Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 Read online

  I knew Dan Bendix from the winter hockey leagues. He played forward, liked to body check along the boards. Big and burly, with scars on his knuckles, he’s a genuinely tough guy. His questions were sharp, but fair. He had nothing to prove.

  Coughlin was the opposite. A runty Irishman from Lansing, he had freckles, red hair, and an attitude to match. He’d gotten his gold shield a few months earlier and felt compelled to play bad cop. He tried too hard, shouting questions at me like I was some mutt off the street, sneering at my answers. He called me a liar. Twice. I let it pass.

  He was right, actually. But his punk-ass attitude made lying to his face a lot easier.

  I hated Max for what he had done, but none of it was his wife’s fault. He threw his life away to get the money for Margo’s care, and I made certain that she got it.

  To do that, I had to eliminate any suspicion that his death had been a “suicide by cop.” And I did. By making him the villain of the piece.

  With a vengeance.

  A good man driven to crime is an old, familiar story, from Robin Hood to Breaking Bad. It wasn’t hard to sell.

  Desperate for money, Max had gone into the drug trade. The brick of crystal meth the Staties found hidden in his garage was the proof. Working on a story about meth labs, Sherry discovered his involvement. She confronted him at the turnout, hoping he would give himself up.

  Instead, he killed her. He admitted it all to me before dying in a desperate shootout. Resisting arrest isn’t suicide. If the two Staties had any doubts, they vanished when I showed them the map of the meth labs I’d recovered from Max’s body.

  The story was a total crock, but it was plausible, and seamless. And they bought it.

  The raids on the crank labs began at dawn the next day and continued through the week. The state police and DEA rolled up eight labs and a dozen cookers. It made national news. Which was the second point of the exercise.

  Helping Margo collect the insurance money her man had died for wasn’t the only reason I sold the state police a bill of goods. It was my last chance to give Sherry what she’d always needed so desperately. More than anything in this world, she’d wanted to be a star.

  By God, she went out as one.

  My version of events conveniently omitted her complicated love life. Instead, Sherry died as a courageous newswoman hot on the trail of a big story.

  I think Zee knew better, but by the time she wrapped up her own investigation, the raids were already underway and my fairy tale had gone viral in the media. On the Net, facts never get in the way of a good story.

  Desperate for a heroine after the recent scandals, the national press turned Sherry into an instant icon. Overnight, her dream came true. Everyone knew her name. She was the center of attention.

  It won’t last, of course. Andy Warhol set fame’s expiration date at fifteen minutes, and most of us never achieve that.

  But Sherry got her share and then some. Her funeral was a media circus. Talking heads from the major networks and most of the minors covered it live from the cemetery, wearing somber faces and black armbands.

  It was a spectacular, star-spangled sendoff. I only wish she could have seen it.

  And maybe she did.

  I’m not religious. The afterlife is a mystery to me. But I knew Sherry down to the bone. Knew her drive and her desperation.

  No power in this world or the next could have kept her away from that show. In my heart, I know she saw that turnout, and warmed herself in the spotlight one last time.

  And if you could ask her if it was worth it?

  I know exactly what she’d say.

  Copyright © 2012 by Doug Allyn

  Next Article

  Previous Article

  Next Article

  FICTION

  GYMNOPÉDIE NO. 1

  by Susan Lanigan

  Art by Allen Davis

  The short fiction of Irish author Susan Lanigan has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Stinging Fly, Southword, The Sunday Tribune, the Irish Independent, and The Mayo News. She has been shortlisted twice for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and has won several other awards. Nature magazine’s science-fiction section recently acquired two of her stories and her work is featured in the science-fiction anthology Music For Another World.

  Once again, the sunset. To be precise, the bit I am allowed to see: parallel gold diagonals streaking across the edge of my bunk and hitting the door, while the sink and privy stay in the dark and the mirror reflects nothing. I prefer the shadow. Since they moved me here five years ago, a kindly promotion from the cell that faced the prison’s north wall, I have seen too many sunsets, each one leading back to the same memory: my mother, long dead now, playing the piano.

