EQMM, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Certainly not. The conversation would have been interminable. He provided the year and the name in each instance, and I wrote them down."

  Lyon drank, burped, wiped. “One of my abandoned interests is the history of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. I gave up the study when it became clear that the board at Columbia University would never honor Rex Stout, or more appropriately Archie Goodwin for his many contributions to American letters. I do recall that in nineteen forty, when the director of the board objected to the others’ choice of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, it was decided that no prize would be issued that year. Are you aware if this ever happened in regard to the Van Dusen Prize or the Golden Muse?"

  "It never did. The former executive director read off twenty-four years and twenty-four names. This year's winner has not yet been determined."

  "I submit that it happened, and that he told you as much when he used the phrase you misunderstood for a man's name. The three syllables you interpreted as ‘Noah Ward,’ had they been spelled out, would in fact read—"

  "No award.” Nurls slumped in his seat. I hadn't thought his spine had that much play in it.

  Stoddard shot to his feet. His tape recorder slid off his knee to the floor. “You took up my precinct's time and mine over a dumbass pun?"

  "A homonym, to be precise. A hazard of oral communication."

  "You and Woodbine are both under arrest for obstruction of justice."

  Lyon's moon face was gray as cardboard, but he held his ground. “Don't be absurd, Mr. Stoddard. I've prevented Mr. Nurls from obstructing justice unwittingly by filing a nuisance complaint. If there never was a Noah Ward, no fraud was committed, and the A.P.A. simply reinvested the money that would have been awarded, assuring the continued existence of the Van Dusen Prize. I have you to thank for a signal accomplishment on my part."

  "Don't drag me into it, you little blimp."

  "No dragging is necessary. Earlier today in this very room, you referred to the Van Dusen as an award, not a prize, and employed an emphatic ‘No’ to indicate your rejection of the importance of the affair to the Brooklyn Police Department. You may have noticed that at that point I entered into a reverie."

  "You stuck your finger in your ear."

  "I find the action stimulates the cortex. Granted you hadn't a notion you were supplying a catalyst for the chemistry of my cognitive function, but that in no way diminishes your role in the outcome."

  "Bull. Since when is wordplay a signal accomplishment?"

  "I must thank you again, for putting the question. In spite of the laws of physics, I have managed to change a tint of paint by adding a small amount of light to dark. I have proven that someone never existed."

  Nurls produced a checkbook, scribbled, and got up to place the check on Claudius Lyon's desk. “Two thousand, including a bonus for a job well done. You are a magician."

  Captain Stoddard hovered. I wouldn't say he drooled, but he was ready to pounce the second Lyon picked up the check. The man behind the desk never looked at it. Instead he turned to me. “Arnie, will you do the honors?"

  I said I'd be pleased as punch. Nurls watched, astonished, Stoddard, boiling, as I tore the check sideways and lengthwise and dropped the pieces into the wastebasket by my desk.

  Stoddard slammed the door behind him, knocking crooked the picture on the wall. Lyon said goodbye to our client, rose, and straightened it on his way to the elevator.

  (c) 2008 by Loren D. Estleman

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

  Show business has long been a favorite criminous setting, and in recent years more mysteries than ever have explored the worlds of film, stage, television, music, magic, stand-up comedy, and other categories of performance. Prolific anthologist Robert J. Randisi's Hollywood and Crime (Pegasus, $25) gathers original stories by such formidable writers as Michael Connelly, Bill Pronzini, Terence Faherty, Stuart M. Kaminsky, and Dick Lochte. Among those with the strongest entertainment industry backgrounds are “Murderlized” by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens, a fact-based 1930s tale in which Moe Howard of the Three Stooges investigates the mysterious death of former stage partner Ted Healy; Robert S. Levinson's “And the Winner Is,” about the 1960 AcademyAwards, gangster Mickey Cohen, and the bitter rivalry of columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella O. Parsons; and best of all, “Jack Webb's Star,” Lee Goldberg's hilarious contemporary tale of a struggling TV writer, his commercial actress wife, a traffic school led by an unfunny stand-up comic, and Joe Friday's star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. The novels considered below explore other corners of the entertainment world past and present.

