The Malfeasance Occasional

by Various Authors

  I shook my head. “I made some calls. None of the other PIs heard from you. I figure my brother must’ve told you about me.”

  Her eyes flashed. “Why would Michael do that? He had the necklace. He wouldn’t want to get caught.”

  My chest hollowed out as if my heart vanished. I’d hoped there was a chance I was wrong. “Nora, you told me your lover’s name was Paul … not Michael.”

  She swallowed. “You … you must have mentioned him.’

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  Her mouth opened but no words came out. I filled the silence. “The photo of Michael tipped me off. You couldn’t see much of his face. But I recognized him anyway and I think the two of you counted on that.”

  She hugged herself as if chilled. “Michael said you were smart. He said if anyone could figure a way out for us, it was you.” She fixed me with her eyes. “He was right.”

  I didn’t feel smart. I’d fallen for a woman—no, I’d fallen for what I fantasized this woman represented: a wife, two cute kids, a future. The American Dream. I’d listened to her sob story, then donned my shining armor and tilted with real giants, not windmills. It could’ve had a happy ending, except that she loved someone else.

  I stood and helped Nora to her feet. “Go enjoy your life.”

  Like our last meeting, her eyes shimmered with tears. She hugged me, her breath warm against my neck. “I won’t forget you.”

  I shooed her out the door and then stood at my window, watching until she climbed inside a taxi and sped away. I slumped into my chair and toyed with the idea of getting drunk. But instead of reaching for the bottle in my drawer, I grabbed Michael’s postcard. I studied the sandy beach and palm trees pictured on its front and smiled.

  CHARLES DREES admits that when it comes to his literary preferences, he’s a mystery-genre snob. “Chances are, if someone doesn’t die, I won’t read it,” he says. His short story, “By Hook or by Crook,” was included in the anthology, The Prosecution Rests, and was later chosen as the title story for the anthology, By Hook or by Crook: The Best Crime and Mystery Stories of 2009. An Active Member of the Mystery Writers of America, Drees lives with his wife in Manhattan, Kansas—the Little Apple—and he is currently working on a mystery novel set in the Heartland.

  The Third Echo

  by Sam Wiebe

  And

  then

  the

  drop.

  Touch down in Glasgow, after ten hours of rom-coms and pasta salads and old people jostling my shoulder on their way to the john. Ten hours without a cigarette. I rush through the terminal and almost miss the woman standing by the baggage claim, holding a sign with my name on it.

  I head to her. The other passengers shoot me resentful glances. Forget that I shared the same cramped Airbus they did. Forget that the woman’s uniform isn’t a chauffeur’s, that she’s not carrying my bag for me, and that the only place she’ll be driving me is the Glasgow City Morgue. I’m a stranger in a suit getting preferential treatment. To the locals, I might as well be English.

  Sergeant Maddie Douglas introduces herself with a handshake that could speed coal on its way to the jeweler’s. She’s taller than me, thickset, with russet hair running out beneath her cap. Her accent is heavy but negotiable.

  “Ye’d be Larissa Kim’s attorney?”

  I affirm. “Dave Feldman. I’m handling receipt and transportation of the body.”

  “After ye identify it. How well did ye know her sister?”

  “I wouldn’t’ve come if I couldn’t identify Echo.”

  Douglas’s wan smile tells me there’s not much left to identify.

  * * *

  Glasgow seems of two minds about modernization. A ferris wheel lies hemmed in by grey-brown slabs of architecture. The Georgian and the pre-fab commingle. Smoking pedestrians scowl at us as the patrol car slides through the afternoon traffic.

  “How badly was Echo’s body burned?” I ask.

  Douglas tells me. My stomach lurches but I keep it down. Douglas looks amused.

  “Kind of law dae ye practice, Mr. Feldman?”

  “Entertainment,” I say.

  “In Canada?” She laughs, as if the very combination of “Canada” and “entertainment” is risible. An inhabitant of the country famous for golf finds my homeland dull.

  We stop by the mortuary in Jocelyn Square. I’m dying for that cigarette.

  * * *

  In a grey room with a curtained window, Douglas and the coroner tell me about the tenement fire. The ignition point is still undetermined, but the corridor outside flat 602B was soaked with accelerant. “Butane,” the coroner clarifies.

