Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  “Yes. I told him I’d sold it as soon as it had come out of pawn. Then he wanted to know who to. I told him I didn’t have the records anymore. The state doesn’t make me keep them that long. So then he bought another gun like the one he’d pawned.”

  And Plan B had been launched, with the help of Nackenhorst’s bilingual nephew. The old man picked at a patched elbow and asked if I needed anything else.

  “Just the name of the buyer of the original Browning,” I said.

  “I told you—”

  I poked him in the S for Stanford, but gently. “You strike me as the sort who has a hard time throwing away bottle caps, never mind ledgers. Dig out the one for ’forty-five, and I’ll be on my way.”

  I thought that would be the start of a long negotiation, but I was wrong. Nackenhorst considered me while chewing a withered lip, weighing me in some mental balance as he had Wilfong and God knew how many others.

  Then he said, “Somebody should tell her. Before she reads about it in the paper.”

  He wrote something on the back of a business card—the very one I’d given him the day before—and passed it over.

  “Guess you’ll do as well as anybody,” he said. “Better, maybe.”

  ---11---

  It took me awhile to decipher Nackenhorst’s scrawl, even though part of the name he’d written was quite familiar. “Wilfong’s mother?” I asked.

  “Wife,” the old man said. “Ex-wife. She and I had an arrangement years ago. I’d let her know whenever Wally hocked something, and she’d buy it back.”

  “Okay. So you remember her name. But how do you happen to have her address down by heart after all these years?”

  “I looked it up after Wilfong came by. I meant to call on her, to let her know he was looking for the gun. Mrs. Wilfong made me promise years ago not to tell Wally about our deal. That’s why I didn’t tell him who had the Browning. I thought about going to see her, but I never did. Christmas rush and all. It might have saved him if I had.”

  I patted the pawn broker’s arm. “He was playing his own long shot by then,” I said.

  The address Nackenhorst had given me belonged to a bungalow court apartment on Rosewood, and the party in question no longer lived there. But the custodian had saved a forwarding address, which he coughed up for a fin. His special holiday rate.

  The new address took me out to Echo Park, to a prewar cottage on a street lined with them. Most were decorated for the big holiday, and a few were overdecorated. The one I was after erred on the tasteful side, each window holding a single electric candle. I considered that a very apt touch.

  Mrs. Wilfong, first name Rosemary, was a little old for the Debbie Reynolds ponytail she had her hair in. She was as slim as Reynolds, though, and had the regulation upturned nose. Her eyes were a washed-out hazel and her full mouth was turned down at the ends like the grille on my Packard. The expression looked as welded-on as the Packard’s, too. Then suddenly it softened.

  I figured my black eye had aroused her maternal instincts until she said, “Scott Elliott. From Paramount. We all thought you were going to be the next big thing.”

  “We?”

  “The girls in the Paramount front office. I worked there before the war. We were all pulling for you.”

  “My draft board pulled harder,” I said. “May I come in?”

  She hesitated. I thought she might be expecting company. She was dressed for some, in a chocolate-brown blouse whose upturned collar and half-sleeve cuffs were trimmed in sawtooth lines of pink, and a full pink skirt that had zigzag stripes of the blouse’s brown.

  I added, “I won’t be long.”

  “I don’t have long,” she said. “We’re having our Christmas luncheon today. I work for an insurance company now. Not as glamorous as Paramount, but it’s steady.”

  Rosemary had a real tree, unflocked. It stood in a corner of her front room, beside some built-in shelves. On one of these rested a hand-tinted portrait of her ex-husband, circa 1942. Ella kept a similar one of me in the same uniform with the same dopey smile on my face.

  Rosemary’s own smile had headed off to the party without her, maybe because I’d stared at the photo too long. “Are you here about Wally?” she asked.

  “You met him at Paramount?”

  “Yes. He was going to be running the place someday. That was the joke he always made. It didn’t work out.”

  “Is that what broke you two up?”

