by Matt Witten
FALLING DOWN DEAD . . .
I was hanging out at Madeline's Espresso Bar that morning when a voice I didn't recognize called out my name. When I looked up I saw an old writer, Donald Penn. He was a short, thin man with scared brown eyes and unkempt white hair who came into Madeline's almost every morning wearing the same threadbare gray sport jacket and skinny dark tie. He'd whisper, "Cup of Ethiopian, please," to whoever was behind the counter, then spend the rest of the morning sitting in a corner, scribbling in a dirty old spiral notebook and muttering softly to himself.
Given how quiet he was, and given he and I had never spoken to each other, I was surprised when he came toward me shouting my name.
I was even more surprised when he lurched forward, flinging a small shiny object at me.
And I was most surprised of all when he fell down, dead, at my feet.
Praise for BREAKFAST AT MADELINE’S, Winner of the Malice Domestic Award
“Witten delights with his charming characters, especially Burns himself.” – Publishers Weekly
“A breezy narrative filled with excitement and wit. The perfect antidote for a rainy day.” – Library Journal”
“A success. Fast…lighthearted… Witten presents his characters and plot twists in a straightforward and believable manner.” – Albany Times-Union
“Interesting characters, a substantial plot, and a subtle sense of humor.” – The Mystery News”
“Charming, witty and moving…an irresistible read. Jacob Burns is a welcome addition to crime fiction.” – Don Winslow, author of Savages
“Mystery fans are going to love this guy.” – Laura Lippman, author of The Most Dangerous Thing
"Jacob Burns is a wise-cracking, write-at-home dad with a nose for trouble… Matt Witten is an up-and-coming comic genius in the amateur sleuth game. Watch this guy, but don't spill your coffee!" — Sujata Massey, Agatha Award-winning author of the Rei Shimura mysteries
“A breezy, funny whodunit. The plot is fun, but it takes a backseat to the loopy, charming Jacob Burns.” – Tom Savage, author of Valentine
For Zachary and Jacob
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my literary agent, Jimmy Vines; my editor, Joe Pittman; and the folks who helped me along the way: Carmen Beumer, Betsy Blaustein, Nancy Butcher, Gary Goldman, Navorn Johnson, Frances Jalet-Miller, Sujata Massey, Mark T. Phillips, Pam Reed and Malice Domestic, Bonnie Resta-Flarer, Beth Teitel, Celia and Jesse Witten, and everybody at Madeline's Espresso Bar. Finally, many thanks to Nancy Seid, who is not only one heck of a wife and girlfriend, but also a darn fierce editor.
WARNING: This book is fiction! The people aren't real! Nothing in it ever happened!
One special note: I have been honored to serve on a grants panel for the Saratoga County Arts Council, one of the finest arts organizations around, and never witnessed any of the chicanery depicted herein.
1
I was hanging out at Madeline's Espresso Bar that morning, same as any other morning—except weekends, when I go heavy on the husband and father thing. It still amazes me sometimes, but I'm forty years old with a wife, two kids, and three hundred thousand dollars, which I hustled late last fall. The three hundred grand, that is. The wife and kids I've somehow accumulated over the years.
You've seen guys like me sitting in the back corner of every coffeehouse from Podunk to Paris. We're the wild-eyed dreamers scribbling madly in worn notebooks or hunched over coffee-stained old portable computers, muttering to ourselves. People tend to give us lots of room.
In my case, though, I'd become something of a local celeb. Last November it came out in the Daily Saratogian how my screenplay sold for a million big ones. Since nothing much happens in Saratoga Springs in November—and since the editor is my wife's best friend—my rather bewildered grin even made the top of page one, right above the winner of the 13th Annual Simulated Deerhunting Competition. The headline screamed, Saratoga writer jacob burns goes hollywood!
So the folks at Madeline's put my mug shot up on their bulletin board, and sometimes I'd hear tourists whispering to each other in hushed reverential tones as they pointed at me. The brave ones would come up and ask for my autograph.
