Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  I straightened slowly and looked down into the courtyard. Gottschalk lay unmoving among the scattered pieces of lumber. For a moment I breathed deeply to control my vertigo; then I ran back to the chain link fence, climbed it, and rushed down the spiral staircase to the courtyard.

  When I got to the ranger’s body, I could hear him moaning. I said, “Lie still. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  He moaned louder as I ran across the courtyard and found a phone in the gift shop, but by the time I returned, he was silent. His breathing was so shallow that I thought he’d passed out, but then I heard mumbled words coming from his lips. I bent closer to listen.

  “Vanessa,” he said. “Wouldn’t take me with her . . .”

  I said, “Take you where?”

  “Going away together. Left my car . . . over there so she could drive across the bridge. But when she . . . brought it here she said she was going alone . . .”

  So you argued, I thought. And you lost your head and slashed her to death.

  “Vanessa,” he said again. “Never planned to take me . . . tricked me . . .”

  I started to put a hand on his arm, but found I couldn’t touch him. “Don’t talk any more. The ambulance’ll be here soon.”

  “Vanessa,” he said. “Oh God, what did you do to me?”

  I looked up at the bridge, rust red through the darkness and the mist. In the distance, I could hear the wail of a siren.

  Deceptions, I thought.

  Deceptions . . .

  The Long

  Silence After

  by Ed Gorman

  First published in 1991.

  The flight from Baltimore was bumpy. Not that Neely cared much. Not now.

  At Hertz he asked for a city map. The counter woman, sweet in her chignon and early evening exhaustion, smiled sadly. As if she knew why he’d come here. She gave him the map and a brand new Buick that did not yet smell as if somebody had barfed in it and then covered up the stench with Air-Wick.

  He had one more stop to make. The Fed-Ex office near O’Hare. A package waited there for him. He did not unwrap it until he got back to the car.

  Inside the red white and blue wrapping, inside the well-lined box, he found what he’d sent himself here last night; a snub-nosed .38. From the adjacent small box he took the cartridges. He would never have gotten this stuff through airport security.

  Finally now, he was ready.

  He spent four hours driving. Street names meant nothing. Sometimes faces were white, sometimes black. He wanted a certain section. Three times he stopped at gas stations and described the area. How there was this drugstore on one corner and a Triple-XXX theater directly across the street and (cheap irony here) a big stone Catholic church a couple blocks down.

  Finally, one guy said, Oh, yeah, and told him where he’d find it in relationship to Rogers Park (which was where he was now).

  Around nine, just before he saw the drugstore and the XXX-theater, it started raining. Cold March rain. Beading on the windshield, giving all the neon the look of watercolors.

  He found a parking garage. A black guy who had a big chaw of chewing tobacco kept spitting all the time he was taking the keys. And kind of glaring. Fucking suburban white dudes. Motherfuckers anyway.

  In the front of the XXX-theater was a small shop where you could rent videos and buy various “appliances” (as they are called). He was never comfortable in such places. Probably his strict Lutheran upbringing. These are places of sin.

  The man behind the counter had bad teeth and a wandering left eye. Somehow that was fitting in a place like this.

  He described the woman he was looking for but the counterman immediately shook his head. “Don’t know her, pal.”

  He described the woman a little more but the man shook his head again. “Sorry,” he said exhaling Pall Mall smoke through the brown stubs of his teeth.

  He didn’t expect to get lucky right off, and he sure didn’t. He started at the west end of the street and worked down it: three bars, a massage parlor, a used clothing store, a tiny soup kitchen run by two old nuns, and a bar with a runway for strippers.

  And nothing.

  Sorry, my friend. Sorry, buddy. Sorry, Jack.

  Never seen/heard of her. You know, pal?

  And so then he started on the women themselves.

  Because of the rain, which was steady and cold, they stood in doorways instead of along the curbsides. The thirty-four degree temperature kept them from any cute stuff. No whistling down drivers. No shaking their asses. No jumping into the streets.

  Just huddling in doorways instead. And kind of shivering.

  And it was the same with them: no help.

  He’d describe her and they’d shrug or shake their heads or pretend they were thinking a long moment and go “Nope, ‘fraid not, friend.”

  Only one of them got smart-mouth. She said, “She musta been somethin’ really special, huh?” and all the time was rubbing her knuckles against his crotch.

  Inside his nice respectable topcoat, the .38 was burning a fucking hole.

  Around midnight he stopped in this small diner for coffee and a sandwich. He was tired, he already had sniffles from the cold steady rain, and he had a headache, too. He bought his food and a little aluminum deal of Bufferin and took them right down.

  And then he asked the counter guy—having no hopes really, just asking the guy kind of automatically—and the guy looked at him and said, “Yeah. Betty.”

  “Yes. That’s right. Her name was Betty.”

  Through the fog of four years, through the fog of a liquored-up night: yes, goddamit that’s right, Betty was her name. Betty.

  He asked, “Is she still around?”

