What other explanation can there be for this cruelty?”

“Well, of course I’m just a policeman. The ways of power are mysterious to me, as to you, Sadiq. But you understand, in the course of my daily work I come into contact with many who know more than I. I’ve heard it said — just a rumor, mind you — that though the land where the home of Aliqqi the Hero stands may be worthless for housing, it could be valuable for the building of a road.”

“A road.” Sadiq looked up from the board. “The new road into the mountains? For the convenience of the mining companies?”

Lo nodded. “The same. But you don’t sound pleased, Sadiq. Are the Uighurs not rejoicing at the efforts of the mining companies? Do your people not stand to profit handsomely? At least, those who own land in the mountains?”

“Every Uighur family in Turpan owns land in the mountains. We’ve lived here since before the time of Genghis. If some fools from Beijing believe there is more in the mountains than the Uighurs know, why should we not profit from their arrogance?”

“You, also, Sadiq? Are you a landowner?”

“My land is along the south slopes.”

“Is that so?”

“Of course. But I haven’t visited it in years. It’s useless: too dry for grazing, too cold for melons.”

“The mining companies might disagree. I assume that, like other families, you’ve granted one or another of them permission to prospect there?”

“They paid a few yuan for the privilege. There’s nothing to be found. They will eventually get bored and go elsewhere, and I’ll have a few yuan I didn’t have formerly.”

“To add to your daughters’ dowries.” The detective brightened. “Then perhaps you’ll be able to take more leisure.”

“If only it were enough for that. No, from the mining companies, there’s little to be had. A man of my station can only work and grow haggard, I’m afraid.” He shook his head. “But speaking about that road, Detective Lo. That road is planned for the other side of the ravine.”

“That’s true. But consider: If the road is built on the other side of the ravine, the Roads Commission will be obliged to purchase the land from Uighur families. Beyond the city’s borders, none of the commissioners’ powers of condemnation apply. But,” he reached to the board and advanced a soldier, “if the Housing Commission condemns the home of Aliqqi the Hero, and the Roads Commission changes the route of the road...” Lo trailed off, eyes fixed on the board as if in thought.

“Ah!” Sadiq drew the syllable out, and continued slowly, “Then the Roads Commission will be in a position to purchase the land it needs not from Uighurs but from the Housing Commission. Am I correct?”

Without looking up, Lo nodded.

“And no doubt Housing Commissioner Wu will then express, in a tangible way, his appreciation for Roads Commissioner Ying’s flexibility.”

“Mustafa Sadiq!” Now Lo glanced up from the chessboard. “You cannot be accusing Commissioner Wu and Commissioner Ying of corruption? You cannot think the commissioners would line their own pockets at the cost of a cultural landmark of your people? Of the Uighurs, the largest of China’s treasured cultural minorities?”

Lo looked over his teacup at Sadiq. Sadiq returned his gaze, and they drank. Replacing his cup, Sadiq said, “It does not matter what I think. But perhaps you can understand why our young men’s hearts are aflame.”

“Young men’s hearts are always aflame.”

“That may be so. But more than hearts may be aflame in Turpan, if the home of Aliqqi the Hero is lost.” Sadiq’s hand moved to the chessboard, where it hovered over an elephant but didn’t touch it.

“I have heard this said, Sadiq. You are a man of wisdom and experience. Do you really believe it?”

“I do. I believe serious trouble cannot but result, if Commissioner Wu is not stopped.” Both men were silent for a time, considering Sadiq’s words. Sadiq sighed. “If only the housing commissioner were not beloved of the mayor, perhaps he could be stopped.”

“He is not beloved,” Lo corrected Sadiq.

“Excuse me, Detective, but how can that be? The home of Aliqqi the Hero is owned by the city. Mayor Din could simply refuse the condemnation proceedings, and yet he has not.”

Lo took a contemplative sip of tea. “Mayor Din is a political man, with great ambition. He does not dare refuse Commissioner Wu. The commissioner’s connections among the provincial bureaus are too strong. But I have heard it said — in the course of my daily work, you understand — that Mayor Din would not mind if the commissioner were, in fact, stopped.”

“Would he not?” Sadiq blinked.

“The Mayor would prefer — so it is said — that the civil servants in Turpan, persons such as myself, understand they have one master only.”

“As long as that master is himself.”

“Of course.” Lo watched Sadiq finally move the elephant. “To the list of Uighur virtues I would add respect for elders. A virtue among my people, also. The fiery young men of Turpan respect you, Sadiq.”

“If they do, I am honored.”

“If the fire in these young men’s hearts flares in the streets of Turpan, the Public Security Bureau will be forced to respond. It would be a shame if these young men’s futures, and possibly their lives, went up in that same smoke.”

“It would indeed.”

“Also, speaking personally, you understand, I should be sorry to see the streets of Turpan suffer any such damage. Despite the heat, I’ve grown to quite like it here. Perhaps it’s the tea.” He held out his cup, and nodded his thanks as Sadiq refilled it. “The, as you call them, miscreants who caused last night’s damage,” Lo said. “I think perhaps I should speak with them.”

Sadiq replaced the teapot on its stand. “Is that why you’re here, Detective Lo?”

“I’m here, Mustafa Sadiq, to play Xiangqi.”

“Of course. Yet I know you to be a man who plans carefully. There is little you do without looking ahead.”

“True enough,” Lo admitted.

“In that case, let me ask you something. Why, when we play Xiangqi, do I always win?”

“Ah.” Lo shook his head. “For that, I can see only two possible explanations. One: Perhaps my plans, though carefully made, do not always succeed.”

“And the other?”

Lo looked up, smiling. “Perhaps,” he said as he advanced a second soldier to the river, “it is part of my plan that you should win.”

Out of the respect they bore Mustafa Sadiq, seven young Uighur men drifted into the spice shop later that evening. They were given tea and dried apricots by Sadiq, and, by Detective Lo of the Public Security Bureau, a calm but compelling explanation of why the path they were on would have no effect on the Housing Commission’s plans for the destruction of the home of Aliqqi the Hero, but might well have implications for the destruction of themselves. Detective Lo suggested other possible paths for such promising youths. The fire in the young men’s hearts glittered in their dark eyes and glowed on the tips of their cigarettes as they sprawled in sullen and insolent postures. Their leader, addressed directly by Lo on one or two occasions, nodded and grunted to indicate he had understood the policeman’s point. Aside from that, they did not speak.

At the conclusion of Detective Lo’s lecture, the young men filed out, mumbling thanks to Mustafa Sadiq for his hospitality and avoiding the eyes of Detective Lo. When they were gone, Sadiq, looking at the door, spoke to the policeman. “I wonder what the result of your words will be.”

“I do also.”

“I hope it is enough.” Sadiq sighed. “Such a wicked world. Really, I’m just a poor shopkeeper. What is one small man to do?”

“Yes,” Lo responded. “Or a detective. Just two small men, in a wicked world. What are they to do?”

Two days later the door to Sadiq’s shop once again opened to admit the damp Detective Lo, who paused occasionally to sniff the contents of a brass box or burlap bag as he made his way to the counter, where Mustafa Sadiq was serving a customer. The old Uighur woman, spying the Han policeman, snatched up her purchase, glowered at him, and scurried away. Lo wiped his handkerchief along the back of his neck and watched her go.

“Very wise,” he said to Sadiq. “Not to call me ‘friend’ in her presence.”

“On a day when that one is angry at the Prophet, I would not call him friend,” Sadiq replied. “Is this another step in your acquisition of new habits? Last time you came before I was expecting you, and now you come when I’m not expecting you at all.” He reached for the kettle.

“I haven’t come for a game, or for tea, Sadiq. I have news that I thought I might share.”

“Oh?”

“The office of one of the mining companies was vandalized last night.”

“Was it really?”

“Windows broken, papers scattered about, and the walls spray-painted.”

“With slogans to the glory of Aliqqi the Hero?”

“Indeed.”

“You were sent for?”

“I was.”

Sadiq nodded. “And the miscreants? Were they caught?”

“No, my friend,” Lo replied. “They were not. However, there is no question in my mind as to who committed this outrage.”

“Is that so?” Sadiq murmured. “Well, your logic is usually faultless. I suppose you will proceed, then, as you must?”

“Yes,” Lo confirmed. “Exactly.”

The following morning, Detective Lo presented himself at the office of Housing Commissioner Wu. Unlike Public Security Bureau Headquarters and the satellite police buildings, the Housing Commission’s suite of offices had powerful air conditioning. The sweat gluing Lo’s shirt to his wide back turned icy, causing him to shiver as though in the presence of a ghost.

Commissioner Wu, small and dapper in a well-made suit, wrinkled his nose at the slovenly, perspiring policeman.

“I apologize for my appearance,” Lo said, sitting though he had not been offered a seat. With his handkerchief he blotted up sweat from his face. “It is very hot today.”

“This is the desert,” Wu retorted. “Each of us, until his wishes are granted and he is finally posted back to civilization, will have to put up with the unpleasant conditions of this forsaken place. Really, though, Detective Lo, isn’t it possible for you to put yourself together better?”

“This is why I was promoted to detective,” Lo said ruefully. “So that I could work in plainclothes. I was a disgrace to the uniform.”

“No doubt.” The commissioner sat back in his chair and frowned. “Detective Lo, I must tell you, your reputation precedes you. To hear you were a disgrace does not altogether surprise me. It is my information that you spend a good deal of time among the Uighurs. I understand you’ve made it your business to be fluent in their language. You play Xiangqi in teahouses and visit with shopkeepers. It could all make one question where your loyalties lie.”

Lo stopped in mid blot. “I’m surprised to hear that the activities of a policeman hold any interest for the housing commissioner. I suppose, on reflection, I’m flattered, though I’m saddened to hear the opinion you express, sir. The actions you describe are my poor attempts to stay close to the events of the city. They seem valuable to me, in my work, you understand, but perhaps I’m wrong.”

The commissioner sighed impatiently. “That is for your superiors, Detective. I understand you’ve come here because you have information you believe will interest me. If you do, please proceed.”

“Yes, sir. Of course.” Lo folded his handkerchief carefully and tucked it into his pocket, seemingly oblivious to the commissioner’s mounting irritation. Crossing his legs and settling into the chair, which, being as substantial as he was, did not complain, he said, “I think you may have heard that the offices of the Golden Chance Mining and Minerals Company were vandalized two nights ago?”

“No, I had not. I’m too busy to involve myself in problems that are not mine, Detective Lo. I would have thought vandalism was routine police business.”

“It is,” Lo agreed. “The Public Security Bureau was alerted by a concerned citizen, and I was sent to the scene. Rousted, in fact, from my bed.” He shook his head with a small smile. “Because, you see, I’m able to read the slogans that were sprayed on the walls. At times like these I, like you, question my decision to study the Uighur language. In any case, I did read the slogans. They were to the glory of Aliqqi the Hero.”

“Aliqqi.” The commissioner snorted. “An illiterate thug who centuries ago routed some other ragged tribe and stole their sheep. Good luck to him and his glory.”

“As you say. In any case, after I surveyed the situation and ascertained there was no useful evidence to be found, I sent the uniformed officers into the streets to search for the, um, miscreants.”

“Did they find them?”

“Unfortunately, they did not. There was no evidence left behind that could identify them, you understand. I’m certain that in time, however, we will track them down. In any case, I took it upon myself to remain, keeping the premises secure until officials of the Golden Chance company could make their way there.”

“All proper procedure, no doubt, and I’m sure you’re to be commended. Detective Lo, I’m a busy man. Why are you here?”

“Yes, of course, sir. I’m sorry.” Leaning forward, Lo produced two folded, wilting sheets of paper from his shirt pocket. With the palms of his pudgy hands he ironed them out on the commissioner’s desk.

Commissioner Wu inched back, as though to keep a distance between himself and anything that had been in such close proximity to the sweaty policeman. “What’s this?”

Lo gestured to the letterhead of the Golden Chance Mining and Minerals Company. “While I was waiting in the office, I thought to gather up some of the scattered papers. The mining company officials were already going to form an unfortunate impression of Turpan, based upon this offense against their property. I didn’t want them to come upon a public servant in the midst of such chaos, just standing there.”

“How civic-minded,” the commissioner muttered.

“One tries to do the right thing. In collecting the papers, though, I found myself glancing at them. Unavoidable, if unplanned; a career’s worth of curiosity, I’m afraid I can’t control it.” He gave a small shake of his head. “Now, I’m just a policeman, you understand, sir, and much of this is beyond my comprehension. However, unless I’m mistaken — always a possibility — I believe this report indicates the presence of, shall we say, unanticipated resources in an unexpected place?”

Commissioner Wu gazed at Lo a moment longer, then lowered his eyes to the papers. Skeptically at first, then more intently, he read through them, gingerly pinching the first sheet at its edge to lift it so he could study the second. When he had finished, he began again, reading with great care. Finally the commissioner looked up at the detective. “There is gold on land owned by the shopkeeper, Mustafa Sadiq.”

Lo nodded. “That was my conclusion also. I’m glad to see it confirmed by a man of your erudition.”

The commissioner frowned. “I had understood the companies prospecting in the mountains to be after copper. Bauxite. Iron, perhaps.”

“Yes, sir. Until this discovery — made, as it seems, within the week — the mountains near Turpan were not thought to have reserves of gold.” Lo hesitated. “Sir?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Well, I don’t expect that a man with your heavy responsibilities and busy schedule concerns himself with what amounts to hearsay about circumstances outside his purview.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“Then possibly you’re not aware of Golden Chance Company’s reputation. They’re known to be a reliable but conservative firm. They’re extremely unlikely to act on information of this sort until it’s been corroborated.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, of course, mining protocol is unfamiliar to me, but it’s my understanding that they’ll have ordered more exploratory investigations, before proceeding in any other way.”

Commissioner Wu tapped the paper before him. “It’s possible, then, that this finding will turn out to be — what do the medical people call it, a false positive?”

Lo shook his head. “Judging from the figures there, I don’t see how.” To the commissioner’s raised eyebrows he said, “I studied a bit of minerology myself, sir, before it became clear to me that academic effort was not in my line. I can still read a simple assay. There is no question as to the meaning of this. But since Golden Chance will be offering the owner a large sum for title to his property, it’s procedure for them to make doubly sure. Before they approach him.”

Commissioner Wu was silent for a moment. “You’re saying Mustafa Sadiq hasn’t been told about this yet?”

“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, you’re correct. He has not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mustafa Sadiq is known to me. He’s one of the Uighur shopkeepers with whom I’ve developed a certain relationship, over the years. During a—” Lo gave a shamefaced smile “—a Xiangqi game recently, he and I happened to touch on the subject of land in the mountains. As I’m sure you know, there are few conversations in Turpan these days that do not include mention of mining, and the mining companies. Sadiq told me his family owns land in the mountains, that he has not visited it in years, and that he has granted one of the mining companies permission to explore it. He said nothing more, nor did he appear to be holding anything back.”

“Did he not?”

“No, sir. Though of course I could be wrong; I speak only as a policeman, with a certain amount of practice at observing people trying not to tell me things.” Lo paused again. “Also...”

“Detective! What is it?”

“Sir, the damage done by the vandals at the Golden Chance offices was extensive. I imagine it will be some time, possibly a week or more, until an inventory is completed, repairs are made, and the routine operations of the firm can return to normal.”

The commissioner sat back in his chair. “They don’t know this report is missing.”

“I’m not sure, of course, sir. But considering the disordered state of their offices and files, I’d be very surprised if they did.”

“So.” Commissioner Wu looked steadily at Detective Lo. “An enterprising man could make something of this.”

“I think that’s true.” Lo returned his gaze.

“Detective Lo,” Wu said. “I have to ask why you’ve brought this... opportunity... to my attention. You and I have never worked together, nor even met. You’re not under my authority. Why haven’t you gone directly to Mustafa Sadiq, with whom you’re so obviously on friendly terms, and offered to relieve him of this worthless land? Why involve anyone, and why, particularly, myself?”

“Well, as to that, Mustafa Sadiq is not a fool. What use has a policeman for land in the mountains? Especially land he’s recently been told is worthless? Sadiq would understand immediately that something was afoot, and of course he will recall signing an agreement with the Golden Chance company allowing them to prospect on his land.”

“You’re saying, if you make an offer, Sadiq will know immediately the land is valuable.”

“Yes.”

“And why would it be different if I make the offer? I, a commissioner, whom he does not know and has no reason to trust? Unlike a friend,” Wu added sardonically.

“It would not be different.”

“Then what is the point of this exercise? Do you expect me to use Housing Commission funds to speculate, buying this land from Sadiq for whatever outrageous sum he demands, in hopes Golden Chance will pay more?” The commissioner stopped and frowned. “Or perhaps you expect me to condemn it. You are a policeman, so I suppose you don’t understand these things, but my powers of condemnation end at the city limits.”

“Yes, sir, I did know that. I agree with you: Condemning the land is not possible, and underpaying Sadiq is not practical.”

“Then why are you wasting my time?” Commissioner Wu’s bark caused the detective to start in his chair.

“That is not my intention, Commissioner, I assure you. Just, as I considered the use an enterprising man, as you say, might make of this information, it came to me that you, sir, are in a unique position.”

“What position would that be?” the commissioner hissed through clenched teeth.

“Well, of course, it’s only an idea, possibly a poor one, but perhaps, sir, at no cost to yourself or the Commission, but in your official capacity, you may be in a position to offer Mustafa Sadiq something in trade for his land. Something he wants very much.”

Later that afternoon, the spice-shop owner, Mustafa Sadiq, found himself summoned to the office of the housing commissioner. Sadiq could, of course, have refused to go, as his neighbors urged him to do. The housing commissioner, for all his despotic behavior, was not the police. He could not compel Sadiq to appear.

But Sadiq shrugged. “I’m curious,” he said. “Why does the housing commissioner even know my name? Why should he want to see a shopkeeper?” His neighbors had no answer. Sadiq changed his shirt, put on a fresh white cap with the embroidery and four-cornered shape of his tribe, and locked up his shop. Heading to the center of the city, where the government buildings squatted, he walked slowly, as the day was very hot.

Housing Commissioner Wu was not the police, but when Mustafa Sadiq was shown into the commissioner’s office, he found the police there, in the person of Detective Lo Pen-wei. He raised his eyebrows at the sight. “Detective Lo,” he said, speaking in Mandarin for the benefit of the commissioner, who sat frowning behind his desk. “Is the reason I’ve been called here a police matter, then?”

“Sit down,” Commissioner Wu ordered Sadiq, before Lo could speak. “Detective Lo is not here in his official capacity — though I expect you to respect his rank — but to serve as a translator. We will be covering some fairly subtle points, and it may be that your Mandarin is not up to the task.”

“The Housing Commission has no translators of its own? How fortunate that the Public Security Bureau is so generous with its officers, then,” Sadiq murmured. He seated himself, eyes on Lo.

“Mustafa Sadiq,” the commissioner said. The shopkeeper shifted his gaze to meet the commissioner’s. “I’ve brought you here because I’m interested in land in the mountains.”

“The land in the mountains is interesting,” Sadiq said agreeably. “The rock formations, the streams — they are unique in all East Turkestan. But I’m a poor shopkeeper, hardly an expert. I suggest—”

“Sadiq!” The commissioner gestured irritably at Lo, who spoke to Sadiq in the Uighur language.

“He means your land in the mountains, Sadiq.”

Sadiq blinked. To the commissioner he said, in Mandarin, “My land in the mountains is no more interesting than another man’s.”

“You’re wrong. Sadiq, I won’t insult you by playing games. Golden Chance Company has found gold on your land. I’ve brought you here because I want to buy it from you.”

Detective Lo began to translate, but Sadiq waved him silent.

“There is gold on my land?”

“I have information.”

Sadiq’s brow furrowed. “Why is it you have such information and I do not?”

“That’s neither here nor there, Sadiq. I’m a government official, privy to much that does not reach shopkeepers.”

Sadiq nodded. “I suppose that’s true. Is it a great deal of gold?”

The commissioner blew out a breath. “Would I have brought you here otherwise? I don’t have time to waste, Sadiq.”

“No.” Sadiq pursed his lips. “Please, you’ll forgive me, Commissioner, but this is all new to me. I must try to understand. My ancient ancestors’ worthless land has suddenly become valuable.” He shook his head. “Keslenqük yilan bolmighi ming yilqilik.”

The commissioner, alarmed, turned to the detective.

“It is a Uighur proverb,” Detective Lo told him. “ ‘It takes a thousand years for a lizard to become a snake.’ ”

“Yes,” said Sadiq. He smiled. “But look! Finally, it does.”

The commissioner snorted. “I don’t know what the meaning of that is supposed to be. We are not discussing lizards, Sadiq. I’m offering to buy your land.”

Sadiq nodded, suppressing the smile and rearranging his features into a serious aspect. “Yes, of course, Commissioner.” He smoothed his moustache, as though in an effort to keep the smile under strict control. After a few moments, however, the smile broke through the moustache barricade. Sadiq said, “Well, thinking of it, I don’t believe this is quite the right time to sell that land. You can appreciate, I have not had much time to consider the varying benefits of the paths open to me, but my inclination is to wait and see what arrangement Golden Chance Company suggests. If you’d like to discuss the situation after that, sir, I’d be happy to visit again.”

The commissioner replied, “Mustafa Sadiq, I think you’ll find my offer more satisfactory than any that Golden Chance Company will make.”

“Possibly. Once I know what they intend—”

“No, Sadiq. Now.”

“But, sir, if I don’t—”

“This is my offer: You will convey your land to me. I will convey to the Turpan Historical Preservation and Restoration Commission the home of Aliqqi the Hero.”

Sadiq stared, open-mouthed, at the commissioner. He turned to Detective Lo, who repeated the commissioner’s words in the Uighur language.

“Well.” Sadiq shook his head, as if to clear it. “That was what I thought I heard.” He hesitated; then, resuming speaking in Mandarin, he said to the commissioner, “It is a generous offer, sir. I appreciate the Housing Commission’s acknowledgment of the value to my nation of the home of Aliqqi the Hero. But...”

Commissioner Wu glanced at Detective Lo, and back to Sadiq. “But what? It is, as you yourself have said, a generous offer. Land where the worth is yet to be proven, in exchange for something of known and inestimable value to your people.”

“Sir,” Sadiq said, “what you say about the value of the home of Aliqqi the Hero to my people is true. It is an irreplaceable monument in our hearts. But I have three daughters. They will have husbands soon — the eldest, Qolpan, is already being courted — and they will have children. The land in the mountains is their birthright. It is not my place to give it away, even in exchange for such a cultural treasure.”

“Sadiq,” said Detective Lo, before the commissioner could respond. “Did you not tell me the home of Aliqqi the Hero is the birthright of every Uighur?”

“Yes.” Sadiq swallowed. “That is what makes this a difficult decision. One birthright for another. But I don’t see how I can agree to this.”

“Sadiq, you yourself will be a hero to your people if you do,” the commissioner said. “Our arrangement, of course, will remain private. But I will make it widely known that I was persuaded not to demolish the home of Aliqqi the Hero, but to convey it to the Preservation Society instead, by the silver tongue of the shopkeeper Mustafa Sadiq.”

Sadiq looked very sad. “Oh, that would be satisfying indeed! But I do not think—”

“On the other hand, if you do not agree, I will make it known equally widely that Mustafa Sadiq had the opportunity to save the home of Aliqqi the Hero, but chose not to, for reasons of his own greed.”

Now it was Sadiq who looked alarmed. “But no! That is not—”

“Is it not? You refuse my offer, in hopes that the Golden Chance company will make a better one — but what can they offer you, Sadiq, except money? So you are trading the home of Aliqqi the Hero for money. There is no other way to look at it.”

“But the home of Aliqqi is not mine to trade.”

“It is, Sadiq. Right now, the fate of your hero’s home is in your hands.”

From alarmed, Sadiq’s features paled to stricken.

“And your neighbors will know,” the commissioner finished. “They will all know.”

“No,” Sadiq whispered. “You cannot. My neighbors will never forgive me.”

“Nor should they, Sadiq, if you let this opportunity pass.”

“But my daughters... No, you must see, if I command the respect of all my nation but yet my daughters must marry beneath themselves because they have no dowries, what have I gained?”

“Beneath themselves? Sadiq, you’re a shopkeeper!”

“Commissioner!” Sadiq drew himself up. “Perhaps in your exalted world—”

“Sir?” Detective Lo, inserting himself in the conversation, addressed the commissioner. “If I might make a suggestion?”

“What is it?” the commissioner asked irritably. Sadiq turned narrowed eyes to the detective also.

“Well, it is this. Mustafa Sadiq: If there were not gold on this land in the mountains — if your daughters’ dowries consisted entirely of the grazing and melon-growing potential of this land — what would you ask for it?”

“But there is gold.”

“Sadiq.” Detective Lo, with only the slightest shift of posture and expression, suddenly appeared much changed: looming, volcanic. Both Sadiq and the housing commissioner stilled and stared. “Sadiq.” Lo seemed to rumble rather than speak. “If there were not.”

“I...” Sadiq was silent for some moments, his wide-eyed gaze fixed on Lo. Finally he whispered, “Seventy thousand renminbi.”

Detective Lo nodded and, saying nothing, turned to the housing commissioner.

“Detective?” the commissioner said. “Are you suggesting I buy this land?”

“I am,” Lo affirmed.

“That I give this man money? In addition to a cultural treasure?”

“Seventy thousand RMB is not so much money,” Lo said soothingly, “even to a policeman. Divided among Sadiq’s three daughters, it will give each a small nest egg, just enough that self-respecting Uighur men will be willing to court them. If, Sadiq, this were to occur, would you agree to the arrangement?”

“I... but the gold...”

“No one will know.” Lo relaxed in his chair, and the volcano vanished, replaced by the chubby policeman. “You will sell your land to Housing Commissioner Wu, who enjoys, from time to time, a rustic retreat, and who, happily settling in here in Turpan, wishes for mountain land of his own where he can wander through the splendor of your rocks and streams. You will also take the opportunity of a business relationship with the commissioner to importune him on the subject of the home of Aliqqi the Hero.

“Commissioner Wu,” Lo turned his attention across the desk, “you will enter into a simple business transaction with Mustafa Sadiq, which you will have no reason to keep hidden. In the course of it, you will be so moved by, as you say, Sadiq’s silver tongue — and by his reasonable price and lack of avarice in your business dealings — that you will agree that the home of Aliqqi the Hero must be preserved, and you will convey it to the Turpan Historical Preservation and Restoration Commission. When, weeks or possibly months from now, the Golden Chance Minerals and Mining Company seeks the owner of this land to make an offer on it, no one will be more surprised than Commissioner Wu. You, Mustafa Sadiq, will shrug philosophically when that happens. Possibly for a time you’ll face some ridicule from your neighbors, but that will be muted and good-natured, as you will be known throughout Turpan as the Uighur who saved the home of Aliqqi the Hero. Your daughters will have small dowries and a heroic father, and your people will have their cultural treasure. A most satisfactory ending.”

Detective Lo, from the effort of such a long speech, found himself perspiring even in the chill of the Housing Commission office. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, folded it, and replaced it in his pocket. As he did so, the room was silent. Finally, Commissioner Wu said to Mustafa Sadiq, “Do you agree to this?”

Sadiq stroked his moustache for some time. In the end, after a long look at Detective Lo, he turned to the housing commissioner and said, “Yes. I do.”

Another week passed before Mustafa Sadiq looked up from the counter to find the round form of Detective Lo Pen-wei occupying the doorway of his shop.

“Step inside,” Sadiq finally called. “You’re blocking all the sunlight anyway.”

“I needed to make sure the shop could accommodate me,” the policeman said, pulling the door shut behind himself. “I’ve tried half a dozen times in the past week to come see you, Sadiq, but the crowds of grateful well-wishers were too thick.”

“My neighbors have been generous in their gratitude.”

“You’ve done your people a great service,” Lo said. “Why shouldn’t they acknowledge it?” He threaded his way carefully through the shop, wiping his brow with his handkerchief. When he reached the counter he folded the cloth and replaced it in his pocket, asking Sadiq, “And your daughters? They’re well, I hope?”

“They are, thank you, Detective. The eldest, Qolpan, informs me she will take the small dowry that has recently come her way and, rather than plan a wedding, will enroll in the University in Urumqi. She intends to study minerology, as her fiancé’s knowledge of the subject has proven so valuable of late.”

“Yes,” Lo agreed, “a subject of much practical use. I myself understand not a word of it, of course, but I’m just a policeman. Well, congratulations, Sadiq.”

Sadiq shrugged and reached for the kettle. Lo raised his hand. “Wait. I came to ask: Now that you’re celebrated among your neighbors, and your daughters are provided for, are you permitting yourself some moments of leisure? If so, perhaps you would care to accompany me to a teahouse, where we can sit in the shade of the grape arbor.”

Sadiq regarded him. “And where a Han policeman can shine in the reflected glory of a heroic Uighur shopkeeper?”

“I cannot deny that being seen with you, given who you have become, could be useful to me, Sadiq. In my work, you understand.”

“Well, then. I suppose under the circumstances I cannot turn this invitation down?”

“No, I don’t think you can.”

Sadiq nodded. “I see. And am I to bring the Xiangqi set?”

“You are.”

Sadiq put on his white hat and went about the business of closing the shop while Lo waited. There was little to it and they soon found themselves on the dusty streets of Turpan under the bright hot sun.

“Is the housing commissioner well?” Mustafa Sadiq asked as they walked.

“I couldn’t say. I haven’t seen the commissioner since you and I were together in his office last week. Barring, of course, the public announcement the following day.”

“You were in People’s Square?”

“It was my duty, as a guardian of the public security. Though, considering Commissioner Wu’s lack of popularity among your people, there was surprisingly little rancor in the crowd. Possibly the substance of the announcement had been rumored; the people were in a jovial mood. The commissioner spoke well of you, Sadiq.”

“Yes, I was flattered. But,” Sadiq said, “though you have not seen him, I think you have heard from him?”

“Briefly, yes.”

“He expressed his gratitude for your help in — our mutual situation?”

“He did.”

“In a tangible form?”

“It’s a custom among my people,” Lo said. “The giving of small gifts.”

They continued in silence, Sadiq acknowledging gravely the greetings of people they passed, blushing once as someone yelled, “The Hero’s hero!” and a small group burst into cheers. Even the presence of the hulking Han policeman at his side did not seem to dampen people’s enthusiasm for Mustafa Sadiq.

The teahouse Detective Lo had chosen was very popular in Turpan, situated as it was around a tiled fountain in a courtyard where a grape arbor twined overhead. The water whispered and so did the Uighurs seated all about, as the shopkeeper and the policeman chose a table. Many people smiled and nodded to Mustafa Sadiq, calling their thanks, giving the thumbs-up sign, but, possibly because of his companion, no one approached. Sadiq acknowledged their tributes, and spoke to the proprietor, who promptly brought them tea and a plate of sweet biscuits, for which he refused payment.

From the inlaid box he had carried under his arm, Sadiq lifted out the white chessboard. Lo took the wooden disks from their embroidered cloth bag and set them in their rows.

“Detective Lo,” Sadiq said, as Lo prepared the board. “Since you are a man who thinks ahead, let me ask you: What do you anticipate the reaction of the housing commissioner will be when he discovers there is no gold on my land in the mountains?”

“His land in the mountains,” Lo corrected, waiting for Sadiq, who was playing red today, to make the first move. “Well, as to that. First, I imagine he’ll be incensed at the incompetence of the Golden Chance company, as time passes and no one contacts him. He’ll find himself with an internal struggle, whether to reveal his possession of the pirated report.”

He waited while Mustafa Sadiq moved his right-rank cannon to a position in front of his general, an unconventional opening.

“And do you think he will?” Sadiq asked. He poured tea from a hammered copper pot into clear small glasses with silver handles.

“Oh, yes. He’ll finally grow impatient and make the contact himself. When Golden Chance admits to mystification as to the report’s contents, and produces the actual assay of your former land, the commissioner’s anger will know no bounds.” Lo responded to Sadiq’s move with an unusual move of his own, shifting his left-side horse also toward the center ranks.

“You will be sent for?” Sadiq asked, stroking his moustache.

“Undoubtedly.” Lo watched as Sadiq moved his right-rank horse. “My outrage will match the commissioner’s own. That the miscreants of Turpan should have the subtlety to sow forged reports among the debris in a vandalized office — this new escalation is shocking, contemptible, and a serious threat to the public security.” Lo advanced a soldier. “I’ll vow redoubled efforts to capture these criminals. Unfortunately, they left us no evidence as to their identities. However, I will reassure the commissioner that, with time, the Public Security Bureau will no doubt bring them to justice.”

“As the first to believe the fabricated report, and as the one who brought it to the commissioner, I’m afraid you’ll be left looking a bit of a fool, Detective Lo.”

Lo shrugged. “A condition I’ve grown used to.”

“And you’ll have made an enemy of the housing commissioner. Even if he harbors no suspicions, he’ll need someone to blame.” Sadiq slid his chariot along the horizontal.

“The housing commissioner,” replied Detective Lo, “will not, I suspect, be much longer in Turpan. Corruption is a serious crime in today’s China. Agents of the Public Security Bureau, such as myself, have recently begun making contact with the mining companies, warning them against unscrupulous officials who might try to take advantage of their high offices for personal gain. The companies have been warned to be particularly alert to forgery and false documents. If such a thing were to be reported, the Public Security Bureau would not be able to turn a blind eye.”

