AHMM, September 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "The only one out there, far as I know."

  "See anyone else?"

  I sat back, looked at him, looked at his partner. “Why don't you tell me what this is about? You didn't come here just to ask about an accident."

  "Just clearing up details,” he said.

  I thought they might want to know more about the shooting, but they mentioned it only that once and didn't ask anything about Dickey Mayfield.

  "Have any idea why he shot me?” I said, just as Bryce and his partner were getting up to leave.

  "Do you?” Bryce said.

  "I know that Dickey Mayfield and Paul Morin were friends."

  "Yes. We're aware of that,” Bryce said, walking behind his partner into the kitchen.

  "Any idea why Alice Mayfield divorced Dickey? You looking into that?"

  He knew exactly what I was implying but pretended not to. He gave me a wry smile. “Have a nice day,” he said, following his partner out the door.

  Of course they knew everything I knew and probably a lot more. And had doubtless drawn the same inferences.

  * * * *

  "No doubt about that,” Mike Kadish said. I phoned him the minute the men were gone. Mike was a lieutenant in the Portland police, my boss a few years back, and a good friend. “But damn it, Duff, you can't go back up there! It's an ongoing investigation. They can handle it."

  "I know. You find out anything?"

  "Only that it wasn't the train that killed him."

  "What did?"

  "The medical examiner says he was dead before the crash. He had apparently been strangled.” He paused, sneezed, apologized, and added, “They don't have all the forensic reports. I expect to get more tomorrow."

  "The circumstances of the divorce? You look into that?"

  "No, I didn't. You'll have to do your own gossipmongering. Why you getting all worked up over this? Ned sending you back up there?"

  "That son of a bitch shot me,” I said.

  "And you want revenge? Are you crazy? Suck it up."

  "I can't.” I lowered the phone and sat there muttering to myself. I had no idea what I wanted.

  I spent a bad night, slapping the pillow, kicking the sheets. I knew I had no business intruding on a murder investigation. But that son of a bitch put a hole in me! Even if the police added the shooting to their own charges, I'd get no satisfaction from that.

  * * * *

  I'd like to say I was going north against my better judgment, but I hadn't consulted my judgment. I had no idea why I was going up there. I knew only that I couldn't stay home and do nothing.

  I phoned Ned. “If you want to get in touch, you can leave messages at that same motel in Houlton."

  "I'm not paying your expenses!"

  That got a grim smile. I lowered my portable. While driving north on I-95 I learned that a squall line was leading a cold front into central Maine north of Baxter State Park. I considered turning around and heading home, but I believed I could make it at least to Houlton and hole up there until the weather cleared.

  Of course, I was thinking what I supposed the police were thinking, that killing Paul Morin would have given Dickey Mayfield a reason for shooting some stranger who came to his brother's lodge pretending to be friendly. It could be why the police had wanted to know how much time had elapsed between my leaving Paul and when he was killed ... and why Bryce asked whether Paul had had another appointment. Dickey could have been out there on that road waiting to meet Paul. And what better place than that lonely wilderness to commit a murder.

  * * * *

  As I lay in bed that night, an old memory crept into my mind. I was standing on a ledge above a beach looking down at blood on the sand where my father's body had lain. I could see every stain on the boulder that had crushed his skull. It was an image I have never been able to eradicate.

  Whoever killed him was still out there. I believed then and believe now that it was another cop who had killed him.

  Whether that had anything to do with my need to find Dickey Mayfield, I have no idea. But ten years ago I had joined the police force for the sole purpose of investigating my father's death and had learned nothing. My venture into police work had been a failure, and I hated failure. I hated leaving things undone.

  * * * *

  Large wet clumps of snowflakes spiraled against my windshield as I pulled off the highway in Houlton. I brought a Thermos of coffee and a large Italian sandwich to the motel, undressed, and curled up on the bed and watched a DVD the desk provided because the satellite reception had turned fuzzy. It was an old Lee Marvin Western. I fell asleep toward the end and didn't wake up until after midnight. I opened the door to a blast of frigid air. It was snowing hard. My Jeep, parked right outside, was coated with more than four inches of snow.

