He lifted out the fries and napkins and set aside the coleslaw. He smiled at the cartoon burger with the “EAT ME” sign on the napkin. It put him right back inside Best Burger: the front counter with the busted stools and the meat cooked in front of you by the grill man with fast, mechanical hands.
Sonny opened a napkin to tuck into his collar the way his grandmother taught him. He saw the wet wrinkle first, and realized that this was a used napkin. Somebody had already swiped their dirty mouth on it. Then, unfolding the napkin further—he saw the writing.
He recognized the penmanship right off. He knew it from the court papers. Sonny read the girl's name and then his eyes lost focus.
Everything went bland as he wondered how that goddamn cop got to his food. The rumbling in his stomach continued, but the wanting was like a distant thunder now. He had cotton all wadded up in his mouth. His eyes were wide and blank as he faced the green-painted wall, on the other side of which was the last room he would ever see.
* * * *
The detective drove home, his gut full, the rare meat roiling. A wave of nausea raised a sheen of sweat over his skin like condensation forming on glass. He kept swallowing to put out the fire. He would keep the burger down. He had to.
Prostate cancer had turned him into a vegetarian. Nuts and grains and kale and okra. Three-plus years without red meat, until today. Three-plus years cancer-free.
The meal burned like a cancer in his belly. It bloated him, his stomach acids hitting it with everything they'd got. Turmoil and torment: his gut the final circle of hell.
Tomorrow he would deliver it where it belonged and be done.
He went into a sort of trance as he drove. Something like a fever dream—only, it was real. A memory. One he returned to willingly now.
He was inside the girl's bedroom again. The mother had left it untouched, as grieving mothers do. He asked for a minute alone. She went out without questioning it and he gently closed the door. He pulled on his gloves and looked around. Everything was in pink and yellow—a dead girl's room decorated in fringe and frill. He scrutinized every windowpane. He breathed on the mirror glass, raising prints, none of them pristine. He had to be very careful now. He had just found Mossman's abandoned car in the woods. Nobody else knew yet. He stood underneath the still ceiling fan, full to bursting with this knowledge, eyeing the soft toys, the dolls, the figurines. He needed a surface that was flat and hard and smooth. He found a china tea set on the top shelf of her bookcase and pulled it down. Tiny little finger cups done in a fine, glassy finish. Using a prepared strip of tape, he lifted one perfect print. He held it to the sunlight. Graceful hairpin whorls, unbroken by crease of injury or wrinkle of age. It would transfer faintly yet true. He then selected a hair bow from a drawer full of ribbons and clips and used tweezers to unwind from it two strands of fair hair. He slipped them into a manila coin envelope, which he then slipped inside his jacket pocket. He did this lovingly. He made the case. He did his job.
* * * *
Sam, the grill man, lay on his side on the back-room cot, listening to Conway Twitty on the clock radio. His shift had ended at ten, but the diner stayed open all night, the grill never going cold. Sam was back on the clock at six A.M., and it was easier just to crash there than drive all the way home and back.
He felt weird about the detective. That was what had him still awake near midnight—that and his empty stomach, for which the smell of the burgers cooking suggested no cure. He couldn't get it out of his mind. Did the detective blame Sam for having served somebody he didn't know was a killer? Sam didn't feel real good about having fed a guy who had a little girl locked up in the trunk of his car—but then, who knew what the detective had locked up in his? Who knows what anybody has locked away?
Okay—tonight he knew. He had figured out what that takeout burger was, who it was for. He supposed he could've spit on it. Would that have made the detective like him better? He could've not finished cooking it. Thrown it into the trash—made a great big show.
But he did cook it. He wrapped it up and sold it to the man from the prison. He put the money in his cash register.
And he served the detective his. Grilled it for him and served it up like his own enemy's heart.
A killer would die tonight with one of Sam's burgers in his belly. Be buried with it in the morning. Packed up together with his earthly remains in a to-go pine box.
Sam rolled onto his back. He pictured the detective finishing his burger, wiping the juice off his empty hands. Sitting still awhile at the counter, disappearing into himself. Then standing, laying money next to the empty Coke, heading home. The bell jingling on his way out the door.
