Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  “She would have to be out here,” Livia says. “Will you deal with her too?”

  “Why are you making a joke?” Kurt says. “Just go inside.”

  They walk together to the back door. Hearing Eda’s tremulous Hello, Kurt doesn’t turn around, but raises his hand in a brief wave.

  The kitchen is cool and silent in the midday heat. Mitzy has remembered to close the windows before noon. Kurt wonders what state he’ll find her in with Brent there. He tells himself that they should have known better than to believe her when she told them that she wanted nothing to do with him ever again. But she’d seemed so resolute that morning, her tears dried, her voice calm. It hadn’t been like the other times she’d called off the wedding when she’d been almost hysterical in her vehemence. Her mercurial nature was a puzzlement to him. He wondered if it didn’t have something to do with Livia’s having an Italian grandmother on her father’s side.

  “Mitzy?” Livia calls softly down the hallway. Kurt follows her. He doesn’t like how quiet the house is. He expected weeping, or words of anger — not this fraught silence.

  Livia enters the light-filled living room a second before him. “Oh good Christ,” she says.

  Kurt looks down to the floor to see his daughter, her blouse open and her skirt kicked away, lying beneath Brent, whose bare behind is glaringly white in the sunshine. Mitzy makes a low moaning sound; it is not a sound of passion, but of the deepest pain.

  Kurt pushes Livia out of his way and grabs Brent by the shoulders, expecting to get him off of Mitzy and give him the beating of his life. But when he tries to lift Brent away, the weight is such that he can only shove him to the side and onto the rug. It’s then that he sees the kitchen knife jutting from the wound on Brent’s neck and the blood soaking his daughter’s half-naked body. Freed, Mitzy rolls slowly onto her side and curls into a ball, still moaning, sounding as though she will never stop.

  Danny Kelley lived in a row house down near the river. Kurt bought a car with the money he’d been saving to buy a ring for Livia and took to spending hours in the hillside park overlooking the shabby neighborhood, waiting, watching for signs of Danny Kelley and Livia coming and going from the house. Livia wore different clothes — even her walk was different, more languorous, seductive. He was losing her a little more each day.

  Brent’s body is heavy, but Kurt must wrestle with it alone. Livia has taken Mitzy upstairs to bathe and calm her. He could hardly bear to watch as Mitzy shambled away, her head pressed to her mother’s side, Livia’s arm supporting her. It’s best that neither of them should see what he is going to do.

  The shelves are so stiff on their supports that Kurt nearly falls back more than once onto the cans littering the basement floor as he yanks them off the wall. Twenty-some years of rust and dirt has secured them even with the shades he’d hung as protection. He stacks the shelves against the wall and stands looking at the exposed door.

  Danny Kelley struggled.

  It was late afternoon, just before five o’clock, when they approached the shabby roadhouse on the Kentucky side of the river. Kurt had followed Danny Kelley there before and knew where to pull off the road and into the trees as Danny Kelley went on to the roadhouse’s driveway — in fact, Kurt knew enough about Danny Kelley’s routes to offer them to any policeman who wanted to know. How easy would it have been just to have Danny Kelley arrested. But then Livia would have been shamed further, and Kurt would never have had her. His pride demanded that much.

  Kurt got out of his car and moved quickly through the thin woods separating him from the roadhouse. Several yards from Danny Kelley’s flashy Buick, he stopped, watching as Danny Kelley, loaded down with a pair of crates, was let inside the building.

  At first, Kurt hadn’t any idea but that he would wrap his hands around Danny Kelley’s throat and squeeze the life from him, but as he slipped into the back of the Buick his hand came to rest on one of the ropes Danny Kelley used to secure his bottles.

  He waited, barely breathing. Sweat ran in a rivulet down one of his temples and into his eye. As he twisted the coarse rope in his hands, his decision — which had seemed, in the beginning, to be a painfully obvious one — began to feel to him like madness, like a fever that had overtaken him, but was now cooling.

