Eight Mystery Writers You Should Be Reaing Nowwww

by Michael Guillebeau

  Booker smiled in a way he knew was not pleasant. “Better watch yourself, friend.”

  Goose’s good eye focused on the badge in Booker’s other hand. He dropped his fist to his side. “Shit, man, you gonna give me a heart attack.”

  “The condition of your heart doesn’t concern me, Goose.”

  The dealer fluttered his hands in front of his face. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Then we should get along just fine. You deal to a woman named Giselle? You’d remember her—looks like a Bouguereau angel.”

  “What are you, some kind of professor?” Goose tipped his head so that his wall eye faced Booker. “Cause you sure don’t talk like a cop.”

  “But I am a cop. So I suggest you answer my question. Do you sell to a woman named Giselle?”

  Goose chewed at his lower lip. Booker could see him weighing his options. Booker knew he didn’t look like much, a little bit balding, a little bit overweight, but he had the badge, and the bulge of his Glock was visible beneath his jacket.

  Goose sighed and shuffled his feet. “Hey, man, she gonna get it somewhere. I don’t give it to her, she just gonna get it somewhere else. Maybe somebody worse than me, somebody treat her bad.”

  “She’s dead, you dumbass. Can’t get much worse than that.”

  “Dead!” Goose looked genuinely surprised. “Since when?”

  “Since yesterday.”

  “Huh. Can’t put this on me, then. I was in jail yesterday. Just got kicked this morning.”

  Booker’s stomach sank. “You know I’ll check.”

  “You do that.”

  Booker would have liked nothing better than to kick the wall-eyed bastard’s scrawny ass all the way to Brushy Mountain, so he was both angry and depressed when Goose’s alibi panned out.

  By Saturday afternoon, he’d tracked down and interviewed the Uncles. Uncle Trey, concerned primarily with the fear that his wife might discover his indiscretion, kept Booker shivering on the porch while he fetched hotel receipts and airline ticket stubs to prove he’d been at a business conference in Las Vegas. Bobby, the jingle writer, invited Booker in and showed him ticket stubs and a program for a symphony matinee. While Bobby rummaged through his desk drawer for the tickets, Booker plinked a tune on a Steinway upright piano.

  Bobby looked up, program and tickets in hand. “Giselle used to play that song.”

  “A lot better than this, I assume.”

  “You assume right, man. She was a great talent.”

  Jim the computer programmer and Beau the architect also had alibis—a handball game and a dozen witnesses at the office, respectively—and Mack was too genuinely distraught to have been anything but innocent.

  “What happens to Ariana?” Mack asked, when he could finally speak.

  “We don’t know that yet,” said Booker.

  “I could take her in,” said Mack. At Booker’s hard look, he hastened to add, “Or maybe my sister could. She has two girls of her own.”

  Mack remembered the framed sheet music, but shook his head in genuine bewilderment when asked if he knew of anyone who might have wanted to steal it. As for secrets, you could never tell, but Booker would have bet money that the only secret Mack had ever had was Giselle herself.

  *****

  Booker liked to think that, even without the baby, he would have asked Giselle to marry him. The pink line of the pregnancy test had simply pushed his timeline forward. But when he presented her with the ring, she stared at it dumbly and then pushed it away.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “We’re good together.”

  “That’s no reason.”

  “I love you,” he said. “How’s that for a reason?”

  Her hands balled into fists. “What kind of world is this to bring a baby into? Look what happened to Professor K. And to RJ. You know what it’s like. You see it every day.”

  “So we make it better.”

  “And what about my career? I’m not giving everything up for a thing the size of a jellybean.”

  He wanted to say she didn’t have a career, that she had thrown it away for a fleeting high, but he didn’t want to fight with her. Fighting never helped with Giselle. Instead, he said, “Honey, it’s just seven more months. Then we can look into day care. Or we could scrimp a little, hire an au pair.”

  Her laugh was derisive. “You. An au pair. And what will you pay her with? Your bright and shining armor?”

