Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  She shut the door and leaned against it. “Tonight?”

  “Yes, tonight.”

  She shut her eyes for a moment. With her eyes shut she had a corpse face.

  “How? Tell me how. Quickly!”

  “They think I’ll be gone. They think I’ll be gone overnight. We’ll come back.”

  “They’ll be together?”

  “Why not? They have planning to do.”

  “But how?”

  “Electricity.”

  She looked disappointed. “Is—is that a good way?”

  “The best. Clean and quick and final.”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes, I can see a lot of ways how it could be. But I won’t just watch, will I? I’ll be part of it.” You there, little girl! Get into that game of musical chairs with the other children.

  “You’ll be part of it. I promised.”

  “Do they have a good chance of catching us, blaming us?”

  “Not a chance in the world.”

  “Oh, good! And later . . . we’ll go away.”

  “Far away.”

  “How much time is there?”

  “Three hours. Four.”

  “Long hours to wait, George.”

  “We’ll take a ride. That’ll kill time. Come along.”

  She had not sat beside me in a car before. She was unexpectedly feline, a part of her that I had not noticed. She sat with her legs curled up under her, partly facing me, and I knew that she watched, not the road, but my face, the glow of the dash lights against it, the pendulum swing of the streetlamps.

  “Scared?” I asked.

  “No. Something else. Like when you’re a child. You wake up in the morning. Another day. Then you see the snow on the windowsill and it all comes with a great rush. The day after tomorrow is Christmas, you say. One more day gone. Yesterday it was the day after the day after tomorrow. Now it’s getting so close it closes your throat. That’s how I feel. Getting one at last that isn’t a sick one.”

  She inched closer so that the hard ball of her knee dug against my thigh. The musky perfume was thick in the car.

  Without turning to see, I knew how her eyes would look. “We’ve never had to say much, have we?” she asked.

  “Not very much. We knew without saying. A look can say everything.”

  “Later we can talk. We can say all the words that ever were. Good words and bad words. I’ve said bad words when I’m alone. I’ve never said them out loud to anybody. And we can say the other words too, and it won’t be like after reading a story.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Oh, murder. Death. Kill. Blood. Bodies. I kill, you kill, we kill. The way you had to learn the Latin words in school.”

  “Conjugations, you mean.”

  “That’s what I was trying to think of. Miranda Wysner, conjugate the verb to kill. I kill, I shall kill, I killed, I had killed, I should have killed.”

  She laughed. Her fingers shut on my arm above the elbow. “Think about it, George. Like swinging a big shining white sword. You swing it at evil and you tell yourself that’s why you do it, but all the time way down inside your heart you know that it isn’t the reason for it, it’s the act itself.”

  I was on the road north out of town. She looked out the windows.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’ll just go north out of town up into the hills and then swing around and come back.”

  She was silent. I drove ever more rapidly. The road climbed and then began to gather unto itself a series of gentle curves that later would grow hard, the shoulders popping and crackling as the car threw itself at them.

  I knew the landmarks. At the crest I slowed down, my arms tired from the strain. I started down the other side. The rising whine of the wind grew louder. The needle climbed. Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five.

  “We’re killing the two of them, you see,” I yelled above the wind. “We can’t make the curve coming up. You wanted a part of it. You’ve got it, baby. You’ve got it. I left a letter with Mallory to open if I should die. It’s all in there. They’ll never worm out of this one. Electricity will kill them, all right. Courtesy of the State of New York, baby.”

  I saw the white posts of the curve in the farthest reach of the headlights.

  Her scream filled the car, filled my ears, drilled into my soul.

  “Faster, Georgie! Oh, faster!” Wild ecstasy, beyond the peak of human endurance.

  I gave her one quick look. The dash lights hit the white-ridged bone structure of her face so that the shape of the skull was apparent. The mouth was wide-screaming, lip-spread. Her voice told me that she had known.

  I came down hard on the brake. The car went into a long skid toward those posts. I let up on the brake, accelerated it straight, came down on the brake again. This time the skid was the other way so that the car headed toward the brink, still skidding sideways. I could hear only the scream of tortured rubber, then the jolting metallic scraping as tires were rolled right off the rims. I couldn’t bring it out of the second skid. The front right wheel smacked the posts and the car spun so that I lost all sense of direction. For a moment it looked as though the car were spinning in one spot, like a top, completely ringed about with the white posts. Then it hit again and I was thrown toward Miranda. I tried to find her with my arms but I couldn’t.

  The crescendo of sound was fading. The car jolted, lurched, stood absolutely still in a world where there was no sound.

  I got out. Other cars stopped. I looked for Miranda. I couldn’t find her. The tow truck had a spotlight on it, and so did the trooper car. I made them shine the lights down and search down the slope. They looked and looked. After I told them a little more about her they stopped looking and they were most polite, and they took me to a doctor who gave me white powders.

  I was in bed for ten days. I told Connie everything. She was very grave about it all and kept her eyes on my face as I answered every one of her questions.

