AHMM, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  For two hours, we argued and orated. Finally, the officer set his final price and refused to go any lower. I excused myself and went to the two Chechens, who had been listening from a short distance away. To the elder, I named the price.

  "It is steep,” he said, “but we will pay."

  He spoke to Kasimov in their guttural Chechen. The young brave counted out several silver coins and handed them to me. I in turn gave the coins to the officer.

  "Tell the Abreks to take their dead and go,” growled the officer, as he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “And tell them to stay on the other side of the river from now on."

  I attempted to help the Chechens load the body of the dead brother into their skiff, but Kasimov would accept assistance from no one. Just before the skiff pushed off into the river, the elder Chechen pressed a small leather bag into my hand. I heard the muffled clink of silver coins.

  "Your commission,” he said, “and our thanks."

  "Forget any payment,” I replied. “This is not money I could spend in comfort after knowing the circumstances that brought it."

  "Kasimov is a proud man,” the elder one explained. “Your actions here today have allowed him to recover a member of his family for proper burial. Consider this payment as a debt of honor."

  For the first time in my life, I held earned money that I had no wish to keep.

  "Armenian,” called the elder Chechen from out on the river as they poled away, “I'll send the skiff back for you in a few minutes. May Allah watch over you in your travels."

  The blessing I could readily accept, but tarnished silver gained from buying a corpse was a different thing altogether. The leather bag burned my fingertips.

  Since there would be several minutes before the skiff returned, I walked back up the bank and over to where Daddy Eroshka slumbered peacefully on the ground. When no one else was watching, I carefully slipped the bag of coins into a pocket in Daddy's ragged coat. Even if he later managed to realize this silver had resulted from the aftermath of a violent death, he would have no qualms about spending tainted money on refreshment for the living.

  As I stood alone on the north bank of the Terek waiting for the skiff to take me back across the river, I pondered on all that had happened here in just two days’ time.

  Kasimov had paid a high price in silver to regain the corpse of his dead brother. Most of this blood money would soon reside in the Cossack treasury, but for Kasimov, it was a matter of family honor.

  For his own part, Mazeppa had paid in violence to ransom the honor of his deceitful marriage. In the end, he too would pay a high price. By now, Mazeppa was surely headed south into the Wild Country before the Muscovy troops could hunt him down on their side of the river.

  But most of all, the Russian sergeant had paid the highest price, his life, for betraying the trust of a fellow soldier, even if Russians and Cossacks were uneasy allies on this southern frontier.

  And I, well, I hoped I was ransoming my own soul by slipping my commission of Turkish silver into the pocket of a drunk. I sometimes wished I could sleep as well as that old, whitebeard Cossack hunter did. For in his own mind, I knew he considered himself to live as innocent as a newborn child in this violent land along the Terek.

  If only money could buy me some of that peace of mind.

  Copyright © 2006 R. T. Lawton

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  REEL CRIME by Steve Hockensmith

  Last fall, James Roday was faced with the kind of choice that only comes along in Hollywood, and even there only once in a blue (and full) moon: He could either be a werewolf or a TV star.

  * * * *

  James Roday. Photo by Kwaku Alston, courtesy of USA Network

  * * * *

  Perhaps surprisingly, Roday almost chose fur and fangs over fame and fortune.

  "Being a werewolf would have been a dream come true,” he says. “But at the end of the day, you know when your ship is coming in, and you get on it."

  And so it is that the young actor set sail on the S.S. Psych.

  Roday stars in the newly launched USA Network series as an irresponsible, fun-loving slacker who finally finds his true calling ... as a phony psychic detective. (Though he solves crimes using his super-keen powers of observation, Roday's character has more luck getting people to believe him if he pretends the clues come to him from the spirit realm.) By committing to the show, Roday missed out on his chance to costar in a werewolves-at-war thriller called Skinwalkers—which the lifelong horror fan cowrote with buddies Todd Harthan and James DeMonaco.