That morning it was already May, and six months had passed since I became a major regional tourist attraction, but I still felt a little stunned. See, I'd spent ten long years—well, to be honest, more like fifteen—writing poignant bittersweet screenplays about migrant farmworkers, homeless Haitians, and others of their downtrodden ilk. To use that infamous L word, I'm a liberal, a stuck-in-the-60s anachronism, an amusing relic to point out to your grandchildren. After receiving several thousand rejections—at least—I finally figured out that no one in Hollywood would ever in their wildest dreams give a rat's ass about any of this stuff.
But then last year it happened: My old college roommate got the rights to a novel called GAS, about deadly fumes seeping out of the earth's core after an earthquake and threatening to destroy the entire population of San Francisco. I guess I must have hit a certain time in my life, because I agreed to do the adaptation. Basically, for a couple of years I'd been wanting to buy myself a pair of hundred-dollar prescription sunglasses. GAS seemed like a good way to finally achieve that dream.
So I wrote the thing, in five short weeks. And the rest, as they say, is history. One million buckaroos. Even after the agents, managers, lawyers, producers, accountants, unions, Internal Revenue Service, and other bloodsuckers drank their fill, and even after I treated myself to two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, I still wound up with that three hundred K, free and clear.
And not only that, advance word on The Gas that Ate San Francisco, which would come out this Christmas, was awesome. So now every studio in Hollywood had a disaster flick they wanted me to work on. Showers of deadly hundred-ton meteors... gigantic man-eating weeds... a thousand cloned grizzly bears set loose in New York City...
Of course, I still had no takers on any of my poignant, bittersweet screenplays.
My agent set up a deal for me to adapt another novel, about a lethal hairy green fungus, transmitted by soap. (I kid you not.) But whenever I sat down to write the darn thing, my brain froze up and all I could think about was eating another handful of Nestle chocolate bits. I gained twenty pounds without finishing a single page, and eventually realized I'd better take a break from writing before I started looking like Marlon Brando.
Bottom line, I needed a break, period. For fifteen years I'd spent my life anxiously chained to the keyboard, on an endless quest for one perfect word after another. Ever since my kids were born I'd been feeling a wee bit perturbed, to put it mildly, that my better half provided a good two-thirds of our decidedly moderate income. But now, abracadabra, I'd rubbed the magic lamp called Hollywood and woken up wealthy. And like a lifer unexpectedly released on parole, I suddenly didn't know what the heck to do with myself. This strange new freedom was baffling.
For right now, all I wanted to do was sip coffee at Madeline's, read their newspapers, do the crosswords, and chill out. Which is what I was doing on that morning in May when a voice I didn't recognize called out my name. This happened a lot lately; if it wasn't a tourist, then it was some aspiring young writer wanting me to recommend them to my agent.
When I looked up, though, I saw an old writer: Donald Penn. Or as everyone at Madeline's referred to him, The Penn. I'd never heard him speak out loud before. He was a short, thin man with scared brown eyes and long unkempt white hair who came into Madeline's almost every morning wearing the same threadbare gray sport jacket and skinny dark tie. He'd whisper "Cup of Ethiopian, please," to whoever was behind the counter, then spend the rest of the morning sitting in a corner, scribbling in a dirty old spiral n
otebook and muttering softly to himself.
In short, he acted very much like me, except a lot crazier—or at least, I hoped so. Certainly his beard was scragglier.
Given how quiet he was, and given he and I had never spoken to each other, I was surprised when he came toward me shouting my name.
I was even more surprised when he lurched forward, flinging a small shiny object at me.
And I was most surprised of all when he fell down, dead, at my feet.
2
Not that I knew he was dead. I figured he was drunk, or maybe he'd just tripped on one of Madeline's quasi-Oriental rugs. "Mr. Penn? You okay?" I asked.
But he didn't answer, and he didn't move, either. Everyone in the espresso bar was staring at me. I knew I was supposed to put down the Arts and Leisure section and do something. But what? Beyond Band-Aids and kisses, my medical expertise is limited.
