EQMM, August 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Please just tell me the truth. I have to know.”

  “I didn't know it cost a thousand dollars.” He slumped against the dresser.

  * * * *

  Callie missed the dog.

  Her only regret, she thought as she drove up the drive to Anne Borden's house. She had called her earlier, and they had agreed on a time for her to come by and pick up her shawl. Callie had fantasized about Anne and she becoming friends, and then she would remember Anne had killed her husband, and she knew they could never be friends.

  Getting out of the car, she noticed the front door was ajar. She pushed it open and stepped into the foyer. “Anne?” The name ricocheted off the glass dome.

  When there wasn't any answer, she walked through the living room and into the den. “Anne?”

  There was a gin and tonic on the coffee table. The shawl was folded neatly next to it. A note rested on top. Callie picked it up and read: “Have a drink on me. Seeing your courage gave me courage. Take your shawl and wear it with a swagger.”

  Callie draped the shawl around her, feeling its soft warmth. Walking back into the living room, she wondered for the first time where all the furniture had gone. Had Anne Borden sold it? Was she cleaning out her life?

  In the foyer, Callie called out Anne's name again. Listening to her own voice echoing back at her, she walked up the stairs, holding tightly to the brass railing. On the landing, she paused before an opened door, then went in.

  Anne Borden lay on her back in bed staring up at a dusty chandelier. Her eyes no longer looked sad, just empty. A gaping hole was where her temple should have been. A gun rested in her opened palm. Blood and bone spattered the wall behind her. A note lay on the end of the bed.

  Callie edged closer and grabbed it. “Callie, if you are reading this then you are braver than I thought. I'm sorry for the mess. My husband would have detested it. But somehow helping to free you from your unsafe ‘safe’ life has freed me to pay my debt. Thank you.”

  Callie closed her eyes for a moment, then took the long end of her shawl and threw it back over her shoulder with a daring that felt new but not uncomfortable. She walked out of the bedroom and back down the stairs.

  Sitting in the warmth of her car, Callie dialed 911 on her cell. Then she leaned her forehead against the steering wheel and waited for the police.

  Copyright © 2012 Melodie Johnson Howe

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Passport to Crime: THE CRIME BEHIND THE FORTUNE

  by Tore Boeckmann

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Dozens of Tore Boeckmann's short stories have been published in mainstream publications in his native Norway. This story appeared in Norwegian in a shorter version and was expanded by the author as he did his own English translation. He now lives in Buffalo, New York, and is the author of a number of academic articles on Ayn Rand. He edited for publication Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction and lectures on her aesthetics.

  Translated from the Norwegian by the author

  Behind every great fortune lies a crime. Those words are whispered whenever Ragnvald Storm comes walking down the street. But only behind his back, of course.

  The whole country knows about the home-brew hobbyist who, after countless experiments in a shack by the wharf, discovered that a particular extract from seaweed hastens the malting of barley. Everyone has heard how Storm started Stormweed Ltd. with half a million Norwegian kroner from his great aunt—a loan which made the aunt immensely rich (although she later died and willed everything back to Storm). Most people are amazed that this formerly obscure person, this Storm, now supplies Europe's largest breweries, employs nine hundred people, and runs the most profitable business in the northern provinces. They can't explain it. Or rather, they can explain it—but only by ascribing it to a hidden and sinister crime.

  They are right to do so.

  Of course, they don't really know. Only two people know, and I am one of them. Also, the rumors that have been circulating for years get the details all wrong. Nothing happened quite the way people imagine it did. Yet the common thread in all the gossip is nothing more than the simple truth: Behind the Storm fortune lies a crime, and without that crime, the fortune would not exist.

  My name is Karl Larsen. Five years ago, my father died and left me the family business, Larsen Fruit & Tobacco, in a small town in northern Norway. I was nearly broke after holding a series of sales jobs across the country that all went bad; and while inheriting a convenience store north of the Arctic Circle was not the big break I'd been waiting for, it would do for a time. Besides, I had more or less grown up in that tiny store right across the street from the bank, and I thought I knew the business.