  But even though Skinwalkers was in production around the same time as the Psych pilot, Roday managed to squeeze in a (non-canine) cameo in the movie (which opens nationwide December 1). And when Psych's first season was shooting in Vancouver, Roday somehow found time to pen a Halloween episode for the show while simultaneously prepping for his upcoming directorial debut (a low-budget horror-comedy called Gravy).

  Clearly, the happy-go-lucky sleuth Roday plays may be a ne'er-do-well, but the actor himself is a ne'er-stop-working.

  "I'm a workaholic to a fault,” he admits. “I didn't have any brothers or sisters, so I was always wholly responsible for occupying my time. And at a pretty young age, I said, ‘Hey, I don't ever want to be bored. What can I do to keep my imagination stimulated?’ And then as I got older, it changed from playing entire imaginary basketball games in my room to doing things that are more productive and work oriented. It became an eyes-on-the-prize thing."

  * * * *

  Dulé Hill and James Roday in Psych. Photo by Jeff Weddell, courtesy of USA Network

  * * * *

  That focus and drive served him well when he first met with Steve Franks, the showrunner behind Psych. Franks knew he needed a lead with comedy chops: He was creating a companion piece for the USA hit Monk, a series in which scoring laughs is just as important as cracking mysteries. But Franks wanted someone who could be serious too—at least about doing whatever it takes to be successful.

  "In the auditioning process, there were a lot of actors who were like, ‘I don't read [for a part].’ And I was like, ‘Enjoy your next job—whatever it is. Because I want someone here who really wants to do this,'” Franks says. “Of the actors who did read, hardly anybody got it. And then James came in, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God! This is the guy!’ He had the right self-deprecating sense of humor. He understood the comedy, and he and I were instantly in sync."

  Whether b.s.ing gullible cops or bickering with his stick-in-the-mud sidekick (The West Wing's Dulé Hill), Roday certainly seems at ease with Psych's goofy humor. Yet the actors he admires most include Val Kilmer, Sam Rockwell, Sean Penn, and Daniel Day-Lewis—none of them kooky cut-ups of the Will Ferrell/Jim Carrey variety.

  "I never anticipated becoming a comedic actor, but I keep getting asked to do comedy,” Roday says. “Coming out of school, I was expecting a completely different path."

  The path Roday thought he was on lead to The Great White Way. After studying acting at New York University, he won a series of roles in off-Broadway productions. (He even took his stage name from one: “Roday” is a character from Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters. The actor's real name is James Rodriguez, but he had to pick something else because another performer was already using the same name.)

  Though Roday says he once had “a huge chip on [his] shoulder” about working in Hollywood, that chip was gradually chipped away after he started landing movie and TV gigs.

  "When you train on the East Coast, Hollywood is the dance you don't want to go to,” he says. “You think doing theater is ‘real,’ and that's what acting is all about. But then if you're lucky enough to get a taste of the other side, you start thinking, ‘What's so terrible about this? Why can't we do everything?’ And that's the bottom line for me. I want to do everything."

  * * * *

  A pack of werewolves (in the daytime) from Skinwalkers, which Roday cowrote. Photo by Steve Wilkie, © Lions Gate Entertainment


  * * * *

  Though he's only thirty, Roday's off to a good start when it comes to doing everything. He's appeared in indie dramas (Wim Wenders's Don't Come Knocking), cult comedies (Beerfest), and big-budget wannabe-blockbusters (Showtime, The Dukes of Hazzard). His TV work has been just as diverse—though not particularly successful. He's been a regular on three short-lived series: cop show Ryan Caulfield: Year One, hottie-lawyers drama First Years, and romantic dramedy (and Alicia Silverstone vehicle) Miss Match.

  "After all that, I wasn't really jonesing to do television anymore,” Roday acknowledges. “I was ready for a break. But the script for [the Psych pilot] was just so smart and funny. There was maybe half a second where I thought, ‘Here we go again.’ But that was it. You don't read enough good scripts to let one pass you by."

  Which is why Roday ended up with his own television show instead of a coat of fur and an unholy hunger for human flesh. And so far he's enjoying himself, even though the grueling TV production grind can make even lycanthropy look laid back by comparison.