  A plow banging on asphalt as it drove along North Street woke me up. It was after ten before I swung a leg over a stool in a diner down the street and ordered orange juice and pancakes and coffee.

  "Think the road to Knowles Corner is plowed out?” I asked the waitress.

  "I'd guess so."

  "And 11 going north?"

  "Stay on those two, you'll be all right."

  I bought a newspaper, found nothing about the train crash. No longer news. Nothing on the crime pages about Dickey Mayfield.

  * * * *

  As I traveled north, listening to radio warnings about more snow, I had pretty much decided the police were developing evidence against Gordon Mayfield's younger brother. It's why they hadn't mentioned him to me. But Paul Morin had been killed going down that road. And Rachel Pratt could have told the police Dickey had gone off somewhere during the hours Paul was killed.

  When I approached the junction where Paul had pointed me to the trail that led to the Mayfield's lodge, I saw the cruiser angled into a snow bank.

  I slowed the Jeep, saw something red through the closed windows of the cruiser. The trooper was behind the wheel. For a moment I thought he was alone, then I saw a man in a seaman's toque facing him, a man with a beard. It was Dickey Mayfield. He showed me the Colt .45 he had been holding against the trooper's face.

  The driver's side window slid down.

  "Get out of here!” Dickey yelled. “None of your business!” He said something to the trooper who, holding his head stiffly against the pressure of the pistol, put the cruiser into gear and backed out of the snow. I saw embarrassment, maybe even shame, in the trooper's eyes when he glanced at me. He didn't signal one way or another that he wanted help.

  * * * *

  Dickey and the trooper went north with me riding their tail. Aroostook County is known for potato fields, and I guess we passed a lot of them, although I didn't pay attention, not even to the few trucks and cars that passed us. In Presque Isle where the cruiser turned north onto Route 1, I scanned the streets for the police. Didn't see any. I suppose we drove eighty some miles before we reached what I had come to expect was Dickey's destination: the small border town of Van Buren. It's where Dickey had lived with his wife Alice.

  As we drove down Main Street I saw a black Crown Victoria with the word POLICE emblazoned across the door panels. It was parked with no policeman in sight. A woman on a street corner waved at the trooper as he drove past, disappointment on her face when he didn't wave back. Dickey didn't once turn to look at my Jeep, although I had stayed no more than a hundred feet behind him. I guess it didn't matter to him.

  I stopped at the corner and watched the cruiser move slowly past three houses and stop in front of the plowed driveway of a small white cottage with dormers on a steep, snow-covered roof and snowcaps on window boxes.

  The front door opened a crack, then closed, then came fully open. A woman in jeans and a denim blouse stepped onto the stoop.

  The passenger door of the cruiser flew open, and Dickey stepped out lugging a shotgun. I turned my motor off, had to wedge the door into a banking of snow to get out of the Jeep.

  Dickey threw something into a snowbank up the road, looked like a
gun, maybe the trooper's, maybe the reason the trooper wasn't out front challenging Dickey. I did have a gun and no intention of letting Dickey harm the woman.

  "Whore!” Dickey was yelling. “With that bastard behind my back? You rotten bitch!"

  The woman was trying to get back inside when Dickey fired the shotgun. I could see her legs sticking outside the doorway when she fell. Dickey fired again, making a sudden patch of raw wood in the clapboards next to the door. I leaped over a snowbank, dropped to my knee with the Beretta in both hands, and got off a shot that hit Dickey as he mounted the steps. The gun fell from his hands. The trooper ran up the driveway and grabbed Dickey's legs and pulled him out of the house.

  He was dead. My bullet had broken his spine. The woman was alive but bleeding badly. While the trooper was calling for help, he suddenly collapsed, holding both hands on his chest. When I got to him, his face was turning blue. I lifted his neck, tilted his head back, and breathed into his mouth. I pumped his chest. Whether that helped, I don't know. But he was alive when the medics got there. Both the trooper and Alice Mayfield were brought to the Saint John Valley Health Center across the river in Canada.

