“Think you could do a picture—the way a police sketch artist does.”
“I can give it a try.” He picks up a pencil. It takes me an inordinate amount of time to summon up my mother’s nose, the shape of her eyes, her chin. I have a poor facial memory I decide. Perhaps my mom does, too and that’s why she calls me Suzie.
But after ten minutes or so, it’s a reasonably close facsimile. At least the accessories are right.
“This is your mom then?” he asks as we trade ten bucks for the portrait. “Wasn’t till I got the eyes right that I recognized her.”
“You know her?”
“Seen her around. Folks call her Brady.” He looks down at the drawing. “The braid, I guess. Never thought about it ’till now.”
“Have you seen her lately?”
He thinks about it. “Wish I could tell you exactly when. One day pretty much blends into the next around here. Every day—the same blue sky, the same seventy degrees.” We both look up. “It hasn’t been very long though. She and her boyfriend...”
“Boyfriend?”
I don’t know why it strikes me as so improbable. Just because she can’t hold onto a cell phone or a TV doesn’t mean she can’t hold onto a man. “Do you know his name—or where I can find him?”
The artist purses his lips. I am waiting for the “one day blends into the next” sentiment again when he suddenly comes up with it. “Name’s George. He’s usually at that recycling center over on Lamont Street. People that run it are pretty cool about lettin’ a few of the homeless drop in. Folks like it better than the shelters downtown where their junk gets stolen and they catch head lice. Center is just back-up place—for when someone’s hasslin’ them. Or if the cops are givin’ them a hard time. You know. You can usually just hang on the street.”
I thank the artist and drive to the recycling center on Lamont, where an employee in a tiny office at the far end of the huge facility says she doesn’t know anyone named Brady but thinks she might know George. “Big guy with a tat on the top of his head?” she asks, and then laughs. “That tat makes me chuckle every time I think of it.”
Now why didn’t the sketch artist mention this tattoo? Maybe George wears a hat outside? “Why does it make you laugh?”
“You never seen it then, honey?” I shake my head. “It looks like steam—like steam coming out of his head. Don’t know how they did it, but that’s what it looks like. Like ole George is blowing his top.”
“Is George the kind of guy who does that—the sort who gets angry?”
“Just the opposite. Nicest guy in the world.”
“Do you know where he might be?”
“Geez, no. I’m stuck in here all day. I don’t know where folks go when they leave here. Don’t know where they come from either.” She laughs harder. “They’re kinda like those zombies that just turn up—coming across the warehouse floor real slow.”
In the years I’ve come to check up on Mom, I’ve never had this much trouble finding her. Is it because of the murders that she’s keeping out of sight? Is it because she has a boyfriend? I am halfway to the Olney Street Police Station when it occurs to me. Usually when I arrive in Pacific Beach, I sit down on a bench and wait until Mom turns up. I read a book, have some iced coffee, take in some of the sun that’s scarce in Chicago a lot of the year, watch the street action, watch the sun set over the ocean. And sooner or later, Mom strolls by. Always. She favors that stretch near Trader Joe’s. It’s like her home. Why did I approach it differently today?
So that is what I do. I park the car, buy myself a cappuccino, pull out a paperback, and sit down on a bench. It takes about forty minutes. In fact, I am pulling out my map to consider other destinations when I catch a glimpse of her turning a corner. Her cart is fuller than ever. The boogie board is gone, but she seems to have picked up a number of other goodies. As she grows closer something unusual happens: she spots me and cries out, “Suzie!”
I rise smiling and wave. As she grows close, I pull out the article I bought in an airport shop as soon as my plane landed. I was so relieved to find it—had worried about its availability the entire flight. As soon as she’s near enough to me, near enough to put my hands on, I reach out for her. Scissors in hand, I cut off that braid.