  The counter man, long hairy tattooed arms, leaned forward and gave him a kind of queer look. “Oh, yeah, she’s still around.”

  The counter man sounded as if he expected the man to know what he was hinting at.

  “You know where I can find her?”

  The counter man shook his head. “I don’t know if that’d be right, mister.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged. “Well, she’s sort of a friend of mine.”

  “I see.”

  And from inside his respectable suburban topcoat, he took his long leather wallet and peeled off a twenty and laid it on the counter and felt like fucking Sam Spade. “I’d really like to talk to her tonight.”

  The counter man stared at the twenty. He licked dry lips with an obscene pink tongue. “I see what you mean.”

  “How about it?”

  “She really is kind of a friend of mine.”

  So Sam Spade went back into action. He laid another crisp twenty on the original crisp twenty.

  The tongue came out again. This time he couldn’t watch the counter man. He pretended to be real interested in the coffee inside his cheap chipped cup.

  So of course the counter man gave him her address and told him how to get there.

  Fog. Rain. The sound of his footsteps. You could smell the rotting lumber of this ancient neighborhood now that it was soaked. Little shabby houses packed so close together you couldn’t ride a bicycle between some of them. One-story brick jobs mostly that used to be packed with Slavs. But the Slavs have good factory jobs now so they had moved out and eager scared blacks had taken their place.

  Hers was lime green stucco. Behind a heavy drape a faint light shone.

  He gripped the gun.

  On the sidewalk he stepped in two piles of dogshit. And now the next-door dog—as if to confirm his own existence—started barking.

  He went up the narrow walk to her place.

  He stood under the overhang. The concrete porch had long ago pulled away from the house and was wobbly. He felt as if he were trying to stand up on a capsizing row boat.

  The door opened. A woman stood there. “Yes?”

  His memory of her was that she’d been much heavier. Much.

  He said, “Betty?”

  “Right.”

&
nbsp; “Betty Malloy?”

  “Right again.” She sounded tired, even weak. “But not the old Betty Malloy.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I ain’t what I used to be.”

  Cryptic as her words were, he thought that they still made sense.

  “I’d like to come in.”

  “Listen, I don’t do that no more, all right?”

  “I’d like to come in anyway.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed. If he pulled the gun here, she might get the chance to slam the door and save herself.

  He had to get inside.

  He put his hand on the knob of the screen door.

  It was latched.

  Sonofabitch.

  “I need to use your phone,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  In some naive way, he’d expected her to remember who he was. But of course she wouldn’t.

  “Could I use your phone?”

  “For what?”

  “To call Triple-A.”

  “Something’s wrong with your car?”

  “The battery went dead.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “What?”

  “I asked where your car was. I don’t see no new car. And you definitely look like the kind of guy who’d be driving a new car.”

  So he decided screw it and pulled the gun.

  He put it right up against the screen door.

  She didn’t cry out or slam the door or anything. She just stood there. The gun had mesmerized her.

  “You gotta be crazy, mister.”

  “Unlatch the door.”

  And then he couldn’t hit her anymore.

  He heard in her tears the inevitable tears of his wife and children when they found out.

  And he couldn’t hit her at all any more.

  She just sat there and sobbed, her whole body trembling, weaker with each moment.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  She just kept crying.

  He started pacing again.

  “I can’t believe this. I keep thinking that there’s no way I could—”

  He shook his head and looked over at her. She was daubing at her nose with an aqua piece of Kleenex.

  “Do you get help?”

  She nodded. She wouldn’t look at him anymore. “The welfare folks. They send out people.”

  “I’m sorry I was so angry.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’m sorry I hit you.”

  “I know that too.”

  “I’m just so fucking scared and so fucking angry.”

  Now she looked at him again. “The anger goes after awhile. You get too tired to be angry anymore.”

  “I don’t know how I’m going to tell my wife.”

  “You’ll do it, mister. That’s the only thing I figured out about this thing. You do what you’ve got to do. You really do.”

  He dumped the gun in the pocket of his respectable topcoat. And then he took out his wallet and flicked off a hundred dollars in twenties.

  “You really must be crazy, mister,” she said. “Leavin’ me money like that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I really must be crazy.”

  She started crying again.

  He closed the doors quietly behind him. Even halfway down the walk, even in the fog and even in the rain, he could still hear her crying.

  There was a three o’clock flight to Baltimore. He wasn’t sure he had nerve enough to tell her yet but he knew he would have to. He owed her so much; he certainly owed her the truth.

  He walked faster now, and soon he disappeared completely inside the fog. He was just footsteps now; footsteps.

  The Dead Past

  by Nancy Pickard

  Nancy Pickard’s rise to the first rank of mystery writers has been relatively swift. While her books show a certain comedic fondness for small-town America, they’re very serious, sometimes very dark, inquiries into the human condition of our particular era; a fact that the major critics are only now coming to understand.

  First published in 1989.

