By Hook or By Crook

by Gorman, Ed

  I looked at the aging cook with new eyes. In her younger days, this woman had escaped a gun battle perched naked on a bicycle.

  “A last question remains,” Mr. O’Nelligan said. “How did Mrs. Leroy and Groom become partners in crime? Here I have no solid bridge, but I will make a leap. At an earlier glory table this summer, the ex-police detective encounters the Browleys’ cook, whom he recognizes from years before. This is, after all, the wife of the man who put four bullets in him. At some juncture, Groom perhaps threatens to reveal her unsavory past unless she pays him a certain fee. Perhaps she then makes an offer — why settle for a handful of cash when something as precious as a gem-studded shield can be obtained with her help and guidance? In this way, Mrs. Leroy turns her would-be blackmailer into her accomplice.”

  “You pretty much got it,” Groom admitted. “I tell ya, that witch can make a guy jump through hoops. You wouldn’t know it to look at her.”

  Mr. O’Nelligan now walked over to Mrs. Leroy and locked eyes with her. I wondered what was going through his mind. Only days ago, these two had been trading flirtations; now he was accusing her of murder. “Tell, madam, what do you say to all that I have laid at your door?”

  Mrs. Leroy never said a word, but her eyes turned to fire. Then it all happened. She let out a high, animal scream, and a butcher’s knife appeared in her hand. It flashed across the Irishman’s chest, dropping him to the floor.

  “Mr. O’Nelligan!” I knelt beside him, quickly joined by Audrey.

  Mrs. Leroy ran into her adjacent room, and we heard a lock click. Handleman slammed his sizable girth against the door, splintering it open on the third try. Guns drawn, he and his men rushed in.

  Audrey undid the top buttons of Mr. O’Nelligan’s shirt to reveal a thin red line across his chest. “She barely marked me,” he told us. “I’m all right.” We helped him to his feet.

  I heard Handleman curse. Moments later, he stepped back into the kitchen. “We found her on the bed. She drove the blade through her own heart. One cool customer.”

  We all just stood there, saying nothing. Then Mr. O’Nelligan walked over to the doorway of Mrs. Leroy’s room and looked in. After a moment, he recited something no doubt by Yeats:

  “I balanced all, brought all to mind,

  The years to come seemed waste of breath,

  A waste of breath the years behind

  In balance with this life, this death.”

  Thirteen

  The next morning, I felt well enough that Audrey agreed to leave me and return home for work. I would drive back later that day. After tying up a few loose ends with Handleman, who grumbled something at us that may have been a thanks, Mr. O’Nelligan and I stopped by Nina Browley’s one last time. We found her outside at a little table with Paige and Pobenski, who, I noticed sat together with their fingers intertwined.

  Polecat nearly fell over himself with his apologies for hitting me. I accepted them rather graciously, I thought, considering he darn near decapitated me. Nina presented me with a wildly generous check, then walked us to my car.

  “This is my last day here,” she said. “I’m selling the place directly.”

  I nodded. “I can understand why.”

  “And, of course, I’ll need to find another cook. Who would ever have believed ... Well, thank you both for all you’ve done. We did avenge Clarence, didn’t we?” She spun away from us and headed back towards the house, whistling cheerfully.

  “A rare creature, indeed,” observed Mr. O’Nelligan.

  We drove home through a light, windy drizzle, the chatter of the radio in the background as we talked.

  “We never actually learned what made Browley tick,” I noted. “What did his glory tables really meant to him? What did he and Nina mean to each other?”

  “No, we never learned. But then, in the end, we did not need to. Let him rest with his secrets. The hearts of other men are oft a mystery.”

  As is yours, Mr. O’Nelligan. I wondered how the heart of this old scholar-warrior was faring in the wake of what it had just passed through. I wanted to ask at what moment he began to suspect Mrs. Leroy. And had that moment overlapped with their playful banter? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.

  Mr. O’Nelligan continued. “We were here to solve a crime, not judge a man. As he would have wanted it, Clarence Browley perished like a knight, sword in hand. Ironically, he was slain by a king’s wife while defending his own castle. Still ... to each man his glory.

