by Sean Dexter
'She hates the Porsche. Says I'm just showing off.'
I shrugged. 'She has flashes of good taste, then.'
He looked for a moment as though he might get angry with me, but then gave it up. He was beginning to appear slighter and bonier to me with every passing minute.
He said, 'So you're the local detective, Mr Hard Case. I take it he hired you to find out whether his wife was seeing someone else?'
I realised that Emily hadn't told him her husband had known of their affair eighteen months ago. She wanted to keep it going as long as possible, even if it was risky. I warmed to her a little more.
I said, 'I presume that's why you sent your men to warn me off. You were frightened of what I might tell him.'
'Something like that. Emily told me she'd seen you outside her house, I ran the plates, we found out who you were and guessed what you were up to.'
'You were doing my job, in reverse. There's a novelty.'
'I thought if I put a scare in you that you'd back off. I didn't know Emily had seen you last night. Why don't women tell you anything?'
'What you don't know,' I said, 'is that I respond to neither reason nor threats.'
'What do you respond to?'
'The almighty dollar,' I said.
'Listening to the way you talk, I don't believe that.'
I stood up. 'Suit yourself.'
'What are you going to do?'
'Clients always want a report for their money. Part of the contract. Goodbye, Mr Finnegan.'
He looked startled.
'I'm not Finnegan.'
'Not your name over the door?'
'My wife's father, Terry Finnegan. My name's Gibson. The repair shop was his. He died, she asked me to run the business.' His eyes suddenly turned inward as he recognised a truth. 'Her money. I do as I'm told.'
And with that, the last piece of information fell into place.
My office can be a cold and lonely environment for a client who receives bad news. I haven't spent a lot of money on furnishings, believing that it would send the wrong message about my fees if I suddenly indulged a taste for brash leather sofas and expensive modern wall-art. I'm a down-to-earth kind of man with inexpensive tastes and—apart from the fact that I read a lot—little aesthetic discrimination.
I only had these thoughts because I saw them written on Richie Downes' face when he came into the office for our second meeting. He glanced around, scowled at the surroundings, then yanked out the client chair and commandeered it. Though sitting down, he was still almost volcanic in size, his big square frame like something from a superhero comic-book, all angular planes and barely concealed muscle. Even his face seemed muscular.
'Well?' he demanded. 'Who is it?'
There were lots of possibilities open to me at that moment, and I probably chose the hardest to deal with. I've never knowingly made my life easy. It would somehow feel like cheating.
I said, 'Mr Downes, I have a policy of being straight with people who are paying me money.'
'Good. So who is it? Don't piss me about, Dyke.'
'I won't if you won't.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'You knew who was seeing your wife before you hired me.'
He sat back. 'So why would I pay you to tell me something I already knew?'
'Because you wanted to be able to blame someone else.'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
I leaned forward, my elbows on my desk. My 'serious' position.
'We both know this isn't about jealousy or divorce proceedings, or anything like that.'
'It isn't?'
'I did some proper detective work,' I said, concealing from him what his wife had told me. 'Desk research. Contrary to what you told me, your business isn't doing well. Finnegan's Repairs is. I think what you want me to do is give you the ammunition to persuade Arthur Gibson's wife to shut down Finnegan's Repairs or divorce him. One or the other. Either way, your shop wins. You succeed and he fails.'
He spent a moment taking this in.
'If I knew about my wife and Gibson, why wouldn't I just tell his wife myself?'
'You want the information to come from me so you can pretend you're on her side, one jilted spouse to another. You'd be able to act the innocent provider of bad news. But this isn't a love triangle. It's a commercial killing.'
His face remained stony but his eyes showed a series of thoughts in transit across his brain.
Finally he said, 'You've got a fancy way of thinking and justifying what you do for a living. But I paid you money. The contract says I get a report.'
It was my turn to look at the furnishings in my office and realise that the reason they were threadbare wasn't because of my lack of taste—it was an over-abundance of scruple. There was a reason I didn't take divorce work or anything I wasn't comfortable with—I had values. And looking at Richie Downes I saw that he wasn't ignorant or immoral, but he was caught up in a set of socially-prescribed habits of which he was completely unaware.