  The bodies recovered carry the ID of James Lester Barkley, 27, of Partick, and Echo NMI Kim, 29, of Vancouver. Both overdosed prior to immolation.

  “Who would burn two addicts?” I ask. For all her faults and bad habits, Echo was easy to get along with. Friendly, passionate. Full of life. A strange thing to say about a corpse.

  “Schemies are hard tae fathom,” Douglas says. “Drug debt’s likely.”

  The coroner heads next door to prep the body. I ask for a smoke, but Douglas is two-years-eight-months quit and the coroner’s assistant is asthmatic.

  Douglas slides open the curtain. The coroner’s voice crackles over the intercom. “All right, Mr. Feldman.” In the adjacent room the coroner uncovers the remains.

  The burns are significant, the face unrecognizable. But I know Echo Kim’s body. She’d once sued the RCMP for bruises incurred in custody. A frivolous lawsuit, but Larissa Kim is my firm’s top client. Anything for Larissa, which meant anything for Echo.

  For the lawsuit, I’d documented Echo’s torso. I’d seen the scars and lesions, birthmarks and moles.

  I know Echo Kim. The body on the gurney isn’t Echo’s.

  “Yer sure?” Douglas asks.

  I nod and point through the glass. “See the forearm? Echo has an abscess there. She‘s self-conscious about it.”

  Douglas opens an evidence bag and takes out a small red faux leather purse. “This isnae hers?”

  The wallet holds photos of Echo and Larissa’s grandfather, Echo’s Care Card, an expired Visa. “Someone go through it already?”

  “What’s missin’?”

  “Her passport, for starters.” I rummage through the bag again. “There’s a polaroid missing, too.”

  “Of?”

  “Echo and Larissa as kids. She’d never leave it.”

  Douglas leans against the wall, gazing from the handbag to the corpse. “I had half a mind it wasnae her, even though that—“ she points to a covered slab of dead flesh in the corner—“is certainly Jimmy Barkley. With her hands an’ face bein’ burnt, teeth removed, passport missin’, and now this business wi’ the photo—it’s a’ a wee bit convenient.”

  “I wouldn’t call a ten-hour flight convenient,” I say. “Sorry I couldn’t help.”

  Douglas smiles. “Help comes i’ many forms. Could ye stand a pint?”

  * * *

  We sit in a pub off Sauchiehall Street that faces an alley. A sign propped in the window reads GOOD FOOD, AVERAGE SERVICE. Douglas orders a pint of Belhaven for herself, tea and Tunnoch’s cakes for me.

  I tell her about Larissa Kim’s television career. Co-lead on a popular American legal drama.

  “Set in Vancouver?” Douglas asks.

  I explain to her how, when the exchange rates favor the Americans, cities like Vancouver and Toronto stand in for Seattle, Chicago, New York. “Like X-Files,” I say. “Or Highlander.”

  She grimaces. “Not a fan,” she says. “Now Due South I like.”

  “Not sure where that was filmed,” I say. “Stachura’s Law is in its third season. Larissa plays a prosecutor trying to balance her love life and career while raising a child with cerebral palsy. She’s a two-time Emmy nominee.”

  “And is Echo an actor too?”

  “No,” I say, thinking yes, and better than Larissa when she wants to be. Echo o
nly acts for judges and police officers, people she needs to outwit and control. No one can make her do what she doesn’t want to.

  “I’ll tell ye something,” Douglas says. “That Asian Jane Doe back i’ the morgue didnae get ‘ose burns from carelessness. Somebody wanted her unrecognizable.”

  “Is Echo a suspect?”

  “Right now she’s a person of interest.” Douglas quaffs her beer and stands up. “There’s a comfy hotel nearby. I’ll drop ye, if ye dinnae mind a wee stop along the way.”

  * * *

  I recognize King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut from the tour itinerary of a punk band my firm handles. The bar is small, the venue mid-sized and up a flight of steps. Both are packed. Douglas and I part a mob of chain-smoking youths out front.

  Douglas corrals the bartender. He has a glazed expression and a disappearing-reappearing smirk.

  “Huffin’ the gas, Davey?” Douglas asks him. “Tire sealant? Fridge linin’?”

  “I dinnae dae that anymaur.”

  “Just coke, crystal, X, and reefer,” Douglas says.

  Davey smirks. “This a lecture, Ma?”

  “Tell me about Echo Kim that lives in the scheme across from yer mum and dad’s.”