  “Well, you certainly earned yours,” I said. “I owe you everything. All our success there was because of O’Nelligan, not Plunkett.”

  “What are you saying, Lee?” He looked aghast. “Are you not the man who took the blow of a middleweight boxer and lived to tell? Are you not the man who put pen to paper to chronicle this case so undauntedly? Are you not the very man who dragged me from my melancholic life into this grandest of adventures? It is I, dear friend, who owe you.”

  To Mr. O’Nelligan’s delight, a familiar voice rose again from the radio.

  This time Elvis informed us that we were nothing but hound dogs. Hound dogs ... aren’t they trackers? Well, then, damned if I didn’t agree.

  • • •

  MICHAEL NETHERCOTT is a writer of mystery and supernatural tales whose work has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine: Crimestalkers Casebook; The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; Plays, the Drama Magazine for Young People; the anthologies Dead Promises, Gods and Monsters and Damned Nation; and various other periodicals. O’Nelligan’s Glory received the Black Orchid Novella Award, and Nethercott has written a novel featuring the O’Nelligan/ Plunkett detective team from the novella. He lives in southern Vermont with his wife, daughter, and son. Visit his website is www.michaelnethercott.com.

  BETWEEN SINS

  By Robert S. Levinson

  “A lot of people would like to see me dead,” Judge Gillian Armstrong said. “I have no interest whatsoever in satisfying their desire.”

  “Walter Farnum in particular.”

  “Currently, yes, Detective. Farnum’s the latest in a long line of criminals that started forming even before I graduated from the DA’s office to Superior Court, but this is the first time I’m bothered. Enough to call on our police department’s new Priority Protection Squad.”

  “The squad’s not so new anymore,” Detective Jack Reno said, adding a half smile that seemed to apologize to the judge for correcting her. “It’s been a year-plus and so far, so good. Haven’t dropped the ball and lost a VIP yet.”

  “Would that statistic have the law of averages working against me?”

  “Not when the law is working for you, Your Honor.”

  Reno watched while Judge Armstrong absorbed his latest grain of logic, her stylishly maintained fingernails tapping out a nervous melody on the highly polished redwood surface of her desk. Her ocean blue eyes wandering the office walls; periodically stopping to examine his face. Pry inside his mind. Satisfy herself that his words reflected his true feelings about the situation.

  He recognized he was seeing a side of the judge that wasn’t part of any public record and added to what he did know: she was among the most popular jurists occupying the bench in Los Angeles Superior Court, especially with the law-and-order crowd that routinely hailed Judge Armstrong as one tough cookie, who meted out tough justice exclusively. Prosecutors and defense attorneys understood that the only way a convicted defendant might get a break in her courtroom was to trip and fracture a bone.

  “You’re staring at me,” she said, abruptly putting an end to her finger-tapping, pushing her chair back from the desk and adjusting herself into a more judicial pose. “Tell me, why is that, Detective.”

  Reno considered the consequences of an honest answer before deciding to — what the hell — give it to her; some of it, anyway. It wasn’t a punishable offense. For now, don’t let on he saw the frightened little girl inside the steel-plated woman.

  He said, “Only confirming what I always
saw and thought back two months ago when I was testifying in the Keating murder trial, Your Honor, how your pictures in the newspapers and on television, they never once did you justice.” He laughed. His pun, if that’s what it was, had not been intentional.

  The curiosity on Judge Armstrong’s face briefly crossed over into concern, her sleek eyebrows drawn together at the rise of her perfectly sculpted nose, her sensual lips pulling tight, giving greater accent to her high cheekbones, then fell into a frown, as if flattery was not the kind of testimony she encouraged.

  Reno knew instinctively the judge was playacting.

  He’d never known a woman who didn’t appreciate a kind word, from the lowest of the street hooks pumping their wares on Sunset Boulevard, back when he was working vice with Scotty Brinkman, to his ex, especially when she got to moaning and groaning about some new wrinkle signaling to the world how she was about to turn forty, making even worse noise than that in those last weeks before Jackie Junior and then Jenny were born.