I said, 'I haven't cashed your cheque. I tore it up. As far as I'm concerned, there was no contract.'
He then performed the only gesture I'd ever seen him do that wasn't for effect: he ran a hand through his hair.
'You don't get it, do you? I'm not just another 'case', though I'm sure that's what you want to think. This is my living we're talking about here.'
'I get that. And I sympathise. But you're doing this for the wrong reasons. Just because the economy's flat-lining you can't help it by killing off other businesses. They don't have to die for you to live.'
'You're wrong—that's exactly what happens. You've obviously never run a business.'
I didn't answer that because he was right in a way. What I did for a living could barely be called a business. It was more like a hobby that people paid me to indulge from time to time.
He seemed to realise he was getting nowhere. He stood up thunderously, leaning his big paws on my desk and looming over me.
'If I go down, I'll know who to blame.'
'Shall I show you to the door or do you remember where it is?'
He said, 'I remember everything. I won't be in touch.'
He left, slamming that door behind him.
At that moment my injured forearm began to throb and I rubbed it through my shirt-sleeve. It was a memory of violence and it hardened my heart.
I stood up and went to my window, looking over the centre of Crewe at the closed shop-fronts, the cash generator offices—what we used to call pawnshops—at the bent-over shoppers struggling with carrier bags from Poundland and containing cheap plastic nonsense from China and Taiwan. At that moment I felt like a member of the local chamber of commerce who'd performed a heroic act of civic duty. I wasn't happy that people like Downes had bought into the kind of behaviour that would have been frowned upon by the Vikings or Genghis Khan. Lacking any sense of community and being unable to extend his sympathies beyond his own self-interest, Downes had been willing to kill off his competition while justifying it as rational behaviour: he was just protecting his marriage. He had the instincts of many politicians, it seemed to me, conflating the private and the public as though they were part of the same continuum: what's good for me is good for society … or at least that part of it to which I belong. That seemed screwed up to me on many levels.
While I didn't like playing the moral arbiter, I had felt an obligation—though to what, exactly, I couldn't say. To the town's commercial life? To a conception of marriage that I didn't really believe in?
Perhaps I shouldn't have felt so noble. Perhaps, like Downes, like all of us, I did what I did merely in order to feel good about myself. And I couldn't blame myself for that, could I?
In the event, my high-handed intervention made no difference. Emily Downes ran off with Arthur Gibson but came back to her husband a month later, almost certainly when the money ran out; we never heard what happened to Gibson. Six months afterwards both motor repair shops were closed down. The cor
rugated metal door of each garage is now locked and decorated with graffiti, and I guess if I walked around to the Benefit Office I'd see all of the mechanics lined up, having nothing to do but accept their dole. In the end it wasn't the story I thought it was, but it turned out to be a familiar one anyway: economics trumps romance every time.
Keith Dixon has worked in higher education, as an advertising copywriter and as a business psychologist, and in most of these careers he was able to incorporate creative writing of one kind or another. About ten years ago he realised that he wanted to spend more time writing and less time earning a living, and since then he’s published three Sam Dyke private eye novels and a work of contemporary fiction called Actress. He’s currently working on another contemporary novel and there’s a further Sam Dyke book in the planning stage. He’s certainly spending more time writing, but he’s yet to crack the ‘earning a living’ part.
The Dutch Connection
By
Kit Rohrbach
I am happy to include a female writer and PI in this anthology and honored to publish the first story featuring the mysterious “Q”. I am eager to see more of this cool character and writer. Oh, and of course I got a kick out of the title of this story as a Dutch writer.
