EDITORIAL NOTES
Friday, April 1, 2011
EDITOR’S NOTES
The Art of Murder Murder is not a pretty picture. As a moral issue, it may be black and white, but in a world less stark, the circumstances often paint a more nuanced image. Motivations add emotional...
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EDITORIAL NOTES
EDITOR’S NOTES
The Art of Murder
Murder is not a pretty picture. As a moral issue, it may be black and white, but in a world less stark, the circumstances often paint a more nuanced image. Motivations add emotional tonalities; the players involved add color and vibrancies; method orders the composition of the canvas. And the literary representation of murder allows us to . . . enjoy a horrendous crime at an artistic remove.
You might go so far as to say that reading mystery stories is cathartic. One or two little murders (or seven, such as we have in this issue), discretely captured in well-written tales, will provide hours of relaxing, engaging entertainment. Such artistic mayhem can even be delivered right to your door every month when you take out a subscription to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine!
LINDA LANDRIGAN, EDITOR
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JOHN R. CORRIGAN is the author of the Jack Austin series of pro-golf mysteries (Out of Bounds, 2006). Once a city newspaper reporter, he now teaches at Connecticut’s Pomfret School. This is his first published short story. This issue features the sixth installment of MIKE CULPEPPER’s Trollfarm...
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EDITORIAL NOTES FICTION
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The Lineup
JOHN R. CORRIGAN is the author of the Jack Austin series of pro-golf mysteries (Out of Bounds, 2006). Once a city newspaper reporter, he now teaches at Connecticut’s Pomfret School. This is his first published short story.
This issue features the sixth installment of MIKE CULPEPPER’s Trollfarm series, which began with 2009’s “The Icicle Judgment.”
Booked & Printed columnist ROBERT C. HAHN also reviews mysteries for Publishers Weekly and the New York Post.
DOUGLAS GRANT JOHNSON has worked in the movie industry as a screenwriter, producer, and director. His last story for AHMM was “No Trouble At All” (July/August 2010).
ELAINE MENGE grew up in Louisiana and is a former English professor at the University of New Orleans. Her story “Scavenger” appeard in the July/August 2009 issue of AHMM.
PERCY SPURLARK PARKER divides his time at home in Las Vegas between the slot machines and his word processor.
GIGI VERNON , a university reference and digital services librarian, writes academic history articles when not writing mystery stories.
CHRISTOPHER WELCH has firsthand experience of both the art and legal worlds, having been a playwright and an attorney. He lives in Rhode Island.
FICTION
FICTION
FORGOTTEN MAN
GIGI VERNON
Art by Edward Kinsella III I’d never squealed on anyone, though I’d had more chances than most blokes, and I had no intention of starting now, even though the guv’nor, my American boss George Carston,...
SHOOTER
JOHN R. CORRIGAN
“I’m still a shooter,” Pete Peters said to me. “They made me into one when I was eighteen.” It was fifteen degrees outside in early December. We were drinking Jack and Cokes in Jumpers Bar on Main Street in Darlington, Connecticut, which is just east—but a full tax bracket—from Hartford and its...
THE ART OF ENMITY
CHRISTOPHER WELCH
Art by Ron Chironna Not much happens in the Berkshires’ art scene during the winter. Except once in a while an artist gets murdered. Even that doesn’t happen very often. Academic symposiums and panel...
SWEET THING GOING
PERCY SPURLARK PARKER
Officer Bob Rycann climbed out the back of the squad car adjusting his uniform. He’d driven deep into the alley, the night shadows covering his activities. He looked around to see if he could detect any onlookers, but the shaded windows of the surrounding buildings were as dark as the alley itself....
THE PARROTT CANNON AFFAIR
DOUGLAS GRANT JOHNSON
Art by Linda Weatherly Everyone agreed the cannon was on the roof. It had somehow gotten from its accustomed place next to the flagpole and onto the roof of the Augustus V. Millbank Administration...