  And so I did. I can run a store as well as the next guy. What I had not expected were the pitiful returns. I had planned to hire a clerk so that I could hang out with the old gang, dropping by the store a few times a day to administrate. Instead, I was stuck behind the counter from nine a.m. to nine p.m.—and even then, I just got by.

  They were long hours. After five o'clock, when the other stores closed, the street lay almost deserted. It was barely worth it to stay open, but I had to squeeze every krone out of the business to survive. So I spent a lot of time staring out the front window at the other shopkeepers who walked by with the day's cash balance, to put it in the night safe next to the bank entrance.

  Every day they came, Rasmussen from the glassware store, Hoff from the bijouterie, Lillegaard the baker, Oiesvold the jeweler, and many others I didn't know. They unlocked the steel drawer and pulled it out, dropped the light brown cash envelope into the drawer, and pushed the drawer back into the wall. Then they twisted the key again, and pulled out the drawer a second time to check that the envelope had really fallen into the safe, which, of course, it invariably had. Then they went home for dinner, while I had to stand behind the counter for hours yet, before I could cross the street myself and drop my ludicrously thin envelope on top of the invisible pile.

  This was how I noticed Storm.

  I didn't know his name at first, or who he was or where he came from; only that he came walking up the street every day around six, heading for the bank and the night safe. He was in his thirties, unusually tall, and he always walked with his upper body bent forward, as if he were pushing his way against an Arctic gale blowing down Main Street, which, of course, was often true. His glance fixed on the sidewalk in front of him, he was fully absorbed by his own thoughts. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to communicate; I've already got too much on my mind. Maybe he had even been heard to mutter it. He could have been a genius, or the local idiot; it was hard to tell.

  I saw him every day as he walked up to the night safe and sent his usually bulging cash envelope through the deposit drawer. The drawer is of solid steel. Its hinged bottom falls away when it is shut, and the money slides down a chute into the safe. The design is simple but reliable, and the habit everyone has of pulling out the drawer a second time to reconfirm the laws of physics is quite paranoid. Yet there is something about the safety of cash that has to be seen to be believed—and so everyone always checks, myself included.

  The only exception was the tall man. I watched him with interest, then with fascination, then obsessively. His routine never varied: As the steel drawer clicked shut, he was already striding on, leaving the bank and the night safe without pulling out the drawer again to check!

  This, I knew with greater and greater certainty as the weeks went by, this was my big break. It was a present dropped in my lap by the gods of fortune. There was no way I could return it unopened.

  I made some inquiries and learned that the tall man's name was Ragnvald Storm and that he was the manager of the local brewery outlet store—a responsible position that some people thought was unsuitable for a man with the reputation of a half-wit. At that time, the local brewery still had a beer monopoly in our town, and alcohol could not be bought on credi
t. Huge sums of cash were left in the outlet store every day.

  Using the most artful of maneuvers to hide my motions, I managed to take the measurements of the inside of the steel drawer (10x15x20 cm). I cut out a thin steel plate with the right measurements, and to the middle of it I welded a ring the size of a thumb. I also bought, through the mail from Denmark, four square magnets.

  I chose the date with care: June 23—Midsummer's Eve. A day when half the population would be getting drunk and dancing around the bonfires. A blowout day for a beer retailer.

  Six o'clock seemed late in coming that day. The street outside was empty except for the usual procession of night-safe customers. Rasmussen, Hoff, Johnson—I could predict the order by now. Soon there would be ten minutes of nobody, and then Storm. I resisted the temptation to wait in the doorway. The street was bathed in sunshine—in fact, the sun would not set at all tonight—and I would have no cover of darkness at any time. To keep my “street time” to a minimum, I stood behind the counter and watched at an angle through the front window.

