Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

by Doug Allyn

  Ironically, he had not killed for gain — it wasn’t in him — but that was the outcome.

  In London I crashed with friends and must have proved poor company, constantly preoccupied. Still half incredulous over my conclusions, wanting them to be wrong. I even played devil’s advocate, seeking to disprove what I’d worked out.

  Was I mistaken about the grease inside Ben’s cap? No, the slippery touch on my fingers had revolted me, making me wipe them on my trousers, though I was too shaken at the time to identify what upset me. Not perspiration, but oil or hair cream.

  There had been an autopsy on Ben Basgate. Surely the pathologist must have discovered that Ben’s death occurred before massive injuries were inflicted, if only by a few minutes? Had he checked Ben’s hands for confirmation that a sedentary man had been swinging an axe for a long while? Obviously not. There was no suggestion of foul play — partly due to my input. The pathologist was presented with the victim of a typical country accident, and he had accepted that version.

  Very well, what about Solly Purchis? Could I be the only villager told about Ben’s purchase of the chain saw? Others might have added two and two, shared doubts with the police, and had them dispelled. A hopeful line — I so wanted to be wrong — but it did not last. I may not have friends in Drawbel (Selina didn’t count, she was more than that, and a secret besides), but people do tend to confide in me. It was likely that Solly had tried to get rid of the saw without going into details; probable, indeed, since admitting that he was stuck with the item rather than just having it in stock would invite them to haggle...

  Turn and twist as I might, it all came back to a certainty impossible to prove.

  One... accepts things. Ridiculous to exile myself on the strength of intuition and clues perceptible only to me — the material ones no longer available. To my hosts’ barely disguised jubilation, I went home to Drawbel.

  Naturally the great bugbear was encountering Tom Oates. Naturally he was just about the first man I met; he came into the post office shop for cigarettes while I was stocking up on groceries. I looked away, mumbling for him to go ahead, I had a stack of stuff to pay for. Tom grunted thanks and was on his way again within a minute.

  “Poor chap,” sighed Betty Higgs, misunderstanding my flinching from him. “Ghost of hisself, these days. Those shadows round his eyes... Gives my hubby the creeps, puts him in mind of them Nazi prison camps, he says.”

  I couldn’t follow that. Betty said, “Well, the weight Tom’s lost, clothes hanging off him like a starving man. Never known a fellow grieve so. Tisn’t as if his precious uncle did him many favours, but he thought the world of him. What Tom needs is to get married.” She regards matrimony as Jewish mothers regard chicken soup.

  Gradually I eased back into the village rut. Staying out of Tom’s way was easy enough, neither of us being overly gregarious. After a month or so I was having supper in the Huntsman when he appeared. We nodded to each other. I shut my brain down and still contrived to talk soccer to Albert behind the bar.

  Studying his reflection in a copper warming pan on the wall, I saw that Mrs. Higgs and her hubby had been exaggerating, but not much. Tom was less trim than stringy, gaunt, and that oily black hair was frosted with grey. When he spoke to me, some casual remark, I answered quite naturally.

  There, that wasn’t so bad, I thought, walking up to the cottage through twilight trees. Crazily, I felt... not obligation or guilt, though there were cobweb-fine tendrils similar to them, but an ambivalent sense of reluctance to let Tom Oates know that I knew. Extraordinarily, embarrassment and self-consciousness outweighed human aversion to a taker of life.

  Later that night I heard a car labour up the track, headlights swept across my sitting-room window, and for no good reason, I expected the caller to be Tom.

  It was Selina. “I won’t come in,” she called when I opened the front door. She leaned out of the car window. “What happened to you? I rang here for weeks, then gave up on you.”

  “Must be your turn, now you know how it feels.”

  “Touché.” She hesitated, then blurted, “I’m getting married.”

  “Nothing more to be said, then,” I replied woodenly.

  “You don’t seem broken up.”

  “Do you want me to be?”

  “I think I do, isn’t that awful.” She smiled sheepishly. “You might at least look shattered.”