  At first, she was only a new name in the appointment book of the psychologist, Paul Laner, Ph.D.: “March 3, Tues., 12:10 Ouvray, Elizabeth

  Then she was a lovely girl in the doorway of his office, young and slim, pale as a ghost, wearing grey trousers and sweater, and her platinum hair caught up at the sides of her scalp with translucent plastic barettes. Her beauty, Laner thought at the time, was the stunning natural kind that is formidable to look upon, and which instantly forms a wall that other people have to scale in order to reach the person behind it. According to the form she had filled out for his receptionist, Elizabeth Ouvray was nineteen years old. Laner, at forty-five, was old enough to be her father, and he felt at least that much more mature than she as he stared at the nervous, ghost-like girl in his doorway.

  Indeed, like a ghost who was afraid to materialize, she hesitated, her head down, eyes averted. She looked to him as if she wished she were invisible. Her hair, parted in the middle, hung down from the barettes like curtains pulled over her face.

  “Come in,” he said.

  She glanced up at him, and smiled stiffly, slightly, as if any facial expression was an effort. Instinctively, Laner wanted to put his hand under her elbow and lead her gently into his office, but he didn’t. The doctor was careful not to touch her, not only because Elizabeth Ouvray looked as if she would flee at the slightest overture, but also because the hand of a male counselor on a female client could be so easily misinterpreted. A comforting pat on the shoulder, a gently intended squeeze of the hand could get even a well-respected psychologist like him into serious trouble.

  She scooted past him without speaking, leaving in her wake a lemony scent that made his jaws ache. Saliva pooled on his tongue, and he swallowed. She was, easily, the best looking patient to walk through his doorway in his twenty-three years of professional counseling. He thought it poignant that a woman so blessed in her physical appearance should appear to feel so cursed. Following that thought, Laner experienced such an immediate and intense desire to find out why she felt cursed that he experienced a mild sexual arousal.

  “Down boy,” he commanded his libido. “Sublimate.”

  Behind her back, he smiled to himself. It pleased him that after all this time in his career he could still get excited about the human mysteries that awaited his unraveling.

  “Sit anywhere you like,” he suggested to her.

  He observed her as she made the difficult and meaningful choice that faced every new client: whether to sit on the couch in the corner farthest away from him, or the Windsor chair midway between the couch and his desk, or in the rocking chair beside his desk. She finally chose the latter—not, he thought, because she was self-confident enough to sit that close to him or because she craved intimacy, or even because she had a bad back. Rather, he suspected, it was because she felt safer there than she would have felt all the way across the room by herself. The doctor couldn’t help but make an instantaneous diagnosis in layman’s terms: fear—stark, staring, trembling, not-quite-raving fear. This clearly neurotic young woman was afraid of her own shadow.

  Laner smiled inwardly at his own Jungian pun.

  He felt a warm surge of hope for this new patient and an even warmer surge of self confidence. Eagerly, almost buoyantly, he crossed the room and sat down at his desk, facing her. Sensing that small talk would not relax this patient who had yet to utter a word to him, he launched right in.

  “How can I help you, Elizabeth?”

  She didn’t hesitate, but said in a soft voice, “I’m afraid.”

  Laner was surprised at her directness. But taking that as a cue, he proceeded to be extremely direct and clear with her, himself.

  “What are you afraid of, Elizabeth?”

  “Everything.” She didn’t smile when she said it.

  “All right. Tell me one thing that frightens you.”

  “Coming here.”

  “Yes, everyb
ody’s nervous the first time.”

  Laner purposely cultivated a fatherly appearance in order to put his clients at ease. He knew that when she looked at him she perceived a nice, middle-aged man with frizzly grey hair, a bushy moustache and beard, bright, intense blue eyes and a tactful, sympathetic smile.

  He presented that smile to her. “What else?”

  “I’m not just nervous,” she protested, as if he had belittled her complaint. Her near-whisper had a defensive, annoyed edge to it. What was this? he wondered. Was she proud of her neurosis (many patients secretly were) or did she already have resources of courage and independence with which to defend herself? That would be a hopeful sign for her prognosis, he thought.

  “I believe you,” he said quickly. “What else scares you, Elizabeth?”

  “People,” she said, and he was inwardly amused to see her look suspiciously, even furtively at him. “Strangers.”

  “I see. What else scares you?”

  “Oh God, you name it!” she burst out. “I think I’m really crazy. I must be crazy to be so frightened all the time.”

  “Nobody is afraid for no reason, Elizabeth,” he told her. “My experience tells me that we will discover that your fears are the natural, if perhaps rather exaggerated, effects of certain causes. Our job will be to uncover those causes, so that we may eliminate the effects of them. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, but it sounds too . . . easy.”

  “Would it make you feel better if I assure you that it probably won’t be easy?” He smiled at her. “We often find that the greater the fear, the more deeply buried the cause. I will help you, Elizabeth, but I can almost guarantee that it will not be in one easy lesson.”

  “You’ll help me?”

  “I will,” he said firmly, and was delighted to see the relieved expression in her eyes, and the slight relaxation of her tense body. “Tell me, Elizabeth, do you feel scared all of the time?”