  By the time I was on my feet the car had been repaired. I didn’t care what happened any more. I didn’t protest when she took me to the gas station. Conner acted odd, and the questions seemed to embarrass him. He said, “Why, sure, a few times Mrs. Corliss cashed checks with me, and I guess I turned some of them over to Louie as part of his pay.” Louie came over and shuffled his feet. He looked younger than I’d remembered. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn’t hold it in his Bogart way.

  “Louie,” she said, “have you and I ever had a date?”

  He stared at her. “What the hell! What the hell, Miz Corliss!”

  “Have we?”

  He manufactured a pretty good leer. “Well, now you bring the subject up, if you want a date, I’d—”

  “Shut up!” Conner rasped.

  “Get behind the wheel, George,” Connie said, “and take me to the Unicorn.”

  I found the street. It wasn’t there. I tried two other streets and then went back to the first one. I parked and went in a cigar store and asked what had happened to it. The man told me he’d been there twelve years and there’d never been a place of that name in the neighborhood.

  We went home. I sat on the living-room couch. She pulled a small footstool over and sat directly in front of me.

  “George, listen to me. I’ve been checking everything. That address you gave me. It’s a parking lot. There aren’t any old Victorian houses on that street made over into apartments. There’s no local record of a nurse named Miranda Wysner. I brought you home from the hospital and took care of you myself. They told me I should put you in a psychiatric nursing home. They thought I was in danger from you. You said some pretty wild things about me in the hospital. I took the risk. For the first two weeks you were home you called me Miranda as often as you called me Connie. It was, I thought, the name of some girl you knew before we were married. Then you stopped doing that and you seemed better. That’s why I thought it was safe to let you drive again. You were almost rational. No, you were rational. If it had been just alm
ost rational, if I had thought that you were in danger, I wouldn’t have permitted it. The steering did break when you had your accident. That’s because the garage you took the car to installed a defective part.”

  I said haltingly, “But . . . you. The way you acted towards me. I know that I’m repulsive to you now. This eye and all—”

  She left the room, came back quickly with a mirror. “Take off the patch, George.” I did so. My two eyes, whole again, looked back at me. I touched the one that had been under the patch.

  “I don’t understand!” I cried out.

  “You were convinced you had lost an eye. They gave up and decided to humor you when you demanded the patch. And as far as my turning away from you in disgust is concerned, that is precisely what you did, George. Not me.”

  I sat numbly. Her grave eyes watched me.

  “I followed you that night,” I said.

  “I went for a walk. I didn’t want you to see my cry again. I’d cried enough in front of you—until I thought that no more tears could come. But there are always more tears. Funny, isn’t it? No matter how many already shed.”

  “Why have I done this to you?” I demanded.

  “George, darling. You didn’t do it. It wasn’t you. It was the depressed fracture, the bone chips they pulled out of your brain, the plate they put in.”

  “Miranda,” I whispered. “Who is Miranda? Who was Miranda?”

  Connie tried to smile. Tears glistened in the gray eyes. “Miranda? Why, darling, she might have been an angel of death.”

  “When I nearly died, she was there . . .”

  “I was there,” Connie said, with an upward lift of her chin. “I was there. And I held you and whispered to you how much you had to live for, how much I needed you.”

  “She said she whispered to all of them on that borderline.”

  “Maybe she does.”

  “Take me in your arms, George,” Connie said.

  I couldn’t. I could only look at her. She waited a long time and then she went alone up the stairs. I heard her footsteps on the guest-room floor overhead.

  We went to the cabin on the lake. I was sunk into the blackest depths of apathy. Once you have learned that no impression can be trusted, no obvious truth forever real, you know an isolation from the world too deep to be shattered.

  I remembered the thin pink skin of her wide lips, the lurch of her walk, the unexpected competence of her hands.

  I do not know how many days went by. I ate and slept and watched the lake.

  And one day I looked up and there was Connie. She stood with the sun behind her and she looked down at me.

  The smile came then. I felt it on my lips. I felt it dissolving all the old restraints. I reached for her and pulled her into my arms. The great shuddering sighs of thanksgiving came from her. She was my wife again, and she was in my arms, and everything between us was mended, as shining and new as in the earliest days of our marriage.

  She wept and talked and laughed, all at once.

  That night a wind was blowing off the lake.

  When she slept I left her side and went to the windows. They look out onto the porch.

  The old rocking chair creaked. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  It was no surprise to me to see her sitting there. In the rocker. There was a wide path of reflected moonlight across the black water, and her underlip was moist enough to pick up the smallest of highlights from the lake.

  We smiled at each other the way old friends smile who have at last learned to understand each other.

  You see, Miranda knows about the drop from the top steps to the lakeshore rocks.

  I turned back to gather up my small and dainty wife in my arms.

  Deceptions

  by Marcia Muller

  Marcia Muller is one of the dominant voices on today’s mystery scene. She gets better and more ambitious, each time out. She has a keen social eye and a gentle wit and a kind of wry tolerance for our sad little shortcomings as people. And she gets all this down in beautifully turned phrases and sentences.

  First published in 1987.

