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

by Donna Andrews

  After lunch she took him there, to Babur’s Gardens, a terraced hillside resplendent with flowers, leading up to a pristine white mosque and a small marble gravestone, and two others on the terraced garden just above it.

  “This is the burial place of Babur, who founded the Mogul Empire — not,” she emphasized with a pointed finger, “the dreaded Mongol Empire, which was something altogether different. Of course, it is true that Babur was a great warrior and led his people in overcoming Turks and Indians and many others, but he was also a very gentle man, a poet, a writer of history. Nearly everything good in our culture began under his rule. This,” she drew in the gardens, the mosque, the gravestones with a sweep of her arm, “he designed himself more than four thousand years ago as the final resting place for himself, his wife, and their daughter.”

  “It’s very beautiful,” Morgan said, impressed.

  But the memory of the place became tainted in his mind later that day when they walked past the ruins of the Kabul Museum and Lee said sadly, “It was once one of Asia’s greatest museums. Now see what unscrupulous men, vulgar men, have reduced it to.”

  Men like me, Morgan thought, oddly uncomfortable.

  In the evening they had dinner at the elegant Khyber Restaurant, eating a mixture of Western and Afghan foods. They were both aware now that the hours before Tuesday were passing quickly.

  “At times like this,” Lee asked, “do you worry much?”

  “No,” Morgan said. “Worry is like thinking about a debt you may not have to pay.” It was a lie. He always worried. Before a battle, he felt as if live things were crawling around in his intestines, eating away at them.

  Later he told her, “Tomorrow pack only a small bag. Stay home all day. I’ll come for you in the afternoon.” And he asked, “You’re still sure about going?”

  “Yes, still sure.”

  “You may never see your family again.”

  “I never see them now.”

  Walking to her apartment after dinner, he admitted, “I lied to you earlier. I do worry.” For some reason he felt sad. “Can we bathe together again tonight?”

  Lee touched his face with both palms. “Of course, my love.”

  Going into her building, neither of them suspected that they were being watched.

  At ten the next morning, Morgan strode into the Dingo Club, two pistols and ammo in a belt around his waist, an Uzi 9mm machine gun and web belt of extra magazines slung over one shoulder, carrying the Mossberg shotgun in one hand.

  The club, not yet open, was empty except for Donahue at his usual table. Halfway back to it, Morgan stopped cold. Donahue had a glass and bottle in front of him, telling Morgan that something was very wrong. No professional soldier drank before a fight; you didn’t want alcohol in your system if you might be wounded. Walking on up to the table, Morgan stood there, waiting for Donahue to speak.

  “The operation’s off, lad,” the Irishman finally said.

  “What’s happened, Donny?”

  Donahue looked up at him forlornly, his expression desolate, eyes mournful.

  “Your brother Virgil was put on trial at seven o’clock this morning. He was found guilty at eight. And he was hanged at nine.”

  Morgan was thunderstruck. “Virgil—? He’s been — hanged?”

  “I just got the news a bit ago. I’m sorrier than I can say, lad.”

  Shock overwhelming him, Morgan sat down heavily on one of the chairs, laying the Mossberg on the table, dropping the Uzi and web belt to the floor next to him. His lips parted wordlessly, incredulously.

  “One of the guards I bribed got word to me,” Donahue said. “I’m truly, truly sorry, Morgan. I really wanted to have a go at this one. With you. Your brother. I was gonna make it my last big raid. I really wanted it—” Tears came to the big Irishman’s eyes. He poured a drink, but did not raise the glass. Instead he angrily propelled both glass and bottle off the table with the sweep of an arm. “Oh, damn them! God damn them to hell!”

  The two men sat in silence, not looking at each other, for what seemed like a long time. Around them, club employees began to straggle in and begin making the club ready for its noon opening.

  Hanged, Morgan thought, shaking his head dully. It was almost too heinous to imagine. Virgil, hanged.

  Finally, Morgan rose from his chair. “We’re set to fly out with Benny Cone at four, if you want to come along.”

