by Неизвестный
Simon Ark looked around at the clockwork dreams of men long gone, men we’d never known. “Perhaps this magician who removes his own head,” he decided. “I believe its maker must have been a kindred spirit.”
* * * *
Edward D. Hoch was a past president of Mystery Writers of America and winner of its Edgar and Grand Master Awards. He published over 950 short stories and several collections, most recently More Things Impossible (Crippen & Landru).
ON THE HEIR, by Hal Charles
Kelly Locke rushed out of Makeup. 5:55. Only five minutes till air-time. Settling behind the too-too contemporary chrome-and-imitation-marble desk that dominated the News Team 4 “Were Here Four You” set, she sensed the familiar butterflies unsettling her stomach. Even after one year as the co-anchor on the city’s highest-rated news program, the pressure to perform was as palpable as the heat and glare from the bright lights. Inserting her wireless earpiece in her right ear, she covered it with her Katie-Co uric-length auburn hair. Not much time to punch up her script before the red light for The Six O’clock Report winked at her.
“Kelly, sweetheart,” called an out-of-breath, raspy voice from the door to Studio A, “I’m so glad I caught you before you went on the air.”
Expecting her ever-last-minute co-anchor Chuck Mann, she was caught off-guard by the bear-like figure lumbering in. Her father, Matthew Locke, the city’s Chief of Detectives.
“My favorite source got a hot tip to heat up a cold news day?” she said, smiling. Her father’s sudden appearances in her life usually meant a scoop or a plea for help on one of his cases.
“I brought you a gift,” he said, still panting, and he handed her a plastic bag.
“You need help again, don’t you?”
“Can’t a father just bring a nice present to his favorite daughter without being treated to 60 Minutes-style ambush journalism?” He kissed her on her right cheek, totally wrecking what Marie in makeup had thought of as her personal Sistine Chapel.
“Four minutes to air-time,” boomed Stanley, her director, through the studio speaker. “And get Marie in here … quick.”
“Dad, I don’t have time to—”
“Open it,” he said, sitting beside her in Chuck’s empty chair.
Rather than argue, she reached into the Gifford’s Rare Books and Collectibles bag and pulled out a dusty tome bound in red leather. “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” she read. “London, 1890. It’s a fake. His first twelve adventures weren’t collected until 1892.”
“Of course, it’s a fake, sweetheart. I wouldn’t try to slip something so obvious by a true Holmesophile, a woman who’s been reading the Great Detective’s adventures since she was a little girl. You can add it to your collection of famous phonies.”
Kelly shook her head. “O.K., Dad, what do you really want?”
“Am I that transparent? This’ll just take—”
“Three minutes,” bellowed Stanley. “Where’s our Michaelangelo of makeup artists?”
Just then a tiny woman with Coke-bottle glasses and a makeup case bolted onto the set. She spun the anchorwoman’s chair around and began dabbing powder in strategic places.
“About a year ago,” said her father, “I established this CI in Reuben King’s organization who’s been feeding us information on a regular basis?”
“CI?” said Marie, turning to look at Chief of Detectives Locke and inserting powder in Kelly’s right ear.
“Confidential Informant,” responded the cop. “Code name ‘Egghead.’ Last week he told me he had a feeling something new big was about to go down.”
Kelly opened her mouth, but Marie clamped it shut and began to apply another coat of Sassy Cinnamon, Kelly’s favorite.
“Every Tuesday,” continued her father, “Egghead and I meet in rotating places. This morning he didn’t show in the waiting room of the bus station.”
“I was there last weekend,” said Marie. “My sister from Saskatchewan—”
“Isn’t it kind of risky for a CI to talk directly to you rather than one of your detectives?” posed Kelly.
“A few years ago I got Egghead out of a real jam-up when he was charged with forgery, so I’m the only one he’ll talk to.”
“Two minutes. Clear the set,” ordered Stanley. “And where the hell is my prima donna anchorman?”
