by Otto Penzler
Banks nodded. He didn't really need another word from Colin Whitman. Not just yet, at any rate.
"Have you found anything out yet, Mr. Banks?" Denise Vancalm asked. They were sitting in the same room as they had sat two days ago, at Banks's request, though the police hadn't quite finished with the house yet, and Mrs. Vancalm was still staying at the Jedburgh Hotel. When Banks suggested the house as a venue, she had readily agreed as she said she had some more clothes she wanted to pick up. DI Annie Cabbot was there, too, notebook open, pen in her hand.
"Quite a bit," said Banks. "Mr. Whitman is under arrest."
"Colin? My God. Did Colin...? I mean, I can't believe it. Why?"
"Don't worry, Mrs. Vancalm. Colin Whitman didn't kill your husband."
"Then I don't understand." She clutched at the gold pendant around her neck. "Why? Who?"
"You killed your husband," Banks said.
"Me?" She pointed at her own chest. "But that's absurd. I was at the poker circle. You know I was."
"You told me that was where you were."
"But Natasha, Gabriella, Evangeline, Heather ... they all corroborated my story."
"Indeed they did," said Banks. "And that caused me no end of problems."
"What do you mean?"
"I just couldn't think at first what would make four law-abiding professional women alibi a friend for the murder of her husband. It didn't make sense. In almost every scenario I could think of, someone would have spoken out against it, suggested another course of action, refused to be involved."
"Of course. That's why it's true."
Banks shook his head. "No, it's not. I said I couldn't think of anything, and at first I couldn't. Perhaps spousal abuse came close, but even then there was certain to be a voice of reason, a dissenting voice. Maybe if he were a serial killer ... but that clearly wasn't the case. Only when Mr. Whitman told me the truth did I understand it."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course you do. Your husband was a child pornographer. All these trips. Amsterdam. Berlin. Brussels. Oh, he did business, of course, but then there was the other business, wasn't there? The secret meetings, the swaps, the children, often smuggled in from Eastern Europe, bought and paid for."
"This is absurd. I want my solicitor."
"All in good time." Banks was getting sick and tired of hearing that request. "Somehow," he went on, "you found out about it. Perhaps he let something slip on the computer, or maybe it was something else, but you found out. You were shocked, horrified, of course. You didn't know what to do. Horror turned to disgust. It sickened you. You had to do something about it, but you didn't know what. All you knew was that you couldn't go on living with a man like that, and that he couldn't be allowed to keep on doing what he was doing. Am I right so far?"
Denise Vancalm said nothing, but her expression spoke volumes. "Do go on, Chief Inspector," she said softly. "It's a fascinating story."
"No doubt your first thought, as an honest citizen, was to report him to the authorities. But you couldn't do that, could you?"
"Why not?" she asked.
"I think there were two reasons. First, you couldn't live with it, with the shame of knowing who—or what—you had been married to for fifteen years. It would have been an admission of weakness, of defeat."
"Very good. And the other reason?"
"Professional. Your business is important to you. You're a fund-raiser and event organizer for charities, predominantly children's charities. Imagine how it would go down with your colleagues that you were married to a child pornographer and you didn't even know it. Oh, there would be sympathy enough at first. Poor Denise, they'd say. But there'd always be those important little questions at the backs of their minds. Did she know? How could she not have known? It would have meant the end for you. You couldn't have lived with that. But the widow of a murder victim? There you get all the sympathy without the vexing questions. As long as you have a watertight alibi. And with Gabriella Mountjoy, Natasha Goldwell, Evangeline White, and Heather Murchison all swearing you were with them all evening, the old surprising-a-burglar routine should have worked very well."
"But how could I have done it?"
"Very easily. After you got to Gabriella's, you left your car there. There's nothing much more distinctive than a red sports car, and you didn't want anyone to see that around your home that evening. You borrowed one of the others' cars, probably Evangeline White's. She wasn't particularly a 'Top Gear' type. All she wanted was a nice little runner that would get her from A to B. Nondescript. You drove back home shortly before your husband was due to arrive, parked out of the way. You broke in through the side window to make it look as if a burglar had gained entry, and then you waited for him. I don't know if there was any discussion when he arrived, any questioning, any chance to offer an explanation, or whether you simply executed the sentence the moment he walked into his study."