I was eight years old when Short taught me to play mumbly peg. When I was eleven, he told me how to kill a man. “Hold the blade underhand and go in low. Pull up; use both hands if you have to, then twist right. He’ll bleed out faster if you take the knife but if it gets hung up on a rib, leave it.” Not the usual sort of lesson for a Philadelphia Main Line princess. I understood I shouldn’t mention it to my parents. But I remembered it. Twenty years later, as I stood in a frozen alleyway with a guy whose intestines were steaming around his ankles, I remembered what Short had said about the knife. “Wipe it. Drop it. Walk away.”
So that’s what I did. Too bad about the knife, though. It was a Cross Double-X fish scaling knife with a heavy duty blade and a wooden handle. I liked the feel of it.
I strolled on down the alley like there was nothing behind me but garbage – which, in a way, was true – and came out into a parking lot. The snow banks shoved up around its edges reflected blue and red from screaming neon. Bowl-o-Rama!!! Fourteen lanes of family fun!!! Oh, good. I’d been in the alley behind the alley. There was enough synchronicity there that I forgave the signs their excessive punctuation. Even though the exclamation points were shaped like upside down bowling pins. Normally, that sort of thing would upset me but I had other problems on my mind. Like checking my shoes to make sure there was nothing worse than slush on them. Like trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
If you had just gutted a guy in an alley, where’s the last place you would be? In the alley, right? So I went in and took a table at the back of the snack bar. I got myself a beer and spent a while listening to the sound of plastic balls smacking into wooden pins. Or not. Mostly not. Only three of the lanes were in use; nobody looked like they were having family fun.
I knew I should be thinking about the mess I was in and, more usefully, how to get myself out of it. But what I ended up thinking about was Short. Nobody ever called him Shorty. I had no idea whether or not Short had been vertically disadvantaged. Most adults look tall when you’re eleven. Maybe it was his last name. I’d never been told to attach a ‘Mr.’ to it, though - and the Main Line was fussy about that sort of thing. But then, Short wasn’t Main Line. I’d heard bits of stories here and there and managed to piece together the idea that he and my grandfather had hung out together back in the Havre de Grace days down in Maryland.
Gram had been one of the mainstays of my over-privileged childhood, ever since the day my mother moved her parents into the carriage house on our Bryn Mawr estate. Possibly she had done it in a fit of share-the-wealth generosity. Or, more likely, as a demonstration of how well she had married. Whatever the reason, I was glad to have them nearby and escaped to Gram’s little blue kitchen whenever I could. It was a warm bread scented refuge from deportment classes and dancing lessons. Instead of reminding me to sit with my legs crossed at the ankle, Gram talked to me. She told me interesting stories about growing up in Maryland, sad stories about surviving the Great Depression, romantic stories about meeting Gramps, and exciting stories about the times during World War II. She was an artist; her forged gas coupons and meat ration tickets could never be told from the real thing. There were gaps in the stories but I knew better than to ask about them. It wouldn’t have been polite and anyway, Gram would have just told me to mind my own business.
And it had been out behind the carriage house that I’d first met Short. He was a friend of Gramps’. I never heard any of those stories; they’d quit reminiscing if they knew I was around. I’d been skulking in the shrubbery, hoping to avoid a ballet lesson, when I saw him. He had a target nailed up on one of the trees and was practicing his knife throws. I was fascinated; I’d never seen anything so graceful—certainly not my efforts at the barre. He taught me mumbly peg, which I found to be a huge improvement on Barbie dolls. He taught me drop points and Damascus steel, tang rivets and cord wrapped grips. He taught me underhand thrusts and feints. When I was eleven, he taught me how to kill a man. That was Short. He’d drop in every once in a while to swap stories with Gramps and eat Gram’s cooking. His favorite was cold mashed potatoes and it was a measure of how much Gram liked Short that she always kept a bowl of them in the refrigerator for him.
He was the one who started calling me Queenie because, let’s face it, Elizabeth is a mouthful of a name for a kid. After a while it got trimmed down to just Q. Short said it’s never a bad idea to have an alias or two handy just in case. Sometimes he’d take me outside and teach me how to play with knives.
But all that was years in the past and wandering around Memory Lane was about as helpful to me as the highly varnished lanes to my left were to the bowlers. I watched a few more balls plunk into the gutters, bought another beer, and got down to some serious thinking.