  **** Christa Faust: Money Shot, Hard Case Crime, $6.99. Former porn movie actress Angel Dare, who now operates an “adult modeling agency,” should never have agreed to a one-time comeback that leaves her battered, humiliated, and on the run from a murder charge. Her story of sex, violence, and Spillane-style revenge is leavened by humanity, occasional humor, sex-industry insights, faultless pace, and eloquent style. Some will be repelled by the subject matter, but to those remaining, this is highly recommended. The dedication to the late paperback icon Richard S. Prather is quite appropriate.

  *** Betty Webb: Desert Cut, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. Lena Jones, a Scottsdale private eye with the personal demons and mysterious history so common in the current market, appears for the fifth time in this disturbing novel. Most of her income comes from her job as technical advisor to a television crime drama. Thus, when she and her documentarian boyfriend find the body of a little girl while scouting locations for a film about Geronimo, she is able to take on the case, possibly connected to those of other missing girls, without a paying client. While the extreme child abuse at the center of the plot is painfully believable and buttressed by an author note and bibliography, one hopes the jaundiced view of TV series production is exaggerated. Webb is a solid pro who knows how to draw in and keep the reader.

  *** Toni L. P. Kelner: Without Mercy, Five Star, $25.95. In the first of a promising new series, Boston entertainment writer Tilda Harper, specialist in where-are-they-now stories, looks into suspicious deaths among the cast members of the 1970s sitcom Kissing Cousins while trying to find the vanished Mercy, the program's goth teenager. Bright dialogue, engaging characters, and a humorous view of fannish obsession support a whodunit plot that is nicely managed though unclued in the classical sense.

  *** David Fulmer: The Blue Door, Harcourt, $25. The author of several mysteries centered on early twentieth-century jazz turns to the Philadelphia music scene of 1962 as boxer turned private eye in training Eddie Cero looks into the disappearance three years earlier of rising rhythm-and-blues star Johnny Pope. Almost everyone, including Johnny's beautiful sister, wants him to leave it alone. Though the payoff isn't quite as good as the problem, characters and background make this one a winner. Eddie's relationship with employer and mentor Sal Giambroni may remind some of Fredric Brown's 1947 Edgar winner The Fabulous Clipjoint.

  *** Robert S. Levinson: In the Key of Death, Five Star, $25.95. Record producer Clyde (Mr. Magic) Davenport so resents being dropped by the popular music giants he made famous that he is systematically killing them off. LAPD cop Josh Wainwright, whose singer wife may have been one of Davenport's victims, is determined to avenge her death. EQMM favorite Levinson manages to have both a pernicious known villain and a whodunit in an intricately plotted and suspenseful thriller that makes maximum use of his music industry expertise.

  *** John Harvey: Gone to Ground, Harcourt, $25. Occasional excerpts from the script of a 1950s British film noir hint that the murder of a gay academic arose from his research into the female star, who died mysteriously and whose family resists cooperation. Most interesting feature of the first book-length case for police detectives Will Grayson and Helen Walker is Harvey's depiction of the triangle, benign and friendly but potentially dangerous, of male detective, wife, an
d female partner.

  *** Bill Moody: Shades of Blue, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. When Bay Area jazz pianist Evan Horne, making his sixth appearance, inherits the home and possessions of his musical mentor Calvin Hughes, some pieces of old handwritten sheet music and a photograph of Hughes with Miles Davis and a baby carriage send the sleuthing jazzman on a quest for the dead man's secrets. The unconventional and seldom predictable plot takes a while to get fully in gear, but Moody, himself a professional jazz drummer, quickly involves the reader with both the characters and the music. Included as incidental characters are real-life drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Ron Carter.

  ** Susan Goodwill: Little Shop of Murders, Midnight Ink, $13.95. Kate London's amateur theatre in Mudd Lake, Michigan mounts the musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors, complete with hard-to-control man-eating plant. During the town's annual Sausage Festival, an elderly bathrobe-wearing bank robber proves to be a boyfriend of Kate's Aunt Kitty, a former ‘50s-era B-movie actress. Representing the comic cozy at its lightest and slapstickiest, this may satisfy some fans of the type but won't win many new converts.

