EQMM, May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

"Is that what your fortune cookie said?"

  "Your son cheated on his essay. That will be brought up to the dean and then duly recorded on his record. No college will admit him. Med school later? I don't think so."

  Jay had to grit his teeth to staunch his fury. “That was the ace up your sleeve."

  "That was the royal flush up my sleeve.” Smile number two.

  "And if I subsidize your sabbatical I guess that will be just the never-ending start of the money flow—in your direction."

  Haviland took his time clearing away the scattered Chinese debris. “Think what you want."

  Fuming, Jay left.

  He sat in his car in the parking lot until the cleaning crew turned out most of the remaining lights in the building and left. There was only one other car in the lot: It had to be the teacher's.

  When he saw the thin figure come from the building and walk slowly over to the car, he scraped his mind clean of any thoughts as he turned on the motor, but not his lights. The car roared forth and struck the man head-on, his briefcase flying off into the night. Jay never looked at his dashboard display on the way home.

  * * * *

  Two days later, in the holding cell, his lawyer and his ex gave him a grim good morning. The police had found his name in Haviland's book as his last appointment and when they had gone to Jay's house to question him they had spotted his damaged car. And the workman who'd been buffing the floor when he entered the school identified him.

  "Vehicular homicide,” his lawyer said. “It's a damn serious charge. Jesus, Jay, why the hell would you drive away from an accident?"

  When the lawyer left, Jay spoke to Lynne, told her exactly what had happened, his voice hoarse, halting. She stared at him, grief-stricken, and took his hands through the bars.

  There were tears in her eyes but she managed to smile.

  "You're a lousy murderer, Jay, but you sure as hell turned into a good father."

  (c)2008 by William Link

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

  Perennial bestseller Dean Koontz's two most recent books have several elements in common apart from expert writing, construction, pacing, and suspense: a strong demarcation between good and evil, darkness and light; strong male and female leads with secrets in their past and murderous sociopaths as their adversaries; valid if curmudgeonly cultural criticism, a plea for old-fashioned morality, and a belief in the psychic sensitivities of dogs.

  **** Dean Koontz: The Darkest Evening of the Year, Bantam, $27. Amy Redwing, whose life mission is the rescue of golden retrievers, takes architect boy-friend Brian McCarthy along on an especially dangerous operation that changes both their lives in a thematically ambitious and deftly plotted supernatural thriller that represents the author at the top of his game. Numerous sidelong references to a recently deceased American satirical novelist, who is never named but whose characters provide aliases to one pernicious miscreant, help drive home the theme.

  *** Dean Koontz: The Good Guy, Bantam, $27. The grimly farcical opening premise might have appealed to Cornell Woolrich: title character Tim Carrier, minding his own business in a neighborhood bar, is mistaken first for a hired killer, then for the real killer's client. Instead of reporting it to the police, which he would do if the hired killer were not apparently himself a cop, he launches an effort to save the targeted victim, a novelist who claims not to know why anyone would want to kill her.

  **** Gianrico Carofiglio: Reasonable Doubts, translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis, Bitter Lemon, $14.95. Even without the added benefit of elucidating the Italian legal system, the series about defense lawyer Guido Guerrieri would be one of the most rewarding in the current market. In this third case, he takes on the appeal of a convicted drug trafficker while struggling with two potential conflicts of interest: a grudge against his client over an ugly boyhood incident and a growing attraction to the client's beautiful wife. With rueful humor, complex characters, clever legal maneuvering, and brilliant final arguments on both sides, this ranks high among the courtroom novels of recent memory.

  *** Cora Harrison: My Lady Judge, St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95. Fans of Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma should enjoy the first case for an Irish lawyer-sleuth of a few centuries later. In 1509, the main problem for Mara, Brehon (i.e. judge, lawgiver, investigator) of the west coast kingdom of Burren, involves the murder of one of her young law students during a traditional Celtic celebration. But she is also seen in action adjudicating cases including a stolen cow, custody of a men-tally impaired youth, an accusation of rape, and ratification of a marriage contract. Along with the fresh background comes one of the best examples of classi-cal puzzle plotting in recent memory.