  I noticed Storm as he passed by the trendy clothing store (which I would soon be able to patronize), and I peeked out the door to make sure no others were around. Then I pulled on my imitation sheepskin overcoat, and I crossed the street without bothering to lock the door behind me. The loose overcoat hid my movements as I stood in front of the night safe. I unlocked and pulled out the drawer, got the magnets from my coat pocket, and placed them on the four inside walls, right above the hinged bottom. I had put the steel plate in a sling inside my coat; now I used a fishhook in the metal ring to lower the plate carefully down on the magnets. I pushed the drawer into the wall, unlocked it, and pulled it out for the second time, then pushed it back in again. I was just removing the key as Storm came up to the safe.

  I nodded and smiled, as if we night-safe customers were united in a special brotherhood. A second later, I almost whistled when I saw that Storm was carrying two cash envelopes, each filled to the point of bursting. Storm paid no attention to me, and did not even meet my eyes. I could have danced a jig on the bank stairs without him noticing. I was satisfied he would never recognize me.

  I could hear the drawer open and shut behind me as I crossed to the store. For a second I held my breath. What if he suddenly decided to check, especially since he had just deposited enough cash to jam the drawer? But then I heard determined steps against the pavement, and I knew he was walking away.

  I gave Storm two minutes to disappear before I crossed the street again and opened the drawer. The two bulging envelopes lay right there. I stuffed them down the front of my pants. I lifted the false bottom and placed it back in the sling. I picked loose the magnets. I closed the drawer.

  Back in my store, I locked the door behind me. For weeks, I had been closing shop early, and handing in the cash balance at the counter the next day. Now I could go straight home, and nobody would find my absence suspicious.

  That night I counted the money: 501,355 kroner. It was more than expected. I could start living now, with nothing standing between me and any goal I might decide on. I put all the cash in an empty marmalade jar. I burned the envelopes and the checks. Then I went to the churchyard and buried the jar next to my father's grave, on the plot reserved for me. No one else would dig there so long as I remained alive. I went home and slept till noon the next day.

  Nothing about the case ever appeared in the papers, and no charges were filed. But the rumors started immediately. Policemen of varying ranks were asking questions in which the name Storm was mentioned—the very same Storm who had been suspended from his managerial position at the brewery outlet. This rumor was true; the police came around to my store also and grilled me for an hour. Of course, I gave away nothing.

  Soon the rumors took on a more definite shape: With typical absentmindedness, Storm had mislaid the Midsummer's Eve cash balance of half a million kroner. The whole thing was just a stupid mistake. Storm himself reportedly acknowledged that he had probably mislaid the money. But proving anything one way or another was a different matter; and in the end, neither the brewery, nor the bank, nor the police really believed that Storm had acted with criminal intent. And so the case was dropped; and Storm was fired.

  After the rumors died down, I heard nothing about Storm for about a year. Then there was an article in a newspaper about some odd new invention he had made involving beer and seaweed, with a picture of a run-down old factory building he had rented to start production. Nobody seemed to know what to make of it. But gradually, as articles kept appearing about Storm's hiring more people, signing international contracts, and building new buildings, something strange happened. The rumors returned, but in a different form. Far from being absentminded, Storm was now a diabolically calculating thief. He had founded his company with money stolen from his last employer. Half a million he had stolen—the very same amount he claimed to have borrowed from his mysterious great-aunt. These rumors persist to this day.

  As for me, I left the money in the ground for a year. I dug it up only when my bank overdraft was stretched to the limit. I had cut back opening hours to between noon and six o'clock, and hired a part-time clerk—and life as a shopkeeper was already a lot easier. I now had time to look around for the big chance. But I was out of luck. I bought a partnership in a firm of wine importers, but it turned out to be a scam, and the loss made me a little gun-shy. I drank a lot and more or less stopped looking.

