EQMM, September-October 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Now that's real stupid. I'm a lot smarter than that guy.

  If I had any luck, I'd sure be better off than I am. I'd have a place of my own, maybe a nice apartment over by Greenbriar Park, instead of having to keep on living in my old room in Ma's house where she can nag at me all the time. I'd have cash for the flicks and the chicks, and for drinks at Fogarty's Saloon and eight-ball matches at the House of Billiards and all the other good things in life.

  But the most cash I ever had all at once was a hundred and twenty dollars, the time I sold the iPod I boosted from Dennison's Department Store to a guy I met at Fogarty's. But I didn't have it long, on account of the guy turned out to be an undercover cop and he busted me for selling stolen property. That's another example of how bad my luck is.

  I kept thinking how good things'd be if I could make one big score. A pile of cash to spend on a new car and some decent threads and a couple of girls I liked but who wouldn't have nothing to do with a dude who was broke all the time. But how was I gonna get it?

  That was when I come up with the plan to rob Ma's bank.

  I mean the bank where Ma has her checking account. She don't have a bank of her own, she's only a clerk at Klausmeyer's Novelty Store. But not the branch she uses, downtown—heisting that one wouldn't've been smart at all. The one over in the Eagle Ridge Shopping Center, in the other direction.

  Robbing a bank was a pretty big step up from shoplifting and boosting a car now and then, but where else was I gonna get some real money? That's where you find all the real money, right? In a bank? Besides, my plan was a good one, if I say it myself. It even had a ace in the hole in case I got caught. I worked on it three weeks before I had it foolproof.

  First thing I did then was write the note I was gonna give the teller. I didn't have no paper in my room so I waited until Ma went off to work at Klausmeyer's and then found some in her desk. It had printing on one side, but I didn't care about that. I was only gonna use the blank side.

  I worked on that note awhile, getting it just right. When I had it all printed in big black letters, it said: DONT SAY NOTHING. GUN IN MY POCKET. PUT ALL BIG BILLS IN BAG. Short and sweet.

  The next day I went downtown to this costume place and boosted one of them fake beards that look like real ones. I tried it on after I got back home and it sure changed how I looked. And when I put on one of my old sweatshirts that had a hood on it and tied the hood tight around my head and under my chin, I didn't look like myself at all. It was a real good disguise.

  Next day after that, I was ready to go. After Ma left, I put on my disguise and took one of the big grocery bags she keeps under the sink and stuffed it inside my sweatshirt. Then I went out to the garage and got my old bicycle.

  The bike was the beauty part of the plan, along with my ace in the hole. Almost every guy that robs a bank, he makes his getaway in a car or maybe on a motorcycle. Nobody was gonna expect a getaway on a kid's bike, right? Besides, I didn't have no car—the last old piece of junk I had got repossessed.

  So I hopped on the bike and rode over to the Eagle Ridge Shopping Center. It was about ten-thirty when I got there. There was a walkway along one side of the bank and that was where I left the bike, propped up against the bank wall right around the corner where I could grab it quick afterward.

  Two tellers’ windows was open and only one customer when I went in. I didn't see no point in waiting around for the customer to leave, so I went right up to the open window and handed the woman teller the note. Her mouth dropped open when she read it. When she looked at me again I put on a mean look to show her I meant business.

  Well, it went off without a hitch. Or it did until I come outside and around the corner with the bagful of money in my hand, and seen that some damn crook had stole my bike.

  I didn't have no choice then, I had to make my getaway on foot. You can do that all right but you got to be lucky, and for a change I had some luck on my side. I started running, fast, straight on out of the Eagle Ridge Shopping Center. People looked at me but none of ‘em tried to get in my way and wasn't nobody chasing me when I come out on 49th Street. I ducked into a alley and yanked off the fake beard and my sweatshirt and pitched them into a trash barrel. Then I went over a block to Mission, where I would've got on a bus back to my neighborhood except that I didn't have no change and only a dumb criminal would open up the bag and start hauling out some of the bank money in broad daylight on a crowded bus.

