“ ‘Are you still Catholic?’ Is he suicidal?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I brought him here. Didn’t want to leave him alone.”
“How much did he have to drink?”
“A lot.”
“Was he drunk when he said it?”
“Maybe. But it wasn’t the booze talking. He’s a lost soul right now.”
“He needs professional help.”
“He’s getting it.”
“He really killed those people?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus,” Annie said. “He was the best man at our wedding.”
“He’s always been one of my closest friends, one of those guys you don’t have to see often to know he’s there for you.”
“People change, Tim.”
“And maybe he has, but what bothers me is I don’t think he had a choice.”
“People make their own decisions, choose their actions.”
I didn’t answer. As usual, Annie hit the issue’s central nerve.
I still didn’t know if I was pursuing the story as a newspaperman or a friend, but the next morning I made the phone call. I dialed at precisely eight A.M. I figured retired Major Sonny McIllroy would appreciate punctuality. Except his wife said he was golfing and told me to try back around eleven.
I did. McIllroy’s voice made me believe he still had a military haircut, wore creased shirts and slacks, and did pushups religiously.
“This is my cell phone,” McIllroy said. “Who is this, and how’d you get the number?”
I told him who I was. I decided he didn’t need to know about the fax on my desk.
“What’s the Hartford Courant want with me?” he asked. “I’m on vacation here.”
“I was hoping you could clarify a story I’m working on. It’s about the Karbala incident.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“About a year ago. Are you saying you don’t remember it?”
“I’m saying it’s over. And it’s not something I care to discuss, especially with the Hartford Courant. I live in Connecticut.”
I knew he did. And I knew where.
“Staying in Florida all winter?”
“I’m in Arizona. And no, I’ll be home in a week.”
“What was First Sergeant Pete Peters’s role in Karbala?”
“Peters? He shot them all. He disgraced the Marines.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Have to ask him that. Look, my wife is calling me for lunch. I’m retired now. All that is in the past.”
Not for Pete, I thought, wondering what it was like to live with a little girl Maggie’s age haunting you every night, to have her blood on your hands.
“Why did Pete Peters shoot those people?”
“What’s this story about anyway? You should be talking to the Marines’ media-relations people.”
“I’m going to a primary source. Why did Peters shoot those people?”
“Have to ask him.”
“I have. Who gave the order?”
“No one. No one in their right mind would order the killing of civilians.”
“Even when one of his own soldiers was killed?”
He didn’t reply.
“Keep in touch with Pete Peters? He’s not doing well.”
“I bet he isn’t. He’s got the blood of fifteen people on his soul.”
“He alone in that, Major?”
“Is this going in the Hartford Courant? What did that crazy bastard tell you?”
“Who sent those soldiers in there?”
He hung up.
I left work early and drove to the Midnight Moon, a motel on the east side of town. East Darlington had become infamous for bank heists in recent years and for a drive-by during which a Catholic priest had been killed. When I went to the motel’s office, the guy at the desk asked me how many hours I wanted a room for.
I told him who I was there to see.
No recognition.
“The guy just got back from Iraq,” I said.
“Oh, the guy with the guns? We got a lot of problems with him,” he said, as he led me to Pete’s room.
It didn’t take long to see why they had problems with Pete. He had an AK-47 on the floor, a 9mm on the small round table, and the .30-06 he’d once used for hunting.
The room hadn’t been updated since the seventies. The shades were drawn, and only the overhead light above the circular table was on. The room smelled terribly. If there was a cleaning service, the guns probably scared them off.
“Can’t hunt in Darlington City limits,” I said, forcing myself to smile.
He didn’t say anything. He was sitting propped against the headboard.
“Can’t use an AK-47 either,” I said.
“It’s not for hunting.”
“What’s it for?”
“Protection.”
“Where’d you get it?”
He shook his head.
“Who started the rumor about where the IED had come from?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“You don’t know or you’re not saying?”
“I have an idea.”
“Why would McIllroy do that?” I asked.
“How do you know I think it’s him?”
“Tell me why he’d do it.”
“I don’t know. But I might ask him.”
I looked at the AK-47. “That all you’re planning to do?”
“Look, Timmy, why don’t you go home?” He took the remote off the pillow next to him and clicked on the TV.
We were sitting in a dark room dominated by the scent of body odor, surrounded by a rifle, a machine gun, and a handgun, watching The Price is Right. Pete had been my best friend as a boy, the best man at my wedding. He’d served his country. And his life had come to this.
“I mean it, Timmy, go home and forget you were ever here. And I don’t think we should meet for beers anymore.”
“That’s fine,” I said and walked out.
A week later, I was at my desk when a story came across the AP wire titled RETIRED MAJOR SHOT DEAD IN AVON. I read it twice. Major Sonny McIllroy had left his home at ten thirty the previous morning to walk his dog. He entered a wooded bike trail and was shot to death. State Police referred to the murder weapon as a “high-powered rifle.”
Pete’s phone call came before noon. “I need to see you,” he said.