  * * * *

  I arrived in Portland late the following evening. Mike called me, said Sergeant Bryce of the state police was looking for me.

  "What's he want?"

  "He wants to know why you went up there."

  "What'd you tell him?"

  "For the first time in my many years as a police officer,” he said, “I told a lie. I said I didn't know. Of course I could have mentioned the word revenge. He would have enjoyed hearing that."

  "Stop kidding around! I saved the woman's life!"

  "So it seems,” and then he laughed. “And after the trooper told them that, he said you probably saved his life as well."

  "They're both okay?"

  "They're doing fine, thanks to you. But Sergeant Bryce still wants to know why you went up there. He knows Ned Gronig didn't send you."

  "I'll think of something,” I said.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Jim Ingraham

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  CONVERSATION WITH Jim Ingraham

  A retired professor of American history, Jim Ingraham published his first short story in these pages in 1986. Like his P.I. Duff Kerrigan, Ingraham grew up in Maine and even worked for a time as a skip-chaser in Detroit. Kerrigan is “the daydream of who I am,” his creator has said.

  AHMM: You come from an academic career. Can you tell us a little about your background? How did you come to write P.I. stories? How has your writing been influenced by your work as an academic?

  JI: After graduating from NYU as a history major (I didn't want to spend my life grading English papers), I wrote three sprawling novels, one of which caught the attention of a New York editor who gave me a lot of advice. I spent two years trying to satisfy him and failed. I just didn't understand story organization. After I had tried for many years to get published, your predecessor, the late Cathleen Jordan, accepted my story “Mystery of the Chinese Ball.” She rejected at least ten subsequent submissions but always encouraged me to keep trying.

  Through some form of osmosis I began to realize that crime stories provided the structure I had been searching for. Before I became a history major at NYU I was a music major at Michigan State. Strange as it may sound, the biggest academic influence on my writing has been my acquaintance with the music of Beethoven. All of art is composition and symmetry and Beethoven is the grand master of that. It's the structure, the order, not the content, that led me to write the Duff Kerrigan stories.

  AHMM: What are the origins of the Duff Kerrigan character?

  JI: I guess Duff Kerrigan is me. I think every first-person narrator is a version of the writer. Hemingway's point-of-view character is always the same—Robert Jordan in one book, Nick in the “Three Day Blow.” It's always Hemingway—not a portrait of himself, but an emanation from himself.

  AHMM: Like you, Duff Kerrigan grew up in Maine. To what extent is that an important aspect of his character, and of yours? You now live in Florida; do you visit Maine often?

  JI: What I like about Maine people is their lack of pretension. Maine, unlike Massachusetts, was not founded by Puritans. It became established by fishermen and farmers and resisted the encroachment of the Puritans. The people I like to write about are ones I admired as a boy—self-respecting, independent working people who do not intrude upon their neighbors. I see Duff as that kind of man.

  I don't try to avoid the postcard image of Maine. I just try to represent my memory of Maine and its people truthfully. The first member of my mother's family took a job in a lumberyard in Kittery, Maine, in 1623. Her people were obstinately Yankee. My father's father arrived in this country at the age of fifteen. I don't believe my mother's people ever forgave her for marrying an immigrant's son, especially a Catholic immigrant's son. Maine, like all of New England, seethed with intolerance, of Irish Catholics on the coast or French Canadians who came down to work in the mills. The tourist magazines like to present Maine as though no “foreigners” had ever settled there. I grew up among Irish longshoremen in Portland, who were looked upon as trash. I could write a lot of stories about this aspect of Maine life, but it's still too painful to think about. I ran away from home twice before I was in the eighth grade.

  I go back to Maine at least once a year. I visit the waterfront and upstate woodlands and pastures, sit with people, talk with people, absorb atmosphere, I love it but can no longer tolerate the winters.

  AHMM: Is there a chance that Duff Kerrigan may appear in a novel?

  JI: I guess there's every chance, although I have nothing planned. I think of Duff as engaged in tight little plots that unfold in a few thousand words. But who knows? Good ideas pop up all the time.

  AHMM: Have you published any novels?