THE WITCH-COUPLE
MIKE CULPEPPER
Art by Tim Foley In those days, many people in Iceland knew some magic. Some had learned the Sami art of finding lost things. There were those who knew words that kept away elves and trolls and others...
LOST IN A STRANGE NEIGHBORHOOD
ELAINE MENGE
Travis pumped the pedals like a wild man. A fever powered him. The fever of triumph. Today he’d kept up with the younger guys for the first time, even in this cold. During cooldown, his breaths condensed so visibly in the evening air, he felt himself going gleefully cross-eyed at the sight. Since...
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FICTION
FORGOTTEN MAN
GIGI VERNON
Art by Edward Kinsella III
I’d never squealed on anyone, though I’d had more chances than most blokes, and I had no intention of starting now, even though the guv’nor, my American boss George Carston, deserved it. And not because I’d lost my job, no. Far worse.
There we stood in New York’s Bowery Mission breadline. Unlike the rest of us, the guv’nor wasn’t humiliated, head hanging, shoulders hunched, shuffling to stay warm; he was roaring drunk again on bootleg he’d managed to beg, borrow, or steal. To the tune of the American national anthem, he sang lyrics of his own creation.
The way he carried on, I needn’t have worried about squealing. Sooner or later he’d get himself nicked. “Mr. Carst—George, give it a rest!” I ordered. “You’re going to get us thrown out of the queue.”
Exaggerating his alarm at my reprimand, he recoiled into a woman behind him who reeked like she’d bathed in hamburger grease.
She shrieked and slammed into a skinny, hatless and coatless fellow. He reached around the woman and smacked Mr. Carston. “Millionaire boy, do us all a favor and get out of line. So there’s more for the rest of us, see?” He bared his horsey, crooked teeth in a grin.
I intervened. “I apologize for my mate. He’s had a bit too much. We’re as down on our luck as the rest of you.”
The bloke repeated my words, aping my accent, badly I must say, then pushed my chest in challenge, trying to dislodge me from my spot. “What are you? His English butler?”
With a sloppy and charming grin, Mr. Carston slurred, “What-if-he-is?”
“Couple of pansies.” The man flailed at us both.
My left connected with his jaw. Down he went onto the pavement in a sprawl, then bounced up even angrier.
From out of nowhere, a stocky, blue-coated copper inserted himself between us. “That’s enough, lads.”
“Officer,” Mr. Carston said respectfully, and hiccupped.
I don’t suppose even his own mother would have known George Carston now, his face bearded and smudged with soot, his clothes stained, rumpled, and torn. I held my breath both hoping and fearing the peeler would recognize him.
For a moment it seemed like he’d oblige. He surveyed Mr. Carston severely.
Unable to stop myself, I moved in front to block his view. “We lost everything in the crash, sir,” I said. “We’ve nowhere to go and nothing to eat.”
Instead of
pegging Mr. Carston for the criminal he was, and hauling him off to the slammer, the copper let us off with a warning. “Then behave yourselves, do you hear? The sisters have got their hands full without your malarkey.” Then he sauntered off, whistling and twirling his nightstick.
I wanted to call him back, “Here’s an arsonist and murderer!” and hand over Mr. Carston, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Even though I kept a nickel in reserve for that very reason.
It was my own bleedin’ sense of loyalty that stopped me. I’d been saddled with it since childhood in a London orphanage, through soldiering in Her Majesty’s Army, and serving as a footman in a Sussex country house. Years of butlering for an obscenely rich and wildly successful American speculator, George Carston, had done nothing to shake it.
It must have been a couple of weeks after Black Tuesday—it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re tramping—that I drove up the long sweeping curve of the drive to find Mr. Carston watching his Long Island mansion burn, a revolver in his hand.
I’d never seen him with a gun before, but he hadn’t been himself since the crash. Since then he’d been drunk, and so had his wife. I never cared much for Mrs. Carston, but he adored her, had bought the mansion for her, in fact. Lately, she’d been kicking up row after row. The best butlers acquire a deaf ear to private conversations, and I was a very good butler, if I say so myself. All the other servants had been fired three days earlier, and that morning, when I’d left on my day off to reluctantly and discreetly seek alternate employment, the only occupants of the house had been me, Mr. Carston, and his wife.
