Brother Leo had found the treasure. He raised the vase to catch more of the moonlight. Something inside the vase rattled. Brother Leo lowered the vase.
“Give it to me.”
Brother Leo swung round.
The black-cloaked figure stepped forward. In the moonlight, Abbot John’s face was stark white in the black hood. “Give it to me,” Abbot John repeated. “And return to your cell.”
Brother Leo’s hands shook a little, but he clung to the vase. “What have you done with the other vases?”
“How dare you question your abbot? It is I who am in charge of the monastery, and I who decides what is best for it. You will give me the vase immediately.”
Brother Leo swiftly considered his options. They were few. He could not run away. Where would he go? He could not refuse to give up the vase. He was alone with the abbot. But if what he suspected, that Abbot John was selling the vases to pay for the Gothic art he loved, then Abbot John could not afford to let Brother Leo make his suspicions known. Best, he thought, to give Abbot John the vase and try to talk his way out of the situation.
He held out the vase.
“Put it down,” Abbot John ordered. “Then step away.”
Brother Leo did as he was told.
Abbot John stepped forward, stooped, and picked up the vase. He shook it, and again something inside rattled. He stepped toward Brother Leo.
Brother Leo moved back, glancing down to see where his shovel lay.
Abbot John set the vase down and moved forward. He had drawn something from deep within his cloak.
Brother Leo could not be sure, but he thought it was the heavy marble pestle from the abbot’s desk. Brother Leo now knew the full measure of the danger into which he had fallen. He moved farther back.
Abbot John advanced on him, the pestle raised in his hand.
An explosion burst in Brother Leo’s ears. He dropped to the ground, not knowing what had happened. Then he saw Abbot John stagger forward. He crashed down and into the grave Brother Leo had uncovered.
Brother Leo turned and saw Allen Walker, his gun still raised. He waited for the shot, uttering a final prayer.
The sounds of the night had stopped with the shot. No coyote howled; no javelina moved about; no insect chirped. Only Brother Leo’s prayer floated up into the desert night air.
Suddenly, Walker turned and fled.
Brother Leo watched in open mouthed astonishment.
“Brother Leo. Get down.”
Brother Leo whirled and faced four dark figures. He looked about wildly, expecting to see open graves from which the Indians had emerged, angered at last at the disturbance of their peace.
“Brother Leo, are you all right? I’m coming.” Heedless now of the dangers of the cemetery’s cavities and of Walker’s gun, Brother Joseph hopped and skipped toward Brother Leo. “Come, hurry. We must get inside the monastery.”
Brother Leo unfroze. He clung to Brother Joseph’s robe and stumbled after him into the monastery. One of the monks slammed shut the heavy wooden door.
Brother Leo collapsed against the wall.
“Are you hurt?” Brother Joseph bent over Brother Leo.
“No. No. I don’t understand.”
“You found the treasure, at least the treasure that, first, Allen Walker was plundering, and then that Abbot John realized was even more valuable, at least commercially, than the vases themselves. Emeralds. They came from the Muzo mines of South America, brought by the Indians who accompanied the Spanish conquistadors. And the Indians brought with them their belief in the sacredness of the emeralds and their custom of using them in ceremonies from birth to death.”
Brother Leo stared uncomprehendingly. “I found no emeralds.”
“The pyrite nodes, inside the burial vases. The Muzo mine emeralds are often encased in pyrite. For Brother Luke, the burial vases and customs were the real treasure. And I suspect that Allen Walker and Abbot John were selling them. That is why Abbot John insisted on moving the coffins. But then Allen Walker’s men must have found the pyrite, and Walker realized what it was. Undoubtedly, he kept his discovery from Abbot John.”
Brother Leo stared, speechless.
One of the monks spoke. “We must go back out. Abbot John may still be alive. And we must call the authorities.”
“Yes,” Brother Joseph said. “We must go out to Abbot John.”
“But,” Brother Leo sputtered. “Walker. He may be lurking out there.”
“I don’t think so,” Brother Joseph said. “He must know that there are at least five witnesses to his shooting of Abbot John. He will not return.”