  In retrospect, I think it's amazing that I kept on going for almost half a decade. But this week it all came to an end. The bank refused to extend my overdraft, and I was declared bankrupt. The notice appeared in today's newspaper.

  This evening I was in the back room of the store for one last time. I was supposed to prepare for the closing-out sale, before handing in my last set of keys to the trustee in the morning. As I was trashing some rotten vegetables, I heard the entrance door open and close, and then footsteps on the floor of the store front. For a second I froze and held my breath. Who the hell could it be? The door had been locked, I was sure of that.

  Deciding that the calm, measured footsteps were not those of a burglar, I stepped into the store front—and stood face-to-face with Ragnvald Storm.

  Or maybe “face-to-face” is not quite accurate. The tall man loomed over me, his expression neither unfriendly nor benevolent, but one of curiosity. He was immaculately and fashionably dressed.

  “You,” I whispered. “Herr Storm!”

  “Good evening.”

  I was filled with a sense that words of great import were about to be spoken, and I felt a creeping fear. Trying to keep my words trivial, I said: “I don't believe we've met.”

  “Well, maybe just briefly.”

  “But what are you ... How can I help you?”

  “You mean, what the hell am I doing here? It's simple. The bank owns this store, and I, as of last year, own the bank.”

  “Of course. I forgot.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Trashing perishable goods.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, his voice taking on a note of irony, “those perishable goods.”

  Following the aim of his glance, I saw three Havana cigars sticking out of my trouser pocket, just where I had put them fifteen minutes earlier. I could feel my face and neck redden. I was too flustered to think of anything clever to say, but Storm decided to come to my rescue. “Keep them,” he said. “They are proof that Marx was right when he said that history always repeats itself—first as tragedy and then as farce.”

  “Repeats itself?” But I knew what he meant, and he knew that I knew. He didn't even bother to explain. He turned and looked through the window at the bank and night safe across the street. Again my glance followed his. “Are you guessing,” I whispered, “or can you prove it?”

  “Oh, I can prove it to a moral certainty, but maybe not to a jury. You were always a suspect to the police, mostly because of your opportunity to observe the safe and its customers from right here inside
the store. You see, if I didn't steal or lose the money, it must have been someone who knew my habits.” He turned to look directly at me. “But I only knew for sure that it was you when you asked the bank to extend your overdraft last month. You might remember the jovial Herr Gundersen who went through your books. He is really a forensic accountant, and he discovered the magical infusions of cash that have kept your business afloat for the last few years.”

  “Are you going to report me?”

  “To whom? The brewery? I own the brewery.”

  “To the police?”

  “I own them too.”

  “Then they'll do what you tell them.”

  “Right, and that's why I can't tell them to arrest you. People will say you're the fall guy, that I'm trying to clear my name at your expense. You know how the gossip mill works. Why weren't you arrested four years ago? Why only when I've become rich and powerful? What's the evidence? We know how we think Storm did it, but how could Larsen have pulled it off?”

  “Yes, they would probably say that.” I was beginning to feel better.

  Storm was about to say something, then stopped himself. Strangely enough, he seemed embarrassed. When he spoke, the words came slowly. “There is another reason I will make no demands of the police in this matter. Not that I have to explain myself to you; yet it feels somehow fitting that you should know.” He cleared his throat. “The fact is, getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. At that time, I had already done all the important experiments and developed the business concept of Stormweed. But I didn't dare take the final step—or, really, the first step—and quit my job. Getting fired gave me less to lose. If you hadn't stolen the money, I might still be the outlet store manager—dreaming every day about all the wonderful things I could have built if only I had had the courage.”

  “So I ... I did you a favor?”

  “The greatest one possible.”

  Storm stepped to the door. “We won't shake hands,” he said. “But I'll give you a last piece of advice. You can follow it or not, I don't care. You almost certainly won't.” He was looking me straight in the eyes. “I don't like you. But today you've reached the bottom, just as I did four years ago. You'll do well to take as much advantage as I did of that opportunity.”