EQMM, March-April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The detectives told me Frank “Reynolds” had been under suspicion for “situations” across the border in Nevada and that I'd been very lucky—that they were certainly glad I was all right. I assured them I was. Same as I told myself, every sleepless night.

  ©2009 by Trina Corey

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  Fiction: THE BLEEDING CHAIR by Janwillem van de Wetering

  Though he was Dutch-born and his most popular detective fiction featured Grijpstra and de Gier, a pair of Amsterdam police officers, we never considered publishing Janwillem van de Wetering in our Passport to Crime department. That's because the author was so fluent in English that he could write a story like the following in English, without any help from a translator or editor. Sadly, this longtime contributor to EQMM died several months ago. This may well be his last published story.

  Let me introduce myself. Hi, I'm James. It's too nice a name for me so I prefer to be called Vetty, short for “veteran."

  I got “veteran” on my license plate, too. As I swapped a leg for a medal, the pickup truck also sports one of those blue invalid cards.

  Silly, I know. Like I want to advertise that there is something special about me, that I bravely fought for my country, losing a useful limb. That there is value to my being around here. While, in truth, I pride myself on my knowledge, okay, let's say “strong suspicion,” that there is not.

  I merely exist, I will tell the crowd at the Thirsty Dolphin. I am aimlessly adrift in the universe, on a desolate, but beautiful—especially now, because it's the midst of winter—part of the Downeast Coast of the state of Maine, U.S.A.

  Bunkport is my hometown. Small to middling, as Maine towns go. Fiercely Puritan once, but there's been some intermingling with other tribes. An ongoing process that leads to exchange of ideas, differences in practice, adjustment of attitudes, that sort of thing.

  The Thirsty Dolphin's Bunkport's only watering hole. Where the action is. The contemplation of action, rather. It is owned by Priscilla, a person of great wisdom and charm, weighing more than any human scale can measure. We all respect Priscilla, because she keeps an aluminum baseball bat under the counter and will not put up with either language, attitude, nudity, or violence that go beyond flexible local standards.

  I'm not unhappily adrift, I tell my audience, who are willing to listen when I promise to pay for the next round of Priscilla's cheaper draft. On the contrary, I tell them, I would be unhappy if I did have an aim. A purpose. A goal. You see, I figure that if I did want to get somewhere, reach some benchmark, I would be unhappy, miserable, outright depressed. Even, especially, if I crossed that line.

  Then what?

  Okay, enough of philosophy. This is a crime story; the publisher, who thinks I can write and occasionally commissions something specific, is into crime now. He is a moral man, but there is an off side to his goody-goody character and just to titillate himself, and his goody-goody readers, he told me he wanted me to write some real bad stuff this time.

  "Like true crime?"

  "Not too true,” the publisher said.

  He is usually here for the summer. In wintertime, bothersome folks leave us in peace. They think we have weather here. Sure, we do have weather, very nice weather, too. Ice, sleet, freezing rain, blizzards, sea fog drifting in from the ocean, and very clear days when the water is almost unbearably blue, the chickadees are singing, and Priscilla has her big-bellied stove going and we all toss in maple logs, and beech, and oak, and apple-tree logs even, and have to peel ourselves out of our layers of jerseys and sheepskin vests and the younger women show their cleavages again. We exhibit some musical talents. Ex-Harvard graduate lobster-man Tom Tipper on keyboards; I work my snare drum and a minimal set of cymbals; and Doc Shanigan plays weird but acceptable bass. Priscilla plays trumpet. Usually softly, intricately, setting a theme and then improvising in unexpected ways, with us right behind her. One wouldn't expect that a huge woman could be subtle. Sheriff hums, his wife Dolly sings scat.

  Yes, crime stories. I know.

  Bad stuff happens in picturesque Downeast Maine?

  Define “bad.” You mean involving “blood and gore"?

  Let me describe, for your amusement, in as much detail as strictly needed, some recent local tales incorporating blood and gore, perhaps, on occasion, even featuring me as a player. No confession on my part—please. None of this never happened. When pressed by the authorities, such as they are, I will suddenly know nothing. The double negatives used are correct language here, due to the many French-speaking folks in northern Maine, although right here, in Down East, we generally try to speak one of the many brands of English.

