Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/10

by EQM

  “Of course,” I said. “Reverend Pressley didn’t say exactly where his sick cousin lives, did he?”

  “I think he mentioned someplace in Louisiana. Isn’t that where they make the best pralines?”

  “So I hear. Do you still have the box the pralines came in?”

  “Certainly. They’re so rich, I may be a month finishing them.”

  “As it happens, I’m from Louisiana, and I’m always on the lookout for good pralines. Could you check the box and see where he bought them?”

  “Just a moment.”

  I tried to keep my breathing and pulse from racing, as the electric tingle became a buzz that filled my head.

  At the very best, Quincy Pressley had withheld information from me.

  I didn’t like to think about the worst.

  “Here it is,” she said, as she got back on the phone. “The box is from the Allons Praline Factory. That part is in English. Then the rest is words I don’t recognize. The first is R-U-E. Then D-E, and after that is C-H-A-R-T ...”

  “Rue de Chartres,” I said, in a practiced French accent. “What about the rest?”

  “The next line is spelled V-I-E-U-X, and C-A ...”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Stillman. I know the rest.”

  “Now how on earth can you know the rest? I haven’t spelled it yet!”

  “I know it anyway. I’ll be sure to pass your message on to Reverend Pressley. And you enjoy those pralines, you hear?”

  I racked the receiver and stared at the wall for a few moments.

  I knew the Allons Praline Factory, and I knew Rue de Chartres.

  Vieux Carre was another name for the French Quarter in New Orleans.

  Where I lived.

  Where Katie Costner had been murdered.

  And, as I had just discovered, where Quincy Pressley had been only a day or so before I came to Prosperity.

  Perhaps, I tried to convince myself, it was all a coincidence. Maybe Quincy really did have a sick cousin. Maybe he had simply neglected to tell me he had just returned from New Orleans.

  I had to know more.

  Among the many dubious talents I have acquired over the years is the ability to toss a desk without leaving any evidence that I’d been there. I quickly went through his drawers. Quincy kept his desk in meticulous shape. It didn’t take long to find his bank and credit-card statements.

  Within minutes, I discovered a set of used air tickets indicating that he had flown to New Orleans two days before Katie Costner was murdered, and had flown back the day after the killing. They were sitting on top of a manila envelope, the only two items in the top right drawer of the desk. I opened the manila envelope, looked at the contents, and knew almost everything I needed to know.

  Circumstantial, maybe. On the other hand, it meant that I had to confront Quincy with what I’d found.

  And I needed to make a telephone call.

  Quincy returned from the hospital around lunchtime. I waited for him in the living room, with the canceled ticket stubs in my hand.

  “Hi, Pat,” he said. “Hope you weren’t too bored.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You had a call.”

  “Oh? From whom?”

  “Inez Stillman.”

  I thought I saw him freeze, for perhaps half a second.

  “Lovely woman,” he said. “Pillar of the church.”

  “She likes you, too. She asked me to give you a message.”

  “What is it?”

  I lowered my voice, and tried to sound menacing.

  “She loves the pralines.”

  This time he did come to a full stop, his back to me. I think I saw his shoulders rise and his chest expand in an exhausted sigh. When he turned toward me, slowly, I could see the concern in his eyes.

  “You have something to say?” he asked.

  “Just a question. Why?”

  Quincy shrugged and sat in the wing chair that had been placed perpendicular to the sofa.

  “That’s a pretty big question,” he said. “It implies that you think you know something.”

  “Let’s say that I’m about ninety-five percent certain that you killed Katie Costner. Can we start with that?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You can’t prove anything, of course. I really do have a sick cousin in Louisiana. She provided me with an excellent reason to go to New Orleans. I’d been waiting for some time for an excuse.”

  I held up the manila envelope I had found.

  “This is a report from the private investigator you hired to find Katie.”