"All this is very clever, but it assumes you have evidence that my husband was what you say he was, and that I knew about it."
"Friends can only be relied on up to a point," said Banks. "Natasha Goldwell values her freedom, and when she found it under threat, she decided that it might be best to make a clean breast of things. It doesn't get her off without punishment completely, of course, but I think we can be certain a judge will view her with a certain amount of leniency."
Pale and trembling, Denise Vancalm reached in her handbag for a tissue and blew her nose. "And what did Natasha have to say?" She tried to sound casual.
"That not only did she and the others provide you with an alibi because they were as horrified as you were about your husband's activities, but that she went over to your house the day before—remember, when I asked you about that, and you told me it was just for coffee and girly talk?—well, that's when she cleaned off your husband's computer. She's good at it. It's her job. Computer software design, specializing in security. Our experts found traces when she told them where to look. Not a lot, but enough to show what was there and to give us a few more leads to chase down. You also cleaned out the safe. No doubt there were disks and photographs there, too."
"It was the computer," Denise said, her voice no more than a whisper.
"What?" Banks asked.
"The computer. Victor was away in Berlin and my Web service was on the blink. We have different services. Sounds silly, I know, but there it is. I wanted to look up a company online. I started the e-mail browser by mistake, and a couple of e-mails came in. I was curious. I'm sure you know what it's like. Oh, there were no photographs of naked children or anything like that, but it was pretty obvious what the sender was referring to. At first I thought it might have been some sick sort of spam, but I checked his folders. There were more. There were ... pictures, too. I didn't find those until Natasha ... they were well hidden, secured."
"Is that why you smashed the computer screen?"
"Yes. I wasn't thinking. I just lashed out."
"He took a tremendous risk in keeping them."
"Don't they all? But he needed them. Obviously, the compulsion overcomes all the risks. Maybe it's even a part of the excitement, the possibility of being caught. I don't know. I really don't know."
"So you decided to kill him."
She nodded and sighed. "You're right. What's the point in lying anymore? I don't blame Natasha. She was never really comfortable with the plan from the start. She was appalled by what she saw on the screen, of course, and she went along with it; but of all of them, she had the most reservations. As I say, I don't blame her. If I could only have come up with some other way..."
"You could have reported him."
"No. You were right about that. And there'd have been a trial. I couldn't have stood that. Everyone knowing."
The irony, Banks thought, was that even now it had come out and Denise Vancalm would certainly go to trial, she would probably get more public sympathy as the murderess of a child pornographer than she would have as the wife of a li
ve one. As for her alibi, the Eastvale Ladies' Poker Circle, Banks didn't know what would happen. Their fate lay in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts, not in his, thank God. As he and Annie walked Denise Vancalm out to the waiting police car, Banks found himself thinking that they would probably not have to look very far to find a poker game in prison.
The Uncertainty Principle
Eric Van Lustbader
My dad is a cardsharp. Like all cardsharps he wanted a son but, instead, he got me. He says he doesn't mind, though, since my brain is filled with numbers. It's filled with equations, really—it's how I see the world, the only way the world makes sense to me—but to him it's the same thing.
Numbers are everything to him. He's spent practically all his life trying to memorize them. I don't have to memorize numbers, they're just there in my head. That's why he loves me just as much as if I was his son, not a girl of eighteen with cornflower blue eyes, long red hair, and the tits of a Penthouse Pet.
I get all that from my mother. Daddy wanted to call me Teddy, but my mother said over her dead body. She named me Charlotte. Daddy got the last laugh, though. He called me Charlie right from the get-go, and it stuck. Which pissed my mother off no end.
Daddy and my mother don't live together anymore. She accused him of gambling their savings away; he accused her of lying on her back all the time. That's exactly what he said. I should know. I was standing right there when he said it.