  "Down” indicates that boats, when helpless due to torn sails or a gummed-up engine, are pushed by the prevailing winds to the lower east. Our clear blue sea hides razor-sharp cliffs, surrounded, right now, by ice floes rubbing each other with a silver sound. Some cliffs are pedestals to bizarre shapes sometimes. Right in front of Big Bitch Island you'll see a rock formation that looks, from a certain angle, like a giant mother Labrador, howling at the moon. Her tits are swollen and two puppies gambol between her feet. Little Bitch Island just shows one puppy.

  There is true danger down here. Freak high tides flood anchored boats, low tides make them rip their bottoms on gravel or bottom ice. Our powerful currents—well, you just can't figure them out, they change at will. We have sudden strong wind falls, called “cat's paws,” that tear at boats. If a vessel collects heavy snow on her superstructure she is likely to flip. Happens every winter a few times, always at night, and tends to annoy the insurance people, who tell us that their statistics show that snow-flipped boats are always old and only recently covered.

  Yes sir, we love to suffer all kinds of impolite weather that the forecast fools forget to tell us about.

  Down East is littered with sunken wrecks, hiding, waiting, desperately looking for company. Torn up themselves, they want to share their fate. Dead cargo boats from yesteryear, nineteenth-century tea clippers, hundred-year-old ferry boats out of Boston are marked on the charts with deadly crosses, but wrecks shift, and they stick you with a sharp mast, or throttle your boat inside their ribs sticking up from the slime.

  "One dark, stormy winter night, driven toward an inhospitable coast, a cargo of chained young noblewomen prayed for mercy.” That's one way seafaring crime tales like to start off. But our crime tale #1 started off on a bright winter morning. Everything was just right, until Elizabeth spotted the bleeding chair on top of a huge floating navigation marker. The sea, supporting this horror, except for slowly swirling currents and just a touch of ocean swell, was calm.

  We were enjoying a day of Indian summer that warms our coast for a week or so that time of the year. We had stripped down to our long silk underwear, which looked good on my stern man. The dog Tillie preferred to melt close to the You Too cabin's kerosene stove. Our shouts brought the little mongrel out reluctantly.

  Tillie sniffed, then barked. “Fresh meat?"

  She looks cute, but a dog is basically a wolf. She was soon scratching the gunwale, wanting to climb the marker and lick the blood off the chair.

  We are lucky here. While the rest of the coast freezes up, Bunkport bay and harbor, and the sea around Bitch, Little Bitch, Shanigan, Squid, Snutty Nose, and Evergreen islands stays fairly liquid. There must be quite a few sea-bottom wells here, spouting hot water. I came close to one while diving for scallops and nearly got burned. And tell you what: I was sure that I was seeing big pink toothy worms down there, twisting toward me. The fear made me come up fast, contracting a case of the bends on the way, a diver's affliction that can be fatal. Doc “Fastbuck Freddie” Shanigan flew me to Bangor and the treatment out there cost me a handful in copay, in spite of my veteran's insurance.

  Bad days, good days. The day I took Elizabeth out was perfect. Good-tempered harbor seals grunted at us from their rocks and herring gulls swished their wings as they came down behind us, assuming we were out fishing and w
anting to share our catch.

  Elizabeth kept pointing at the top of the buoy.

  We were looking up at a giant marker, a channel buoy just off Bitch Island, a steel monster painted in garish colors. It comes with radar reflectors, a gong, lights that switch on at sunset—an impressive gadget at all times—and it was carrying a big easy chair, securely fastened by thin lobster-trap lines. Getting the chair up on a twenty-foot-tall buoy must have taken some doing. Elizabeth climbed the structure and shouted down that the chair appeared to be riddled by what could only be bullets. Bullets that hit their mark, for each hole was red-ringed.

  Elizabeth, who usually doesn't use language, shouting down at me now, used language.

  "Beeping blood.” She tweaked her nostrils to keep the smell out. “Beeping feces."

  She was right. Beeping human fluids, for sure.

  She climbed down, her silk bodysuit showing off her long legs, slender torso, and rippling muscles (she likes rock-wall climbing, and yoga, and that Chinese movement deal where you don't move much but it generates lack of interest in selfish worries). She jumped into my boat, the You Too, and blew the stench out of her nose. She reported.