  She always became more girlish when she played; even then I noticed the shy hesitant smile when she made the odd mistake. I was five then, standing in the doorway of the study in a manner, Dearbhla told me afterwards, of a child self-consciously trying to be “cute.” I have no idea whether Dearbhla told me this out of malice—whether she already detected a resentment I could find no words to express—or because she was genuinely amused. Anyway, she was not there to witness it firsthand. By the time she was there on a regular basis, my mother and her orange kaftans and hair tied back with a grubby chenille ribbon had gone, gone forever.

  My mother had few pieces in her repertoire but since I, at the age of five, was her primary listener, it should not have mattered too much. Yet I recall, in flashes, how her head would jerk upwards when my father pushed the creaking gate of our little garden open. The look of strained hope that crossed her face as she pushed the open window full out and started a few bars of the same piece. She started in medias res, I believe, to fool my father into thinking that she had been playing on for hours, unaware of his presence, in some sort of creative trance. I don’t believe he fell for it. He would come to the door and wink at me as she fingered the keys like alien objects, her eyes self-consciously shut.

  It was always the same piece, Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, and she was never able to get all the way through without making a mistake. To me now, that seems absurd; unlike Dearbhla, I never had a great talent for music, but even I could pick my way through something of that level with no great difficulty. But my mother’s mistakes were always so small—a missed note when it unexpectedly changed to F minor on the second repetition, an E instead of a D in the bass—that somehow I could always hear the soft chords transcending the little awkwardnesses. I remember (this must have been earlier, I must have been even younger then) hearing the muffled ripple of bass and right-hand chords through the timber of the shivering piano as I curled myself into a ball at my mother’s feet. I nearly fell asleep with my cheek touching the cold bronze of the una corda pedal, spittle drooling down my cheek. The evening sun was coming through the two-paned window, shafts of it warming the wood, and warming my mother’s orange kaftan and warming the pale brown carpet where I lay my head. The soft pedal remained cold, unmoving. I don’t know how long I lay there until I was picked up and brought to bed. It seemed like infinity, but then again this happened long ago, before I learned to measure time, each begrudging second, hour, and year of it.

  She never quite got it right. Each rendition was a diamond with a different flaw. I didn’t mind. Like an idiot savant, I craved routine. The routine of sun falling on my mother and the Gymnopédie, the routine of drizzle soaking the unmown grass in our front garden and the Gymnopédie, the dying elm shedding its last leaves as the Dutch beetle gnawed away at it from the inside—and the Gymnopédie—

  “I’ll get it,” my mother would call out, “I will, you’ll see.” Then she would fling her head back and laugh, and the light would catch the fine hairs on her neck, her neck that was able to arch so elegantly and make my father catch his breath. Dearbhla says I don’t remember properly, after all I was very young and children idealise things a lot, don’t they? But then again, rare things are easy to recall by virtue of their rareness
—and happy memories of my childhood are rare indeed.

  I don’t know why Dearbhla still visits me, week in, week out. I should be the last person she wants to see. She is a joy to look at through the Perspex panel: those tapering, gloved fingers are still beautiful, their clasp of the thin, unlit cigarette irreproachably filmic. They will never touch a piano again. But even in late middle age she retains the proud cheeks and prominent eyes that captivated her audience as much as the pieces she performed for them. The last time she came, she brought a letter in a vellum envelope. Typed, of course; she can hardly write by hand now. I haven’t read it yet. I want to hold off as long as possible to make the anticipation all the keener. Prison has taught me discipline, the ability to ration pleasure. She arrives again tomorrow: I will have read it by then.

  She has forgiven me much, Dearbhla, or perhaps she visits me out of need: I am the only surviving witness of the great tragedy of her life. As long as she blames me, she is safe. She can duck responsibility for her one failure.