The guy even now bleeding out in the alley was named Henk van der Vaart. Dead, probably. Dutch, obviously. So this had to do with the diamonds. The last time I’d seen them, the stones had been snuggled all safe and cozy in a velvet bag chained around Henk’s waist. So what was his problem? What had I done to piss him off? That had been a deliberate attack back there in the alley, just as sure as Philly is a cold, damp, miserable place to spend the winter. George Washington noticed that two hundred years ago; not much has changed weather-wise in the interim. Usually I go someplace warmer; I had only hung around this long to mediate the diamond deal. It was supposed to be a simple swap – diamonds for dollars – with me in the middle, taking a cut and making sure everybody behaved themselves. Tomorrow I was leaving for Florida. Well, that plan was now pushing up tulips along with Henk.
I poked at the idea of heading on down to Fort Walton Beach and hoping whatever had fallen apart here would manage to put itself back together without my help. Since I had no idea what had gone wrong, I couldn’t gauge the odds of it getting right again. And there was the unpleasant possibility that the problem could follow me south. Ducking out wasn’t really an option anyway; I hate loose ends. I fix other people’s problems for a living and I get paid well to do whatever is required. Just because there isn’t a union doesn’t mean there aren’t professional standards. You do the job and you do it well. Otherwise, word gets around and pretty soon there aren’t any more jobs and you’re asking people if they want to super-size that. Or worse, teaching English in some private middle school on the Main Line. I was good; I was reliable. Those white beaches were tempting but they wouldn’t do anything to enhance my reputation.
Neither would drinking beer in a bowling alley in Haverford. I had been walking home from the train station when I spotted Henk following me and led him into that convenient alley. He had a knife of his own, did Henk. A big, Crocodile Dundee affair with a shiny blade that glinted in the street lights. Silly. He must have thought it would look like a mugging. Ma
ybe it still did. I would have liked to go home and curl up with a glass of wine and a new biography of John Adams. I had bought it as a beach book but had been unable to resist getting into it. Now, that wasn’t going to happen and I was feeling snarky about it. If I got a move on, I could catch the next train into Center City. In town by 8:00; walking into the lobby of the Rittenhouse Hotel by 8:15. I might yet be able to salvage some of the evening.
Ardmore, Wynnwood, Narberth. I didn’t need to watch the towns of the Main Line glide past the window. I knew them all by heart. Merion, Overbrook. I ignored them and thought about the diamonds. This was the deal: some guys from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan - Ruud Jakobitz and a couple of his friends - had some diamonds that a cartel in Amsterdam wanted to buy. Which seemed pretty much ass backwards to me. An evening of surfing around on the internet educated me on the basics of Canadian diamonds. Canadian diamonds! Who knew? But there’s a place up there in the Northwest Territory called the Polar Bear Mine and evidently it’s just chock full of sparklies. Naturally, the Dutch, what with the monopoly on African diamonds that they’ve been enjoying for nearly ever, aren’t too happy about this. From what I’d read, I got the impression they were pretending with all their might that they still had no competition.
So my best guess was that the guys from Amsterdam wanted a close look at the Polar Bears without being seen shopping for them. I had no idea how the Yoopers came by the stones. Probably not in any straightforward, legal sort of way but that was none of my business. My business was to be at Rittenhouse Square early this afternoon. The Dutch cartel had insisted on a neutral go-between. Jakobitz hired me for the job. Van der Vaart’s boss, Karl Ooijer okayed it. (Considering the names I’d been introduced to lately, I figured I wasn’t going to need to clear my throat for at least a month after this job was over.) Picture me standing there with both hands out. Jakobitz puts the diamonds in one hand; our visitors from Amsterdam put cash in the other. I cross my arms in front of me, slipping a meager twenty percent into my pocket on the way past, and everybody’s happy. And that was how it had gone down. Except that nobody was happy – not me, certainly not poor old Henk van der Vaart.