  Before he could reflect on his thought’s logical conclusion — that a sane man would simply have declared his love for Livia and wooed her with gifts and letters and promises, as, surely, Danny Kelley had done — Danny Kelley was in the car and had started the engine. Kurt fought against the urge to close his eyes as he dropped the rope around Danny Kelley’s neck and jerked it backwards, knocking the man’s cheap straw hat to the seat. Danny Kelley’s hands were suddenly in his hair, grabbing frantically at Kurt’s ears; his fingers jammed into Kurt’s eyes and nostrils. Only the Buick’s enormous steering wheel kept Danny Kelley in his seat as his body tried to arch away from Kurt. It seemed to Kurt that an hour passed before Danny Kelley stopped moving. The rope felt as though it had seared itself into Kurt’s flesh, but for a long time he was afraid to let it go.

  Brent’s body lies on the basement floor, wrapped in the area rug from the living room, surrounded by cans of apples, carrots, green beans, corn, stew, yams, beets, and sauerkraut. Only the rug’s padding, which Livia had insisted that they buy when they brought the rug home, had kept the blood from soaking through to the living room’s wood floor.

  It takes some work to get the door to the hidden room open; Kurt forgot that he had nailed it shut. As he works, he can’t get the image of Brent’s face in death out of his mind. The boy’s pale forehead was broad and open, his empty eyes a bright, honest blue. He was from good German stock. Brent, even though he’d sometimes treated Mitzy shabbily, always had an air of innocence about him that Danny Kelley had never had. He was nothing like Danny Kelley.

  Finally, the door is open. Kurt is afraid to look inside the room, but he steels himself and squats down to inch his way in, the beam of a flashlight leading him on.

  Kurt lay in bed, looking at his burned and swollen hands. His hands had killed a man, yet he felt little remorse. It would take time for Livia to come to him, he knew. But he would be there for her, waiting.

  “Kurt!” His mother’s voice was a fierce whisper.

  Kurt sat up to see his mother in the doorway in her long nightgown, her gray and black hair hanging over her shoulders.

  “There’s someone in the house,” she said. “In the basement.”

  “No,” Kurt said. “There’s no one there.” But he felt the fear rising in his body.

  “He’s pounding on something,” she said. “I can hear him.”

  Kurt couldn’t speak. No one had broken into the house. The knowledge that Danny Kelley was still alive down in the hidden room flooded over him.

  “Go!” she said. “You’re the man now, Kurt. Do you think your father wouldn’t go and see? You get his gun from the bureau. I will call the police.”

  Kurt, his hands shaking, went to his father’s empty room and got the gun.

  “Don’t call the police,” he whispered as he went downstairs. “Promise me you won’t call. Let me do this.”

  “You call,” she said. “I don’t want to go back down there.”

  He closed the bedroom door and heard her lock it behind him.

  In the dark kitchen, he opened the basement door and stood, listening, to Danny Kelley.

  The musty air of the room steals his breath away just as it had when he had first stood there beside his father a lifetime ago. The beam from the flashlight picks out a pair of shoes lying in the middle of the floor. They are surrounded by toy soldiers — a hundred or more — and look like giant fortresses that the soldiers had been unable to scale.

  Knowing that the shoes cannot be all that is left of Danny Kelley, Kurt forces himself to slide the beam across the wall, where he sees the familiar scratchings of the slaves who’d once hidden themselves here. But he doesn’t stop to examine them. They are nothing to
him.

  He finds Danny Kelley, who is little more than a dusty pile of outdated, cheap clothes with bits of bone sticking out of them, in the corner behind the door. For more than twenty years, the Danny Kelley of his nightmares and dreams was a ghoul, a half-alive creature who lived behind a door that was twenty times the size of the one standing open behind Kurt. Danny Kelley was the echo of a hoarse voice, cries punctuated by the sound of weakening fists pounding at the door. But the bugs — the eaters of the dead — had long ago made their way through the hard-packed dirt and found Danny Kelley.

  Finally unafraid, Kurt inspects the wall nearest the skeleton to see if maybe Danny Kelley had scratched Livia’s name into the wall with his dying strength. But Kurt had emptied Danny Kelley’s pockets before putting him in the room, taking his cigarettes, money, keys, and matches. Danny Kelley had died in the dark, an erstwhile groom forever separated from his bride. But he would no longer be alone.