“Anyway,” said her father, “I figured something had happened to Egghead. Then this afternoon I get an email from my nephew Edgar.”
“But, Dad,” protested Kelly, turning abruptly and catching Marie’s powder puff like a beanball between the eyes, “I don’t remember a cousin Edgar.”
“That’s because you don’t have one. My guess is my informant was right. Something is going down very soon, but Reuben King runs a tight ship. Egghead couldn’t shake free to contact me in the usual way, but he’s a smart cookie and—”
“One minute,” the director reminded her. “Miss Locke, far be it from me to disturb a family reunion right out of reality TV, but I must remind you there are some three-million viewers out there waiting for you like some contemporary watchman to assure them that’s it’s six o’clock and all’s well with their world.”
“Dad,” said Kelly as Marie made a final swipe at her nose, “you’ve got to leave the set.”
“Of course, sweetheart. As soon as I finish this.”
“But … all right … if you have the email, what’s the problem?”
“Thirty seconds,” bellowed the director.
“Stanley,” protested Kelly, “it’s important—”
“Don’t go diva on me, Miss Locke,” returned her director. “If I have to come in there and throw that muscular male out on his heiny—”
“Heiny, my butt,” said the Chief of Detectives, showing the first sign he was aware of the situation in the studio.
“Dad, please,” begged Kelly.
“Ten seconds, your highness,” thundered Stanley like an angry Norse god.
“The email,” explained her father, “is a bunch of gibberish as far as I’m concerned. That’s why I need your—”
Kelly’s left hand shot out, pushing her father down behind the anchor desk just as the cameraman on One pointed at her and the red light flashed on above the equipment. “This is The Six O’Clock Report, and I’m Kelly Locke … on top of the news,” she ad-libbed. “Chuck Mann is on assignment.” Either suing his plastic surgeon, she thought, or offering the blonde summer intern one of Chuck’s Tips for Breaking Into the Business. “Tonight’s Top Story contains a note of sadness. Now that the Barons have moved from Homer Black Field to their new complex, the City Council has just sold the old ballpark to an unknown buyer. For a bit of nostalgia, we go to a live InstaCam report from Brian Fardo.”
As the solitary reporter on a bridge overlooking the deserted field began his stand-up, Kelly turned away from the narration on her monitor. The red digital clock on the wall above Camera One told her she had 57 seconds left to get rid of her father.
“Dad, can this wait till 6:30?” she pleaded to the uncomfortable figure scrunched between the desk and the MaxTronic WeatherMation CompuMap.
“The game’s afoot, Sherlocka. By 6:30, for all I know, King’s boys could have pulled off the crime of the century — a heist, smuggling, a major hit, drugs. Of course, if you don’t want to scoop Channel Seven’s Action News…”
“Ooh, you know they’re all ‘If it bleeds, it leads’,” she snapped back. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the short, scarecrow figure of Stanley entering the studio under the ON THE AIR sign. Surely he didn’t intend to make good on his threat.
Suddenly Camera Two’s light flashed. “Thank you, Brian Fardo, for that report,” Kelly heard herself say. A piece of paper from off-camera appeared in her hand. Taking what she thought must be a news bulletin bro
ught in by her director, she began to read, “Dear Uncle Matt…”
Clearing her throat, she turned back to Camera One. “That story coming up, but first.” She read the teleprompter’s piece on a local congressman defending his recent junket to Hawaii as necessary to his ongoing investigation of excessive sugar in his constituents’ diets. Then she broke for a commercial.
“Dad,” she exclaimed in exasperation, “are you trying to get me fired?”
“Fired up,” said Matthew Locke. “Just finish the email.”
One hundred and forty-six seconds to go. Kelly quickly scanned the email her father had labeled “gibberish.”
*
Dear Uncle Matt,
As you requested, I have researched our friend’s familial activity. He is indeed in line for a sudden windfall as befits his royal station.