I shook The Penn. Nothing. Trying to ignore his rotten fishlike odor, I bent down and felt his neck. No pulse. I put my hand in front of his nose and felt a tickle, but it was just some stray hairs from The Penn's mustache.
"Call an ambulance," I heard someone say, and then realized the croaking voice was mine.
Noise and commotion suddenly burst out behind me, people running around and screaming for a phone. Some guy in a Buffalo Bills jacket raced in from the front room, grabbed The Penn, and started banging his chest and blowing air into his mouth.
As Buffalo Bill pounded away just like the studs on ER, I looked down at my shaking left hand. Somehow I was still clutching the shiny object that Penn had flung at me.
It was a key. In fact, a very familiar key—I had one just like it at home.
My hand was holding the key to a safety-deposit box at the Saratoga Trust Bank.
Buffalo Bill wiped sweat off his forehead and frowned. An ambulance roared up and three hyper-efficient EMTs dashed in, zapped and tubed The Penn to no avail, then carried his body out on a stretcher.
Reality suddenly hit me like one of those hundred-ton meteors. Donald Penn was stone cold dead. And as he was dying, he tossed me the key to his safety-deposit box.
Why?
There was only one possible explanation I could think of: The crazy bastard knew he was dying... and his final dying wish was to have me open his box.
It gave me the shivers.
Three unhappy-looking cops came in and questioned me, followed by a cute young reporter from the Daily Saratogian. They all wanted to know exactly what had happened.
I told them what I saw: it looked like a heart attack. But I never mentioned the key. I figured it was nobody's business but mine. Mine and The Penn's.
They didn't probe too hard. Clearly this was just another sad-sack derelict biting the dust from too much booze and too much scrounging for leftover, half-eaten Happy Meals from the McDonald's garbage bin.
So less than five minutes later, the cops let me go. I stepped out of Madeline's and blinked up at the blue May sky. My feet started moving, and before I knew it, I found myself walking up Broadway toward the Saratoga Trust Bank.
I had to sidestep hordes of young mothers idly wheeling their baby carriages as they basked in the sunshine. Saratoga Springs is a tourist town that takes its flowers seriously, so there were tulips, daffodils, and other splashes of color blooming all over the sidewalk. Teenage kids with weird haircuts sat on the benches smooching, and Skidmore College women were out in force wearing ultra-tight tops and ultra short skirts. All of this springtime festiveness made The Penn's death seem even more bizarre.
As I headed up the marble steps of the bank, I wondered what I'd find in his box. Old love letters? Thick stacks of thousand-dollar bills? Dirty socks?
I walked up to the thin-lipped, middle-aged woman who spent her days perched like a withered parrot outside the bank's imposing safety-deposit vault. The way it works at the Saratoga Trust, you give Ms. Thin Lips your key and sign a form, after which she proceeds to open the vault's thick steel doors. Once inside, she hands you your box, and then turns her back to give you some privacy as you put in or take out your valuables. Or if you request it, you get your own small private room.
So I gave The Penn's key to Thin Lips and waited while she got out the form. She looked down at it, then up at me, and frowned. "You're not Donald Penn," she said.
"No, he gave me his key. He wanted me to get something out of his box," I explained.
She eyed her form doubtfully. "He has not authorized you to do that."
"Well, but he gave me the key."
"You are required to obtain his official authorization."
"That'll be a little hard to do. He's dead."
She stared at me, not sure if I was making some kind of sick joke. I decided to give her the works. A tear fell from my eye, a trick I learned from an actress friend once, and I blubbered, "He died right in front of me, thirty minutes ago."
But Thin Lips just constricted her lips even more. I don't know how she managed to get her words out through that tightly zipped mouth. "Unless you're a family member, or you're mentioned in his will, you can't get into his box."
Death to all bureaucrats. "Ever?"
"An individual's safety-deposit box is sealed after his or her death. The laws and regulations in this regard are extremely strict."