  "I'm holding up. It's just about learning what your limits are physically and how much sleep you need at night,” Roday says stoically, once again sounding very much unlike the devil-may-care man-child he plays on Psych. “Really, I welcome the challenge and the responsibility. I've been dabbling in TV for a while without truly carrying the load [as a series lead]. So I think it was time to step up and give it a try."

  Copyright © 2006 Steve Hockensmith

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  AHMM CLASSIC: MY MOTHER, MY DAUGHTER, ME by Margaret Maron

  * * * *

  Hank Blaustein

  * * * *

  It isn't just me, is it? Surely other mothers of little girls experience this uncanny sensation when time overlaps and folds back, when they feel they've lived this incident before in another body or seen it through different eyes?

  For instance, when I tell five-year-old Beth, “You're not going out in shorts in the middle of winter!” and she glares at me a long level moment before she stalks off to change, then I know—I mean I really know—exactly what she's feeling. More than that, I am her, whirling away from my mother and biting back the rebellious words that would get me a spanking.

  I flounce upstairs and yank open the dresser for those ugly woolen slacks, banging my anger, but not hard enough to bring Mama up with the fly swatter. (And how come that never gets put away for winter?)

  With an almost physical jerk, I pull myself back to the present of 1965. I'm me again and getting irritable and if Beth slams the drawer just one more time, she's going to get a smack on the bottom.

  You see? It's been like this since she was a toddler. My husband doesn't understand; but a girlfriend said recently, “I never liked my mother much till my daughter started glaring at me every time I spoke to her. Suddenly I understand.” Yes.

  And yet, somehow, that isn't exactly it. Not all of it anyhow. Even though I'm an adult now, safely married with a successful husband, comfortable house, and daughter of my own, it's only the child I once was that I fully understand, not Mama. I was probably no more aggravating than Beth, but these day-to-day flashes of irritation don't make me stop loving Beth. So why did Mama stop loving me?

  Perhaps if she hadn't died the year I married Carter, Beth's birth could have bridged the unspoken distance between us. Or is the apparent warmth between most mothers and their grownup daughters only a mutual pretense while the politeness between Mama and me is unavoidable reality?

  Must Beth and I come to that?

  I was four, almost five, when I learned not to take Mama's love for granted. Her moods were as uncertain as that wartime spring of 1945. There were moments of unquestioned security, but too often I would look up from play and see her watching me from a window, her eyes bleak with foreboding—almost as if I were a Nazi hand grenade primed to explode in her face.

  Eventually, as the larger world groped its way back to sanity, so did my small one. My father came home from the Merchant Marine to stay, and by the time I was an adolescent, the stiffness between Mama and me was taken for granted. Yet even now, twenty years later, when Beth touches in me a sense of déjà vu and I look at myself/Mama through Beth's/my eyes, then I yearn for that barely-remembered closeness and again I wonder....

  * * * *

  Today I sit before the mirror in my bedroom, intent on getting my makeup exactly right. I'm meeting my husband for dinner and, like most men, Carter feels flattered when he thinks I've taken special pains just for him. Except for slipping into my new mini-skirted A-line, I can leave as soon as our teenaged neighbor gets home from school to sit with Beth.

  Beth sprawls across my bed as she watches me in the mirror and whines halfheartedly about being left behind. She knows I won't relent and that Karen will indulge her most outrageous demands, but she has to keep her hand in. Her restless fingers flip the dial of my clock-radio, and as the serious tones of a newscast fill the room, I lift my hand to keep her from changing it. My favorite cousin is with the Seventh Fleet, but it isn't mentioned; and when I drop my hand, Beth turns to a rock station, muttering, “Why do they always have to have wars?"

  Why? I echo silently. The newest Beatles song floods the room, but I'm lost in sudden memories of the staccato war bulletins that used to burst from our old radio and transfix the grownups in alert uneasiness. The words, urgent and tense and half-obscured with static, meant nothing to me; but that sudden adult fear made me afraid, too, without knowing why.