  “Stepdad’s,” Davey says. “She the Chinese burd?”

  “Korean-Canadian,” I say.

  Davey looks at me. “Anywan ask ye?”

  “Who’d she pal around wi’, Davey?” Douglas puts five pounds on the bar.

  “A few quid’s gonnae make me a grass? I dinnae think so.”

  “‘Think’ isnae a word ye should be usin’, Davey.” Douglas’s tone is imperious and cool. “Tell us.”

  Davey taps the other barkeep and says he’s going for a smoke. The three of us walk up St. Vincent Street, away from the sound of young voices. The rain comes on like a dimmer switch. Soon even the insides of my eyelids feel damp.

  Davey tells us about Jimmy Barkley. A product of numerous housing schemes, a trafficker in coke and amphetamines, and a walking hair-trigger temper. Barkley was also something of a white supremacist.

  “He had those wee Hitler flags wi’ the windmills on ‘em. Copies of Mine Camp. I seen his ma clean that junk out his room the night before she moved. ‘Magine that—she says he’s 26, too old tae be livin’ at home, and he says fine, ye get out.”

  “Echo and Jimmy weren’t an item?” Douglas asks.

  “They jes’ used each other. I hung with them a few times. Jimmy teld us he was givin’ her free tastes, win her over so she’d help him wi’ a big-time deal.”

  “Kind of deal?”

  “Skag. Echo teld him she had a Triad hookup. Asian mafia. Total shite, but Barkley fell fur it, the div.”

  “Who else associated with them? Any other Asian women?”

  “I dinnae grass on the livin’,” Davey says, pocketing Douglas’s cash. “Line’s got to be drawn somewhere, uh?”

  * * *

  I sleep that night in a hotel bed like all others, with the same three sheets I’ve found everywhere—paper-thin bedsheet, threadbare comforter, beige blanket the texture of burlap. Tonight they’re a great flat weight crushing my stomach.

  I dream that Larissa’s assistant meets me at YVR and drives me back through Vancouver to the set of Stachura’s Law to give the bad news to Larissa. Only, when I get there, it’s not Larissa playing the part of intrepid DA Rita Chen, it’s Echo. “No one can tell us apart anyway,” Echo says, breaking into howling, distorted laughter.

  I wake up to the polite screech of the hotel phone.

  “Sgt. Douglas of the police is here,” the receptionist says.

  In the lobby Douglas is pawing through tourist brochures. She pockets one for HISTORIC GLAMIS CASTLE. “Never been,” she says. “Toil and trouble and a’ that.”

  She has takeaway coffee and more Tunnoch’s, which we devour on the drive out to the housing schemes.

  “It was Barkley’s apartment that burned,” she says. “Technically his ma’s. Echo crashed here and there.”

  “Sounds like her,” I say.

  “I went back to Davey. Turns out he’s no problem grassin’ on the livin’ for the right price. He made some calls and got me Echo’s last address.”

  “So why am I along?”

  “Figured ye could chat up her old roommates, Flora Lee and Joyce Nunn. They might trust ye, workin’ for the sister and a’. Schemies arnae too sociable with the polis.”

  “This isn’t dangerous, is it?”

  “I’ll be downstairs.”

  Douglas lets me off in front of a twelve-story concrete honeycomb. No working elevator. My tobacco-addled lungs take a beating on the long climb to the ninth floor. By the time I’m up there, my chest is heaving like the ribs of an accordion.

  The door to 907 has holes where the numbers used to be. Knock knock.

  Instead of the women, the door is opened by a gorilla in a wife-beater and knockoff Adidas track pants. Mossy black hair grows on his shoulders and throat. I state my business. He snorts and turns back into the flat, not closing the door, not inviting me in.

  Anything for Larissa. I follow.

  I tell him I’m looking for Flora or Joyce. He asks why. To ask them about another girl. What girl? I’m not an expert on interview technique, but I’m pretty sure the interviewee doesn’t ask the questions.

  “Do you know Flora or Joyce?” I ask.

  “Mebbe.” I watch him sluggishly prowl the apartment, which is dirty and filled with burn-pocked MDF furniture.

  “There’s a cash reward,” I say. Interest gleams in his small eyes. I tell him I work for a movie star—well, TV star—who will spare no expense to get her sister back.