Lo reached out a hand for his cannon, but a voice over his shoulder said, “I wouldn’t do that.” Lo turned to see a broad-backed Uighur man in a gray tribal cap. “I don’t mean to interfere, of course,” the man went on. “But Mustafa Sadiq has just played his chariot. In this opening, you must respond with your chariot also.”

Detective Lo looked to Sadiq, then back to the other man. “I’m Ahmet Erxidin,” the new man said. “I’m honored that a Han policeman enjoys our ancient game.”

“Xiangqi is ancient among my people too, Ahmet Erxidin, and many enjoy it. I’m Lo Pen-wei of the Public Security Bureau. I appreciate your advice.”

“Ahmet Erxidin is renowned for his skill at Xiangqi,” Sadiq told Lo. To Erxidin he said, “My friend, will you have tea?”

“Thank you, I will.” The gray-capped man moved a chair and sat. “Mustafa Sadiq is too kind,” he said to Lo. “My skill is only what it is, but I do spend a great deal of time at the Xiangqi board. I’m always seeking new opponents. Perhaps, if Mustafa Sadiq is not available, you would consider giving me a game? I can be found in this teahouse most days.”

Lo beamed. “I would be honored. To sit in a teahouse playing Xiangqi is one of the joys of life in Turpan.”

The proprietor brought a third silver-handled tea glass. Mustafa Sadiq poured tea for the newcomer, and for himself and Detective Lo. All lifted their glasses, and before they drank, Sadiq said, “I offer this toast: To my friends.”

“To my friends,” they each said, and drank.

Copyright © 2012 by S.J. Rozan

The Jury Box

by Steve Steinbock

A thousand books pass through The Jury Box every year. Of those, only a handful are chosen for review each month. I was asked how I select the books I review. Like any other mystery fan, I pick books that grab my attention. I look for themes among the books. And I try to seek variety.

The question that inevitably comes next is, how can I evaluate “fluffy” mysteries alongside “serious” crime fiction? Easy. I judge each book on its own merits. A novel featuring a crime-solving canine chef might be likely to have less literary merit than an epic coming-of-age novel with a serial killer or a work of historical noir. But I’d rather read well-written “fluff” that keeps its promise to the reader than a mediocre or pretentious version of either of the latter.

Every book is a promise made by the author to the reader. It’s a promise that the book is the author’s sincere attempt to tell a good story with integrity and skill. As individual readers, we may choose cozies or noir, historical or contemporary, humorous or starkly serious. It’s the mission of The Jury Box to place as many titles as possible before you under the wide umbrella of “mystery fiction” and let you choose. It’s also my goal to give my readers honest evaluations of the books I review. I’ve been finding that my star ratings have been sliding upward. I find myself less inclined to finish an average or below average book, so I’m less likely to review two- or three-star books. A three-star book is a solid novel that keeps its promise, while a four-star book exceeds it. A five-star book, of which I include two this month, takes me completely by surprise and raises the literary experience. With that in mind, this month we look at a very wide variety of titles, running the gamut of crime fiction.

*** Bailey Cates, Brownies and Broomsticks, Obsidian, $7.99. A cozy mystery set around a bakery run by witches is about as lightweight as crime fiction gets. The heroine is, in fact, named Katie Lightfoot. But I couldn’t help but smile all the way through Katie’s antics as she tries to open a new business and solve the murder of the curmudgeonly community leader who wanted to close it down, all the while discovering her covenous family background. An enjoyable first-in-a-series by Cricket McRae (writing as Bailey Cates).

*** Lisa Lutz, Trail of the Spellmans, Simon & Schuster, $25.00. Document #5 of the Spellman Files series continues to follow the misadventures of Isabel “Izzy” Spellman, the thirty-something slacker who probably wouldn’t be in her parents’ detective business if she didn’t do it so well. Her younger sister is now in college, her brother married with a child. The family takes a series of separate cases that seem to be at cross-purposes. Lutz’s style is offbeat and unique, but very accessible, making this series one of my favorite guilty pleasures.

Lutz and ex-boyfriend David Hayward worked together on another off-beat project, Heads You Lose, which recently was released in trade paperback (Berkley, $15.00). The result is a tag-team collaborative novel about a headless body that won’t stay put. This modern-day “Trouble With Harry” echoes the affectionate rivalry between the two authors.

**** Jess Lourey, November Hunt, Midnight Ink, $14.95. I’ve been following Lourey since her 2006 debut, May Day. Lourey’s heroine, rural Minnesota librarian and accidental detective Mira James, worked her way through eight months of sleuthing. The series started off on a high note and has only gotten better. November Hunt opens with a fatal hunting incident; but the victim’s daughter suspects it was not an accident. Mira wades through a field of local pot growers, a library fundraiser, and a long-kept community secret. A good story told well, with solid writing.

***** Howard Shrier, Boston Cream, Vintage Canada, $17.95. Shrier is my top find of the year. The Toronto-based author is not well known below the Canadian border, but his excellent P.I. series deserves much wider attention. Hired by an Orthodox Jewish couple to travel to Boston to locate their medical-student son, P.I. Jonah Geller and his partner Jenn cross paths with an evil but altogether believable criminal consortium. Geller is an exceptionally well-drawn character, a true man of peace who is forced to harness his own inner violence.

***** Ariel S. Winter, The Twenty-Year Death, Hard Case Crime, $25.99. At 672 pages, The Twenty-Year Death is the biggest book yet from Hard Case Crime. Contained in this first novel are actually three separate interconnected novels, each set a decade apart. Malniveau Prison, set in 1931, is written in the style of Georges Simenon. The Falling Star (1941) is modeled on Raymond Chandler’s work. Police at the Funeral (1951) is an homage to the dark style of Jim Thompson. The entire volume, which bears some comparison to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, is a dark, affectionate tribute to the genre.

There’s been an upsurge in the number of novellas and short novels published recently. Some may blame it on the short attention spans of electronic-age readers. But I welcome it as the return of a neglected literary form.

James Sallis, Driven, Poisoned Pen Press, $19.95 (HC), $11.95 (TPB). This sequel to Sallis’s 2005 novel Drive (the basis for the 2011 film starring Ryan Gosling) follows the semi-fugitive former stunt driver as he’s pursued by vengeful gangsters. When they kill his fiancée, he sets out on his own quest for vengeance. While it’s not imperative to have read Drive, an important aspect of the plot hinges on a character and event from that earlier novel. Sallis has created a starkly heroic anti-hero.

Melodie Campbell, The Goddaughter, Raven Books, $9.95. Canadian publisher Orca Books, in an attempt to aid adult literacy, publishes a series of “Rapid Read” novels through their Raven Books imprint. Melodie Campbell tells a hilarious story of the goddaughter of a mafia leader drafted into a jewel-smuggling operation. The caper goes bad when high heels containing the contraband are stolen.

Max Allan Collins, Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook, Thomas and Mercer, $14.95. In his introduction to this collection of three of his novellas, Collins discusses the short novel and its place in detective-fiction history. He rightfully mentions that it was once not uncommon to find a 40,000 to 50,000 word “novel” published in Manhunt, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, or EQMM. Collins has gathered three such novellas, in the style of Rex Stout, featuring P.I. Nathan Heller, each set amidst actual crime cases from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.

Collins has also teamed up with James L. Traylor to produce Mickey Spillane on Screen (McFarland www.mcfarlandpub.com, $45.00), which chronicles the many film and TV adaptations of Spillane’s work, in-cluding details on the cast and crew, episode guides to four different Mike Hammer TV series, and multiple TV movies. The book, throughout, is filled with black-and-white photos.

Finally, I couldn’t let another column go by without making mention of a collection of stories by one of our favorite EQMM contributors, Melodie Johnson Howe. Shooting Hollywood (Crippen & Landru, $43.00 HC/$17.00 TPB), contains nine stories about aging starlet Diana Poole, eight of which originally appeared in EQMM.

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Steinbock

Mariel

by David Dean

David Dean’s July 2011 EQMM story “Tomorrow’s Dead” received nominations for the Edgar Allan Poe and Derringer awards. He joins us this month with a less hardboiled story, but one whose characters may make you think twice next time you see an apparently innocent little girl riding her bike around your cul-de-sac. The author is a former chief of police who recently retired to spend more time writing. We have several more of his powerful stories scheduled for 2013.

* * * *

The neighbor watched Mariel approach through his partially shuttered blinds. She cruised down their quiet cul-de-sac on her purple bicycle, her large head with its jumble of tight curls swiveling from side to side. He thought she looked grotesque, a Shirley Temple on steroids. Mariel ratcheted the bell affixed to her handlebars for no apparent reason and stopped in front of his house. He took a step back from the window.

His house was one of three that lay along the turnaround at the end of Crumpler Lane and normally she would simply complete her circumnavigation of the asphalted circle and return to her end of the street. This time, however, Mariel’s piggish eyes swept across his lawn and continued to the space between his house and that of his neighbors to the north, who despised the child as much as he did, if that was possible. A crease of concern appeared on his freckled forehead and he took a sip of his cooling coffee.

Suddenly she raked the lever of her bell back and forth several times, startling him, the nerve-wracking jangle sounding as if Mariel and her bike were in his living room. He felt something warm slide over his knuckles and drip onto his faux Persian carpet.

Hissing a curse about Mariel’s parentage, he turned for the kitchen and a bottle of stain remover. “Hideous child,” he murmured through clenched teeth. “Troglodyte!” What was she looking for? More than once he had chased her from his property after he found her snooping around his sheds and peering in his windows. Though he had complained, her mother had proved useless in controlling the child. She was one of those “single moms” that seemed to dominate the family landscape of late, and had made it clear that she thought he was overreacting.

He recalled, with a flushing of his freshly razored cheeks, how she had appeared amused by the whole thing and inquired with an arched brow how long he had been divorced — as if the need for companionship might be the real motive behind his visit! He felt certain that on more than one encounter with the gargantuan and supremely disengaged mother, he had smelled alcohol on her breath, cheap wine, if he had to hazard a guess.

But what now, he wondered? Usually Mariel crept about in a surprisingly stealthy manner for such a large girl, but now she commanded the street like a general, silent but for the grating bell that even now rang out demandingly once more... but for what?

Forgetting the carpet cleaner, he set down his morning mug and glided stealthily back to his observation point at the window. He felt trapped, somehow, by this sly little giant so inappropriately named “Mariel.” What had her mother been thinking, he asked himself with a shake of his graying head, to assign this clumsy-looking creature such a delicate, feminine name? When he peeked out again it was to find Mariel’s bike lying discarded on his lawn, the girl nowhere to be seen. The crease between his eyes became a furrow and he rushed through his silent house to the kitchen windows.

Carefully parting a slat of his Venetian blinds, he looked out on the path that led between his property and the next and on into the woods. A large head of curly hair was just disappearing down it and into the trees. A shudder ran through his body and beads of sweat formed above his upper lip like dew. Damn the girl, he thought, feeling slightly nauseous as suspicion uncoiled itself within his now-queasy guts.

Unbidden, the image of the dog trotted into his mind, its hideous prize clasped between its slavering jaws. It had reeked of the rancid earth exposed by the recent torrential rains. He remembered with a shudder of distaste and a rising, renewable fury how it had danced back and forth across his sodden lawn, clearly enjoying its game of “keep away.” He remembered the shovel most of all, its heft and reach, the satisfaction of its use.

“That was her dog,” he breathed into the silent, waiting room, then thought, Of course it was... it would be. His soft hands flexed as if gripping the shovel once more.

Mariel stood over the shallow, hastily dug grave and contemplated the partially exposed paw. The limb showed cinnamon-colored fur with black, tigerish stripes that she immediately recognized. She hadn’t really cared for Ripper (a name he had been awarded as a puppy denoting his penchant for ripping any and every thing he could seize between his formidable jaws) but he had been, ostensibly, her dog.

Ostensibly, because as he had grown larger, his destructive capabilities, coupled with Mariel and her mother’s complete disregard of attempting to instill anything remotely resembling discipline, had resulted in a rather dangerous beast that had to be kept penned in the backyard at all times. Mariel had served largely as Ripper’s jailer.

As she couldn’t really share any affection with the dog, or he with her, they had gradually grown to regard one another with a resigned antipathy, if not outright hostility — after all, she was also the provider of his daily meals, which she mostly remembered to deliver. It was also she who managed to locate him on those occasions when he found the gate to his pen unlatched (Mariel did this from time to time to see what might happen in the neighborhood as a result) and coaxed him into returning. This was the mission on which Mariel had been engaged this Saturday morning in early November. She saw now that she had been only partially successful — Ripper would not be returning to his pen.

Looking about for something to scrape the loose earth off her dog’s remains, she pried a rotting piece of wood from a long-fallen pine tree and began to dig into the damp, sandy soil. Grunting and sweating with the effort, her Medusa-like curls bouncing on her large, round skull, she managed to expose Ripper within minutes. Whoever had buried him had not done a very good job of it and the slight stench of dead dog that had first led her to the secret grave rose like an accusing, invisible wraith. Mariel wrinkled her stubby nose.

Ignoring the dirt and damage being done to her purplish sweatshirt and pants, which matched her bicycle, she seized the dead creature by his hindquarters and dragged him free of the grave. Letting him drop onto the leaf litter of the forest floor with a sad thump, she surveyed her once-fierce companion.

She thought that he looked as if the air had been let out of him — deflated. His great fangs were exposed in a permanent snarl or grimace, the teeth and eyes clotted with earth. She pushed at his rib cage with a toe of her dirty sneaker as if this might goad him back into action, but nothing happened, he just lay there.

She thought his skull appeared changed and squatted next to him to make a closer examination. As she brought her large face closer, the rancid odor grew stronger yet, but Mariel was not squeamish and so continued her careful scrutiny. It was different, she decided. The concavity that naturally ran between Ripper’s eyes to the crown of his skull was now more of a valley, or canyon. Mariel ran a finger along it and came away with a sticky black substance clinging to it. The stain smelled of death and iron.

Having completed her necropsy, Mariel stood once more and surveyed the surrounding woods. The trees had been largely stripped of their colorful foliage by the recent nor’easter, but her enemy was not to be seen. Though she did not truly mourn Ripper’s untimely passing, she did greatly resent the theft of her property and its misuse, and concluded with a hot finality that someone owed her a dog.

She gently kicked Ripper’s poor carcass as a final farewell, then turned to leave and find a wheelbarrow in which to transport him home once more. She knew of several neighbors who possessed such a conveyance and almost none were locked away this time of year.

It was then that something within the dog’s recent grave caught her attention — something that twinkled like a cat’s eye in the slanted beams of daylight that filtered through the trees. Mariel dropped to her knees, thrusting her chubby hand into the fetid earth to retrieve whatever treasure lay within. When she withdrew it once more it was to find that she clasped a prize far greater than any she could ever have imagined — a gold necklace, its flattened, supple links glistening like snakeskin and bearing a pendant that sparkled with a blue fire in the rays of the milky sun. Mariel had no idea as to what, exactly, she had discovered, but her forager’s instinct assured her that she clasped a prize worth having.

Without hesitation, she gave it a tug to free it from the grasp of Ripper’s grave, but oddly, found that her efforts were resisted. She snatched at it once more, impatient to be in full possession of her prize, and felt something beneath the dirt move and begin to give way. Encouraged at the results of this tug of war, she seized the links in both hands now and rocked back on her considerable haunches for additional leverage.

With the dry snap of a breaking branch, the necklace came free and Mariel found herself in full possession. The erupted earth, however, now revealed a yellowish set of teeth still lodged in the lower jawbone of their owner. Several of these teeth had been filled with silver and as Mariel had also been the recipient of such dental work, she understood that the remains were those of a human. A stack of vertebrae was visible jutting out from the dirt, evidence of the result of the uneven struggle, though the remainder of the skull still lay secure beneath the soil.

Mariel’s grip on the pendant never wavered as she regarded the neck of the now-headless horror that had previously worn the coveted necklace. With only a slight “Ewww” of disgust, she rose in triumph to slip the prized chain over her own large head, admiring the lustrous sapphire that hung almost to her exposed navel while ignoring the slight tang of death that clung to it. She felt well-pleased with the day’s outcome, Ripper’s demise notwithstanding.

With her plans now altered by this surprising acquisition, Mariel dragged her dog’s much-abused corpus back to the grave from which she had only just liberated him, tipped him in, and began to cover Ripper and his companion once more. When she was done, she studied the results for several moments, then thought to drag a few fallen branches over her handiwork.

Satisfied with the results, she turned for home once more, pausing only long enough to slip the necklace beneath her stained sweat shirt. Mariel did not want to have to surrender her hard-won treasure to her mother, who would undoubtedly covet the prize and seize it for her own adornment. Besides, she had things she wanted to think about and did not want anyone to know of the necklace until the moment of her choosing, especially the three men who occupied the homes on the cul-de-sac. It had not escaped Mariel’s notice that only those three had easy access to the path that led into the woods and passed within yards of the secret grave.

The neighbor watched her emerge from the trees and march past his house. He studied her closely but could read nothing from her usual closed expression. Other than her clothes being a little dirtier than when she went in, she appeared the same as always and he breathed a sigh of relief.

It was silly, he thought, as he saw her raise and clumsily mount her bike, how one unpleasant child could instill so much unease. It was because he was a sensitive man, he consoled himself — he had been a sensitive boy and with adulthood nothing had really changed. He had always resented the unfeeling bullies of the world, child or adult. Children like Mariel had terrified him when he had been a schoolboy and apparently nothing had changed in that respect either.

The sudden jangling of the bell caused him to gasp and his eyes returned to the robust figure of Mariel. She surveyed the surrounding houses with her implacable gaze, studying each of the three on the cul-de-sac in turn, coming at last back to his own. He shrank back from the window once more, his heart beating rapidly.

Then, with a thrust of a large thigh, her bike was set in motion and she pedaled from his sight with powerful strokes. “Damn her,” he whispered defiantly as his earlier concerns returned with such force that his blood suddenly roared in his ears.

Finding an overstuffed chair to settle into, he peered around the plush, dim room with its collection of his own paintings on the wall, while around him songbirds began to chirp and sing from their cages as if to restore and calm him. He smiled weakly in gratitude at their effort even as Mariel’s imperious face returned to his mind’s eye with a terrible clarity. He closed his eyes against her, massaging his now-throbbing temples with his soft fingertips. If she had discovered anything in those woods, he asked himself, she would have come out screaming, wouldn’t she? He lowered his head into his sweaty hands, while a blood-red image of Mariel shimmered on his inner eyelids... Wouldn’t she?

Mariel had no trouble engineering her encounter with Mr. Salter. He worked on his lawn from early spring until the cold and snow of January finally drove him indoors. As long as there was any light she knew that her chances were good of finding him in his yard. So after she was delivered home by her school bus and had enjoyed a snack of cream-filled cupcakes, she pedaled her bike directly to the cul-de-sac and his property.

Salter watched her approach with a sour expression meant to ward her away, but Mariel was not troubled by such subtleties. She came to a sudden halt in his driveway, causing a scattering of carefully raked gravel. She watched Salter’s expression darken at this, but he refrained from saying anything. He shut off the leaf blower he had been using and its piercing whine faded away. Man and girl observed each other from several yards apart as his corpulent Labrador waddled happily toward Mariel, thick tail wagging.

“Bruiser,” Salter warned menacingly.

The dog ignored him and continued on to Mariel, pleased to be patted on his large head. Salter’s complexion went darker yet.

“Can I do something for you?” he asked, his tone clearly implying the opposite.

Mariel regarded him without answering, while fingering the necklace she had retrieved from its hiding place before going out. Salter fidgeted beneath her round-eyed stare. “Be careful of the dog,” he muttered hopefully, “he might bite.”

As Mariel had surreptitiously recruited Salter’s dog during her many secret forays, she knew this to be untrue. She often went into Salter’s garage where he kept the dog food and fed the animal while he was away teaching shop at the high school, Bruiser was always pleased to see her as a result. As if to emphasize their relationship, the dog laid its great head on her thigh, sighed, and stared adoringly into her eyes.

This was too much for Salter, who turned his wide back on her and went to pull at the cord that would start his treasured leaf-blower.

Mariel glanced at the well-worn path that led from Salter’s backyard and into the woods. “I have this,” she said, pulling the necklace from her shirt and allowing it to fall down over her plump stomach. The sapphire shone in the late-day sun like a blue flame. Her eyes remained warily on Salter, even as her small mouth puckered into a smile of possessiveness.

Salter, glancing over his shoulder, halted, and turned slowly back. “Where the devil did you get that?” he managed. He took a few steps closer as Mariel backed her bike away an equal distance. Bruiser’s head slid off her thigh, leaving a trail of saliva.

Seeing this, Salter stopped and studied Mariel’s prize from where he stood. “Did your mother say you could wear that?” he asked.

As the girl did not reply, but only continued her unsettling scrutiny, he added, “Does she even know that you have it? For that matter, how the hell could your mom afford something like that... provided it’s real, of course?” Forgetting himself, he took another few steps, but Mariel was already turning her bike to coast down his driveway.

“I know that you’ve been coming onto my property,” he called to her as she picked up speed with each stroke of her powerful legs. “You’d better stop sneaking around here... it’s called trespassing, you know, I could call the cops.” His voice grew louder as she added distance between them. “And maybe I will the next time,” he offered.

“Did you steal that?” he called out meanly as she disappeared around the curve.

Mariel only looked back as she sped up the street and out of sight of the cul-de-sac. A small smile played on her puckered lips. She scratched Mr. Salter off her list of suspects.

Mariel surprised Mr. Forster in his own backyard. She had glided silently across his still-green lawn to roll to a halt at the back edge of his house. Forster had his back to her and was busily feeding and talking to his flock of tiny bantam hens. He did not notice her arrival. The hens themselves restlessly pecked and grumbled within the pen he had provided them and gave her no notice as Forster continued to scatter feed amongst them.

Mariel enjoyed watching these birds, and had several times in the past attempted to better make their acquaintance. On one such occasion, Forster had found Mariel within the pen itself attempting to catch one of his miniature chickens, feathers flying about in the air amid a cacophony of terrified squawking. He had been livid with rage at her incursion and had joined the ranks of other neighbors who had visited her home to complain to her mother. Mariel had learned to be more careful since that encounter and had not been caught since, but neither had she been successful.

“They’re funny,” Mariel lisped quietly.

Forster spun around, scattering the remainder of the feed from the bowl he was using. “Oh,” he cried, as the small, black fowl swarmed his shoes and cuffs for the errant seeds. “Oh,” he repeated; then focused on his unexpected visitor. He brought a hand up to his heart and gasped, “You scared me half to death, Mariel. I didn’t hear you come up and you nearly scared me half to...” He caught himself. “You usually ring that little bell of yours,” he finished with a limp gesture at her bike.

Man and girl regarded one another across several yards of mostly grassless, churned-up soil... evidence of poultry. A worn path into the woods separated them. Mr. Forster set the metal bowl down and opened the pen door to come out. Mariel clumsily rolled her bike into a half-circle that left her facing in the direction from which she had come.

The older man appeared to note the child’s wariness and slowed his steps, easing himself leisurely through the door and taking his time in carefully closing and latching the wire-covered frame. When he turned once more to Mariel it was to find her holding out a large jewel pendant that hung about her neck from a gold chain. She reminded him of the vampire slayers in horror films attempting to paralyze and kill their undead foes with a crucifix.

“My goodness, Mariel, that is some necklace you have there. It’s lovely. You are a very lucky girl to have that.”

Mariel continued to fix him with both her gaze and the pendant while her lips vanished into a grim, pensive line. Forster stared back uncertainly. “Was there something that you wanted?” he thought to ask at last.

The sapphire wavered in her grip and she slowly lowered and slipped it once more beneath her top. It appeared to have no power over this man either. As she puzzled over her lack of progress in her investigations thus far, Forster took two steps closer.

Forster was only slightly taller than Mariel and had no more than fifteen pounds over the ten-year-old, so she was not as intimidated as she might have been with other men in the neighborhood.

“It’s the hens, isn’t it?” he ventured. “You appreciate them like I do.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the chicken coop. “I was probably a little hasty last time you were here,” he continued. “I should have thought... but when I heard all that commotion and came out to find someone in the pen... Well, I should have realized that you were just as fascinated by them as I am.” He studied Mariel’s broad, unintelligent face for several moments. “Would you like to hold one?”

Mariel’s gaze flickered just slightly at this invitation. The thought of actually holding one of the softly feathered birds had become something of a Holy Grail for her and her breath caught at the idea.

Forster turned and retraced his steps to the coop and within moments returned stroking a quietly clucking hen. Mariel smiled and reached out both arms for the coveted bird, but Forster stopped a few paces short of her. Still running his hand over the bantam’s glossy feathers, he nodded contentedly at Mariel and said, “Show me that necklace again, why don’t you? I was too far away to be able to see it well. How about another look... I won’t touch it; then I’ll let you hold Becky.” He smiled widely at Mariel and held the bird a few inches away from his chest to indicate his willingness.

Mariel quickly retrieved the necklace from within her shirt and held out the pendant for him to study, her small greedy eyes never leaving the near-dozing hen. Forster leaned forward onto the balls of his feet and studied the stone silently for several moments. Finally, Mariel heard him exhale and murmur, “You should be very careful with that, Mariel. That’s exactly the kind of thing that grownups will want to take from you.” He leaned just a little closer and asked, “Does your mother know you’ve got that?” And when she fidgeted and didn’t answer right away, added, “I wouldn’t tell her, if I were you... she’ll want to wear it... and keep it... for sure. Any woman would.”

Mariel stuffed the necklace back down her shirt and thrust her arms out once more for the agreed-upon chicken. Forster carefully placed it within her thick arms and smiled as Mariel’s normally glum face began to light up with the tactile pleasure of the silken bird. In her enthusiasm, she began to run her sticky hand down the hen’s back with rapid movements, even as “Becky” began to squirm and protest volubly at the excessive downward pressure of her strokes. The contented clucking quickly became the frenzied cackles of a terrified chicken in the clutch of a bear cub.

Forster, seeing that Mariel’s technique required more practice and refinement, made to take the bird from the grinning schoolgirl, but she turned away with her prize as if she meant to keep Becky at all costs. With that movement, however, the hen was given just the opening she required in which to free her wings. Becky began to flap them frantically in her rapidly escalating desire for freedom.

Startled, Mariel released the bird, which in a whirlwind of beating wings and flying feathers covered the short distance to her coop in awkward bounds only slightly resembling actual flight. Mariel was left with nothing but a few of the errant feathers and her hot disappointment.

With a frown of both disapproval and resentment, she pushed off on her bike and made for Crumpler Lane. Behind her, Forster called out, “They just take a little getting used to, Mariel. Come back when you want and I’ll teach you to handle them!”

After she had gone away, he turned to his precious coop to insure that Becky was returned and properly locked in for the night. Then, with a sigh, he went up the back steps and into his house, turning on the lights in room after room as true darkness fell.

Mr. Wanderlei was next on Mariel’s list and she was not long in cornering him. She found him that very Saturday as he was painting the wooden railing of his front porch.

Stopping at his mailbox, she gave her bike bell several sharp rings to gain his attention. He glanced over his shoulder and smiled at her.

“Hello, Mariel,” he called, while lifting a paintbrush in salute. “Another few weeks and it will be too cold to do this.”

Mariel could think of nothing to reply and so rang her bell once more. Mr. Wanderlei set the brush carefully on the lip of the can and stood, wiping his hands on the old corduroy pants he was wearing. “Is that a new bike?” he asked amiably.

Mariel nodded her big head at this, then thought to add, “My Grandma bought it for me. I didn’t steal it.”

Wanderlei smiled and answered, “I never would have thought so.” He ambled down the steps in her direction.

Mariel fumbled with the necklace and only just managed it bring it out from beneath her top as he drew near. This caused Wanderlei to halt for a moment as he took in Mariel’s rather astounding adornment.

“Goodness,” he breathed at last. “That’s some necklace for a little girl. Where did you get that?” He ran a large knuckled hand across the top of his mostly hairless skull.

As she had done with Salter and Forster, Mariel realigned her bicycle for a quick escape should it prove advisable, one foot poised on a pedal. She remained silent.

Wanderlei fished a handkerchief from his pocket and set about wiping his face and near-naked pate. “Such things cause great temptation,” he said finally. “Of course, I know that you’re too young to understand what I mean exactly.” He glanced up and down the street, then turned his gaze onto her once more.

“Where I work, there are men who have killed for such baubles.” A slight frown crossed his face. “Do you know where I work, Mariel?”

In fact, Mariel did know, as one of her uncles had pointed him out to her during a visit between incarcerations. She nodded slightly.

Wanderlei studied her face with interest, then said, “Well, then you know that I’ve spent my life amongst a lot of very bad people.” His eyes had taken on a sparkle that was beginning to make Mariel uneasy. He took another step and she eased her rump upwards in preparation for escape.

“Are you Christian?” he asked gently. “Does your mother ever take you to church?”

Mariel frowned, unable to follow Mr. Wanderlei’s drift. Even so, she nodded involuntarily out of nervousness.

“Is that right?” he smiled, completely ignoring her necklace. “Really, what church would that be?”

“We go sometimes,” Mariel whispered, for some reason not wanting to lie outright to this man. “We’re Cat’lics.”

Wanderlei’s expression became one of disappointment. “Oh, I see,” he murmured. “That would explain the love of gold and baubles,” he said quietly, as if Mariel were no longer there.

Mariel rose up and pushed down on the waiting pedal; she had learned what she needed to know here.

Wanderlei looked up as she pulled away, his expression gone a little wistful now. “You and your mother are welcome to attend the services here at our house anytime you want,” he called after her. “God accepts anyone who has an open heart. Do you have an open heart, Mariel?”

That night, as Mariel lay awake in her bed, she contemplated her efforts to date at exposing Ripper’s murderer and was bitterly disappointed with the results. Though occasionally blessed with flashes of innovative vigor, her intellectual resources had been sorely taxed by the whole affair. She stared blankly out of her curtainless window and thought of almost nothing.

The backyard was bathed in the cold illumination of a full moon that created black-and-white etchings of once-familiar objects. Ripper’s empty chain-link pen was captured near center frame of her nocturnal reverie, its gate standing forlornly open, forever awaiting his impossible return. A spill of shadow ran like blood from the doghouse and onto the brilliant concrete pad it rested upon.

Mariel felt her eyelids grow heavy, while above her the ponderous footsteps of her mother measured the distance from her bathroom to her bed. This was followed by a groaning of bedsprings and a loud yawn; then silence descended over the household. Outside, something glided soundlessly from out of a tree, only to vanish within the greater shadows of the forest. Mariel’s eyes began to close.

As she was drifting off, she saw something moving stealthily along the darkened tree line that formed the natural boundary of her yard. As she was often a nocturnal traveler herself, this did not, at first, alarm her. Mariel had spent many a night prowling Crumpler Lane and its environs, and had on more than one occasion allowed herself into the homes of their neighbors using emergency keys that they had thought were cleverly hidden within flowerpots and beneath paving stones. In fact, her midnight forays and cool boldness had become something of a neighborhood legend.

This had been several years before, however, shortly after the loud divorce of her parents and the twaining of her family into a Mother-Daughter/Father-Sons arrangement. Mariel had hoped she would discover that her brothers were simply sleeping over at some neighbor’s house but never seemed able to catch them at it. When the state’s child services were brought in, her mother took drastic action and placed a latch on Mariel’s bedroom door.

She watched dreamily as the figure detached itself from the shadows and emerged, glowing, into the moonlight. The man looked familiar, but the bright, ghostly light only served to erase his features. He glided across the littered lawn of her backyard in a direct line with her bedroom window and a small, shrill alarm began to sound in Mariel’s head. She struggled to come fully awake and sit up.

The man disappeared from view as he reached the wall of her house and for the first time sound entered into the hushed scene. Mariel heard the scrape of something metal and remembered the rusty ladder that lay beneath her window. She had not needed that ladder since her mother ceased locking her in at night and it had lain, discarded and forgotten, until now, in the rank grasses of her backyard. It was this sound that set her in motion.

Sitting up, fully awake now, she slid noiselessly from her bed and began stuffing her pillows beneath her blankets. Once done, she dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl to the closed bedroom door. It had been some time since her mom had locked her in and she hoped that she had not done so this night.

Behind her a head rose cautiously within the frame of the window. Mariel froze as soon as she saw its elongated shadow begin to crawl up the opposite wall, then, ever so slowly, lowered herself into the welter of dirty clothes and discarded dolls and toys that formed the tangled landscape of her room. She sank from sight within the camouflage of her own environment.

Peering out from beneath a damp towel that she draped over her head, Mariel saw the silhouette swivel slightly, then focus on the lumpy bed revealed in the moonlight. For several moments the scene remained frozen in this attitude. Then the window began to squeak like the tiniest of mice.

Mariel knew that she could call out to her mother and perhaps, if she had not had too much to drink, awaken her to the peril she faced. But this was not part of Mariel’s rapidly forming plan.

Instead, she snaked an arm upwards for the doorknob. With any luck she could ease herself out into the hallway as the intruder made his way into her room; then... use the latch that she herself had been confined with so many times before. As for the window, she had simply to race around to the back of the house, tip the ladder over, and he was caught like a rat! Then, and only then, she would yell bloody murder! Wouldn’t everyone be surprised at what she had accomplished? Mariel began to grin beneath her covering.