  “Yes. Her mother’s request. Susan was all alone after her husband died. She knew she was sick, and she wasn’t inclined to do much about it. She asked me to find her daughter. She wanted Katie to come back to Prosperity for the funeral when she died. I hired that investigator. He did a very thorough job. Doesn’t prove I did anything.”

  I laid the envelope on the sofa.

  “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m not in the proof business. I know you did it, and you know you did it. I only want to know why.”

  Quincy stood, slowly.

  “I think I may have a sherry. Could I interest you in one?”

  “No.”

  He crossed to the small cabinet in the front room, opened it, and poured a bit of amber liquid in a cordial glass. He returned to his seat and took a sip.

  “I came to Prosperity, oh, thirty years ago, only a few years after I was ordained. I felt a calling. I wanted to work in a small town, where I could make a real difference. I wanted my service to have meaning.

  “There was a young man who came to me. He brought his wife. They were having ...” He waved his free hand in the air. “... marital difficulties. The man was depressed. The woman was frustrated, and unsatisfied. They were on the verge of separation and divorce. The woman wanted a child, very badly, and it didn’t appear that she was likely to have one.

  “I was in this very room one day, preparing a sermon, when the wife came to my door. She was crying. She was frightened that her husband might be considering leaving her. I tried to comfort her. I offered her a sherry,” he said, holding up the glass. “She accepted it.

  “We talked at length. When she left, I felt that I had done a good thing. I liked that feeling. It was the reason I came here, to do good things.

  “She returned several days later, again seeking comfort. I did what I could. After a few weeks, she visited every three days or so. Then she offered to volunteer in the church. I needed the help, so I accepted.”

  He took another sip from the cordial glass.

  “I have no desire to go over the more sordid details. I’ll simply say that we became much closer than we should have. I regretted it, certainly. I am a man of the cloth, after all, but I am also a man. A ... very weak man, it seems. The wife came to me after a few months, almost shaking with excitement. She said there had been a miracle and that she was going to have a baby. She believed that this child would mend the torn fabric of her marriage.”

  “This came as something of a surprise to her husband, I’d imagine.”

  “I think he ignored the improbability of it all and decided to accept the child as a gift from God—which, in an abstract and indirect sense, it certainly was. They had a boy.”

  “Roger Thoreson,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Roger was your son, and the apple of everyone’s eye in this town. Everyone blamed Katie Costner for his suicide.”

  “Yes.”

  “ You blamed Katie for his suicide.”

  “Well, of course I did. After his father died, I tried to act the role of a surrogate father to Roger. I tried to warn him about Katie. He wouldn’t listen. She lured him in, and she drained him, and then she moved on, like the vampire she was.”

  I tried to pick up the story.

  “Katie’s father died, and she didn’t attend the funeral. Her mother became ill, and asked you to find her. You hired the detective. He located her and told you where she was. Katie�
��s mother died, and you didn’t bother to tell Katie.”

  “She wouldn’t have come,” Quincy said. “Katie had no intention of ever setting foot in Prosperity again, after the way she had been treated. There was no point in contacting her.”

  “You knew where she was, though,” I said. “You waited until you had a reason to travel to Louisiana. You flew to New Orleans. You went to Katie’s home. She welcomed you, of course. You’re a preacher. You weren’t one of those people who drove her out of town. You passed the time of day, and then you found the opportunity to strike and you choked the life right out of her.”

  “And then I bought a box of pralines for Inez Stillman,” he said. “It’s true. Every word.”

  He drained the glass of sherry and examined the glint of sunlight in the cut-glass cordial.

  “I ... think perhaps another would do nicely,” he said.

  He stood and went again to the cabinet. He reached in, but instead of pulling out the decanter, he withdrew a nasty looking revolver.

  “It really would have been much better if you had stayed in New Orleans.”

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said.

  “The gravediggers were at the church this morning. They just finished Katie’s grave. The people from the funeral supply will deliver the vault for the casket in an hour or two. My plan is for you to be at the bottom of that grave, covered with a tarpaulin. The vault will be placed on top of you. It’s made of concrete, and I daresay it will crush you quite badly. Nobody will ever know you are buried underneath Katie.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said.