I walked into Jumpers at seven thirty. He was there, drinking coffee.
I sat down beside him. “What’s up?”
The blonde bartender brought me a coffee.
“See anything interesting on the news today?” he asked.
“Don’t watch TV news. I’m a newspaperman.”
“You’re a friend, first and foremost.”
“Yeah?”
“You know what I mean.” he said.
“Sure.”
“Sonny McIllroy is dead,” he said.
I nodded.
“You know why I asked you to meet me?”
“Pete, your secret’s safe with me, if you’re worried about that. Like you said, I’m a friend.”
“Timmy, I didn’t do it.”
I drank some coffee and looked at the TV. “Fine with me.”
“I mean it. Jesus Christ, I didn’t do it. I don’t want you thinking I did.”
“Got an alibi?”
“My therapist. Soon as I heard about it on TV, I went online to see what time it happened. I was at the VA when he got shot.”
I didn’t say anything. I took out my wallet and tossed three dollars on the bar, but I didn’t put my wallet away. I took a picture of my daughter Maggie out, and I looked at it. I could feel Pete’s eyes on me.
“There’s something else,” he said.
I sipped my coffee, my eyes never leaving the picture.
“He was shot with a .30-30. And you weren’t at work yesterday. I called.”
I closed my wallet and returned it to my hip pocket.
&n
bsp; “I’m just a newspaperman who used to hunt,” I said.
He’d forgotten about his coffee now. And neither of us noticed the surrounding noise.
“That little girl’s death isn’t only on you, Pete.”
“Seems like it is,” he said.
“I know,” I said, “but I talked to McIllroy.”
The light reflected off the bar. Pete’s eyes looked very blue.
“You once asked me if I knew what it was like to lay in wait and then shoot someone,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
I offered my hand to him.
He looked at it for a long moment. Then he took it, and we shook.
Neither of us spoke again, and I stood and walked out.
When I got home, I kissed Maggie goodnight.
Copyright © 2011 John R. Corrigan
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FICTION
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 discussions at the art museum happen more often. They’re deadly in their own way but don’t lead to police investigations as often as they should.
The police opened a real investigation, a murder investigation, after his girlfriend found Marty Levin’s dead body. Marty was an artist, a sometime friend of mine, and he had been on a panel discussion the day he died. As part of a symposium. At the Crafts College Art Museum. During Art Festival Week in Craftsbury. All the cultural tombstones. What was inconvenient was that they found the body behind our house.
Sandy and I came back from dinner and discovered police cars outside our home, all of them with rotating red and blue lights, and an ambulance and a fire truck with them. I never found out why the fire truck was there. I also never found out why the police didn’t telephone either one of us. It wouldn’t have been hard to do and seemed an elementary courtesy after a dead body has appeared on your property.
The police were all state troopers, some of them in their vaguely operetta-like uniforms, and two of them in plain clothes. They were polite enough, but no one would call them chummy.
“Your place?” asked a man who identified himself as a detective captain.
“It is,” I said. “Our place.” Sandy didn’t say anything.
“Come with us,” one of them said. “We want you to identify the deceased.”
The deceased was lying on the ground behind our house where my gallery is and just in front of a small guesthouse. The deceased had bled into the patches of snow left behind by a fragile January thaw. The deceased was Marty Levin. The blood came from a wound near his forehead. I had never seen the body of a person who had been killed before, not in a traffic accident, not in a fall, and certainly not by a gunshot. The lifelessness of Marty’s body diminished its reality; it had lost most of its resemblance to the living being I knew and seemed more like a wax replacement. There was a pizza box not far from the body. It was a strange token of ordinary life. Sandy turned away.
“Do you men live here?” Yes. “Together?” the detective asked. We did. “Unmarried?” Unmarried, not even to one another though this was Massachusetts. “Children? Either of you?” None.
They looked us over, their faces betraying no expression whatsoever. “Do you own a handgun?” the detective captain asked. We do not. No handgun, no rifle, no shotgun, no cap pistol. Their expressionless examination of us suggested doubt, but maybe I was just feeling paranoid.
“Where have you gentlemen been this evening?” Gentlemen in the inflection he gave it sounded like a code word.
“Having dinner at the Red Hawk Inn.”
“When did you get there?” I told him. “And you were there together until you left?”
We were, but . . . Some of the servers knew us and saw us; the bartender knew us and saw us, but could any of them say for certain that neither of us left after ordering, or after finishing the salad or the entrée? The Red Hawk is not far from our home, less than a mile. Could anyone there say for certain that one of us hadn’t gone home, used a gun we didn’t own and gotten back in a few minutes?
Nope, probably not.
The detective suggested we might not want to leave the area until they completed their investigation.
Not only had I never previously seen a body that had been killed, I also had never previously been suspected of the killing. I doubted Sandy had, either.