  ** Don Bruns: St. Bart Breakdown, Oceanview, $24.95. In his fourth appearance, rock journalist Mick Sever flies to the titular island to interview legendary record producer Danny Murtz, a drug-addled sociopath whose female friends have a habit of vanishing or turning up dead. The island and journalistic backgrounds are effective enough, but the characters and plot are less engaging than hoped.

  ADDENDUM: By bizarre coincidence, the very day I learned of the death of my friend and literary hero Ed Hoch, I found in my mailbox the seventeenth (and certainly not last) edition of the loose-leaf Edward D. Hoch Bibliography (Moffatt House, Box 4456, Downey, CA 90241-1456), covering the years 1955 to early 2008. Edited by June M. Moffatt and Francis M. Nevins, and including extensive introductory material by Marvin Lachman, it is a testament to the extraordinary career of a writer who first broke into print with “Village of the Dead” in the December 1955 issue of one of the last surviving mystery pulps, Famous Detective Stories; had been a frequent contributor to EQMM for nearly a decade before beginning his historic unbroken run of appearances from May 1973 to the present; created no less than 28 mystery series; and was one of the last and greatest practitioners of classical Golden-Age-style detective fiction. Apart from the hundreds of meticulously crafted stories that form his literary legacy, Ed Hoch was loved and admired in the mystery field for his good humor, kindness, generosity to other writers, and wisdom. The memories and the stories live on.

  (c) 2008 by Jon L. Breen

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  Fiction: FORGET ME NEVER by Terence Faherty

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  Art by Mark Evan Wolker

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  Terence Faherty is the author of two mystery series at novel length that have also had short-story entries in this magazine (the Owen Keane and Scott Elliott stories.) The following story belongs to what he calls his Star Republic series, about a newspaper reporter who has an interest in offbeat crimes. To date, it has only run in EQMM .

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  "You've been wanting to do an article on those damn roadside memorials,” Boxleiter said. “Here's your big chance."

  E. N. Boxleiter was my longtime editor at the Star Republic, the Indianapolis newspaper where I spent my days and many of my nights, and I'd learned to give his big chances a very critical examination, kicking their tires and looking into their mouths both. Not that it ever did me much good in the end.

  Take the current example. As it happened, I had wanted to do a story on roadside memorials set up for accident victims, the homemade shrines that had become such a common sight around Indiana. The memorials were the heart's work of some loving survivor of a person killed in a car or truck or motorcycle accident, and the earliest ones—the ones I'd first noticed—had been simple wooden crosses wired to a guardrail or mile marker or just stuck in the grass of a berm. Over the years the designs had evolved like the Christmas-light displays of competitive neighbors. Now they commonly featured plastic wreaths, stuffed animals, and photos of the deceased.

  I was never able to pass one without wondering about the phenomenon. Specifically, I always asked myself why the spot where a loved one had met a violent end seemed to be so much more meaningful to some industrious mourner than the victim's grave, the more traditional lodestone of grief.

  I'd gone as far as contacting a friend who taught cultural an-thropology at Lockerbie Univer-sity, a local private college. She'd told me of ante-cedents to the memorials that went all the way back to the Middle Ages, when it had been a common practice to erect roadside shrines for travelers killed by bandits. And she'd shared her pet theory that the roots of the practice were sunk even deeper. Despite the cross motif, she believed the shrines might spring from some racial memory of a time before the Christian concept of heaven became established. That explained to her satisfaction the focus on the site of death rather than the grave. It had been the last known whereabouts on earth of the dearly departed's spirit and therefore a likely spot for that spirit to hang around.

  All of which might have made for an interesting feature article, if my editor had been interested in a simple feature. From me at least, Boxleiter expected something more offbeat. Something bizarre or with a scent of mystery. And now his pleased expression told me he had caught a whiff of that scent.

  "Take a look,” he said, pushing a Polaroid snapshot across his desk. He was holding four others with their backs to me, like a gambler stretching out a pat hand.