  Whoever had sat in that chair, and got drilled by bullets, was tied down with strong ropes, bits and pieces of which were still there. Most likely the ropes were cut, when subject was dead, to allow the corpse to slide into the Atlantic. A human corpse, Elizabeth guessed. She didn't think anybody, using block and tackle (for only apes and Tarzans could have lifted the object that high), had hauled a porpoise or a seal up there.

  Like you, the puzzling reader, we tried to recreate a situation. We weren't sure. We weren't there when it happened.

  "We” was me and my stern man. The stern man, this time, was a woman, but we don't use the term “stern person” down here. We don't talk politically correct much, either. “Stern man” it is, whatever the gender. Regular good-old-boys, gay people, a beautiful city-lady like Elizabeth, a teener going out on a first try, your grandpa, you; stern men they all are if they back up the captain. I, for as long as I am in charge of the vessel, am known as Skip.

  Now who the hell would tie a live target to an easy chair, somehow get the load on top of a floating giant channel marker, and then shoot that body dead, and subsequently cut it loose, leaving chair, blood—and waste-stains—for visiting Elizabeth to discover?

  Sadistic pirates?

  Sure, we have pirates here (crime story # 2). Not flying the skull-and-bones flag no more, not using swords or muskets. Those wonderful days are gone, except on screen with Johnny Depp leading. Today's pirates are sly. They became sly because of technology. Nowadays most vessels communicate via cell phones and radio. Any suspicious event will be promptly reported to law enforcement that, since 9/11, has become fast and nosy. Our part of the coast is patrolled by Coast Guard cutters; Sheriff, and his deputies Dog and Sycophant, are out too sometimes, using a confiscated speedboat. There are also military choppers and airplanes peering down. It won't take long to catch pirates entering a vessel by force.

  Give up adventuring on the high seas?

  Hey, this is America. Now we have friendly young boating types who offer their services to the mega rich about to sail their multimillion-dollar—it's only shareholders’ money—yachts out for a spell. Our betters know about embezzling, helping themselves to other people's money, but they don't know about sailing. If they go out on their own they're accident-prone, which could make them look foolish.

  The charming young boating types tell the make-believe commodore they'd like to come along, just for the ride, they don't care about wages, all that's wanted are board, a hammock below deck, a gratuity at the end of the trip, maybe. They're young and carefree. A bottle of rum and Hi Diddle Doodle “and here we are, Admiral. At your service. Check that global positioning system, adjust that automatic pilot, swab your decks, untangle your lines."

  So owner and girlfriends cavort in mahogany- and teak-lined cabins and the charming young boating types run the equipment, swab the decks, polish the plastic, slave away, grinning and singing.

  Yes?

  No. Not for long, anyway.

  Ah, can you hear the double-bass groan as this scenario unfolds? As soon as the yacht is out of sight of land the newfound friendly crew, eager to please, point out an imaginary albatross or a killer whale or some other oddity. “Look over there, sir,” Sir, and the girlfriends, get shot through their heads. The live-in pirates check the yacht's depth meter, sail to where they have a good distance under the keel, take their victims’ jewelry (did you see the ads for $30,000 watches in Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair?), cash, credit cards, electronic devices (especially laptops that store double bookkeeping, hidden wealth, numbered bank accounts complete with passwords), driving licenses, and other identification for future use and reference, and heave-ho-overboard the suckers go. The pirates usually take the trouble to attach weights to their victims’ bodies. That way the corpses, once they balloon with intestinal gas, can't pop up to cause trouble to the living. Once safely on the bottom something will eat them pretty quick. The pirates don't like to worry, they're busy right now. Hoist all sails and look sharp, dead south as she goes.

  Deep waters are the habitat of dogfish.

  Dogfish, that's a kind of shark. We have lots of them in Downeast coastal waters. Nasty-looking creatures. They won't go for the living so much but they sure cherish the dead. Lobsters like corpses, too. Ever eat a Maine lobster? Tasty, eh? I like lobster myself. Lobsters and crabs are recycled dead meat, but it doesn't do to be picky. Dogfish meat is also good, but it's a hassle to drag those big buggers across the gunwale. Lobsters I dive for, grab a few from where they wave their antennae between the seaweed. In winter I go down, too. I have a good dry-suit. It's fun down there between the waving kelp, especially when the sunlight filters through marine foliage.