Back to TOC
Marlowe’s Wake
Phillip DePoy
Christopher Marlowe held his dead father’s hand. Dressed in black, Marlowe was beyond mourning, body numb, brain silent. His father had been in perfect health that morning, had even spent an extra hour in his favorite tavern that afternoon, celebrating the fact that sixteen-year-old son Christopher was shortly bound for scholarship at Cambridge. He had staggered home, more drunk than usual.
By dark his body lay on the kitchen table of their family home in Canterbury.
Later friends and relatives would gather, dancing, singing, making all the noise they could in the hope they might somehow call back the departed from beyond the grave.
More often than not, the dead remained dead and were buried. Christopher had been born in 1564, the year after the worst plague in England’s history. The Black Death claimed the lives of eighty thousand people. There had been so little room to bury the dead that coffins were frequently dug up, older bones taken elsewhere, and graves reused. A grisly discovery had been made: one in twenty coffins had fierce scratch marks on the inside. Five percent of the people buried in plague times in England had been put in their graves alive.
So in an effort to avoid that horror, the Marlowe family dutifully waited, leaving the body of the beloved sire out for all to see, with no real hope of recovery in so obvious a corpse.
As Marlowe sat, eyes closed, dressed all in black, mumbling a confused prayer, the door swung open.
Instinctively Marlowe stood, dagger already in hand, as his father had taught him to do. In the doorway stood a thin man in a blood-red cape, rapier drawn.
The two men stared at each other for a moment.
“Dr. Lopez,” Marlowe finally muttered. “You’re too late, as you can see.”
Rodrigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew converted to Church of England, was the most renowned physician in Europe. An old friend to the Marlowe family, he had achieved lofty status when he had twice saved the life of Queen Elizabeth. Rumor in London had it that Lopez was shortly to be named the Royal Physician, a notion that enraged half the court. A Jew and a Portuguese tending to the world’s greatest monarch!
“Hello, Chris,” Lopez whispered, putting away his rapier. “Sorry. I saw someone sitting over the body and I was afraid—how long has he been like this?”
“Since late this afternoon,” Marlowe answered hopelessly.
“Good,” Lopez said crisply. “If you’ll allow me, I think I might have something that would help matters.”
Lopez moved to the dead man’s side, withdrawing a small leather pouch from beneath his arcane cloak.
“What are you doing?” Marlowe demanded.
“I’ll tell you later,” Lopez answered vaguely “if it works.”
With that Lopez opened the pouch, took out a small silver vial and a bag the size of an apple. Lopez lifted John Marlowe’s lifeless head carefully, setting the bag on the table. The contents of the vial were poured into the dead man’s mouth.
“Now hand me the bag,” Lopez commanded.
Marlowe blinked, then handed Lopez the bag in question. Lopez opened it and held it under the corpse’s nose.
“What are you doing?” Marlowe insisted again.
“Sh!” Lopez snapped.
Suddenly the deceased eyes opened wide and the dead man drew in a tremendous breath. As he did, he breathed in the dusty white contents of the bag that Lopez held under his nose. A second later John Marlowe gasped, coughed, and sat up on his own.
“Christ in heaven!” he hollered.
Marlowe, mouth wide, could only utter, “Father?”
In the blink of an eye John Marlowe recognized Lopez, nodded, and struggled to get off the table.
/>
“They’ve done it, then,” he said to Lopez.
Lopez only nodded.
The father, still dressed in his best suit of clothes, purple doublet, tall boots, took a deep breath.
“Chris, you know Dr. Lopez,” he said as if he were making a casual introduction in the street.
“Do I know Doctor—what the hell just happened?”
“First, a brief explanation of the science behind your father’s recent, though impermanent, demise,” Lopez interjected pedantically. “The combination of a lead cup and any ale may sometimes induce a death-like trance. Full many a man presumed dead from the plague has merely suffered this lead poisoning, hence our newly minted custom of the wake. Someone knew this, and accelerated the effect by somehow corroding a cup with a potion or a powder so that massive amounts of lead would find their way into your father’s blood and render him dead or near it.”
