The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  Pythag was masterful. Even under this prolonged scrutiny, he— as the saying goes— kept his cool. Or would have, were it not for the television lights. The heat they generated would have made puddles of the exhibit if any of the ice and snow had been real. Instead, it made a puddle of Pythag. He began to perspire profusely.

  I do believe he still might have carried it off, had not Mrs. Farthington chanced to look at him just when he felt forced to lift a finger to swipe a ticklish drop of moisture from the end of his nose.

  Mrs. Farthington, startled to see a mannequin move, clutched at her bosom and fell down dead on the spot.

  The tortoise inherited.

  When his friends in the police department refused to pursue a criminal case against him, Pythagoras Peabody was sued by the museum.

  Persephone was not pleased with me.

  This last was uppermost in my mind when I strolled alone through the museum the day after the civil suit was announced, and my own suit of Persephone rejected. Had I not loved her so dearly, I might have been a little angry with Perse. Her brother was a confounded nuisance, but she blamed me for his present troubles. I should have kept a closer watch, she told me. Had she deigned to accompany him on his daily outings? No. Monday was the worst day of the week, as far as she was concerned. That was the day her lunatic brother stayed home. I decided to give her a little time with him, to remind her of my usefulness to her.

  One would think I would have gone elsewhere, now that I had the chance to go where I pleased, but there was something comfortable about following routine at a time when my life was so topsy-turvy. So I returned to the museum.

  Standing before the great mastodon, I sighed. It had been Pythag's ambition to ride the colossus. Could it be done? To give the devil his due, that was the thing about going to a place like this with Pythag— he managed, somehow, to always add a bit of excitement. I mean, one really doesn't think of a museum as a place where the unexpected might happen at any moment. Unless one visited it with Pythag.

  Why should Pythag have all the fun? I overcame the hand-railing with ease.

  It was not so easy to make the climb aboard the skeleton, but I managed it. I enjoyed the view from its back only briefly— let me tell you, there is no comfortable seating astride the spine of a mastodon. Knowing that Pythag would be nettled that I had achieved this summit before him, I decided that I would leave some little proof of my visit. I made a rather precarious search of my pockets and found a piece of string. Tied in a bow about a knot of wires along the spine, it did very nicely.

  The skeleton swayed a bit as I got down, and the only witness, a child, was soon asking his mother if he might go for a ride, too— but in a stern, Pythag-inspired voice, I informed her that I was an official of the museum, repairing the damage done by the last little boy who climbed the mastodon, a boy whose parents could be contacted at the poor house, where they were working off payments. Although we haven't had a poor house in this city in a century, she seemed to understand the larger implications, and they quickly left the museum.

  As anticipated, Persephone called the next day.

  "Take him," she pleaded. "Take him anywhere, and I'll take you back."

  "Persephone," I said sternly.

  "I know, and I apologize, dearest. I will marry you, just as we planned, only we must wait until this suit is settled. I won't have a penny to my name, I'm afraid, but the three of us will manage somehow, won't we?"

  "Three of us?"

  "Well, I can't leave poor Pythagoras to fend for himself now, can I?"

  And so once again, I found myself in the Museum of Natural History with Pythag at my side. He had donned a disguise— a false mustache and a dark wig. A costume not quite so warm as the Inuit garb, but no less suited to its wearer.

  He began teasing me about my recent setback with Persephone. If he was an expert at devising troublesome frolics, Pythag's meanness also derived benefit from his ingenuity. When he told me that Perse would never marry me, that she had only said she would so that I would continue to take him to the museum, I felt a little downcast. When he averred that she would keep putting me off, always coming up with some new excuse, I found his Pythagorean theorem all too believable.

  I had experienced such taunting before, though, and I rebuffed his attempts to hurt and annoy me by remaining calm. Outwardly, in any case. The result was that he became more agitated, more determined to upset me. At one point, he said that she would never marry me because I was dull, and lacked imagination and daring.

  "Really?" I said, lifting my nose a little higher. "As it happens, Professor, I have done something you haven't dared to do."

  His disbelief was patent.

  "I've climbed the mastodon," I told him.

  "Rubbish," he said.

  "Conquered the proboscidean peak."

  "Balderdash!"

  "Not at all. There's a little piece of string, tied in a bow on his back to prove it."

  It was enough to do the trick. He climbed, and it seemed to me the skeleton swayed more than it had the day before. As I watched him, and saw him come closer to my little marker, it became apparent to me that I had tied the string at a most fragile juncture of supporting wires.

  It was a wonder, really, that I hadn't been killed.

