AHMM, May 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * *

  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  Copyright ©2011 Dell Magazines

  * * *

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  Cover by Farhad/Images.com

  * * * *

  * * * *

  * * * *

  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: MISFITS OF CRIME by Linda Landrigan

  Department: THE LINEUP

  Fiction: ENEMIES by Janice Law

  Fiction: PAWNS by Janet E. Irvin

  Fiction: WHY by Robert Lopresti

  Fiction: THE CALCULATOR by Mithran Somasundrum

  Fiction: DEATH IN REHAB by B.K. Stevens

  Mysterious Photgraph: TIME EXPIRED

  Fiction: BANKASAURUS REX by David Dietrich

  Department: BOOKED & PRINTED by Robert C. Hahn

  Fiction: THE CASE OF THE TELEPHONING GHOST by Joe Helgerson

  Department: THE STORY THAT WON

  Department: COMING IN JUNE 2011

  * * * *

  Department: EDITORIAL: MISFITS OF CRIME by Linda Landrigan

  Not everyone is cut out to be a smooth operator, as our stories this month demonstrate. In Mithran Somasundrum's story “The Calculator,” a socially inept genius from the U.K. disappears in Bangkok, while in Janet E. Irvin's story “Pawns,” a carnival outcast absconds with the ancient, and restless, bones of King Kardu. B. K. Stevens's underemployed academic Leah Abrams finds herself leading a therapy group of people with harmless addictions—harmless, until one member of the group is murdered in “Death in Rehab.” Meanwhile, Janice Law writes of academic rivalry that gets out of hand in “Enemies.” David Dietrich shows us how a bank heist should go down in “Bankasaurus Rex"; and Robert Lopresti suggests there some questions that a law officer shouldn't ask in “Why.” Finally, Sheriff Huck Finn and his deputy Injun Joe are on the line in “The Case of the Telephoning Ghost” by Joe Helgerson.

  These are stories that, in one way or another, all made us chuckle, and we think you'll enjoy them as well.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: THE LINEUP

  David Dietrich lives in Texas with his wife and twin boys. His last story for AHMM was “Sundown, 290 West” (July/August 2010).

  Booked & Printed columnist Robert C. Hahn is the former mystery columnist for the Cincinnati Post.

  Joe Helgerson's YA novel Crows & Cards (Houghton Mifflin), set in 1849 St. Louis, made the 2009 Smithsonian Notable Books for Children list.

  Janet E. Irvin received the Best Fiction Award from the anthology Oasis Journal 2010, published in October, for her story “Searching For Mr. Mistletoe."

  Janice Law is professor of literature and a painter whose works have been shown locally around Connecticut. She is the author of Voices (Forge, 2003).

  Robert Lopresti's first story for AHMM appeared thirty years ago, in the June 1981 issue. “Why” is his eighteenth story for AHMM.

  Mithran Somasundrum's most re- cent publication in AHMM was “The Farm in Ratchburi” (October 2010).

  B. K. Stevens has published more than twenty-five stories with AHMM. She and her husband live in Virginia, where she teaches literature and composition at Lynchburg College.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: ENEMIES by Janice Law

  * * * *

  Art by Joel Spector

  * * * *

  If it hadn't been Turkott, Wallace would have behaved very differently. That goes without saying. Wallace L. Ivery, full professor with an endowed chair in Victorian Studies, was a temperate, cautious, responsible citizen, past president of MLA, member in good standing of the University Senate, reviewer for the best publications, and referee for countless scholarly journals.

  He was reliable, too, not a man to panic in a tough situation; witness his success over the years in academic in-fighting and university politics. In his own estimation, he was a good man, tough but fair, with a certain charm and a properly ironic view of the world. If he'd been asked to sum up his personality in one word, Wallace would have picked “reasonable."

  ". . . to see ourselves as others see us . . .” et cetera, but Burns was outside his period, and really Wallace was quite decent and rational in his dealings, with one little exception: Peter Havermeyer Turkott III, who summed up every folly and depravity ever associated with the fields of academe. How did he hate Turkott? Let us count the ways.