She found the doorknob and began to turn it. From behind her came the hiss of clothing sliding over the window sill followed by a soft thump. Things were happening a little faster than she had planned and so she tried to hurry a bit more. She could hear her own breathing as she slithered into the opening she was making.

Then Sailor began to hiss and yowl, only just now deciding that this stranger in his room was not welcomed. Mariel looked back over her shoulder; she had completely forgotten Sailor.

The cat had been a gift to her mother from a former boyfriend who had worked on a clamming boat, hence the name Sailor. Naturally, he took up with the one member of the household who cared nothing for him — however, Mariel was not above putting him to good use.

Without a word, she sprang to her feet and snatched the fat, orange cat from the nest he had created within her bed coverings. With a screech of protest he was suddenly airborne in the direction of Mariel’s would-be assailant, his claws fully extended in a futile attempt at air-braking.

When the two met, it was the nocturnal visitor’s turn to vocalize, as he screamed like a woman in labor, whether from pain or terror, Mariel could not know. From above, there was a great concussion as her mother’s considerable bulk was set suddenly in motion.

Mariel, consigning Sailor to whatever fate awaited him, flew for the door once more, slamming it behind her and latching it all in one movement. A tight smile appeared on her chubby face as she raced for the back door, even as her name was loudly heralded with her mother’s rumbling approach.

Tripping over the uneven doorsill, she spilled clumsily into the silvered yard just in time to see the intruder fling himself from the ladder and begin his headlong flight. She had not been fast enough! Her disappointment rose like bile in her mouth. But even as her mother blocked the moon from view and began to scrabble at Mariel with sweaty, fleshy hands, she noted with some vindication that her enemy had fled in the direction of the cul-de-sac.

The sheriff’s K-9 unit tracked the burglar unerringly from Mariel’s window to Mr. Salter’s backyard, the scent leading them directly into Bruiser’s territory. There, the sleepy, overfed dog, alarmed by the night’s doings, and mysteriously free of confinement, managed to engage the interlopers in a snarling, slobbering, snapping exchange of canine unpleasantness. In the end, he was reincarcerated, but not before thoroughly spoiling the search. Mariel knew all of this from eavesdropping as the officers briefed her mother in the living room.

When the policemen asked Mariel if she had gotten a good look at the man who had made his way into her room, she studied the dirty knees of her pajamas for several moments as if thinking very carefully, then mumbled, “I think it was Mr. Salter.” Though she had never really gotten a good look at her assailant, Salter appealed to both her logic and sense of justice based on both the dogs’ tracking and the fact that she liked him the least of anyone in the neighborhood. The officers glanced meaningfully at one another after her pronouncement, then departed to invite Mariel’s neighbor to accompany them to the station for further questioning.

After they had left, Mariel had a very difficult time falling to sleep — it had been a very exciting evening. When, at last, she did drift off, it was with the pleasant sense of a job well done, mission accomplished.

As the following day was Sunday and Mariel’s night had been a long one, her mother allowed her to sleep in well past noon. When she did awake it was with a ravenous appetite and an equally fierce curiosity about the results of her efforts on the neighborhood at large. It seemed to her that an act of such magnitude would result in seismic changes on Crumpler Lane. So after two heaping bowls of frosted cereal and a glass of chocolate milk, she mounted up and set off to reconnoiter her domain.

The day was bright and fine, but as it was mid autumn, the sun remained low in the sky and a distinct chill could be felt through her inadequate windbreaker. Racing down the lane, she swerved to drive through all leaf piles that awaited pickup, scattering the labor of her adult neighbors with her willful passage. When she arrived at the Salter household she did it twice, and then rolled to a halt one house away to watch for any outrage.

None was forthcoming. The house remained closed and silent. There were no cars in the driveway either, and Mariel imagined Mr. Salter’s wife and teenage daughters down at the police station weeping and pleading for his freedom. She felt confident that the cops would pay them no heed and might even arrest them as well, because they were related to him. She smiled at this thought, though she had hoped to be the unmoving object of their pleas herself.

Mariel heard a stealthy footfall behind her and, without sparing a look, began to pedal quickly away.

“Mariel,” A voice called to her softly... urgently.

After placing a safe distance betwixt herself and the voice, she spun around to see who had called out to her. It was Mr. Forster.

He stood uncertainly by his mailbox, which was entwined in ivy. He smiled weakly at her and said, “I was trying not to startle you... sorry.”

Through the near-skeletal trees behind him the cold disk of the sun peeked through. Mariel waited.

He nodded his neat head at the Salter home. “What a ruckus last night, huh... police and everything... goodness, I didn’t know what was going on around here.”

Forster stopped awkwardly. Mariel watched his face and noticed that he had whiskers today.

“Scared the hens nearly to death, I can tell you that! They don’t like a lot of commotion. Of course, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.” He glanced slyly at the Salter residence; then asked, “What did happen last night? I figured if anyone knows what went on it would be you. You’re our neighborhood policeman... er, woman, that is.”

Mariel felt her chest expand with pride. “Come on,” he waved her forward, “we can feed the hens while you tell me all about it.”

Forster turned and began to walk back up his drive without a backward glance and Mariel followed. When they reached the backyard he took up a pan of feed and handed it to her and she began to scatter it for the hens. Within moments they were busily scratching away at the soil around her feet.

“So what did happen, Mariel?” Forster asked after a period of contented quiet.

Mariel felt herself beginning to smile and tried to suppress it. “Mr. Salter came in my room,” she managed by way of explanation, while gauging her chances of seizing one of the glossy black hens.

“He did?” Forster gasped. “Why on earth would he do that?”

Mariel’s small lips twisted uncomfortably. “Don’t know,” she said at last.

“Hmmm,” Forster hummed, then added, “Maybe he was trying to steal something... what do you think?”

Mariel shrugged and said nothing. The pale sun, sinking ever lower, cast lengthening shadows across the wooded backyard.

Forster leaned toward Mariel and asked in a confidential tone, “You haven’t told anybody about that necklace, have you?”

Mariel’s small, pale eyes flashed up and back down again; then she shook her head, causing her curls to bounce in agreement.

“Good,” Forster assured her. “That’s very good... not even your mom, though?”

Again she shook her head.

“How about some hot cocoa, what do you say? It’s getting chilly out here and the hens will be all right for a while.” Again he turned and walked away from Mariel without looking back. At the top of the steps he held the door open for her and patted her on the shoulder reassuringly as she passed within. Mariel felt his fingers run over the necklace beneath her pullover as the slightest pressure — a fly walking across her neck.

He crossed to the stove where a kettle was already pumping steam into the fussy, overheated room. “Lots of sugar?” he inquired brightly.

Mariel nodded enthusiastically even as small beads of sweat formed along her hairline — the heat was a palpable force. There was also a peculiar, not altogether pleasant smell in the house.

“Sit... sit.” He waved at the round table that was placed within the arch of the bow window. Between the gingham curtains Mariel could see the backyard with its chicken coop and the darkening woods beyond. Ripper flashed through her memory and then was gone.

“It’s for the birds,” Forster called to her as he spooned cocoa mix into a mug and poured the hot water. “They can’t take the cold, you know... the songbirds. Most of them are from South America.” He swept an arm toward the ceiling of the room and Mariel saw them for the first time: dozens of cages mounted at various levels within the kitchen and continuing on into the rest of the house. Forster whipped off the parka he had been wearing and slung it onto a nearby chair. He wore a T-shirt beneath as mute testament to the hothouse atmosphere of his home.

“They’re always quiet when a stranger comes in... but they come around when they get used to you.”

As if on cue, first one, then another began to sing and the house soon filled with their tropical chorus. Mariel thought she had never heard anything so beautiful and rose as if on strings. She gripped the cage nearest her and peered in at the tiny, vibrant creature. The colors of its plumage, brilliant blues and reds, shimmered with the rise and fall of its delicate breast. Forster was still busy making the hot chocolate, taking far more time at it than her mother ever had, and Mariel lifted the little latch to its cage to reach in and...

“Don’t!” Forster screamed, spilling some of the cocoa from the mug he had in his hand. “Don’t touch them, Mariel!” The birds, all of them, went instantly silent.

Mariel started and drew her hand back but not out. It was not her nature to surrender the initiative without good cause. The tiny bird regarded her sticky, chubby fingers without alarm.

“They’re very delicate,” he added, while looking for an uncluttered surface to set the mug down on, then added under his breath, “Not that you would know anything about that, you little Neanderthal.”

Mariel didn’t know anything about that, nor did she know the meaning of the strange word he had used, but she did know when she was disapproved of; this was something of which she was keenly aware. But of far more importance, she recognized Sailor’s handiwork from the night before.

Forster caught her gaze and looked down at the long, festering scratches that ran down his arms, then back up at Mariel. “I despise cats,” he hissed very much like one. His pupils shrank to tiny dots as his neck tendons distended. “I just wanted the necklace, Mariel... that’s all. I have my reasons, as I’m sure you know.”

Mariel said nothing and the room filled with a thick, clotting silence.

Forster nodded, as his face rearranged itself into something less savage. “If you give it to me now, we can still be friends,” he promised quietly, “you can still have your cocoa. It’s just that the necklace is important, it might be recognized if you wear it around. It’s not really worth anything otherwise... it’s cheap, paste jewelry... something a whore would wear — something a whore did wear.” He set the mug carefully down and took a sudden step across the slight distance that separated man and child.

“You killed Ripper,” Mariel pronounced clearly, seizing the songbird with surprising rapidity.

Forster froze in midstep. “Don’t,” he gasped, even as he watched the bird’s tiny, futile struggles within Mariel’s pudgy grip. “Please... don’t.”

Mariel withdrew her fist with the bird firmly in her control. Backing up to the door, her sweaty free hand groped for the handle while Forster watched her every movement, his eyes sliding back and forth as the heat-swollen door resisted her efforts.

As she turned slightly to gain more leverage, he eased a step closer, taking advantage of Mariel’s distraction, his long fingers reaching out for her nest of curls.

Mariel’s fist shot up, the tiny head of her captive swiveling this way and that in its panic, its black, shiny eyes blinking and blinking.

“Okay,” Forster halted once more, his hands coming up palms outward, “okay, please... please, don’t hurt him, Mariel... please.”

At last, she succeeded in throwing open the door to the outside world, letting a cold wind rush through the stifling kitchen.

“Maybe,” she answered enigmatically, backing out onto the porch, her eyes never leaving his as she pulled the door slowly closed behind her. The latch snapped into place like a hammer blow in the now-silent room. From the porch Forster heard a muffled giggle and the sound of clumsy footsteps.

He took a long step, then had to grasp the edge of the table to keep from falling, his legs grown too weak to support him. He slumped down onto the nearest chair. After several moments there came the ratcheting of a bike bell. “Oh God,” he moaned into his hands, “Oh God, what am I going to do?”

Finally, as his breathing quieted, he looked up and around him as if just awakening. Lifting the mug he had prepared for Mariel, he drank its contents down in one scalding gulp, then walked from room to room turning on every light. All around him the air began to fill with the song of a new and sudden day.

Returning to the kitchen, he resumed his seat at the cluttered table, and after a while, sagged tiredly forward, laying his head to rest on the place mat. As his eyelids began to flutter his breathing grew very rapid and he began to pant like a dog, perhaps like Mariel’s dog, he thought. Then, suddenly, it slowed once more to become reedy and shallow. Trying to lift a hand to reach out for the empty bird cage, he smiled and muttered, “The speech of angels... the language of God.”

From other rooms his choir sang on.

Though Mariel had been successful in keeping the necklace a secret, the songbird proved another matter altogether. Between its near-continuous song celebrating the unfettered freedom of Mariel’s bedroom, and Sailor’s constant yowling and scratching at her closed door, the secret was soon out. The following morning Mariel’s mother discovered the colorful little creature flitting happily about Mariel’s room, leaving its droppings wherever they happened to land. Neither she nor Sailor was amused.

Remaining mute in the face of interrogation as she always did served no purpose in the end, for her mother had heard from other mothers on the street about Mr. Forster’s fussy relationship with birds. An unsettling suspicion began to dawn on her.

Snagging the contested bird within the worn fishnet from an old forgotten aquarium, she confined it within a perforated bait can left behind by her ex and set off down the street. Mariel followed on her purple bike at a distance, silent, resentful, and slightly fearful, but curious for all that.

When Forster failed to answer her repeated knocks, Mariel’s mom marched her formidable bulk to the rear of the house, where she found his hens scattered about the yard and far into the woods. Upon seeing her they stormed forth with hungry shrieks. Ignoring them, she mounted the rear steps, grunting with each, to peer in through the glass of the back door. Forster sat slumped at his table and would not respond to her repeated poundings. An empty mug with a teddy bear painted on it rested next to an outstretched hand. As keen as her daughter, she noticed right away the long scratches that festooned his bare arms.

Turning with a gasp, she swept back down the steps, through the now-fleeing hens, and back up the street to her home, carrying Mariel in her wake by force of will and dire threats. The police responded within minutes of her call.

Mr. Salter was released from custody with a muted apology from the police, even as Forster was bundled away for autopsy. It appeared Mariel had misidentified her assailant in the darkness, a common enough mistake even for an adult. For his part, Salter threatened lawsuits all round.

As to Forster’s motive for breaking into Mariel’s bedroom, the general consensus was the obvious one. But as he was dead, the matter was laid to rest with his body.

Mariel, as a reward for her brave defense of herself, was allowed to keep the bird, and though it was not a dog, she was very satisfied with the exchange. As for the necklace, she continued to keep it a secret from her mother and wore it only when out of the house. Ripper, forgotten in all the excitement, remained in his shared and secret grave, an arrangement that also suited Mariel, as she had no wish for her possession of the necklace to be challenged in any way.

Copyright © 2012 by David Dean

Misprision of Felony

by O’Neil De Noux

A Shamus and Derringer Award winner for his short fiction, O’Neil De Noux has contributed work from several of his long-running series to EQMM. This month he debuts a new character, Detective Joseph Savary. If readers like this New Orleans homicide cop as much as we think they will, we’ll probably be seeing him in a novel soon. Meanwhile, De Noux fans won’t want to miss his latest novel issued on Kindle, the John Raven Beau mystery The Body in Crooked Bayou.

Detective Joseph Savary counted nineteen people on Felicity Street. Four older men sat on folding chairs outside Ojubi’s Barbershop, two women swept the sidewalk beyond the shop, two others hosed off their stoops while chatting with each other, three boys rode around on bicycles, four girls hovered between a parked blue Chevy and a dark green Pontiac, two young men leaned against the outer wall of the Laundromat, another two sat on the loading dock of the long-abandoned warehouse and pretended they weren’t watching the plainclothesman. Savary tapped down his black sunglasses and gleeked the men on the loading dock. No reaction.

Savary had left his suit coat in his unmarked gray Chevy Impala. He was glad he wore a white shirt today, as the sweat wouldn’t show. He loosened his sky-blue tie and rested a hand atop the grip of the nine-millimeter Glock 17 semiautomatic resting in its Kydex holster on his left hip, next to the gold star-and-crescent NOPD badge clipped to his belt. He stood stiffly in front of the boarded-up door of Jeanfreau’s Grocery and glanced at his watch. Two p.m., exactly. Same time, same day — a Wednesday — as two months ago. On that Wednesday, a lone black male put a bullet into the forehead of Jack Hudson, the owner of Jeanfreau’s. Grainy black-and-white video showed a young, thin African-American male in a white T-shirt and low-riding jeans, pulling out a forty-caliber semiautomatic, pointing it at the gray-haired old man. The weapon was tilted on its side, gangster-style, waving in the right hand of the shooter. Jack Hudson, a man who’d bragged he was part Zulu and once shook Martin Luther King’s hand, exchanged words with the gunman, touched his chin and the big pistol went off, snapping Hudson’s head back. The shooter went around, had to kick Hudson out of the way to empty the cash register, stuffing cash in his pockets, snatching two candy bars on his way out. Looked like Milky Way bars, maybe Snickers.

Savary fitted his sunglasses back up and stepped over to Ojubi’s Barbershop. The four men outside, all over fifty, stopped talking. The barber, in a white smock and black pants, stood and stretched.

“Afternoon,” Savary said.

The barber nodded.

“Back again, huh?” The barber was Willie Ellzey, who lived on Terpsichore Street but stayed with his woman on Eurphrosine, as he’d explained. Savary looked at the only man he hadn’t spoken to on his four previous canvasses, twice in the morning, twice in the evening.

“I’m Joe Savary,” he told the skinny man with blue-black skin as dark as Savary’s. “I’m working on—”

“Jeanfreau.” The man didn’t look up. “We know.”

“What’s your name?”

A pair of bloodshot eyes met his and the man said, “Joe Clay. You wanna see my ID?” The voice was harsh, challenging.

“That would be nice.” Savary pulled out his notebook as the man reached around for his wallet, took out his driver’s license. Savary copied down the details.

“You come around here often, Mr. Clay?”

Savary got the same answers he’d been getting since he took over the case. No one saw anything or heard anything. No matter that Jack Hudson was a neighbor, had run the neighborhood grocery store since old man Jeanfreau died in 1968. It was as obvious as the nose on the detective’s face. A local boy did this, but no one was giving him up to the police. It didn’t even matter if Savary was raised three blocks away on Erato Street. The day he started the police academy was the day he’d left the neighborhood — permanently.

He moved to the women. He’d spoken to some of them before, the two young men by the Laundromat as well. One was the son of a fireman and was actually civil to Savary, the other barely mumbled responses. The two sitting on the dilapidated warehouse loading dock who pretended they weren’t watching Savary would not even look at him as he stepped up.

“Police,” he said to the taller of the two. Both were maybe twenty, both in white T-shirts and those long shorts with the crotch below the knees. “What’s your name?”

Nothing.

“Stand up.”

“Say what?”

“Stand up before I yank you up by your ears.”

The taller one stood slowly and Savary, who towered over the man, patted him down.

“Man, you can’t just search us,” said the shorter one.

“I’m not searching your friend. I’m patting him down. Terry versus Ohio. Look it up. If a police officer has reasonable suspicion that a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime, the officer can pat that person down for weapons. For officer safety as well.”

Savary found something. “That a cell phone and a wallet?”

The tall man nodded.

“Take them out. Let’s see some ID.”

The smaller one stood and raised his hands. Savary patted him down as well.

“What crime we did?”

Savary nodded to the large sign nailed to the wall of the warehouse which read: Posted — No Trespassing.

“I don’t write the laws. I just enforce them.” As Savary jotted down their names, addresses, cell-phone numbers before passing their IDs and cell phones back, he asked about Jeanfreau’s and received the usual information. Nothing. He called in their names, had both run through the police computer. Both had records, but no felonies and nothing around the neighborhood. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

A tan Impala pulled up and Savary went around to the driver’s side to speak with his sergeant. Jodie Kintyre gleeked him over her cat-eyed sunglasses. It tickled Savary, because Jodie had wide-set, hazel, catlike eyes. She claimed Scottish descent, but there had to be some Asian blood in her genes with those eyes.

“Any luck?”

He laughed, stood back as she climbed out. Unlike most women cops, Jodie liked wearing skirt suits and wore them well. This one was beige. She left her jacket in the car as well, readjusting her shoulder rig with gold badge affixed. She was a striking woman in her forties with that shock of yellow-blond hair cut in a long pageboy. Jodie stood five-seven, her heels added a good inch but she had to crane her neck to look up at Savary, who stood six-four.

“I’ll take this side of the street.” She clicked her ballpoint pen, flipped open her notebook, and moved to the two outside the Laundromat. Savary crossed the street. A half-block down he ran into a distant cousin, Eddie Tauzin, who worked as a caretaker at the Audubon Zoo.

“On my way to work, my man.” Eddie slapped the big detective’s shoulder. “You gettin’ nobody to talk about it?”

Savary shook his head.

“Man, I been askin’ but no one sayin’ nothin’.”

He got a nod in response. “I appreciate your asking around.”

Eddie moved past, backing as he walked. “You know, I hear anything, I’ll give you a call.” He turned, spied Jodie across the street, and looked back at Savary. “I admire the comp’ny you keep.”

Reverend Tom Milton stepped out of his chapel with a large sponge in hand, spotted Savary, and gave him a knowing smile. The Sacred Congregation of the Good Lord occupied a two-story brick building two blocks from Jeanfreau’s.

“Hot enough for you, boy?” The reverend leaned over a bucket, dipped the sponge inside. Savary wiped his brow as Milton took the sponge to the picture window lining the front of his building, slapped it against the glass, and rubbed on the soapy water.

“Hear anything from your congregation?” It was the same question Savary had been asking.

“You know if I did, I’d be the first to call. You get any luck at your church?”

That brought a smile to Savary, a lapsed Catholic who hadn’t been to church, except for weddings and funerals, since he was a teenager.

“You want a bottle of water?” the reverend asked.

“No, thanks.”

Milton reached over and patted Savary’s back as the detective went by. Hopefully, the man of the cloth would pass any information to Savary, who had asked the reverend to talk with the children of his congregation about the matter because kids hear and see more than anyone in a neighborhood. When Savary was a patrolman, Milton and some kids had helped him recover two stolen cars. But that was before Katrina.

Things were different now, AK — after Katrina. The hard-core criminals, who were some of the first to return, had reestablished themselves with a killing vengeance. The murder rate was back up top as new blood carved out drug territories and the police department, as devastated as the neighborhoods, reeled in turmoil from lack of manpower, lack of leadership, lack of inspiration.

Savary linked up with Jodie back at her car and she actually had a line of perspiration on her upper lip. The fair-haired sergeant rarely perspired, even in the sweltering summer city.

“M.F. screwed this one up from the start.” She went on to her repeated diatribe against Detective Maurice Ferdinand, who had done absolutely nothing on the Jeanfreau case beyond overseeing the processing of the crime scene. M.F.’s recent transfer to the reorganized Vice Squad was welcomed by the rank and file of the Homicide Division. M.F. in the Vice Squad, always a joke in decadent New Orleans, was a classic example of the Peter Principle — a worker rising to the level of his incompetence. So much for a man who thought being called M.F. was cute.

“Know how I know it’s somebody local?” Savary asked.

Jodie narrowed her left eye as she looked up at him.

“All these people out here and no one saw anything. No one’s heard anything. You think a ghost flittered in here and shot old man Hudson? If it were a stranger, someone would tell me, ‘I saw him but don’t know who he is.’ But that’s not what we’re getting. No one saw anything because they know who he is.”

Neither detective had to say the word “retaliation.” Eyewitnesses, especially inner-city eyewitnesses, were at the top of the endangered-species list in New Orleans. So much for the vaunted witness-protection program.

Back at headquarters, Savary sat next to his Macintosh G5, donated by Apple to the department AK, typed in the hundred block of Jeanfreau’s Grocery, and searched the police database for any incidents that had occurred there over the last five years. As a boy, Savary had looked up the definition of “felicity,” discovering it meant “intense happiness.” Felicity Street was a real-life oxymoron.

In the five years AK, NOPD had received over one thousand calls along the twenty-four blocks of Felicity Street. In the last two years there had been two murders in the blocks around Jeanfreau’s — nine rapes, twelve aggravated batteries, eight burglaries, seven armed robberies, two carjackings, twenty-nine batteries, the list went on. Savary narrowed the search to Jeanfreau’s Grocery and discovered there were nine thefts, two armed robberies, two simple batteries, four disturbing-the-peace calls, and a Peeping Tom reported there.

The only arrests on site involved the two simple batteries — fist fights — and the Peeping Tom case. A suspicious man standing outside Jeanfreau’s had a warrant out for his arrest for Peeping Tom from Tangipahoa Parish. Jack Hudson was the victim of both armed robberies. Of the nine theft cases, five listed young African-American males as the culprits. Two were later arrested after pulling the same shoplifting stunt at other stores.

Savary stood and stretched. Time to get home, cook something up, and call his girls on the phone. Every night between six and seven, when he wasn’t working, Detective Joseph Savary called his ex-wife’s number and talked to his girls. Emily was nine and Carla four. Carla thought she could show her daddy things through the phone as if he could see what she pointed the receiver at. Last night she was talking about a drawing she’d done and said, “See, Daddy?”

“Yes, baby. I see it.”

Savary left headquarters, heading uptown to his small apartment near Audubon Park. He would pass his ex-wife’s house, the one he still paid the mortgage on, but would not stop. Joint custody in Louisiana meant his ex was the custodial parent, but he got his girls every other weekend and every other holiday. He fought for those visits even harder than he fought to solve murders. He barely knew his father. His girls would not suffer this.

It had been a Sunday morning, just before six A.M., January 8, 1815, and the men lined behind the Rodriguez Canal strained to see through the heavy fog. Bagpipes echoed across the plain as the British army came at the quickstep. Major Joseph Savary, commander of the 2nd Battalion of Free Men of Color, stood near the center of the American line, not far from General Andrew Jackson. A rocket rose into the sky near the swamp to their left and the fog lifted to reveal the enemy columns in all their splendor — red coats, shako hats, steel bayonets atop their muskets.

The column near the river rushed the exposed redoubt just in front of the American line. The column coming along the swamp, closer to Savary’s position, rolled toward them, sixty men abreast, the column so long its end could not be seen. It was a magnificent spectacle until the American cannons opened up.

A maelstrom of fire and shells — grapeshot, canister shot, chain-shot and black iron cannonballs — ripped through the British lines. Still they came, and Savary’s men were finally able to join the firing. Major General Sir Edward Pakenham in his black commander-in-chief jacket and his best friend Major General Samuel Gibbs were cut down not far from Savary’s position. Later, Andy Jackson would claim it was one of Savary’s men who shot General Pakenham.

As the British attack faltered, eventually to fail, Major Joseph Savary learned his brother had been killed down the line. Etienne Savary was one of the eight Americans killed that morning. The mighty British army, veterans who had defeated Napoleon’s finest in Spain and Portugal, suffered over two thousand casualties. Major Savary buried his brother in an above-ground tomb in the city they helped save. He had his brother’s name carved into the tombstone above the words “Killed in action at the battle of New Orleans.”

Nearly two hundred years later, Major Joseph Savary’s descendant and namesake felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he stepped away from a shotgun house in need of a paint job at the corner of Felicity and Freret Streets. The door slammed behind him. Detective Joseph Savary had just eliminated another suspect, Willie Nelson (no relation to the singer), a nineteen-year-old convicted serial purse snatcher just released after serving two years at Hunt Correctional Center. That left one name on his list of those who’d had run-ins with police around Jeanfreau’s, a list Savary had made quick work of, eliminating one dead guy, one in jail in Mississippi, and the others who had fairly solid alibis. What pricked Savary’s goose bumps was the fact that no one had said anything about the last name on the list, Oris Lamont, also nineteen. Every other name had come up in the interviews except Lamont’s. In his short lifetime, Oris Lamont had managed to get arrested five times as a juvenile and seven times as an adult, charged with aggravated burglary, simple burglary, auto theft, simple robbery, carjacking and a new drug charge. There was a lone conviction. Simple burglary. He served fourteen months of a ten-year sentence. Lamont had spent his entire eighteenth year in prison.

The silence wasn’t probable cause for arrest, by a long shot, but it drew Savary to focus on Lamont, who had been arrested the previous week on Felicity Street for possession of crack cocaine with attempt to distribute. Savary hurried back to headquarters and pulled up a mug shot of Lamont, scooped up a copy of the videotape from the Jeanfreau murder, and headed straight back to his car.

On his way to the FBI Building on Leon Simon Boulevard, Savary called an old friend on his cell. Elvin Bishop had played middle linebacker at St. Augustine while Savary was the team’s star defensive end. Both were good enough to bring two state championships to St. Aug, but these particular Purple Knights both passed up college ball. Bishop’s knees required orthopedic surgery after their senior year and Savary passed on playing for Southern Miss for a full academic scholarship to Xavier.

“You busy?” Savary asked when Bishop called back. He’d left a voice mail and hoped his friend was in town.

“Just got out of a meeting.”

“I’m coming over.”

“Now?”

“I need a favor.”

The FBI compound, surrounded by a twenty-foot steel-and-brick fence, was guarded by Department of Justice police, who stopped Savary at the gate and directed him where to park his unmarked police car. The homicide detective did not have an official U.S. government “secret” clearance, so he remained in a first-floor, windowless waiting room until Bishop could come downstairs to meet him.

At five-ten, Bishop was stocky, his face filling out from his high-school days. He flashed the familiar easy smile as he approached. Savary stood and they shook hands, slapped each other’s shoulders.

“Glad to see you’re still in town,” Savary said.

Typical FBI custom was to have agents work away from their home for years before they had an opportunity to be stationed back home. Bishop spent his first five years in Baltimore but returned with the glut of special agents right after Katrina and remained.

“So, what you got?”

Savary reached into his briefcase and withdrew the videotape and the envelope with the mug shot. “Need you to send this to Quantico. See if your lab guys can do a facial comparison for me.”

Bishop laughed. “You been watching too much CSI bullshit.”

“I know you got the technology. This is a first-degree murder case. You gonna help me, or do I have to call Coach on you?”

They both laughed at that, although a call to Coach Washington would prod the old man to tongue-lash Bishop. Washington might be retired, but these were his boys and he was still around to coach them.

“Remember that damn hook-and-ladder play?”

“Never forget something like that.”

St. Augustine Purple Knights versus their nemesis, the Archbishop Rummel Raiders, the only team to beat St. Aug both years of their back-to-back state championship seasons. Their senior year, St. Aug held on to a six-point lead. Ten seconds left, fourth and goal and the Raiders’ two sacks and a penalty had them all the way back to the St. Aug forty-yard line.

Everyone expected a Hail Mary pass. The Raiders had beat the Brother Martin Crusaders earlier in the year with one. No one expected a hook-and-ladder. Savary drew back into pass coverage. The Rummel quarterback dropped back but threw short, to their fullback, who wheeled and lateraled to their star running back, a fleet-footed, skinny white boy — they later learned he was the star of their track team and the fastest kid in the school.

“Vincent — I forgot his last name.” Savary said.

Vincent, the Raider running back, scampered past two linebackers but Savary had him cut off near the sidelines with Bishop and their strong safety closing quickly.

“Still don’t know how the boy got through.”

They’d reviewed the videotape again and again. The four players collided at the thirty-yard line. Bishop and the safety went down, Savary pulling the Raider toward the turf, only Vincent’s legs kept churning and he yanked away and hit the afterburners.

“Fastest white boy I’ve ever seen.”

Vincent outraced the St. Aug cornerback and free safety to the end zone. Extra point good. Rummel 21 — St. Augustine 20.

“I bumped into Vincent right after Katrina. He’s with ATF,” Bishop said. “His great-great — I don’t know the number of greats — was wounded at the Battle of New Orleans.”

Savary felt goose bumps again.

Both men knew the story of Major Joseph Savary and the 2nd Battalion of Free Men of Color.

Savary held up the videotape. “I need a Hail Mary on this one.”

“We’ll see. Wait here.”

“Wait?”

“Don’t have to send it to there. The meeting I was in had our two top forensic scientists from there. Let’s see what they say.” As he backed out of the room with videotape and envelope, Bishop pointed to the far wall. “There’s coffee and muffins.”

The coffee was weak but the pecan muffin quite delicious. Savary had a second and was dozing on a fairly comfortable sofa when Bishop came back in with an Asian man in a gray lab coat.

“This is Special Agent Kent Yamasaki.” Bishop introduced Savary and eased behind the smallish Japanese-American who said, “There is a ninety-seven percent probability that the man in the video is the man in the photograph. I am having a report prepared for you.”

“Ninety-seven percent is good, isn’t it?”

“We never go higher than ninety-eight. It’s as close as you can get, Detective.”

Savary called Jodie on his cell on the way back to headquarters.

“Who’s the duty judge?”

“Joe Sayzo.”

“Dammit.”

Sayzo was as anti-police as they came. Better known as “Lack of PC Sayzo,” the man rarely saw enough probable cause in officers testifying at preliminary hearings, forcing the DA to produce fact witnesses, who were hard enough to get to court for a trial, much less a hearing. Sayzo saw even less probable cause in most warrants.

“I don’t have enough for an arrest warrant,” Savary said. “I was thinking I have enough for a search warrant. I’ll go talk to the suspect, case he wants to cop out.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Neither had to mention the fact that Judge Marcus Summers was next up as duty judge. That would be tomorrow. A retired state trooper, Summers understood probable cause for what it was, “a reasonable belief that an individual committed a specific crime.” Far from the “beyond a reasonable doubt” necessary for conviction, PC was what every cop strived for. It was up to the DA to present a case “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Damn attorneys. Shakespeare had it right. First, kill all the lawyers.

Two sheriff’s deputies brought Oris Lamont, who was young and thin, like the killer in the video, into the small, stuffy interview room at Orleans Parish Prison where Detective Joseph Savary sat behind the small table with a Miranda Rights form. He’d filled out the pertinent details of name, address, date, and time.

Lamont sat in the chair across the table from Savary and reached for the mini digital tape recorder next to Savary’s hand.

“Don’t touch it,” Savary said. He introduced himself and asked, “You have a lawyer?”

“Not yet.”

Savary started reading Lamont his rights.

“I know them,” Lamont interrupted.

