EQMM, March-April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He walked. It was dark now, and he stayed just off the road, avoiding headlights. Brief rain pattered somewhere in the woods. He concentrated on keeping his mind empty, his pace, his breath, his heartbeat even.

  At the Spoonbill Shops, where he'd left his car, he slid the backpack inside a grocery bag on the floor, and went into the market. When he got home, he had two full grocery bags to carry inside. The sledge went into its slot among his tools. He hosed down his boots and jumpsuit and threw them, with rope and tackle, in the catamaran, among the rubble of his other outdoor gear, a temporary risk he'd have to take. He put his clothes in the washer and stepped into the lap-pool shower. Dressed in clean sweats, he started the wash and went upstairs, unloaded groceries, and read for a while, or tried to. When he looked out at the golf course, he saw lightning flicker in the distance. He hoped it would rain a lot during the night.

  A little after eleven the phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. After four rings, after the machine kicked in, he picked up, said, “Hello. Sorry, I was doing laundry."

  Elise asked if he'd seen Wick that evening.

  "No,” he said, “I thought he was staying late in the office, paperwork."

  "That's what he told me,” she said, “but he isn't answering there, and his cell phone's off, and he hasn't come home."

  "Maybe he's on the way. Or maybe he stopped off somewhere for a drink,” said Tom.

  "Maybe,” she said. “I guess I'm silly to worry, but he's been odd lately."

  "Under a lot of pressure,” Tom said.

  "Yes,” she said. “Well. Sorry to bother you. I'll call the bar at the club—maybe he's there."

  That conversation was on tape, if anybody ever got that far, checking.

  * * * *

  In bad financial times, the state needed a good laugh. And Florida guffawed with scorn at the man who died faking his own death. Too tricky by half, that Bill “Wick” Fenwick, who thought he could thread his way under the surface, come up in a new spot, and get away. But no: After his wife's worried calls, police found his car parked by the gate to Old Crater. In the early morning light, it was easy to follow his track. There were his clothes, his wallet and keys still in his khakis, his cell phone on top of a little memo book, a note in there talking about how he'd always liked to come here to get close to nature, to get ideas. And now, in his despair, where could he turn for peace? (This was utterly hokey, Tom thought, when he read it in the paper. No wonder Wick hadn't mentioned the note to him.) Further search turned up the other car, parked among pines, inside it the new identity, the planned escape. And from that end, they found the declivity with the rope dangling, and below it the body, a middle-aged man in swim trunks, with a lamp on his head, askew.

  They brought in a diver who located the passage from sinkhole to sinkhole. It was assumed Wick had gotten through (a feat in itself, the sheriff said on TV), but didn't make it out of the deep water—no foothold and perhaps he couldn't find the rope in the dark, or couldn't climb it. Unnamed official sources were quoted speculating about how much whiskey he'd drunk, the lamp up above failing, maybe a cramp, maybe his heart, though it was found he'd definitely drowned. Anyway, it looked like justice.

  Editorials said, enough of these scoundrels.

  Parents said, sinkholes are very, very dangerous.

  The widow and the daughter at the funeral were grateful for the support of old friends, of whom there were not many as the financial facts came out.

  The businesses, layered with debt, would be closed in on by creditors. Forensic accountants found funds Wick had siphoned overseas, though not as much as they hoped. Under Florida homestead law, business bankruptcy or not, the Mrs. got the house. Which she could sell, in time, when things had settled down.

  The life-insurance company had to pay Elise: The policy had long outlasted the suicide waiting period, and anyway it's not suicide if you die faking suicide, so, though there was comment about Wick's accident being the result of a planned embezzlement, in the end, she'd get that money.

  Tom saw her at the funeral, and at the office a few times, only in public, all aboveboard. She looked pale, and spoke slowly, hesitantly, and people said she'd been given sedatives. And when she told friends she was taking Nikki away for a time, up to the mountains, people said, of course, poor thing, she's near a breakdown, imagine the betrayal and bad publicity. But Tom was sure she was alert, and careful. Wick had underestimated her, Tom knew. She was an excellent actress.

