The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  After that speech I went out to get a hamburger, bringing it back to eat, loudly and slowly, while I waited. I was slurping at the bottom of the ice in my plastic cup when the doctor came out.

  "Five minutes," Dr. Paige said as I slid into the chair across from his desk. "Please remember I'm seeing you only out of respect for Miss Cahill."

  I checked my watch before asking, "When you called me the other evening, you said you've been seeing Skye for two years."

  The jerk just stared at me and nodded.

  "I assume that means she lives here, in Omaha?"

  "Elkhorn."

  Now it made sense why she'd sent me out there. Maybe seeing the street name had triggered off a repressed memory. "According to her grandmother, Skye was raised in Los Angeles?"

  "Yes."

  "Would it be breaking any great ethical code to tell me the last address you have for her in California?"

  He rolled his eyes in such a way that made me want to harm him. "Miss Stanton…"

  "Look, you can either cooperate with me now or later. Now will only take up" —I checked my watch again— "four minutes and thirty seconds. Later could take days. I'm a bullheaded German with free hours to spend haunting your office."

  He pounded his fist down on the date book in front of him. "Yes! Of course I know her address!" He swiveled his chair angrily around and started punching numbers into his computer. When the screen was lit up with Skye Cahill's history, he read the address: "Three-twenty-nine Oak Street. She lived there with her husband for three and a half years." Then he closed the file and defiantly turned toward me. "What else?"

  "Three minutes left for you to listen to a theory of mine."

  He sat back nodding, at first bored and then stunned to hear that I suspected Skye Cahill of murdering her father, Edward Blevins, when she was sixteen years old.

  "Miss Cahill is incapable of such a violent act."

  "What about Ann?"

  The doctor's ears perked up then. "Now, that's an interesting thought." I must have struck a nerve; all of a sudden he wanted to talk. I leaned back and listened.

  "The personality of Ann is the idealized mother figure. She protects and loves Skye, unconditionally. I would suspect she is capable of doing whatever it takes to keep Skye safe. But if that was the case, why hadn't she struck out sooner, try to harm the unstable parent or abusive husband?"

  "When was Ann… born?"

  "As far back as Skye can remember," he said.

  "Then wouldn't it make sense that the mother would blame the father for putting the child in danger?"

  "Very good, Miss Stanton."

  "How long did Skye know she was adopted?"

  "As far back as she could remember. Yes, it all makes sense."

  I picked up my purse and pulled out a copy of the original cassette Skye had given me. I started to stand, and the doctor looked disappointed. "You're not going so soon? Look, I apologize for my bad manners."

  I tossed the tape at him. "Listen to this and see if you agree with me that Skye was confessing to protect Ann, the personality who actually pulled the trigger."

  He was excited now. "Sit, we can listen together."

  I started for the door. "Dr. Paige, I'm really not interested in helping you make a name for yourself by exploiting this young woman. The chief of police from Ardmore, Oklahoma, has also received a copy of that tape and will be contacting you, as will the detective who booked Skye here, in Omaha. I have no interest in the outcome of this case. That will be left to the three of you."

  I hurried out of the door before he could say anything else. When the elevator doors opened, I thought I was home free until I saw those frightened eyes.

  "Miss Stanton." Skye grabbed my arm and nudged me to a corner in the hall. "I've been waiting outside your apartment for hours. Where have you been?"

  "Working on your case," I told her gently.

  "So? What did you find out? Was that man my father?"

  "Yes, Skye, he was." I watched her expression and it never changed. I wasn't sure if I was talking to Skye or Ann. I felt so sorry for her.

  "I need to see Dr. Paige," she said, and walked away as if I had suddenly gone invisible.

  "And I need to make a call," I said to myself, dialing the police.

  * * *

  Someone once told me that the second most important thing about doing a job is knowing when you are finished. As I forced myself back into my car, I kept telling myself I'd done only what Skye Cahill had hired me to do. My job was done. What happened to her as a result of my investigation was of no concern to me.

  But still I felt guilty.

  Jürgen Ehlers

  Golden Gate Bridge— A View from Below

  JÜRGEN EHLERS is one of the rising stars of the German literary scene. With the trials and tribulations the German mystery publishing field is going through right now (see the World Mystery Report for Germany), one can only hope that this will not diminish this terrifically talented author's output. Only time will tell, but for now, enjoy this suspenseful tale of people loving, living, and dying in San Francisco. "Golden Gate Bridge— A View from Below," was first published in the anthology Crime Scenes.

  Golden Gate Bridge— A View from Below

  Jürgen Ehlers

  How nice to see you again!" Thus the reunion with my brother began with a lie. I had not been looking forward to seeing him for the first time in fifteen years. His telephone call the day before, and instantly it was all there again, everything I had tried to push out of my mind ever since. He had been giving a lecture at Hamburg University and wanted to call briefly before flying back. "You look fine," I said. And that was not a lie. He did not look his age, forty-seven. I wondered if he had dyed his hair.