  “You’re a stranger here. Nobody knows you. Nobody will miss you if you simply disappear. Now, I need you to go to the back of the house. I can’t have blood all over my living room. Clues, you know. I watch the television crime shows. I know what to avoid.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What? This is a real gun, Pat. I know how to use it. Don’t think for a second I won’t just shoot you where you sit.”

  I should have been angry, but Quincy just saddened me.

  “You aren’t going to shoot me.”

  “Give me one good reason why I won’t.”

  Judd Wheeler stepped into the room from the kitchen and leveled a pump shotgun at Quincy.

  “Because if you do, I’ll have to shoot you,” he said. “I heard everything. Gallegher called me right after he found the evidence, and explained his theory. He picked me up at the station, so my cruiser wouldn’t be here when you got home. Drop your gun right now, or I will drop it for you.”

  Quincy was distracted, so I shot out my hand and grabbed the revolver from him. He seemed mystified. He didn’t even bother to resist.

  I felt a little sorry for him.

  The next day, I stood at the graveside while the local Methodist minister conducted Katie Costner’s burial ceremony in Quincy Pressley’s stead. I had long since resolved my differences with religion and I allowed myself to focus on the reverence of the occasion.

  Katie was buried next to her parents. Just two rows over lay Roger Thoreson and his mother, and the man who died thinking he was Roger’s father. It felt a lot like the end of a Shakespeare tragedy—two families brought to ruin by the weaknesses and flaws of a man who believed that he was both an instrument of mercy and a sword of vengeance.

  I didn’t stick around to see them lower the casket into the vault. I didn’t want to hear the scrape of wood on concrete, or the thud of falling earth. I had endured enough of Prosperity and its secrets to last me a lifetime.

  By dinnertime I was three hundred miles closer to home.

  Copyright © 2010 Richard Helms

  Previous Article Department of First Stories

  Department of First Stories

  LESSON PLAN

  By Naben Ruthnum

  Like a number of other EQMM writers, Canadian Naben Ruthnum has had another artistic career, as a rock musician. He spent the past ten years in Vancouver where he played in a rock band called Bend I ...

  Top of Department of First Stories

  Fiction Passport to Crime

  Department of First Stories

  LESSON PLAN

  By Naben Ruthnum

  Like a number of other EQMM writers, Canadian Naben Ruthnum has had another artistic career, as a rock musician. He spent the past ten years in Vancouver where he played in a rock band called Bend Sinister. He wrote “Lesson Plan” between tours with the band, then decided that the touring life wasn't for him. He is now pursuing a master’s degree in English at McGill University, where, he tells us, he just finished a novel in the vein of Kingsley Amis.

  I walked out of the school, past my overdressed and insult-ingly young boss, past the helpless secretary. I was clutching Grace’s narrow forearm through her sweater. It felt like two hot twigs wrapped in cashmere. I took her up the stairs so fast she had to hop. Outside, it happened to be as cold and rainy as people imagine Seattle is year-round. We stood under the canopy for a moment without talking, which is funny. She was the only person I’d had an honest conversation with since I arrived in this city.

  With most people, I wouldn’t know how to begin talking about my work. And I certainly don’t want to, which again seems a little funny, as my day job involves talking and little else. I’ve managed to find the separation that self-helpers are always talking about: My job isn’t my work. But my work does come out of my job.

  I moved to Seattle right after university, coming out West with hopes of finding a band, getting in on a music scene that I’d been picturing in my head. I soon found out it didn’t exist. My bass sat around unused. So did I. I grabbed the first job I could get, teaching ESL—that’s English as a Second Language—at one of the dozens of schools in town, this one not too far from the shimmering seafood-and-tourist reek of the fish market.