  Five weeks later, he came home to find her huddled beneath a crocheted afghan, her knees drawn up to her chest, her eyes swollen and rimmed with red.

  He bent down and pressed his lips to her forehead. “Hard day?”

  She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “How’s our jellybean?”

  A tear trickled down her cheek. “There is no jellybean.”

  “What?”

  “There. Is. No. Jellybean,” she repeated. “No baby. I got it taken care of.”

  Taken care of. For a moment, the air seemed to have been sucked from the room. “You didn’t even talk to me about it?”

  She picked at a fingernail, flaked off a chip of cherry red polish and flicked it away. “It wasn’t your decision.”

  “It was my child too.”

  “It wasn’t a child,” she said. “It wasn’t anything. A tiny blob of cells.”

  But he knew better. At thirteen weeks, it had a heartbeat of its own, a nervous system, brain waves. At thirteen weeks, it could feel pain.

  More than that, it had been his chance to toss a ball around in the backyard, build a tree-fort, take his son—or daughter—to a Titans game. All the things he’d never done with his own father but might have done with his child. And she had robbed him of them.

  Through sheer force of will, they kept their relationship together for six more months. He found himself thinking of the child. Would it have been a boy or a girl? Would it have had her eyes? His hair? He imagined himself reading his daughter a bedtime story, taking his son fishing, though he had never been fishing a day in his life.

  Lovemaking was perfunctory. A few bitter couplings. The last time, he’d rolled out of bed and gone for a walk. When he came home, she was gone.

  He wished he’d gone after her. He wished a lot of things. He only heard from her one time after that, and he remembered that late-night call with shame. The phone rang and rang, as he lay on the couch and let the machine pick up. “Hey, Booker. I wondered if…um…I thought you might want to…that maybe we could…” There were tears in her voice. He thought he might die if she kept on.

  And then he was on his feet, reaching for the phone, and she was saying, “Oh hell, never mind,” and he was left holding the receiver, tears streaming down his face as he listened to the dial tone.

  *****

  Two days ago, if anyone had asked Booker what his greatest strength was, he would have said patience. Methodical and plodding, as ordinary as dirt, he had always identified with the cartoon turtle who always somehow beat the hare: I may be suh-low, but I’m sure.

  Today, though, he felt anything but patient. He forced himself to take his time, review the file again, do detailed background checks on each of Ariana’s Uncles.

  A dull throb began at his temples, and he swallowed two aspirins dry and chased them with a cream cheese Danish from the vending machine. He rummaged through his desk and found a CD Giselle had made for him a thousand years ago, leaned back in his chair and listened to her playing Mozart’s “Piano Sonata No. 11” and Liszt’s “Dream Song.” Then “Rhapsody in Red” came on, and he closed his eyes and let the music roll over him. He listened to it half a dozen times, then ejected the CD.

  The room went suddenly silent. Nothing but tick of the heater and the hum of the lights. Exactly how a world without Giselle should sound.

  He turned back to the files.

  Just after lunch, he struck, if not gold, at least pyrite. Robert “Bobby” James Glassman, composer of advertising jingles, had once been a student of Walter Koresky
.

  Booker closed his eyes and called up a memory. Giselle in his arms, sobbing, “Poor RJ. He looked like he’d been smashed in the face with a shovel.”

  RJ. Robert James.

  By three o’clock, he was at the performing arts center, handing a limited warrant to a pert blond behind the information desk.

  “Robert James Glassman,” he said. “I need to know what seat he was in and if his ticket was redeemed.”

  She tapped something into her computer. “Just…one…sec. Okaaay. Here it is. F-22. Yes, sir. It looks like he redeemed his ticket.”

  “Just one ticket?”

  “Yes, sir. It looks like he was alone.”

  “And the people on either side of him?”

  “Just a moment, and I’ll get you those names.”

  *****

  Two calls, less than five minutes each.

  “This is Detective Thomas Booker, homicide.”

  A few lines of small talk, then, “Do you remember the symphony matinee yesterday?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Seat F-22. Was anyone in it?”