Savary continued until he reached the waiver portion and read, “I understand what my rights are. No pressure or coercion of any kind was used against me to waive my rights. At this time, I am willing to answer questions without a lawyer present.”

“What’s this about?”

“It’s not about any chicken-shit drug charge.”

Lamont’s dark brown eyes went wide. He leaned back in the folding chair. He tried smiling. Savary pulled a crime-scene photo from his briefcase, a photo of the exterior of Jeanfreau’s from the afternoon of the murder. Lamont looked at it but his eyes revealed nothing, not even recognition of a place he must have passed hundreds of times in his short life.

“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no murder.”

“Who said anything about a murder? I could be a robbery detective for all you know.”

“You got a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.” Savary pushed the waiver forward. “You’ll have to sign the waiver to talk with me.”

Lamont folded his arms. Savary shrugged, picked up the waiver form, and said, “You can go back inside then. With your padnas.”

“I got no padnas.” Lamont reached for the form, signed it, said, “I want you to tell the judge I cooperated. Damn drug charge.”

“When was the last time you were in Jeanfreau’s?”

“Man, I don’t know. It’s been awhile. A year or so.”

“Really? You know there’s video inside. You sure you didn’t drop in, get a cold drink?”

“Nope. I mean yeah. I ain’t been inside.”

“You remember Mr. Hudson, don’t you?”

“I ain’t talkin’ ’bout that old man or any charge he put against me.”

“I’m not here to talk about shoplifting.”

Savary tried different tacks. What had Lamont heard about the murder? Was he outside when it happened, maybe saw something. Oris Lamont insisted he hadn’t been at Jeanfreau’s for a year. Savary turned on the tape recorder, read Lamont his rights again, and recorded the young man’s statement, how he hadn’t been in Jeanfreau’s for a year. As he was ending the statement, Savary casually asked, “Old man Hudson” — that’s what Lamont called him — “what did he mean when he touched his chin?”

“Huh?”

“When he touched his chin. Was that a signal?”

Lamont laughed. “That’s no signal. Band-Aid on his chin kept comin’ off, the old fool.”

“When was this?”

“No time in particular. I just seen him do that.”

Lamont added nothing else of value. Didn’t seem overly concerned about the matter. Only added, “I need your name.”

Savary passed him a business card.

“I wanna give it to the judge on this cocaine case. Show him I cooperate with the police.”

Savary went to the morgue early the next morning, caught pathologist Dr. Jess Gomez before the man started on his first autopsy.

“Go back down to the record room,” Dr. Gomez said. “See the investigator. I usually put everything in my notes. Only put what’s pertinent in the autopsy report, but my notes are more detailed.” Savary found it an hour later. Jack Hudson had a clear Band-Aid on his chin on the day he was murdered.

“All this may be enough for an arrest warrant,” Jodie said as Savary typed out a search warrant on his computer. “It’ll sure be enough for a search warrant.”

The right honorable Judge Marcus Summer of Criminal District Court agreed and signed the search warrant for Oris Lamont’s shotgun single house, a block off Felicity Street at the corner of Magnolia and Melpomene. The house smelled of burnt cabbage and creaked heavily as the detectives and uniformed officers came through the front door. The place seemed to rock beneath their weight.

Lamont’s mama wasn’t happy with all the police in her house and being forced to remain in the living room with her five-year-old daughter, who wore a pink dress and hugged a stuffed Sponge Bob doll.

Savary found a Milky Way wrapper under Oris’s bed, as well as two Baby Ruth wrappers and an Almond Joy wrapper. He also found a Ruger nine-millimeter with six rounds left in a ten-round magazine under a loose floorboard beneath Oris Lamont’s single bed. His mama never saw the gun before. He looked at the little girl and those big eyes stared at the semiautomatic.

“Is this your gun?” Savary asked the child.

“That Oris gun.”

Her mother pulled her away from the detective and glared at him.

“You’re violating our rights, questioning a baby.”

Savary gave the woman a cold smile.

A crowd had gathered outside, kept back by two Sixth District patrol officers. Savary spotted a familiar face and went over to Reverend Milton, who moved toward him.

“Let him through.”

The reverend looked Savary in the eye, but only for a moment. He shook his head. “I figured the longer you worked on the case, the more likely you’d figure it out.”

“You knew about Oris? That he had a gun. That he did it.”

“Everybody knew, ’cept y’all.” The reverend looked over at Oris’s mother, now standing on the front stoop with her little girl.

“Can I go talk with her?”

Savary nodded. “We’re leaving.”

Reverend Milton grabbed his elbow, looked him in the eye again. “I didn’t see it happen. I mean, I didn’t know for sure, ’cept everyone said it and Oris asked me not to talk to the police. He acted real casual-like. You know what I mean.”

A crime-lab technician took the Ruger to the lab for firearms examination to check if it matched the spent casing found at the crime scene and the bullet removed from Jack Hudson’s brain at the autopsy. Savary went back to Jeanfreau’s and checked the candy bars. The Milky Way wrapper found under Oris’s bed matched the lot number from the Milky Way bars still on the shelf at Jeanfreau’s.

He wasn’t at his desk ten minutes, just starting his arrest warrant, when the crime lab called. “It’s a match. Casing and projectile from the crime scene came from the Ruger. And we got a good print from one of the cartridges. It’s from your suspect’s right index finger.”

Savary looked at the wall clock hanging above the unofficial logo of NOPD Homicide, an Art Deco illustration of a vulture perched atop a gold star-and-crescent badge. Six o’clock. He should be finished with the warrant by the time he usually called his girls. Then he’d see the judge. Then go ruin Oris Lamont’s evening.

Elvin Bishop smiled as soon as he spotted Jodie Kintyre with Savary in the windowless FBI waiting room. Jodie was in no smiling mood. The special agent’s silver suit, coincidentally, nearly matched the color of Jodie Kintyre’s skirt suit. Joseph Savary’s suit was as dark brown as his eyes. Bishop brought a manila folder to Savary.

“Official forensic report on your videotape and photo comparison. SA Yamasaki wants to hold on to your evidence and will be available for court testimony.”

Savary made the introductions, then gave his old friend a brief rundown on the Oris Lamont arrest as they sat, Jodie on the sofa, the two men in soft chairs.

“He lawyered up,” Savary said, “but we’ve got a good circumstantial case against him.”

“Good. Glad I could help.”

Jodie held an envelope up for Bishop, said, “You can help a little more.”

Bishop took the envelope, which was unsealed, removed the letter inside, and read it, slowly. He looked up at Savary afterward, for a long moment, then at Jodie.

“You serious about this?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” Jodie’s voice was low and firm, her face deadpan. “I’ve been a homicide detective for fourteen years. The new superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department doesn’t sign a letter like that in jest.”

“Misprision of Felony?”

“Your boss and the U.S. Attorney here in New Orleans like using this against crooked cops, don’t they?” Before Bishop could answer, Jodie continued, “We have no sympathy for crooked cops either, but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Bishop turned to Savary, who said, in a deeper voice, “Shooting someone in a store is no different from shooting someone on a bridge.”

“You’re talking about the Danziger shooting?”

“No, you are. We’re talking about Felicity Street. We’re talking about an entire neighborhood committing Misprision of Felony. I have a list of names.” Savary gave his old friend a hard look, then let his face relax into a slight smile.

“It has to be a federal crime,” said Bishop.

“My killer committed a federal crime,” Savary answered. “Eighteen U.S.C. nine twenty-two (g) makes it a federal crime for any person who has ever been convicted of any felony to ever possess any firearm regardless of whether it is inside or outside his home. This is a blanket federal ban on all felon gun possession and is punishable by up to ten years in federal prison.”

Bishop looked at Jodie as she pulled out a sheet of paper and quoted, “Misprision of Felony. Eighteen U.S.C., section four. Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.” Jodie looked up, recited the rest of the statute from memory. “This offense, however, requires active concealment of a known felony rather than merely failing to report it.”

“An entire neighborhood actively concealed a convicted felon with a gun, concealed a murderer from me. From justice,” Savary added.

Bishop took in a deep breath. “I’ve been working the Danziger case.”

“I know. That’s why we came to you.”

“Those cops met the requirement of active concealment.”

“So did Oris Lamont’s friends, relatives, and neighbors. I’ll be happy to lay my case out to a federal grand jury.”

Bishop looked at the door, started to get up, sat back down, and shrugged. “You gonna call Coach on me?”

“I’m serious about this,” Savary said.

“I’ll take it to the ASAC.”

Assistant Special Agent in Charge — Savary ran it through his mind.

“Indict one person for Misprision of Felony on this case,” Jodie said, “and it’ll put the fear of the Lord in people. A tool we can use.”

Savary stood first, stepped toward his friend. “Tell your ASAC, it’s about time the FBI, with all its might and money, went after street crime here in the murder capital of America, instead of spending all your resources chasing politicians, bad judges, and bad cops.”

Bishop stood and Savary put a friendly hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We’re not saying lay off crooked cops, judges, politicians.”

Jodie stood. “He knows what we’re talking about. Street crime.” She came over, extended her hand for Bishop to shake.

As he did, he narrowed his left eye, his face softening. “You know, this could work.”

Savary almost reminded his friend that was what the Gene Wilder character said after reading Baron Frankenstein’s secret notebook in Young Frankenstein.

Jodie had the last word as they were leaving. “You know how much the U.S. Attorney loves being in front of TV cameras? Our superintendent intends to take this to the TV stations if you guys do nothing. Misprision of Felony. It’s got a nice ring to it.”

As they left, back into the steamy afternoon, Savary asked his sergeant, “You think this’ll work?”

“Not a chance.”

“I don’t think so either.”

“But they’ll have to think about it.”

Jodie turned her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and repeated the oldest NOPD saying, one dating from the dawn of the department, back when NOPD was caught in a war between Irish street gangs, Sicilian Mafiosi, wharf thugs, and a corrupt city government.

“It isn’t NOPD versus the criminals. It’s us against the world.”

Copyright © 2012 by O’Neil De Noux

Cog in the Wheel

by Sarah Weinman

In the five years since Sarah Weinman’s EQMM debut with “Boy Inside the Man” (5/07) she’s been busy writing for the Wall Street Journal, the National Post, and other publications, and for National Public Radio. She serves as News Editor at Publishers Marketplace and is in the process of editing an anthology of twentieth-century suspense fiction for Penguin Books that is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2013.

* * * *

The hell of it was, she hadn’t even noticed him.

Weeks, months, even years later, when she probed the recesses of her memory for some telltale sign of wrongness she should have picked up on, a clue that would have pointed to disaster she could have helped avert, she came up empty. Her memory might have been truthful or tricking her, but the conclusion was inescapable: Nothing was amiss, no protocols violated, no atypical behaviors. The discrepancy between banality and catastrophe couldn’t be explained no matter how often her superiors pressed her. “Surely there was a sign,” voices repeated again and again, in darkened rooms and in court hearings, in public depositions and private, off-the-books meetings.

Eventually they were satisfied with her stubborn insistence of normality and left her alone. Or, if not satisfied, then long past the point of frustration, exhaustion plainly evident on their faces. They would glean nothing further from her. She could go home, on with her life, back to her repetitive, anonymous business. There were more important people to lay guilt upon, more powerful people to blame or who would pin blame on others. She was just another cog in the wheel, who wouldn’t change a damn thing if knocked out. Another one of the nameless, faceless people nobody cares about.

But nameless, faceless people still feel guilt. They still scrounge for every last scrap of dignity and strength to get through the day. Lord knows she did. Getting up in the morning was hell. Looking at her husband was agony because of the way he looked back at her now, ever since she’d told him what happened and what her role had been. And she still had to go to work in the same place that undid her. The same place that destroyed her.

All because of another nameless, faceless, easily forgotten person. One who slipped in and destroyed a country and changed the world.

The hell of it was, nothing really changed afterwards.

Oh, there were more security measures. Shoes examined, bodies scanned in full, junk touched, protests launched. Flying, once so glamorous that commercials played up the sex angle, turned into an arduous ordeal where nickels clamored to turn into dimes. She didn’t fly much anymore, and figured the next time she took a transatlantic journey they’d charge for breathing the canned oxygen, having run out of new ways to fleece travelers.

Even in the days before the War on Terror, customers glowered when they reached her. Fidgeting, eyes darting everywhere, secrets bursting to come out of their mouths, ears, even noses, stories to be shared in too much detail. If anything, the new security measures brought on more gabbing talk about nothing. She barely heard it. The same as it ever was. The mandate was to get them through, ask a token question or two, and keep the line moving.

What had changed was the nature of the line. After the event, she’d been moved off of the main concourse into the specialty wing, where the perceived troublemakers waited for hours for bureaucrats to decide their fate. Would they be able to complete their travel plans or be forced to go back where they came from? Would they stay on course or be taken to some other darkened room, not unlike the ones she was taken to, where more faceless bureaucrats would ask uncomfortable questions, eliciting answers by any means necessary? She tried to push those thoughts from her mind day after day. It was hard. Those in limbo, as she thought of them to keep a sane distance, had a more hunted look about them. Frustration was only the beginning. Sometimes there was despair, even terror. Mostly there was listlessness, what with their fate completely out of their hands, no way to communicate with the outside world, no way, even, to go take a piss or a shit. That’s how I feel, she’d think, what with eight-hour shifts punctuated by a grand total of a half-hour break. Nothing else. Those were the rules.

She could quit. She’d come so close, even picking up the phone to tell her supervisor she was done before putting it down again. She’d saved so many resignation e-mails in draft, from florid, confessional essays to terse one-line declarations. Her husband had flat-out told her she should, to the point of offering their marriage as a sacrificial lamb if she didn’t. But she didn’t, and she didn’t know why. She hated this unending litany. Everyone around her knew it. They used to ask why, but years of noncommittal answers giving way to narrowed eyes and the silent treatment made them stop. Some of them probably figured it out.

It had only taken years of blindness to fade before the ugly truth emerged: She needed to be here because she wasn’t fit for anything else. A new job in a new place would reveal her to be tainted. She could wrestle with it in this purgatory, absorbing the frustration of scores of travelers like heroin shot directly into her jugular vein. But anywhere else she’d be unduly exposed and judged as harshly as she judged herself for her actions, or lack of them. Where she hadn’t been noticed before, now they would notice her. That’s what she deserved.

So here she was, sequestered from the world, in a space akin to no-man’s-land. Like some standalone, in-between place, she thought, not part of America, not part of any country at all. Ugly gray walls, even more deplorable brown carpeting. The juxtaposition made her laugh out loud on her first day back on the job. Now she barely registered the hideous décor, the way she barely registered those in limbo or her coworkers, each with their pet dramas and crises she wanted no part of.

It was, in a word, perfect, for her state of mind. Everything suspended, nothing resolved. And then, when she least expected to, she noticed.

She’d processed twenty cases by four p.m. that day, not a record, but nowhere near a slow day. There were protests and cries as always, and her face remained stone throughout. Stay behind or go ahead, be deported or move on to the proper destination, she would not show any emotion. None of it mattered; all expressed emotion broke over her like a wave cresting over the surf. So late in the day she realized she’d hit some kind of Zen point where there was nothing to do but to stare impassively and speak in robotic tones. “Free to go”; “I’m sorry but your request has been denied”; “Wait here and my supervisor will speak to you.” Memorized phrases she could rattle off in her sleep.

At four P.M. her supervisor had come out, but not to see any of the detainees. Instead, he went straight to her cubicle and asked if she was doing all right.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she responded, wincing at the prickly tone creeping into her voice. She didn’t have to ask how she’d become so bitter; it had shown up one morning, six weeks after the event, never to leave. She wasn’t used to it, but she wasn’t ashamed of it anymore, at least.

Her supervisor sighed. “You know why,” he said. “I have to ask every week around this time.”

Before he could say why she cut him off. “Regulation,” she said.

“Yes. Regulation.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

He shrugged. There was no answer. He too was a lifer. Lumpy in the wrong places, hair combed over for his own dwarfed vanity because nobody else gave a shit. He had no one at home, that much she knew. Once, perhaps, but not for a long time. He never talked about anything other than the job, anything other than keeping the line moving. Which was why “Regulation” pained him. He didn’t really care about her welfare, and if she quit he wouldn’t miss her. Or anyone else they worked with. But what he did care about were the rules and sticking to them. One morning she’d dawdled a moment too much and the result was a ten-minute lecture during her fifteen-minute lunch period, which led to afternoon indigestion and a faster move through the queue.

The conversation ended and he turned around without another word. She exhaled. Then came the ringing sound that signaled another customer. Back went her impassive mask. She looked down at the files now in front of her to register the name of her next guest, as she thought of them in her darkest moments, just enough to have the requisite two-minute non-conversation. The man shared his name with many from at least sixty different countries. It didn’t stand out.

“Can I help you?” she said automatically, her face still down.

“You could wave a magic wand and let me into the country,” he answered. She could hear the smile in his voice. She couldn’t help herself. She looked up.

And wished she hadn’t.

The same damn question asked so many times. “How did you not notice anything amiss?” Customs people asked it. FBI people barked it. CIA, NSA, name your acronymic intelligence agency, they all asked it. Sometimes nicely, a lot more times less so.

Each time she had the same answer. “My job was to keep the line moving. Not to notice things that weren’t there.” How frustrated they all were! But she couldn’t lie. She couldn’t invent a motive or even some gut feeling. He was another nameless, faceless traveler with all his papers in working order. It wasn’t her fault he got on the plane and instigated the disaster that wrecked the country.

Of course it was her fault. She knew that every morning, every evening, every waking breath. Why hadn’t she been fired? She had practically begged for it, a week after her return from leave. When all of her colleagues looked the other way. When her supervisor at the time shook his head, his sad eyes saying a lot more than he ever would with words.

She knew she wouldn’t quit. The economy wasn’t so great, though compared to how things were now it had been a bright and rosy time. She and her husband needed the money to make the house payments. And when the meltdown did happen and her husband lost his job, quitting, never much of an option to begin with, stopped being one outright. Six months turned into a year turned into two years, and only when the ninety-nine weeks of benefits ran out did her husband find work — at half the salary with none of the benefits.

So she stayed put and turned back into the robot everyone demanded she be. Then she started bringing the automaton self home. Her husband didn’t complain; he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. But boy, did she hear his gripes loud and clear, the ones she couldn’t express herself.

All those thoughts raced through her mind during the fraction of a second between looking up and registering the face now in front of her. Because what she felt now was true-blue, genuine shock. What she wanted to voice, but did not, was that she was looking at the impossible. The spitting image of impossible.

It wasn’t him, of course. Even in her stunned state she could see that this man’s nose sloped to the left where the other man’s twisted slightly to the right. His eyes were brown, not blue. His skin a half-shade darker. But looking at this one she finally reckoned with how obsessed she had become with the other man, the one she let get away, the one who changed the world.

Was it so trite to think she had a shot at reversing course and redeeming herself? Yes, it was trite. But damned if she didn’t believe it in that moment of taking this man in, what he represented — or what he didn’t represent.

She looked down at his file again, more for show, but he wouldn’t know that. “Your visa expired three months ago.”

“It’s the wrong visa,” he said. “I have proper papers but they wouldn’t allow me to produce them.”

“Who wouldn’t allow you?” she asked.

“The agent out there,” he said, gesturing to the customs line behind the door. “He trusted his computer, not the papers.”

“The computer says your visa expired three months ago,” she repeated.

“May I show you my papers?”

She sat up a little straighter, flexing her shoulder muscles back. He couldn’t have a gun in his pocket, or even a weapon. Such things would have been taken away from him. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that he would have something lethal in his pocket. Pills? A non-metallic shiv? Should she call her supervisor and draw attention, or would that be profiling?

In the end, she said yes. He rifled through the left pocket of his coat and placed three sheets of paper on the counter, underneath the glass separating them. She took the papers and looked at the first sheet. Same name, same vitals, and a stamp where it was supposed to be. This visa was good for another eighteen months.

But. She examined the other two sheets. They matched the first one. And yet. “Hold on a minute,” she said, turning her back. She went back to her cubicle and called up the sample documents. And there it was: a fleur-de-lis that wasn’t supposed to be there. The flower that changed the world, she thought morbidly.

Five minutes later, to give the appearance of deeper scrutiny, she faced him again. “I’m sorry but your request has been denied.” She held up his papers. “We’ll keep these.”

She felt nothing as his face transformed into frustration, then rage, then despair. He wasn’t getting in. It was that simple. But where so many others had walked back to their seats in defeat, he had one more thing to say before sitting back down, uttered so softly she wasn’t even certain he said it or if she imagined it:

“You let my brother in. Why not me?”

Six months later the world changed again. Not by plane, but by car, several different ones all over the country. So many dead, among them a name she had willed herself to memorize just after four p.m. that day, the twenty-first case she had processed. She knew at the time, even as his body professed defeat, even as she beckoned her supervisor over to handle the situation with near-eerie calm, that he would find another way. No-fly lists wouldn’t deter him. Several rounds of increasingly intense Homeland Security questioning wouldn’t stop him. Her rejection was just more ammunition in a war she had become part of without even trying.

He left behind a video manifesto that placed blame among the typical high-ranking suspects. He never mentioned her by name but included a single oblique reference: a three-second shot of a fleur-de-lis, changed exactly as it had been on his fake visa.

She quit her job the very next day. No apologies, no explanations.

After all, she was a mere cog in the wheel.

The hell of it was, she had noticed him.

Copyright © 2012 by Sarah Weinman

Dead Men’s Socks

by David Hewson

David Hewson’s debut story for EQMM focuses on a character from his series of contemporary crime novels about Rome’s Questura. The British author’s books have been translated into 23 languages and his first novel, Semana Santa, was made into a movie with Mira Sorvino. The ten books in the series to which this story belongs are currently in development for English-language TV. The sixth in the series, The Garden of Evil, was the American Library Association’s 2008 mystery of the year.

* * * *

Peroni bent down to take a good look at the two bodies in front of him and said quite cheerily, “You don’t see that every day.”

“Actually,” Silvio Di Capua replied, “I do. This is a morgue. Dead people find their way here all the time.”

The cop was early fifties, a big and ugly man with a scarred face and a complex manner, genial yet sly. He frowned at the corpses, both fully clothed, lying on gurneys next to the silver autopsy table. One was grey-haired, around Peroni’s age, short with a black — clearly dyed — goatee, tubby torso stretching against a dark suit that looked a size too small for him. The other was a taller, wiry kid of twenty-two or so, with a stubbly bruised face and some wounds Peroni didn’t want to look at too closely. Dark-skinned, impoverished somehow, and that wasn’t just the cheap blue polyester blouson and matching trousers. Rome was like everywhere else. It had its rich. It had its poor. Peroni felt he was looking at both here. Equal at last.

“What I meant was, you don’t see that...” He pointed at the feet of the first body. “And that...” Then the second.

Di Capua grunted, then put down his pathologist’s clipboard and, with the back of a hand cloaked in a throwaway surgical glove, wiped his brow.

Peroni was staring at him, a look of theatrically-outraged disbelief on his battered features. Di Capua, immediately aware of his error, swore, then walked over to the equipment cabinet, tore off the present gloves, pulled on a new pair.

It was nine A.M. on a scorching July morning. Peroni and Di Capua had just come on shift. The day was starting as it usually began. Sifting through the pieces the night team had swept up from the busy city beyond the grimy windows of the centro storico Questura. Today was a little different in some ways. The head of the forensic department, Teresa Lupo, had absented herself for an academic conference in Venice, leaving the Rome lab in Di Capua’s care. Leo Falcone, Peroni’s inspector, was on holiday in Sardinia. Nic Costa, his immediate boss, was taking part in some insanely pointless security drill at Fiumicino Airport. Their absence left Peroni at a loose end, with no one to reign in his inquisitive and quietly rebellious nature.

“Don’t try to distract me with minutiae,” the pathologist said.

“I like minutiae,” Peroni replied. “Little things.” He looked down at the kid in the cheap blue blood-stained clothes and thought: little people too. “Who are they?”

Di Capua glanced at his clipboard and indicated the older man. “Giorgio Spallone. Aged fifty-one. An eminent psychiatrist with a nice villa in Parioli, fished out from the river this morning. Probable suicide. His wife said he’d been depressed for a while.”

“Do psychiatrists do that?” Peroni asked straightaway. “Wouldn’t they just climb on the couch and talk to themselves instead?”

Di Capua stared at him and said nothing.

“Where?” Peroni continued.

“Found him beached on Tiber Island.”

“That’s a very public place to kill yourself,” Peroni replied. “Bang in the center of Rome. I’ve never known a suicide there in thirty years.”

“He probably went in elsewhere,” Di Capua said with a shrug of his spotless white jacket. “Rivers flow. Remember?”

“Time of death?” Peroni asked. “He’s dried out nicely now. Shame it’s shrunk his suit. That won’t do for the funeral.”

“I don’t know. I just walked through the door. Like you.”

The cop glanced at the second corpse. “And this one?”

Di Capua picked up his notes.

“Ion Dinicu. Twenty-two years old. Some small-time Roma crook the garbage-disposal people came across in Testaccio.”

“Small-time Roma crook,” Peroni repeated. “It sounds so... judgmental.”

“He lived in that dump of a camp on the way to Ciampino. Along with a couple of thousand other Gypsies. We got him straightaway from the fingerprints...”

“Oh yes,” Peroni said, smiling. “We printed them all, didn’t we? Man, woman, and child, guilty of nothing except being Roma.”

“I’m not getting into an argument about politics,” Di Capua told him.

“Fingerprinting innocent people, taking their mugshots... that’s politics?” Peroni wondered.

“Don’t you have work to do?”

“I knew his name already,” Peroni went on, ignoring the question. “Got here before you. Looked at the records downstairs. The kid never went inside. Couple of fines for lifting bags from tourists on the buses. Got repatriated to Romania when we were busing people there. Came back, of course. They never take the hint, do they?”

“Maybe he should have done,” the pathologist suggested.

The cop went to the other end of the body and leaned over Dinicu’s bloodied, bruised features.

“What killed him?” he asked. “And when?”

Di Capua sighed.

“You’ve worked here a million years, Peroni. You know what a man looks like when he’s been beaten up. When did it happen? I apologize. The battery died on my crystal ball. Come back later when I’ve got a new one.”

“Some big tough guy who liked to use his fists,” the cop said. He pointed at the corpse of Spallone. “The other guy’s got a messy head too.”

Di Capua folded his arms.

“Not unusual with river deaths. Could have hit the stonework falling in. Got washed around by the swell. When we’ve done the autopsy, then I’ll tell you.”

Peroni leaned over the dead psychiatrist and said, “Nah. If you hit stonework, you get grazed. The Roma kid could have gone that way. He’s cut. Spallone here...” He looked more closely. A bell was ringing, but too faintly. “He’s bruised. Swollen. No blood.”

“Blunt-force trauma,” Di Capua said.

“That tells me a lot.”

The pathologist folded his arms and looked a little cross.

“Why should I tell you anything? You’re not dealing with either of these guys. Not as far as I know. Inspector Vieri’s been round seeing Spallone’s widow. He sent some wet-behind-the-ear agente to wake up the little hood’s camp at seven. No one talking, of course. If it wasn’t for the prints and photos, we couldn’t even ID him. Agente said even his own father wouldn’t help. Chances are it’s a gang rivalry thing and some other Romanian hood will wind up dead a couple of days down the line...”

“Dead quack gets an inspector and the full team. Dead immigrant gets a visit from an infant. The Roma mourn their dead, Silvio. Just like we do. Also you’re forgetting the deal.”

“The deal?”

“You don’t do cop work and we don’t dissect your corpses.”

Di Capua was starting to get mad.

“Yeah well... One drowned doctor. One beat-up street kid. And you hanging round here as if you care. Don’t you have work to do?”

“There’s always work if you look for it,” Peroni answered. “Right now I’m...” He searched for the right word. “Foraging.”

“Then why don’t you go forage somewhere else?”

“What next?” the big man answered, ignoring him again. “Slice and dice. Weigh the organs. Check the spleen and things. Peek inside at every last little bit of them, working or not, until you get something to write down on your report... what? Tomorrow? The day after?”

Di Capua opened his arms wide.

“That’s the way it goes. Custom and practice. One mistake and we all could hang. As you know. Now...”

“Just a favor,” Peroni said quickly, coming close, putting a huge arm round the skinny, balding pathologist.

“Why should I...?”

“The socks,” Peroni interrupted. “Those...” He pointed at the two sets of feet in front of them. Shoes off already. Ankles splayed. Very dead.

“What about them?” he asked.

Peroni laughed, took away his arms, clapped his big pale hands. Then he retrieved a pair of scissors from the kidney bowl on the silver autopsy table and carefully cut up through the front of all four trouser legs. Spallone’s expensive dark blue barathea didn’t give in easily. The Roma kid’s garish polyester was so flimsy he could slice it apart just by lifting the lower blade.

“Are you kidding me?” he asked when he finished.

Both men were wearing long socks pulled up close to the knee. Odd socks. The one on each right leg light blue and unpatterned. The other pale grey and ribbed so subtly the markings were scarcely noticeable.

The fabric of the blue socks seemed as cheap and thin and as artificial as the kid’s shiny jacket and trousers. The toes were close to going on both. The grey ones were newer, wool maybe. Expensive.

“I never knew a young guy who wore long socks like that,” Peroni murmured. “Curious...”

“Gianni...”

“But not as strange as the fact that two dead men, found the same morning in different parts of Rome, seem to have dipped into the same sock drawer before they went out for the night.”

“You don’t know that!” Di Capua was incensed.

Peroni retrieved his phone from his pocket and took a picture of the dead legs. Then he reached forward and very lightly tweaked Spallone’s dead big toe.

Di Capua shrieked.

“That was the favor,” the big man added. “I don’t leave till I get it.”

The pathologist grumbled. But he still went and got a pair of tweezers and, very carefully, pulled each sock from each dead limb, depositing them in four separate plastic envelopes.

Then the two men peered at the plastic bags. One set, the grey ones, had a brand, a pricey one from Milan. The others looked the kind people picked up three pairs to the euro from a street stall. No name. Nothing to identify them.

“I can check on the fabric to see if they’re the same too,” Di Capua said, serious now. “Give me till the end of the afternoon.”

“Thanks,” Peroni said, and slapped the pathologist hard on his white-jacketed shoulder. “That would be good.”

Inspector Vieri’s team worked on the floor below, in an office next to Falcone’s unit. Peroni’s customary home was empty now. Costa had taken everyone except him to Fiumicino for the drill there. Peroni knew why he’d been left behind. He always found it difficult to keep a straight face when the management decided to lead everyone in the merry dance known as role-play.

Vieri had arrived the previous month sporting the finely tailored suit and standoffish manners of a young officer eyeing some rapid progress up the ranks. He had all the traits that mattered when it came to catching the eye of promotion boards: a couple of degrees from fancy universities, a spell at business school, periods in some of the more fashionable specialist units involving terrorism, organized crime, and financial misdemeanors. The man was all of thirty-three and had never, Peroni suspected, punched or been punched once in his entire life. To make matters worse, he hailed from Milan and spoke in a gruff, cold northern voice that matched his angular pasty face. He never set foot in the Questura without shoes so polished they looked like mirrors. No one ever saw a hair out of place on his bouffant, gleaming, black-haired head. The general opinion in the Questura bar round the corner was he’d make comissário before he turned forty, maybe even thirty-five. After that, the direction of his golden future was anyone’s guess. Just to rub salt in the wound, the man’s wife was a beautiful redhead who worked as a producer for the state TV company RAI. All things considered, as far as the average grizzled Roman cop was concerned, Vieri might as well have worn a sign saying “Shoot me” on his back.

This morning’s suit was dark blue barathea, not unlike the shrunken jacket and trousers clinging to the corpse of Spallone upstairs. Peroni, who had barely met the man, strode over smiling, introduced himself, and asked if he could help.

Vieri gave him a taciturn stare. He’d brought a handful of officers from Milan with him when he arrived in Rome, turned them into his personal confidants, people he spoke to before any of the locals whenever possible. An unwise decision for such a clever man.

“Don’t you have work in your own unit?” Vieri asked. He didn’t look in the least grateful for the offer of free manpower. Just suspicious.

“Sure,” Peroni replied pleasantly. “But sometimes a little local knowledge can help an officer who’s new around here. I hope you don’t mind my saying. Rome’s a village really, sir. The peasants tend to stick with their own and...”

Vieri wasn’t listening. He was staring at his phone, a model that was decidedly fancier than anything handed out as stock issue to the average Questura officer. Another innovation from Milan.

“The socks,” Peroni added.

The young inspector scowled and waved him down. He was reading his e-mail. It seemed to Peroni he was the kind of man who thought every message, whatever its contents, was of overriding importance, if only because it was addressed to him.

Vieri barked out a couple of orders to two men across the room. Local guys. Peroni knew them both. One of them nodded. The other briefly stared at Peroni with hooded eyes.

“The socks,” Peroni repeated. “If you’d care to come upstairs to the morgue I can show you. Better to see than try to explain sometimes.” He scratched his ear. “I keep trying to work out how many possible solutions there might—”

“I don’t approve of police officers interfering with the work of the forensic department,” Vieri said rather pompously, not once taking his eyes off the phone.

Peroni felt his hackles rising and wondered whether he cared if this man noticed or not. “It’s cooperation, not interference, sir...” he began.

To Peroni’s surprise Vieri’s hard stare managed to silence him.