  After, “God bless Mama and Daddy,” I was taught to pray, “and bring Uncle Paul home safe from the war.” But that was as much a part of the ritualistic ending as “and-make-me-a-good-girl-amen.” Uncle Paul, Mama's younger brother, had been in Europe for three of my four years and I did not remember him. He was killed at Bastogne in December of 1944, although it was March before we knew for sure. When Mama put down the phone, I was appalled. I'd never seen her cry, had never realized there were things that could make an adult cry.

  Someone—I forget just who—put an arm around Mama and shooed me off to the candy store with a handful of pennies. That night Mama interrupted my prayers harshly. “Didn't you understand? Uncle Paul is dead!” And so I stopped praying for him, even though his deletion left a gap in the singsong formula that bothered me for months.

  * * * *

  Eyes finished, I begin on my lips and Beth draws near to watch. She stands on one foot and leans against my bare shoulder, staring at me in the mirror objectively while her lips arc in unconscious imitation. Amused, I recall watching Mama put on her blood-red lipstick; but this is only another of those surface memories that color all our familiar actions when our children watch.

  Bored, Beth goes to the window to look for Karen, then returns to play with the dozen or so perfume vials on my dressing table, souvenirs of all the foreign ports my cousin's ship has visited.

  A schoolbus rumbles to a halt outside and the little glass bottles tinkle as Beth whirls away, dancing across the room to the window.

  "Karen! Wait! I'm coming now!” she shrieks, and kisses me hastily. I hear her light footsteps patter on the stairs as I, too, call down to Karen with last-minute instructions.

  Beth waves up to me as I stand at the window in my lace-trimmed slip; and although her smile is gay, though she leaves me without another backward look, skipping up to Karen and draping the older girl's sweater around her thin shoulders as she follows Karen across our wide lawn, I am suddenly filled with unbearable anguish and something colder.

  Guilt?

  Guilt at deserting my child?

  Ridiculous! I'm as good a homemaker as Donna Reed, as devoted a mother as June Cleaver. Surely the few hours I'm away each week take nothing from Beth. Her father and I will be home before nine thirty. Carter doesn't like late hours or any music that rocks harder than Pat Boone's, and after six years of marriage, we don't exactly linger over candlelit tables.

  But the feeling of guilt persists, overshadowed now by a
growing sense of desolation so strong that I sit down before the mirror again, perplexed. Absently I straighten the perfume bottles Beth has muddled and see that one has come unstopped. It's a small cube of dark green porcelain, sprigged with minute red roses, and its heavy fragrance permeates down through layer after layer of suppressed memories ... how incredible that I could have forgotten so completely!

  * * * *

  It arrived on a cold dreary day in early March when it seemed that winter would last forever. Mama took the box from the postman and knelt on the living room rug to tear it open. It'd been months since Daddy's last shore leave, and presents trickled back to us in lieu of the letters he never wrote.

  I realize now that those presents must have been a pledge more to himself than to Mama and me that there was a time and world unbounded by gray North Atlantic waters and deadly U-boats. In later years he was such a silent, preoccupied, just-there father that I forgot how perceptive his gifts had been.

  I asked him once to tell me how mermaids ran and was crushed when he explained the difference between the glittering mermaids I'd imagined and the grim actuality of the Murmansk Run. But weeks later, he sent back a tiny wooden mermaid scaled with golden sequins.

  That day, Mama lifted the square green bottle from its nest of tissue and let me touch the exquisite ceramic roses. Then she smoothed some perfume on her bare white arms and lay back upon the rug, her eyes closed; and while chill March rains streamed down the windowpanes, the room filled with the heavy languorous scent of full-blown roses under a hot June sun.

  "What does this say?” I asked, tickling her nose with the note that had fallen out. She opened her eyes, crossed them for my benefit, and read, “'This reminded me of the day we met.’”

  "Didn't you always know Daddy?” I asked, as much in surprise as to prolong her mood.

  "I was the original farmer's daughter,” she answered fliply. She gazed around the spacious rooms with their deep rugs and polished tables and Sadie clattering out in the kitchen beyond many closed doors. “Luckily for me, he wasn't a traveling salesman."