Of course, I didn't know what that meant until I was older. No point in judging either of them. They were doing what came natural to them; they couldn't do any different.
Daddy trained as a dealer. That was right here in Reno, which is where he met my mother. Not at the dealers' school or at the poker tables, where he liked to spend time as soon as school was out for the day. He met her at Maxine's Royal Flush, a high-class chicken ranch, off Route 395. By design, the front gate was a stone's throw from Julio's Diner, a popular truck stop. That Maxine was smarter than your average whore.
She'd designed the front gate herself to look like all the working ranches around those parts, which I suppose was a kind of joke. The Royal Flush is where Daddy liked to spend his nights, and his money. He set up a poker game there, fleeced the truckers after they had been well fucked. Maxine didn't mind; he gave her a fat cut. Plus, he got to hang out with all her girls.
My mother was the most beautiful of the bunch. She liked to say that she hated his guts until he taught her how to play poker. He taught her how to smoke a cigar, too, but that's another story. My mother had a talent for playing poker. Soon enough, she graduated herself from turning tricks to fleecing them. In fact, she got to be better at it than Daddy.
He always told me he liked that—he liked all the money she raked in. But now I think he was lying. I think deep down he resented it, and it got to gnawing at him, like a starving rat gnaws at wood. Love turns to hate so easy, doesn't it?
When they split, they left it up to me where I was to go. I chose to live with Daddy. My mother didn't mind. She didn't want me with her, anyways. She said she didn't live the kind of lifestyle that was suitable for a child my age. When she left, I told myself it'd just take some time to wrap my mind around that one. I was wrong. I never did understand how she could just abandon me like that.
She even told me "a secret" that last day: She told me she wasn't my real mother. She said she couldn't have a child, so she and Daddy adopted me.
After that first splash of fear and confusion, I recovered pretty good.
I laughed in her face. "I only have to look in the mirror to see what a liar you are."
And that's how we left it, she and I.
Where she is now, God only knows.
Nowadays, I help my daddy. You'd think I'd still be in school, but right off the bat he signed me up for home schooling. That's just like him. What a scam. They only send a bunch of test papers around once a year to make sure you're learning what you're supposed to learn. Right off, I got into the habit of giving the test papers to my friend Seth. At first he didn't want to do me the favor. But then I did a favor for him and it changed his mind, sort of. He still didn't want to take the test for me but, even then, Seth was so gaga over me he'd do just about anything to get a favor from me. Nowadays, Seth keeps saying I should quit this life my daddy and I have. Even though he's two years older, I pay him no mind. Why should I? Daddy and I have it good.
Daddy runs a high-stakes poker game that attracts the real big boys: politicians, mobsters, and, once in a while, a celebrity or two who think they know what they're doing. Daddy takes them in, of course. They've got money to burn, and man, do they like to burn it. Throwing it around in that company makes them feel—I don't know—I think it validates them, is the word I'm thinking of. (I'm not stupid. I read the dictionary all the time. Also, the encyclopedia. That was Seth's idea. I do it to keep him—what's the right word?—mollified. Now that I'm eighteen, and the home schooling is over and done with, you'd think I'd have blown Seth off. But I haven't. I don't know why, really. Maybe I just like having him around, like an old chair that's too comfortable for words. He's slim and tall, with thick dark hair and pale gray eyes that are hard to look away from. He has a big smile, which is nice, too.)
More often than not, Daddy sits in on the games. That's the point, really. That's where we make the big bucks. And that's where I come in, me with my head full of equations. I stand behind him while he's playing, my hands on the ladder back of his chair. Nobody minds. I'm only a girl. Plus, a lot of the men like to look at me. Daddy doesn't mind that; he says it distracts them and, seeing the look on their faces, I believe him. It's always the same look, no matter who the man is. They're filled with a greedy urgency, as if they're chained to their seat, just out of reach of the trough that's been set out in front of them. Soo-wee!