  “Oh, yes. But he must have gotten ill, because he left right after the performance started.”

  “And when did he come back?”

  “He never did.”

  *****

  “You can’t prove anything,” said Bobby Glassman. For the fourth time, he took off his glasses and rubbed them with the tail of his shirt.

  “Why? Because you wore gloves and burned the evidence?” Booker waved a music composition tablet at the prisoner. “You forgot to burn this.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. I compose music. That’s what I do.”

  “You compose drivel,” said Booker. “Except for this.” He flipped through the tablet until he found a familiar composition. “You left off the name, but this is ‘Rhapsody in Red.’”

  “Correction. The first page is ‘Rhapsody in Red’. The second page is original. I wanted to see if I could finish it.”

  “I have a recording in my office,” said Booker. “It’s a recording of Giselle playing both pages of ‘Rhapsody in Red.’ ”

  “Both—”

  “The page Professor Koresky’s widow found, and the second page, the one she never saw because it was locked in the evidence room. Shall we see if Giselle’s recording matches your composition?”

  Glassman’s shoulders slumped. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Was that how she knew you’d killed Professor Koresky? Because she saw your composition book?”

  “Heard me whistling it.” Glassman shook his head. “Stupid.”

  “And then she realized why you said you’d been mugged the night Koresky died. Because the two of you struggled, and he bloodied your nose. Giselle figured it out, tried to blackmail you, so you killed her. But why take the music?”

  A vein in Glassman’s neck bulged. “Because it was mine!”

  “Yours…” Booker bowed his head, understanding.

  “It was the best thing I ever wrote. The only decent thing I ever wrote. And that son of a bitch stole it.”

  “But his widow had the song recorded. You could never claim it again anyway,” said Booker. “You killed him for nothing. You killed them both for nothing.”

  *****

  He didn’t expect to see Shiraine again, but on Monday morning, there she was, resplendent in a hot pink Spandex mini-dress and four-inch, leopard-print heels. “I got something for you,” she said, and tossed an envelope onto his desk. “Giselle said anything ever happened to her, I should look you up and give you this.”

  He picked the envelope up. Turned it over in his hands. “Thank you.”

  “That makes us even.” She sashayed away, an exaggerated swing in her hips that made him smile in spite of himself.

  When she had gone, he took the envelope outside and climbed into his car. It was cold, but he didn’t bother with the heat.

  Instead, he turned on the radio, found the classical station, and leaned back against the seat. He closed his eyes and let the music fill him.

  When he felt calm enough, he opened his eyes.

  Then he opened the envelope.

  Inside was Giselle’s diploma from the music academy, a valentine Booker had given her, a homemade CD of her music, and a birth certificate.

  “Ariana Nicole Braun,” it said.

  He looked at the next line.

  Father, it said. Thomas Booker.

  He looked at it for a long time. Did the math again, and came to the same conclusion.

  Then he drove home in a haze and made another call.

  *****

  For the second time that weekend, Booker rapped on Peggy Gleason’s door.

  He tugged at the macaw tie, which seemed conspicuously bright.

  Inside, Giselle’s daughter sat on the sofa, hands clasped in her lap, a scuffed duffel bag at her feet. She looked like she’d been waiting for a long time.

  He pushed aside the coffee table and knelt beside the couch. “Ariana,” he said. “I’m your . . .” He stopped. He could lie to the case worker—and would, if it came to that—but he couldn’t lie to the girl.

  But was it a lie? Wasn’t a father more than blood and DNA?

  “I know who you are,” she said. She touched a finger to the bright strip of color at his chest and said, “I like this tie.”

  “I like it too,” he said, and held out his hand.

