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

by Donna Andrews

  Agatha Award-winner Donna Andrews is the author of two mystery series, one published by Berkley, featuring an artificial intelligence as the sleuth, and the other from St. Martin’s Press, featuring amateur sleuth Meg Langslow. The latest in that series is The Penguin Who Knew Too Much. “A Rat’s Tale” was inspired, says Ms. Andrews, bu the fact that she herself is a packrat.

  ❖

  I had a bad feeling when the doorbell rang. Of course, I never like hearing the doorbell. I’d known for a while that someone could file a complaint with social services or the health department at any time. As soon as they stepped through the door, the game would be up. The old man would be off to some home and I’d be out in the cold.

  And I kind of like the old man. Maybe I should resent him for killing off the rest of my family, but that was a long time ago. And he’s mellowed since. It’s been ages since he put down any poison. Could be he’s realized I know better than to eat it, but I think these days he enjoys the company. He still mutters “Goddamned rats!” whenever he sees me, but there’s no venom in it anymore.

  So when the doorbell rang, I scuttled over to the door and got there before he did. He has to follow the paths, and I can run along the top of the magazines, in the places where they don’t quite reach the ceiling or where I’ve gnawed tunnels through them.

  By the time he reached the door, I was already perched in one of my observation points — a nice, comfortable nest I’d hollowed out in the old National Geographics that flanked the door, with a couple of convenient peepholes.

  “Who’s there?” the old man said.

  “It’s Ron.”

  I flattened my ears at that — Ron, the old man’s nephew, worried me. So far he hadn’t tried to get the old man to move out or clean up, but I figure that was because he was afraid it would end up costing him money.

  The old man opened the door.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Ron said. “Can’t we talk inside?”

  The old man stared at him for a few moments, then pushed the door partway closed, to give himself room to turn around, and began shuffling back down the path. Ron pushed the door open again and slipped in. He stood in the hall taking shallow breaths for a few seconds, the way he always did. Humans never really seemed to appreciate the rich, nuanced collection of odors the old man had created here in the house. Even the old man probably didn’t really appreciate it — he’d just stopped noticing.

  I hoped Ron would puke, like last time, but he fought it back. He closed the door and followed the old man down the path.

  I scrambled to follow. I had to go more slowly than usual. The old man couldn’t hear the rustling noises I made while crawling over and through all the newspapers and magazines, but Ron’s ears were keener. And despite my caution, he must have heard me.

  “I still say you’ve got rats,” he was saying as I arrived at my observation post in the kitchen.

  “No, I don’t,” the old man said. “And if I did, they’d be my rats, and none of your business.”

  The old man sat down in his usual place — a little cave hollowed out between the stacks of Reader’s Digests and flattened cardboard boxes around the kitchen table.

  Ron looked around, confirmed that there wasn’t anywhere else to sit — just as there hadn’t been the last dozen times he’d been here. He leaned against the kitchen counter, careful not to touch any of the junk precariously piled there.

  “What do you want?” the old man asked.

  “Doesn’t it ever occur to you that maybe it’s a good thing to have someone check on you every once in a while?” Ron said. “What if some of this junk fell on you? You could die before anyone found you.”

  “I’d still die before you lifted a finger to help me. What do you want?”

  “I need some money,” the nephew said.

  “Tough luck.”

  “I’ve got people after me!” Ron was sweating slightly, and the room still had its usual frigid winter chill. “If I can’t make my interest payments—”

  “Tough luck,” the old man repeated. “I don’t have any money, and if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

  Not the first time they’d had this argument. Usually, it went on until Ron lost his temper and stormed off, calling the old man names over his shoulder. I’d have found it annoying, but I’d noticed that the old man seemed quite cheerful for a day or so after their arguments.

  This time, Ron gave up almost immediately.

  “You damned useless old miser,” he said.

  The old man gave a couple of wheezy chuckles and then went back to the Cheerios he’d been eating for lunch when Ron arrived.