Believing that to be a sufficient explanation, Lopez began packing his pouch.
“No.” Marlowe gaped. “There’s more—there’s more to it than that. How do you know that’s what happened?”
“The cure for such a malady worked,” Lopez answered, “ergo my guess was correct.”
He shrugged.
Marlowe stared. “Father. You were dead.”
“I was not, in fact,” John said. “Obviously. Clever of you to send for Dr. Lopez.”
Lopez and the younger Marlowe looked at each other.
“I didn’t send for this man,” Christopher said softly. “I—you’re alive! I have to tell Mother.”
“Chris,” Lopez said as his mysterious pouch disappeared, “you should probably sit down.”
“Son,” John said, “there’s more to this than—yes, you should probably sit down.”
Marlowe sat. Only then did he realize he still had his dagger in his hand.
“Someone has nearly murdered your father,” Lopez began. “We should let them believe they have succeeded.”
“Murdered my father?” Marlowe looked between the other two men. “Why would anyone want to kill him? He makes boots!”
“If it were possible,” Lopez answered, “I would find that out for myself. But I am officially in London at this moment. I am not here. Your father won’t have the strength to do anything like this for days, and by then it will be too late. And as I’ve said, there is an advantage in allowing the murderers to believe that they have succeeded.”
Marlowe’s head swam.
“The Pope’s men have been in Canterbury for years now,” the father began. “Because of our family’s Catholic history, they continue to believe we might help them restore England to the Pope, and even take away our Queen. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but I have been convinced—I have been persuaded—to feign an interest in their cause, and to report their activities to—to the Queen’s officials. From time to time.”
“What?” Marlowe said, straining to believe his ears.
“Dr. Lopez and I have been training you to similar effect since you were ten,” John Marlowe went on, “though you did not know it. Now I’m afraid, a bit before your time, you must use these subtle skills we’ve taught you and take matters in hand. Tonight, I’m afraid. It is imperative you discover the identity of the head of their organization. They’re bold enough, now, to resort to murder. So now is the time to stop them. You must find out who killed me.”
“No.” Marlowe shook his head.
“You can do it,” his father said. “I have faith in you.”
“I—I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he stammered.
“If I were in your place,” Lopez said, drawing his cloak around his neck, “I would start in the tavern where your father was last drinking. The place where he was killed.”
“He’s right,” John Marlowe agreed. “When I announced I was celebrating your Cambridge scholarship, two men bought me a drink. One was all in green and the other had a face like an otter. Look for them. One of them is very likely our man.”
“They won’t still be there,” Marlowe snapped, “after they’ve killed a man.”
John Marlowe smiled. “They will, in fact. In the first place, they believe they did their work surreptitiously, and were not detected. And in the second place, they were drunk beyond belief, with the apparent intention of drinking even more. They’ll be there because they’re idiots.”
Even after dark the Parrot Inn was crowded, a riot of color and noise. Men in torn black tunics, boys in soiled red doublets, old drunkards in brown rags all crowded around the long tables. The floor, hard-packed soil of England, was covered with straw, old food, and mangy curs. The low ceiling was held aloft by six columns of rough timber.
At the bar, a small oak barricade against the onslaught of customers, stood the woman of the house, Nell Whatley. Beside her: husband Pinch. It was widely imagined he acquired the name because he was a thief; Nell insisted it had more to do with the gesture which had first brought them together.
Three younger women in nearly identical ginger dresses danced and weaved their way through the glut of men, setting cups here, plates there, enduring the occasional rude suggestion.
Ordinarily in a place like this the serving women might have entertained or even made profit by rude suggestions. Serving women in public houses were very often public women as well. But it was known far and wide that these three girls were the dark-eyed daughters of Nell and Pinch, and the all had a different response to such behavior. A man named Leyden had once accosted the youngest, Jenny, with carnal invitations. As a testament to that moment in history, a withered leathery disc was affixed to the column closest to the fire. It was a warning, there for all to see. Jenny had cut off Leyden’s right ear and nailed it to the wood.