  After a moment, staring at the ceiling as if it were a memory screen, Judge Armstrong said, “Yes, I’m reminded now of how you spent much of your time on the witness stand with your eyes trained on me. I admonished you several times to address your answers to the jury or the district attorney’ “

  “The DA wasn’t as pretty as you, Your Honor.” She swatted away his words. Reno grinned. “Besides, I was only returning the favor,” he said. “You did your own fair share of undressing me with those big baby blues of yours.”

  “Your ego is misinforming you, Detective. Any looks you received from me were of absolute and utter disdain for your testimony in Keating’s trial for murder. You permitted the defense to break you down on the stand and single-handedly turned a certain conviction into a not guilty verdict.”

  “The truth did that, not me. It was a weak case going in, strictly circumstantial. All I did was tell the truth, especially when the DA tried to steer my testimony his way. Perjury wasn’t a game I was prepared to play, Judge. Would ever play.”

  “And because of that, the jury sent that killer back on the street to kill again, as he did last month. Is it any wonder then that I consider you and people like you disrupters of justice whom I can not dismiss from my mind and my life fast enough?”

  “That and worse you said about me to the media hounds after the trial. Yet, here I am. Here we are. So, why’s that, Your Honor? You have some explaining to do, don’t you think?” He aimed a finger at her. “Nice necklace by the way.”

  She reached up and covered the necklace’s centerpiece, a carved ivory lion in repose that seemed to be using as its den the gulf between her oversized breasts, erect as pyramids inside a midnight black cashmere sweater a size too small for her athletic frame. She was in her early fifties, a decade older than him, but not to look at her now, free of the staid judicial robes that hid a sensuous woman. She smelled good, too; not any perfume she’d ever worn in court, or he would have remembered.

  She seemed to welcome his lingering gaze for another moment or two, then abruptly turned her back on Reno, saying, “Any explaining I have to do I’ve already done, to Assistant Chief Grace, before him to the chairman of the Board of Police Commissioners, Tommy Dix. I told them about the threats on my life. Both agreed Walter Farnum was the likely source and insisted on involving the Priority Protection Squad. And you, Detective, convincing me Jack Reno was the best man to supervise my safety and well-being, so — ” whirling around to face him again, motioning a finger like an arrow aimed at his heart “ — here you are, Detective, over my strong personal feelings.”

  “And my own,” he said.

  She leaned forward, palms on the desk surface, using it as a pulpit while declaring in words dripping with sarcasm, “At least we have that in common, Detective.”

  That look in her eyes suggested to Reno it was more than that — like a spider sizing up a fly. He said, “If we’re going to be hanging together for the duration, please call me ‘Jack.’”

  “Call me ‘Judge Armstrong.’ Or ‘Judge.’ Or ‘Your Honor’ ... Any one of those will do, Detective Reno.”

  • • •

  Judge Armstrong lived in Beachwood Canyon, about a mile up from Franklin Avenue, in a modest bungalow sandwiched between a lavish Craftsman cottage and another of those ultra-glitzy three-story condominiums that were sucking the history out of the hills below the HOLLYWOOD sign.

  Reno’s original protection blueprint called for exterior surveillance on a 24/7 basis, with a pair of uniforms on-site even when the judge was not around, guarding against unlawful entry by persons unknown in an area given to high incidents of burglaries and break-ins.

  He put himself on the day shift, glued to the judge’s side from the time he met her at her front door to whatever time he dropped her off and said goodnight; always discreetly out of sight but within shooting range, if it came to that.

  The blueprint worked for three days, until the morning Judge Armstrong didn’t answer the doorbell.

  Or his hammering on the door after a couple minutes.

  Or Reno calling out her name after he broke open a window and climbed inside, his calls growing from a cautious question into an anxious shout as he methodically hunted after the judge, a two-handed grip on his Glock 23, using the weapon like a divining rod.

  She had to be in here somewhere, damn it.