The radio cut out first, before anything else. Going to static—a disruption over the airwaves.
Then the lights flickered. The rattling air conditioner unit outside the back door clicked off, shutting down.
Lights dimmed, surging off and on for ten seconds ... fifteen seconds ... twenty seconds. A deep draw on the grid. Sam imagined an aerial view, lights dimming all across the county in one long, complicit blink.
They flickered once more, then came back on. The air conditioner kick-started again, whirring back to life, and the static cleared and the radio music resumed playing, the same song, the glowing red digits of the clock now blinking 12:00 like a sign urgently advertising midnight.
Two thousand volts.
Sam rolled over and hoped his appetite would return in the morning.
(c)2007 by Chuck Hogan
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Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen
Black Mask, greatest of the twentieth-century crime-fiction pulps, published over half the fifty-plus stories in Otto Penzler's huge trade paperback anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (Vintage, $25), an admirable collection of mostly unfamiliar material. Covering the 1920s through ‘40s, its three sections—crimefighters, introduced by Penzler; villains, introduced by Harlan Ellison; and dames, introduced by Laura Lippman—were published separately in Britain. Three selections each by Dashiell Hammett (including the powerful and previously unpublished “Faith"), Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Cornell Woolrich join novel-length works by Carroll John Daly and Frederick Nebel and stories by Horace McCoy, Thomas Walsh, Richard Sale, George Harmon Coxe, Frank Gruber, and James M. Cain. Among the more obscure items are a pair of enjoyable (if implausibly plotted) stories about D.B. McCandless's Sarah Watson, a tough, chubby, and middle-aged female private eye, who antedated Gardner's Bertha Cool.
Black Mask's most significant innovation was the hardboiled private eye. Joining Hammett and Chandler in the P.I. pantheon, and believed by iconic critic Anthony Boucher the greatest of the three, Ross Macdonald came on the scene after the great days of the pulps had passed. His reputation has been kept alive through the efforts of Tom Nolan, first with his 1999 biography and most recently with The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, $45 hardcover, $25 trade paper), which gathers all the previously published short stories about Lew Archer. Nolan's excellent introduction gathers the surprising range of biographical details on the Southern California shamus scattered through the novels and stories. A selection of tantalizing openings to unfinished Archer cases are not throw-away false starts but scenes as polished and memorable as the author's finished work.
Among the Archer novels in reprint from Vintage/Black Lizard is the 1951 case The Way Some People Die ($12.95)—although not as fine as the work Macdonald would do in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was deemed by Boucher the best of its kind since Farewell, My Lovely or even The Maltese Falcon.
As the following examples show, the condition of the private eye today remains healthy.
**** Richard Aleas: Songs of Innocence, Hard Case Crime, $6.99. Three years after quitting detective work for the Columbia University writing program, John Blake tries to prove the apparent suicide of a girlfriend and fellow student, who had a secret life in the Manhattan sex industry, was really murder. Aleas (pseudonym of Cha
rles Ardai) tops his Edgar-nominated debut Little Girl Lost in this man-on-the-run thriller, expertly crafted in every way and ending with one of the most shocking and chilling conclusions in recent memory.
**** Anne Argula: Walla Walla Suite, Ballantine, $12.95. Spo-kane policewoman Quinn's de-but in Homicide My Own was a unique police procedural, and her return as Seattle private eye, working mostly for a mitigation investigator whose job it is to save convicted murderers from hanging, is nearly as unconventional, though lacking the earlier book's supernatural overtones. Quinn's Pennsylvania coal-country slang takes getting used to, but her voice is among the most original on the current scene.
**** Walter Mosley: Blonde Faith, Little, Brown, $25.95. In late 1960s L.A., a Vietnam veteran disappears, leaving his young daughter in the care of his friend Easy Rawlins, troubled following the break-up of his long-term relationship. Centered on the shifting tides of American race relations and the psychological journey of its protagonist, this is one of the most remarkable series in contemporary crime fiction.
