Eight Mystery Writers You Should Be Reaing Nowwww

by Michael Guillebeau

  He flashed his badge. “Detective Booker. I’d like to speak with Ariana.”

  “Don’t know why you bother,” she grumbled. “Like you care about some dead whore.”

  “I’m not the one who murdered her,” he said, more roughly than he’d intended. “So how about cutting me a little slack?”

  The door closed, and a moment later, the chain rattled as she slipped it from the lock. She swung the door open and waved toward the living area, where the child sat on a dingy green sofa, drawing something in a cheap newsprint tablet. Her dark hair had fallen across her face, and when he called her name, she looked up and swept back her bangs in a graceful gesture so like Giselle’s it almost broke his heart.

  Eight years old, pale and slender, with her mother’s fine features and the same pale green eyes. He looked for some trace of himself in her, found none. Did the math. Close, but not close enough. He felt a pang of jealousy. This should have been his child.

  He sauntered past the widow Gleason and perched on the arm of the couch beside the child. “You like to draw?”

  The girl shrugged and nibbled at the tip of her eraser. “I guess.”

  “May I see?”

  She handed him the picture, a woman with long dark curls playing the piano. He didn’t know much about children, but he thought it was very good.

  He looked at it too long and handed it back reluctantly. “That’s your mother. But I didn’t see a piano in your apartment.”

  “She sold it.”

  The thought of Giselle, bereft of her music, made his chest ache. “She must have really needed the money.”

  “We always need money.” She ducked her head, and the dark hair fell across her face again.

  “She was a beautiful woman, your mother,” said Booker. “Talented. Smart.”

  Beneath the curtain of hair, Ariana nodded.

  “But she had a problem. And she knew a lot of other people who had problems. And sometimes they might need money, too.”

  She didn’t answer, but there was another slight nod, and he knew she was listening. He went on. “Sometimes they take things that don’t belong to them, and sometimes they hurt other people when they do it. Can you tell me if your mother had anything somebody else might have wanted?”

  She lifted her head and shook back her hair. “She had some jewelry. Nice jewelry. From her boyfriends.”

  Boyfriends.

  Grimacing, he reached into his pocket for a palm-sized steno tablet and dutifully scrawled the child’s descriptions of the jewelry—a pair of diamond earrings, a moonstone necklace, a sapphire and diamond ring he recognized as one he had given Giselle on the anniversary of their first meeting. According to the child, there had been other pieces over the years, but Giselle had eventually sold or pawned them. In addition to the jewelry, she had a wad of cash in an oatmeal canister—two hundred dollars or so. For heroin and groceries, Booker suspected, and just enough rent to keep from being evicted.

  He got a name and a description of Giselle’s dealer, a jittery, wall-eyed black man who answered to the name of Goose.

  “Does he come to your house a lot?” Booker asked the girl. “If he’d knocked, would she have let him in?”

  “I guess so. Is that what happened? She let somebody in?”

  “The lock wasn’t broken, so yeah, it looks that way.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and said, “Anybody else she might have let in?”

  The girl gnawed at her lower lip. “I have a lot of uncles,” she said finally, and counted on her fingers. “Uncle Trey, Uncle Beau, Uncle Jim, Uncle Mack, Uncle Bobby.”

  “These uncles…”

  “They aren’t really uncles,” she said.

  Booker winced at the knowledge in the girl’s voice. She described the uncles in a flat, dull tone too old for her years. Uncle Trey was the married CEO of an investment company. Uncle Beau was an architect, Uncle Jim a computer programmer, Uncle Mack the manager of a local Food Mart. Uncle Mack was Ariana’s favorite; he brought her drawing pads and colored pencils and talked to her like she was a real person. Uncle Bobby was a studio musician who supplemented his income by writing and composing advertising jingles.

  “Would you like to hear one?” she asked. At his nod, she clasped her hands in her lap and sang:

  “If sleepless nights have got you down,

  And all you do is toss around,

  Just take a swig of Rest-in-Ease

  And wake refreshed as a cool breeze.”

  The laugh burst out of him without warning. “God. That’s dreadful.”