  He sits in a forlorn-looking chair that gasps as it takes his bulk. “Joyce’ll be back soon.” He waves me toward the couch. I find a few centimeters that aren’t covered with stains.

  “Dave Feldman.” I extend my hand.

  “Byron,” he says. He shuffles a cigarette out of a pack and lights it. I notice there are no smoke detectors in the apartment, just cords dangling from holes in the ceiling.

  “I’d love one of those,” I say.

  “Bet ye wid.” Byron pockets the pack. “Tell us aboot this hoor yer lookin’ fur.”

  “Echo? Well, she struggles with addiction. Her sister loves her. Wants her found.”

  “An’ yer job’s findin’ people, eh?”

  I smile. “Far from it. I’m an entertainment lawyer. From Canada.”

  “Kind of entertainment comes oot o’ Canada? Northern Exposures an’ shite?”

  I start to answer but he cuts me off. “Whit’s this hoor’s name?”

  “Echo. Kim.”

  “Chizzit?”

  “Kim is her surname.”

  “Chinese, uh.”

  I don’t dispute him.

  Byron stands and moves toward the door. I start to follow. I don’t know where we’re going. Byron throws the deadbolt on the door and I realize just where I am.

  And I smell butane.

  He’s got me by the throat, throttling me. Lets me go long enough to wind up. A haymaker blasts the air from my gut. For the second time that morning I’m choking for breath.

  David Chaim Feldman’s athletic prowess ends with the Put-Put Golf in the student union arcade of his alma mater. But I’m not going out without a fight. I wrap my arms around his leg and push, trying to topple him. A fire hydrant might be easier to shift. Fight or no, I am going out.

  Going—

  Gone.

  * * *

  When I wake, I’m on the carpet by the couch. I hear him punching numbers into the phone. He clears his throat and spits. The gob lands near my face.

  “Aye, it’s Byron,” he says into the phone. “Ah got summit. Some lawyer lookin’ fur Echo Kim. Nah, he’ll nae be goin’ onywhaur. Ah’ll check.” His foot jabs my ribcage. “Ye still alive?”

  “No,” I manage to say.

  “He’s drawin’ breath.” Another jab. He holds the receiver near my face. �
��Yer name?”

  “Feldman.”

  “Ye get ‘at? Sorry bastard. Looks a ned tae me. Mebbe ah should—if yer sure he’ll nae spill. Fine. Ah won’t hurt ‘im. Nae a scratch. Unnerstood.”

  I manage to flop over onto my back. I see Byron looking down at me.

  “Ye bleed easy,” he says.

  He sits, reaches under the couch and unearths a syringe.

  “Ah’m sposed tae let ye go,” he says, “but we both know that isnae happenin’, is it? Ah’ll gie ye the same choice ah gave that yob Barkley an’ ma sister’s Chinese friend. Ye can huv the needle—lethal injection like—or ah can carve ye up masel’.”

  “No third option?” I manage to say.

  “Sure. Ah kin burn ye while yer still alive.”

  There’s a tap-tap on the door. Byron steps over me on his way to answer it. He pockets the phone. “Nae messin’ aboot,” he says.

  I look at the sliding door and the small balcony beyond it. If it’s Douglas knocking, I could call out to her. But I’d be inviting her to join me. If it’s whoever Byron called, I’ll take my chances on a nine-floor plunge.

  Light footsteps. I quarter-turn and look up to see a blonde harridan smoking and looking down at me thoughtfully. Behind her Byron says, “Get it goin’, Joyce.”

  “Ah jest need tae change—”

  “Ah said oot.”

  She drops her cigarette on the floor, spins and leaves. Byron chains the door behind her. He’s wrapped the syringe in a dishcloth. Now he shakes it out into his hand. I think absurd thoughts about sterility and cleanliness.

  More knocking. Byron tosses the needle on the couch and mutters “Chrissakes.”

  I hear Douglas’s voice.

  I watch them from the floor, sideways in my vision. He lets her past him. She enters, shrugging off her coat and whinging about the weather. She spies me.

  With her hands wrapped in her sleeves and her back to him, he seizes her.

  As he does she spins toward him. Her hand comes out of the jacket carrying a nasty-looking sap. Her arm arcs around, bringing it down on his collarbone. I hear a snap and a scream from Byron as his arm goes slack. The second shot catches him on the temple. His legs seem to forget their purpose and he collapses.