  The thought came to me as simply as that. One minute, Pythag was astride the spine, asking me to bring him a piece of string, so that he might tie his own knot. I imagined spending the rest of my days nearly as tied to him as I would be to his sister. All my life, protecting treasures of one sort or another from a man who thought rules were only for other people, never himself.

  "You must bring my own string back to me," I said. "That is how it's done."

  And that was how it was done.

  I was horrified by the result, and remain so. Mastodon skeletons are, after all, devilishly hard to come by. Persephone is convinced that the experts there are actually enjoying the challenge of reassembling the great beast.

  The museum, no matter what it may say to the papers, is considering dropping its civil suit, hoping to extract a promise from Persephone not to pursue a wrongful death action against them. We are mulling it over.

  I say we, because Pythagoras was mistaken, as it turns out. His sister will marry me. I confessed all to her, of course. Persephone merely asked me what took me so long to see what needed to be done.

  Persephone and I are indeed well-suited.

  Robert J. Randisi

  Black and White Memories

  ROBERT J. RANDISI had a very busy year in 2000. His most recent novel was Blood on the Arch featuring Detective Joe Keough. The Shamus Game, a Private Eye Writers of America anthology edited by him, was also published in Oct. of 2000. His short story collection, Delvecchio's Brooklyn, was published in January 2001. Any of these novels or collections reveals his gift for superb characterization, up-to-the-minute dialogue, and a real grace for revealing how people think and act, especially when crime is involved. "Black and White Memories," published in the electronic magazine The Mississippi Review, reveals all this and more.

  Black and White Memories

  Robert J. Randisi

  1

  Guilt had long since bled the color from Truxton Lewis' memory of Elizabeth Bennett. Whenever the first strains of Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" started playing it all came back to him, but always in black and white. He wondered for years why that was. Then it came to him. It was the guilt.

  Despite the guilty sinking feeling when he remembered the one time in his forty years of marriage he had been unfaithful, he would not have given up the memories for any reason— no matter what color they came in. The song was playing on the radio as Tru Lewis pulled up in front of the house owned by Jack Langston. Since retiring from the police department ten years ago— and since the death of his wife several years earlier— Tru had been housesitting across the country in an attempt to relieve the boredom of being retired and a widower. One was bad enough, but bo
th were too much to handle. The house was on Seven Mile Beach in Port May, New Jersey, a beautiful, Victorian town a county over from Atlantic City. It was October, which meant the tourist season was over. When Tru discovered that there was a house available in Port May he hurriedly made the call that got him the job of housesitting the place for a month. He stopped the car in front of the house, one of the largest on the beach. Apparently, Jack Langston had made a ton of money dealing in commodities, and this was his family's summer home. Tru would "sit" in it for the month and then someone else would take over. A month was Tru's personal limit.

  He retrieved his suitcase from the trunk and a bag of supplies from the back seat of his car, an '89 Ford Galaxy he'd borrowed from a friend, and let himself into the house with the key the real estate office had supplied him with. There were several keys, and he'd been well schooled in their use. He had not been in the house before, but had seen a diagram and knew where the guest room— his room— was. He'd learned early on in his housesitting career that owners did not appreciate a stranger invading their master bedroom and usually insisted on an alternative.

  He left the bag of supplies in the kitchen, then went directly to the guest room and dropped his suitcase on the bed, which was full-sized, and comfortable looking.

  Next he took a walk through the house, checking each of the rooms to make sure it was secure and had not been violated since the owner's departure. Finding everything in order he tried to decide whether to go back to the bedroom to unpack, or to the kitchen to put away the supplies. He opted for the kitchen.

  His "supplies" consisted of six bottles of his favorite beer— Michael Shea's— and a box of one hundred Tetley tea bags. It took him a moment, but because the beer was warm he decided to put it in the refrigerator and make himself a cup of tea.

  Armed with the steaming cup he went to the sliding doors at the back of the house, off the livingroom, and went out onto the full deck. There was a breeze coming off the water. He stood there and enjoyed it, sipping the tea, thinking about the last time he'd been in Port May.

  2

  Port May, New Jersey September 1966

  Tru Lewis was twenty-nine years old, had been a member of the New York City Police Force for seven years. From the beginning he seemed to be on the fast track to the top. He'd made detective after four-and-a-half years, much of that spent working undercover. However, it was that time period that was the cause of his recent problems. Suddenly, two-and-a-half years after his last undercover assignment had ended he was under investigation by the Internal Affairs Division, who suspected him of skimming off the top of three million dollars in drug money which had been confiscated by Tru and his partners. What made it even worse was that his "partners" were apparently testifying against him.

  "You have to get away, Tru," his wife told him. "I know that. I can understand that. But why can't we get away together?"