  Kurt’s mother would not leave the house until it was over. For those first few days, the most worrisome days, the days when Kurt would begin to shake and sweat at work thinking about Danny Kelley, she would play the piano for hours on end to keep from hearing the noise coming from the basement. At night she played the radio just loudly enough. She would make Kurt cold suppers so she wouldn’t have to linger too near the basement door. They would eat on the back porch or upstairs in his father’s old bedroom. Then, for a whole day, then two, then three, they heard nothing.

  Kurt replaces the shelves and restocks them, filling a single bag to take upstairs. He crumples the empty bag that had held the fertilizer he’d hurriedly sprinkled over Brent’s body at the last moment, hoping that it had enough lime in it to have some effect.

  He finds Livia sitting at the dining room table. Livia — who he knows is made of iron inside — sits slumped over the table with her head resting on her arms. His heart aches for her, for Mitzy. At his touch, Livia looks up. Her face is lined with care, but she hasn’t been crying. It is Mitzy who will be their biggest worry.

  Kurt sits in the chair beside her rather than at his usual place at the head of the table. Upstairs, Mitzy, with the help of a couple of painkillers from an old prescription, is finally sleeping.

  “I was thinking,” Kurt says softly, “of who Brent reminded me of.”

  Livia shakes her head. “No, not now,” she says. She reaches out to cover Kurt’s hand briefly with her own, then goes into the kitchen. Kurt hears her get a glass from the cabinet and turn on the faucet. The water runs and runs, and the sweet, domestic sound of it blends with his single thought: She knows about everything.

  For the benefit of Eda Hidebaugh, when it is full dark, Livia combs back her hair and Kurt helps her don Brent’s letter jacket. He watches as she backs Brent’s car out into the alley and drives away to leave it in the lot of a bar to which he often took Mitzy. A half-hour later, praying that Mitzy will stay in her stuporous sleep, Kurt picks up Livia and drops her off a few blocks from home.

  He is waiting when Livia comes in by the front door, which is hidden from Eda Hidebaugh’s gaze. When she holds out the handkerchief that he had given her to wipe her fingerprints from the car, Kurt takes her into his arms to pull her firmly to him. Her body feels soft and malleable to him, as though he could pull her close enough that they could become one person. She belongs to him now, and no one else.

  Remote Control

  by Mick Herron

  © 2007 by Mick Herron

  Mick Herron’s last book to see print in the U.S., Why We Die, received a starred review from PW, which praised his series P.I., Zoë Boehm, as “smart, dogged, and never down for the count.” Mr. Herron is a master plotter, and manages here to create both a clever twist and an interesting snap-shot of modern London.

  ❖

  It starts on a train. Maurice’s fault. Maurice is about my age, but since his divorce, he’s let himself go: his suits overdue a dry-cleaning; his shirts frayed at the cuff. Some days, he could stand a little closer to the shower. To hear him tell it, though, he’s better off.

  “Finally I get a little peace,” he says. “That woman could talk for England. They should record her phone calls for training purposes.”

  But for all the spin, it’s not just his cuffs that are frayed lately. Small things rattle Maurice’s cage. Some days we don’t get a seat — it’s a busy line — and once he’d have grinned and deployed those origami skills commuters develop for reading newspapers upright in a crowd. Now he seethes instead, staring grimly out of the window as if, instead of fields and dormitory towns, we’re flashing through a post-nuclear landscape. His hair needs attention. He still has good teeth, though.

  “Jesus,” he tells me. “They should make it a crime.”

  “Make what a crime, Maurice?”

  “Coming into the capital without due purpose,” he says. “Some of these dumbbells, they’re going shopping, can you believe it? They get on a train, eight-ten in the morning, they’re going shopping on Regent Street. So us poor working stiffs have to stand. Hell of a way to prepare for the day ahead.”

  “Most of them have jobs, Maurice.”

  “The ones that don’t should be stuffed in the luggage racks.”