  *** Joan Druett: Deadly Shoals, St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95. Also distinguished for classical puzzle, good writing, and fulsome historical detail (bibliography included) is the fourth case for Wiki Coffin, son of an American seaman father and a Maori mother, who does his detecting as a multi-purpose member of the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition of the late 1830s. Helping a New England whaling captain look for his stolen schooner in the Rio Negro area of Patagonia, Wiki encounters a wider plot. One of the two major surprises, while more than generously clued, is pretty unbelievable.

  *** Paul Charles: Sweetwater, Brandon/Dufour, $29.95 hardcover, $15.95 trade paper. The series about Christy Kennedy is a unique one that should be better known to American readers. The Ulster-born London cop's style of interrogating suspects has a touch of Nicolas Freeling's Van der Valk, but Golden Age buffs will put even higher value on his creator's classical plotting style, including this time an elaborate murder method that might have appealed to John Dickson Carr, John Rhode, or Dorothy L. Sayers. The victim of multiple, possibly ritualistic stab wounds is Harry Ford, a Kennedy acquaintance whose complicated relations with a small group of friends from college days yield several potential motives.

  *** Duane Swierczynski: The Crimes of Dr. Watson, Quirk, $24.95. In a series of letters written during the time of Sherlock Holmes's disappearance, Watson describes mysterious events leading to his arrest on charges of murder and arson. This throwback to the 1930s dossier mysteries, a creative job of writing and book production including evidence facsimiles (e.g., theatre ticket, vintage postcard, 1895 California newspaper, arrest ledger) and illustrations with the novella-length text, proves a cleverly clued whodunit with a solution Sherlockians would find shocking if it were intended seriously.

  *** Philip R. Craig and William G. Tapply: Third Strike, Scribner, $24. Two long-standing series sleuths, Boston lawyer Brady Coyne and unofficial Martha's Vineyard private eye J.W. Jackson, join forces for the third and presumably last time, Craig having died in May 2007. Involving a ferry workers’ strike, a paranoid former Red Sox pitcher, and the coming visit of an ex-President, this turns out more thriller than detective story. Repetitiousness and excessive domestic detail are redeemed by vividly captured locale, likeable characters, and exciting finale.

  *** Lyn Hamilton: The Chinese Alchemist, Berkley, $23.95. Toronto antique dealer Lara McClintoch's efforts to purchase a T'ang dynasty silver box containing a formula for immortality take her to China. If offering a little too much travelogue for some tastes, this is another solid entry in a consistently diverting series.

  The 1939 novel Satan's Murder Machines is the first of three by prolific pulpster Norvell Page gathered in The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham (Baen, $15). There is much fun to be had in the dime novelish adventures of one of those pulp-magazine crime fighters who presaged the superheroes of comic books. Joel Frieman provides an entertaining fictionalized foreword about Page.... The prose hero franchise lived on in paperback original novels, including the highly successful long-running series by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir about U.S. assassin Remo Williams, three of whose early adventures are gathered in The Best of the Destroyer (Forge, $14.95), beginning with the 1972 novel Chinese Puzzle, published around the time of President Nixon's visi
t to China and identified as the book (third in the series) that pinned down the satirical current-events formula.

  Jim Harmon, best-known as a radio historian, wrote several novels for the 1960s “sleaze” market, which emphasized story and had more in common in its sexual content (tame by today's standards) with the Spicy pulps of earlier decades than with soft-core porn of its own time. Vixen Scandal (Ramble House, $20), with an introduction by Richard A. Lupoff, pairs two 1961 novels, Vixen Hollow and The Celluloid Scandal. Despite the limitations imposed by market requirements and speed of production, Harmon's wildly plotted mysteries contain a surprising quotient of good prose and storytelling, with some strong scenes of action and conflict, clever turns of phrase, offhand jokes, and keen social observations.

  (c)2008 by Jon L. Breen

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  Fiction: THE QUARRY by Larry D. Sweazy

  Larry D. Sweazy won the WWA Spur award for Best Short Fiction in 2005, and was nominated for a Derringer award in 2007. His stories have appeared in The Adven-ture of the Missing Detective: And 19 of the Year's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, Boy's Life, and Hardboiled, and have been featured onAmazon Shorts. He is the owner of WordWise Publishing Services, and also works as a freelance indexer.