**** Bill Pronzini: Savages, Forge, $24.95. Of current private eye series, San Francisco's Nameless Detective (known by third-person necessity as Bill) is certainly the longest running and arguably the best. Now virtually semi-retired and concerned about his wife's breast-cancer scare, Bill reluctantly takes on a previously dissatisfied client, who wishes to prove her sister's supposedly accidental death was really murder. His case and operative Jake Runyon's, unrelated but sharing a thematic unity, are both satisfactorily and surprisingly solved, with fairly laid clues, and one of them features a chilling murder motive that may be unique in fictional annals.
*** Parnell Hall: Hitman, Pegasus, $24. New Yorker Stanley Hastings, whose usual bread and butter is documenting slip-and-fall cases for a personal injury lawyer, takes on one of the strangest job assignments since “The Red-Headed League": stopping a hired killer who wants to quit the trade from completing his latest assignment. As usual, Hall delivers smart dialogue, humorous observations, semi-farcical complications leading to a logical conclusion, and fidelity to the rules of fair play.
*** Mark Coggins: Runoff, Bleak House, $24.95 hardcover, $14.95 trade paper. Part-time jazz bassist August Riordan stumbles over bodies, has the Dragon Lady of San Francisco's Chinatown for a client, and even encounters Chandler's favorite scene saver, the sudden appearance of a guy with a gun, but the easy, humorous style, details on computerized election fraud, and sharply observed Bay Area background make it all most enjoyable. Riordan's main associate is not the muscled sociopath of some series but a tech-savvy standards-singing drag queen.
*** Loren D. Estleman: American Detective, Forge, $24.95. Detroit's Amos Walker, solidly in the loner tradition and a conscious anachronism in the twenty-first century, participates in much physical action, including the traditional blow to the head, all described in one of the most dazzling prose styles extant. The initial job, soon complicated by murder, is to discourage the daughter of a retired Tiger pitcher from marrying an apparent fortune hun-ter. The case includes another Asian-American Dragon Lady.
*** Peter Spiegelman: Red Cat, Knopf, $22.95. New York sleuth John March takes on as client his unpleasant brother, who is being stalked by a woman he met online for casual sex. The inventive plot is solidly contemporary, the characters and background strongly conveyed, the style reminiscent of the masters.
** Marcia Muller: The Ever-Running Man, Warner, $24.99. San Francisco's Sharon McCone, one of the best and longest running examples of the new-style non-loner, family-oriented P.I., goes to work for husband Hy Ripinsky, whose worldwide industrial security firm has been the target of bombings by the odd-gaited jogging miscreant of the title. An outlandish plot and soap opera excesses won't deter regular readers, but newcomers should try earlier novels. (Muller, even better at short stories, gathers nineteen of her best in Somewhere in the City [Pegasus, $15.95]. Most have been previously collected; some involve McCone or her associates.)
** Michael Harvey: The Chicago Way, Knopf, $23.95. The Windy City's Michael Kelly unofficially reopens an old case that got his former police partner killed. Making this Renaissance sleuth a jogging Cubs fan who reads TheIliad in the original Greek seems more parodic than be-lievable; stock characters and plot clichés stack up relentlessly. There's enough narrative impetus and stylistic flair to sustain reader interest, but disregard the outrageous hype.
(c)2007 by Jon L. Breen
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Fiction: SANTA WITH SUNGLASSES by William Link
* * * *
Art by Mark Evan Walker
* * * *
William Link and his former writing partner Richard Levinson are considered by many to be the most successful collaboration in television history: What few know is that the duo began their professional writing career in EQMM, in 1954. They went on to conceive such immortal TV characters as Columbo and worked together until Levinson's death in 1987. Mr. Link has gone on to write other top shows, including, The Cosby Mysteries.
* * * *
Gino Benedetti was her nemesis. Megan's contempt for him had not yet reached the level of blind hatred, but it was climbing slowly, like the box-office numbers of her current film. The latest irony was that he had shot her and other arriving members of the cast at the gala premiere in Manhattan.
Benedetti was a charter member of the Hollywood paparazzi, a ravenous group of scavengers who fed on the live meat of movie celebrities rather than on the bleeding flesh of roadkill. The unfortunate aftermath was that after the photos were published, the careers of some did indeed become roadkill.