  She had told him, when he revealed Wick's plan to her in June, that she'd long suspected he'd do some such stupid thing, had seen the other id in Wick's desk back when she found the private-eye report. From then on she'd set aside cash culled from their expensive life, sent where it wouldn't be found, against the day when he abandoned her and Nikki.

  Still, the details of Wick's plan had infuriated her. She said it was all boy's adventure and would look fishy, there'd be a lot of noise and a big chase after him, and then she'd be tied up in it, suspected. And when Wick was, inevitably, caught, and tried, and jailed, what a disaster for Nikki. Better he should fail, she said, and Tom had agreed.

  * * * *

  At times Tom walked through waves of vertigo, a feeling that the ground beneath him could turn to powder, but he did what was demanded. He worked with the receivers, his employment now to salvage what could be saved. He got to know the accountants, who listened to his requests for payments that would keep things going and bring in revenue for a smaller, steadier business that could perhaps emerge in time.

  In separate trips through August and September he'd dropped the rope, sledge, cut-up jumpsuit, each glove, each boot in the Little Peregrine, in distant spots, where the water ran fast and deep after tropical rains. Nobody was looking for them. Nobody was looking at him. The accountants talked about what Wick's books told them, about the nested companies making each other loans. Some days, they laughed and whistled with admiration at Wick's nerve.

  In mid November, Elise flew down from the mountains to come to the office to sign papers. She looked serious, and older, in a brown suit, no earrings, a thread of gray in her hair. She said goodbye to him in front of others, saying to him, as to them all, “I hope we'll meet again."

  But he knew it would be better not to. While she could visit here, and he could court her, even after a few years they could marry—that's how Wick would think—it was better for her to be free, and far away. He shook her hand, and wished her well.

  Tom realized, of course, that she'd known in any plan Wick would turn to him, and so she'd made sure he was her ally. But once she was gone, he started thinking she must have seen, for a long time—years?—what he was capable of. Tom wondered exactly when he'd started hating Wick.

  Playing the front nine one morning in early December, on a day when the humidity had cleared, he drove into a bunker. Stood there, waggling the five iron, feeling the sun on his bunched shoulders, the golden force of it. He swung and sprayed sand, and the ball lifted and reached the green, but there was nobody to see it. Then he got what he had lost. And what he had: his own shadow stretched unrivaled across the fairway.

  Copyright © 2010 Lynne Barrett

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  Fiction: DUEL by William Link

  William Link, together with his writing partner Richard Levinson, created many of TV's best crime series, including Murder, She Wrote, Mannix, and Columbo. For his TV work, he will be celebrated this year at the Malice Domestic Convention, where he will receive the Poirot Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Mystery. Speaking of Columbo, Crippen and Landru Publishers has just released a collection of of 14 new Columbo stories by Bill Link entitled The Columbo Collection.

  Jim Siders left his wife at their apartment off Columbus Avenue and took a taxi, which he could ill afford, to Penn Station. It was a blistering hot August day and he was wearing a fifteen-year-old poplin suit, the kind you usually saw the rumpled Charles Laughton wear in his old courtroom movies.

 
The Metroliner, which he could ill afford, took him to Philadelphia, where he got off at 30th Street Station and took another overpriced cab to the precinct house in West Philly.

  He found himself surprisingly calm waiting for Lieutenant Charles Robinson, the homicide cop who had called him and said they needed his “abilities” in a current case they were working on. He knew Robinson was downplaying the importance of the investigation. He and Gail had watched the story evolve, the child who had mysteriously disappeared from her family's mansion. If the victim had been a minority kid he doubted it would be getting this kind of media attention.

  That's why he was a little surprised when Lieutenant Robinson came out to greet him. Robinson was black as tar, wide, heavy-footed, like the old heavyweight champ Sonny Liston without the glower. He was warm and seemingly friendly, unlike some of the other cops Siders had helped over the years who resented him when his insights proved accurate and the media played him up more than them.

  "Got any vibes yet?” Robinson asked, smiling.