  “Shut the door on your way out,” he said, between spoonfuls.

  Ron was staring at the old man’s mouth as if it fascinated him, watching the jaws work and then the Adam’s apple bobbing when he swallowed.

  “Useless,” he muttered.

  He stood up and took a step toward the kitchen doorway. I felt relieved.

  Then he reached over and took something off one of the mountains of junk. A rolling pin. A few things slid off the pile — some plastic butter tubs and some folded brown-paper shopping bags. The old man glanced up. He didn’t see the rolling pin — Ron hid it behind his body, and stood looking up at the junk, as if waiting until things stopped falling to take the path back to the front door. Once the danger of an avalanche had passed, the old man focused back on his Cheerios.

  Ron turned around and whacked him on the head with the rolling pin. The old man’s head went down on the table, and the bowl of cereal tipped onto the floor.

  Ron stood there looking at the old man for a few seconds. Then he reached out and grabbed a rag off one of the piles and wiped the end of the rolling pin he’d been holding. He threw the rolling pin down at the old man’s feet and the rag back with the rest of the junk. He grabbed a broom and poked at the junk around the old man until he brought enough stuff crashing down to almost hide him.

  “Useless old miser,” he said.

  For the next hour or so, he ransacked the house. He started by checking the places the old man used regularly — the kitchen drawers that would still open. The freezer. The medicine cabinet in the one usable bathroom. The area around and under the old man’s bed. I alternated between keeping an eye on him and checking on the old man, who wasn’t quite dead yet. He was still breathing, and occasionally he’d mutter for help.

  After Ron ran out of easy places to look, he tried tearing into a few of the piles of junk, but he had to give that up rather soon, since there was no place to put the stuff he pulled out.

  “I’ll show you, you miserable packrat,” he muttered.

  He went back to the kitchen and pulled things off the pile until he could reach the old man’s pocket and take out the house keys.

  “Help me,” the old man muttered. I couldn’t tell if Ron heard. He just piled some of the junk back on top of the old man and left.

  Once I was sure he was gone, I got to work. I ransacked the kitchen for food, dragging everything I found down into my tunnels in the walls or beneath the crawl space. I figured I’d have to move eventually once the old man was gone, but the more food I could scavenge, the longer I could put that off.

  The old man finally died around nightfall. As I scuttled around his cooling body, I realized that even though he was, technically, also food, I was curiously disinclined to do anything about it. True, he was thin, and would probably be fairly tough and stringy, but I’d eaten worse. Maybe it was sentimental of me — the old rat and the old packrat who’d lived so long together becoming friends, or some such nonsense. More probably a good instinct — after all, if whoever found the old man saw rat bites on him, they might go into high gear with an extermination program before I had a chance to relocate.

  It was near midnight when I heard a key in the door. I crept to an observation point.

  Ron again. He came in with two big boxes of black trash bags. H
e opened one box, pulled out a bag, and walked through the trails for a few minutes, as if he couldn’t decide where to start. Then he settled on the old man’s bedroom. He began picking up stuff, looking through it, and stuffing it into the trash bag.

  Slow work. At this rate, it might take him almost as long to empty the house as it had for the old man to fill it. Decades. I had a feeling he’d give up long before he even made a dent in the junk.

  And then I had an idea. I checked out all my observation points, and studied the nearby junk. I found a few places where I thought I could start a landslide if I pushed, pulled, or gnawed the right thing.

  I started with the front door. I had to do a bit of gnawing at the base of the stacks, out in the open, but I timed my forays for right after Ron had returned from taking a bag outside to his car. After his fifth trip outside, I waited till he was back up in the bedroom and set off my booby trap.

  A year’s worth of the Washington Post came crashing down in front of the front door. I leaped across the path to the other side, and by the time Ron came clumping down to investigate, I’d added a decade’s worth of National Geographics to the pile.