  ESL had been my fallback job all through university, the work that kept my small gut full of beer and my nose entertained with whatever I felt like snuffing up there. After my first couple of years teaching, I did what I’d forbidden myself from doing—I slept with a student.

  Eun Hee was, of course, my favorite student, a cute Korean girl who had a fair number of interesting things to say. It’s painful for me to recall most of the dialogues I had in the identical gray booths of the identical schools I taught at, but hers stood out.

  “Yeah, I like baseball, okay, yeah, Koreans do,” she said the first day, impatient at being asked the same question twice. I’d lost concentration. Teaching conversation is harder than it seems—you’re being paid to extend small talk that you’d usually be screaming to get away from into hour-long dissertations on emptiness. The students bored me, and I bored them. Eun Hee could talk, though. Her English wasn’t perfect, but her interests were. Restaurants, getting drunk, gangster movies, noisy rock, and the inevitable end to that sequence. We spent time together outside of class, and even though we weren’t really dating, we were doing something. She quit the school and spent her time with me for the rest of her couple of months in town. On her last morning, she gave me an envelope.

  “What’s this?” I was practically unconscious from our third bout between the sheets in as many hours. I don’t usually screw to impress but I didn’t know the next time I’d have such regular access to a pretty girl, so I was getting the most out of it.

  “It’s for you. Present,” she said, getting up and picking a soft towel off the floor to wipe the sweat from her body. She unzipped her already-packed suitcase and picked out a few things to put on for her flight back to Seoul.

  “What present? You don’t need to get me a present.” Especially a green present in an envelope that had this kind of weight. I told her I wasn’t a gigolo.

  “What?”

  “Gigolo. Like prostitute, but a man.”

  She snapped on her bra. She always put her bra on before any other piece of clothing, and I liked that. “I learned more from you and had more fun with you than in the conversation school. That,
in envelope, is my last two months’ tuition. I got a refund. And now you get it.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “I learned from you. You keep the money.”

  I kept the money. It lasted me the rest of the year—I was stunned to find out what kind of tuition students paid at that slipshod language school, which gave airhead college kids ten bucks an hour to blather and occasionally teach the students a new word. Most of the other teachers spelled like five-year-olds and talked like hasty text messages. I prided myself on being a bit above the pack, and felt even better about quitting.

  My angle here in Seattle doesn’t have anything to do with what went on with Eun Hee, and I’m sure she’d disapprove. I disapprove. I work at various schools for about a month apiece, chatting my way through six-hour days. Surveillance sessions, I call them. The male students are the toughest, because there’s no possible benefit, but I find that schools tend to assign me more girls than guys to talk to, based on my one asset: my face. Being twenty-five, handsome, and functionally intelligent is a leg up in a business filled with nascent Dahmers and aging ex-cons with a yen for young Asians. They don’t do background checks at most schools. They usually don’t check your references, either. If the reprobates who teach around me aren’t worried, I certainly have nothing to fear.

  I don’t scout for the Eun Hees anymore. She was more of a girlfriend than a source of income. The money was incidental, accidental. I seek out the slightly chubby girls, the ones with a Tommy-gun spray of acne and a stencil of loneliness on their faces. And I give them what they want—which isn’t sex, no, not at all—it’s a boyfriend, a nice American boyfriend with a hand to hold and time to spend. I pick up new students, girls who’ve only taken a couple of classes. Eventually I convince them that I’ll drop out of teaching if they’ll drop out of school and claim their refund. Then it’s simple. I live for free while we’re together, and gouge the tuition refund out of them by guilt or intimidation when they leave.

  I felt pretty bad the first time, standing near the entryway of a bank while Yoon Jin withdrew the last of her spending cash—earned by her father and brother during fourteen-hour workdays in some hellish Pusan office—and brought it up to me. Three thousand, five hundred and sixty-nine dollars. Small earnings for an actual criminal, probably, but to me it was enough for a few months. I paid for our cab to the airport and saw her off. Yoon Jin left too fast to realize how much she should hate me, I think.