  I reached in and touched her hand. “I’m not making much sense to myself these days, not tracking properly. We had lovely times, Sel’, and I’ll never forget them. Best wishes, goes without saying.”

  “Thanks. Come to the wedding, promise.” The sheepish look returned. She didn’t want to add that having known the bridegroom since he was in short pants, and being a casual friend of hers, I would start tongues wagging if I stayed away.

  “If I’m in-country, I’ll throw rice and toast the pair of you,” I replied, thankful for darkness to blur a smile produced by willpower.

  That ought to have been the end of it, but these things never end.

  When Selina walked up the aisle of St. Mary’s, I was better than four thousand miles away, appearing on a TV chat show in New York. The host got my name nearly right and mentioned the latest book twice. In Chicago the name came out right during radio interviews, but one muttonhead forgot to ask about the book and another left listeners with the firm impression that I was peddling a whodunit while I was hyping a historical novel. In New Orleans, final stop, a charming guy got all the facts straight, allowing me to quit while ahead.

  Tom Oates has gone fully grey now, his face drawn and furrowed, but the weight is back on and he’s a healthier colour. Predictably, Ben left Monks Farm to him. Tom has gone in for organic farming. There’s a good market for naturally grown vegetables and Ben’s neglect left the fields fallow long enough for chemical fertilizers to leech out. Tom breaks even, which is all he need do, thanks to money inherited along with the estate.

  Not long ago I stumbled on the last pointer to his guilt: the motive. I was lecturing at a weekend creative writing school — love hearing myself talk, even without a fee. Over dinner, one student explained that he ran a property development company (“You’ve heard of Sunday painters, I’m a Sunday scribbler, ha-ha-ha”). Oddly enough, his work, right down to its dense thickets of syntax, read eerily like a less genteel Henry James who knew far too much about bribery over zoning matters.

  When I mentioned living at Drawbel, Don Maxwell went into a boisterous pantomime, holding his index fingers towards me in a cross, vampire-defying fashion. Steadying our bottle of excellent wine, I said mildly, “It’s a nice part of the world and they gave up burning witches and eating babies... oh, ages ago, hasn’t happened since nineteen fifty-five.”

  Maxwell chuckled inordinately, he was pretty high by then. “Drawbel Valley is written on my heart like Calais on Queen Mary’s. Lost a fortune there. Could have made one, leastways, and didn’t. Pal o’ mine retired there, asked me down. You know how it is, ‘If you’re ever in the area,’ and I stuck his address in the Filofax. Lo and behold, not a month later I went to an auction in Bath; Ben’s place was an hour down the road by Jag’, so I took him up on the invite.

  “Well, he had this farm he didn’t know what to do with and the minute I set eyes on it — golf course, I go. Golf course. Knock the house down or extend it, whichever keeps the planners happy, and there you are, clubhouse and pro shop. We shook hands on the deal, and no sooner have I set up legal meetings than the silly beggar snuffs it. Left the place to a man who carried on alarming when I said the king was dead, long live the king, let’s make a cartload of money. No sale, no dice, no golf course and trimmings.”

  So that was the long-ago trigger. Ben had broken the news to Tom one fine Sunday morning, and died in the subsequent explosion.

  Maxwell frowned concernedly. “You all right, mate? Look like you had a bad oyster.”

  But even that, more’s the pity, was not the finish.

  Not long a
fter dinner with my rich friend I was strolling up Park Street towards Bristol University to collect some research material. And I started assessing, in a chauvinist pig’s window-shopping manner, a very short skirt and long legs.

  Then she glanced back and it was Selina. Fortunately my face is naturally impassive. I hadn’t seen her close-to in several years. It was not that she had aged, but there were elements of hardness and dryness, an aura as much as a look. Makeup more emphatic than before, a discontented pucker to her mouth. “Billy! Are you following me?” Big smile, wet kiss.

  Like a fool, effusive through guilt at being disappointed in her, I asked Selina to lunch. “Lovely! I’ll just tell my manageress...” Truly, it had slipped my mind that her boutique was in Park Street.