  “What the—” Ron exclaimed. Then he shook his head. He went back to the bedroom and returned with one of the boxes of black plastic bags.

  When he got to the foot of the stairs, I set off my third avalanche. That kept him stunned for long enough for me to dump two more piles of junk on him. By this time, the path through the front hall had all but disappeared. It was just a disorganized heap of books, magazines, and junk, with Ron squirming feebly at the bottom.

  “Help me,” he kept whispering. “I can’t move. Somebody help me.”

  I went back to the kitchen and snuffled around the old man’s feet for the last couple of Cheerios. I sniffed his sad, naked ankles, but he continued to be absolutely unappetizing. Curious.

  Ron, on the other hand, was fat and sleek and quite tempting. As soon as he was dead—

  Though that could take a while — why should I wait? I decided I’d go and see if he was telling the truth about not being able to move. And if he was, I planned on making sure his last few hours — or days — were far less enjoyable than the old man’s.

  The Profane Angel

  by Loren D. Estleman

  © 2007 by Loren D. Estleman

  Art by Laurie Harden

  Loren D. Estleman’s film detective, Valentino, first saw print in the pages of EQMM and has been an EQMM exclusive ever since. That’s about to change: The first novel in the series, Framed, is expected from Forge this autumn. The following tale showcases Carole Lombard, as Valentino tries to determine the legitimacy of an old woman’s claim about the supposedly long-dead film star.

  ❖

  Pegasus made his majestic way down the San Diego Freeway, waiting with wings partially folded through the relatively steady stop-and-go before the morning crush and the noon rush; took brief flight on Sunset Boulevard; and settled down to wait through the standard three light changes at each intersection in West Hollywood.

  The sight of the mythical beast, painstakingly worked in plaster and spray-painted all the colors of the Day-Glo rainbow, drew no more than the occasional curious glance toward its perch on the open rented trailer. L.A. had seen stranger sights on an almost daily basis.

  Nevertheless, Valentino was relieved when he pulled into the alley next to the Oracle Theater and found Kyle Broadhead waiting with a pair of husky undergraduates to help him unload the sculpture. He disliked attracting attention, and had chosen the one place in America to live where it was virtually impossible.

  Broadhead wrinkled his nose at the garish paint job. “What a hideous way to treat a noble creature that never existed. Where’d you find him, Fire Island?”

  “Close.” Valentino got out of the car and stretched. “An Armenian rug dealer in the Valley stuck it in front of his shop to attract business. Some students from State have been redecorating it once or twice a week for five years. It’ll take ten gallons of mineral spirits just to get down to the original workmanship.”

  One of the burly UCLA students snorted. “Everybody knows you can’t trust a Statie with a box of Crayolas.”

  “Spoken by the young man who credited Stagecoach to Henry Ford on his midterm.” Broadhead, rumpled and dusted with pipe ash, patted Pegasus on the flank. “Welcome home, Old Paint. Your brother’s missed you.”

  Valentino untied the ropes that lashed the statue in place, the students bent their shoulders to their task, and after much grunting, mutual accusations of sloth, and two pinched fingers, the winged horse stood at last on a pedestal opposite its twin at the base of the grand staircase in the littered lobby.

  “There’s teamwork.” Broadhead admired the tableau.

  Valentino said, “What’s that make you, the coach? I missed your contribution.”

  The professor took his pipe out of his mouth. “Do you realize how much concentration it takes to keep one of these going?”

  The student who had suffered the casualty stopped sucking his fingers. “The new one’s bigger.”

  “It won’t be when we strip off all those coats of paint,” Valentino said. “It isn’t any newer than the other one. They were sculpted at the same time by the same artist. If I hadn’t tracked this one down by way of the Internet, duplicating it would have cost me a fortune.”

  “As opposed to the several you’ve already sunk into this dump.” Broadhead nursed his pipe.

  “A man has to have a hobby.”