  Donahue shook his head slightly. “Thanks anyway, lad.”

  Leaving the Mossberg and Uzi and ammo, Morgan walked out of the club.

  At Lee’s apartment, the door was ajar. Frowning, Morgan drew his Glock, thumbed the safety off, and eased inside. Lee’s father was sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead as if in a stupor.

  “Where is she?” Morgan asked.

  The father smiled slightly. “I watched you last night,” he said. “I saw you come in here with her and I waited all night until you came out this morning. I know that you have dishonored her and she has dishonored my family. Shame has been cast over me. Now that shame is erased.”

  Morgan’s already ashen face blanched even more pallid and horror clouded his eyes. He went into the bedroom.

  Lee lay on her back, still wearing the plain white cotton gown she had pulled on to say goodbye to him at her door. Her face was whiter even than Morgan’s, whiter than the white cotton gown, whiter than the pristine white satin sheets on the bed. Her throat had been cut and the blood in which she lay had dried almost black under her head.

  Morgan sighed a great, hollow sigh and thought: This is my punishment for the life I’ve led. He felt deep remorse that Lee had been punished too.

  Walking back to where her father sat, Morgan raised the Glock and put the muzzle between the man’s eyes.

  “Shoot me,” Lee’s father said. “Kill me. I do not care. I did what was right. I face death without shame.”

  Morgan thumbed the safety of the Glock back on. “No,” he said. “You live with it.”

  He left the man sitting there.

  Stretched out on the empty cargo deck of the Constellation about five minutes after it was airborne, Morgan heard Benny Cone call back to him from the cockpit.

  “Hey, Tenny! We got off by the skin of our teeth! They just closed the airport!”

  Morgan went forward to the cockpit. “What happened?”

  “It just came over the air from the tower. There’s some kind of rebel army attacking Pul-e-Charki prison. The place is under siege. Prisoners are escaping like ants.”

  Son of a bitch, Morgan thought. Donny’s doing it anyway. He’s getting his last big raid.

  “The radio say anything about a big fire on the other side of the city? A lumberyard?” he asked Cone.

  “Nope. Just the attack on the prison.”

  Good for you, Michaleen, Morgan thought. Just you against the prison, with no diversionary tactic. One on one. Way to go.

  Going back aft in the plane, Morgan stretched out again. For a brief moment, he felt guilty about not being there with Donahue. Then he thought of Lee and the guilt faded.

  Lee would forever be with him.

  And he would never kill again.

  Scream Queen

  by Ed Gorman

  © 2007 by Ed Gorman

  Booklist recently called Ed Gorman a “modern master,” and his latest Sam McCain novel, Fools Rush In (Pegasus), received a starred review in Library Journal. The following Gorman story will also appear soon in the limited-edition collection Midnight Premiere, edited by Tom Piccirilli (CD Publications). An advance review from Booklist raves: “There isn’t a single unrewarding entry [in the book]!”

  ❖

  Allow me to introduce myself. My name’s Jason Fanning. Not that I probably need an introduction. Not to be immodest but I did, after all, win last year’s Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

  Same with my two friends: Bill Leigh, the Academy Award-winning actor, and Spence Spencer, who won the Academy Award two years ago for Best Director. Peo
ple with our credentials don’t need any introductions, right?

  Well...

  That’s the kind of thing we talked about nights, after Video Vic’s closed down for the night and we sat around Bill’s grubby apartment drinking the cheapest beer we could find and watching schlock DVDs on his old clunker of a TV set. Someday we were going to win the Academy Award for our respective talents and everybody who laughed at us and called us geeks and joked that we were probably gay... well, when we were standing on the stage with Cameron Diaz hanging all over us...

  We had special tastes in videos, the sort of action films and horror films that were the staples of a place like Video Vic’s.

  If it’s straight-to-video, we probably saw it. And liked it. All three of us were on Internet blogs devoted to what the unknowledgeable (read: unhip) thought of as shitty movies. But we knew better. Didn’t Nicholson, Scorsese, De Niro, and so forth all get their start doing low-ball movies for Roger Corman?