  "Zip,” Siders smiled back. This was somebody he knew he could work with, an amiable cop, overweight, overworked, with an agreeable absence of attitude.

  "Give me a list of your travel expenses,” Robinson said. Another smile: “I'll get you reimbursed just about as fast as they reimburse me. That's a promise!"

  He took Siders back to his office, a cramped, cluttered room with only an ancient fan with a missing blade fighting the stagnant heat. Robinson sat on the corner of his desk, Siders in a hard-backed chair facing him. “What do you know about the case?” he asked.

  "Just the little I saw on television."

  Robinson nodded, serious now, the startling whiteness of the teeth in his smile gone. “Eight-year-old little girl driven home from school by the family chauffeur. Servants saw her watching TV in her room."

  "Were her parents home?” Siders asked.

  "No. Mother was shopping in town, Dad was at his business. The little girl, Allison, never showed for dinner. This was three days ago now."

  "You mean someone took her from the house?"

  "Looks that way. Unless she walked out herself. Maybe met a friend, but we talked to all her buddies and nobody saw her again after they left school."

  Siders was sweating now, but not from tension. “Was the child angry at her parents?"

  "Not that we know of. They're so distraught, I'd think they'd admit it if there was some kind of conflict with the kid. Although the cook told me the parents have these horrendous arguments, shouting matches, which the kid was privy to."

  Siders was not a stranger to out-of-control fights with one's wife. Luckily he and Gail hadn't had a child who would have had a front-row seat on their fireworks. He knew he had grown mistrustful of most women after his wife had that “incident” with her old high school friend.

  Robinson crisscrossed big hands under his arms. “Hot today! You want a Pepsi or something?"

  "No, no I'm fine."

  Robinson went to a small fridge Siders had missed, opened it, pulled out a bottle. “I want to take you out to the house, let you poke around, hopefully get some vibes."

  "That's what I'm here for, Lieutenant."

  "Have to tell you something else. We got one other person working with us on the case—another psychic.” He smiled. “Unless you divined that already."

  Siders smiled back, but now the bad sweat broke out: He finally had a vibe, the wrong kind. “Who?"

  "Woman named Libby Stark. You know her, ever hear of her?"

  "No."

  "She's local. Seems the mother, Mrs. Schofield, goes to her quite a bit. She insisted we bring her in to see what she could come up with. You bothered with that?"

  What could he say? “No. Not if she could be helpful. We'd both be working toward the same goal."

  It seemed that now the broken-bladed fan started working. He suddenly felt cold, very cold, in his old poplin suit.

  * * * *

  Robinson drove him out to an imposing Georgian mansion on the Main Line. He was still quietly seething with worry: He had hated competition even as a kid in school, never played games, chess, cards, anything that put an opponent square in his face. Who was this Stark woman, some Philly faker, preying on stupid rich women with lots of time and money on their manicured hands?

  In Allison's bedroom there was a profusion of personal objects, but nothing with “vibes,” as the lieutenant put it. He looked in the laundry hamper, at a tangled pile of dresses, underwear, T-shirts. Nothing spoke to him.

  * * * *

  Later, downstairs in the opulent living room, Robinson introduced him to Mrs. Schofield, a pale, almost translucent blond, not unattractive woman in her thirties. She was with another woman, dumpy, dowdy, fortyish. Mrs. Libby Stark.

  Siders shook hands with both of them. Stark had a surprisingly strong grip, which he knew connoted an authoritative, confident personality.

  "I've seen you on Court TV,” she said. He didn't know if there was the shadow of a sneer on her fleshy lips.

  They were joined by the husband, an executive type, whose handsome, stolid face betrayed no emotion, either because he refused to exhibit any or because he didn't have any.

  "...usually don't call in any psychic folks until the late part of our investigations,” Robinson was saying.

  "But—"

  Mrs. Schofield interrupted: “I called Libby because I thought you fellows might need all the help you can get."

  Siders checked out the husband, who looked as if he harbored a low-grade contempt for his ditzoid wife who actually believed in these crystal-ball charlatans, especially this Philly specimen. But his wife's bills to her psychic were probably no worse than her bills from Saks or Neimans or the downtown jewelers. Those more upscale charlatans.