  I suppose it is the time in my life for regret, for the secrets I have held so deep inside me to metastasize into cancer. Like my father, I'm a doctor, or was. Now I'm just a patient with IVs snaking into my arm, dripping morphine venom into my veins. I know by the smiles, by the ticks on my chart, that my time is short. And I've been thinking a lot about Teg Saidlow recently.

  I know more about Teg Saidlow than I have a right to. But then again, I figure we've all seen people like Teg once or twice in our lives—I just couldn't gawk for a minute, turn away, and walk on by him. Things would've been easier, especially with Teg dead and buried for so many years now, if I would have.

  A lot of people around Harlow thought Teg was just a freak of a boy who read a lot of books and had green teeth, but I thought he was a magician. For one brief summer, sticks became swords, Ivanhoe and Don Quixote quested through the woods and ravines, hills became mountains full of gold, and my imagination was born in the sound of Teg's storytelling voice. But, by the end, Teg was like a mouse trapped in a maze that didn't have any cheese in it. Every which way he turned there was just another hardwood wall. And no matter how hard I fought, I couldn't conquer the dragons that came after him.

  Teg had a rough way to go from the start. He never knew his real daddy. Things got even worse when his mother married the marshal of our town when he was twelve. Now I'll tell you, it's hard to speak ill of her, but Teg's momma had a real mean streak in her. I saw her kick a cat more than once, and rumor had it that she took a shovel to her neighbor's dog for waking her up from a nap. Bad thing was, she was a looker, had legs looked like they were carved of marble, and always wore clothes that looked more like skin than cotton. She could go from a mean middle-aged woman to a smiling schoolgirl in less than two seconds.

  Teg was my best friend, really the only friend I had when I was growing up. I can almost reach out and touch Teg, smell the clean summer air, and taste my momma's homemade ice cream. I know it's the drugs and the pain, but the funny thing is, I can't tell you what I had for breakfast this morning. Life's kinda funny that way, always flipping things around, tricking your senses and tearing at your heart, promising you the past. When in truth, there's nothing but quiet darkness waiting for you at the fork in the road.

  * * * *

  The first time I saw Teg Saidlow he was stepping off the bus with his mother in front of the Rexall drugstore. She had on a tight black skirt, high heels, and a white blouse so thin you could see the lace on her bra straps. It was the middle of July, and the woman didn't have one bead of sweat on her skin. Her luggage looked expensive, all shiny brown with stickers pasted all over the front. My father had a similar suitcase that my mother got from the S&H Green Stamp catalog. Teg, on the other hand, carried a grocery sack that looked like it was about to bust open at the seams. His pants were too short and his hair was cut all jaggedy, like someone had taken a pair of pinking shears to his bangs. I knew right then he was going to be a bull's-eye for Big Mike Bowman, the marshal's nephew, if they planned on staying around Harlow very long.

  Not many new people came to Harlow, and when they did, well, the tongues got to wagging. Teg's mother's name was Loreen McCall, and that started things off right away, considering Teg's last name was different. The only thing worse than being black in Harlow was being different. I was a couple of years older than Teg when he arrived, but I was old enough to know trouble when I saw it. My mother and father didn't outwardly tolerate gossip, but there was nothing they could do to stop my sister, Pearl, and her wildfire tongue when they were out of earshot. Pearl knew everything that went on in town. Some girls collected dolls; Pearl collected stories about people and then added twists and turns of her own. I know now she was just bored. Being in Harlow was like living on a desert island to her. When she grew up, Pearl went on to be a newspaper editor in Chicago. No small feat in her day and age, let me tell you, but after all that happened in Harlow, she had a mission to tell everyone the truth. It was that way with her until the day she died, except for one thing: She never told anybody our secret about Teg Saidlow.