  By the time I got home I was tired from the long walk and still a little shaky, but the shakiness went away soon as I dumped the money out on my bed. All that beautiful green. I figured there must be ten, fifteen grand there, easy, but I was wrong. It was more, a lot more.

  $26,000 and change.

  Man, oh man!

  After I counted it again—it was even more that time, $27K—I put it back into the bag and hid the bag in my sock drawer. Ma never looks in my sock drawer. Then I went to the kitchen and cracked a brew to celebrate. I was feeling good, the best I'd felt since the time Chuck Potter and me went joyriding in a ‘65 Mustang we boosted at Greenbriar Park and then picked up two girls who liked to party.

  I was on my third beer, just kicking back and thinking about all that cash and what I was gonna do with it, when the doorbell rang. I thought it was probably some salesman, or maybe one of the neighbors. But it wasn't.

  It was the cops.

  City heat, a whole bunch of ‘em in and out of uniform. Couple of FBI agents, too—I never seen a FBI badge before and man, it's really something, big and shiny, not like them cheap badges the city cops carry. They had a search warrant, so there wasn't nothing I could do but let ‘em in and let ‘em search and they found the $27K right away in my sock drawer. I could've told them I never seen it before, like that mook down south who said his pants wasn't his, but I got more smarts and more pride than that. I didn't say nothing, except for one question I just had to ask.

  "How'd you find me so quick? Somebody see me running away from the bank?"

  One of the FBI guys said it was the note I give the teller.

  "The note? What about it?"

  "Don't you know what you wrote it on?"

  "Just a piece of paper I found . . . wasn't it?"

  "Not just any piece of paper,” he said. “One of your mother's bank statements with her name and address on it."

  Well, I should've looked closer at the printing on the other side of that paper, but I'd been too busy trying to get the words in the note down just right. You can't think of everything.

  See what I mean about lousy luck?

  So they read me my rights and hustled me down to police headquarters and stuck me in one of them interrogation rooms. I was scared, but not too scared. I mean, I knew I wasn't gonna get off with no slap on the wrist this time, but it wasn't as bad as it could've been. I still had my ace in the hole.

  Two city detectives and one of the FBI agents come in and asked me did I want a lawyer present during questioning, and I said no on account of I never did like lawyers much. None of the public defenders I had ever made no real effort to keep me out of jail. Then they asked me to tell about my plan to rob the bank, then they told me to write it all down and that took awhile. When I got done I asked the FBI slick how long I was gonna have to spend in prison.

  "Depends on the judge,” he said. “Ten to fifteen years, with time off for good behavior."

  "Well, that's not too bad,” I said. “It'll be worth it."

  "Why do you say that?"

  So then I showed my ace. “On account of the money when I get out."

  "What money?"

  "From the bank,” I said. “It's mine now, right? I sure as hell earned it."

  The FBI slick and the two detectives all of a sudden bust out laughing. They laughed so hard one of the cops had tears in his eyes. I didn't see what was so funny, but I didn't care. When I get out of the slam and start spending that $27K, it'll be me that has the last laugh.

  Copyright © 2010 Bill Pronzini

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

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  As Erle Stanley Gardner proved again and again, trial scenes are among the most reliably dramatic elements in the mystery writer's arsenal. Consider the latest from six courtroom specialists, beginning with the all-time master of the legal thriller, continuing with two solid practitioners, and finishing with three who have a lot to offer but some drawbacks as well.

  **** Scott Turow: Innocent, Grand Central, $27.99. In a sequel to the author's classic Presumed Innocent (1987), Kindle County's Rusty Sabich, now an appellate judge, is once again on trial for murder, this time of his wife Barbara. Beautifully written and rich in complex characters as all of Turow's fiction, it is also a fine pure whodunit. It's not necessary to have read the earlier book to enjoy this one, but they are best read in tandem—and in either order, for amazingly Turow does not give away the solution of Presumed Innocent.

  *** Scott Pratt: Injustice for All, Obsidian, $7.99. In the third case for Tennessee defender-turned-prosecutor Joe Dillard, all the trial action comes early in the courtroom of the incredibly evil Judge Green, most extensively the case of a church deacon accused of possessing child pornography. After Dillard's friend Ray Miller commits suicide in Green's court, the judge himself becomes a murder victim and Miller's son the prime suspect. Pratt has the narrative gift that makes successful writers of popular fiction, and the complicated plot is neatly worked out.