I braked and tumbled out of the borrowed Model T, not even bothering to cut the engine or shut the door.
A loud rumble like a howitzer transport startled me, and then into the headlights stampeded a herd of panicked horses from the stable adjoining the house. At the last instant, they swerved and galloped into the dusk.
My voice shaky with dread, I asked, “Where’s Mrs. Carston, sir?”
He was so blotto he could hardly stand, his knees kept trying to buckle and his feet wouldn’t stay put. Tears started running down his face, and he dropped the gun in the withered grass of the unmowed lawn.
I knew then, though I couldn’t believe it. Sickened and dazed, I left the Ford’s motor running and walked away, back down the drive, toward town, my only possessions the clothes on my back and the eight dollars and sixty-eight cents in my wallet.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Mr. Carston following. He staggered and lurched like a mindless monster, a Frankenstein, his eyes black wells of horror in the darkness. I’d seen plenty of mates like that in the trenches. Shell shocked they called it when they locked them up in an asylum with the other nutters.
He followed me into Manhattan and to the Bowery’s seven cents a night flophouses, and he’s been following me ever since. He’s been drunk ever since too. I know I should have bleedin’ turned him in the first chance I got, but I couldn’t. We landed in it together, and right or wrong, like it or not, you don’t let your mates down.
In no time we’d run through my money. There was no work to be had, and meanwhile more jobless men arrived every day. Then it was Skid Row, and the beds in the YMCA when we could get them, and sleeping in doorways or under the Manhattan Bridge when we couldn’t. When the nights grew colder we took refuge along the waterfront with the hobos in their camp of shanties—their jungles, they called them.
The hardship of the hobo’s life came easily to me, and the camaraderie too. Must’ve been my institutional upbringing. It was a jolly sight better than the trenches. And the guv’nor . . . did he even realize where he was or what he’d done?
Rain drummed on the cardboard that served as my shanty’s roof, and my worries and the night’s chilly damp kept me awake. I heard a distant shout, and then Mr. Carston ducked inside, a mackintosh slung around his shoulders like a cape.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
Drunk, he muttered, “What?” and wilted onto our bedding of newspapers to sleep. A moment later there was a bellow and a weight crashed on top of us, collapsing the shanty and burying us.
I squirmed out and found Pinks, an old Negro from our jungle, screaming, “Sonofabitch!” and beating the guv’nor under the cardboard.
I pulled him off.
“That low-down thievin’ rascal done stole my trenchcoat,” Pinks said, drunk, but not as drunk as the guv. “Right out from under me!”
The rest of our jungle woke, and Fosterman, Dug-loon, R.R., Mr. Smith, Pete, and some of the newcomers gathered around to see what the commotion was.
R.R., who had a long Old Testament beard and was generally looked up to as our captain, pushed Pinks aside. He dug through the rubble, stripped the mackintosh away, and handed it back to Pinks.
On the ground, Mr. Carston curled up into a ball and groaned.
“He’s a bum,” R.R. pronounced. Bums—hooch-crazy drunks—were despised by all true hobos.
“What-if-I-am?” Mr. Carston muttered.
The rain pelted down, soaking us. Shivering, Dug-loon, Fosterman, and Pete went back to bed.
R.R. stood over the guv and said in his disappointed manner, “George don’t contribute nothing. Don’t bring nothing for the pot. Don’t do a blessed thing for anyone but himself.” He reached down and pulled the guv up. “George’s gotta leave on account of thieving. He’s no longer welcome.” He pulled a matchstick out of his pocket and extended it. “Go build your own fire.”
On his feet, Mr. Carston swayed and blinked at us, grinning sloppily, oblivious that he’d just lost the jungle’s protection and aid.