  “No,” she said. “I never wanted any of that. I’m not sure Wally really wanted it when we got married in nineteen forty-one. But after the war, when he’d convinced himself that he’d been cheated out of his life, he wanted it badly. By the end, it was all he wanted.”

  Rosemary had been addressing her front windows. Now she turned to face me. “Wally’s in some kind of trouble, isn’t he?”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  I told her the whole story then, complete with a flashback set on a crowded troop ship. She cried a little and asked to be excused for a minute. She came back with a shoe box and a story of her own.

  “After the war, when Wally started to sell off his things, I tried to buy them back. I thought he’d want them someday when he was himself again. I got to know Mr. Nackenhorst, and he’d call me whenever Wally came into his shop.”

  She handed me the box. It was packed tightly with pieces of Wilfong’s life. Among other fragments, I found a Bronze Star, a silver cigarette case, and a small automatic, a Browning .32.

  As I checked the serial number against the four I’d written down in my official operative’s notebook, I was reminded of the moment in The Maltese Falcon when Sidney Greenstreet finally gets his hands on the black bird for which he’d given so much of his life. I felt a little of the same nervous anticipation, which was crazy. I hadn’t chased the little automatic around the world or even the country. Still, as Wilfong had said, all our lives had been turned upside down by those long-ago murders in Sarajevo. And maybe the popgun I held in my moist palm had been the lever.

  Unfortunately, the scene played out exactly like the one in the Greenstreet movie. The serial number of Wilfong’s Browning didn’t match. He’d won a lead falcon in that crap game after all. I put the Browning back in the shoe box, or tried to.

  “Take that with you,” Rosemary said.

  “It’s not one of the Sarajevo guns,” I said. “Nobody will come after it.”

  “I don’t care. It’s the gun that killed Wally. Not whatever he used down in Mexico.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me either,” Rosemary said. “I mean, I’ll never understand why Wally wouldn’t let any of that go. Why he had to stay in the one town in America where he was a failure when he could have gone anywhere else and been a success. Why the things he’d lost meant so much more to him than the things he still had.

  “You said Patrick Skidmore told you that Wally got upset when he realized he’d pawned a gun that might be worth a few dollars more than he’d gotten for it. Did that make sense to you? It makes perfect sense to me. I watched Wally fret himself into a whole new man over his lost chances. It was a man I couldn’t live with, not even for the love of the man he’d once been. Take the gun, please.”

  I pocketed the automatic, and Rosemary saw me to the door. When I was on the front step, she asked who she could call about bringing Wally home to be buried. I told her I’d set it up.

  She said, “Of course you will,” and smiled again, adding, musingly, “Scott Elliott. From Paramount.”

  ---12---

  Something about Rosemary Wilfong’s parting words kept prodding me in the gut as I drove away. I decided it was the mention of our old employer, hers and mine and Wilfong’s, Paramount. My showing up on her doorstep had revived the past for her, as Skidmore’s call had done for her ex. For him, it had been one more reminder of lost chances and, as it turned out, one reminder too many. But for Rosemary, closing the circle had been comforting somehow. I was a messenger from happier time
s, from a world of make-believe and Hollywood endings. I’d even promised to deliver one of those endings, in the form of a dead husband she could bury, perhaps with his Bronze Star pinned to his chest.

  I found myself hoping that burying the past would work out for Rosemary. It was what her ex-husband should have done. Wilfong should have taken that phony Browning he’d bought from Nackenhorst and thrown it into Santa Monica Bay as a symbol of all the past chances he was putting behind him, once and for all.

  On impulse, I decided to do it for Wilfong, using the Browning he’d left behind. Or maybe I was doing it for myself. My postwar life had turned out differently, thanks to Ella and Paddy, but I still had my share of regrets to bury in the form of a likely proxy.

  I was a long way from the bay, but I happened just then to be passing a cross street that ended in midair. A new freeway overpass was being built, an everyday occurrence around greater Los Angeles. This effort was fairly far along. The foundation walls were already up on the far side of the cut. On the side where I parked my car, a form of plywood and scaffolding was awaiting its convoy of cement trucks, which would probably arrive right after the Christmas break.