  “It is!” She seemed pleased with his assessment. “But he thinks he’s wonderful. Do you want me to sing another one?”

  She was on the third jingle when there was another knock at the door, and Coppinger burst in, grinning like he’d won the lottery. “Say goodbye to the kid and get your coat, Padre. I just solved this one.”

  “What do you mean, you solved it?” asked Booker. “Just like that?”

  “Nothing to it.” Coppinger jammed his hands in his pockets and put on his aw-shucks look. “Lady upstairs was bringing in her groceries when this junkie whore runs past her covered in blood and carrying a pillowcase.”

  Beside Booker, Ariana gasped and pressed her hand to her mouth. Booker patted her knee and gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. To Coppinger, he said, “Why wait until now to say anything? Why didn’t she call the police then?”

  “Around here? You got sunstroke, Padre? Or, the way you were huffing and puffing all the way up here, maybe just a stroke.”

  Booker ignored the insult. Coppinger was right about one thing, anyway. This was the kind of neighborhood where nobody ever saw anything. “This junkie. She got a name?”

  “LeVeaux. Shiraine LeVeaux.”

  “No,” the girl said. “Shiraine wouldn’t hurt Mom. She sleeps on our couch sometimes, when her boyfriend beats her up.”

  Coppinger shrugged. “You never know, with junkies. Come on, Booker. I want to put this thing to bed before midnight.”

  “Just one more thing.” Booker turned back to the girl. “There was a silver picture frame on the floor beside—” He caught himself. “A silver frame. The picture inside was missing. Can you tell me what was in it?”

  “Music,” she said, bending over her drawing. “Like this.”

  Her pencil flew across the page, a storm of musical notes with sharp, dagger-like tails. With a final flourish, she held it up to him, and the title she had scrawled across the page struck him like an arrow.

  “Rhapsody in Red,” it said. Giselle’s most prized—and macabre—possession. And he had given her that, too.

  “You know what this is?” he asked the girl.

  Her nod was solemn. “It belonged to her music teacher. The one who got murdered.”

  In October of their final year together, Giselle’s mentor and former professor, a well-known composer and pianist named Walter Koresky, had been bludgeoned to death in his Belle Meade mansion. DNA tests indicated two blood types, the professor’s and—presumably—his killer’s. Among the pieces of evidence admitted was a blood-spattered folder filled with sheet music, including two pages of a new composition, “Rhapsody in Red.”

  The irony of the title was lost on no one.

  Booker shook his head, started to ask another question.

  In the doorway, Coppinger shifted his weight impatiently. “Come on, Padre. We’re burnin’ daylight.”

  *****

  They found the hooker—Shiraine, Booker reminded himself—sprawled across the sofa, glassy-eyed. On the coffee table in front of her lay a syringe, a plastic bag of whitish powder, and a pawn shop receipt for a pair of diamond earrings, a necklace, and a sapphire and diamond tea ring.

  “Got something,” he said, as Coppinger poked his head into the kitchen.

  “Got something here, too,” said Coppinger, from the next room. “Jeans and a sweatshirt soaking in the sink. And that ain’t rust in the water.”

  *****r />
  “I ain’t killed nobody.” Shiraine, crashing and cranky, slapped her palms on the table and flipped her long blond cornrows over her shoulder. “She was dead when I got there.”

  “Sure she was,” said Coppinger. “And I got a nice little statue in New York harbor I can sell you real cheap.”

  Booker shot Coppinger a look, and Coppinger crumpled his empty coffee cup in his fist and stalked from the room. “I’ll watch through the two-way,” he said, and slammed the door behind him.

  Booker turned his attention back to Shiraine. “If she was dead when you got there,” he said, “why were you covered in her blood?”

  “I was tryin’ to see was she still alive. She was my best friend, case you didn’t catch that part of it.”

  “We caught it,” said Booker. “We just didn’t get the part about why, when you found your best friend lying on her floor in a pool of her own blood, your first instinct was to steal her blind.”

  “She didn’t need that stuff no more.”

  “Did you ever think to leave it for that little girl?”