  EXCERPT

  River of Glass

  “This third Jared McKean mystery is a worthy successor to Racing the Devil and A Cup Full of Midnight…with a tough yet sympathetic protagonist who goes to all ends for friends and family. Solid plotting and well-drawn characters make this a series to add to any hardboiled-mystery reader’s list.” — Michele Leber, Booklist

  “Even at close to 300 pages, this book was one of those rare novels that are fast-paced and moved so smoothly I read it in one sitting. The reader is pulled into the story from the first page, and the author keeps you spellbound to the last exciting page. I loved it. Highly recommended.” —Tom Johnson, Detective Mystery Stories and Pulp Den

  The storm blew itself out around midnight, and by dawn, a new bank of clouds had rolled in. They filled the sky from horizon to horizon, gray and roiling, swollen with rain. A few scattered drops fell throughout the day, as if God were spitting on us.

  That afternoon, I put on my father’s leather bomber jacket, locked my elderly quarter horse in the paddock, saddled my Tennessee Walker, and rode out into the woods behind the house. The air was cool and damp, thick with the smells of mud and moss, the mulchy scent of deadwood, and the occasional far-off whiff of skunk. The trail twisted like a copperhead, littered with broken branches and mottled with gray light.

  The wind rose and rattled the leaves. Crockett tossed his head and picked up his pace, hoof beats muted by the rain-softened earth. When I gave him his head, he slipped into a running walk, hips lifting and falling as his hind legs stretched beneath him in a smooth, ground-covering gait.

  He faltered at a side trail, turned his head toward it. The underbrush made the trail seem darker there, the air somehow less clean. Crockett drifted toward it, but I’d had my fill of darkness. I nudged him forward and past, into a band of sunlight.

  Somewhere to my right, the wheeze of Frank Campanella’s Crown Vic broke the stillness like a chainsaw in the wilderness. I knew it was Frank, even without benefit of sight. He’d had the Vic long before he and I had worked homicides for Metro Nashville’s now-defunct Murder Squad, probably before I’d graduated from the academy at nineteen, possibly since before I was born.

  A thousand scenarios flashed through my mind—car crashes and drownings and God-knew-what-else involving my son, my ex-wife, my nieces, my brother and his estranged wife . . . Frank was my friend, but there was no good reason for him to show up at my home unannounced.

  Dread closing my throat, I turned my horse and urged him toward the house.

  When I rode out of t
he woods, Frank was on the porch, a glass of lemonade in his hand, my friend and housemate, Jay Renfield, hovering anxiously beside him. I’d known Jay since kindergarten, and our friendship had survived both his revelation that he was gay and his ongoing struggle with AIDS.

  Frank looked up as I bent to open the pasture gate. He said something to Jay, set his glass down on the porch railing, and started down the steps. By the time I led Crockett across the pasture and into the barn, Frank was waiting for me.

  He was a cinder block of a man, shoulders straining against his regulation suit. Square jaw, bristling eyebrows, silvering hair. He ran a hand through it, leaving a ruffled patch above one ear. Then he gave me an awkward man hug and said, “How you doing, Cowboy?”

  I gave his back a thump and turned back to loosen the latigo of Crockett’s saddle. “You didn’t come here to ask me how I’m doing.”

  “No, but now that I’m here, the question has crossed my mind.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Or was, until you stopped by.”

  “I’ll try not to take that personally.”

  “It’s not personal. You know what they say about shooting the messenger. You have your bad news face on.”

  “I have a bad news face?”

  “It’s like your regular face, but squintier.”

  He let that pass. “Did you go to the office today?”

  “What are you, the office police?” I tugged the cinch loose and lifted the saddle and pad from Crockett’s back. There was a saddle-shaped patch of sweat beneath. I ran my hand over it, checking for tenderness, and found none. “I did a skip trace and a couple of background checks. Nothing I couldn’t do from here.”

  He cocked his head. Gave me a narrow look. “Skip traces. Background checks.”

  “It’s honest work. Pays well. Plus, I can do it from my couch.”

  “You’re wasted on it.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, pretended to study Crockett’s saddle. “Jared, what happened to Josh wasn’t your fault.”

  A vision of my nephew lying limp in a tub of bloody water shot a sharp pain through my temples. If I’d done things differently . . .