  Once we had ordered, Selina burbled that she only looked in at the shop twice a week now and as for me, I was a recluse, what were the odds against the two of us, etcetera and so forth. Pleased to a borderline nerve-wracking extent.

  I don’t like the sound of this, whined the base, self-serving swine at the back of my mind. Married women have always been off-limits to me, less from concern over adultery than simple prudence. Affairs of that brand generally end in tears before bedtime; afterwards, actually, and because of.

  Cue for tepid, neutral small talk, how was the boutique faring, what were her holiday plans... er, this Turner exhibition due to open at Bristol art gallery next month, wouldn’t that be a treat.

  The smoked salmon couldn’t be ignored any longer. As soon as I paused for the first mouthful, Selina jumped in with, “I made a terrible mistake, you know.” And it all poured out: husband a morose workaholic, jealous, possessive, yet unwilling to spend much time with her. “Any attention he spares is the wrong kind, checking on me. I have to keep an eye on the business, but every time I come here, there’s a scene. He’s probably ringing the shop right now; I told Mandy to say I’m out looking at fabrics.”

  “No need for that,” I said firmly. “We’re just having lunch, probably won’t happen again for years.”

  “You’ve always been a friend,” said Selina, deaf to that warning shot. “Let’s not lose touch again, Billy.” Which was rich, considering she had kept me uncertain and distanced in the past, dates refused, calls unanswered as often as returned, and our liaison ended without discussion.

  The pattern was depressingly familiar: damned if I did, damned if I didn’t, a rat either way. I could snub Selina right now, reminding her that then was then, and she was married now. Or I could stand by her, leading to meetings on the sly. I’d make a pass, it’s the way I am, and the overwhelming probability was that Selina would respond, that being the way she was.

  Tucking my feet under the chair to avoid knee contact, unplanned or otherwise, I thought about a friend of mine in the Metropolitan Police, a murder investigator.

  He says there are two tribes of killers, and there is no point in punishing one sort, because having taken a life, they would kill themselves sooner than do it again. The downside, according to this expert, is that for some of the other tribe, murder gets easier with practice.

  “I’m not talking serial killers,” he explains, “just your outwardly normal citizen, driven to violence. A few degenerate into being capable of knifing the bloke who beats ’em to a parking space or compliments their girlfriend on her hairdo.”

  Tom Oates belonged to the never-again tribe. Ben Basgate told him that the place to which Tom had devoted all his adult life was doomed to become a golf course, and — detonation. A freak event, an unrepeatable anomaly. I was utterly sure of that... but not utterly enough to bet my life.

  And Selina, as you will have guessed by now, wasn’t just any old wife. She was Mrs. Tom Oates.

  Even if I didn’t make a pass (Tom represented an inhibiting factor powerful enough to discourage that), the danger was that sooner or later I would be tempted to tell Selina why her husband was morose. Then... who knows? The best possible prediction was one hell of a mess.

  Say I kept my mouth shut and my hands to myself. Selina wanted a male admirer to share her woes and provide implicit assurance that her company was valued. Jealous husbands resent such males. Somebody was bound to see us together, or merely intercept and interpret a look between us, generating gossip until...

  Until, for the sake of argument, I had an accident.

  So — I reflected as duckling in orange sauce was served and she said what a pretty restaurant this was, I’d always known places she would like — the only solution was polite but firm rejection.

  “Selina,” I began, and she asked, “Yes?” on a rising note. The light was flattering in there, but I noticed the lipstick on her wineglass and the way her hands looked older than the rest of her. And, heart twisting, I chickened out.

  “Just Selina,” I lied. “Good to see you again.”

  From the way she tucked in, the cuisine was good. I couldn’t taste the food.

  Before the year was out my phone would ring and a familiar voice would ask if I was alone in the cottage because she needed a friendly ear. Or she’d be walking her dog — well after dark, of course — and just happen to drop in. For the first time in my fairly disgraceful life, the prospect was deeply repugnant.

  Again I opened my mouth. Again I could not bring myself to tell Selina to grow up and get lost, in whichever order she preferred.

  Painted into a comer, I did what any upright country gentleman would have done.