  She looked away, eyes red and watery. “She was gonna be rich. That’s what Giselle said. Gonna be set for life.”

  “Really.”

  “Said she knew some things worth big bucks. Secrets.”

  “Whose secrets?”

  She shrugged. “We was friends, not business partners.”

  Booker said, “What happened to the music?”

  She cocked her head, brow furrowed. “What music?”

  “In her picture frame. It was just a piece of paper with some music notes on it. It wasn’t in your apartment, and it wasn’t listed on the pawn receipt, so where is it?”

  She gave a sharp little laugh. “What the hell I want with that shit? You can’t eat it, can’t sell it, you can’t even get high on it. So what the hell good is it to me?”

  “True enough,” Booker said, through clenched teeth. “One more question. Why didn’t you try to save her?”

  “I did try to save her,” said Shiraine. “How you think I got her blood all over me?”

  *****

  “She’s telling the truth,” said Booker, when Shiraine had been returned to her cell. “She doesn’t know about the music.”

  Coppinger blew out an exasperated breath. “You got a junkie whore running from the scene, covered in blood, carrying a pillowcase full of the victim’s jewelry, and you want to fuck up a slam-dunk case because of a scrap of paper with little black scribbles on it?”

  “She didn’t do it. Don’t you think we ought to find out who did?”

  Coppinger threw up his hands. “You want to play Nancy Drew? Fine. Play away. But I’m going home to my wife, my kids, and my big screen TV, and come Monday, I’m filing my report. And if you don’t have anything more to go on than some crazy idea about sheet music, we’re closing the case. The vic is nobody, Padre. Just some dead hooker.”

  Booker looked down at his hands, but he kept his mouth shut, because a day ago, he might have been the one closing the file on Nobody. A schizophrenic homeless man doused in gasoline and set on fire by a couple of kids from good neighborhoods. A used-up prostitute slashed by her pimp and left in a dumpster.

  They were all Giselles to someone. And if they weren’t, they should be.

  He sighed and picked up the file. He needed sleep, but what was it Hamlet had said? To sleep, perchance to dream…Aye, there’s the rub. He didn’t think his dreams tonight would be the pleasant kind.

  At one o’clock, Jen called. “I just got off and tried your place. Since you didn’t answer, I thought you might be working late. Tough day?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I’ll be up for a while,” she said. “There’s beer in the fridge.”

  “Rain check, okay?”

  “Okay. But if you change your mind, you know where I keep the key.”

  “I’ll probably end up working most of the night. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. What you’re doing, it’s important.”

  Giselle had thought so too, at first. He could still feel the warmth of her fingers as she smoothed the front of his shirt and called him her hero. Then, somehow, things changed. He’d come home late, exhausted by death and bleary from lack of sleep, and she’d meet him at the door—drunk or high, or maybe just crazy—pounding at his chest and flailing at him with fists and nails. “You stupid son of a bitch. Running yourself ragged for the cost of a PB&J? Who do you think you are, some kind of fucking white knight?”

  He’d hold her wrists and absorb her fury, his tongue like stone in his mouth.

  Yes, he thought but did not say. Yes.

  *****

  He said goodbye to Jen and hung up, wondering why he’d blown her off like that. Jen was a good kid, but hell, she thought Camus was the name of the killer whale at Sea World. He wished that didn’t bother him.

  God—almost a decade, and he still missed those long, intense discussions with Giselle, the ones that started with a glass of wine on the sofa and ended up with the two of them in bed, drunk with alcohol and ideas, consumed by literature and lust. Dostoevsky and the Russian masters, Renaissance art, Schopenhauer, a priori knowledge and Immanuel Kant.

  He pushed the thought away and picked up the file again. Made himself pore over every photograph, every interview.

  The super had seen a man in a knit scarf, ski mask, and hooded jacket go upstairs maybe a half an hour before Giselle was killed. Maybe that meant something, maybe it didn’t—the wind had been bitter that day, and a lot of people were wearing scarves and ski masks.

  He closed the file and sat there for a long time, thinking. Always before, he’d known she was out there, somewhere. Now the world felt suddenly empty. He felt empty.