“He will get away,” one of the monks said. “We must call the authorities.”
“It is my fault,” Brother Leo said. “All my fault. I knew something was wrong. Walker pretended to be a lover of birds, but he mistook a rare mountain bluebird for a common bluebird. I suspected that he must be helping Abbot John to sell the vases. But why did he shoot the abbot?”
Brother Joseph shook his head. “I cannot be sure. Abbot John must have found some pyrite somewhere and realized what it meant. He had Brother Luke’s notebooks and would have known the history of the monastery. Walker would not have wanted to share the emeralds. So he shot him and would have shot you. I don’t know how he hoped to get away with it, but perhaps his greed overtook any rational thinking. Greed, once given in to, is not controllable.”
Brother Leo groaned. “It is all my fault. I wanted to save the monastery, and now . . .” He threw up his hands. “A murder. Theft. All of it. Our monastery and its people will know no peace. We will lose our peace, the real treasure.”
Brother Joseph stood silently for a minute. “Brother John,” he said. “Take Brother Leo to his cell. The rest of us will bring Abbot John inside, except for you, Brother Paul. You will call Father Dennis at Mission San Xavier. He is a doctor and he will give us the death certificate we need.”
Brother Paul turned to go to the abbot’s office.
“And Brother Paul,” Brother Joseph said sternly. “You will not call the authorities. None of us will.”
The monks stood for a moment, then moved.
Two days later, the monks filed into the crypt church, holding Abbot John’s coffin high.
Abbot Joseph held up his staff to begin the chants for the dead.
Copyright © 2010 Marianne Wilski Strong
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Fiction
BOOKED & PRINTED
ROBERT C. HAHN
Call them screwball mysteries, those books that feature unconventional female leads, hot male suitors, slapstick humor, and yes, the occasional murder. It’s a subgenre that was popularized by Janet Evanovich with her successful Stephanie Plum series (starting with One for the Money in 1994) and continued by Lisa Lutz with her zany series featuring Isabel “Izzy” Spellman (beginning with 2007’s The Spellman Files). Given the success of these books, publishers have been eager to proclaim the subgenre’s next champion. This month we take a look at three new novels that follow in the footsteps of Evanovich and Lutz.
LIAR, LIAR by K. J. Larsen (Poisoned Pen, $24.95) is the collaborative effort of sisters Julianne, Kristen, and Kari Larsen; it features Caterina “Cat” DeLuca and her large and vocal Chicago family. Cat runs the cleverly named Pants on Fire Detective Agency, which specializes in lying and cheating (male) spouses; her cell phone ringtone is Hank Williams’s “Your Cheating Heart.” Cat became an expert on straying spouses during her marriage to the despicable Johnnie Ricco, so she decided to put her painfully acquired knowledge to practical use.
Things go awry quickly for Cat when she’s hired by Rita Savino to get the goods on her husband Chance. Chance turns out to be “smoking hot” figuratively and literally when an explosion sends him to his maker and Cat to the hospital. Aside from having her bell rung by the explosion, Cat is fine, but she keeps seeing the supposedly dead Chance at odd times and places, like in
her hospital room, and only when no one else is around to see him.
Cat is surrounded by DeLuca men—her dad, uncles, brothers, and cousins—all cops—most of them honest. The DeLuca women are supposed to marry and breed, so Cat’s lack of progeny and her dangerous occupation are twin disappointments to matriarch Mama. Cat’s determination is impressive as she tries to sort out the conundrum posed by the Savinos while trying to cope with Mama, the meddling DeLuca men, and her annoying ex-husband. A word of caution: Cat and her family are Italian and the Larsens provide such loving and frequent descriptions of food—caponata, sopressata, puttanesca, cannoli, and other delicacies—that you may gain weight.
Scared Stiff (Kensington, $22) by Annelise Ryan carries a blurb reading, “Move over, Stephanie Plum.” Annelise Ryan is the pseudonym adopted by Beth Amos (Second Sight, Cold White Fury) for her Mattie Winston series, which began with Working Stiff and continues with Scared Stiff. Stiffs—corpses—are what Mattie works with as deputy coroner in Sorenson, Wisconsin, which is a change from her old job as an ER nurse.