  That’s how we were going to win our Academy Awards when we finally got off our asses and piled into Spence’s eight-year-old Dodge Dart and headed for the land of gold and silicone. We knew it would be a little while before the money and the fame started rolling in. First we’d have to pay our dues doing direct-to-video. We were going to pitch ourselves as a team. My script, Bill’s acting, Spence’s name-above-the-title directing.

  In the meantime, we had to put up with working minimum-wage jobs. Mine was at Video Vic’s, a grimy little store resting on the river’s edge of a grimy little Midwestern city that hadn’t been the same since the glory days of the steamboats Mark Twain wrote so much about.

  Even though we worked different gigs, we all managed to go hang at Bill’s, even though from time to time Bill and I almost got into fistfights. He never let us forget that he was the normal one, what with his good looks and his Yamaha motorcycle and all his ladies. We were three years out of high school. We’d all tried the community-college route, but since they didn’t offer any courses in the films of Mario Bava or Brian De Palma, none of us made it past the first year.

  I guess — from the outside, anyway — we were pretty geeky. I had the complexion problem and Spence was always trying to make pharmaceutical peace with his bi-polarity and Bill — well, Bill wasn’t exactly a geek. Not so obviously, anyway. He was good-looking, smooth with girls, and he got laid a lot. But he was only good-looking on the outside... inside he was just as much an outcast as the seldom-laid Spence and I...

  Do I have to tell you that people we went to high school with smirked whenever they saw us together? Do I have to tell you that a lot of people considered us immature and worthless? Do I have to tell you that a big night out was at GameLand, where we competed with ten- and twelve-year-olds on the video games? If Spence was off his medication and he lost to some smart-ass little kid, he’d get pretty angry and bitter. A lot of the little kids were scared of us. And you know what? That felt kinda good, having somebody scared of us. It was the only time we felt important in any way.

  And then Michele Danforth came into our lives and changed everything. Everything.

  Spence was the first one to recognize her. Not that we believed him at first. He kept saying, “That little blond chick that comes in here every other night or so — that’s Michele Danforth.” But we didn’t believe it, not even when he set three of her video boxes up on the counter and said, “You really don’t recognize her?”

  Michele Danforth, in case you don’t happen to be into cult videos, was the most popular scream queen of all a couple of years ago. A scream queen? That’s the sexy young lady who gets dragged off by the monster/ax-murderer in direct-to-video horror movies. She screams a lot, and she almost always gets her blouse and bra ripped off so you can see her breasts. Acting ability doesn’t matter so much. But scream ability is vital. And breast ability is absolutely mandatory.

  The funny thing with most scream queens is, you never see them completely naked. Not even their bottoms. It’s as if all the seventeen-year-old masturbation champions who rent their videos want their scream queens to be virginal. Showing breasts doesn’t violate the moral code here. But anything else — Well, part of the equation is that you want your scream queen to be the kind of girl you’d marry. And the marrying kind never expose their beavers except in doctors’ offices.

  Couple of quick things here about Michele Danforth. She was very pretty. Not cute, not beautiful, not glamorous. Pretty. Soft. A bit on the melancholy side. The kind you fall in love with so uselessly. Uselessly, anyway, if your life’s work is watching direct-to-video movies. And those sweet breasts of hers. Not those big plastic monsters. Perfectly shaped, medium-sized good-girl breasts. And she could actually act. All the blog boys predicted she’d move into mainstream. And who could disagree?

  Then she vanished. Became a big media story for a couple of weeks and then some other H-wood story came along and everybody forgot her. Vanished. The assumption became that some stalker had grabbed her and killed her. Even though she always said she couldn’t afford it — scream queens don’t usually make much more than executive secretaries — she had to hire a personal bodyguard because of all the strange and disturbing mail she got.

  Vanished.