  JI: Glad you asked! My novel Remains to be Seen has been purchased by Five Star Mysteries and is scheduled to appear in July 2008. It's a fair-play whodunit, unfolding in an academic setting in Maine and follows a murder investigation by a young woman detective called Perci Piper. A major character, Vinnie Milano, comes right out of Duff Kerrigan's neighborhood in Portland.

  AHMM: Which writers do you admire and why?

  JI: I admire writers I can learn from. There are, of course, the giants on whose shoulders we all stand. But aside from them, I admire Ross Thomas, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Dashiell Hammett, Somerset Maugham, Tony Hillerman—pretty much in that order. To me, Ross Thomas was the best of the modern crime writers—witty, urbane, structured. Hemingway for his understanding of point of view, Greene for his seamless placing of characters in the story's atmosphere, Hammett for his directness, Maugham for his storytelling, Hillerman for his evocation of atmosphere.

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  IMPORTED FROM AFRICA by G. Miki Hayden

  Oddly unerring, the mailman always stopped by with a package for Miriam, Miriam's cowife Nana, or their husband Kofi at exactly the moment when all three were simultaneously out of the house. Miriam, who had returned from buying oxtails (all right, beeftails) at the grocery to find a slip in the mailbox, was amazed at how precisely postal delivery timed such things.

  And so the next day, Miriam headed for Harlem's Manhattanville Station, where she surrendered her check-cashing ID, together with the little brownish postal notice.

  "From Africa,” said the clerk admiringly after returning to the window with the parcel.

  Aha. Miriam nodded. This must be the present Nana's parents had mentioned in a recent postcard. Miriam signed the delivery slip and took up the bulky package.

  Ever practical and domestic minded, she began at once to tear at the wrappings. The more she could throw away immediately, the less she would have to drag down to the recycling can. She had brought her own cloth carrying bag for just such an instance and stood for a few minutes at the post office trash bin shedding Styrofoam popcorn and old newspapers.

  Whatever the in
-laws had sent was carefully packed, and Miriam didn't breach the inner core of the present. Still, she'd done well in getting rid of a great deal of garbage. Miriam walked home under the sunny skies of a mid December day.

  Nana had left a dish in the sink and gone out, just like any daughter in her early twenties, and not like a cowife. Miriam smiled. She foraged for a small paring knife and began to cut open the package. What emerged at length was something rather strange for a seasonal gift. But what could be expected from parents who dispatched their only daughter to marry the father's best friend of several decades before? Yes, the girl had been returned from her first, failed marriage—but wouldn't any normal mother be glad to have a daughter back at home?

  Two crude statuettes had been sent, neither very handsome nor very well made. One piece was the reclining figure of a bare-breasted woman without a head. The other was the unsophisticated and inscrutable representation of the head and torso of a male. Both works were a type of red clay pottery, and neither appealed to Miriam's aesthetic sense formed by years of perusing the gift shop at the nearby Harlem Studio Museum. Not to mention that Miriam was herself an artist of sorts. She wove baskets and playful little animals from palm fronds and grasses and sold those alongside her husband at the Shabazz Market on 116th Street.

  How pitiful that the Mensah family had seen fit to send such a sorry offering. Nana would feel ashamed if she saw it. Miriam put the pieces back in the inner box they'd arrived in and the box in her bag. Perhaps she would send a lovely note to the Mensahs and tell them how appreciated their thoughtfulness was—and she'd leave the pieces out of sight. Certainly the figurines were dull and wouldn't enliven the décor of the simple one-bedroom apartment where Nana slept in the living room and Kofi and Miriam took the single real sleeping chamber.

  Why had the Mensahs sent a holiday present, come to think of it? Were they that grateful that Kofi had taken their daughter off their hands?

  * * * *

  Two days later, Miriam was at home chopping onions for dinner when the mailman buzzed with a package for the Obadahs. Miriam signed, thanked him, and brought in the present. Addressed to Kofi and family, the flat, large parcel was from Nana's parents. A second one? Now that was peculiar. Miriam took the knife and sliced through the tape just as Nana bounced in the door trailing the outdoor cold along when she entered.