No one bothered the girls at the Parrot Inn.
Jenny excused herself when she nudged past the two men who were leaning against Leyden’s Post, staring at Marlowe as he entered the Parrot and slipped behind his father’s usual table.
“Sorry, boys,” her voice lilted. “Do you want a bench? There’s one by the bar.”
She always had a kind word for a stranger.
“Skiv off, you,” the taller man hissed without even looking at her. “We’re trying to work.”
That man was dressed in dark green from head to foot, so tall he had to stoop. Still his soiled red hair brushed the roof beams.
The other man was shorter, and did, indeed, look a little like an otter. He was wrapped all in dirty grey. He kept his silent gaze on Marlowe.
“All right.” She smiled.
A moment later Jenny brought ale and a cut of brown bread to Marlowe’s table. He had already taken out a piece of paper and a pen and begun writing, as he often did.
“Kit, sorry to hear about your father,” she whispered in his ear, her black hair brushing across his cheek. “Listen, I wouldn’t look now, but there’s two boys at Leyden’s Post who’s staring you down.”
He kept writing, his eyes glued to the paper. “Hello, Jen.”
“Should I tell Papa?”
Marlowe reached into his doublet and pulled out two coins. “Thank you, sweet, I saw them when I came in. They’ve been in here since this afternoon?”
She nodded.
“I see.” Marlowe continued writing. “I think they may be the ones who—who killed my father, as a matter of fact.”
“Killed?” she asked breathlessly.
“Soft, Jen,” Marlowe said, still not looking up. “I’ll take care of it.”
“You don’t need help with them?” she asked, alarmed. “They’ve both got knives.”
He looked up. His smile dazzled, his words were drawn out.
“I am more afraid of your lips,” he murmured, “than I am of any man’s blade. I know how to fight a dagger, but there is no defense against the taste of your mouth. Or so I have imagined.”
“Oh.” She tried to steady herself, but she appeared unused to the ordinary poetry of public seduction. For a heartbeat or two, it seemed
she had forgotten how to breathe.
Still, she did her best to return to herself. “Well, at least let me get out of your way before you go carving up them boys.”
She straightened up, managed a wink, and was off in a ginger blur toward the bar.
Marlowe kept writing with his left hand, but under the table, in the darkness, his right hand found the knife he had tucked into his boot. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the two men by the post. They were making the appearance of warming themselves by the fire, but it was ridiculously clear that they were, in fact, studying Marlowe.
Jenny whispered a few well-chosen words to her father as she set down empty cups. Pinch nodded once, and put his hand under the bar.
The rest of the crowd of twenty or more—a large number for the size of the room—seemed oblivious to any impending danger.
Marlowe finished what he was writing. He nodded, satisfied, it seemed, with what was on the page. He calmly leaned back in his chair. His face and body were then obscured by the shadows in his corner.
In a blur of black shadow, his arm shot forward.
In the next instant he leaned forward again, took up the quill, and began, calmly and steadily, to write more on his page, as if nothing had changed.
But the weasel-man in grey began to bleed. Marlowe’s knife was stuck in his shoulder. The man beside him, dressed in green, didn’t notice until the littler man grabbed his companion’s arm and spilled blood on it.
The taller man let out a shriek, but it was barely heard above the din of the room. No one seemed to notice that anything was amiss.
Pinch’s hand relaxed on the thick wooden club behind the bar.
“Help!” the tall man in green cried out at last, a bit of panic in his eyes as he scanned the room for the owner of the knife that was stuck in his companion’s shoulder.
Several men permitted themselves a glance then.
Marlowe stood. “My God,” he said theatrically, “I think that man’s been stabbed.”
He bounded across the room, deliberately provoking laughter at his choreography. One man even applauded.
Murder at the Beach: Bouchercon 2014 Anthology Page 14