  Perhaps she is correct. Perhaps it is my fault.

  When Dearbhla first came to the house, the laughter was different. It was laughter that sounded as if it were trapped in a bad sitcom and never let out. It banged crossly against the china my mother brought out for her visitor and rat-tatted irritably against the walls.

  Dearbhla sat on the edge of one of our armchairs, her eyes eager, hands holding her cup in a way that spoke pure elegance. My mother, her face white and strained, her hair still pulled back in the grubby ribbon, had lost her look of girlishness. Her belly rounded out a little and her neck no longer arched the way it used to. When my father propelled me forward to Dearbhla and boomed at me to say hello, I was crushed in silk and perfume and Dearbhla’s slightly harsh voice breathed affectionately in my ear, “Well, there’s the darling.”

  Her presence unsettled me. It was as if something alien, wondrous, and scary had come into our little cottage, enveloping it with an aura I had never experienced before. When I had lain under my mother’s feet back then, I had felt such security, but in Dearbhla’s arms I sensed danger and excitement. Her embrace was too cloying and yet delightfully warm, her fingers wrapped around me and dug in like claws. I looked over to my mother’s fingers, which were lacing and unlacing each other in tension. I saw how short and spatulate they were. Fingers that would get lost playing the difficult octave spans that Dearbhla was to show me, though I could not know that at the time.

  It was my father who first suggested that Dearbhla play something. She smiled, but looked uncomfortable at the suggestion. “Oh David. Should I, really?” I could tell from the tautness of her body, still holding mine, that she longed for it, but did not dare say yes. Not openly. Not yet.

  But my father, his voice queer and rough, said, “Yes. Play. Play!” His command was heavy with a weird ache.

  “Well,” Dearbhla said. “If you insist.”

  My mother’s eyes widened. The pupils in them had shrunk into tiny black dots and they were all iris. She stood up in a jerky, unlovely movement, walked over to Dearbhla’s chair, and pulled me out of her arms. I squeaked with alarm.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Dearbhla said good-humouredly, getting out of the chair.

  I could tell my father was about to say something to my mother, but then Dearbhla sat down at the stool, her fingers running lightly over the keys without pressing them. I shuddered as they did so, imagining them clinging hard to me, even though her touch on the keyboard was delicate. I looked over at my father. His eyes were closed, lips parted open. Now it was he who looked as if he were in a trance.

  “What shall I play?” Dearbhla asked gaily.

  “Anything,” my father whispered.

  I did not look at my mother.

  After what seemed like an age, Dearbhla hit two black keys and then let loose. I was later to learn that the piece was a Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor by Chopin, but at the time it was just a roaring tumble of notes, all pouring out sweetly and asynchronously into the air. The energy in the room changed as she played. Her eyes glazed over as left and right hand concentrated on maintaining the difficult cross signatures the composer demanded.

  My limbs were stiff with awe, almost rooted, though I felt the urge to pee. I’d barely shifted when my father placed a hand on my shoulder. He shook his head briefly, curtly. I stayed to listen to Dearbhla play.

  It ran down my leg. I felt the trickle seep through my red cord dungarees, warm, burning, immediate. The music enraptured me so that I felt no shame. Dearbhla and my father remained oblivious also. But Mother was not of that world, and saw.

  “That child.” She pointed at me. “Look at those wet pants. Look at them.”

  Dearbhla stopped playing.

  “David,” my mother continued, glaring at my father. “Are you going to do something? Look at those wet pants. They’re disgusting.”

  I was embarrassed, not for myself, though my thighs were beginning to chafe with the urinous sting, but for my mother. Even at that young age, I sensed that she, not I, was in the wrong, that her motives for humiliating me were suspect.

  “Ah, don’t worry, Lily,” Dearbhla said, getting up. “It was an accident. It could happen to any child.”

  My mother stood up too and faced Dearbhla. For a moment, it looked as if she were going to hit her. My father sat down, crossed his legs, and folded his arms. The moment seemed interminable. Then my mother crossed over to the piano and sat on the stool, breathing heavily.