  Reno had escorted her safely into the bungalow shortly after nine last night, after she’d hoisted more than a few at a retirement party for the Honorable Thurston Hale, stepping down from the Superior Court bench after forty-seven years because he was no longer able to stay reasonably awake or control his bladder during a trial.

  Judge Armstrong had imbibed one bubbly too many, or two or three or four, and was rubber-legged. No way she as going to make it past the front door without Reno’s help. He propped her up, one arm around her waist, the other supporting her elbow, and guided her one careful step at a time down the central hallway to her bedroom, smiling at the discovery it was furnished and decorated like a little girl’s room.

  Lots of pink and powder puff blue.

  Stuffed teddy bears all over the place.

  Display shelves on two of the walls full of Barbie dolls and other types he could not put a name to in a variety of sizes and shapes, all elegantly costumed.

  Nothing he could reconcile with the tough-minded judge he was trying to maneuver onto the floral-patterned bedspread, only —

  She wasn’t making the job easy.

  Crooning an incoherent song, Judge Armstrong locked her hands behind Reno’s neck and pulled him down. He landed on his knees alongside the bed, but her tugging brought his face close enough for her to reach his lips with hers.

  “Um,” she said, a kittenish purr emanating from the base of her throat. She found his tongue. A growl replaced the purr and quickly was overshadowed by a moan.

  Reno realized the moan was his.

  “You bit my damn lower lip,” he shouted at her. “I’m tasting blood.”

  “Mm, yummy. Me, too,” she said.

  He broke free of the judge, turned and fled the room, ignoring her mush-mouth calls for him to come back, help her get ready for beddy-bye, share her goodnight prayers, tuck her in, but the name she was signaling him with sounded nothing like “Jack” or “Reno.” Nowhere close. Not that it made a difference. He knew to get the hell out of there, knew better than to get caught up in her emerging demons. He was attracted to her, yeah, but years of experience had taught him never to mix business with pleasure. Not an easy lesson to learn.

  The first time he did, it had cost him his marriage.

  The second time, a promotion.

  The time after that —

  Oh, hell.

  He’d take his chances.

  Reno wheeled around and headed back into the bedroom.

  Judge Armstrong was dead to the world.

  Snoring loud enough to bring in the hogs.

  He threw a blanket over her and retreat
ed, this time for keeps, quietly inching the door shut.

  Now, this morning, at the bedroom again, Reno assumed the usual cop-cautious, gun-ready approach to entering, flat against the wall to the side of the closed door. He called for her and after several seconds of silence angled around and kicked the door open. Overnight, the room had become a disaster area. The bears and the dolls were scattered. Dresser drawers had been pulled open and their contents tossed. There was a diagonal crack in the vanity table mirror, Her clothing had been moved from the closet and piled bonfire style in the middle of the room, and Judge Armstrong —

  Reno discovered her after busting through the connecting door to the bathroom. She was sitting in the tub, still in the outfit she’d worn last night at the Hale retirement party, her face set in an indifferent expression that suggested neither fear nor relief.

  “What the hell happened?” he said, holstering his Glock and offering her his hand.

  She looked up like she was seeing him for the first time and waved him away. “You’ll find a tall bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet,” she said. “Get me three.”

  That was it for conversation until they were settled at the kitchen table over coffees he’d had a uniform bring in from the Beachwood Village Coffee Shop.

  “You asked what happened,” she said. “Middle of the night, a noise startled me awake. Not sure what had caused it, not sure where I was or how I had gotten here, only certain I was not alone. I grasped the likelihood it was one or more of Walter Farnum’s killer minions come after me and somehow — ” turning especially sarcastic “ — had penetrated your impenetrable system for ensuring my safety. I knew better than to inspire a confrontation. I hurried to the bathroom and locked the door and strangled on my breath while hearing my bedroom being torn apart. That’s what happened to me, Detective. Now you tell me what happened that made it possible for this attack on my person to happen.”

  “It wasn’t necessarily Farnum’s people, Judge Armstrong. Maybe a burglar. Wouldn’t be the first burglary in this neighborhood.”