  Access to the site was controlled by a sawhorse painted yellow and a length of chain-link fencing that was a foot or two short of what they’d needed. I squeezed through the resulting gap and walked to the end of the pavement, where I could look down into the big mold.

  Inside was a web of reinforcing steel, so tightly woven that Tiny Tim himself couldn’t have climbed to the bottom. I waited for a break in the traffic behind me before I pulled out the Browning. I didn’t say a prayer for Wilfong, though he probably could have used one. I knew Rosemary would take care of that. I just tossed the gun in, listened to it rattle its way down through the rebar, and headed back to work.

  Copyright © 2010 Terence Faherty

  Previous Article Next Article

  Previous Article Next Article

  Fiction

  WHERE THE SNOW LAY DINTED

  By Sue Pike

  Art by Laurie Harden

  A past winner of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best short story, Sue Pike has also been active as an anthologist. She is one of the original members of the Ladies Killing Circle, which began as a critique group “to help each other grow as writers.” Nearly two decades later, they’ve become the longest running critique group in Canada, compiling, along the way, seven anthologies of crime stories. Ms. Pike is also the editor of the anthology Locked Up (see Deadlock Press). But we’re happy to see her put on her fiction-writer’s hat again.

  The dog appeared out of nowhere, loping towards her on the snow-covered highway, grinning its silly grin, wagging its crooked tail. Moira stomped on the brakes and clung hard to the wheel as the car slewed into the oncoming lane and back again. Thank God there was no one else foolish enough to be out on the county road in this weather.

  She took a shuddering breath and waited for her heart to stop racing. This was ridiculous. It was the second time she’d imagined that silly bitch peering up at her through the blizzard. The first was on Highway 401 as she headed east out of Toronto. Eighteen lanes of traffic and suddenly there was an imaginary dog in her lane. She’d swerved then too and it was only the quick reflexes of the man in the next lane that had saved them both.

  The dog was dead, for heaven’s sake. Moira knew that. She’d arranged for her to die. She blinked and the dog disappeared into the blizzard.

  Her windshield wipers struggled under the load of snow and her headlights stalled on the swirling vortex in front of her. Moira had been clinging as close as she dared to the rear bumper of a snowplow ever since she turned north at Kingston. There was a measure of safety in his wake, but the flashing lights were driving her crazy. She tried falling back a few yards, but the plow was throwing up such a wake of salt and snow that she pulled closer again. The lights were relentless, sparking first on one side of the truck and then the other with the regularity of a metronome. A band of yellow danced madly across the top of the cab. She tried squinting, rubbing her eyes, humming—anything to keep from falling under the hypnotic spell.

  At least there was no sign of the dog. She’d always hated dogs. Her mother had filled her with stories of deadly, debilitating diseases. Rabies. Distemper. Heartworm. But Moira’s aversion was for something altogether different, something sly and malevolent in the way they looked at her.

  “Dogs are not moral beings, Moira. There’s nothing evil about them.” Royce was the logical one in the family, the oh-so-reasonable barrister. In all the years they’d been married, she’d never gone to see him in court; wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

  The sign for Jones Falls loomed into view and she leaned forward, searching through the squall for the turnoff to Franks Road. It couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards now. She counted them off and when she spotted the gnarled apple tree sagging under its weight of snow and frozen fruit she wrenched the wheel to the left and dove across the highway, praying nothing was coming from the other direction. Her tires spun as she hit a drift before settling into familiar ruts on the dirt road. The Land Rover crawled past fences and outbuildings until finally the farmhouse came into view. Warm light spilled from the parlor windows, illuminating the front part of the long driveway with steep banks on either side.

  She could feel the tension draining from her shoulders. Merv had kept his word and come over to get the place ready for her arrival. God knew he wasn’t always reliable, but this time he hadn’t let her down. The handyman lived on the next concession north and did odd jobs around the farm for Moira and Royce while they were in Toronto. Did them or didn’t do them as the spirit moved him.