  *** William Bernhardt: CapitolBetrayal, Ballantine, $26. With the U.S. under imminent threat of attack by a Middle Eastern dictator, the President and some of his advisors, including lawyer Ben Kincaid and an unidentified traitorous mole, have been removed to a bunker under the White House. The Vice President, claiming the President's intermittently eccentric behavior proves him incompetent, attempts to seize power under the 25th Amendment. In a makeshift trial with a very tight deadline and members of the Cabinet serving as jury, Ben takes on the President's defense. Along with the legal gymnastics and over-the-top thriller action, Bernhardt provides a generously clued whodunit. You may not believe all the wildly unlikely goings on, but this fast-reading and involving tale is the best addition to the Kincaid series in quite a while.

  ** David Rosenfelt: Dog Tags, Grand Central, $24.99. Like his creator, New Jersey lawyer Andy Carpenter operates a dog-rescue operation. In his latest canine-related case, he defends Billy Zimmerman, an ex-cop and disabled Iraq veteran turned thief, on the charge of murdering Major Jack Erskine. How is the crime connected to the suicide bombing in which Zimmerman lost his leg? The best courtroom action comes when Carpenter tries to get bail for Milo, Zimmerman's German Shepherd accomplice. As usual, the lawyering details are good, the dog characters well observed, and some of Carpenter's smartass dialogue and narrative funny, but the thriller stuff, with excessive cross-cutting and changes of viewpoint, isn't too engaging.

  ** Robert Dugoni: Bodily Harm, Touchstone, $25. In a novel more bloated than Rosenfelt's and without the saving grace of humor, Seattle attorney David Sloane brings a product liability action against a toymaker who may be responsible for the deaths of two children. Expert trial action and strong basic plot suggest what an interesting legal novel this could have been without soap operatics and over-familiar suspense situations.

  ** Barbara Levenson: Justice in June, Oceanview, $24.95. Miami attorney Mary Magruder Katz takes on a variety of clients. In the main event, a federal habeas corpus hearing, she attempts to save a young Argentine national, arrested on a flight from his country and suspected of terrorist activities, from being sent to Guantanamo without due process. This second entry in a promising series has some of the same problems as Fatal February (2009): repetitiousness, excessive trivial detail, and a courtroom climax that comes off as too easy, since Mary's opponent has no case whatsoever.

  **** Richard A. Lupoff: Killer's Dozen, Wildside, $14.95. Thirteen widely varied stories, most previously uncollected, constitute the versatile and original author's best all-mystery collection. Two first appeared in EQMM, most of the rest in other magazines or original anthologies. Styles range from classical detection to hardboiled, locales from a 1940s summer camp to the set of a made-for-TV boxing movie. A teenage Sherlock Holmes appears on trans-Atlantic shipboard in “Inga Sigerson Weds,” from the recent anthology Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (Minotaur, $25.99), edited by Michael Kurland. A 1976 story, “The Square Root of Dead,” written with Kurland, belongs in the dying-message hall of fame.

  *** Rupert Penny: She Had to Have Gas, Ramble House, $17.99. First published in Britain in 1939, this case for Scotland Yard's Inspector Beale and his journalist friend Tony Purdon is the kind of book Golden Age nostalgics treasure: smoothly written with sly wit and character touches, fairly clued (including even a Queenian challenge to the reader before the final chapter), rich in misdirection and inexplicable events. A young lodger's body is discovered by her landlady, an apparent suicide by gas, but when the police come, the body is gone. Subsequently, a young female corpse is found with hands, feet, and head all missing. Is it the same woman? The plot is super-complicated, and the events are somewhat racier than typical of British mysteries of the period. The publisher offers Penny's other seven novels, all new to U.S. publication. I plan to seek them all out.