  He looked about my room. Of course, he spotted the photo at once. The only souvenir of my trip to California fifteen years ago. The photo that still kept its place in my study was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. No ordinary picture, though. None of those you can buy at any souvenir shop in San Francisco. It just showed part of the steel construction of one of the piers. My brother had taken it. "Just give me your camera!" he had demanded and then held it obliquely downward into the gap between footwalk and driveway, and pushed the button. "Farewell to California, I would call the shot," he had suggested. This being the ultimate view of the sun-kissed state for the several hundred suicides who had jumped off the bridge so far. That was typical of my brother. Always good for some bizarre action, clever, fast, unpredictable. The years spent together had never been sufficient for me to grasp more than half of his mind. In the meantime I had stopped trying to understand him.

  "You should have thrown it away," he said. He took the picture off the wall and tore it to pieces. As if that could make any difference.

  Many people assume it would be a great advantage to have a big, strong brother. That is only half true. Certainly, I used to admire and envy him not only for being ten years my senior but also for his intelligence. He had his diploma in economics when I had just passed my O-levels. But at times I had also hated him, especially when he had said things like "You would not understand that!" in such an arrogant manner that only big brothers are capable of. Naturally he had got that job in California, picked out of a crowd of over two hundred applicants, whereas I had to be glad to find any job at all.

  My invitation to California had arrived when I had almost given up hoping for it. He had announced that he had quit his job and was about to do something different, somewhere else in the U.S., but before leaving San Francisco he intended to show me around. He couldn't spare much time, but an extended weekend would be fine. The plane tickets? It would be his pleasure. He had always been a show-off.

  * * *

  I might have forgotten some of the details if I had not kept a diary in those days. We had never been able to afford major trips. The flight to the U.S. was the most exciting event of my life. I simply had to write it down. There I was, standing on the Golden Gate Bridge, together with
my brother and Nick Mintford, his landlord, and with Parker, the guide dog. Mintford was about my brother's age. "I am Nick," he had introduced himself. We all called each other by our first names, which was completely new for me. I felt part of a big family.

  "Over there, I think that is Fisherman's Wharf, and the tiny island in the middle of the Bay, that is Alcatraz." Nick pointed exactly in the right direction. I was impressed. Of course, my brother had told me in advance that Nick was blind. Nick, the freelance journalist and landlord of a little appartment in the attic of his house in Oakland. I was impressed at how independently he could find his way around. Only after a closer look did I grasp that his seeming independence was carefully orchestrated. Part of his freedom of movement, of course, he owed to Parker, his mongrel guide dog. His ability to point out the tourist spots to us, however, he probably owed to the fact that he had not been blind all his life. Right now he was holding on to the railings for orientation, and I was sure that he had not made this tour for the first time, and he might well have rehearsed his act with Marie, his wife.

  Nick was clearly proud to show me his town. To be honest, I was pretty tired after the twelve hours' flight and would have preferred to get some sleep first. However, Nick's enthusiasm just carried me along.

  Our sightseeing tour ended abruptly, when all of a sudden a heavy shower of rain poured down upon us. I had seen the clouds well in advance, but my brother had swept away my concern saying "Not at this time of year!" Obviously, there were exceptions, and even my big brother did not know everything. We were completely drenched by the time we reached our car. Parker shook his coat and jumped onto the backseat. Nick took the seat next to his companion. My brother pushed back his wet hair and sat down behind the wheel. Probably only I could hear that he was humming at a very low key: "It Never Rains in California."

  * * *

  Marie I did not meet before the evening. She was a nurse. We collected her at the hospital and drove to a small Afghan restaurant near the university to have a meal. After dinner we went to Nick and Marie's place.

  The house was over in Oakland, halfway up the hill, and from the back you had an astounding view of San Francisco and the Bay. Nick moved about in his house like a seeing man. Without hesitating he found the right drawers, and I would not have been able to open a bottle of wine more expertly than him. We drank Californian red wine. Nick knew all about it. I liked the wine; we emptied several bottles.

  We talked about all sorts of things. Of course I had to appreciate Nick's column that had appeared in The New Yorker a year ago. The central part was the description of a sunrise in San Francisco. Those guys over in New York apparently had been unaware that their author was blind.

  Later I helped Marie with the washing up. "That is one of the things Nick hates to do," she said. "He is afraid of breaking something. To be honest, he probably doesn't drop any more plates than I do. But it doesn't bother me much. Just carelessness, nothing more. But he always blames it on his blindness."

  "I think he takes it marvelously," I said.

  Marie smiled. "A lot of it is just facade. He tries to make it all look light and easy, but really it bothers him a lot. You can see that from the fact that he drinks too much."