  The pirated yacht, under new management, sets a course around Florida and is sold to a Venezuelan oil mogul or a Mexican police general or a Colombian drug lord who had been checking out some luxury harbors. The foreign visitor points his choice out to the charming young boating types he has been introduced to by his U.S. Organized Crime agent, a two-sided government mini-mogul, most likely. Ese bote me sirve, amigos, Don Ladron says and pays some cash up front, promises the balance on delivery in a Mexican harbor, and drives his rental limo to a private jet waiting at Bar Harbor airport.

  Good business, also for the heirs of the dead owners who, in time, will collect some considerable insurance.

  A couple of those charming young boating types did appear in Bunkport three summers ago, and, a few weeks later, a yacht owned by a former CEO (now “pursuing other interests,” he told us, buying drinks at the Thirsty Dolphin) got reported as missing, together with Moneybags and his ladies. The very same lads showed again last summer, but this time the situation was different. Both pirates were shot dead, the hired skipper and his wife were executed, and all four corpses were found on the yacht Take It Easy, so a Coast Guard lieutenant told us.

  So what happened?

  Here, I put together a script.

  Crime story #3

  A local one-legged Vietnam veteran is enjoying his therapy in his converted fishing boat. It's autumn. He watches summer birds taking off for the south and winter birds coming in to replace them. The fellow suffers from a Multi Traumatic Disorder. The psychiatrist told him his best bet to stay normal would be, apart from taking his medication regularly, to do next to nothing.

  Our protagonist feels it's time to take a nap. He maneuvers his boat behind some huge rocks where it is protected from currents. He drops his anchor. Just as he wants to slip into the cabin he spots the top of a mainsail on the other side of the rocks. He claws himself onto the roof of his boat's cabin and witnesses Dramatic Action.

  What do you know? There are the two beach bums in designer jeans he remembers from their previous appearance at the Thirsty Dolphin, where Commodore Moneybags hired them to run his vessel. T
he CloudNine was presumed to be lost at sea with the commodore, passengers, and crew lost forever.

  And here we go again. From what the veteran is witnessing from his vantage point between sheltering granite formations, the charming young men are about to take over another sea castle, the Take it Easy, a Walton Wharf creation with a price that takes awhile to write down due to a multitude of zeros.

  A month before Elizabeth's appearance I was listening to an older couple who recently sold their ancient wooden mini schooner after sailing her around the world. Not having gotten much for their worm-eaten vessel, they put an ad in the Down Easter Courier offering to take yachts from A to B, which was answered promptly by the owner of the Take It Easy. Would the couple take his brand-new multimillion dollar yacht from Bunkport, Maine to Mobile, Alabama?

  Why, sure, sir.

  The owners flew down, were impressed by the old weather-beaten couple; up-front cash appeared, hands were shaken.

  "Godspeed and see you soon. If you need a crew, feel free to hire."

  Taking the Take It Easy out for trials, the couple (this hypothetical script has it) is approached by our killers, on one of Bunkport's floating docks, unseen by our veteran.

  Our veteran now sees the new victims, the old man in his weathered Greek sailing cap and worn U.S. Navy peacoat and his wife in an overall and a battered hat, kneeling on the boat's deck, looking into the barrels of the pirates’ pistols. The young men bring back their guns’ hammers slowly—crrrack, crrrack—and lightly touch their triggers. The shots ring out loudly. The old folks are knocked over backward.

  Amazing. Not so much the violence he observes but the veteran's own reaction. He feels he is getting into a rage. The veteran hasn't been that desperately angry in years, not since Viet Cong mortar splinters shredded his left leg. The Traumatic Syndrome is raising its ugly head. Our hero's innate coolness is tested. Or so he hopes. (Maybe he has no innate coolness.)

  This kind of mood shift has happened before, where he felt filled with cold, deadly rage, after he woke up in an empty trailer on a back road in inland Maine, about a hundred miles from Bunkport. The pre-veteran is now five years old. He is alone, even his dad's bad dog is gone. Looks like nobody is aiming to return soon. Have the unemployment checks run out? No more food stamps and church handouts? Where are his parents’ clothes, guns, flashlights, the deer hanging upside down from the trees behind the trailer, the canned beans stacked under the sink? “Mom! Dad! Did you go to sell the empty beer cans?"