  San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is deceptively fragile-looking, especially when fog swirls across its high span. But from where I was standing, almost underneath it at the south end, even the mist couldn’t disguise the massiveness of its concrete piers and the taut strength of its cables. I tipped my head back and looked up the tower to where it disappeared into the drifting grayness, thinking about the other ways the bridge is deceptive.

  For one thing, its color isn’t gold, but rust red, reminiscent of dried blood. And though the bridge is a marvel of engineering, it is also plagued by maintenance problems that keep the Bridge District in constant danger of financial collapse. For a reputedly romantic structure, it has seen more than its fair share of tragedy: Some eight hundred-odd lost souls have jumped to their deaths from its deck.

  Today I was there to try to find out if that figure should be raised by one. So far I’d met with little success.

  I was standing next to my car in the parking lot of Fort Point, a historic fortification at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. Where the pavement stopped, the land fell away to jagged black rocks; waves smashed against them, sending up geysers of salty spray.

  Beyond the rocks the water was choppy, and Angel Island and Alcatraz were mere humpbacked shapes in the mist. I shivered, wishing I’d worn something heavier than my poplin jacket, and started toward the fort.

  This was the last stop on a journey that had taken me from the toll booths and Bridge District offices to Vista Point at the Marin County end of the span, and back to the National Parks Services headquarters down the road from the fort. None of the Parks Service or bridge personnel—including a group of maintenance workers near the north tower—had seen the slender dark-haired woman in the picture I’d shown them, walking south on the pedestrian sidewalk at about four yesterday afternoon. None of them had seen her jump.

  It was for that reason—plus the facts that her parents had revealed about twenty-two-year-old Vanessa DiCesare—that made me tend to doubt she actually had committed suicide, in spite of the note she’d left taped to the dashboard of the Honda she’d abandoned at Vista Point. Surely at four o’clock on a Monday afternoon someone would have noticed her. Still, I had to follow up every possibility, and the people at the Parks Service station had suggested I check with the rangers at Fort Point.

  I entered the dark-brick structure through a long, low tunnel—called a sally port, the sign said—which was flanked at either end by massive wooden doors with iron studding. Years before I’d visited the fort, and now I recalled that it was more or less typical of harbor fortifications built in the Civil War era: a ground floor topped by two tiers of working and living quarters, encircling a central courtyard.

  I emerged into the court and looked up at the west side; the tiers were a series of brick archways, their openings as black as empty eyesockets, each roped off by a narrow strip of yellow plastic strung across it at waist level. There was construction gear in the courtyard; the entire west side was under renovation and probably off limits to the public.

  As I stood there trying to remember the layout of the place and wondering which way to go, I became aware of a hollow metallic clanking that echoed in the circular enclosure. The noise drew my eyes upward to the wooden watchtower atop the west tiers, and then to the red arch of the bridge’s girders directly above it. The clanking seemed to have something to do with cars passing over the roadbed, and it was underlaid by a constant grumbling rush of tires on pavement. The sounds, coupled with the soaring height of the fog-laced girders, made me feel very small and insignificant. I shivered again and turned to my left, looking for one of the rangers.

  The man who came out of a nearby doorway startled me, more because of his costume than the suddenness of his appearance. Instead of the Parks Service uniform I remembered the rangers wearing on my previous visit, he was clad in what looked like an old Union Army uniform: a
dark blue frock coat, lighter blue trousers, and a wide-brimmed hat with a red plume. The long saber in a scabbard that was strapped to his waist made him look thoroughly authentic.

  He smiled at my obvious surprise and came over to me, bushy eyebrows lifted inquiringly. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  I reached into my bag and took out my private investigator’s license and showed it to him. “I’m Sharon McCone, from All Souls Legal Cooperative. Do you have a minute to answer some questions?”

  He frowned, the way people often do when confronted by a private detective, probably trying to remember whether he’d done anything lately that would warrant investigation. Then he said, “Sure,” and motioned for me to step into the shelter of the sally port.

  “I’m investigating a disappearance, a possible suicide from the bridge,” I said. “It would have happened about four yesterday afternoon. Were you on duty then?”

  He shook his head. “Monday’s my day off.”

  “Is there anyone else here who might have been working then?”

  “You could check with Lee—Lee Gottschalk, the other ranger on this shift.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  He moved back into the courtyard and looked around. “I saw him start taking a couple of tourists around just a few minutes ago. People are crazy; they’ll come out in any kind of weather.”

  “Can you tell me which way he went?”

  The ranger gestured to our right. “Along this side. When he’s done down here, he’ll take them up that iron stairway to the first tier, but I can’t say how far he’s gotten yet.”

  I thanked him and started off in the direction he’d indicated.

  There were open doors in the cement wall between the sally port and the iron staircase. I glanced through the first and saw no one. The second led into a narrow dark hallway; when I was halfway down it, I saw that this was the fort’s jail. One cell was set up as a display, complete with a mannequin prisoner; the other, beyond an archway that was not much taller than my own five-foot-six, was unrestored. Its water-stained walls were covered with graffiti, and a metal railing protected a two-foot-square iron grid on the floor in one corner. A sign said that it was a cistern with a forty-thousand-gallon capacity.