  The photograph on the desktop was a close-up of a pretty typical roadside shrine: a white cross with a framed portrait attached to its intersection. The photo within the photo appeared to be of a smiling young woman, but it was very small. Above it, stick-on letters of the type used on mailboxes spelled the name Maria. A vase containing flowers was wired to the bottom of the cross.

  Because I could see that the prints my boss still held each had a notation on the back, I turned over the one he'd dealt me. In smudged felt tip was written, “I-70 westbound near the 94 mile marker."

  I waited for the punchline, and Boxleiter laid the other photos down, almost reluctantly. I thought at first that they were four different shots of the same memorial. Each showed a white cross bearing the name Maria, the same framed black-and-white photo, and the same glass vase. Each vase contained the same bouquet. The slight differences in the lighting of each shot could have been due to their having been taken at different times of day. But then I noticed some significant variations in the backgrounds. The milepost just visible in the original photo didn't appear in any of the four near-duplicates. And one of the four clearly showed a bit of guardrail where there shouldn't have been any.

  To confirm the likeliest explanation, I checked the backs of the prints. Sure enough, each had a different location smeared there. One was I-70 eastbound at the 94 mile marker, putting its shrine right across four lanes of interstate from the one I'd first examined. Another was Shadeland Avenue at Tenth Street. The remaining two were I-65 southbound near the Keystone exit and I-465, Indy's beltway, westbound near the exit for State Road 67, on the city's southwest side.

  Boxleiter was nodding. “Exactly. Five identical memorials to a woman identified only by her first name. The Polaroids were taken by a highway maintenance guy named Halleck. He noticed the two on I-70 because that's on his normal grass-cutting route. They got him so interested, he talked them up back at the highway garage and another grass cutter mentioned the one on I-465. After that, Halleck spent a Saturday afternoon driving around town. He found the other crosses, photographed them, and sent us the results.

  "He's a man after my own heart, this Halleck,” Boxleiter concluded. “He wants an explanation. So do I."

  I reached Halleck, first name Alan, in the cab of his tractor, thanks to the miracle of cellular communications. He agreed to meet me at the first cross he'd found, the one on I-70 westbound at the 94 mile marker.

  On my drive
from downtown, I used my own cell phone to reach my friend the Lockerbie cultural anthropologist. Professor Constance Brewster—Connie when we'd been undergraduates together—was about to leave for a lecture. I gave her a quick description of the mystery shrines and asked for a quick opinion.

  "Fakes, obviously,” she said in her decisive way. “The question is, why would anyone bother? You say these memorials are basically big white crosses? That's interesting. You know, ever since the courts started ruling against religious displays on public property—manger scenes, Ten Commandment plaques, or whatever—I've been expecting some kind of grass-roots reaction. This could be an example of that. The highways are public land, after all. Some religious activist could be setting these up as a way of thumbing his nose at the court rulings. Who's going to tear down a memorial to an accident victim?"

  I asked her why, if these were protests, they all featured the same photo and name.

  "Why not?” Connie asked back. “Maybe it's to make them recognizable to the faithful. Wait a minute, you said the name was Maria? Could that photograph have been a picture of the Virgin Mary? They can do some amazing things with computer graphics these days. It could be Our Lady of Czestochowa with Cindy Crawford's hair pasted on. Check it out and get back to me."

  Alan Halleck's mowing rig was parked on the shoulder of the interstate when I arrived. I pulled well onto the grass myself, but I still felt my car shake as a semi rumbled past.

  "You get used to that,” Halleck said when I finally ventured outside the car. “The crazy traffic. It's like working around a big buzz saw or in a fireworks factory. You have to put the danger out of your mind or you can't do your job."

  Halleck was a young, muscular guy dressed in work boots, khaki shorts, and a green YMCA shirt. He was tanned to make a dermatologist cry, though his eyes were well protected by mirrored sunglasses that would not have looked out of place in a Ferrari. The shades were hooked behind ears that might have won him the nickname jughead in a less sensitive time and supported by a square, flat nose. His sun-lightened hair was also square, his flattop as perfectly manicured as any country-club green.