  I fell silent, because I had also drunk too much. Did that show? Did I talk too much? Was Marie's remark aimed at me rather? I watched her putting the glasses up onto the highest shelf. She was a beautiful woman, although she must have been well beyond thirty which was old for me at the time. How lucky Nick had been to have found such a companion!

  "Was Nick already blind when you first met?" I asked.

  She nodded.

  "Some kind of illness?" I asked. At that moment I sensed already that she did not want to talk about it.

  She answered in a single word: "Vietnam."

  I fell silent. What could I possibly say? All of a sudden I became fully aware of the wonderfully innocent country I was living in. Eternal peace all my life. Other people had been less lucky. But at least Nick was still alive, and he had found Marie. I envied him for Marie.

  * * *

  America is the land of firearms. Nick had one, too. He showed it to us the same evening, when we touched on the question of security. Him being in the house on his own most of the day, what if a burglar came?

  Nick grinned. "I would shoot him! Just like this!" He had jumped to his feet. His chair fell over. Just two steps to the sideboard and he had pulled open the drawer and produced a gun, which he now trained at us. Not just vaguely in our direction, but at every single one of us, one after the other.

  We had all jumped up. I held my breath. After all, Nick had drunk a lot, and we had to assume that the gun was loaded. It seemed rather large and menacing, but I had never seen a gun before. Except on TV, of course.

  For a few seconds we all stood as if frozen. I do not know why, but all of a sudden I felt the urge to test Nick. Very cautiously I slid sideways. Inaudible, as it seemed to me. But not so for Nick. The muzzle followed my move.

  "It's not easy to trick you," I said. My voice sounded strange.

  "No." Nick put the gun down. "And it is not advisable to try." He felt for the chair that he had pushed over. Uneasy silence.

  "How about a cup of coffee?" asked Marie. The spell was broken. We spent a long evening in easy chat together.

  * * *

  It was well after midnight when we clambered up the stairs to my brother's flat. I was dog-tired. Right next to me the springs creaked when my brother flung himself on his bed. "Nick is quite a character, isn't he? By the way, do you know how he became blind?

  "Vietnam," I said. I had nearly been asleep.

  My brother looked at me. "Good joke!"

  I hated it when he talked down to me like that. After all, I was almost twenty, and apart from that in this case I was pretty sure. "Marie told me so."

  "All right, it had to do with Vietnam," he conceded. And then he let me in: Nick had not been wounded in the war, as I had assumed. He had not been to Vietnam at all. He had fired a bullet through his head when they had come to draft him.

  "My God," I said.

  Again I thought of myself. How easy had it been to dodge the draft in Germany, even for me, who had only half believed in being a conscientious objector. And the risk of ever having to go to war had appeared so remote that I had never considered it seriously.

  Again my brother looked down at me. "You think now that it's ever so cool to protest against war like that. Kill yourself in order to avoid killing others."

  Indeed I had thought along those lines. "But— couldn't he have simply gone to Canada? I mean, others have done that, as far as I know."

  He had gone to Canada. Staying with friends near Ottawa. But then his mother had died and he had thought it essential to be present at her funeral. That was not in San Francisco but someplace in the North, the name of which I have forgotten. Nick's father was the mayor. They say he had not agreed with his son's decision to flee to Canada. They say he hadn't known that he would come down for the funeral, just for the day. The family reunion took longer than he had expected, and eventually Nick was talked into staying overnight. And then, next morning, there was the police.

  "Nick assumes that his father had turned him in. That in the course of the night, all of a sudden, he had realized that as mayor he had no choice but to enforce the law. And after all, everybody had seen that his son was back. Nick locked himself into his father's study. When the cops threatened to force the door open, he had taken the pistol out of his father's desk, put the muzzle at his temple and pulled the trigger."

  He had been lucky. The bullet had penetrated his skull too far to the front and caused no lasting brain damage. Only that he was blind. And at that, of course, unsuitable for military service. He was lucky twice. At the hospital where he was nursed he met Marie. She was a young probationer then, and of course she was also fervently against the war. They got married three months later.

  * * *

  After breakfa
st my brother and I went out to explore. The university and botanic gardens. Nick did not want to join us. The sun was shining. Only too soon would I be on my way back home to Hamburg. To drizzling rain and 17 degrees centigrade. I congratulated my brother on his wonderful life here in California. If I were him, I would never leave the place.

  My brother looked at me. "You wouldn't believe how lonely I felt over here for the first few months. Sure, all the people I had met were nice and friendly, but most relationships are rather superficial. If it hadn't been for Nick and Marie, I would have despaired." That was something he had never mentioned in his phone calls. But there had been frequent calls during the first months. Suspiciously frequent calls, I would say with hindsight. When the calls got less frequent, our mother concluded that he had found new friends. Or a friend rather.