  He dressed like a stevedore, for one. Not that Wallace had ever seen a stevedore up close, but Turkott favored jeans of a certain age and flannel shirts or black turtlenecks under ancient tweed jackets. Sandals in the spring and fall; work boots in the winter. Quelle horreur!

  Wallace, as befitted the holder of an endowed chair, dressed formally in dark suits or pinstripes with a vest and wore ties and display handkerchiefs in rich but subdued floral prints, a dignified couture. There was no reason for Turkott's crack that he looked “like Oscar Wilde in drag,” an unwise remark in every way, given all Wallace knew about him!

  But they were “chalk and cheese,” as the British say, on every point. Wallace was something of an Anglophile, which Turkott thought an affectation and had said so more than once. Which showed, in Wallace's opinion, how limited the man was. Teaching the great Victorians, many of whom were subjects of the Crown, necessitated some context, some feel for the mores of the time.

  Turkott, with his Contemporary Culture Studies, “knickers and popcorn,” as Wallace dubbed it, didn't need to do more than reach for the video and pontificate on the inner meaning of television dramas and “cultural celebrities.” Pathetic stuff.

  Unsurprisingly, their animus carried over into department business. Pity poor graduate students who wound up with Turkott and Ivery on their dissertation committees. Pity job candidates unlucky enough to have both come to their trial lectures. Blood on the floor!

  This was distressing to everyone, but as Wallace always assured his colleagues, it was entirely Turkott's fault. And if no one else was going to challenge habitual idiocy, he, Wallace, as one of the senior faculty, felt that he had to speak up. Sometimes he got support on this tack; other times the faculty let him down.

  The fact was that Professor Peter H. Turkott III, was also senior faculty, without, to be sure, the cachet of an endowed chair but, in the view of some impressionable minds, as eminent, or possibly even more eminent, than Wallace.

  Turkott was forever being interviewed on television, called up as an expert, don't you know, on the meaning of some disaster in Celebrity World. He spent couch time unpacking the meaning of trendy shows and books whose inner message, Wallace thought, was simply “buy me."

  So it is easy to understand, “self-evident,” Wallace would have said, that when he saw Turkott, he did not react as he would have to any other person on or off campus. This is what happened. He finished up his twilight seminar, three hours from three thirty to six thirty p.m., a gathering highly desirable and always with a waiting list. Turkott could say what he liked, but the Victorians were not “so yesterday” as he thought.

  Wallace went out to the car with his briefcase full of papers in one hand and his laptop in its bag in the other. The parking lot was still quite busy; dry leaves were flying in a cold December air that rustled around the cars and lifted the sand that never seemed to get swept up from one season to the next. Needed tonight, probably, as there was snow in the offing.<
br />
  Since Wallace was on his way to an open house at the provost's, he decided to lock up his papers and his laptop. He turned his key and threw open the trunk of the BMW, lifted his computer bag automatically, and stopped. Peter Turkott was lying inside his trunk. Anyone else would have screamed or dropped the case, at the very least. Wallace, a man of great reasonableness and self-control, slammed the trunk down and stowed his computer and his briefcase on the passenger's seat.

  Then he went back and, glancing warily around the lot, eased the trunk open. It was a dummy, of course, an over-elaborate prank from his graduate students, a trick of the light—he was much overdue for a visit to the eye doctor. A second look put paid to all that. There was Peter Turkott, with his middle name and numerals and his eminent reputation and public intellectual status, lying wrapped up in a blue tarp with only his face showing, quite, quite dead.

  Wallace put his hand forward cautiously: Turkott was not only dead but cold. And that was so typical of the man. Had Turkott been warm, Wallace could have called the police, confident that his presence for the last three hours at his seminar, “Sex and Spirit in Late Victorian Poetry,” put him, what was that ghastly phrase? Out of the frame.