  She turned into the drive and too late realized that any plowing Merv had done must have taken place hours ago. A foot or more had fallen since then. The car floundered. She pressed down on the accelerator, attempting to bull her way through, but the SUV spun its wheels and side-slipped into a drift, burying the driver’s door.

  Moira turned the key and threw the car into reverse but only managed to spin the rear tires deeper into the bank. She turned off the motor and let her head fall back against the soft leather of the headrest, wondering what Royce would say about her driving up here today against his advice. Foolhardy, no doubt. A dog with a bone, Royce called her, and not in a kindly way, either. Every Christmas it was the same thing. Good old Moira would drive up to the farm a day or two ahead of everyone else so the family could swan in on Christmas Eve and experience a holiday straight out of Currier and Ives. And every year it took her every minute of that time to put up a tree, decorate it and the entire house, bake the goodies, and prepare the Christmas feast. Royce was always far too busy and the two boys and their wives were just about useless. The daughters-in-law would arrive with a tasteless casserole or a couple of bags of store-bought cookies and think they’d done their bit. The five of them would wolf down her exquisite meals and then race outside to snap on skis or snowshoes, leaving good old Moira to clean up the mess.

  She sighed and checked her watch. It was barely four o’clock, but darkness was already settling in. She hoisted herself over the gearshift to the passenger seat before opening the door and stepping into the blizzard. Snow stung her face and sifted down her neck and over the tops of her boots. She pulled up her hood and sidestepped to the back of the Land Rover, holding on to the roof rack to keep from slipping. She grabbed a bag of groceries with one hand and the mesh sack containing the frozen turkey with the other before starting the long trudge to the house through snow halfway to her knees.

  The dog appeared from nowhere. With every step she was there nudging Moira, tail wagging, tongue lolling to one side, as ugly and infuriating in death as she’d been in life. Moira tried to kick her aside, but lost her balance and staggered, falling hard on her back, the turkey dropping onto her knee. She cried out and felt tears freezing to her cheeks.

  She rolled over, trying to ignore the stab of pain from her knee, and using the
turkey to lean on, managed to get to her feet again. She picked up the spilled groceries and shoved them back in the sack and then, grasping everything to her chest, she limped toward the door. Finally, blessedly, she was inside the house. She let the groceries slip to the vestibule floor and before she could talk herself out of it, turned and set off again to get the next load. The phantom dog had vanished.

  The phone rang just as she was fighting her way up the steps with the last of the Christmas presents. She kicked off her boots and ran to answer it.

  “Hey, Ma. How was the trip?” Her eldest son, Colin, had never quite lost the accent he’d acquired from their four years in Melbourne.

  “Horrible. I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of the car.” She shrugged out of her coat and padded into the kitchen to pour a measure of single malt into a glass. “When are you and Louisa coming up?”

  “See. That’s why I’m calling. It’s looking like this snow is going to keep up for at least another day. Louisa’s worried about traveling in her condition.”

  “What condition?” Moira reached into the freezer for a handful of ice cubes. “She isn’t sick, Colin. She’s pregnant. Everyone travels when they’re pregnant.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Don’t start? You’re telling me you’re not coming for Christmas and you say don’t start?” Moira’s voice broke. “I’ve just made the most ghastly trip up here with all the gifts and food.” She took a swallow from her glass. “Not to mention an enormous turkey. What am I supposed to do with this turkey?”

  “We tried to tell you we wouldn’t be coming, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “When? When did you tell me that?”

  “Oh, Ma.” Colin sighed. “We’ve been saying it since Thanksgiving.”

  “But it’s tradition. We always spend Christmas on the farm.”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s time we started our own family traditions.” Colin sounded like the stubborn little boy he’d been so many years ago.

  Moira clicked her tongue in annoyance. “This was your great-grandparents’ farm. We’ve been coming here since you were an infant. You can’t just stop because you’re too lazy to make the drive.”