Marty was an old friend of mine and our guest, sort of. He wasn’t staying in the house, though there was plenty of room. He was staying in a semi-insulated two-room cabin in the back. He smoked, and if he was going to smoke he could deal with inadequate space heaters for a few days. So could his girlfriend, Renee. Marty didn’t care where they stayed. Renee did, and let us know it in her sour way by conveying dissatisfaction. She was good at that. Mostly she wrapped herself in a blanket, came into our house, and watched television.
I didn’t understand what Marty saw in her except that she was around twenty-five, which was twenty-five years younger than Marty. Renee had dark hair that she kept carefully in place, she had no sense of humor that I could discern, and she was practicing to be overweight. She had a cell phone glued to one ear when it wasn’t in her lap so she could text message someone. She had no compunction about using the phone in the middle of what seemed to be a conversation or a meal. She spelled her name without an accent mark where the accent mark should have been and came from someplace where they didn’t have accent marks. She might have killed Marty out of annoyance or because he didn’t take her out to eat on a Wednesday evening.
After the afternoon’s contentious symposium at the museum, she and Marty had gone for drinks somewhere, then came back and ordered a pizza. Marty had sent her to pick it up. I was surprised she agreed, but she did. Maybe she’d insisted on the pizza. When she came back, she found Marty’s body on the gravel path just outside the guesthouse door. She had barely enough presence of mind to phone 911 before she ran into the guesthouse and collapsed.
She was still there when the detectives finished with us and was still borderline uncontrollable. She was sobbing and couldn’t speak coherently. We let her stay in a bedroom inside the warm house that night. The police put their own padlocks on the guesthouse, but we would have let her sleep inside anyway. Several policemen didn’t sleep at all that night. They sat outside in a state police car, watching the guesthouse. I guess they were watching the guesthouse. Maybe not.
The police let her leave late the next afternoon. That surprised me. They even let her take the car she and Marty had driven to Craftsbury, but only after signing enough paperwork to take out a second mortgage on the Eiffel Tower.
The symposium weekend included a retrospective of Marty’s work. An opening reception at the museum had followed that afternoon’s confrontational, belligerent symposium on the Future of Twenty-First Century Art. Several panelists there were certain what the future shouldn’t hold and told the rest of us and each other loudly and forcefully. I didn’t understand their confidence.
Afterwards, the retrospective opening was in the large, central space of the Crafts College Art Museum, named after a long-deceased worthy who had contributed some attractive watercolors to the college many years before. Marty’s work had nothing whatsoever to do with watercolors, now relegated to two side rooms. Marty’s work didn’t have much to do with anything except itself.
Marty was a conceptual artist. His work was “non-retinal.” Non-retinal meant that the work didn’t appeal to the eye but to something else, to the imagination, maybe, or to a quasi-philosophic idea of what art should be. It certainly did not try to be visually attractive. Attractive was outside the pale. There didn’t even have to be a “work” to qualify a concept as art, but Marty produced installations that had a physical presen
ce, though the presence often seemed gestural and mysterious.
He had broken the hall up into several exhibition spaces. In one of them, Marty had stretched twine of various thicknesses from the top corner of a white panel to the opposite corner at the bottom, several strands of twine per panel.
“How do you like it?” asked Sandy. I didn’t answer right away. “Neither do I,” he said.
It was not that I didn’t like it. Liking it doesn’t have much to do with anything. As with so much else in the art world, it challenged my quaint idea of what “art” should seem like, and that was the point of it. My greatest fondness is for French rococo art, paintings, drawings, sculpture—not a favored style at the moment. It is highly retinal and distinctly non-conceptual unless you’re Mme. de Pompadour.
“It’s unusual, isn’t it?” said Dolly Burch. “Not something we’d usually exhibit . . .” Dolly was a museum trustee, a woman of warmth and clear-headed convictions. “All that carrying-on at the symposium this afternoon! At least it made me look at Mr. Levin’s work again.”
“And?”
“And . . . I’ve looked at it again,” she said and smiled. “Perhaps Egan Swift was not altogether foolish.”
Egan Swift. Egan Swift was a famous figure in the art world and a longtime resident of Craftsbury when he wasn’t in New York City finding artists to savage. He’d had a lengthy, vociferous career as an art critic, and—in his own estimation—as a philosopher of art and aesthetics, whatever aesthetics is. In his view, a view stated more and more sharply over the years as his influence ebbed, art of any value stopped in 1962. Period. Everything that came afterwards—pop art, op art, minimalism, you name it—was novelty art and belonged on the shelves at FAO Schwarz, not in museums.
It would be fair to say that Egan Swift and Marty Levin agreed on nothing at all. Whatsoever. Not even where the sun rose every morning, and their disagreements were strenuous and unpleasant. Egan showered scorn on Marty for not recognizing that the sun rose where generations of artists and critics had seen it rise in the long, western cultural tradition: in the north. For Marty, that was enough to make him assert, in angry invective, that only yesterday’s fools could not recognize that it now rose in the south, so get used to it. They did not have what a sane person would call discussions, and they were the two central panelists at the afternoon’s symposium. Everyone there should have worn hazmat gear.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 04/01/11 Page 4