  He might have called anyway, being an upstanding citizen, a responsible member of societies large and small. In fact, Wallace was sure he would have called if he and Turkott had not had a serious row in the conference room just the day before. Standing in the parking lot with his rival stiff in his trunk, Wallace had to struggle to remember the quarrel. He thought it had started with Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's feminist novel in verse, and the subject of a letter he'd written in reply to an over-the-top article in TLS.

  Yes, the altercation started there, the first tiny slippage before the avalanche. It ended with the department's administrative assistant threatening to call the chairman out of his Melville seminar and to summon the campus police if they didn't, right then and there, split the cost of the samovar that had been collateral damage. Naturally, most of the fault lay with Turkott, who combined inaccuracy with offensiveness, but Wallace felt that he had contributed just enough—though under great provocation—to make a 911 call awkward.

  So. How to cope? His first thought was that as an unknown someone had put Turkott in his trunk, he could simply pass the corpse along. Wouldn't the Late Unlamented be better foisted off on some graduate student of unblemished record? Some sunny personality without death feuds or recent threats of bodily violence—although how anyone could take words in a literary critical context as a viable threat was beyond Wallace's imagination.

  Find a car with a trunk that was unlocked, that was the thing. His own car was new and modern and needed the key, which raised questions of expertise and of the provenance of Turkott's remains, questions to be explored in some leisure hour. For now, Wallace went up and down the rows, discreetly trying the latches on hatchbacks and sedans, clunkers, and SUVs, and even a handsome black Mercedes that was far too good for Turkott.

  The one and only possibility was a little white Hyundai. Wallace hustled back to his car, reversed out at top speed, pulled up behind his target, and flipped up its trunk. He was ready to make the transfer when, foul luck, he saw a line of students converging on the lot. No time. Wallace slammed the trunk closed, slid back into his car, and took off.

  The dashboard clock read six fifty p.m.—unbelievably only fifteen minutes had passed since his whole life was upended. Where to go with Turkott was the question: the mall was too busy; the dump, barred and locked; the parks, snowbound and mostly closed for the season. What about that excavation on campus, the foundation for the new classroom building? Fenced and patrolled, and in any case, campus was a bad idea, suggesting academics, students, intellectuals with bitter conceptual differences. All undesirable.

  Wallace settled finally on the provost's open house, but not, alas, as a solution for Turkott. He realized that he couldn't miss the party, because first, he'd promised Morgan to stop in, “soon as my seminar's over,” and second, he was aware that any deviation from routine might be suspicious. Just the same, when he pulled over on the narrow road up to the provost's, he checked twice that his trunk was locked, like some nervous nelly.

  Outside was bad; inside was worse. Though exchanging little witticisms and interdepartment gossip was normally a pleasure, the party was torture. Eating the provost's elegant canapés, drinking the quite good wine, badgering the dean—he of the basilisk eyes and the noncommittal stare—about the upcoming budget cuts, even flirting discreetly with the provost's young, vain, and influential wife, Wallace kept seeing Turkott lying in his blue tarp in the back of the BMW.

  If only he could go out and lift the trunk and find Turkott gone. Or if only he could concentrate on a clever solution, despite the wandering modern jazz the provost favored and the laughter and the sallies of competitive intellects all round him. Couldn't Turkott be digested in some strange agricultural lagoon or incinerated in one of the bio labs? Didn't the sciences provide useful services like that? I should have paid more attention to such things, Wallace thought. He kept looking covertly at his watch, wishing it were time to make a graceful exit yet irrationally hoping that he could delay a decision.

  Finally, he was at the door, shaking hands with Morgan and his misses, who got a quick kiss. “Wonderful party, as always. You've spoiled us forever,” the usual persiflage. Then out into the storm, for while they had amused themselves inside, the straggling flakes of snow had regrouped into a thick white shower. Wallace struggled to get the BMW out while his colleagues rushed to be first away, pulling out without looking and accelerating down the narrow road as if they all had corpses in their trunks and the big decisions to make.