  *** Michael Innes: Appleby Talks About Crime, edited by John Cooper, Crippen & Landru, $28 hardcover, $18 trade paper. These 18 stories about Scotland Yard's John Appleby, sometimes slight in plot and mostly very short, demonstrate the author's trademark witty style and learned charm. Innes was the pseudonym of Oxford don and mainstream novelist J(ohn) I(nnes) M(acintosh) Stewart (1906-1994). Most of the stories appeared in the 1950s and ‘60s in London's Evening Standard newspaper; apart from one reprint and one original from EQMM, two reprints from The Saint Magazine, and one story written for the 1979 anthology Verdict of 13, the stories are new to U.S. publication. Valuable features are a critical introduction by editor Cooper, a complete listing of the Appleby short stories, and a biographical afterword by the author's daughter Margaret Mackintosh Harrison.

  ** Frank McAuliffe: Shoot the President, Are You Mad?, The Outfit, $16.95. Per the afterword by Liz (McAuliffe) Gollen, her father wrote this follow-up to his three novella collections about professional killer Augustus Mandrell in 1975, but it was rejected because the publishers (understandably) considered it too soon after the Kennedy assassination for a comic novel about a plot to kill a U.S. President. There are laughs to be had here and a few interesting plot twists at the finish, but the ornate, facetious first-person style and over-the-top farce will not suit every taste. In a book that depends so much on elaborate language, lapses in editing and proofreading are especially unfortunate.

  Copyright © 2010 Jon L. Breen

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  Fiction: TO KILL AN UMP by Brendan DuBois

  Brendan DuBois tells EQMM that he's just completed the seventh novel in his Lewis Cole detective series, Barren Cove, and has started work on his fourteenth novel, a new stand-alone thriller. Last year, he sold his one hundredth short story, quite an accomplishment, but, as he ruefully notes, “nowhere near the record of the master himself, the late Ed Hoch.” Mr. DuBois lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, and often makes use of his state's history and rural settings in his stories. This one's no exception.

  To get to his old hometown, Randy Jarvis could have taken a flight to the regional airport in Manchester, rented a car, and gotten there in less than two hours. But for a variety of reasons, he had decided to take the bus. The bus took about six hours, the air conditioning was weak, and the view of the New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire landscape through the dirty window was as dull as he remembered it, but for his seventy-one-year-old bones, the seat was comfortable enough. Plus, bus travel in this increasingly paranoid land meant a lack of secuirty, no IDs necessary, and a thin paper trail, which was a plus when one wanted to travel anonymously.

  Which fi
t him to a T. For he didn't want anyone to know he was heading back to Palmer, New Hampshire, a place where he had grown up and lived for twenty-one years, before moving on to other things. For fifty years he had stayed away from Palmer, until a little voice, a little urge, made him decide that it was time to come back and settle things.

  He folded his hands across his little potbelly, sighed. At his feet was an old leather athletic bag, the fabric cracked and stained, and in that leather case was an old baseball uniform, an old baseball glove, and, resting above the faded cotton cloth and creased leather, something else that made him take the bus home.

  A .38 revolver.

  Something that would have barred him from any airline, but—lucky or unlucky, depending on one's point of view—metal detectors had yet to be set up at bus terminals, and the excuse he had for carrying a deadly weapon wouldn't have carried much weight with the police or the FBI.

  For now, a half-century later, Randy was returning home to set things right.

  He looked out the dirty window, sighed again, and remembered.

  * * * *

  Randy Jarvis woke that Saturday morning in September, 1958, tingling with anticipation. This was it, this was the day that was going to make everything right, that was finally going to be his payoff after twenty-one long years in this gritty, smelly mill town of Palmer. He got out of bed, quickly got dressed, and washed his face in a tiny sink in the corner of his room. He had lived for the past couple of years on the second floor of Grace Willoughby's boarding house ("Rooms, weekly or monthly, two meals provided per day") and if all went right today, he wouldn't be here that much longer.

  He brushed his teeth, looking at himself in the smeared mirror, looking as well at his surroundings. One room, one bed, one radio, one chair, and the sink. That was it. A shared bathroom down the hallway, a small black-and-white television set in Mrs. Willoughby's living room downstairs, and that was his entire life.