By an act of Parliament in 1759, his regal ancestor was commissioned Viceroy for the court at Cambridge. What’s more, it is true he sailed for Newport with the Duke of Kent on Christmas Eve.
His triumph is revealed in the family crest: a lion crouching beneath a rising sun on an empty field of sable.
Your nephew,
Edgar
*
The light on Camera Two flared red as Matthew Locke shot up like an errant jack-in-the-box. Just as suddenly Kelly shoved him back down.
“Back to the news,” Kelly said. Then she read a puff piece about how lawyers for DJ Colin Oskopee would appeal the rap group’s conviction at a recent Christmas concert for starting a riot by biting off the heads of three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. All the while her mind busily sorted out the details in the email. It was starting to make sense.
Turning to Camera One, she said to a grinning man standing in front of a blue screen that her monitor electronically transformed into the MaxTronic WeatherMation CompuMap, “And what does the New Year hold for us weather-wise, Bill Frost?”
“There’s no such word as ‘weather-wise’,” whispered her father from the bowels of the anchor desk.
Avoiding his criticism, Kelly whispered back. “Your Egghead is no dummy. He knew that Reuben King was reading his emails. I’ll bet he still makes his living as a forger, and he contacted you on your personal email at home.”
“Yes, he’s an expert in faking documents to ‘prove’ families are descended from royalty … if the price is right.”
“This isn’t ‘gibberish,’ but a clever code disguised to look like he’s been researching a family history for a client. Look at the first paragraph. He says, ‘As you requested’ — you asked him what King’s mob was up to, and he’s replying as to their ‘activity.’ And, as you suspected, King — remember ‘his royal station’? — will make lots of money — soon.”
“I’ll buy that,” bellowed the Chief of Detectives, forgetting to whisper and causing the weatherman to lose his concentration.
“I can’t quite figure out the second paragraph, but the description of the family crest tells us something about the crime they’re going to pull off, their ‘triumph’.”
Her father looked at her blankly while the weatherman droned on about the influence of Canadian lows and Mexican highs.
“The lion in the crest is the king of beasts,” posed Kelly, “so Reuben King will commit the crime at dawn, as indicated by the rising sun.”
“But where?” said her father, excitedly throwing his hands into the air and smashing the MaxTronic WeatherMation CompuMap at a spot just east of Houston.
As Bill Frost tried to explain the unexpected storm in the Gulf of Mexico, Kelly continued, “Sable is a term in heraldry for the color black. A dark field at sunrise.”
“Dark? Deserted? Black?” said the Chief of Detectives. “That could be anywhere.”
“Of course — Brian’s story,” she blurted out. “Somebody found a use for that abandoned stadium. But what crime could Reuben King be planning at a deserted Homer Black Field? The answer has to be in the second paragraph.”
“Hmm,” mused her father, firing up his curved pipe.
“Dad,” protested Kelly, picturing a fuming Stanley, “there’s no smoking on the set. Wait a minute!” Hastily she started circling key words in the second and third paragraph of the email. “It’s elementary, my dear father,” she said in her best Victorian accent. Then she read the encircled words. “Parliament, Viceroy, Cambridge, More, True, Newport, Kent, Eve, Now, Triumph, Merit. What do these words have in common?”
“They may have been banned from advertising on TV about the time you were born,” said the Chief of Detectives, puffing on his pipe, “but they’re still cigarette brands.”
“King must be doing something illegal with cigarettes.”
“Bootlegging. He buys them cheap in the South and trucks them up here. He has to have a place to store them before selling them privately to avoid the cigarette tax. What better place than deserted locker rooms?”
“King,” Kelly concluded, “is the unknown buyer of the old ballpark.”
“Who will be quite known tomorrow morning after my men are there when his trucks arrive at dawn.” Matthew Locke grabbed his daughter and hugged her as weatherman Bill Frost tried to explain the strange cloud of smoke that had drifted up from the South. “Sweetheart, for Sherlock Holmes Irene Adler may have been the woman, but for me, you are the woman.”