  Teg and his momma set up house in the trailer behind Miss Molly Chad's restaurant, The Blue Moon, and it wasn't long before Loreen McCall was waiting tables and flipping her eyelashes at the marshal. Loreen had a way of winning people over with her soft voice and the way she'd look at you out of the corner of her eye. Like I said, the questions did arise, and the women folk weren't as taken with her as the men were. I heard my own mother whispering to Dad one night that Maggie the Cat had come to town in the form of Loreen McCall, and he'd better keep his distance. Which would have been difficult, in any case, being as he was the only doctor in the county. He said he knew how to handle stray cats and began to tickle Mother.

  No one quite knew where Loreen and Teg came from, she was kind of wishy-washy on that issue, but somehow, she bewitched most people into forgetting she hadn't been born and raised in Harlow.

  Teg kept a low profile right from the start. I only saw him twice before school started that year, and both times he was taking out the trash from The Blue Moon. I really didn't think too much about him that summer other than the occasional story Pearl reported to anybody who'd listen on the front porch. Most of her stories had to do with Big Mike tracking down the new boy, breaking his glasses, and setting fire to his books.

  I was a gangly kid with my own problems and I was glad to be out of Big Mike's headlights. You'd think Big Mike had it out for smart kids because they were weaker and he was dumb. But that was not the case. Big Mike had a pretty good head on his shoulders when it came to schoolwork. He was tall, a center for the junior-high basketball team, but he wasn't overly muscular. I think now he was just trying to survive. He was the smartest kid to come out of the Bowman bunch in years, and being the smartest kid (along with being a decent ballplayer) meant he got to do pretty much what he wanted when he wanted. His parents had already pegged all their hopes and dreams on a fourteen-year-old boy. Big Mike wanted to make sure no one got in his way, because he was looking for a one-way ticket out of Harlow, even then.

  My other problem was Pearl. She had started to court, and she was pinned for the high-school sorority, so there were slumber parties on Saturday nights and boys from the football team sniffing around all the time. Pearl and me didn't get along too well then because Mother had appointed me as her tag-along. Let me tell you, being a chaperone at any age is no fun. Pearl and her beau of the week did everything they could to ditch me, but I was like a fly on maple syrup. There was no way I was going to disappoint my mother.

  * * * *

  About six months after they came to Harlow, Loreen McCall and the marshal, Lehigh Bowman, waltzed into the justice of the peace's office and got married. Now Lehi
gh wasn't the brightest man in the world, but he thought he was the smartest man in Harlow. Lehigh was Big Mike's uncle, and the gun on Lehigh's hip made him think he knew everything. All of the Bowmans had been marshal of Harlow at one time or another, and with Lehigh being the youngest, it was pretty much accepted he would have the job for life. The job didn't require much, and it was a good thing, because if there was one thing Lehigh Bowman didn't know anything about, it was hard work. My dad always said he envied Lehigh because he was the only man he knew who got paid for taking naps in the middle of the day.

  Anyway, Lehigh and Loreen moved onto the Bowman place, a farm where most all the other Bowman brothers lived as well, into a small two-bedroom wood-frame house that hadn't been painted since the beginning of the big war. Teg was relegated to the basement. It seemed that being a step-daddy didn't set too well with Lehigh; he wanted Teg as far away as possible so he and Loreen could hump like bunnies on the living-room floor whenever the urge struck them. Teg told me later that he was really happy about living in the basement. He could sneak out the window any time he wanted and disappear into the woods behind the Bowman farm.

  For weeks after the marriage, Lehigh walked around town like a big Rhode Island Red rooster, saying he'd married the “purtiest woman ever to come to Harlow.” You'd've thought he'd won the Irish Sweepstakes. But it didn't take long for reality to set in, and Lehigh was back to his normal routine of naps in the afternoon and drinking beer at Store Longwood's bar on Main Street. Loreen kept working for Miss Chad, and Teg, well, that's when things started to get real bad for him.

  * * * *

  I didn't set out to be friends with Teg Saidlow, but it happened the summer after he and his momma came to Harlow. Lord knows I had enough trouble in school on my own, fending off Big Mike too much to notice that Teg was too. As I already told you, I wasn't very athletic. My biggest muscle was on top of my shoulders. Except I didn't know that then. Oh, I liked to read, and my mother was always reciting poetry and listening to opera records she'd purchased in New York City when she was a girl, but I thought most everybody knew the things I knew.