“I know it was once fashionable for police officers to watch and sigh and groan as pathologists go about their business,” the inspector said. “Truthfully, it’s a waste of time. Theirs and ours. When forensic have something useful to tell us, they will do so and I will listen. In the meantime...”

Peroni watched him bark out yet more orders. Hunts for CCTV images. Mobile-phone records. Car details. A call to the media to see if anyone had seen a man answering Spallone’s description near the river the previous night. Nothing about the Roma kid.

“You don’t think it was suicide?” he asked when Vieri was finished.

“I don’t know, agente,” the man replied curtly. “I have no preconceptions. His widow assures us he was a troubled man. He absented himself from home at regular intervals.” Vieri shrugged. “I’ve no reason to disbelieve her. Spallone was a widely respected man. He sat on the board of several public bodies. He was a patron of the opera. Known in political circles. We will investigate and report in due course.” For the briefest of moments his stony, ascetic face displayed something approaching doubt. “I imagine she’s right. They were a wealthy couple, well connected. Hard to see anything else.”

Peroni stood there, wondering whether to point out that Vieri had contradicted himself already. Instead he said, “I would really appreciate two minutes of your time to see these socks.”

“You didn’t listen to a word I said, did you?” Vieri snapped.

“On the contrary. I hung on every one.”

The young inspector turned away from him. He was listening to someone else speaking on the phone.

“The Roma kid...” Peroni began, not moving a centimeter, speaking a little more loudly to regain Vieri’s attention.

“If the father can’t even stir himself to come and identify the body, there’s very little I intend to do at the moment. They can stew until they want to talk, or sort it out between themselves and then we’ll pick up the pieces.”

Peroni blinked, struggling to believe what he was hearing though, with a moment’s reflection, he knew the man’s callous words should not have come as such a shock. This was the modern force, not the one he’d joined thirty years before. Priorities, procedures, resource management... and the keeping sweet of bereaved relatives of men who sat on public boards and patronised the opera. All these mean, inhuman practices had come to swamp the previous shambling chaos through which officers sifted hopefully, trying to sort good from bad, the crucial from the inconsequential, with little to help them other than their own innate intelligence and knowledge of their fellow men and women.

“You’ll never get a thing out of the Roma if you send kids to talk to them,” he said with undisguised brusqueness. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Vieri’s eyebrows — which were, the old cop now noticed, manicured and shaped — rose as if in a challenge.

“You think you could do better?” the man from Milan asked.

“I know it,” Peroni replied straightaway. “You want me to go there?”

“You don’t work for me,” Vieri said, looking him up and down. “Frankly, I prefer younger officers. My problem, not yours...”

With that he turned and started talking to his men again. About phone records and databases, video and intelligence. Peroni guessed this team could try to work two cases — no, one and a quarter at best — for the rest of the day and never set foot outside the building, never do a thing without having a phone to their ear, their fingers on a keyboard, their minds tuned for a call from the morgue and the delivery report that said: It’s fine, go home, there’s nothing you can do.

One of the men Vieri had brought with him from Milan was watching Peroni with a look that spoke volumes. It said: Get out of here.

“You know,” Peroni said, touching the guy’s arm and nodding at the sunny day beyond the window, “it’s really not scary out there. You won’t even get sunburn, I promise. You should try it sometime.”

Then he marched out of the room, along the corridor, back into his own empty office, looked at the vacant chairs there, the silent phones, the desks, the computers, papers strewn everywhere.

Years before, Peroni had been an inspector himself. As arrogant as Vieri. Maybe more so. Maybe with better reasons. He was good at that job, a leader, a man who let people run with their own imagination at times, and always — or usually — managed to reel them in before they went too far. Then his job and his private life collided and when he woke up from that crash everything he held dear was gone: family, career, a good few friends. He was lucky to keep any kind of position in the police after that, even one as a lowly agente, maybe the oldest, lowliest officer there was by now. Lucky too that, for some reason he could never understand, love came back into his life in the shape of Teresa Lupo, the morgue boss now in Venice. And friendship in the form of Costa and Falcone.

But they weren’t here. He was and he could do what he damned well liked.

Afterwards Peroni would try to convince himself it was a considered, reasoned decision, one weighed and balanced, pros and cons, before he made up his mind. But this was, he knew, a lie, a conscious act of self-deception. The proof already lay in his pocket. On the way out, he’d subtly lifted a very full notepad from the desk of one of Vieri’s taciturn Milanese minions.

There was one sentence in it about Ion Dinicu and three pages about the eminent psychiatrist Giorgio Spallone and his businesswoman wife Eva. They lived in a fancy street in Parioli. It seemed a good place to start, but only after he’d checked a couple of things on the computer first.

The villa was, like everything in the couple’s quiet, rich, suburban cul-de-sac, daintily perfect. A three-story detached home from the early twentieth century, soft orange stone with colorful tiled ribbon decorations over the green shuttered windows. A small orchard of low orange and lemon trees ran between the ornate iron gate and baroque front door with its stained glass and plaster curlicues and gargoyles. In the finely raked gravel drive stood a subtle grey Maserati saloon and next to it a lurid red Ferrari.

He glanced through the window of the low sports car. There were magazines on the passenger seat, titles about women’s fashion, a few coarse gossip mags, and, somewhat oddly, a glossy about men’s health, with a cover of a muscular bodybuilder type straining at a piece of exercise equipment. There was nothing on the seats or the dash of the Maserati. The car looked clean and tidy. And, like the Ferrari, not much used except as some icon placed behind the iron gates, one advertising the wealth of those to whom these vehicles — so unsuited for the busy, narrow roads of Rome — belonged.

Showy jewelry for the drive, and it wasn’t hard to work out which was his and which hers.

Parioli, he thought. The place was such a byword for bourgeois snobbery that the term pariolini to describe its residents had become, for some, an insult in itself. It was a little unfair. But only a little.

He walked up to the door, rang the bell, and showed his ID when a maid in a white uniform answered. She was foreign, of course. Filipino, he guessed. The name “Maria” was embroidered on the uniform. She’d been crying recently and didn’t look into his face after she read the ID.

“I know we’ve been here already. How upsetting this is, Maria,” he said. “But I do need to check a couple of small details with Signora Spallone. Please...”

She wasn’t there, the maid said, still staring at the ground.

“Where is she?”

“Down at the gym.”

Peroni was thinking about this when the woman sensed his puzzlement and added quickly, “It’s Signora Spallone’s job. She and the signore own it. She wanted to break the news to the people there. They all knew him.”

“Of course,” he said, nodding. “This is such a very small thing. I just need to check some clothing in their bedroom. Giorgio’s. One quick look. The boss won’t let me off shift until it’s done. Can I...?”

She opened the door and he walked in. The place was beautiful, spotless and palatial, walls covered in paintings, old and new, corridors dotted with what looked like imperial-era statues.

“Their bedroom?” he asked.

“They sleep apart,” she said quietly and led the way upstairs.

The first bedroom they came across was huge, the size of many working-class apartments. It had its own separate lounge and a bathroom with two sinks, one toothbrush by the nearest.

He opened a wardrobe and saw line upon line of elegant dresses there.

The husband’s room was as far away as it was possible to get. Right at the back of the house. He could hear the drone of traffic from the busy main road. It was small and functional and hadn’t been decorated in years.

“When did Giorgio move in here?” he asked.

She looked at the bed, all perfectly made for a man who’d never sleep in it again. Then she brushed some stray cotton fibers off the sheets and said, “Two months.” Nothing more.

Peroni opened the wardrobes. Plenty of expensive suits and shirts, drawers with underwear and socks. All wool or cotton. Nothing cheap or artificial.

“He was a careful dresser,” he said.

She nodded. “The signore took pride in his appearance. He was a gentleman.”

“A depressed gentleman?”

Her chin was almost on her chest.

“I am the maid, sir. You ask those questions of the lady.”

Peroni got the address of the gym, a back street near the Campo dei Fiori in the city center, not far from the Questura. An awkward place to get to from Parioli, twenty-five minutes if the traffic was light. Then she showed him to the door. He couldn’t help noticing a pile of unopened letters on a sideboard next to it. A few looked like bills. Several bore the names of banks.

He stood on the threshold for a moment, gazing at the Maserati and the Ferrari.

“Those are not cars for Rome,” Peroni said. “Too big, too expensive. Too easily scratched by some stupid little kid who hates anyone who’s got the money to buy them. Why anyone...”

“They hardly use them,” the woman said. “Only when they leave the city. Every morning I wash them down. But when those big ugly things last went anywhere...” She shrugged.

“How do they get around, then?”

“I call a driver,” she said as if he was being dim.

Peroni didn’t approve of exercise. So gyms didn’t impress him much. The one the Spallones owned was called the Palestra Cassius and occupied the first floor of a vast palazzo in the Via dei Pellegrini, the old pilgrims’ street from the city to the bridge to the Vatican. The name intrigued him until he saw plastered behind reception a black-and-white picture of the man most people knew as Muhammad Ali, not Cassius Clay. There was a debt to history being paid here, but it wasn’t a Roman one.

The place smelled of aromatic oils and sweat. There was a blank-looking girl with a ponytail behind a computer, rows and rows of unused exercise machines, and close to the small windows at the back, a boxing ring. A sign leading off to the right said SAUNA.

“Exercise I can do without,” Peroni told the kid behind the desk when he walked in. “But sitting around sweating doing nothing... that I can manage. Is it good?”

She gave him a leaflet. It boasted of the biggest, most traditional Finnish sauna in Rome. She had her name embroidered on her T-shirt: Letizia. Someone, Spallone’s wife, he guessed, liked to tag the things they owned.

“I could break into a good sweat looking at the prices,” he said.

“We’ve got great introductory discounts,” she piped up. The girl looked around at the lines of empty machines. “And discounts after that if you ask nicely.”

“I always ask nicely. How many people work here? Trainers, fitness people, and the like?”

“Ten, fifteen guys. Plus me. We’re good.”

“I’m sure you are,” Peroni said, showing her the police ID. “But I’d really like to see Signora Spallone now if you don’t mind.”

The woman was in her office with ten or so of her men. Every one of them was big and fit, under thirty, he guessed. Names embroidered on their shirts. Mostly foreign, from the way they spoke and muttered as he showed his ID. More than half of them blond, Nordic. Like Eva Spallone herself, he now saw.

She ushered them out and gave him a hard stare, the one civilians used when they thought the police were paying them too much attention.

“You’re not Italian,” he said.

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“Not at all. It’s just that I always try to place people. It’s a game.”

Eva Spallone looked no more than thirty-five. She had short blond hair, the face of an angel, bright blue eyes, and the curvy, almost carved kind of figure Peroni normally saw in the magazines, not real life. She didn’t look as if she’d been crying recently.

“Finnish,” he said.

“You guess well.”

“Not really.” He pointed to the books and trinkets behind her desk. “You’ve got that blue-and-white flag there. The sauna makes a thing about being Finnish and not many do that. Two and two tend to make four. Usually, anyway.”

On the desk stood a picture of her with a man he took to be the living Giorgio Spallone. She was in a wedding dress, he in a suit. The Colosseum was in the background. So many weddings used that location for pictures after the ceremony. From the look of her, he guessed this couldn’t have been more than four or five years before.

“I went to your house,” he said. “There was a detail to be cleared up. We thought you’d be at home.”

Her eyes misted over then. Very quickly, it seemed to him.

“This was Giorgio’s business too. It was how we first met.”

A tissue came out of a very expensive rose-colored leather handbag, so small it couldn’t have contained much else. She wiped her pert nose then rubbed her bright blue eyes with the back of her hands.

“In a sauna?” Peroni asked.

“He loved the silence, the tranquillity. When his mind was troubled, it was the place he went. On his own.”

She didn’t want to answer that question.

“So you two started the business?”

“It was a wedding gift.” Another dab of the eye. “He was the kindest man. Everyone here loved him. I had to tell them myself. Lately he’d been so... melancholy.”

Peroni found he couldn’t take his eyes off the wedding photo.

“What detail?” she asked.

“Was your husband a fastidious man?” Peroni asked.

Eva Spallone blinked.

“Fastidious?”

“Was he careful about what he wore? How good his clothes looked? How neat they were?”

“Very much so,” she said.

“Thanks.” Peroni got up.

“You came all the way for that?”

“I don’t need to take up any more of your time, signora. Will you be here long? Just in case my boss thinks of anything else.”

“I’m having lunch with a friend. Round the corner. So many people to tell. And you won’t let me do anything with poor Giorgio. No funeral arrangements. It’s okay. I understand.”

He asked himself: Was that what most widows did the day their husband was found floating in the Tiber? Have lunch with someone to tell them how awkward things were?

He wondered. Most people reacted by staying close to the home they shared. A few found that too full of memories. Too painful.

“Here,” she said and gave him a business card for the gym with her mobile number on it.

On the way out he stopped by the ring. Two of the hulks were sparring, landing not-so-gentle blows with puffy brown leather gloves.

Peroni watched them, thought about the gloves, and said quietly to himself, “Boxing.”

The rest of the hulks stood around watching, commenting in a variety of accents, none of them native Italian. None of them looked to be in mourning. Next to the ring was a glass door marked as the sauna entrance. Peroni wandered over and took a look. He’d no idea what a sauna was like, really, so he opened the door and found himself gasping for breath almost instantly. It was like peering into a hot, damp fog. All billowing steam, so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

“You wanna try?” asked a hulk, taking him by surprise when he walked up behind.

“Isn’t there someone in there already?”

The hulk laughed.

“Who knows? You share a sauna, man. That’s what it’s about. Togetherness.” He squinted at the fog. “But no. I don’t think there’s anyone there. Thursdays are quiet.”

“Spallone used to come here alone, I thought,” Peroni told him.

“Yeah well...” The hulk shrugged. He looked and sounded East European, Russian maybe. Peroni couldn’t quite make out the name stitched on his shirt. “That’s more business than choice, I guess. Sauna’s a sociable thing.” A big elbow nudged Peroni in the ribs. “A place for men to talk. Get things off your chest.”

“Maybe I’ll try next week,” Peroni told him and walked out of the building, back into the bright day. It was just after noon now. Lunchtime. He wondered what Teresa was doing in Venice, how the playacting was going at Fiumicino, what kind of culinary delicacy the ever-picky Falcone had chosen for his solitary meal in Sardinia. All this speculation made Peroni hungry so he bought a panino stuffed with rich, salty porchetta from the market and ate it from his big left fist as he drove out to Ciampino and the Roma camp.

He didn’t need any directions for this place. Every cop knew where the Roma lived, dotted around the city in shifting encampments, bulldozed from time to time by the authorities only to reappear a few weeks later, a kilometer or so down the road. Several hundred, even a thousand men, women, and children lived in these places, crammed together in hovels built out of scrap wood and corrugated iron, huddled around makeshift braziers in winter, sweating out in the open in the scorching summer. For years now the Italian government had been trying to push them back into Romania and Hungary. It was like trying to sweep away the tide with a broom.

Peroni pulled through the camp gates and found his car immediately surrounded by scruffy urchin kids, hands out begging for money. He pushed through them and found himself confronted by a tall, surly-looking man with a beard. Grubby clothes, dark, smart eyes. Security around here.

“Police,” Peroni said, showing his ID. “I’d like to see Ion Dinicu’s father.”

“Not here,” the man said immediately.

Peroni sighed, looked around. There were eyes glittering in the dark mouths of the makeshift homes, all watching him. He’d dealt with these people many times in the past. It was never easy. They liked living apart from everyone else. They didn’t want the police to solve their problems, offer them protection. In their own eyes they were a separate nation, detached from a world which failed to understand them. That didn’t mean they were without rules or principles or beliefs. Faith even.

“If Ion isn’t identified... claimed by someone...” Peroni told the man, “... then it’s up to us to deal with his

funeral. If that’s what you want, fine. But bear this in mind. We’ll pass the work on to a charity, in all probability. A Catholic one since we’re in Rome. If anyone wants an invitation...”

The bearded man stood there, silent.

“If Ion’s father speaks to me now, just for a few minutes, I will make sure a request goes through for an Orthodox service. Romanian Orthodox, if you like. It can be done. It won’t be unless I ask for it.”

He waited.

Orthodox and Catholic. It was like football. Same game, different teams. Bitter rivals.

Two minutes later he was in a corrugated shack at the end of the camp, seated at a low plastic table with an elderly bent man who smelled of cheap dark tobacco and wood smoke.

“What do you want?” Ion Dinicu’s father asked.

“To find out who killed your son.”

“Why?”

Peroni shrugged and said, “It’s what I do. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want some kind of...” He hesitated. The word sounded odd, wrong, in these circumstances. “... justice?”

Dinicu’s father had the same kind of eyes as the man on the gate. Dark and intense. Blazing now.

“Find me the man who killed my Ion and I’ll show you justice,” he said. “He was a good boy.”

Peroni sighed.

“He was a pickpocket. A petty thief. Petty. But a thief all the same.”

“That was then!” the old man cried. “Not now.”

“Now he’s dead. I want to know why.”

The Romanian was silent for a while, then he murmured, “Everyone hates us here.”

“Why did Ion come back then? After we deported him?”

“Everyone hates us there too. At least here, there’s money. Work.”

“Tourists on the bus. Women with purses in the park.”

“No!”

“Then what?” Peroni wanted to know.

“When he came back he was a chauffeur. People wanted to go somewhere, they called. He was good. Cheaper than those taxi guys. Reliable. He had his own car.”

This was interesting.

“Where’s the car?”

“Gone. He went out on a job yesterday. Next thing, you send round some kid in a uniform to tell me he’s dead. What am I supposed to say?”

Peroni folded his arms, stared out of the opening of the shack, watched the kids playing with their grubby toys, the women sitting round darning clothes, hanging up washing. He couldn’t shake from his head what he’d seen in the morgue that morning. How many possible explanations were there?

“This is going to seem an odd question,” Peroni said. “What kind of socks did your son wear?”

The man blinked and looked at him sideways. “Is this a joke?”

“Not at all. What kind? Short? Long? Medium?”

Ion Dinicu’s father rolled up the legs of his cheap black trousers. His socks ran all the way to the knee.

“These socks,” he said.

The cop nodded.

“I mean,” the man went on, “these socks. We shared. Socks. Shirts. Was cheaper. Easier that way.”

“Right,” Peroni murmured and found his mind wandering back to the city.

“What happens to my son? You won’t let the Catholics have him? Don’t do that to him. He don’t deserve it.”

Peroni said, “Give me some way I can get in touch with you. When his body’s released I’ll make sure they know he needs an Orthodox service. If you want to come in to the Questura...”

The father was shaking his head briskly.

“Then give me some way...”

The man reached into his pocket and handed him a card. It read “Deluxe Ciampino Limousine Service” and had two mobile-phone numbers printed beneath a colour photo of the front of an elderly but very shiny Mercedes, a young man standing beside it, smiling.

“The second phone number’s mine. First was Ion’s,” he said.

Peroni said thanks, then walked back to the car.

By the time he was back in the city, looking for somewhere to park near the Campo dei Fiori, most of the smell of tobacco and wood smoke had left him. Peroni squeezed the battered, unmarked police Fiat into a diagonal space that left the front wheels up on the pavement of the Via dei Pellegrino and would, to his regret, force pedestrians into the cobbled street. He hated doing this, but there was work to be done.

He got out and called the Questura. Prinzivalli was the duty sovrintendente running the uniform officers out on patrol. This was good news. He was an old-time cop, a colleague going back three decades. Peroni said, “If I asked for five strong men outside an address near the Campo dei Fiori in twenty minutes would you want to know why? Time’s a little short, see.”

There was a pause on the line. Trust was an odd thing. Delicate, easily broken.

“I’ve got officers round there all the time,” Prinzivalli said. “I’d still need to give them some idea what exactly they’re looking for.”

Peroni told him, then passed on Eva Spallone’s mobile number and some more instructions.

“You know the new guy from Milan? The inspector? Vieri?” he said when he was finished.

“Mr. Cheery, we call him,” Prinzivalli replied.

“He’s the one. Well, Mr. Cheery’s busy right now. It’s best he doesn’t know. Not straightaway.”

There was that pause again, then Prinzivalli said, “Vieri hates being interrupted when he’s busy. I’ve learned that already.”

“Me too,” Peroni said, then finished with a few more details and cut the call.

He read the notes he’d made on the computer that morning. Detailed notes. There was a stationery shop on the way to the gym. He went in there, bought the things he needed, then walked down the narrow street to the Palestra Cassius.

It was now close to four o’clock. Peroni smiled for the girl on reception and said, “It’s me again, Letizia.”

She was chewing a nougat from the bowl on the counter, looking bored in the way only teenagers knew.

Eva Spallone wasn’t there. Must have been a long lunch. Prinzivalli could deal with her then.

There seemed to be one customer in the place, a fat guy sweating and grunting on an exercise bike. The hulks were still crowded round the boxing ring. Peroni walked over. Two of the biggest blonds were in boxing shorts, bare-chested, tanned pecs and biceps gleaming with oil, sparring lazily off and on the ropes. They looked bored too.

Peroni clapped his hands and brought the fun to a close. Ten sets of eyes turned on him. He waved his ID card high, chose his most authoritative of voices, and ordered them all into Eva Spallone’s office. That instant.

They obeyed straightaway, shambling over to the far side of the gym in a long line. Peroni watched them. Bodybuilding did something bad to the way people walked, he decided. It was like health stores. They always seemed to be full of sick, sniffy people.

The ten hulks filled the small office. The smell of sweat and oils and liniment was a little overpowering. None of them spoke, which he found interesting.

“This is a simple, routine check,” Peroni announced, forcing his way to the desk. “I want...”

He began coughing. Kept on coughing. The hulks stared at him. They looked worried they might catch something.

“Sorry... sorry,” Peroni said, gasping. “Got a really bad throat today. Hurts like hell. Tell you what...”

He pulled out the dark grey paper he’d bought in the stationery shop and the blue pen, then scrawled a single word in large capital letters.

“Any of you guys ever been...” He coughed and roughed up his voice even more. “Here?”

Then he walked down the line showing them the paper. Eight of them shook their heads. A thuggish-looking guy with the name Vladimir embroidered on his T-shirt glared back at Peroni and said, “Was years ago. In Russia.”

“Must have been fun,” Peroni replied.

Only one, halfway down the line, didn’t answer at all. He was the biggest of them all, one of the boxers, a good deal taller than Peroni, muscle-bound with a flattened nose, dim close-set eyes, and a stripe of Mohican-cut blond hair. His chest gleamed with sweat and oil, his muscles looked as if they’d been sculpted somehow.

There was a name embroidered on his bright red satin shorts. Eva Spallone did take great care to tag her possessions. Peroni looked down at it and said, “Sven?”

“What was the question again?”

Peroni held up the paper. The close-set eyes, glanced at it nervously, then darted round the room.

“The rest of you leave,” Peroni ordered, and he didn’t take his attention off the man in front of him for a moment as they filed out of the office.

“Swedish?” Peroni asked when they were gone.

“Finnish.”

“Like Eva Spallone. Isn’t that nice?”

The hulk just stood there. Big, stupid Sven, with his beady blue eyes and blond cockatoo stripe.

Peroni looked at him and said, “You know, when my daughter was four years old the doctors thought there was something wrong.” He indicated his eyes. “Here. With her sight. We went through all these tests. Pretty nurse in the clinic.” He grinned. “I never said no when it came to running her there.”

“What?” Sven asked.

“Bear with me,” Peroni went on. “One of the things they thought was maybe to do with the way she saw colors. That perhaps she was color-blind.” He sighed. “Scary when you think there’s something wrong with your kid. There wasn’t. She just needed better glasses. But that nurse was so pretty, so careful, I kept going back and talking to her. I thought I knew everything then, of course. Color blindness. Red and green. People couldn’t see traffic lights and things. I was a smartass. She put me straight. Sure they can’t see red or green. But they can see something, which light is on for one thing. So they can drive if they want. No problem usually. And also...” He reached into his pocket and found his own notepad where it sat, next to the one he’d stolen from Vieri’s guy that morning. “It’s not just red and green. That may be the most common kind there is, but you find lots of others. Like one called...” He glanced at the note. “Tritanopia. You heard of that, Sven?”

The Finn stood there stiff as a gleaming rock, saying nothing.

“I looked it up. They call it blue-yellow color blindness but it’s not that simple. Specially with the blues. Anyone who’s got this thing really struggles with those. Can’t see the difference between blue and black easily, for one thing.”

“What’re you talking about?”

Peroni’s eyes narrowed, “I’m talking about you. How did it go? Let me guess. Eva’s been monkeying around with you for a little while. She says, ‘Oh Sven, oh darling Sven. If only it was the two of us. You and me running the gym. Then we’d be together and make lots of money too. But Giorgio won’t ever divorce me...’ ”

Beads of sweat were beginning to build on the Finn’s broad, tanned forehead.

“So all you’ve got to do is wait one night until he’s in the sauna on his own. Walk in there, boxing gloves on, beat him about the head until he’s out stone cold. You got those gloves on, remember. No serious marks. No cuts. Dump him in the river. Eva says how sad, how depressed he was. Suicide. Stupid cops nod and then you’re done.”

Sven cleared his throat and stared down at his own broad chest.

“I guess Eva thinks a sauna’s a clever place,” Peroni went on. “All that evidence — sweat and blood and everything — gets washed away down the drain. Not sure about that, frankly, but it doesn’t matter. You see, Giorgio Spallone’s a nice guy. Really. His maid in Parioli calls him cars from some poor Roma kid called Ion. He likes Ion. Feels sorry for him. Sneaks him into the gym for a sauna last night as a favour. And there’s the Roma kid, hidden in all that steam, when you go wading in with the boxing gloves, punching Giorgio in the head.”

Peroni reached down and lifted Sven’s vast fists. He undid the lace ties of the boxing gloves at the wrist and gently tugged them off his enormous hands. There were cut marks on the knuckles. He touched them. Sven flinched. Then he looked more closely at the hulk’s face. There was a graze near the right cheekbone.

“Middle-aged psychiatrist’s a piece of cake for a thug like you. A Roma kid like Ion doesn’t go down so easily. I guess the gloves came off there. But he was a little guy. You punched him out in the end.”

“This is stupid...” Sven murmured.

“It was,” Peroni agreed. “See, when it’s done you now have two bodies in all that steam. Both naked. One, Ion, dead, I guess. Giorgio out for the count. You got to dress them — Eva won’t do that for you. You got to get them out of there.”

He cocked his head and looked up at the Finn.

“Ion’s car, I guess. You got his keys, beat where it was out of him. Put the two of them in there. Giorgio goes in the river somewhere near the Ponte Sublicio in Trastevere. Then you drive over and dump Ion with the trash near the nightclubs in Testaccio, the sort of place a Roma kid might find himself in trouble.”

“Stupid,” Sven said again.

“Here,” Peroni told him, “is the problem. Tritanopia. You got to put their clothes on and it’s hot, you’re scared, you’re all alone. And you don’t see what everyone else can. Those two guys are wearing different-colored socks. They’d know it. I’d know it. But not you.”

He pulled out his phone and showed the hulk the photo from that morning: four dead legs, two sets of odd, long socks.

Peroni put the phone away and picked up the paper sheet he’d written on.

“See this? The paper’s just about the same color as Giorgio’s socks. The pen the colour of Ion’s. You can’t read what I wrote there, Sven. Because it all looks the same to you. Here. Let me help.”

He took out a red pen and scribbled over the letters he’d written earlier in blue.

“How’s that?”

Sven could see the word now. He stared at it with his tiny, frightened eyes.

“P-R-I-G-I-O-N-E,” Peroni spelled it out.

“Prison. Jail. Incarceration. That’s the place you’re headed. One murder’s bad enough. But two.”

He sighed, put away the paper, reached up and lifted the Finn’s chin so he could look into his face.

“Two is so much worse. My advice is this. Tell the truth. Think about cooperation. Tell everyone how Eva put you up to it and led you by your beat-up nose. We’ll find out anyway. You don’t think you were the first one she made goo-goo eyes at, do you? We’ll talk to all the other guys. But if you help us now, you’re talking years off the sentence. Otherwise...”

He stood back and looked up and down at the shining, sweating man in front of him, quaking in his tight red satin shorts.

“Otherwise it’s just more fisting time in jail, and really I do not recommend...”

The Finn pushed him out of the way and raced across the gym towards the stairs.

They run oddly too, Peroni thought. Arms pumping, legs going up and down like mechanical dolls.

He walked over to the receptionist, watched by the line of wide-eyed, open-mouthed hulks who’d stayed behind and the fat customer now stationary on his exercise bike. There he picked up a couple of fistfuls of nougats from the bowl and stuffed them into his pockets before calling Vieri.

“There’s good news and there’s bad,” he said when he got through to the inspector, still in his office in the Questura. “The Spallone case and the Roma kid are done. Bad is...” He popped a nougat in his mouth. “... you’re going to have to unplug yourself from your BlackBerry and take a walk outside.”

When he got down the stairs he found Sven cuffed, hands behind his back, face pressed against a blue police wagon blocking the narrow street. Prinzivalli was there, seven men with him. Peroni handed out nougats from his jacket pockets.

“I only asked for five,” he said. “You didn’t need to come.”

Prinzivalli watched the hulk make one last effort to struggle, then give up. The Finn looked shocked and a little teary-eyed.

“It’s on my way home. End of shift.” He popped Peroni’s nougat into his mouth. “I thought perhaps this was something I didn’t want to miss.”

“It’s just an arrest,” Peroni answered.

Eva Spallone was being marched down the street in the custody of two women officers leading her firmly but politely by the arm.

“Wife?” Prinzivalli guessed.

“The ice queen of the north,” Peroni murmured.

Moments later, a Lancia saloon drew up behind the van. Vieri got out, face like thunder, with three of his minions from Milan.

Peroni looked at the men holding Sven, nodded for them to let go a little. The hulk looked up, saw the Spallone woman, and started to squawk in broken Italian, “Was her idea! Hers...”

“Tell him,” Peroni cut in, indicating the approaching Vieri.

“Her idea!” he yelled again, at Vieri this time. “Not mine!”

By now the Spallone woman was close enough to hear.

“Shut up, you moron!” she screamed at him. “Shut the...”

She glanced at Peroni, looked as if she felt stupid for a moment. Then the abuse started again, this time in an incomprehensible stream of gibberish, a language so strange Peroni couldn’t begin to guess a single word.

He took out his phone and hit the record button. When she was done he stopped the phone, walked out in front of the van, and said to the officers there, local and Vieri’s crew from Milan, “Listen to me. I want these two taken into separate custody. No chance they get to talk to one another. No shared lawyers.” He held up the phone. “I want a Finnish translator. Call Di Capua and...”

Vieri broke stride and leapt in front of him, then roared, “I am the inspector here!”

Peroni put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Of course.” Then he turned to the men again and said, “The inspector wants these two in custody. No contact. Finnish translator. Forensic are going to seal off the sauna in this place. The Roma kid was killed there, Spallone got beat up. Whatever this woman thinks, there’s got to be some trace left. Check bank records and the financials for this gym of hers. This place was bleeding old man Spallone dry. Talk to the maid. She’s got the Roma kid’s number and called him when Giorgio needed a ride. There’s your link. And the car.” He pulled out the business card Ion Dinicu’s father had given him. “This is an old Mercedes. Dinicu used it as an illegal cab. Spallone was his customer. My guess is, Sven here ferried them away in it after he hit them, then dumped the thing. Find this...” He squinted at the picture and read out the licence plate. “... and we’re in court come Friday. My guess is, start looking around Testaccio.” He glanced at the Finn. “Sven here’s not the brightest button in the box.”

The Finn squeaked.

“And you,” Peroni added, glaring at the hulk in the red satin boxer shorts, “remember. Tell the truth. One word. Fisting.”

They all stared at him in awed silence. Peroni eyed a minion from Milan. The man had his notepad in his hand. He hadn’t written a word.

“I’ll repeat the licence plate once more,” he said. “After that...” He touched Vieri on the shoulder again. “The inspector gets cross.”

They all scribbled it down that time. Peroni looked at Vieri and asked, “Anything else?”

The man’s hair didn’t look as perfect as it had that morning. He was lost for words.

“I’m off shift in thirty minutes,” Peroni added, glancing at his watch. “Take off the fact I never got a lunch break, in truth I’m done now.” He eyed Prinzivalli. “Beer? The usual place?”

The uniform man stripped off his uniform jacket, turned it so the lining was on the outside, and said, “The usual place.”

“Come... with... me...” Vieri ordered, gripping Peroni by the arm.

They walked round the corner, back towards the Campo, and Peroni filled him in on the details along the way.

To the man’s credit, the inspector listened, furious as he was.

When the explanation was done, Vieri shook his head and said, “I could have your job.”

“No, no.” They stopped by the place Peroni had bought his porchetta panino that morning. “I’ve done much worse than this and I never got kicked out then. Besides, I’ve only got a few years left. What’s the point?”

He looked Vieri in the face.

“Anyway, what are you going to say? Fire this man because he tracked down a couple of double murderers on evidence I wouldn’t even walk upstairs to look at? Not when he pleaded with me? I was too busy on my BlackBerry, see. Too tied up watching CCTV and waiting for the mobile-phone records to land in my inbox.” He scratched his head. “Is that how you get on the up escalator in Milan? If so, let me offer some advice. Don’t try it here. Won’t work.”