  He thought of the picture frame, and his throat closed. Giselle had wanted to play classical piano, not the generic dreck that passed for music these days, and Booker was happy to pull in the paycheck while she attended classes and played her music. If their living conditions were modest, he hardly noticed. He was a man of few needs.

  He failed to see—or maybe didn’t want to see—the dilated pupils, the insomnia, the wild fluctuations between mania and depression. She stopped taking studio gigs, mainly because she’d stopped getting offers. Her talent was prodigious, but not even beauty and talent could compensate for her erratic behavior. If she showed up at all, she was just as likely to call the featured artist a cocksucking bastard as to shake his hand, as likely to stalk out of the session as sit down at the keyboard.

  She would come home an hour before dawn, reeking of liquor and sex, sobbing hysterically and begging him to forgive her. And because of the other times—times spent watching her long fingers fly over the piano keys, feeding her strawberries on the back porch of his parents’ house, kissing her eyelids after a long night of lovemaking—he always did.

  Maybe she could have pulled herself together, gotten counseling, gone into rehab. Maybe he could have pulled some strings, gotten her into a good program. Then Professor Koresky was murdered.

  Giselle took it hard. Her career was in shards, her friend and mentor murdered, and to top it all off, on that very same night, another friend and former classmate had been mugged and robbed, his eyes blacked and his nose broken. Giselle met him for lunch the next day and, later, lay in Booker’s arms and sobbed. “Poor RJ. He looked like he’d been smashed in the face with a shovel. What the hell is wrong with the world?”

  While the folder languished in the evidence room, Koresky’s widow found the first page of “Rhapsody in Red” in her husband’s composition book. It was recorded as “Unfinished Rhapsody” and hailed as the composer’s most brilliant work.

  A few days later, a young Kurdish man with a history of petty crimes was arrested for Koresky’s murder. The boy was convicted—despite a shortage of evidence and a prosecution case a six-year-old could have punched holes in—and sentenced to sixty years; he’d be an old man by the time he came up for parole. It was a
high profile crime, and there was pressure from the top to close the file, and fast.

  Booker was grateful the case wasn’t his. But when Koresky’s widow died of heart failure and the Kurdish boy was shanked in the prison shower, Booker called in a favor and slipped both bloodstained pages of “Rhapsody in Red” out of the evidence room. He mounted them in a brushed silver frame and had a treble clef engraved on it. It was a macabre gift—he knew that—but he also knew Giselle would love it. She was fascinated by such things.

  *****

  He stopped on the way home for a box of Krispy Kremes, the glazed kind, still warm from the oven. How stereotypical could you get? He was pushing the outer limits of the weight requirement, maybe even crept a few pounds past, but what the hell? He’d go low-carb tomorrow, make up for it.

  At home, he dropped the half-empty Krispy Kreme box on the table and headed for the bedroom, tugging off his navy silk tie. He opened the closet door, and a blaze of color greeted him. Silk ties, over a hundred. Salvador Dali’s melting watches; Van Gogh’s starry night and other famous paintings; a series of wildlife designs; scenes from Casablanca, the Three Stooges, old horror movies; and a slew of Warner Brothers cartoon characters. Giselle, who’d teased him about his staid attire, had given them to him, the first a strip of blue silk emblazoned with scarlet and blue-and-gold macaws.

  “I love it,” he’d said, and she laughed.

  “You’ll never wear it.”

  “I love it anyway.”

  And he did. Each morning, he took a few minutes to stand in front of the closet and look at his ties. And then, every morning, he reached for the navy.

  *****

  On Saturday, he got to work early and made some calls to a couple of snitches. By the time his coffee was cold, he’d gotten a lead on Giselle’s dealer.

  Goose had set up operations in front of a shabby little soul restaurant called Like Mama’s. A pair of thin wires connected ear buds to an MP3 player clipped to Goose’s belt. The dealer’s eyes were closed as he bucked and gyrated to imperceptible music.

  Booker jerked the buds from Goose’s ears. The dealer’s eyes snapped open, and he drew back a fist as if to throw a punch.