  Two or three times a year I go to London for a council of war with my agent, Hal Maitland. Needless get-togethers in this era of phone, fax, and computer, but we eat and drink tax-deductibly, spinning yarns about the good old days (good because they’re behind us) when he was a publisher’s PR man and I a persecuted hack on the Daily Excess. We invariably pronounce a solemn curse on that dreadful rag; and still read the thing every day.

  Hal and I were in the Groucho Club a few days after that distressing reunion with Selina. He’d outlined sundry interesting possibilities, then guffawed. “Nearly forgot... There’s this idealist at a tiny little West Coast college who thinks you’re a loss to academe and wants to do something about it.”

  “Whereabouts on the West Coast — Dorset, Devon, Cornwall?”

  “California, you dolt. Head of English department at this place has gone overboard about Wails and Whispers. According to the professor, and she should know, it’s a—” Hal squinted in an effort of memory, and recited “ ‘an allegory of Britain’s vanishing class structure, at once elegiac and profoundly pessimistic.’ ”

  We looked at each other. Wails began as an entry for a BBC-TV drama anthology of social comedy. The Beeb said they didn’t want vulgar farce, thanks all the same. Waste not, want not: I turned it into prose, cut the custard pies, added copious French quotations and Latin tags, and Hal found a publisher who believed what agents told him. It sold all of two hundred and fifty copies — fifty of those bought at special rates and entombed in a carton at the back of my garage.

  When he’d wiped his eyes, not to mention evidence of Caesar salad off his tie, I asked Hal for more details.

  He snorted dismissively. “Left the letter at the office, nearly put it in the round file, my wastebasket. One of those writer-in-residence deals. Nothing there for you, chum. They’ll spring for a round-trip air ticket and provide an apartment on campus, but the place is at the back end of nowhere and they wanted you there by the end of next week when whatsit, semester, starts. Far too short notice.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

  Black Water

  by Doug Allyn

  © 1994 by Doug Allyn

  A new short story by Doug Allyn

  The protagonist of this new story by Michigan author Doug Allyn, Michelle “Mitch” Mitchell, started life as a man in the stories “The Puddle Diver” (AHMM10/86), “Night of the Grave Dancer” (AHMM 9/88), “Icewater Mansions” (EQMM 1/92), and “The Ten-Pound Parrott” (EQMM 2/92). It was only when Mr. Allyn expanded the story “Icewater Man
sions” into a book that he decided a female protagonist would serve his series better, and so we find superimposed on the earlier “Mitch” a completely new character who shares some of the old Mitch’s history but otherwise has sprung fresh from the author’s pen...

  ❖

  I hate tending bar in the morning. People who drink before noon tend to be surly and sarcastic, especially to a woman. Or so I thought until I hired a male bartender. He quit after three days. And two fistfights. Apparently morning grumps are gender-neutral.

  Bartending isn’t a trade I chose freely. I inherited The Crow’s Nest, a northern Michigan bar/restaurant with a tackle shop attached, from my father. We weren’t close, my father and I. I was surprised he left me the Nest, but not surprised its mortgage payments were four months behind. Still, the bar has a terrific view of Huron Harbor, I was ready for a change in my life, and as a single woman with a young son to support, I do what I have to.

  Summers are best. I spend most days in the dive shop renting boats and scuba gear while Corey plays on the beach. Sometimes I pick up odd jobs skin diving for things tourists lose on the lake bottom. Outboard motors, tackle boxes. And sometimes bodies.

  In the fall, the sunbirds fly south, my son returns to his private school, and I work myself half to death trying to ease the ache of missing him. Heck, I’ll even tend bar in the mornings.

  And sometimes it gets interesting. A Wednesday morning in late fall, a young Hispanic guy in a black leather jacket and faded jeans wandered in. I’m tall for a woman, nearly five-ten, but he was taller, six foot plus. He was probably in his late twenties but didn’t look it. He had a pasty, junk-food complexion and a permanent pout hiding behind a scrubby goatee.

  He took a seat at the bar, ordered a double shot of Wild Turkey, neat, knocked it back with a single gulp, then ordered another.