  He couldn't tell her why. He couldn't bring himself to tell her he was sick to death of the smell of baby powder and puke. It seemed to him that babies smelled of either one or the other, and recently those smells had attached themselves to her, as well.

  "I'm not good to be around, sweetie," he told her. "Let me do this. The verdict comes down Monday. I just want to spend the weekend alone. I'll be back Monday, I promise."

  She'd held tight to the front of his shirt and asked, "You're not going to do anything foolish, are you?"

  "Like swallow my gun? That's not my style, hon. I'll be back. I swear."

  She'd kissed him fiercely and he'd left and driven to Port May, New Jersey, where his uncle— a retired cop— had a cottage he said he could use.

  "Fuck 'em, kid," his uncle had told him. "Go to my cottage and don't think about it."

  Not thinking about it was easier said than done, but going to the cottage did seem like a good idea. He could get away from the suspicious stares of his "friends and neighbors," as well as the constant crying and spitting up of his new daughter.

  And his wife. Suddenly the love of his life had become someone he wanted to run away from. Her solicitous behavior around him, combined with the fact that their daughter had become an appendage on her hip, served only to irritate him.

  * * *

  His uncle's cottage was on Seven Mile Beach. He hadn't been there since he was a kid. When he pulled up in front it looked the same. It actually looked the same as the last time he'd seen it, almost fifteen years earlier. He stood in front and studied the side of the house where his uncle had once tried to smoke out some hornets from a nest but had only succeeded in setting the house on fire.

  He used the key his uncle had given him to open the door. Even the inside looked the same. The furniture worn and musty, the walls cracked and peeling. He was carrying a small duffel bag with extra clothes in it, and a paper bag with a six-pack of his favorite beer, Ballantine. He put the beer in the fridge, dumped his duffel in the smallest of the two bedrooms, and then went out back on the porch to look at the water. He left the front and back doors open to air the place out.

  After twenty minutes he decided to close up the house again. He put on a windbreaker, because the salt air was cool in September, stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and started walking.

  * * *

  Being alone turned out to be a bad idea. All he could think about was what he would do if he was kicked off the force— or worse, kicked off and arrested. He replayed each scenario over and over again. Just when he started to think that swallowing his gun might not be such a bad idea he came to the end of the beach and saw the shack.

  Not actually a shack, but a small restaurant. It almost looked like what his old man used to call a roadhouse. He decided it was more of a café than anything else.

  It was getting dark and the place was lit, though not brightly. He looked around and was struck at how black and white everything seemed. The sand was white, the sides of the building were white, the water was dark, there was not a hint of color anywhere. It was as if he had stepped through a portal into an alternate dimension where color had been drained from everything. He could smell fish frying, and hunger suddenly gnawed at his belly. He realized he hadn't eaten since that morning, when his wife had tried to force breakfast on him. He'd finally agreed to eat some toast before leaving, just to shut her up.

  He walked towards the little cafe and as he got closer he could hear music coming from inside. It was Dusty Springfield singing "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me." As soon as he opened the screen door and stepped inside he saw her.

  The interior of the place continued to foster the colorless illusion of the moment. The floor was laid with black and white tile, the walls, tables and countertops were also white. The leather of the booths and counter stools was black. A man behind the counter wore a long white apron over a white t-shirt and black pants. What hair he had left was black, a wispy fringe around his head and a thick mat on his forearms.

  And in the midst of all this she stood, a shining oasis of color in a desert of black and white.

  And the color was gold.

  3

  Her skin was pale, and her waitress uniform was a white apron, a white peasant blouse and a black skirt— but her hair was golden blond, and made her stand out, although she would have done so, anyway. Her figure was Monroesque, with full, round breasts, the nipples of which were prominent, probably because the place was airconditioned to the point of freezing.

  A few of the booths were occupied, and some of the tables. Since the tourist season was over Tru decided these had to be locals.

  "Sit anywhere," the man behind the counter said.

  Tru only saw the one waitress, so it didn't matter where he sat, she'd be waiting on him. He chose a booth with no one seated directly in front or behind him.

  When she came over he saw that she was older then he'd first thought, maybe late-twenties instead of early. She had blue eyes, which he hadn't been able to notice until now. The blue of her eyes and gold of her hair were the only hints of color
in the place.

  "Can I get you something?" she asked, and he realized this was the second time she'd spoken. He'd been staring and hadn't heard her the first, but now he did and her voice had a smokey, throaty quality to it.

  "Oh, uh, a burger," he stammered, feeling fourteen again, when being near any girl, let alone one as beautiful as this one, had made him stammer.

  "How'd you like it?"

  "Well done."

  "Fries?"

  "Sure."

  "A shake?"