  And now, according to Spence, she’d resurfaced fifteen hundred miles and three years later. Except that instead of being dark-haired, brown-eyed, and slender, she was now blond, blue-eyed, and maybe twenty-five pounds heavier. With very earnest brown-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose.

  We had to admit that there was a similarity. But it was vague. And it was a similarity that probably belonged to a couple of million young women.

  The night the question of her identity got resolved, I was starting the check-out process when the door opened up and she came in. She went right to the Drama section. I’d never seen her go to any of the other sections. Her choices were always serious flicks with serious actors in them. Bill and Spence had taken off to get some beer at the supermarket, the cost of it being way too much at convenience stores.

  I’d agreed to the little game they’d come up with. I thought it was kind of stupid, but who knew, maybe it would resolve the whole thing.

  It was a windy, chill March night. She wore a white turtleneck beneath a cheap, shapeless thigh-length brown velour jacket. She was just one more Midwestern working girl. Nothing remarkable about her at all. She always paid cash from a worn pea-green imitation-leather wallet. Tonight was no different. She never said much, though tonight, as I took her money, she said, “Windy.” She went under the name Heather Simpson.

  “Yeah. Where’s that warm weather they promised?”

  She nodded and smiled.

  I rang up the transaction and then, as I handed her the slip to sign, I nudged the video box sitting next to the cash register out in front of me. Night of the Depraved was the title. It showed a huge, blood-dripping butcher knife about to stab into the white-bloused form of a very pretty girl. Who was screaming. The girl was Michele Danforth. The quote along the top of the box read: DEPRAVED to the Max... and scream queen Danforth is good enuf to eat... if you know what I mean! — Dr. Autopsy.com

  “Oops,” I said, hoping she’d think this was all accidental. “You don’t want that one.” I picked up the box and looked at it. “I wonder what ever happened to her.”

  She just shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I never watch those kind of movies.” She took her change and said, “I’m in kind of a hurry.”

  I handed her the right movie and just as I did so she turned toward me, showing me an angle of her face I’d never seen before. And I said, “It’s you! Spence was right! You’re Michele Danforth!”

  And just then the door opened, the bell above it announcing customers, and in came Bill and Spence. They’d left the beer in the car. Video Vic would’ve kicked my ass all the way over into Missouri if he ever caught us with brew on the premises.

  She turned and started away in a hurry, so fast that she brushed up against Spence. The video she carried fell t
o the floor.

  Bill picked it up. He must have assumed that I had played the little game with her — bringing up Michele Danforth and all — because after he bent to pick up the video and handed it to her with a mock-flourish, he said, “I’m pleased to present my favorite scream queen with this award from your three biggest fans.”

  She made a sound that could have been a sob or a curse, and then she stalked to the door, throwing it open wide and disappearing into the night. My mind was filled with the image of her face — the fear, the sorrow.

  “She’ll never be back,” I said.

  “I told you it was her,” Spence said. “She wouldn’t have acted that way if it wasn’t.”

  “I wanna bang her,” Bill said, “and I’m going to.”

  Spence said, “Man, she’s nobody now. She’s even sort of fat.”

  “Yeah, but how many dudes can say they bopped Michele Danforth?”

  “Wait’ll we get to La-La Land,” Spence said. “We’ll be boppin’ movie stars every night. And they won’t be overweight.”

  Our collective fantasy had never sounded more juvenile and impossible than it did right then. In that instant I saw what a sad sham my life was. Shoulda gone to college; shoulda done somethin’ with my life. Instead, I was just as creepy and just as pathetic as all the other direct-to-video freaks who came in here and who we all laughed at when they left. Video Vic’s. Pathetic.

  “Hey, man, hurry up,” Bill said to me. “I’ll get the lights. You bag up the money and the receipts. We’ll drop it off at the bank and then tap the beer.”

  But I was still back there a few scenes. The terror and grief of her face. And the humiliating moment when Spence had spoken our collective fantasy out loud. Something had changed in me in those moments. Good or bad, I couldn’t tell yet. “I got this sore throat.”