  I have a job. I work in corporate finance, and earn nicely without causing outrage. And Maurice has a job. His company operates CCTV systems. I sometimes wonder if it’s the vaguely Hollywood flavour of this that has tinted his speech with Americanisms. And, too, he sees a lot of bad behaviour. Maurice doesn’t monitor screens himself, but what he calls the show-stopper stuff gets spliced onto tapes and shown at parties. His outfit has a security contract which puts cameras along the South Bank, all the way to the Isle of Dogs. He’s seen people screwing against the wall in broad daylight, and not just professionally, either. Muggings, of course; rapes, fistfights, stabbings. Politicians arm in arm with local gangsters. Last year he seemed happy in his work, but as the days grind by, the wells we draw from sink deeper. Maurice has a new boss, and this is a travesty of justice. Maurice should have been the new boss — not this punk, which is how Maurice refers to him. “This punk,” he says. “This goddamn kid.” This goddamn kid is ten years younger, two stone lighter, and fifteen grand a year richer than Maurice is right now. Maurice feels he’s been gazumped. “That was my job,” he says. “Goddamn punk came out of nowhere.”

  Remain detached, I want to tell him. Stay in control. Or you will rupture one day; burst one of those complicated valves that keep the heart pumping. Once you let the rage inside, it’s hard to get it out. Trust me. I know about this.

  Maurice hasn’t mentioned the boss in a while. New angers blossom daily.

  “Freakin’ personalised numberplates,” he says this morning. “Don’t you hate them?”

  “They have their uses,” I say. “Easy to remember.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not forgetting this one in a hurry.”

  And he goes into a spiel about being cut off by a red sports car at the weekend. Maurice was entirely in the right. These twits in their flash motors: Decapitation would be too quick.

  “She was driving,” he says. “But it’s him I remember. Shaved bald, and when did that get to be cool? I remember in the good old days, your chrome-domes had the grace to be ashamed.”

  He wore an earring, too, and Maurice has much to say on this subject.

  “I figure he had his hand up her skirt, and that’s how come she was in a rush. Looked old enough to be his big sister.”

  The train pulls into platform 8, and the long forever of its gradual halt begins; the release of its doors.

  “Whoosh,” he says, and I think he’s imitating the doors, but he isn’t. “W-H-O-O-5-H. The S was a 5.”

  On the concourse, we make our usual farewells.

  “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” he warns me.

  “Remember,” I tell him. “They can kill you. But they’re not allowed to eat you.”

  But I say it distractedly, because my mind is elsewhere.


  If you want to know where it gets you — letting the rage inside — keep your eyes open as you slog around the city. You’ll see people behaving like all kinds of weather at once: fizzing and spitting; boiling and baked; grey and grim. Just by walking where somebody else wants to be, you’re making mortal enemies for life. Somebody asked me “What the hell?” last week because I slowed to check a shop window, and I’ve no doubt he thought it a reasonable question. Trench warfare has its critics, but city life is no picnic either. A Daily Mail columnist once spent a morning on the pavement outside Bond Street station, and not a soul stopped to check he wasn’t dead. Though to be fair, they might have recognised him. One less Mail columnist would brighten anyone’s day.

  Remain detached. Stay in control. Or you will rupture; burst a complicated valve.

  Trust me, because I know about this. I killed a man once. It was mostly an accident. It happened years ago, when I was a student, over a girl: a girl I hadn’t even spoken to, but told a friend about, and next thing I knew they were going steady. It seemed to me that he would never have looked her way if I’d not pointed her out. You dream your dreams aloud, and they come true for someone else. I waited for him after the pubs shut one night, on the towpath he used as a shortcut. He was drunk, and might well have ended up in the canal even if I’d not been there — which, as far as the world was concerned, was the case. The following day it seemed like a strange dream. Now, I recall it as a warning: Remain detached; stay in control. There are angry places in each of us, and we visit them at our peril. I can’t even remember that girl’s name.

  The things that are precious remain worth fighting for. But I’ve learned to let go of the space around me. I don’t ask strangers “What the hell?” because I already know what the hell.