  Siders said, “Mrs. Schofield, do you mind if I look around the house? I might pick up something in one of the rooms where your daughter has been."

  "Oh yes, yes, of course. Consider the house yours. You too, Libby."

  Fine, Schofield's face seemed to say. And maybe they should contribute to our astronomical mortgage while they're at it. And this Siders guy—tell him the liquor cabinet and my wife's jewelry box are off-limits.

  "Thank you, Annette,” Mrs. Stark said, rubbing in her friendship with the lady of the house. “I know how worried you and Stewart are over this terrible situation, but rest assured I will do my very best.” She volleyed a look back at Siders as if to say: This is my territory, buster, always has been, always will be, so maybe you'd better get back on the train.

  "Okay, people,” Robinson finally said, like a tolerant tour guide, “I think we better let you psychics do your thing."

  * * * *

  During his tour of the house, Siders bumped into Mrs. Stark in a sort of demilitarized zone, the study. “Picked up anything?” he asked, trying to be friendly.

  She smiled. “If I did you'd be the last to know."

  "Mrs. Stark,” he said, “we don't have to be enemies."

  "Don't we? You've had your run as a media darling, darling, don't you think it's time for somebody else to have her place in the sun?"

  * * * *

  Siders caught his first vibe in the chauffeur's quarters over the garage. It was a one-bedroom dwelling with few personal possessions except for clothing and some photos in cheap frames on the wall. Siders was immediately drawn to a shot of four mechanics, grease monkeys in oil-stained coveralls smiling fatuously at the camera. Something about it, Siders thought, something about it.

  Later, as a mauve summer dusk slowly descended and chandeliers sprang up like bonfires all over the huge house, the chauffeur himself arrived with a beautiful Angora cat in his arms.

  As Siders and Robinson approached the man near the garage, Mrs. Stark having already left for the day, the psychic felt another strong, almost seismic pull, not knowing if it was emanating from the man or the animal.

  It seemed Cassandra, the Angora, had become deeply depressed since Allison's disap
pearance, and had been taken to the vet for “therapy."

  "How old is she?” Siders asked the chauffeur, a short, bright-eyed man in his forties named Jorge. Siders had immediately recognized him from the photograph.

  "Four, maybe five years,” he answered in an accent that Siders later learned from Robinson was Argentinean.

  Cassandra refused to be petted. Typical, Siders thought: Male cats are much more friendly than the watchful, judgmental females. Like his wife. But he still wasn't sure if he was getting a glow from Cassandra or the chauffeur.

  "Vibe?” Robinson asked after the chauffeur had left. The cop was more perceptive than he'd thought.

  "I always get good vibes from cats. I had a beautiful Siamese when I married my wife, but she made me get rid of it."

  "You were lucky,” Robinson laughed. “When I got married my wife made me get rid of all my girlfriends!"

  * * * *

  In the motel that night, Siders suddenly woke at almost three in the morning. There was just a light paintbrush of neon at the window near the panting a/c unit and the hesitant patter of rain.

  The image of two numbers had emerged from his sleep: 7 and 6. It had seemed as if he had been looking up at them, like they were on a building or a sign. 7 and 6.

  He called the precinct house and cajoled a detective, who luckily knew Siders's role in the case, to call Robinson. “Middle of the night? He's gonna chew your head off,” the man warned him.

  "Not when he hears what I have."

  Luckily, a sleep-drugged Robinson was more cuddly than Cassandra. “Anything,” he said. “Tell me anything you have."

  Siders told him about the 7 and 6 in his dream. He considered dreams the mind's movies, almost like a binary code that could either mask or reveal the truth.

  Robinson was silent for a long time; then Siders heard him soft-talking his wife back to sleep. “You know this guy Jorge—the chauffeur?—he used to work at a gas station, was a mechanic there?"

  Very sleepy: “Right."

  Then it hit Siders like the fifty thousand volts from a stun gun. “A 76 gasoline station?!"