  “Movies are only a hobby when your work hasn’t anything to do with them. You spend all week procuring and restoring old films and all weekend rebuilding a theater to show them in. Which reminds me. Someone called while you were out riding and roping.” Broadhead unpocketed a foil-lined wrapper that had contained tobacco and handed it to Valentino.

  “What’s it say?” He couldn’t read what was scribbled on it.

  “An old lady in Century City says she has something to sell. Probably a home movie of her playing jacks at Valley Forge. I told you that interview you gave the Times would draw more pests than genuine leads.”

  Valentino went up to the bachelor quarters he’d established in the projection booth and dialed a number off Caller ID. He couldn’t distinguish letters from numerals in Broadhead’s scrawl. A young woman told him he’d reached the residence of Jane Peters. He got as far as his name when she interrupted.

  “Yes, Miss Peters is expecting your call. She’s resting at the moment. Are you free to come to the apartment later today? She has a property she thinks might interest you.”

  “May I ask what it is?”

  “A movie called A Perfect Crime.”

  “The title’s kind of generic. Can you give me any details?”

  Paper rustled. “It’s a silent, released in nineteen twenty-one. The director’s name is Dwan.” She spelled it.

  “Allan Dwan?”

  “Yes, that’s the name.”

  He steadied his voice. “What’s the address?”

  Broadhead was alone when he returned to the lobby. “You owe me twenty apiece for the grunts,” the professor said. “I offered them extra credit instead, but any dolt can pass a film class.”

  “Here’s fifty. I’m feeling generous.”

  “What’s the old lady got, The Magnificent Ambersons uncut?”

  “Almost as good. Carole Lombard’s first film.”

  He dropped off the trailer at the rental agency and day-dreamed his way across town. Carole Lombard, the slender, dazzling blond queen of screwball romantic comedy, had made an insignificant debut at age twelve, then blazed across the screen in the 1930s, reaching her peak of fame when she married Clark Gable, the King of Hollywood. Stories of her bawdy sense of humor and outrageous practical jokes were legend, and by all accounts the couple was deliriously happy. But it all ended tragically in early 1942, when the plane carrying Lombard home from a war-bond rally slammed into a mountain thirty miles from Las Vegas. She was thirty-three
years old.

  Valentino hadn’t had cause to revisit Century City since he’d moved out of a high-rise to take up residency in the Oracle, where he awoke in the morning to the zing and chatter of the renovators’ power saws and nail guns and went to bed in the evening past walls where there had been empty spaces and empty spaces where there had been walls only hours before. But in Jane Peters’ building he congratulated himself on the move: A brat hit every button on his way out of the elevator, sentencing its only remaining occupant to stopping at every floor.

  “Mr. Valentino? I’m Gloria Voss, Miss Peters’ health-care provider. We spoke on the phone.”

  He shook the hand of the tall, slim brunette in a white blouse, pressed jeans, and new running shoes. The living room was clean, spacious, and decorated tastefully in shades of gray and slate blue, but smelled of many generations of cigarettes under a thin layer of air freshener.

  His nose must have twitched, because she said, “She tries to fool me by flushing the butts down the toilet, but the place always smells like a smoking car. I think she bribes the nasty kid downstairs to smuggle them in. He probably shoplifts them.”

  “I might have met him.”

  “That explains why you’re late. Some day he’s going to try that button trick on Miss Peters and get a tongue-lashing to make him wish she’d used a paddle. She has an impressive vocabulary.”

  “No wonder she likes Carole Lombard. They say she had her brothers teach her every curse word they knew, to put her on level ground with every man she dealt with. They called her the Profane Angel.”

  “Jane told me that; and many other stories as well. I’ll have to rent a Lombard film sometime. Anyone whose escapades can make a trained nurse blush is worth checking out.”

  “You haven’t seen A Perfect Crime?” He had a sinking feeling he’d been lured there under false pretenses.

  “No projection equipment here. But she tells me I’m not missing much. ‘Child actors should be drowned, like kittens.’ That’s a quote.”