Striking, six-foot Mattie has been separated from her surgeon husband David since she discovered him playing doctor with a coworker. When a corpse is found among a suburban Halloween display, Mattie must respond still dressed in her Wizard of Oz costume. The victim, Shannon Tolliver, turns out to be the wife of one of Mattie’s former coworkers. When suspicion falls on Shannon’s husband Erik, Mattie starts looking for alternative suspects.
Ryan really works the sexual tension element in Scared Stiff, as Mattie is pulled in three directions by three different men. She is being wooed by the wealthy Aaron Heinrich, while she holds off husband David. Meanwhile, she lusts after Homicide Detective Steve Hurley, but so does cute reporter/photographer Alison Miller, who isn’t shy about going after whatever or whomever she wants.
Scared Stiff has some very funny moments to its credit, although Ryan overplays the potty jokes—the humor of emptying someone’s urine bag stales pretty quickly—and Mattie’s unfortunate tendency to lose her clothing seems more forced than comic. Ryan does more right than wrong, though, and pulls off a some great comic scenes, such as when Mattie ends up driving a hearse after wrecking her own car.
Nora McFarland’s A BAD DAY’S WORK (Touchstone, $14.99) introduces Lilly Hawkins, a “shooter” for a Bakersfield, California, TV station. Lilly’s job is on the line due to a string of screwups, but she gets a chance to redeem herself by scooping the competition with film of a murder scene at Valley Farms—untill she gets run off by the detective known as “Handsome Homicide.”
Unfortunately for Lilly, the tape she shot turns out to be black. On top of that, someone believes that there is something incriminating on the tape and that she still has it. Yet another screwup results in a two-day suspension from her job, followed by a visit from a couple of thugs, whom Lilly pegs as cops, who punch and threaten her to get her to produce the (non-existent) tape. Lilly doesn’t know whom she can trust at the TV station or among the police, but she knows she has to do something. She approaches the murder victim’s family to gather more information and ends up adding a gang leader to her list of enemies.
McFarland’s plot keeps readers guessing about what might have been on the tape and whether either of the supposedly helpful men, Handsome Homicide or the station’s star reporter, Rod Strong, is actually what he seems. McFarland offers up plenty of eccentric characters and flashes of humor and romance, but best of all she shows Lilly starting to realize her own shortcomings. As the novel progresses Lilly discovers that she really doesn’t know anything about her coworkers: Her inability to disguise her reactions to others has isolated her and, ironically, made her unknowable as well. This hard-earned beginning of self knowledge serves to make Lilly both interesting and appealing. It should be fun to see where McFarland takes her in her next adventure.
ALL POINTS BULLETIN: U.K. house John Blake Publishing reissued Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s HITLER’S ANGEL under its Max Crime imprint in June. The alternate-history thriller, in which an American student interviews a reitred German detective and tries to solve the mystery of the suicide—or was it murder?—of Adolf Hitler’s niece, will be available in the United States in January. • In Blake Crouch’s novel SNOWBOUND (Minotaur, $25.99), a lawyer, blamed for his wife’s disappearance, goes on the run with his eleven-year-old daughter in tow—until the day an FBI agent appears on his doorstep, announcing that she knows he’s innocent. • The Western anthology GHOST TOWNS (Kensington/Pinnacle, $6.99) features stories from Loren D. Estleman and Steve Hockensmith, among others. • Steve Hockensmith’s fourth cowboy detectives novel, THE CRACK IN THE LENS (Minotaur, $24.99), has been nominated for a 2010 Nero Award, presented by The Wolfe Pack (www.NeroWolfe.org).
Copyright © 2010 Robert C. Hahn
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Fiction
LUCILLE
WAYNE J. GARDINER
The woman who has been looking at the three-by-five photo tucks it away in a compartment of her big Coach bag and says, “So that’s Charlie, huh?”
“That’s him,” Walter says.
“Nice-looking man,” she says.