* * * *
“Hal Charles” is the writing team of Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, two mild-mannered English professors in sleepy little Richmond, Kentucky. A collection of their short stories, Bloody Ground, appeared from the Jesse Stuart Foundation a couple of years ago.
LOST AND FOUND, by Jean Paiva
“Really, Patti, you’ve done some crazy things before, but this takes the cake.” “Marsha, you’ve got to remember to call me Trish now. Patti is another person from another time and I’d just as soon forget her.” “That’s another one of your insanities, changing your name at your age, but I’ll try to humor you.”
“And that’s what best friends are best at,” answered Marsha who was, in fact not only my best friend but perhaps my only friend.
After a divorce you can finally find out who your friends really are and after mine I found out. The neighbors sided with Ted and my co-workers probably would have if they had known him. He was charming and, as an athletic six-footer, managed to get on every committee that had a spot — that is, if the committee name sounded prestigious enough and didn’t require too much real work. Meetings once a month were permissible, especially if it meant one less evening he had to stay home. The Community Planning Board, the Citizens for Better Schools, the Neighborhood Environmental Society, the Little Theatre at the Library and half a dozen others kept him out of the house evenings the equivalent of two weeks each month. He spent another week’s worth of evenings playing squash at the club — excuse me — his club. The final week of each month was allocated for either going to neighbors’ homes for dinner or cards, or having them over to our house, the latter the only activity that definitely included me.
Ted did lead an active life. My life involved coming home from work — a job we planned for me to quit as soon as our furniture and car were paid for and Ted’s bills for his clothes and sports equipment was under control — and to sit in front of the television.
I barely saw him. There were, of course, mornings when, bleary eyed, both of us could look at each other from behind our respective section of the day’s newspaper. Neither of us was a morning person and, needless to say, this wasn’t the best time to communicate. Ergo, there was very little communication.
After the divorce, Ted got custody of the house and all it contained, plus the car, the neighbors, the community, the committees and the club. I was more than willing to leave the suburban palace he coveted, complete with court and attendants, and take a small but comf
ortable apartment near my office. By saving myself two hours of commuting a day I hoped to free some time and energy, finally, for myself.
So far, one year and six months later, there had been little productive use of that extra time. Most of the initial hurt had dissolved but there was still that twinge of pain whenever I thought about my years as Ted’s doormat. Not that I resented Ted for the time he caused me to waste or for the tears I shed when he told me he was bored to death with me and wanted a divorce — even though he assured me that having all his bills finally paid had nothing to do with it.
Of course not.
In any event, I wasn’t the type of woman who harbored resentments. Not me.
Besides, I’d break out in hives or suffer indigestion when, I mean if I did — so I overcame any possible thoughts of bitterness or revenge and set out to make my own life a better one.
* * * *
Marsha’s prattle on the open phone line brought me back to our conversation. “Marsha, this is not crazy.” I tried to defend my action. “A lot of women in my position are doing it.”
“Trish — you see, I got it right — a lot of women in your position are crazy. Placing a classified ad for a man! What do you think you’ll find?”
“Maybe something I lost, or maybe something I never had to begin with,” I philosophically answered. “After all, this is just an extension of the old ‘lost and found’ columns. Besides, it’s too late to argue the point. I’ve done it. I’ve placed a classified ad and it’s scheduled to run in this afternoon’s paper.”
Marsha sighed, a sure sign she had all but given up hope. “What did your ad say?” she asked. “I’ve seen some very strange ads and can only hope you stayed within the bounds of good taste.”
Not knowing whether to be amused or insulted, I decided amused would be the better tack. “Why, Marsha, I didn’t know you read the classifieds.” Score one for me, I thought, as my good friend hemmed and hawed her way through a few minutes explaining that she occasionally glanced at the section though never, of course, read — much less had any other interest — in the ads.