Vieri stiffened.

“We would have found all this,” he insisted. “When forensic reported, when we got round to the detail...”

Peroni felt a little red light rise at the back of his head.

“You didn’t need the detail. Two dead men, odd socks, same pairs. How many questions does that raise? How many possibilities? They didn’t get up that way. All you have to do is work out how they got naked. Then ask yourself why whoever dressed them didn’t spot the socks were wrong. Really. That’s it.”

The man from Milan was silent, a little down in the mouth.

“You use your eyes,” Peroni added. “Watch what people do with theirs. You know the only person who’s looked me straight in the face all day? That poor Roma kid’s father. He didn’t have anything to hide. He wasn’t choking on some stupid obsession with systems and procedures and idiotic theoretical...”

“Okay, okay,” Vieri interrupted. “Point taken.”

“And yes,” Peroni added, “you would have got there in the end. But this case maybe hangs on our golden boy Sven getting scared enough to cough it all up and put Eva beside him in the dock. Get his confession and before long she’ll realise she can’t wriggle out of it. You won’t have to prove a damned thing. You could have spent months trying to do that, and I’d bet a politician’s pension somewhere along the way Sven would have gone missing, by himself maybe or courtesy of some other hulk Eva was keeping sweet between the sheets.”

Vieri nodded. He seemed to agree.

“It’s Toni, isn’t it?” Peroni asked. “I’m Gianni.”

Vieri glanced behind him to make sure no one was watching. Then he took Peroni’s hand. “The trouble is, Toni, all that northern crap doesn’t really cut it here. Not sure it does anywhere, frankly. Walk around staring at your BlackBerry and your computers all day and you’re as blind as that stupid Finn to a few things, maybe ones that matter. At least he’s got the excuse he was born that way.”

“The paperwork...” Vieri began.

“... is your problem. This is your case. You get the credit. Tell them you sent me out to see Dinicu’s father on a hunch. It all fell into place from there. You’ve got someone itching to confess to two murders and cut a sentencing deal. No one’s going to ask a lot of questions.”

The inspector nodded.

“And if none of this had worked out? All your hunches came up empty?”

Peroni grinned.

“Then you’d never have been any the wiser. Here.”

He gave him the minion’s notepad, the phone with the recorded exchange in Finnish between Eva Spallone and Sven, and the keys to the unmarked police Fiat.

“I stole the notebook from your guy. A translator might find something useful on the phone. And me and Prinzivalli... it may be more than one beer. You get someone to deal with the car.”

“Fine,” Vieri said and started to turn on his heels.

“Hey,” Peroni called. The man stopped and looked at him. “You should come for a pizza with me and my friends. Falcone, Costa, Teresa. Well...” He shrugged. “She’s more than a friend. You’ll like them.”

Inspector Vieri laughed. It made him look human.

“Oh,” Peroni added.

He reached into his pocket, took out a nougat, held out it for the man from Milan.

“Welcome to Rome.”

Copyright © 2012 by David Hewson

Karen Ovenhouse and the Ruin Snooper

by Peter Turnbull

Since Peter Turnbull’s last appearance in EQMM, he has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and received Barry and Macavity nominations for his EQMM story “The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train.” His Hennessey and Yellich series, to which that story belongs, has a new novel, The Altered Case (Severn House/June 2012). A newer Turnbull series, set in London, has its third book (The Garden Party) out this December.

* * * *

Joseph Kelly, ruin snooper, walked the walls from Baile Hill to Lendal Bridge knowing, as do all citizens of the fair and famous city, that most often the quickest way to get from one part of central York to the other is to walk the medieval battlements. When opposite the railway station, which when it was built in 1870 was the largest structure in the world, he glanced to his right and picked out the angular roof and stone-slabbed platform of the original station, a much, much smaller version, which had been built “within the walls” so that the Victorians’ steaming leviathans entered and exited the station via a small tunnel still visible underneath Queen Street. At Lendal Bridge, Joseph Kelly turned and made his way to the railway station, outside of which he would be able to get the bus he needed to catch. He was a man of middle years, rotund in most people’s view and with a faraway look in his eyes. He wore plus fours and a Norfolk jacket even on the hottest days and presented an image of a man from a different era, an image completed by a box Brownie camera on one shoulder and a canvas knapsack on the other which contained his lunch and a flask of coffee. Atop his head on this warm April day was a battered felt hat.

Joseph Kelly had supported himself throughout his life by doing odd jobs, or by sporadic work on the buses as a driver or conductor. He had once driven a taxi but had given that up when a spate of attacks on taxi drivers served to remind him that beneath the medieval facade of wynds and ghosts and cholera pits, and behind the ecclesiastical splendor of the Minster, and behind the prestigious university, was a violent little town. York has a city charter, but it has not the size nor the dynamism of a true city, so thought Joseph Kelly, but he was born in York and had always been happy to live there. It was during the winter months that he worked, in the main; the summer months he chose to devote himself to this true passion. For Joseph Kelly was a committed “ruin snooper.” The passion he felt for ruins had dominated his life to the exclusion of all else. He had snooped ruins since he was a boy when, fishing rod in hand, he had pushed open a rusty gate on which was a sign which read trespassers will be prosecuted because a sixth sense had told him that fishable water lay in the foliage he could see beyond the gate. His sixth sense had been correct, for he came across a large pond, just too small to be called a lake, in a wood, which teemed with roach and trout and perch. As he sat on the bank that summer’s day he noticed that the foliage which at first had seemed wild and random had in fact the remnants of a formality about it, and that many of the trees were “nonindigenous,” as his geography master would have said. Then he realized that he was sitting beside a man-made lake in the midst of what had once been a magnificent formal garden, probably laid out in the eighteenth century during the Augustan Age of Classicism which had given England such buildings as the Royal Mint and the Bank of England, streets like Regents Street and the Royal Crescent in Bath, and the great gardens like Castle Howard. Joseph Kelly then realized that if the place he was in was a long-abandoned garden, there may, nay must, also be a long-abandoned house. So he left the fish he had caught in the keepnet and went exploring. What he found changed his life. What he found detoured him down a path in life from which he was never to deviate. Joseph Kelly had found his first ruin.

It had been a small house as the great houses go, or went, but it was Augustan. Those columns, those grand staircases, those frescoes, by then rotten and decayed, the lawn taken over by trees, a tree which had grown in the greenhouse and had burst up out of the glass. He had entered the house, a small boy alone in the vastness, probably, he thought, the first person to do so in many, many years. He walked up one flight of a creaking staircase and down the other back, or servant, stairs, exploring, touching history, never knowing what was going to be behind each closed door. That particular house had been Wadden Hall, subsequently demolished, the garden cleared and the fishpond concreted over to make way for a housing estate. But Joseph Kelly had seen it, had wandered its echoing corridors and great halls, and had seen it in its last days of ghostly mystique, when the echoes of its days of former grandeur were faint but discernible. That day he had returned to the pond, released the fish in the keepnet, and returned to York. He sold his fishing tackle and with the proceeds bought a box Brownie and a roll of black-and-white film. Then, a day later, he returned to Wadden Hall and photographed it, inside and out. For the next thirty summers Joseph Kelly had travelled England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, but mostly England because it is in England that such abandoned magnificence is chiefly to be found. And knowing that he was visiting buildings which were fast disappearing as the English landscape changed, he set out to document each ruin he visited, using only black-and-white film, using the same box Brownie camera. He had wandered the great halls of yesteryear photographing as he went, and had found things that had been abandoned: a tray of gold and silver coins; another tray of Roman coins, neatly labelled; oil paintings, clearly valuable, which still hung on the walls; huge silver and crystal chandeliers still hanging from ornate ceilings; but if he took anything at all it was only in the form of a photograph. He came to see the houses as living things that allowed him to enter. He didn’t want to violate that trust, or his own integrity, with theft.

On that hot Tuesday in April, perspiring in his Norfolk jacket and felt hat, he boarded a bus outside York Railway Station which took him out to the village of Great Keld, from where at a half-hour’s brisk walk there stood Pately Hall, or rather the ruin of the same, which he did not know had existed until he read an article about it in the Yorkshire Post. It was a ruin to be snooped: so conveniently close to York too.

He alighted the cream Rider York double-decker at Great Keld in the square beside the war memorial and noted wryly that Great Keld had clearly not been one of the seven “lucky” villages of England that did not have to raise a stone in memory of its war dead in the years after 1918. In fact, going by the size of the stone, and the generous number of names on four sides, Great Keld appeared to have suffered particularly badly in the “war to end all wars.” He walked past a parade of buildings which he felt had a 1920s or 1930s feel to it, shops with awnings and wares placed for inspection on the pavement, and then beyond the pasty grey road, he drove out between the gently undulating green of the Yorkshire Wolds. He left the road and followed a pathway beside a pasture in which a herd of Herefords grazed contentedly, black and white on the green, under the blue. Leaving the path, he picked his way through trees and shrubs and came across Pately Hall and did so quite suddenly, the garden having been colonised by the woodland and the ancient walls covered with ivy. But it was one of the great houses of the eighteenth century, distinct Palladian style, built, thought Joseph Kelly, just prior to the French wars, when the English gentry could afford such indulgences. Later the wars would bankrupt the gentry and allow the rise of trade and manufacture as a source of wealth for the English.

He found the first body hanging in the main hall. Just hanging there on a thin nylon cord which had been threaded through a chandelier which Joseph Kelly, experienced ruin snooper, knew would have been attached to a stout beam by means of heavy-gauge bolts and chains and would be well able to support the extra weight of what was a light and small and frail-looking human of the female sex. The other end of the cord was attached to the cast-iron fireplace surround which Joseph Kelly knew was also well able to support the weight of the dead woman. The hall was huge, and the length of the cord from fireplace to narrow neck was perhaps fifty feet. A very tall pair of stepladders lay on the floor, looking old, as if they belonged to the house, but they nonetheless explained how the cord had been threaded through the chandelier. Beneath the suspended body was a small upright chair, lying on its side as if having been pulled or kicked away, which indicated the way in which the deceased had been propelled into the hereafter. The deceased herself appeared to have a parchmentlike skin, a rotting flesh; there was a carpet of dead flies beneath her. Her time had not been yesterday.

Joseph Kelly pondered the body and then took his box Brownie and photographed it. It was the manner of the man. Ruin snooping had hardened him to surprise and had hardened him to death too, because this was not the first human corpse he had found. Often he came across the decaying corpses of men or women surrounded by a few meagre but twentieth-century artifacts such as plastic food containers or bottles of still-available alcohol: down-and-outs had sought shelter and had slept their final sleep. But this was the first suicide. If it was suicide.

The age first. Difficult to tell, because she was partly skeleton, but the impression was of a young woman in her twenties; the clothing was denim, cheap, now crumbling. Her hands were dangling beside her. The noose was of a simple circle, her feet were just six inches from the floor, allowing plenty of leverage to kick the chair away. But he thought it a terrible way to go, the way you’d kill someone if they didn’t know the difference between hanging and lynching. That in hanging there is a “drop,” causing the neck to snap and death to be instantaneous. In theory. Lynching, Joseph Kelly had once read, derives its name from Dr. Lynch of the University of Cambridge who, in the fourteenth century, put a noose around his son’s neck and suspended him from his study window, in full view of the people in the street below, until he expired. It can take fifteen minutes to die when being lynched, most of the time in a state of consciousness; and the neck is stretched. Here, the neck may have been long and swanlike in life or it may have been elongated as she died, flailing her arms and legs about, her feet just six inches from the floor.

Joseph Kelly left the room and walked a long, echoing, musty corridor with a vaulted ceiling. He entered a room at the back of the house and looked out. There was a motor vehicle, an old van, a Ford Escort van, that had been able to approach the house along a track that could be made out winding among the foliage. The tires were now deflated, the doors open.

The vehicle puzzled him. Had someone driven up to the house to commit suicide? Why then go into the house at all, what with all those good stout branches in the woodland surrounding the house? He had a sense of a story unfolding: Here amongst this decaying pile of grandeur was a much more recent decay and loss.

He returned to the corridor and climbed the back stairs. The corridors upstairs were narrower than the corridors on the ground floor, as he had found was most often the case in old houses, and he also found that the rooms, as most often happens, had been well coveted by birds and bats, the long-ago broken windows allowing them easy access.

The second body was also semi-skeletal. It was in a near-sitting position, propped up against the wall beneath a window. Male, by the clothing. Heavy footwear and a male wrist watch. Joseph Kelly photographed the body. He noticed a knife on the floorboard beside it, the blade still black with congealed blood. He photographed the knife as well.

Joseph Kelly then travelled the house, opening doors and cupboards, finding, as he occasionally did, silverware, porcelain, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clothing, but he was satisfied that there were no other corpses. He went outside to the rear of the house and examined the Ford Escort van. A length of cord similar in nature to the cord which suspended the first body was coiled in the rear of the van by the spare tire. The keys were in the ignition. All very strange.

Joseph Kelly walked away from the house and back towards the road, pausing en route to admire and photograph an ancient yew, which had clearly been planted on the platform when the original garden was laid out. He strolled back to Great Keld, and from a phone box in the square he phoned the police. “There is no great hurry,” he said. “None whatsoever... They’ve both been there for at least twelve months.”

Two constables in an area car collected Joseph Kelly. He was sitting where he said he would be sitting, on a bench outside a pub he could see from the phone box. “The Green Man,” he said. “I’ll be outside the Green Man.” As the car pulled up, he drained his pint of brown and mild and slid, as invited, into the rear seat. He directed the driver to the road he had taken to walk to Pately Hall and suggested a suitable place to leave the car when they came to the path by the field of Herefords. He took the constables to the house but declined to enter. A few moments later, the constables exited the house and approached him.

“Ever hear of criminal trespass?” one said icily as his colleague radioed to the Friargate Police Station in York that the caller had been genuine and that there were indeed two bodies, repeat two, and in one case the death seemed suspicious. The other, he said, may have been a suicide.

“Oh yes,” Joseph Kelly said, glancing over the facade of the house, noting, where the ivy allowed it to do, how it still glowed becomingly in the sun.

“And you’re not worried about being prosecuted?”

“No.” Kelly smiled. “No, I’ve done my homework. Ferreting around an old ruin of disputed ownership and not doing any damage is not trespass. The only property that can be trespassed upon without damage being done is the railway, because your presence is deemed a threat to the safety of the railway users. I’ve been exploring ruins all my life. I’ve been invited to leave the premises once or twice but never even threatened with prosecution for trespass because I do not damage or steal. Done my homework, like I said.”

“Halfway home.”

“Sorry, sir?” Carmen Pharoah glanced sideways at Ken Menninot.

“Nothing, just thinking aloud. I live in Beverley, this drive is taking me halfway home. Then we’ll have to return to York, then I’ll do this drive again, only I hope to complete it this evening.”

“Much better to live over the shop, sir. My journey to work is a brief walk of a few hundred yards. Buckingham Terrace to Friargate via Lendal Bridge. Ten minutes on a good day.”

“Not the right time of life anymore, Carmen. When you get married and start your family, you’ll know the value of living off the patch.”

“Yes...” Carmen Pharoah returned her gaze to the road. At thirty-two she heard her biological clock ticking ever more loudly. D.S. Menninot’s words had reached her... and Wesley hadn’t kept his word... She’d left Stoke Newington Police Station in London, where a black face is accepted, and with the promise of marriage humming a pleasant tune in her ears, had moved to York, where a black face is still an oddity. She had bought property and then Wesley had phoned her and said he’d been thinking... He thought he ought to make his first marriage work... and she was on her own. Again. Ken Menninot parked his car behind the Land Rover he recognised as belonging to Bill Hatch, which itself was parked behind an area car. A constable stood by the roadside, ready to escort them to the old house.

Bill Hatch bumbled out of the house as Ken Menninot and Carmen Pharoah emerged from the foliage. “Dead,” he said, smiling, brushing his wild hair from his eyes. He rested his black leather bag on the ground. “Oh yes, very dead.”

“Do tell.” Menninot smiled. “I recognise the expression of an intrigued pathologist from a hundred yards.”

“Intrigue is the word. Exactly how they died I can’t tell, but I would be surprised if the initial impression is not correct. The male in the upstairs room died of a stab wound to the chest, the female in the grand hall suffered death by strangulation with a ligature. But confirmation, and in what order they died and by whose fair hand, is, as yet, to be ascertained.” He wiped his brow. He was middle-aged and a little overweight, and suffered even in the mild April heat. “They’re both young... in their twenties, possibly early twenties. They’ve been dead for at least twelve months. Both were dark-haired. He was about five ten, and she a diminutive five nothing. About. I’ll have the bodies removed as soon as Scene of Crime has finished popping their flashbulbs and have them taken to the York City. Do you know if the mortuary van has arrived?”

“Not by the time we arrived,” Menninot answered. “Just your beloved Series One and the area car.”

“So I dare say you’ll like to go and view what you must view? Who’ll be representing the police at the P.M.?”

Menninot glanced at Carmen Pharoah. “Would you like to?”

“If you wish, sir.”

“I wish, I think. I’d like to root around here for a bit.”

“It’ll be more interesting than the P.M.” Bill Hatch said, glancing at the building. “Fascinating to walk around, in other circumstances.”

“Well, that’s rank.” Menninot smiled. “It has its privileges.”

Though he did not admit it openly, Ken Menninot very rapidly came to understand Joseph Kelly’s fascination. The opening of long-closed doors, the reaching back in time, the atmosphere, the spirits still in these vast rooms and endless corridors. He went to the rear of the house and then outside to where a Scene of Crime officer was examining the van for latents. Menninot asked him if he had found anything.

“Forlorn hope after this length of time, sir.” The man stepped out of the van and stood up. “I don’t know how long it’s been here with the door open, but long enough for a layer of dust to settle and obscure everything. But I’ll carry on. There’s some nylon cord in the rear. It looks to me to be the same as the type used by the girl who hanged herself — if that’s what happened. I’ve tagged it and I’ll get it up to Wetherby for analysis.”

“Good man. Would it disturb anything if I lifted the bonnet?”

“Not a thing, sir. I’ll get the catch for you, it’s in here somewhere.”

Menninot opened the bonnet and took a note of the chassis number to put through the NVLCC computer at Swansea. Menninot was only on his second cup of coffee when the result came through by fax. The vehicle was a Ford Escort van, black, registered owner was Max Farr, twenty-three years, Ripon Road, Jesmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

“A little local knowledge, please.” Menninot held the phone to the side of his head.

“Anything to oblige.” The officer of the Northumberland Police had a cheery attitude.

“Farr. Max Farr, Ripon Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Do you know him?”

“I’ll see.”

Menninot heard the unmistakable sound of a computer-terminal keyboard being tapped... a moment’s pause, then, “Yes, yes, we do know him. And so do you. Don’t you do local checks? He’s a mis per.”

“Probably not anymore,” Menninot said, feeling chastened for not doing local checks before phoning another police force.

“He was a student at York University. Reported missing in the summer the year before last, about twenty months ago. His file is cross-referenced to another mis per. Trixie Ellis, also a student, believed to be his girlfriend. Have you found their bodies perchance?”

“Perchance we have.” Menninot went over the nuts and bolts of the find at Pately Hall.

“Sounds ominous enough. But at least we’ll be able to put Mr. and Mrs. Farr out of their misery, though by now they’ll have accepted the worst. Prior to that, he wasn’t known to us. No record at all, a good lad, keeping his nose in the books. Do let us know if we can be of assistance.”

“Certainly we will, though I confess on my waters I think the only thing we’ll be asking you to do is break bad, but not by now unexpected, news to Mr. Farr and his lady wife.” Menninot replaced the phone and pressed a four-figure internal number. “Collator.”

“Sir?”

“Two files, please. One on Max Farr, a mis per of about twenty months ago. It’ll be cross-referenced to another mis per of the same date, one Trixie Ellis. On my desk as soon as.” Menninot glanced at the clock. Still only five p.m. A lot seemed to have happened since he and Carmen Pharoah were asked to go to a remote part of the Wold and rendezvous with two constables in an area car and a member of the public who had reported something suspicious.

The collator brought the files to Menninot. Both were thin, “mis per” only files, a single referral sheet, then nothing. When last seen, both Trixie Ellis and Max Farr had been living at 14 Doncaster Road, York.

Menninot went there. It was a rambling mid-Victorian terraced house which smelled of damp and Menninot fancied that it would be difficult to heat during the winter months.

“We thought they’d eloped.” The young woman blinked behind thick spectacles. She was of short, spindly appearance, very bookish, not for her the cocktail circuit. “They had the front room, they shared it, they were a very together couple. Big Max and Little Trixie. Him so big and her so small.”

“She was a small woman?”

“Oh, yes. She was self-conscious about it. She used to dress cheaply because she was able to buy children’s clothes, no tax, you see, but she really yearned to be taller. The police looked round their room when we realised that they hadn’t eloped, after about a week. But everything was normal, nothing had been packed, everything was there. A lot of cash too.”

“A lot?”

“Fifty pounds. That’s a lot. It would be to Max and Trixie. If they were going away they’d take that with them. They don’t come from wealthy backgrounds. Max’s father is a bank clerk, and Trixie’s dad is a coal miner. It was after exams, but they both still had some course work to address... Really it’s a wonder we didn’t get suspicious sooner.”

“Has their room been relet?”

“Yes, it has, to another couple. And their possessions, Max and Trixie’s that is, their possessions were removed by their parents. That was some few weeks and I mean some few weeks for the course.”

“Oh?”

“Well, that was the time Karen Ovenhouse was kidnapped. You must remember that?”

“I do.”

“She’s on the same course as me, same course that Max and Trixie were on, Medieval English. . Very small course, so we know each other well. Karen doesn’t have much to do with us, holds herself aloof a bit. . but she was on the course... sits in lectures, seminars. . She was abducted just before the exams. . then Max and Trixie vanished just after the exams. Then Karen turned up safe. . Talk about topsy-turvy. I was so glad to go home. Southampton never looked more welcoming.”

“Is that your hometown?”

“For my sins.”

“I see.” Menninot paused. “So Karen Ovenhouse would have known Max and Trixie?”

“Yes... a small course... But there was a bit of a class gap between Karen and the rest of us. We’re all lower middle class or working class. Karen is practically one step down from the Royal Family. But yes, they knew each other.”

“So, a close-knit course of students. Were you upset when Trixie and Max disappeared?”

“I’ll say — people don’t just vanish. But they did. Only Karen didn’t seem upset, but that’s her class, they’re taught from a very early age to control and conceal their emotions.”

“Interesting.” Menninot nodded. “Very interesting.”

Menninot returned to Friargate Police Station. He called in at the detective constables’ room to see if Carmen Pharoah had returned from York City Hospital. She had. He found her sitting at a desk compensating for the lessening of natural light by having switched on the low-wattage anglepoise light on her desk.

“I see you’re back from the P.M.?”

“Yes, sir.” She glanced up at him. “Just writing up Bill Hatch’s findings now. He’ll be faxing his report to us as soon as possible.”

“Can you give me the gist of it?”

“The male appears to have been stabbed in the heart.”

“He can tell that from such an old corpse?”

“Apparently so. The heart muscle is still identifiable, as is the damage caused by the knife, as is the dried blood still evident on the shirt. Death would have been instantaneous. He would have slumped back against the wall.”

“The manner in which he was found, in fact.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So what have we got, a murder/suicide? She kills him then strings herself up? Not unknown.” He glanced at a picture of a black woman in a green swimsuit, standing on a pebble beach beneath palm fronds, and in the background dark clouds of an approaching storm. “Who’s that? Your sister?”

“She’d love you for saying that! No, that’s my mum, taken on a beach in St. Kitts. I was an early child. Very early.”

“I see, so...”

“Well, it may not be so simple, sir. The woman had head injuries, a fractured skull. Probably not sufficient to kill her, but sufficient to render her unconscious, semiconscious at least.”

“Therefore not able to string herself up.”

“Exactly. That’s Bill Hatch’s opinion.”

“So, we’re looking at the hand of a third person in all this.”

Later, in his office, as the sun dipped fully beneath the skyline, Menninot closed the file on Karen Ovenhouse’s kidnapping and picked up the phone on his desk and dialed the D.C.’s room extension.

“D.C. Pharoah.”

“Carmen, Ken Menninot.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Busy?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Good. Grab your coat, we’re going to Leeds.”

“Leeds?”

“Leeds.”

“Karen was always so, so expensive.” The woman in the scarlet designer dress sniffed into her gin, her feet sunk in the deep pile carpet. Oil paintings hung on panelled walls; the room smelled of wood polish. This was Leeds beyond Soldier’s Field. This was Roundhay.

“Always expensive,” the man echoed. The leather armchair in which he sat squeaked each time he moved. He stroked a Persian cat which lay curled up in his lap. “Not like you, my sweet.”

The woman scowled. “I want to be expensive. I am expensive.”

“I was talking to the cat.”

“Men wouldn’t look at me when I was carrying her.” The woman addressed Menninot and ignored Carmen Pharoah. “So we didn’t have another one. I wouldn’t.”

“Bought cats instead,” mumbled the man.

“Sent her off to school as soon as she was seven.”

“As soon as she was seven. Off she went.”

“Then to university when she was eighteen.”

“From school to university.”

“We had to pay the fees, of course. No grant for the likes of us, for the likes of her. We’re monied, you see.”

“Monied,” echoed the man.

“Then she gets herself kidnapped. Foolish girl. Paid the ransom. Police advised against it, but we paid anyway. One million pounds.”

“Solved the problem, you see,” the man said without taking his eyes off the cat. “She came back, dirty, wanting a bath and a meal. But otherwise unscathed. So our life could proceed.”

“Proceed.” This time it was the woman who echoed.

Ken Menninot and Carmen Pharoah stood and saw themselves out of the Ovenhouse residence. They doubted that their departure was noticed.

The following afternoon, when D.S. Menninot and D.C. Pharoah were once again both working the afternoon shift and so were able to pick up the case, they interviewed Karen Ovenhouse in the dean’s office, at the dean’s invitation, but in his absence.

“I felt they owed me,” Karen Ovenhouse said calmly.

“You would have got more if you had waited to inherit in the fullness of time,” Menninot replied, equally calmly. “I mean, we’ve visited your parents... what they must be worth...”

“That’s it, you see, that’s the motivation. I’m not going to inherit anything.”

“You’ve been disinherited?”

“No, there’s just nothing to inherit. There wouldn’t have been anything to inherit if I had waited until they expired of old age. Short of murdering them, that is.”

“Explain.”

“Well, the house, the contents, it’s all show. My father’s business collapsed and he sold the house and its valuable contents to a finance company on the basis that they continue to live out their lives there... so they keep the image, remain the envy of their friends... They got two million pounds for that house of theirs. Half for me is not unreasonable. They don’t want a fuss, so they paid. I knew they would.”

“Where’s the money now?”

“In my bank account. Confess the manager’s eyes opened when I paid the money in. But there had been no publicity, so no one knew that Karen Ovenhouse had been kidnapped. Better than his customers going into the red. It’s in a high-yield account.”

“So what happened in the house? I mean the ruin. Pately Hall?”

“Is that what it’s called?”

Karen Ovenhouse was a tall, slender woman; in terms of appearance she was more of a businesswoman than an undergraduate. The Cartier watch, the gold bracelet, the pinstriped suit. “Well, they got greedy, dare say, it’s the old, old story. I offered them ten thousand pounds each. For them and their background that’s very big money. They had to take zero risk, the plan couldn’t go wrong. We picked up the ransom using his van and got back to the house... When they found out how much money was involved, they wanted more. He, Big Max, came at me with the knife... I don’t know what happened... There was a struggle...”

“Very convenient,” Menninot said coldly. “In fact, the truth of it is that you got rid of them as soon as you had the ransom.”

“Believe what you want to believe. We had a fight and she hit her head. I thought she was dead so I made it look like suicide.”

“That actually killed her. At this stage, I have to caution you that if you do now mention anything...”

“No need.” Karen Ovenhouse held up her hand. “I’ll confess. I’ll confess to everything, the ransom, my own kidnapping... I’ll do ten years... half of it in an open prison. My million pounds will have nearly doubled by then and I’ll still be in my early thirties. I can cope with that.”

“You don’t keep that. The law prohibits you from profiting from a crime.”

Colour drained from Ovenhouse’s face.

“It’ll be confiscated, ‘sequestered’ is the correct term,” Menninot continued. “And it will be easy enough to trace since you told us it’s in a bank account in your name. A false name, or an overseas account, and we might have a problem.”

“I didn’t know that. I thought...”

“You’re right about the other bit, though... the ten years... And I’d say that’s minimum... And I wouldn’t bank on the open prison either.”

Joseph Kelly sat in his small flat poring over an Ordnance Survey map of South Downs. There was a ruin there, just to the north of Brighton. One day to get down there, one day snooping, one day to get back...

Copyright © 2012 by Peter Turnbull

Old Man Gloom

by David Edgerley Gates

David Edgerley Gates belongs to a rare breed: He’s a short-fiction specialist, and has received two nominations for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award and one for the Shamus Award for his stories. His tales are often of novella length and always involve a vivid depiction of his chosen setting, which is usually the American Southwest. This month he brings back the character featured in his last story for EQMM (see “The Lion of the Chama” 12/03), retired lawman Benny Salvador.

That year Aurora was one of the little Glooms who gather at Zozobra’s skirts. She was thirteen. Her sister Angelina, at fourteen, liked to pretend she was too grown up for such things, but she fussed over Aurora’s costume all the same, and when Fiesta came, she was as excited as any other child, anticipating the fireworks blooming in the night sky.

They got there early, Benny and Teresa and the girls. Aurora had been to rehearsals, but she wanted to be sure she was well ahead of time.

Teresa let her skitter away.

“She’ll be fine,” Benny said. He knew his wife was afraid she’d lose Aurora in the crowd. He had to admit that he was too, but God had given them wings to fly. You had to put your fears aside. You bent the bow, children were arrows. Anything that might have happened to them before was history.

“What if she has to pee?” Angelina asked him.

“You’re asking me?” He had to take a leak himself.

It was the weekend after Labor Day. The war had been over for two years. Benny Salvador was still sheriff in Rio Arriba. Connie Navarro, the girls’ mom, was working down south in Albuquerque, and visited every weekend. Their father, Victor, was up in Hanford. He tried to get back every few weeks, but to all intents and purposes, Benny and Teresa were their parents.

Teresa had delivered two babies, stillborn, so the Navarro girls were her lifeline. His, as well. You played the cards you’d been dealt, in life or at the table, and occasionally you drew a good hand. Benny felt the deck had been kind to him, so far.

Zozobra was a marionette, thirty feet tall. He had a papier-mâché head and sticks for arms, draped in a tall white gown. People wrote their grievances on little slips of paper, and they were stuffed inside the puppet, so when the puppet burned, your grief went up in smoke, it was hoped. A new tradition, not as old as Fiesta itself, which dated back to De Vargas and the eighteenth century. Zozobra had been invented by a Santa Fe artist named Will Shuster, based on a Yaqui tribal ritual, an effigy of Judas, paraded through the village and then destroyed, with his sins. It had a primitive appeal, cathartic and celebratory, and Benny found it somehow reassuring. He’d long since lost his faith in the Catholic church, and avoided Mass. Aurora’s First Communion was next on the immediate horizon. Benny knew he’d be bullied into submitting to it by the women in his life.

At dusk, bonfires were lit around the stage. The little Glooms danced at Zozobra’s feet. The monster puppet dipped his head and groaned, flailing his arms. Then it was full dark, and Old Man Gloom himself fell to the torch.

Zozobra burned, his groans louder and more anguished. The pyrotechnics inside him began to explode, so not only did he burn, he sent off pinwheels of sparks. Then the skyrockets and Roman candles lit up. The audience laughed and applauded.

Off to his left, Benny heard three sharp reports. Even with the fireworks onstage, he knew gunshots. He told Teresa to stay with the girls and worked his way through the press.

Santa Fe PD had a presence, for security and crowd control, and they’d responded first. Benny was glad to see Johnny Lee Montoya there too. Johnny was a captain with the state police, and he and Benny went back.

The cops had established a perimeter. Benny and Johnny Lee showed them their shields, and were allowed in.

“What happened?” Benny asked the senior sergeant.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” the Santa Fe cop said. He knew Benny Salvador by reputation.

“You have a shooter?” Johnny Lee asked.

“No, sir.” The sergeant knew Montoya for another hard-ass.

He’d let the chain of command bump heads.

“What are you doing here?” Benny asked Johnny Lee.

“Same as you, celebrating Fiesta with my kids,” Johnny told him. He smiled. “Aurora was terrific.”

Benny nodded. He looked at the sergeant. “Anything?”

“We’re trying to canvass witnesses, and we’re looking for a throw-down,” the sergeant said. He meant a discarded weapon.

“It’s not our jurisdiction, Benny,” Johnny Lee said to him.

“Anywhere my girls are at risk is my jurisdiction,” Benny said. He looked at the sergeant again. “All due respect, but I could use a word with the investigating officers.”

“No problem, Sheriff,” the sergeant said, only too happy to hand this one off. “Homicide dicks are on the way.”

“ID on the victim?” Benny asked.

The sergeant shook his head.

Benny knelt down. The dead man was an elderly Japanese.

Three in the chest, DOA when he hit the ground. He was wearing an old suit, much repaired. His hat was a few feet away. Benny stood up. “Your crime scene,” he said to the Santa Fe cop.