Anyway, there I am standing behind Daddy, watching the cards. Even when the discards are dead and covered with other discards, they stay in my mind, their faces making equations that keep re-balancing as each hand goes on. In this case, the equations translate into odds, and I use my fingers tapping on Daddy's back to translate the odds to him. I give him a tremendous edge. We have to be careful, though, so he doesn't win all the time and cause a ruckus. Some of the men at the table are soulless. A human life to them is no more than the flip of a card. Faceup you live, facedown you die.
You might think I'm making this up or, at the very least, exaggerating. I'm not, believe me. Once, one of those men—Roddy Shone—felt the day's celebrity was cheating on him. In fact, he was, but that's another story. Roddy bit down on his twenty-dollar Havana, stood up, brushed imaginary flecks of ash off his shiny shantung-silk suit. Then he walked over to where the celebrity was sitting.
Roddy is slightly bandy-legged, so he sways back and forth when he walks. Some think he swaggers, and hate him for it, but they're wrong. They hate him 'cause he can make them wet their pants just by clenching his fist.
On his way over, his suit jacket swings open, and I see the butt of the .45 semiautomatic snug in its gray chamois holster beneath his left armpit. (I suppose now you're wondering how I know the first thing about guns. I worked on and off for two years at a pawnshop over by Mountain View Cemetery right after Daddy made me quit the bail-jumper gig 'cause he thought it was too dangerous. Truth be told, it was. But in those days I was kinda wild. Of course, for a girl like me, Reno is fairly buzzing with career opportunities: dealer, hostess, showgirl, pole dancer—just stop. Don't make me go all the way to the bottom.)
Anyway, back to Roddy Shone. I like Roddy. He doesn't take himself too seriously, except with the políticos, who he has a lot of muscle with. Roddy understands the concept of face, which I picked up from watching all those very cool Kurosawa DVDs I got from Netflix.
The minute I saw Roddy's right hand move up toward the butt, I knew we were in for trouble. Trouble is one tiling Daddy's card game can't stand. Trouble means the game will fold like a Frenchman on the firing line. Worse, w
ith a rep like that, it will never start up again, and then where would Daddy and I be? We could move to Vegas, I guess, but our hustle is Reno. We know it inside out. That's the hustler's secret, his true edge. No, Vegas was a no-go.
So Roddy is halfway to the celeb who, I might add, is frozen like a hare in the headlights, when I detach myself from Daddy's chair.
"How about a drink, Roddy?" I say.
Roddy's gaze glowers past me. "Get out of my way, kiddo." Man, he was pissed. He only calls me "kiddo" when he's all het up. "Man beats me fair 'n' square, that's all right. I take my medicine, just like the next man. Who wouldn't? You puts your money down, you takes your chance with Lady Luck. But when I'm cheated out of a pot, that's fucking war, that is."
"Can't argue with that," I tell him, my heart throbbing in my throat. "But wars are won a lotta different ways."
Something about my voice—or maybe what I said—makes him look down at me. "Where the fuck did you hear that, kiddo?"
"Kurosawa," I say.
"And who the fuck is Kurosawa?"
"A Japanese film director."
"Never heard of the bastard."
"You heard of The Magnificent Seven?"
"Are you kidding? With Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen."
"Then you heard of Kurosawa," I said. Which isn't, strictly speaking, true, but in Roddy Shone's case, it's close enough.
Anyway, while this is going on, Daddy takes the opportunity to hustle the celeb out of the room. As they reach the door, we can all hear him say, "And don't fucking come back, if you value your skin."
It was a corny, totally over-the-top movie line but, what the hell, he was talking to a movie star, wasn't he? And it impressed the hell out of Roddy, which was kinda the point.
I take Roddy over to the bar sideboard, fix him a stiff bourbon and water. He laughs a little, shattering the tension like a crystal vase hitting the floor.
"My man, Steve fucking McQueen," Roddy says, with bourbon shining his lips. "Him and a Jap, go figure." He shakes his head, ruffles my hair, which I hate, but I bite my lip rather than tell him that. "Damn, Charlie. For a girl, you've got a curious mind."