In the past few weeks, I’d learned a lot about the jungle’s rituals which reminded me quite a lot of the trenches. You didn’t kip from your mates, and you shared what you had, no matter how little.
What was I supposed to do? You can’t kick a man when he’s down and retain your self-respect. It’d be like hurting a child or a dog. But that doesn’t mean I was bleedin’ happy about it. “If he goes, I go,” I said slowly.
“That’s a real shame,” R.R. said, regretful.
“Naw, you stay, Will. We like you,” shy Mr. Smith said. “We like you a whole lot.”
“I like you, too, Mr. Smith, but I can’t desert the guv’nor. Not now.”
“Don’t never even share his liquor neither,” Pinks grumbled. “And he’s got cash too.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We lost everything.”
“I seen it.” Pinks tackled Mr. Carston, tore off a shoe and sock, and triumphantly waved some bills. “You was thinking he got his moonshine from the hooch fairy? Or the Salvation Army whiskey line?” He cackled and slapped his thigh.
The rest of us, me included, stared openmouthed. He’d had money and he’d let me panhandle change and stand in breadlines? Resentment tightened my throat.
I looked at R.R., Mr. Smith, and Pinks for a long moment—faces grimy and lined with outdoor living. They’d taken us in, shared their campfire and pot, and he—we’d betrayed them.
“What’d you say now, Will?” R.R. asked with a sorrowful half smile. “The matchstick don’t apply to you. Gonna stay with us?”
Unwillingly, on George’s behalf, I took the match from R.R. “I guess not.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pinks sneak off, bills clutched in his hand, and I tore off after him.
In a huff, I gathered up our belongings and stalked away, so angry at myself for going along with the guv, I couldn’t bloomin’ speak. He didn’t even notice. I found a doorway protected from the rain for us, huddled down, and waited for the dawn.
I must have drifted off. Next thing I knew, a warehouse owner nudged me with his boot. “Hey, mister. Move along.”
Mr. Carston was gone, but I wasn’t too worried. He must’ve gone in search of more liquor. He’d be back. Somehow he always found me.
It’d stopped raining and I made my way to Mr. Zero’s soup kitchen for a handout of sandwiches and coffee, then cleaned up and s
haved as best I could at a public toilet. Futile as it was, as I did first thing every day, I made the long trek to the Midtown employment agencies for domestic help. No one was hiring servants. Afterwards, knackered, I rested my aching feet on a bench in Central Park while I read yesterday’s Post plucked from a rubbish bin. An editorial on unemployment that talked about the “forgotten man” caught my eye, but didn’t hold my attention. I turned the page, and my stomach lurched when I saw the headline THE BUTLER DID IT! and an old blurry photograph of me.
My face burned with shame. Were there any peelers about? No. I looked around expecting people to recognize me and raise the alarm. But no one took any notice of another out-of-work bloke dozing in a sitting position to avoid arrest for vagrancy.
Tweed cap pulled down over my eyes and chin buried in my coat, I stuffed the newspaper in my pocket and hurried down a less exposed side street. A crowd of fifty or so men blocked an intersection. Must’ve been the promise of a job, a couple of hours work for two or three men unloading a truck or carting away junk. I squeezed into the throng and read.
The article described how Mr. and Mrs. Carston had been shot and their house torched. A new witness, our former housekeeper, had come forward claiming I’d always despised Mrs. Carston and that I’d sworn vengeance after she fired me. It was balderdash, of course. The housekeeper was known to embellish to no end if it shone a spotlight on her.
My pulse raced. Even my bloomin’ loyalty had its limits. I wasn’t about to take the fall for George Carston. I couldn’t wait for him to come to his senses. I had to find him now.
Always the way, isn’t it? Neither hide nor hair to be seen. Back in the Bowery, Mr. Carston wasn’t in the usual places—the benches under the Manhattan Bridge arch depicting the buffalo hunt, Chatham Square, the Brillo factory warehouses.
I paced the streets figuring I’d eventually cross his path or he’d cross mine, but I didn’t. He didn’t.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 04/01/11 Page 1