As if he were doing the guy a favor. No such luck.

Dean Norris didn’t like Benny Salvador stepping on his toes. And he didn’t much care for the state police presence either. Johnny Lee Montoya had pull with the governor’s office. But it was a Santa Fe PD homicide case, and Benny was Rio Arriba, out in the sticks. He could show an interest, but he had no real reason to be involved. Neither did Montoya. Lieutenant Norris made every effort to make this clear, short of telling them they could butt out.

They were in the detective bullpen on the second floor of police headquarters, in the municipal building. It was Saturday morning, the day after the burning of Zozobra.

“Not a lot I can tell you,” the homicide commander said. “We don’t have much more than we had last night. It was a big crowd, it was dark, everybody was watching the show, and none of them saw the shooting.”

“Anything we can do to help,” Montoya said.

“I appreciate that,” Norris told him.

“You identify the victim?” Benny asked.

“His family did. Takeshi Minamoto, age seventy-three. Guy was a peach farmer, on the Embudo, your neck of the woods.”

“What was he doing down in Santa Fe?”

Norris shrugged. “Looking for the party,” he said.

“Was he by himself?” Benny asked.

“Far as we know. His daughter tells us he got in his truck yesterday afternoon and drove off.”

“Okay,” Benny said. “Keep us posted. We turn anything up, we’ll let you know.”

“Good enough,” the homicide dick said. He didn’t want to give Rio Arriba or the states a marker, but it had gone unspoken that a murder is solved in the first seventy-two hours, or the trail goes cold. If the sheriff came up with anything workable, it was all to the good.

Benny and Johnny Lee went down to the street.

“Something on your mind?” Johnny Lee asked.

“The cop upstairs thinks we’re looking for credit on his arrest, if he makes one,” Benny said. “You looking for points?”

“I’m not as hungry as I used to be.”

“I don’t fault him for ambition,” Benny said. “If the guy wants to get ahead, more power to him.”

“You just don’t want it to get in the way.”

Benny nodded. “We’ll take what comes,” he said.

“What else?” Johnny Lee asked him.

“Japanese are generally close, in terms of family.”

“Just like Norteños,” Johnny Lee said.

“The old guy gets in his truck and drives away, and doesn’t tell his daughter anything. That’s uncharacteristic.”

“Unless he’s keeping something from her.”

“What’s the big thing about Fiesta?” “Tradition,” Johnny Lee said.

Benny shook his head. “Crowds,” he said.

“I see where you’re going. If the old man wants to meet somebody, and he wants to keep it a secret, he comes to Fiesta. Who notices, all the people in the streets?”

“Question is, who did he want to meet with?” Benny asked.

Twenty miles upriver from Española there was a cluster of small towns, Velarde, Dixon, Peñasco, along the banks of the Embudo, a tributary of the Rio Grande. It was orchard country, and an acequia system kept the farmland well watered. Peaches, apples, pears, and apricots, grapevines and lavender, piñon and pecans.

First cultivated by the Pueblo, then settled by the Spanish; the Minamoto family were relative latecomers.

Three generations, Emily Minamoto told Benny. They were walking under the peach trees, heavy with fruit, ready for their second harvest of the season.

Benny was only a kitchen gardener, himself, but he could appreciate Emily’s connection to the earth. There was something gravitational about it.

“Did your father emigrate from Japan?” Benny asked.

“No, he was born here.”

Nisei, she meant, second-generation. Emily herself was Sansei, or third-generation, pretty much assimilated, which her English name suggested.

“It didn’t keep us out of internment,” she said.

Benny had known this was coming from the beginning. Out of courtesy, he’d waited for her to bring it up.

“I was in eighth grade,” Emily said.

Fourteen, he thought. Angelina’s age.

“They let us bring one suitcase apiece.”

American citizens, behind barbed wire, armed guards on the perimeter.

“My father still practiced Shinto,” she said, smiling. “I was educated by the nuns, so I was a Catholic.”

The camp had been located at the western edge of the Santa Fe city limits, on a hillside overlooking what later became a national cemetery, where many veterans of the Pacific war were buried, some of them survivors of the Bataan Death March. Benny was aware of the ironies.

“It wasn’t easy, but it was livable,” Emily said. “My brother told me they got to play softball, listen to the World Series on the radio. Then he enlisted in the Nisei brigade. He was killed at Monte Cassino.”

It was the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.

They’d been awarded more Purple Hearts than any other outfit in Europe. The 442nd had fought in Italy, and into France. They had something to prove, so the conventional wisdom went.

“You know what’s hard,” she said. “It’s hard to come back and pick up the pieces. My father was Japanese, culturally, but I thought of myself as an American.”

“I can’t repair the damage,” Benny said.

“I’m not asking you to,” Emily said. “I’m wondering why we went through all of this, and then my father gets shot.”

“I’m wondering the same thing,” Benny said.

“Is it racial bias?”

“Possibly.”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“What was he doing in Santa Fe?” Benny asked.

“He didn’t tell me,” Emily said.

“That makes two of us,” Benny said.

Benny hadn’t gone to war, but the war had come to New Mexico.

The secret city up at Los Alamos, the Japanese relocation camps, the Navajo Code Talkers. Much of it under wraps, still.

“We’re boxing with shadows,” he said to Johnny Lee Montoya.

“The War Department won’t give anything up.”

“When did they ever? I thought you had an in with Groves.” He meant the guy who’d spearheaded the Manhattan Project.

“Groves is a lieutenant general these days. He walks with the gods. Mere mortals are beneath his notice.”

“So we’ve got no chips we can call in?”

Benny mulled it over. “What about the FBI?” he asked.

Johnny Lee had had a prickly relationship with the Bureau during the war. They were security-conscious, jealous of their prerogatives, and dismissive of local “hick” law.

“I was thinking maybe Gideon Horace,” Benny said.

Johnny Lee sucked on his teeth. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said. “But worth a shot, anyway.” Horace had been with the Albuquerque office. Not the senior man, the AIC, but not the lowest-ranking guy either. Montoya thought he was even halfway human, an exception to the culture of mental constipation that generally characterized the Feds. “I heard he’s been reassigned to the Big Rez, up in Farmington.”

“Give him a call?”

“Sure,” Johnny Lee said. “What are you going to be doing?”

“I’ll try the back door,” Benny said.

The so-called relocation camps had been run by INS, with staff recruited locally. Benny thought it would be easy enough to track down some guys who’d worked the guard duty at the Santa Fe camp. He went over to the VFW on Montezuma.

“Yeah, my brother Oscar, matter of fact,” Fidelio Ramirez told him. Fidelio was working the stick, and offered Benny a beer. Benny hesitated, and then said yes. Fidelio drew him a long frosty. “He was kind of, what’s the word? Chagrined, when the Army turned him down in ’forty-two. Couldn’t pass the eye exam.”

“You active duty, yourself?” Benny asked.

“National Guard, the Philippines,” Fidelio said. “You know what I’m saying?”

Benny nodded. Fidelio had survived the Death March.

“We were stationed at Clark Field. Anti-aircraft was outgunned by the Zeroes. They hit the B-17’s right on the deck. We faded into the jungle, and MacArthur, that windbag, got on a PT boat and beat it for Australia.” Fidelio shook his head. “We held out until April. Dysentery, malaria. The drizzly shits and no quinine. The worst with the watery bowels, see, it ain’t the squirts so much, it’s how it makes your skin raw, the inside of your legs. Then you try walking seventy-five miles.”

Five thousand men died because they couldn’t keep up, shot or bayoneted, disemboweled, beaten to death.

“I was at a hundred and seventy-two pounds when I enlisted. I weighed ninety pounds when I was liberated,” Fidelio said.

How much had he aged? Benny wondered. Three years as a POW translated in physical terms to ten or twelve, he’d heard. So if Fidelio were thirty, he actually looked forty. He’d given up ten years of his life in the Philippines.

“We figured we were dead meat. After we surrendered, the Japanese thought we’d dishonored ourselves. They didn’t respect us as soldiers.”

“How’d you feel about them?” Benny asked him.

“How do you think I felt? I hated their guts.”

“What about the Japanese who were interned stateside?”

“Apples and oranges,” Fidelio said. “Those people weren’t Japs, they were Americans. Not to mention that a bunch of their kids died fighting for this country.”

Benny didn’t know if everybody was as forgiving as Fidelio.

“Your brother Oscar think the same?”

Fidelio shrugged. “Ask him,” he said.

“All right,” Benny said.

“See, the news stories about Bataan didn’t start coming out until later, because of wartime censorship, but I see where you’re going with this. You want to know if there were any hard feelings. Were people in the camps mistreated?”

If their treatment wasn’t inhumane, it was still demeaning. They lost their possessions, they were separated from their families, they were herded together into tarpaper shacks. Maybe he was fishing in the wrong pond, but Benny was still fishing.

“Thing is, there were casualties after the fact too,” Fidelio told him. “Three-and-a-half years on rice and rat meat, it takes a toll. Some guys got home, they died the first year back. They never recovered. And their families see what it did to them? Yeah. somebody might hold a grudge.”

Or want to make it look that way, Benny thought.

New Mexico boys had taken a disproportionately high hit. There were a lot of names on war memorials, some commissioned by the state, others put up with private contributions in smaller towns like Truchas and Alcalde.

Oscar Ramirez lived in Truchas, between Española and Taos, but he worked at Los Alamos, the Hilltop, local people called it, or simpler still, the Labs. The place had outgrown itself twice over from its early start in ’43, when it was known as Site Y, and security had been so tight it didn’t exist on paper.

These days, instead of Quonset huts and barbed wire, it was closer to becoming an actual town, with public schools and paved roads and open access. Many areas were still, of course, highly restricted, and the military presence was significant, but Benny met Oscar in an ordinary coffee shop.

“What do you do here?” Benny asked him.

“Maintenance,” Oscar said.

Well, that covered a multitude of sins. Benny knew better than to inquire further. Even a janitor had a clearance, on the Hilltop. You mopped up secrets.

“I talked to your brother Fidelio, down in Santa Fe,” Benny said. “He bought me a beer at the VFW.”

Oscar nodded. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and a wary look.

“You were a guard at the internment camp during the war.”

Oscar nodded again, but was obviously puzzled.

“I wanted to get a handle on what it was like, the internal dynamic,” Benny said.

“The who?” Oscar asked.

“How it was, who did what, the general climate. Was there any prejudice, was there any sympathy? What was the demeanor of the Japanese? Were they resentful?”

“They played a lot of softball,” Oscar Ramirez told him.

Which is what Emily Minamoto had said. “They any good?” he asked.

“Yeah, they were real good. They could hit it over the fence. We’d go pick up the ball and toss it back to them. They only had the use of one.”

“So your relationship was friendly, more or less?”

“Why not? They were mostly teenagers, and old farts.”

“What about their families?”

“What families?” Oscar shook his head. “The camp in Santa Fe was segregated. Men only.”

“What happened to the women and kids?”

“No idea,” Oscar said.

Benny digested this. Emily hadn’t told him she’d been sent somewhere else. “Tell me about the Nisei brigade,” he said.

“Army recruiters came in. Anybody who was draft age jumped at the chance, same as I would have.”

“Bother you?”

“Bother me, why?”

“You were Four-F, poor eyesight. They fought in your place, a bunch of Japs.”

“You trying to piss me off?”

“I appreciate what happened to your brother.”

“You don’t have a clue,” Oscar said. He stood up.

“You know a guy named Takeshi Minamoto?” Benny asked.

“Tashi? Sure,” Oscar said. “He’s a fruit farmer. Me and some of the other kids, we used to help him with the peach harvest, we were fifteen, sixteen years old. Hard money, but we worked for it.”

“He was in the camp.”

“What are you getting at? They said he was an enemy alien, which is baloney. He broke his ass, dawn to dusk.”

“He got shot dead in Santa Fe the night before last.”

“What?”

“I want to find out if it’s racially motivated.”

“And you’re coming to me?”

Benny was beyond embarrassment. “Give me something, Oscar. So far, I’ve got nothing.”

“I told you, there’s nothing to get.”

“I don’t buy it,” Benny said. “If you and your brother harbor no ill will toward the Japanese, you must be the only two guys this side of Tokyo.”

“Get lost,” Oscar said, and walked away.

The MPs stopped him on his way out of town and escorted him to the provost marshal’s office.

“What’s your business here, Sheriff?” the major asked him.

“It’s not Army business,” Benny said. “All due respect.”

“With all due respect, that’s my decision,” the major said. “I’m responsible for security on this installation.”

Benny thought about whether to play it hard or easy. “Take me into custody, you feel you’ve got the authority,” he said.

“Let’s not be hasty,” another voice drawled.

The soldiers jumped to attention, and Benny turned. It was Groves, in the flesh, in uniform, all three stars.

“You’re like the clap, Benny, you’re hard to get rid of, but I’m in your debt,” the general said. “Care to tell me how I can help?”

“It’s not a security question,” Benny said.

“Even better,” Groves said.

They stepped outside, onto the porch. The afternoon was clear and hot, the sky cloudless, the air still and dry. Benny rolled a smoke. The post CQ was just across the street from Fuller Lodge and what had once been known as Bathtub Row, where the senior Manhattan Project scientists and their families, like Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, had been quartered.

“Have you thought about the consequences?” Benny asked.

“You mean bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” Groves shook his head. “It ended the war. You know what kind of casualties we would have taken if we’d had to invade the Home Islands? The Japanese would have fought to the last man, woman, and child.”

The estimate, Benny had heard, was that the U.S. would have suffered a million dead.

“You know, the object was to beat Hitler to the bomb,” the general told him. “More than a few of the men who worked here were German refugee Jews. They understood it was a real danger. But after Germany surrendered, the air went out of their tires, and some of them, Oppenheimer included, didn’t think there was a practical use for the weapon.”

“Obviously, you disagreed.”

Groves gave him a level look. “I hope you’re not going all gooey on me, Sheriff,” he said.

“No, the Japanese had to be beaten, one way or another.”

“What are you doing here, Benny?” Groves asked.

Benny told him about the murder victim, Tashi Minamoto, and the Ramirez brothers.

“You think it goes back to the Jap relocation camps?”

“My guess. Bad blood.”

“They got a raw deal.”

“Why weren’t Germans and Italians interned?”

“You’re being naive,” Groves said.

“Okay, it was about the Yellow Peril,” Benny said.

“There was a war on,” Groves reminded him.

“The war’s over.”

“Maybe not for everybody,” Groves said.

“That’s my point,” Benny said.

“I understood you the first time.”

“What are you doing here, General?” Benny asked.

“Taking a victory lap,” Groves said.

“You deserve it.”

“I do,” Groves said, with a wry smile. “But the plain fact is, I’ve made a lot of enemies. I’m resigning from the Army.”

“A man can be judged on the strength of his enemies,” Benny said. “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Didn’t say I did.”

Benny stubbed out his cigarette, and they shook hands.

“Good luck, Sheriff,” Groves said.

“Good luck to you, General.”

“I’ve been twice blessed,” Groves said. “I got to build the Pentagon, and I built Los Alamos. You don’t get lucky three times. It tempts the gods.”

Groves and Oppenheimer had tempted the gods, and beaten them. “What was it Oppenheimer said, after the first successful bomb test?” Benny asked, although he already knew the answer.

Oppenheimer had said, I am become death.

“You should be wary of too much philosophy,” Groves said.

“Only if it conceals a falsehood,” Benny said.

But what was the lie? Nobody had told him a deliberate untruth, or nothing he could put his finger on.

“Why don’t you believe the Ramirez brothers?” Teresa asked.

“Their story doesn’t ring true.”

“You’re suspicious by nature. Simplest is best.”

Simplest was always best. He knew that from forty years of law-enforcement experience.

“Oscar told you he picked fruit on the Minamotos’ farm when he was a teenager,” she said. “So he knew Emily’s father.”

“He knew him at the camp in Santa Fe too,” Benny said.

“Then it’s more likely he did him favors than bullied him,” Teresa said.

“Smuggled his letters past the censors? Or made sure he had warm clothing in the winter, something extra to eat?” Benny nodded. “That’s if you take Oscar at face value.”

“Why would Oscar wait two years?”

“Good point. Then again, why would anybody? There must have been any number of opportunities to stick it to an internee back during the war, when they were locked up.”

“But you do think that’s what this is about?”

“It makes the most sense.”

“You know better than to construct a theory and then make the evidence fit after the fact,” she reminded him. “You’ve got too many loose ends.”

“Not every story we wish to be true is false,” Benny said.

“Well, where to start?” Gideon Horace asked them. It was a rhetorical question. The FBI agent had agreed to meet Benny and Johnny Lee in Tierra Amarilla, the Rio Arriba county seat, halfway between Farmington and Española, far enough off the beaten path they wouldn’t attract attention. Horace, of course, was required to report any official contact with local law.

This was off the record. Background only.

“The women probably got sent to Manzanar, in the Sierra Nevada,” he said. “Not exactly a garden spot, but the camps in general were located away from population centers.” He looked at Benny. “I’m not saying right or wrong, it’s how it was. The War Department made the call.”

“How did they decide who went where?” Benny asked him.

“It was pretty arbitrary,” Horace said. “Japanese from Hawaii, say, were sent to the mainland. More of a risk of fifth column, is my guess. Pacific fleet had been decimated at Pearl Harbor. In any event, internees were categorized according to perceived risk. Were they loyal to the Empire of Japan, or were they loyal to the United States?”

“Why was there a question?”

“Japanese were thought to have a racial bias.”

“You believed that?”

“Better safe than sorry.”

Benny nodded. “What were the categories?” he asked.

“There were the die-hard imperialists, Bushido, the Rising Sun, all that eyewash. They wound up in Army custody, POWs, in effect. Then there were people who got classified as possible security risks because they wouldn’t renounce their Japanese citizenship, first-generation, for the most part. And of course there were kids who got released when they agreed to serve in the U.S. military. But there was a lot of mix and match, and a certain amount of tension. Most people went along with the program, and some of them got beaten up because they were seen as collaborators, or the rumor went around they were getting preferential treatment. It depended on who did what, or who got did to.”

“How did a fruit farmer from Embudo find himself shut up in a camp as an enemy alien?” Benny asked.

“He had the bad luck to be Japanese,” the FBI agent said.

“How much trouble got stirred up?” Johnny Lee asked him.

“Internally? We had an ugly incident in Santa Fe. A bunch of bad apples got transferred in from Tule Lake. They had shaved heads, they did regimented calisthenics, they behaved like they were in the Nip army. In fact, most of them chose to be repatriated to Japan after the war. They were hoodlums. They thought the rest of the internees had shamed themselves by giving in to relocation.”

“What happened?” Benny asked.

“They started a ruckus. Had to be broken up with tear gas and night sticks. Heads got cracked. Thankfully, nobody got dead, either side. You have to understand that the older guys, guys who’d been in the camp three or four years, they were terrified of these fanatics. Hell, they had a Suicide Squad. You crossed them, it was banzai. You wound up getting your ass handed to you, and if you were lucky, it was still in two pieces instead of six or eight.”

“What happened afterwards?” Johnny Lee asked.

“Ringleaders got shipped out to the Fort Stanton stockade.”

“Things settle down after that?”

“Pretty much.”

Johnny Lee looked at Benny. “Goes against the conventional wisdom,” he said. “That the Japanese were passive.”

“They don’t sound very passive,” Benny said.

“They’re not a passive race,” Horace said.

“We back to that?” Benny asked.

“That’s not what I meant,” Horace said. “I meant that, as a culture, they don’t like to suffer embarrassment. They have a pride in themselves.”

“Don’t we all,” Benny said.

“What are you looking for, Sheriff?” Horace asked.

“An answer I can understand.”

“Easy answers are hard to come by.”

“I didn’t imagine it would be easy,” Benny said.

“You think we’re barking up the wrong tree?” Johnny Lee asked.

“I think you can’t catch smoke in a bag,” Benny said.

“What do you want to do?”

“Go back to Santa Fe PD. See if they’ve turned anything up on the crime scene.”

“Homicide squad won’t be glad to see us.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Johnny Lee smiled and shook his head. “You ever get tired of being a pain in the ass?” he asked.

“Not a bit of it,” Benny said to him.

“Me either,” Johnny Lee said. “Let us go amongst them.”

“Eight millimeter shell casings.”

“Which suggests what?”

“Jap gun,” the detective said. “Probably a Nambu, souvenir pistol somebody brought back from the Pacific.”

“Interesting,” Benny said.

“Yeah,” Norris said. “Not that it gets us any further.”

“Still no witnesses?” Johnny Lee asked.

The cop shook his head. “Everybody was watching Zozobra burn,” he said. “The killing took place behind their backs. It might as well have happened in a vacuum.”

Benny nodded. “Crowds,” he said to Johnny Lee.

“You got something going?” Norris asked him.

“The old guy arranged to meet somebody, is what I think,” Benny said. “They did it at Zozobra because nobody would notice them, with all the people.”

“Why keep it a secret?”

“Guilt, maybe.”

“What was Minamoto guilty of?”

“He was Japanese.”

“You think it was a race crime?”

“I meant the Japanese take personal shame very seriously,” Benny said. “Minamoto was old-school. He may have been looking to atone for something.”

“You didn’t tell me your family was separated,” Benny said.

“It didn’t occur to me,” Emily said.

He was familiar with this habit of mind. If it was a thing everybody had common knowledge of, that made it unremarkable.

“Tommy joined the Army, and my mother and I were released.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen forty-three. We still had to report to INS once a month.”

They were standing by the cenotaph at the edge of the national cemetery. Emily put her hand on the warm stone. Her brother’s name was engraved there, along with many others. They were buried overseas, but their names were here.

“A lifetime ago,” she said, sadly.

For these guys, Benny thought. “When you were released, why wasn’t your father released as well?” he asked. “He didn’t present a danger.”

“He felt he had an obligation.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The camp in Santa Fe was self-governed, to a degree.”

“How much of a degree?”

“More than you might think,” Emily said. “Because of its size, and the number of internees, there were frictions, and they turned to some of the older men, like my father, who formed grievance committees, to see that people were treated fairly.”

“So your father worked with the camp administration.”

“Both sides respected him.”

“Did they offer to let him out?”

“Early in ’forty-four.”

“Why didn’t he take the deal?”

“Because of the hard-liners,” Emily said. Kibei, she explained, American-born Japanese who’d gone back to Japan for their education, and then returned to the U.S. As a group, they tended to resist assimilation.

“I heard that after some of them got transferred in from Tule Lake, there was trouble,” Benny said. “Your father wind up in the middle of it?”

Emily nodded. “They called him a traitor to the Emperor.”

“Your father was an American citizen.”

She smiled, without humor. “So he was.”

Benny shook his head. “What a can of worms,” he said.

“It was a difficult time.”

“Everybody fought their own war,” Benny said.

“We did,” Emily said. She glanced at the memorial.

“Who took care of the farm while your family was interned?” he asked her.

“Our neighbors,” she said. “We’ve always helped each other out, then and now.”

“And they wanted nothing in return, when you came back?”

“We share the land, we share the water rights, we share the labor,” she said. “Come harvest time, everybody pitches in.”

Even a kid with Coke-bottle glasses? he thought to himself. “You remember a guy named Oscar Ramirez?” he asked.

“Sure,” Emily said. This time her smile was unrehearsed.

“What?” Benny asked.

The smile stayed in her eyes. “Oscar had a terrible crush on me, I’m afraid,” she said. “He never spoke up, of course. I knew how he felt, it just wasn’t in the cards.”

“Cultural differences?”

Emily shot him a sharp look. “No,” she said.

“Excuse me,” Benny said. The question still hovered.

Emily cleared her throat. “Oscar’s a sweet person,” she said. “He’s sincere, he’s honest, he’s a good catch. The plain truth is, I’m not attracted to him, or not that way.”

“Which isn’t what he wants to hear.”

“Who does?”

“He was a guard at the Santa Fe camp,” Benny said.

Emily kept her gaze level, face front. “I wasn’t about to break Oscar’s heart to get my father preferential treatment,” she said. “People do a lot of things, out of necessity. We all disappoint ourselves.”

“Which wasn’t a compromise you were willing to make.”

“For my own sake, I might have, but Oscar deserved better.”

“What if he’s still in love with you?” Benny asked.

“I wouldn’t betray that,” she said.

“You think it’s all he has left?”

“Oscar’s entitled to his feelings,” Emily said.

About those feelings, Benny realized Oscar probably wouldn’t be forthcoming, especially since Benny had already rubbed him the wrong way, but there was no helping that. Benny could only hope a second interview might go better than the first.

In the event, he got lucky, because Oscar’s brother Fidelio called him.

The three of them met at the VFW. This time it was Benny’s turn to buy the first round.

Oscar, it turned out, was embarrassed. “My brother figures I owe you an apology,” he said to Benny.

“No need,” Benny told him.

“Caught me off-guard, you telling me Tashi Minamoto was dead. It hit a little close to home. And the way you asked the questions, you got my back up.”

“Man’s only doing his job,” Fidelio said.

“You find out who killed him?” Oscar asked Benny.

Benny shook his head. “Not yet,” he said.

“You include us out?” Fidelio asked.

Is that what this was about? Benny wondered. “I don’t have a reason to include you in,” he said.

“Well, there’s Bataan,” Fidelio said.

Benny looked at Oscar. “Tell me about the riot,” he said.

Oscar pulled a face. “Those guys were trouble from the get-go,” he said. “They were a gang. They intimidated the old guys. The young guys had all joined up, like Tommy Minamoto, so there was nobody left to stand up to the muscle-heads.”

“Tommy’s father,” Benny said.

Oscar nodded. “Tashi had brass balls. He wasn’t afraid of making enemies. He knew who his friends were.”

“Friends come and go,” Benny said. “Enemies accumulate.”

He’d meant to ask Oscar about Emily, but in the end he thought better of it. There was no purpose in rubbing salt into old wounds.

“You had a major running security at Los Alamos,” Benny said.

“Peer de Silva,” Groves said. “He made lieutenant colonel, before the war ended.”

Groves was back in Washington. Benny was both surprised and pleased he’d taken his call. “Is de Silva still in military intelligence?” he asked.

There was a pause. Benny could sense Groves smiling. “You must be cashing in that favor, Sheriff,” he said.

“In late ’forty-three or early ’forty-four, two or three dozen Japanese nationalists were released from Army custody at Tule Lake, and reassigned to the internment camp at Santa Fe, where they caused some fair amount of grief.”

“I’ve heard the story,” Groves said.

“They were returned to Army custody for the duration. What happened to them after V-J Day?”

“They were sent back to Japan.”

“All of them?”

“What’s your question, Benny?”

“I want a list of their names, and the disposition of their cases.”

“That would take months.”

“I don’t have months,” Benny said. “Colonel de Silva has access to the classified records, and you’ve got a few chips you can call in.”

He could tell the general was making careful notes of their conversation. “Anything else?” Groves asked.

“Current location,” Benny said.

“Needles in a haystack.”

“I mean whether any of them are stateside,” Benny said.

“What’s this about?”

“It’s about a murder in wartime.”

“The war’s over.”

“Not for everybody,” Benny said.

“Okay,” Groves said.

They’d had the same conversation before.

“I started out thinking it was payback,” Benny told Teresa. “A revenge killing, an American GI who was mistreated when he was a POW, say, or a family member, somebody with an axe to grind.”

“Like one of the Ramirez boys.”

“Except they don’t fit the picture. I could cast a wider net, maybe, but I just don’t get the impression there was bad blood between the Minamoto family and anybody else up in the Embudo valley. They worked hard, they got along with everybody, their neighbors took care of things when they were interned.”

“You don’t think there was prejudice?”

“There had to be some,” Benny said. “These people were unfairly singled out because they were of Japanese descent, and then they all got lumped together, so it could be that easy, the only good Jap is a dead Jap.”

Teresa knew he was thinking out loud.

“Thing is, that of course they weren’t all the same,” he said. “Yeah, some of them still had family ties to Japan, some of them were active enemy sympathizers. But look at Tommy Minamoto. Purple Heart, posthumous Silver Star, fighting in Italy. He died for his country, and that country was the United States, not Imperial Japan.”

“So which side was his father really on?”

“Our side,” Benny said. “I think that was the problem, the tensions between the interned Japanese in the camps.”

“He tried to be a peacemaker.”

“And got labeled a collaborator.”

“Where’s this leading, Benny?” she asked.

“Your question, remember, was why anybody would wait two years,” he said. “A survivor of the Bataan Death March, or some kid who was Four-F because he’s almost legally blind?”

She smiled. “And who’s still carrying a torch for Emily?”

“So maybe the guy’s been out of action the last two years,” he said. “Two years to brood about the injustice, the shame.”

“You think he’s been in prison?”

“I’m guessing he’s been in Japan,” Benny said.

“Colonel de Silva’s list,” Johnny Lee said. He was calling from Albuquerque, an hour and a half south of Santa Fe.

Of the thirty-five men, only three had been issued visas with recent U.S. entry dates. The FBI had tracked one guy down in Los Angeles, where he was visiting family. The second guy was reportedly in the Baltimore area. The third guy was dead in an Albuquerque motel room, of self-inflicted wounds.

“I’ll drive down,” Benny said.

“You’re not going to see anything I haven’t,” Montoya said. “And you won’t want to see what I saw.”

After three days, the people in the adjoining rooms had complained about the smell. Even in September, the weather in Albuquerque could be hot. When the cops broke the door down, the first of the responding officers who went into the room fell to his knees, his stomach heaving.

Nobody made fun of him later. None of them had ever seen a Japanese ritual suicide.

Kneeling on a bamboo mat, the dead man, later identified as Iyeshi Saito, had placed the katana, the sword of a samurai, to his left. He’d used the wakizashi, the short sword, to open his bowels into his lap. Just out of reach, to his right, was an 8mm pistol, a Japanese officer’s Nambu model. There had been no friend present to administer the killing blow, and the pistol was Saito’s last resort, but it had apparently slipped away from his bloody hands, and he’d thrashed to death.

“Three days,” Benny said.

“The timing’s right,” Johnny Lee said. “He shoots Minamoto and then kills himself. We’ll run ballistics on the gun.”

“This stinks,” Benny said.

Johnny Lee had been in the motel room with the dead body, and he could vividly remember the smell, but he understood Benny meant it metaphorically.

“What do I tell Minamoto’s daughter?” Benny asked. “We owe her an explanation.”

“Saito left a note,” Johnny told him.

It was in Japanese calligraphy, done with careful brush strokes.

There was arterial blood spray on the wrinkled rice paper. Benny was cautious not to tear it. “What does it say?” he asked the college professor, spreading it out on his desk.

“It’s haiku,” the Japanese scholar told him.

“Bear with me,” Benny said.

“It’s a poem, very formally structured.”

“Can you translate it?”

“It’s not an exact science.”

“Approximately, then,” Benny said.

Snow alights gently

On the shoulders of a lark

Grief burns, fire takes wing

“Meaning?” Benny asked.

“Exile, perhaps, and rebirth, or renewal.”

“The cops tell you they found this next to a suicide?”

The professor nodded.

“An educated guess, then.”

“It might mean he redeemed himself, in death.”

Benny decided he wouldn’t show anybody else the poem.

He took Aurora and Angelina up to Emily Minamoto’s farm to pick peaches. As he expected, it was hard work, but satisfying. The girls, of course, complained to him about it.

Benny had little sympathy.

Peaches, he explained patiently, are easily bruised.

Copyright © 2012 by David Edgerley Gates

In Walenstadt

by Milena Moser

Passport to Crime

Born in Zurich, Milena Moser left school for an apprenticeship as a bookseller. On completing it, she lived in Paris for a couple of years, then returned to Switzerland where she co-founded a magazine and became a freelance writer who now has sixteen novels, two volumes of short fiction, and many radio plays to her credit. She and her family lived in San Francisco from 1998–2006, where she found the inspiration for this story.

* * * *

Translated from the German by Mary Tannert

The water was ice cold. There were hands in it, hands that closed around her ankles, tightened their grip, pulled downward. Martine had run down the bank and directly into the water, just as she always did when she trained with her swim club. But here she stopped suddenly, the water barely above her knees. She gasped for breath. The hands clung to her calves, squeezing mercilessly. She’d get leg cramps in a minute if this went on.

Never mind, she told herself sternly. She pulled on her goggles, adjusted her nose clip, raised her arms, and pushed off. Dove under the surface. And came back up again, coughing, breathless. Her feet paddled, wild and uncoordinated, spent one long, panicked moment feeling for solid ground. There was something wrong with the lake. She tore the goggles from her face, gasped again.

Martine Meier, long-distance swimmer. What a spectacle she was making of herself! Thank goodness nobody was around at this time of day to see her. The lake’s beach was deserted in the gray of dawn, the water before her lay leaden and still against the backdrop of mountains so blue they looked like paper cutouts.

She’d woken up at five. Jet lag. Had simply lain there awhile in the unfamiliarly narrow hotel bed, wide awake, eyes open. In the next bed, Joanna snored gently. Four to a room — that was unfamiliar too. Yesterday evening, Joanna had generously doled out sleeping pills from her apparently plentiful supply of medication. Martine had refused them; after all, she was responsible for the little group. But at five in the morning, wide awake, she’d regretted her caution. Finally, she got up, pulled on her swimsuit in the dark, and made her way to the lake in the first shimmer of dawn, through the empty streets of Walenstadt.