Walter swivels his wrist in a gesture that says he doesn’t really have an opinion about it. “Well,” he says, “we don’t make decisions like this based on a guy’s looks.”
“No,” she says. “I suppose not.”
They’re at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant at Chicago O’Hare. She’s just flown in from New York City and Walter is meeting her here for lunch before she catches a two o’clock flight to Kansas City.
It’s the first time they’ve met.
Each knows of the other . . . knows who the other is . . . their reputation.
Walter hadn’t expected her to look like this.
Lucille . . . the lyrics of an old Kenny Rogers song run through Walter’s head. The name just doesn’t fit.
He’d heard she was a looker, but this might be the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen in person. Looks like the woman who was in the movie Get Shorty with Gene Hackman and John Travolta. What was her name?
“Is it a recent picture?” she asks.
Walter is taken aback momentarily, thinking Get Shorty goes back quite a few years, then realizes she’s talking about the photo of Charlie.
“Four or five years, I’d guess.”
A little frown on that flawless face. “Nothing more recent?”
“Well, as you might imagine, our organization doesn’t publish an annual yearbook,” sounding a little more like a smartass than he intended, wondering if he’s offending her, but she’s smiling and saying, “No, I don’t imagine you would,” that smile making Walter think, Wow!, but she has no way of knowing that because Walter’s expression remains the same regardless of who he’s talking to—Hollywood starlet, FedEx delivery man, Chicago politician—he’s perfected it over the years.
Rene Russo! That’s it . . . the actress in Get Shorty.
“And we’re doing this in Kansas City because . . . ?”
“Get it out of our backyard,” he says. Bring in someone from New York. Take care of this unpleasantness in KC. Reasonable precautions.
She likes this Walter. A man’s man, she can tell that in the few minutes she’s been with him. Not too dazzled by her . . . this gives her pause, but in a way, she likes that too.
Walter is a big man, former linebacker for Northwestern, even at fifty looking like he could stop anything or anybody coming up the middle. Plenty of muscle, but a classy guy too. Nice manicure, Armani suit. Looks a little like Jesse Ventura, but with hair.
“And Charlie’s not worried about why he’s going to Kansas City?”
“A special assignment, that’s the kind of thing Charlie does for us.”
“Can I ask what’s the reason he thinks he’s going there?”
A lot of questions, Walter thinks, but she is a pro. Maybe knowing some of this will help her get the job done.
&nb
sp; “He thinks we’re sending him down to talk with a guy who’s gotten out of line.”
“Named?”
“Why does it make any difference?”
“I don’t know that it does, but if it somehow proves to be useful later, I’d be disappointed that we hadn’t talked about it.”
“Nick Dulea.”
“But Nick’s not really in any trouble?”
“No.”
“So what if Charlie finds this Nick and takes care of this problem he thinks is real?”
“We’ve told Nick to make himself scarce for a couple days, check into the Ritz on the organization’s tab, enjoy room service, watch a few movies, get some tips from the Golf Channel . . . a little mini-vacation right there in Kansas City.”
“And Charlie will be at the Marriott?”
“That’s where he’s staying, but you’re likely to see him at Houlihan’s. That’s his favorite bar in KC.”
She shrugs like there’s no accounting for taste.
“Well,” she says, looking at her watch (it’s a Rolex, Walter notices), “it’s about time for me to catch a flight.”
“Good luck,” says Walter. “See you back here in a couple days,” wondering if there might be an opportunity to spend some more time together before she heads back to New York.
Walter watches her walk away, just as impressive from the back as she was sitting across the table from him. Walter wondering what she was thinking as she looked back once over her shoulder, wondering if maybe she was having the same thought he did about the return trip.
What she’s really thinking as she walks down the corridor: Even though she’s being well paid by Walter, there might be a way to sweeten the pot. She’ll think about it on the plane.
Eight hours later the bartender is talking to her, chatting her up, using that natural gift of gab that comes so easily to bartenders and barbers. But she isn’t having any of it. Charlie can tell, even from the other side of the room, even in this dim light.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 12/01/10 Page 11