I thought for a moment, then said, "Oh." Not exactly brilliant, I know, but it was all I could come up with.
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously, until they were even thinner than her lips. "What do you want from Mr. Penn's box, anyway?"
I stood up huffily and threw the woman my snootiest frown. "I'm surprised you would ask. That's a breach of privacy, is it not?"
Thin Lips gave a guilty little start. As I turned and walked away, I could feel her glaring at my back. It was the most fun I'd had all morning.
That night, after our kids were in bed, my wife and I sat on the front porch sipping our almond sunset tea. "What was this guy's story, anyway?" I asked obsessively, for maybe the hundredth time.
"Maybe he was a secret millionaire, the bastard son of Aristotle Onassis," Andrea suggested.
"No, really," I said.
"He's a Venusian spy who faked his own death in order to escape his tyrannical masters."
I shook my head and laughed. Andrea is by nature an upbeat person, and she's also an expert at getting me to lighten up—a skill she was forced to acquire during all those years of being married to a struggling writer.
Andrea looks like a 60s folk singer, with long black hair down to her waist, freckles, and deep brown eyes that reach right into you. Thanks to long hours of working out at the Y, she's in even better shape than she was before her pregnancies.
In short, she's a beautiful woman.
Sometimes when I would sit at Madeline's and think about my life, and how the highlight of my career was some inane B flick about killer gas, I'd get really depressed. But then I'd think about Andrea, Babe Ruth, and Wayne Gretzky, and feel okay again.
Babe Ruth is our five year old, and Gretzky is three. They used to be Daniel and Nathan until they decided to change their names.
After kidding around with Andrea on the front porch, and then kissing my sleeping boys good night, I was able to put The Penn’s safety-deposit box out of my mind and get some sleep.
But the next day, while reading the Daily Saratogian, all my irritation at being unable to get into his box returned full force. The story on The Penn’s death described in moving detail how he had died in my arms. Actually, of course, he'd died at my feet, but why quibble?
The cute young reporter had learned that The Penn’s body was examined by the county medical examiner, who declared the cause of death was indeed a heart attack. But the reporter hadn't succeeded in learning much else about The Penn beyond his age, fifty-three, and his address, 511 Broadway. She mentioned that he was a writer, but said he had no known publications. And no known relatives, no known jobs... no known anything.
I sat at the kitchen table wondering if The Penn’s
friends—assuming he had any—called him Donald or Don, or Donny. Then, thrusting that thought aside, I went out to the driveway with Gretzky to play hockey. His babysitter was sick, and today was Tuesday, one of the three days Andrea teaches at the local community college. So that left me holding the bag—or in this case, the baby.
Gretzky is the more easygoing of our two children, with a knack for relaxing and enjoying the simple pleasures of life, a talent he must have inherited from his mother. The one time he gets really fierce is when he's playing hockey. So he and I battled each other all morning in a hotly contested, no-holds-barred game. I played pretty well, I thought, but the kid is tough, and he beat me 83 to 0.
Then he held his crotch and started dancing. A dead giveaway. "Do you want to make peepee?" I asked.
"Hockey players don't make peepee," Gretzky answered firmly.
"Sure they do."
"No, they don't!"
Normally Gretzky is, as I said, the cheerful, easygoing sort. But not today. After several minutes of attempted rational explanations, followed by several minutes of attempted evenhanded negotiations, I eventually wound up carrying him kicking and screaming to the bathroom, just in the nick of time. He let loose about three gallons.
I figured he was just acting obstinate because he was sleepy, so I said gently, "Honey, time for a nap."
"Hockey players don't take naps," he declared angrily.
Oh, Lord.
Forty-five minutes and several Dr. Seuss books later, I tiptoed out of his bedroom, thrilled that I was about to get some time to myself. But then the door creaked. "Daddy?" Gretzky called out.
I gritted my teeth and tried to keep the desperation out of my voice, because if Gretzky heard it, he'd never let me go. "Yes, sweetheart?"