At home, she had to drive just to get to the water. To the swim club on the bay, where she did her training every morning in ice-cold, mercury-contaminated water. A mile out, a mile back. 3.2 kilometers in just under forty minutes. A Swiss mountain lake shouldn’t be any trouble. She settled the goggles on her face again, took a deep breath in. Breathed out.

There was something wrong with this lake.

Martine, pull yourself together!

In San Francisco, the water was a chilly fifty-seven degrees, and she swam every day clad only in a short-sleeved neoprene suit. There were big waves in the bay, seals, soft-drink bottles; there was sewage, and now and then even a shark gone astray. By comparison, a mountain lake was nothing! — even if, she admitted, it was a very deep, very dark lake. She pushed off one more time, dived under the surface, and stretched her arms over her head. Across the lake and back, that’s what she’d set herself, but it was clear immediately that she couldn’t do it. Not through the middle of that bottomless lake; it would swallow her, she was sure of it. She forced herself to swim a couple of strokes, swam away from a cold, naked fear, away from herself. But she thought she could see shadows through the goggles; hands, hands that reached for her. After a couple of strokes, she turned around. She didn’t even swim all the way back; she was still far away when she touched bottom, stood up, and waded out. By the time she got to shore, the sun was coming up. It would be hot today, but Martine was trembling.

Her group was already at breakfast at the Hotel Churfirsten when she got back. The jet lag had affected all of them, all except for Joanna, who was still snoring peacefully when Martine let herself into their room to change. Joanna lay on her back, her mouth wide open, both arms wrapped around her light-blue cosmetic bag, which contained her collection of pills. Martine got dressed quickly and went down to the breakfast room; it was her job to help the group manage in these foreign surroundings.

“Over here, honey!” Mr. Zoggan, the tour organizer, waved her over to his table. But Kate, one of the three other women with whom Martine shared her room, rescued her just in time.

“Martine, can you come over here a minute? I really need your help!” They hid behind the menus, giggling like schoolgirls. Another successful escape.

Zoggan had hired Martine to accompany a small group of American hobby genealogists looking for their roots in Switzerland. Fourteen Americans with names like Wenger, Iberg, and Schaerer. Genealogy is a popular pastime in the United States. After all, everybody has roots somewhere. It’s just that, in a nation largely settled by immigrants, this somewhere is somewhere else. And Mr. Zoggan, himself of Hungarian descent, had seen a market opportunity in that fact. He organized trips through Europe that were supposed to help Americans encounter their roots. He’d guided the first few himself, but then he’d begun to hire natives who could help the group negotiate the usual cultural divides.

Martine had imagined the task would be easier than it was — a paid flight to Switzerland, she’d thought, a Switzerland that had seemed small enough after fourteen years in America that she’d have time for a quick visit with all her relatives and old friends, from her grandparents in Ticino to friends in Zurich and Basel, all the way to her brother and his family at Lake Geneva. Especially since the group was staying in Walenstadt. After all, in Switzerland all roads lead to Walenstadt. Or at least through it.

But her charges needed more of her than she’d thought. It started at breakfast: “No eggs? No bacon? Is that all?” they’d asked, staring glumly at the fresh croissants the Swiss called gipfeli, at the homemade jam, the comparatively strong coffee in big jugs, the foamed milk.

“Isn’t there anything normal here for breakfast?” her niece had asked when she’d visited Martine in San Francisco, staring just as glumly at the menu of the Seal Rock Inn, famous all over the region for its breakfast.

“Normal?”

“Müsli. Or maybe a gipfeli.”

“There are fried eggs. Sunny side up.”

Kate turned the croissant in her hands. “All these carbohydrates,” she sighed. “I really shouldn’t. I’m on Atkins.”

“Oh, never mind, they’re so small!” Joanna slid into the empty seat next to Martine and reached for a gipfeli. She looked well rested and fresh, almost wound up. “Just eat half of it! What are we doing today?”

Martine had already helped herself to two gipfeli and was spooning jam onto her plate. Joanna was right. In comparison to American super-sized portions, these really did look small.

“Aren’t we meeting the prince today?” Betty smoothed the lapels of her salmon-pink polyester blazer. They were embroidered with pearls in a floral pattern. Her plump body was encased in a floor-length skirt of the same fabric, and on her feet there were white sneakers. Betty looked exactly like the stereotype of an American tourist. Fat, blond, wearing a camera. She’d gotten hold of Martine on the bus from the airport to Walenstadt and had promptly designated her as her “bus buddy.” And Martine had noticed very fast that she’d underestimated Betty. She ought to have learned by now that it was pretty much impossible in San Francisco to judge anyone by his or her appearance. The muscular young woman with dragons tattooed on her arms could be a student rabbi, the dropout in the baggy pants could be an Internet millionaire, and the overenthusiastic Betty Hoblitzel with her soft Southern accent was one of the most sought-after defense attorneys in the entire city. Who had, moreover, taken Martine aside first thing and asked her in a conspiratorial undertone where to find “those famous coffee shops.” Martine had to stop and think for a minute, because the question seemed so unlikely coming from Betty. “They’re in Amsterdam,” she finally replied in an apologetic tone. “Amsterdam. In the Netherlands.”

“Zoggan promised us a prince, didn’t he?” Betty repeated. “Isn’t Switzerland a principality?”

“That’s Liechtenstein!” said Martine, relieved to have understood what Betty meant. “No, I don’t think we’re going there today.”

Or at all. At any rate, Zoggan hadn’t said anything about Liechtenstein. He must have been having a joke at Betty’s expense. Zoggan had a unique sense of humor; Martine had observed that much during the flight. Every flight attendant who passed his seat was the recipient of his pinches on any body part within reach, accompanied by his squeals, until the pilot threatened to make an emergency landing and throw him off the plane.

After breakfast, he distributed American flags. “It’s the Fourth of July!” he said.

Martine sighed and took him to one side. “Dan,” she said, “no offense, but people here might misunderstand that.”

“Misunderstand it?” He unscrewed the lid from one of the two thermos bottles that hung diagonally across his belly and took a swallow. Martine’s roommates had bet they were full of vodka.

“The flags,” said Martine. “People could misunderstand them.”

“What do you mean? The Swiss aren’t lefties, are they?!”

“If we march through the city waving those things, people will think America’s invading.”

“So what? It didn’t bother them last time.”

His speech had already become somewhat indistinct, and his face was deep red. The others were clearly right about the vodka. Martine was asking herself what he meant by “last time” — D-Day? World War II? Normandy? — when suddenly a chattering noise began to issue from somewhere around his hips. He unhooked a walkie-talkie that hung on his belt.

“Yes, honey,” he spoke into it. “What is it? Over.”

Mary Alice Zoggan stood at the back of the dining room at the window, looking out and holding her walkie-talkie to her lips. It was the only way Martine had ever seen her talk to her husband.

“Put the flags away,” her voice issued tinnily from the device.

“But honey...”

“Just do what I say! Over!”

“Over,” repeated Zoggan sadly, and gathered up all the flags. Then his face lit up again. “I’ve got something much better!” he sang out. From underneath his chair, he pulled out a giant Cat in the Hat top hat and set it on his head. It was nearly two feet tall. And he was still wearing it when, a few minutes later, he set off leading the little band. The street in front of their hotel was in the process of being torn up for repairs, and construction workers in bright orange safety overalls clung to their jackhammers for dear life, as if the machines would otherwise pull away and run amok through the town. But as the little procession passed, even undecorated with American flags, the big machines fell silent; the construction workers stared and the jackhammers, their operators frozen in surprise, bored holes in the air.

“How cute,” Kate cried out, and pointed to the geraniums blooming in pots lining the roadway. “Look, isn’t that sweet?”

That was Kate: She saw the flowers and not the torn-up street. That was America, thought Martine, who had fled Zurich fourteen years ago to unlearn complaining and self-pity. Well, that wasn’t the whole truth; a certain California swim champion had played a role too. The marriage had lasted just long enough to convince his parents he wasn’t gay and to provide Martine with a Green Card. Since then, she’d lived alone. And sometimes she wished self-pity were allowed.

The women in the group twittered in that excited enthusiasm typical of American women, their voices climbing to a pitch of euphoria. Martine didn’t notice it much at home, but here she half expected the windows to begin to tremble and then shatter, one after another, the entire length of the town’s street, leaving behind a sea of broken glass.

The conference room at the Hotel Post had been reserved for them. Mr. Zoggan had a slide show ready, postcard pictures of Switzerland that made even Martine sigh. Then a map of Switzerland, with red lines crisscrossing it, one for every member of the group, from Walenstadt to every corner of Switzerland.

“I don’t see my name,” said Jim Hanson.

Mr. Zoggan turned on the light. “Bad news,” he said. “Your ancestors don’t come from Switzerland, they’re from Sweden.”

“Sweden, that’s right,” Jim nodded. “South Sweden, to be exact.”

His wife Kate beamed at everyone. “Jim’s great-great-great-great-great, well, great-something grandfather immigrated to America with his wife and seven children. But on the ship, a disease broke out and only one son survived, and that was Jim’s great-great-great-great—”

“—grandfather, right,” finished Mr. Zoggan, winking at Martine. “But unfortunately, I have to tell you that Sweden isn’t Switzerland. It’s a frequently made mistake, right, honey?” he added. He would have pinched Martine playfully in the side if she hadn’t strategically tipped her chair backward at just the right moment.

Mrs. Zoggan’s brows drew together in disapproval. The first rumors about her had begun to circulate on the flight over: that she used to be a nun and had left the cloisters for Mr. Zoggan, who was, as a younger man, charming and handsome. No, said the others, she was with the police, vice squad, and she’d arrested Zoggan and then succumbed to his charms. Betty said she thought she recognized her from the district attorney’s office. That was less interesting, and therefore probably true.

Jim Hanson’s mouth was hanging open in surprise. “They’re not the same thing? Well, I’ll be jiggered! How far is it from here to there?” All the members of the group would be taking day trips to the places where their ancestors had lived. After all, all roads led to Walenstadt, and from there to everywhere else. Zoggan had already organized everything, including the taxis. Americans weren’t very good at public transportation, and a week wasn’t enough time to train them. However, South Sweden was not on the itinerary.

Zoggan laid a map of Europe on the table and spread it out. Hanson measured the distance with his thumb. “No problem,” he said. “No problem at all, Kate, baby. We’ll fly. There in the morning, back in the evening.” He turned to the group. “Just to be there, to see it and breathe the air, you understand? The same air that little boy breathed who was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather back then.”

The others nodded.

“That’s exactly why we’re here!” said Zoggan, clapping his hands together. “Time for a drink!”

The waitress had been leaning against the wall, listening to Zoggan, arms crossed. Now that he had called for a break, she took their orders.

“Miss, miss!” Jack LaDove plucked at Martine’s sleeve. The old man wore a snow-white crocheted beret and glasses with frames so large they covered half his face. He looked like one of the Sopranos, but in fact he was of Swiss descent and from San Francisco, an ex-Marine with tattoos up and down his arms.

“Miss,” he asked her, “just explain one thing to me. With all due respect, how come we don’t automatically get ice water here in Switzerland when we eat in a restaurant?”

Yes, why was that? Martine could remember being a health-conscious but poorly paid young swim teacher and ordering tap water in restaurants, and recalled how reluctantly the waiters had brought it. “To tell the truth, I don’t know.”

Ice cubes were another problem. There were never enough of them. And the size of the glasses — they seemed much too small to the Americans. Patiently the waitress took their orders, which were easy to remember: cola, cola, and cola. With lots of ice. And a beer for Mr. Zoggan.

“Mr. Zoggan,” said the waitress. “Is that you? The person who made the reservations and everything?”

Mr. Zoggan didn’t react. She had pronounced his name the way it would seem phonetically correct to someone in Switzerland. And she had asked him the question in Schwyzerdütsch, in Swiss dialect.

“Yes, he’s the one,” Martine answered for him. She took the waitress to one side. “Could you maybe bring us some tap water? And a big bucket of ice?”

“That’s not healthy,” the waitress grumbled.

And Martine agreed with her, just as she’d agreed with old Jack LaDove two minutes ago. She had become a chameleon — American with Americans, Swiss with the Swiss.

“I was asking because we’ve got a Zogg here in town,” said the waitress when she reappeared with a tray bearing several liter bottles of cola; there was no ice. “And you’d never guess — he’s a genealogist too!”

“That’s unbelievable!” Martine realized she’d reacted exaggeratedly, her voice high-pitched, clapping her hands together — American, in other words. She’d have to pull herself together before she caught herself jumping in the air and giving the waitress a high-five.

“Yes, and the interesting thing is, there were these rumors about his great-uncle; they said he drove a girl to kill herself. You know what I mean, Got Her Into Trouble—” her face assumed a meaningful expression and Martine nodded dutifully — “and then dumped her. And the girl drowned, and the man was never seen again. And then naturally you ask yourself: Did she jump in of her own free will, or did he push her under? Anyway, old Zogg, our Zogg, he was sick of these stories, so he started researching his family, and you know what? He was able to prove that this great-uncle never even existed. It was all just talk!” And for emphasis she wiped both hands emphatically on her apron. “There!” she said with finality.

“That’s crazy,” said Zoggan, when Martine told him the story. “I definitely have to look him up. My ancestors were Hungarian gentry — with a touch of, what else? Gypsy, ha ha ha! And boy, that really came out in me!” He reached for Martine again, and once again she was able to avoid his grasp just in time. Zoggan’s movements had become slower and somewhat unsteady. “But you never know; maybe there’s a connection. Get the guy’s telephone number for me, would you, honey?”

Lunch at the Hotel Post consisted of Wiener schnitzel and French fries. The same thing as the evening before at the hotel in Churfirsten. Zoggan had ordered all the meals for the sake of simplicity. Martine asked herself what he was charging the group for their food. But they didn’t complain; they were happy not to be confronted with unfamiliar dishes and menus they couldn’t read.

“Great food,” said Joanna. “A schnitzel’s a lot like chicken nuggets.”

Jack muttered something incomprehensible. LaDove, the dove. But originally his family had had the far less poetic name of Krauter.

He turned to Martine. “Krauter’s not exactly a name that’ll open you a lot of doors in America. At least, not right after World War Two. It wasn’t even the name my ancestors came over with. That was Dütsch. But when they reported to the immigration authorities, the officer says, ‘Dutch? You’re from Holland?’ and my ancestor says, ‘No, Dütsch like Deutsch, like German,’ in his best broken English, and just like that, they wrote down their favorite nickname for Germans — Kraut. Or in our case, Krauter.” Jack told the story as if he’d witnessed the scene. “Of course, we had to change it.”

Martine associated the dove with Picasso. To her it was the symbol of peace of a man tired of war. But maybe Jack had been a mercenary in the Spanish Civil War? Martine would have believed it of him.

Things were utterly different on the way back through the town. People greeted them from both sides of the street, waving cheerfully. Even the construction workers doffed imaginary caps as the group wandered by, Zoggan in the lead sporting his Cat in the Hat top hat again. It was as if the news had spread like wildfire through invisible channels: The Americans are okay. These Americans are our Americans.

Later, Martine took the women shopping. Betty bought a pair of blue metallic health sandals that seemed positively chic compared to the white sneakers she usually wore. Joanna studied the list of ingredients on every nonprescription pain reliever the pharmacy offered and finally decided on the 500-pack of Contra-Schmerz. “I have horrible migraines,” she said, and clasped the little bag possessively to her chest. They wound up the expedition at a café on the town square, ordering coffee and cake. The pieces of cake seemed to the women to be so small that they claimed the calories in them didn’t count.

“I thought I’d find you here,” said a man of indefinite age with uncombed longish brown hair, who sat down uninvited at the table. The women took one look and slid closer to Martine.

“You’re the folks on the trail of your ancestors,” the man announced in English. This remark was greeted with twitters of relief: How good his English was, how pretty this town was, and how friendly all the Swiss were, especially him.

“Why didn’t you come to me? I’m a genealogist and a family researcher by profession,” he said, and laid a business card on the table between the half-eaten pieces of cake. Dr. Martin Zogg, Genealogy and Family Research, it said.

“Isn’t that the same thing?” asked Martine in Schwyzerdütsch. He shot her a dirty look. But it was too late; Betty had already asked him whether he would like a cup of coffee — the coffee was so wonderful here, really strong! — and had used the occasion to order another round of cake.

“Zogg, now that’s interesting. Are you related to our Mr. Zoggan?”

“Didn’t he say his family was from Hungary?”

“I couldn’t say,” said Dr. Zogg, and took a deep breath that clearly heralded a long explanation. “As you know, the names of immigrants were often changed by the immigration authorities to the point of unrecognizability, and...”

“That’s just how it was with my family!” interrupted Betty, leaning forward in her excitement. Hoblitzel was the spelling of Hablützel that had been recorded by a bored and overworked civil servant. Betty had been able to determine that after long months of Internet research. Hablützel as in Dorothea Hablützel from St. Gall, who had fled to America in 1844, seventeen years old and pregnant, after being commanded to appear before the court because of her pregnancy. “Can you believe it?” gasped Betty. On her deathbed, Betty’s grandmother, Dorothy Hoblitzel, had exacted three promises from her grandchild: to let her blond hair grow long again, to go to church, and to take a trip to see the homeland of her great-great-great-grandmother Dorothea.

“It took a long time before I even got from Hoblitzel to Hablützel,” said Betty with a touch of satisfaction in her voice. “But I don’t give up easily!” And she flicked back her shoulder-length blond hair.

“Hey, Mary Alice, come join us!”

Mary Alice Zoggan came toward them across the plaza, her stride energetic. She was carrying a first-aid kit and the ever-present walkie-talkie.

“Here,” said Joanna, pulling over a chair from a neighboring table. “We were just talking about your husband.”

Mary Alice stopped abruptly and half-turned as though she wanted to leave, but changed her mind and dropped into the chair. As she unclipped the walkie-talkie from her belt, a pair of handcuffs fell out of her pocket. Under the shocked gaze of the others, she picked them up matter-of-factly and laid them on the table.

“I could check whether your husband’s family has roots in this area,” offered Dr. Zogg, but Mary Alice waved dismissively. “Spare me!” she said, and ordered a cognac. “Martine, you and the others need to wind things up here and come back. He’s got another excursion on the program.” She never said “my husband” when she talked about him. Just “he.”

The excursion consisted of a trip to the local beach. “To cool off,” said Zoggan, winking meaningfully. Martine shuddered. The experience she’d had that morning was still too fresh. Betty had no swimsuit with her and stayed at the hotel. Joanna did the same, retiring to their room with her new package of pills. But the others all wandered slowly in pairs or groups of three down the street to the beach. Zoggan was still wearing his Cat in the Hat headgear. Occasionally someone waved from a window and they all waved back.

Martine had moved her towel somewhat apart from the others and was sitting alone when a young woman spoke to her.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

It was the waitress from the Hotel Post, wearing a flowered swimsuit and with a horde of small children around her. Martine hadn’t recognized her at all.

“I’m Hedi,” the young woman introduced herself.

“Martine.”

Hedi called something to the children, who ran off to play, and then dropped down onto Martine’s towel next to her. “I’m tired of standing,” she sighed. “Aren’t you going in?”

“No, I... I can’t.”

“But you look as if you swim.”

Martine’s muscular upper arms and broad shoulders and the high-cut Speedo with the swim badges on it had all betrayed her. So she described her experience that morning even though she still found the whole thing embarrassing. Told of the hands that had reached for her.

“The hands, of course,” said Hedi, as if it were all completely obvious. “The dead. I don’t like them either. Some people don’t notice anything, but other people are more sensitive, if you understand what I mean.”

You and I, was what she meant. We’re more sensitive. Or maybe she meant: we women.

“The dead?” Martine repeated.

“That girl I told you about? The one who drowned? I’m not sure how to put it, but let’s just say she wasn’t the only one.”

Martine shuddered, and Hedi changed the subject. What was it like to live in America? she wanted to know, and whether it might be a good change for, say, a waitress from Switzerland. You know, just asking.

The sun was still hot. Children splashed in the water, shouting, jumping from a raft. At first, nobody noticed that Mr. Zoggan, farther out in the lake, was fighting for his life. And by the time somebody out on the raft called for help, it was too late.

Martine sprinted into the water; it splashed, icy cold, around her thighs. She threw herself in, swam out into the lake, leaving herself no time to think, no time to be afraid. Zoggan was thrashing and treading water farther out, near the raft, but still far from the middle of the lake. Martine had almost reached him when she heard him call out, one last time. Then he went under. Fast and suddenly. As if somebody had pulled him down. She dove under. He was gone. She had on her goggles, but the water was murky and she couldn’t see anything, not even air bubbles. She dove again and again, but there was just no sign of him. She simply couldn’t find him. Neither could the divers from the rescue team who fished her out of the lake, coughing and blue with the cold. They dove for hours. Nothing. As if he’d never existed. Nothing remained but the Cat in the Hat top hat, which drifted, listing to one side, in the water.

“Let go,” he’d screamed. “Let me go!”

In Schwyzerdütsch.

The rumors about Mrs. Zoggan were all true, as it turned out. She worked for the district attorney’s office. She’d spent nine years as a nun, and after leaving the convent she’d gone to the police academy and had then become one of the first female cops on the vice squad in San Francisco. She never said whether she’d met her husband during a raid. Just that the handcuffs she always had in her pockets were a personal memento.

Handcuffs, thought Martine.

Copyright © 2012 by Milena Moser; translation Copyright © 2012 by Mary Tannert

Dial Country Code 91 + M for Murder

by Stewart Brown

Department of First Stories

Stewart Brown is a software developer who worked in tech support for a call center for several years. But it wasn’t so much his work in that field as his experience as a customer waiting on hold for tech support that inspired this story. The author lives in Arvada, Colorado with his wife and nine-year-old son. He tells EQMM that he’s been writing short stories off and on since childhood. This is his first paid professional publication.

* * * *

“Welcome to the Spade Detective Agency. If your life is in immediate danger, please hang up and call the local authorities. For English, please stay on the line. Para el español, por favor, pulse uno. Press 2 if you would like to hear about our weekly crime-buster specials. Press 3 if you are calling about an existing investigation. Press 4 to start a new investigation. Press 5...”

[beep]

“You have selected ‘new investigation.’ Press 1 if the crime involves blackmail or extortion. Press 2 if the crime involves kidnapping. Press 3 if the crime involves treason. Press 4 if the crime involves murder. Press...”

[beep]

“You have selected ‘murder.’ Press 1 if the victim was a business associate or colleague. Press 2 if the victim was a spouse or loved one. Press 3 if...”

[beep]

“You have selected ‘spouse or loved one.’ Press 1 if the victim was poisoned. Press 2 if the victim was stabbed. Press 3 if the victim was shot. Press 4 if the victim blew up when he started his car. Press 5 for all other modes of death.”

[beep]

“You have selected ‘other.’ Please hold while I transfer you to one of our highly qualified private detectives.”

“All of our detectives are currently solving crimes. Your wait time is approximately five minutes.”

[hold music]

“It’s murder by numbers 1,2,3... It’s as easy to learn as your A, B, C.”

[45 minutes later]

“Thank you for calling the Spade Detective Agency. This is Hamish. Would you like to hear about our weekly crime-buster specials?”

“Um, no. I would like to speak to a detective.”

“My name is Hamish. I am a detective. How may I help you?”

“Well, I, uh. I think my husband may have been murdered and I would like to hire a detective to investigate.”

“Thank you, madam. What is your name?”

“Nancy.”

“Thank you, madam. What is your husband’s name?”

“Marlowe. Marlowe Drew.”

“Is your husband deceased?”

“Uh, yeah. That is why I’m calling.”

“Thank you, madam. Please tell me about your husband’s death.”

“First of all, you can call me Nancy. And you don’t have to keep thanking me.”

“Thank you, mada—, I am very sorry, Miss Nancy. Please tell me about your husband’s death.”

“Well, about three weeks ago he was rock climbing with some friends. They were in a very remote part of the Rockies when the rope that tied Marley to his climbing partner broke and he fell. But the weird part is that no one actually saw him fall. And the climbing rope was new. They don’t just break. I think someone might have cut it.”

“Please tell me, did your husband have access to dead bodies?”

“What? Of course not! Why would he?”

“It is my belief that your husband faked his own death.”

“That’s ridiculous. Look, I don’t have time for this. I just want to set up an appointment to meet with a detective. Can you do that or not?”

“I am sorry, Miss Nancy, that is not how the Spade Detective Agency works. We only do remote investigations over the phone.”

“You mean they outsourced their detectives?”

“Well, from my perspective we ‘in-sourced.’ ”

“No, I need someone who knows what they are doing, to... to... I don’t know... look for clues... interrogate witnesses... whatever private detectives do.”

“Miss Nancy, I assure you I know what I am doing. I have a certificate in Murder Investigation from the New Delhi School for Detective Studies. Perhaps you’ve heard of the school? It is the fourth-highest ranked detective school in all of New Delhi. Besides, hiring someone will cost you many thousands of dollars. And we are having a special this week which makes murder investigations very reasonable.”

“So, how does this work?”

“I will walk you through troubleshooting your husband’s death, then I will use my superior powers of deduction to solve the murder. And if I fail, your next murder investigation is free. Would you like to continue this investigation?”

“I guess it’s worth a shot.”

“Now, did your husband have access to dead bodies?”

“No, of course he didn’t.”

“Was there an autopsy? Did you identify the body yourself?”

“No, they weren’t able to recover him. My poor Marley is still out there. I just pray that someday we’ll be able to bury him next to his mother.”

“Not likely, madam. By now the wildlife has probably devoured his carcass. You’ll be lucky if they find even small bones, let alone enough to bury in your family plot.”

[sob]

“Oh no... I am very sorry, Miss Nancy. I am quite sure Mr. Drew was a great and generous man and will prosper in whatever afterlife you believe in.”

“So, the first question in a murder investigation is: Who stood to gain from Marlowe’s death? Did he have any enemies? Maybe a business partner?”

“No. He worked for himself, selling insurance.”

“What about his mistress? Could a secret lover have killed him?”

“Certainly not! Marley was a wonderful husband. He never so much as looked at another woman.”

“That you know of.”

“How dare you! You have no idea how much that man loved me.”

[slightly muffled:]

“No, I’m going to have to skip lunch today... I’ve got another clueless wife with a dead husband... It is unbelievable. Third one this week.”

“What?”

“Oh, uh, sorry. I was... just discussing your case with another detective. What were we talking about?”

“We were talking about how much my husband loved me!”

“Oh yes, I am sure you are a very nice person. What about your finances? Do you owe anyone money?”

“I don’t think so. Marley paid all of the bills. As far as I know, we were never late.”

“Do you know where he kept his financial records? I would like to verify that he was not hiding anything from you.”

“Let me check his desk. I’m going to put you on speaker. Hold on a sec.”

“Okay, I found our mortgage statements. Oh my gosh... we were three months late. This can’t be right.”

“What about your checking and credit-card accounts? Do you see them in his desk?”

“Um... yes, here they are. It says our checking is overdrawn... and these credit-card bills say we owe thirty-one thousand, four hundred fifteen dollars and ninety-two cents. This can’t be right.”

“So, your husband was a deadbeat.”

“He was no such thing.”

“Is it possible your husband owed money to the mob? Did you ever hear him talk about guys with names like ‘Fat Paulie,’ ‘Machine Gun Kelly,’ ‘Toucan Sam,’ or ‘Tony the Tiger’?”

“No, never.”

“What about street gangs? Is there a chance he was a pimp or a drug kingpin?”

“WHAT?!?”

“Never mind. Let’s move on. Keep looking through his desk. Is there anything else unusual?”

[long pause]

“I found an envelope full of receipts. Let’s see, flowers... motel rooms... jewelry? He never gave me these things... Oh my gosh!”

“What? What did you find?”

“I found a receipt for a watch. It had a custom engraving on it. It says: ‘For my dearest Aggie.’ Oh Marley, how could you do this to me?”

“I knew it! Three murdered husbands this week and every one was carrying on a torrid extramarital affair.”

[sob]

“Do you know who this Aggie is that your husband was having sex with?”

“She’s... she’s...”

[sob sob]

“She’s Agatha Hardy. Marley’s best friend is Joe and Agatha is his wife.”

“Is she the vengeful type? Would she kill Marlowe if she couldn’t have him to herself?”

“How should I know? Oh my gosh! I just realized something...”

“What? What is it?”

“Joe was Marley’s climbing parter! Maybe he found out about the affair and killed Marley.”

“Oh! Aaaahhh... aaaargh!”

[incoherent screams of pain]

[sound of phone crashing from desk]

“Hello? Hamish? Are you there?”

“I am here. Sorry about that. I spilled coffee on myself. Now... where were we?”

“Ah yes, you were telling me that Joe was climbing with Marlowe when he died. Using my superior powers of deduction, I deduce that Joe found out about the affair and, in a fit of rage, cut the rope while Marlowe dangled precariously from a cliff, sending him tumbling down the mountain, where he was probably consumed by crocodiles or whatever type of wildlife resides in your region of America.”

“Um... okay. I think you might be on to something.”

“Well, I think we can wrap up this case...”

[dog barking]

“Scooby, shut up. Hamish, can you hold on for a sec? Someone is coming up to my door.”

“Oh my gosh! I can’t tell who it is, but it looks like they’re trying to unlock the door... he’s... whoever it is, is coming into the house! I can hear him downstairs. He’s yelling, ‘I did it. I got away with it.’ It must be Joe. He killed my Marley and now he’s coming after me! What do I do? Help me, Hamish! What should I do?”

“Um... You know, madam, I mean Miss Nancy, I really am not sure. Let me put you on hold and get a senior detective.”

“No! Don’t...”

[hold music]

“Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?”

“Hello, Miss Nancy? Thank you for holding. I have Missmarple on the line with us. He is one of our most experienced detectives.”

“Hello, madam. How are you?”

“I can hear Joe downstairs. He’s looking for me. He’s going to kill me.”

“Thank you, madam. There is no need to panic. Do you have a gun readily available?”

“No. We don’t have any guns.”

“Thank you, madam. What about a large stabbing instrument? Like a machete or an axe?”

“Not in my husband’s study. Oh my gosh! He’s calling my name. He is definitely looking for me.”

“Do you have a cricket wicket?”

“A what?”

“I think Missmarple means a baseball bat.”

“Oh yes, thank you, Hamish. I forgot we are talking to America. Do you have a baseball bat?”

“No. I don’t have anything like that... Oh my gosh! I think he’s coming up the stairs.”

“Look around the room. Is there a large blunt object you could strike him with?”

“Marley’s trophy. He won ‘Salesman of the Year’ last year.”

“Well, a trophy is not going to be much of a match if he has a gun, but I guess it will have to do. Stand behind the door. When he comes into the room, come out and hit him from behind. We’re on speakerphone so we’ll be right here if you need anything.”

“Okay. I’ll try.”

“So, Hamish, have you had lunch yet?”

“No, I’ve been stuck on this call all afternoon. It’s been a crazy day.”

“I know what you mean. By the way, madam, be sure to hit him as hard as you can. If you don’t knock him out on the first hit, he’ll probably shoot you or something.”

“After we have finished this investigation, do you want to go get some lunch?”

“Yes, that is a very good idea. I’m starving...”

[thunk]

“I did it! I did it! I got him.”

“Miss Nancy? Is that you, or is that Joe?”

“It’s me, Miss Nancy. I did exactly what you said. He came into the room yelling for me and I stepped out behind him and really let him have it.”

“Is he knocked out?”

“Yes! He isn’t moving... in fact... he’s not breathing.”

“Is it Joe? Were you right?”

“Let me see... Oh my gosh! It’s... it’s... Marley!”

“Wait a minute, Hamish, I thought you said Marley was the deceased husband?”

“He is now.”

“You know, Missmarple, I told her at the beginning that Marlowe probably faked his own death, but she didn’t believe me.”

“Don’t get me started on that one. Our customers call us up, wanting us to solve their crimes, but then they don’t even listen to us.”

“I... I can’t believe it. I killed my poor Marley. Oh no. He had two train tickets. He wasn’t going to kill me, he was going to take me away somewhere.”

“Just as you suspected: an insurance scam. Good job, Hamish.”

“You know, Missmarple, Miss Nancy really is better off now.”

“What do you mean, Hamish?”

“She will get a small fortune from the insurance company, and her cheating husband is dead. Since the authorities think he died in the mountains, all she has to do is dispose of the body. She is much better off now than she was before.”

“That is a good point, Hamish.”

“Thank you, Missmarple. Miss Nancy? Are you still there?”

“Yes, I... I’m still here.”

“Thank you for calling the Spade Detective Agency. Please stay on the line while I transfer you to our Customer Satisfaction group, where you will be asked to take a short survey.”

[hold music]

Copyright © 2012 by Stewart Brown

Content

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 6. Whole No. 856, December 2012

Golden Chance by S. J. Rozan

The Jury Box by Steve Steinbock

Mariel by David Dean

Misprision of Felony by O’Neil De Noux

Cog in the Wheel by Sarah Weinman

Dead Men’s Socks by David Hewson

Karen Ovenhouse and the Ruin Snooper by Peter Turnbull

Old Man Gloom by David Edgerley Gates

In Walenstadt by Milena Moser

Dial Country Code 91 + M for Murder by Stewart Brown