She had no idea why he had fastened his callous lens on her. She was a rising young actress at mid-level stardom, courted already by the entertainment media. But even though she considered herself a hip, college-educated New Yorker, she usually let her press people do all the flesh-pressing.
Was Benedetti somehow in love with her natural beauty? Although most of Hollywood beauty these days, she had to admit, was as natural as a computer graphic or Burt Reynolds's hairline. Maybe it was what Oscar Wilde had written: We always kill what we love.
The reason for his fascination was relatively unimportant. Megan and her producer husband Arnold couldn't attend an awards dinner or go to a rave club on Melrose without Benedetti's intrusive Nikon in their faces or their windshield. But he was especially lasered in on her. He never spoke or joked, flirted, like some of his equally desperate cohorts. He was just a painfully thin, ferretlike young man with slick, combed-back black hair who circled, danced, paraded around her, the camera like an obscene clicking insect in his thrusting hands. He always wore sunglasses, the lenses opaque, black as midnight. She had heard his fervent dream was getting the cover of People.
Christmas Day, they had been invited to a brunch at the home of a producer friend of her husband's, Jay Graham.
She had left Arnold sleeping off a massive hangover and gone with her stepson Toby to the party, stunned to see the mansion's lawns and surrounding trees blanketed with snow: a glaring, blinding-white wonderland. When was the last time it had snowed in Beverly Hills? Ever?
Jay explained the phenomenon to her while his adored and adorable daughter Samantha opened her Christmas gifts.
Samantha had read about, or seen on the tube, white Christmases all over the world. How come, she asked her father, she had never seen one out here?
"What could I do, Megan?” Jay asked. “You know I would climb mountains for the child. And then it hit me!"
The solution was his studio bringing trucks at five in the morning and spraying pulverized ice all over their mini-estate. Jay made sure he and his wife were with Samantha in her bedroom when she woke and saw a strange, wavering, eye-dazzling lake of light on the ceiling. Then she ran to the window and experienced her first white Christmas. Perfect, Megan thought: God, like everyone else, was on the studio payroll.
They went back to the periphery of parents monitoring the gift-opening ceremony. Megan saw that the crowd
was made up of mostly movie people, no TV stars. In the rigid Hollywood caste system, the Brahmins of the Big Screen rarely consorted with the television Untouchables. And no one was even gawking out the windows at the “snow.” But then in Beverly Hills, no one would ever be caught gawking at anything.
Only later did Santa and his merry elves appear to frolic with the youngsters. Toby seemed bored with them, fascinated only with one of Samantha's gifts, a Cyber-shot digital camera. “I want one,” he whined.
"You'll get one for your birthday,” Megan promised.
"That long?” At nine he was already a demanding, overweight brat, a classic TV couch potato who could maneuver his father like a studio animal wrangler. Unfortunately, Dad was fat and demanding too. Sometimes she wished, if it were possible, she could drown them both in their gene pool.
And then she realized that Santa, surprisingly thin in his unpadded red costume, was taking pictures of the children, even at angles that included their parents’ famous faces. She saw too, with a tightening fist of anger in her gut, that Santa was wearing sunglasses.
She quickly ducked away as he tried to take her and Toby's picture, and nudged the nearby Jay on his arm. “Santa,” she said quietly. “Where did you get him?"
"Agency. Why?"
"He's Gino Benedetti, king of the paparazzi, grabbing photos he'll be selling to all takers tomorrow."
Blood climbed high in Jay's face. “You're sure?"
"I'd be the last person to get you sued, Jay."
"Thanks.” He strode angrily off toward Santa, who was shooting pictures now of his vulnerable Samantha, who was grinningly aiming her new camera back at him.
* * * *
He was making her life a living hell. Now he had followed her to her boyfriend Judd's apartment in West Hollywood. Megan had seen the anonymous gray SUV moving discreetly on her tail while she drove there from Brentwood, and the klaxon of her fears had sounded like an air-raid siren. Arnold had recently hired a new butler, Tanner, a frozen-faced, self-effacing older Brit, whom she detested every time he obsequiously nodded when she entered a room. Was he on the paparazzo's payroll, alerting him every time she left the house?
EQMM, January 2008 Page 4