  Wallace knew that he had to act fast because he couldn't take forever to get home. He'd been careful to check the handsome grandfather clock in the provost's hall. It was probably inaccurate, but none the worse for his purposes. I left at quarter of eight; I remember the clock was striking. He could say that if asked, but, of course, he wouldn't be; it wouldn't come to that because he'd think of something.

  He considered the mall again, with its dumpsters and trash barrels and rows of cars, and he was headed that way on the reservoir road with black water on either side of him and empty road behind and before, when he slammed on the brakes and cut his lights. Enough! He jumped from the car, unlocked the trunk, grabbed Turkott, and with one giant heave, got him from the car to the pavement and then, one step, two, three, to the guard rail and over.

  A splash down below; thankfully, the water wasn't frozen. Wallace stood panting and wet with sweat in the white swirling flakes, until he thought he heard a car. He slammed the trunk shut, slid into the BMW, put it in gear, and roared away. He was at the main road, having almost slid out several times in his haste, before he remembered his seat belt. Fasten it, because everything has to be as usual.

  Irene was waiting with dinner for him, and though the provost's fancy canapés were not sitting any too well, he sat down to pot roast and did his best with it. “Wonderful,” he said.

  "Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Irene.

  Had he been too fulsome? Had he eaten enough? Wallace realized that for the foreseeable future his every action would be problematic. He invented a headache and went up to read in bed, saying that he had an early morning meeting with one of his doctoral students.

  "I'll get the car filled afterwards,” he told Irene, though he realized as soon as he spoke that he had no reason to mention it and that the big station on the highway was not on his normal route.

  "Pick up some eggs at the supermarket,” she said.

  He stopped himself just in time from saying that he wasn't going that way and, instead, made much of writing himself a note. This was going to be a wearying business. Even in his afterlife, Turkott was proving a nuisance, and Wallace realized that he would have to be on his mettle.

  The next morning, he forced himself to be very bright and helpful with his student, though
the chapter du jour was on Conrad's Nostromo, which Wallace thought singularly ill chosen with its theft and concealments and hidden motives and hidden treasure. He profoundly wished that it was a lighter full of silver that he'd hidden instead of Turkott.

  Finally, after two good hours of conscientious toil, with the rough spots of the chapter polished, the assumptions clarified, and the structure, sound, Wallace was able to drive off toward the reservoir. He expected to see police vans and an ambulance and streamers of yellow tape against the snow. Despite his exemplary self-control, his heart was pounding as he entered the strip of forest along the reservoir.

  The pines and hemlocks were frosted with globs of snow like whipped cream and a deep blue burned in the sunny sky. Wallace noticed none of this, just the unbroken whiteness of the reservoir on both sides. He almost went off the road in surprise. The black water of the previous night had been replaced by a pure white sheet, and Turkott, who'd bobbed up persistently in his dreams, was locked somewhere under the ice. Eventually, there would be spring, maybe even a January thaw, but not yet, and the delay would produce confusion. Wallace couldn't help smiling.

  At the gas station, he filled the car, ran it through the self-serve car wash, and paid the skinny, shiftless-looking detailer to go over the inside. “One picks up so much sand,” Wallace said, being friendly, making conversation.

  The guy grunted and started up his vacuum, whisking away, Wallace hoped, all traces of Turkott and his blue tarp. When the cleaning was finished, he parted with a modest tip and drove back to campus. He arrived, light of heart, to collect the gossip of the day, the absence of Peter Havermeyer Turkott III. Wallace was all ears and properly goggle eyed with surprise.

  Oh, the rumors, the joy! A lover was suggested, more than one, the malicious added. Rough trade from the city was the general feeling, though Wallace maintained the high ground on that suggestion. Nonetheless, this useful theory sent the campus police searching various urban alleys and abandoned buildings, while Wallace kept a nervous eye on the thermometer and developed a passion for the Weather Channel.