  “Lily, for God’s sake.” My father was angry now.

  Ignoring him, my mother breathed in a sob, pulled her hair ever more fiercely into a ponytail, and launched into—yes, you guessed it, same old same old—the Gymnopédie. Her playing it all wrong made it even worse. As she made mistake after mistake, she started to cry openly. At the major seventh chord that resolves into the final D, she made the worst clanger of the lot, hitting an F sharp and then going to the wrong place in the bass. I prayed she would stop, but no, she kept going. Dearbhla, to give the woman her due, kept her face an emotionless cast as the whole miserable, cringe-inducing ritual dragged on.

  “Lily, stop.”

  “No, I won’t. I won’t stop. And I won’t have that woman telling me how to rear my children.”

  Dearbhla gasped discreetly.

  “Now,” my mother looked at me, “I’m going to finish my piece. Your favourite, honey, remember?”

  I felt my voice come from a very faraway place.

  “No. It’s not my favourite. I like Dearbhla’s better. And you were mean to me in front of people. Daddy told me not to go to the bathroom. And,” I felt my father’s and Dearbhla’s relief and satisfaction surge towards me even though their faces still betrayed nothing, “you don’t play it right. You make mistakes. Dearbhla never makes mistakes.”

  For the last fifteen years I have regretted saying those words. Perhaps if I had stayed silent, none of this would have happened.

  There is little else to remember about my mother. A few weeks later, I remember my father buying ice creams for everyone. She burst into tears. He asked her what was wrong with the ice cream. I joined in, also angry at her always crying and ruining our fun. We couldn’t do anything without her crying now. I came to dread her presence.

  She puked up her ice cream. All of it, in a yellow-white mess, over the kitchen table. It had that sharp hydrochloric smell of vomited food and I couldn’t bear to eat any more of mine after that. I didn’t understand about morning sickness then. As my father cleaned up, his mouth was twisted in disapproval, a disapproval I shared.

  Another day she shouted at him, in front of me, “Why won’t you love me? Why do you go to her all the time?”

  I thought my father would shout back, the way he had once or twice before then, but no, he just cleared his throat and left the room. I didn’t understand why he wasn’t angry, but something in his demeanour made me terribly afraid all the same. As a child, I did not understand what it is to be indifferent to someone: I d
o now. The years I’ve spent in this place have flattened me out pretty well, to the point where I am pleased to say I am indifferent to almost everybody.

  One day I opened the wrong door at the wrong time, and saw a pair of feet. Familiar feet in off-pink ballet pumps. They were at about eye-level, which looked rather strange, and swayed softly from side to side, as if they were performing a little dance, though they did not move or point.

  Then a bulky body intervened. Pinching fingers grasped my shoulders; I was hurled away.

  “Go back,” my father hissed. “Go back, for God’s sake, you silly boy.”

  Later he told me about my mother. She had hung herself with one of those soft threads used to tie back the drawing-room curtains. I was a bit confused and asked if there would be any baby now. He said no, there wouldn’t be, that it had disappeared away. That it was all for the best.

  It didn’t really make any sense to me, why she had done it. She was annoying, but I still didn’t want her to go away like that. For some reason I thought it had something to do with the ice cream.

  Why does Dearbhla come? I want to ask her that every time I see her sit down and smile at me, curving the gloved fingers around her cigarette, still wincing with the difficulty of it, even though her maiming happened fifteen years ago last week.

  In one afternoon I took everything from her, but still she comes, sometimes with CDs, sometimes with a book by someone like Milan Kundera or Charles Bukowski, or sometimes just by herself.

  “Why?” I finally say.

  Dearbhla takes off her gloves and puts her exposed, ruined hands against the glass. The fingertips whiten as she presses them close.

  “I come here,” Dearbhla says, “because I have nowhere else to go. I have no one else to speak to who can understand what I have lost. Except you.”