EQMM, March-April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I shut my eyes and devised a ruse. In case I survived.

  A few similarly awful roads intersected ours. We turned on one of them and fifteen minutes later, to my immense relief, we pulled up in front of a clapboard shack at the edge of a big lake. A dock with a few boats tied to it poked into the water. The sign said Crane Lake Store—Cabins For Rent.

  "Good luck,” said Pete. “You'll need it.” He left in a hurry.

  The sound of the Model A rattling through the woods faded and died.

  The old gent behind the counter listened politely as I explained my predicament. “I need to find my friend Jimmy Philbin,” I told him. “His father died recently and I've got some documents he needs to sign, so his mother can get her hands on some lettuce the old man left."

  The gent smiled as if he'd heard tales like mine before, and tapped a bell on the counter. A door behind him opened. A younger fellow emerged from a dimly lit alcove that might have served as an office. He had a pistol holstered on his belt. The old gent repeated what I'd said.

  "What's your name?” the guy with the heater inquired. I told him. He asked how I knew Jimmy.

  "From St. Andrew's parish. From the saloon, Tin Cup's place."

  His eyes narrowed. “Let's see the papers,” he said.

  I pawed around in the carpetbag and came up with the envelope Arthur had given me. “They're in here, but I can't let'cha read ‘em. Lawyer told me Jimmy should open it, nobody else."

  "Oh yeah? And how do you know Jimmy's here? Who told you that?"

  "Jimmy did, when he came to town for his old man's funeral. The lawyer knew too."

  He thought it over for a few moments, and sighed. “C'mon,” he said. “I'll show you where his place is, and rent you a boat. If you get back here before nine or so I can rent you a cabin for the night too. Otherwise you're on your own."

  I grabbed my carpetbag and followed him. He untied a rowboat and showed me how to fit the oars into the locks. “See that out there,” he said, pointing at a dim hump of shadow rising ever so slightly above the choppy surface of the water. “That's an island. Jimmy's place is out there.

  It's further than it looks,” he added, as I stepped aboard.

  "Really? It looks like it's halfway back to Virginia."

  He allowed himself a flicker of a smile. “All'a three miles,” he said. “We hang a lamp on the dock at night. Say hello to Jimmy.” He gave me a shove-off.

  I rolled up my sleeves and put my back into it. The wind was against me, but intermittent. I didn't check my progress until I needed a rest. It was disheartening. I could've swum to shore. I leaned into it again and tried to think about something other than the distance I had to row. The investigation came to mind, of course, and it soon occurred to me that my modus operandi is always the same, even when I'm two hundred miles from anything familiar. You have to start somewhere. I start with the coppers. They generally know who did it even if they can't prove it, and sometimes they did it. I hated to think that Jimmy Philbin was behind Cavanaugh's murder, but as theories go, it wasn't bad. He was an infamous percentage-copper, so blatantly on the take that Chief Tommy Brown, a man whose palm has been crossed more times than a priest's heart, didn't hide his disdain for him.

  I rowed for most of two hours before I was close enough to pick out details on the island. There were two cabins and a dock. I spotted what might have been a person behind one of the cabins, but when I got nearer I could see it was a scarecrow. A big one with straw pigtails and a slouch hat.

  I stood on the dock and stretched, working the kinks out of my muscles. I was sweaty and exhausted. My back ached. A black fly landed on my arm and bit me. Another one buzzed my ear.

  Having been amply warned that sneaking up on residents of Crane Lake wasn't advisable, I purposely clunked off the dock. All I heard was the echo of my footsteps.

  I walked around back of the cabin, close to the water. A yard with a garden had been hacked out of the underbrush, and someone was down on their hands and knees under the scarecrow, pulling weeds. I could tell by the rear end I was looking at—large, shapely—that it was a woman. I didn't want to embarrass her, so I cleared my throat.

  "Yeah what,” she said, in an irritated tone.

  "I'm lookin’ for Jimmy Philbin."

  "Gone huntin'."

  She tossed some weeds on the lawn, jerked out a stem of goldenrod, then another, and gave no sign of stopping any time soon. It was hard not to stare at her backside, which swayed a bit as she weeded.

  "Uh, when's he comin'—"

  She stood, whipped her sunhat off, and turned to face me. It was her. The tongue-kisser. She must have seen the look on my face, but she didn't recognize me. She wiped her brow and pushed back a few strands of taffy-colored hair.

  "What do you want with Jim?” she said.

  "I'm a friend."

  "Yeah right.” She smiled, which lit up her puss, although it was not a good-humored grin. She had a nicely upturned nose, plump cheeks, and big blue eyes. She was wearing a pair of frayed OshKosh B'Gosh coveralls, and based on the way she'd jiggled when she rose I guessed nothing underneath, but I was wrong. She reached under the bib, revealing one lovely round breast in the process, dug around a bit, and then I was staring at the business end of another pistol.

  "Jim doesn't have many friends,” she said. “Lotta people want to arrest him though."

  "Not me."

  "Came all this way to say hello, did'ja?” She lowered the weapon until it pointed at my privates. “BANG!” she hollered, and she laughed when I jumped. “If you're the buzz, then I'm Aimee Semple McPherson. Who are you, anyway?"

  I hesitated. She stopped smiling. “C'mon, out with it. What do you want here?"

  "Well, I am a friend of Jimmy's, from back in St. Paul, and I'm hopin’ he can give me some information."

  "About what?"

  I thought about it for a moment, then told her the whole story. What did I have to lose? It was just a hunch, but it looked to me like I could hand her the envelope and call this case closed.

  That was how it looked to her, too. “So gimme it,” she said, when I finished. “I'll take care of the rest."

  "Promise me you'll give it to Jimmy?"

  That amused her. “Why should I promise you anything? I'm the one with the pistol, remember. You're just a peeper without enough sense to arm yourself when you come to Crane Lake."

  I took umbrage at that. I didn't know I was coming to Crane Lake, I explained. I left for Duluth yesterday, and the rest was just following my nose. “Besides, how do you know I'm not packin'?"

  "By looking at'cha, that's how. There are enough droppers around here so I know one when I see one.” She tucked the pistol back where it came from, baring a breast again in the process. She caught me looking and smiled, friendlier this time.

  We walked out on the dock together. I pulled the envelope out of the carpetbag and handed it to her. She immediately tore it open and began to read.

  "Oh, this is rich,” she said. “Listen, you'll get a kick out of it."

  "But I'm not supposed to—"

  "'Dear Frank,’ “ she read. “ ‘It didn't take long to figure out that it wasn't a real kidnapping. The police took me aside a few days after you disappeared and said they were afraid you'd been grabbed by inexperienced criminals. They deduced that by the paltry demand you made. To be precise, they said the perpetrators were “aiming low.” Of course, the moment I heard that term I thought of you.’ “ She laughed out loud. “Know why Frank didn't ask for more? He was afraid he couldn't get that much."

  "You tellin’ me Frank Cavanaugh is alive and kickin'?"

  She put a finger to her lips. “Listen to the rest."

  It was short and to the point. Arthur said he'd been keeping track of Cavanaugh's “peregrinations” by the marked bills. The fact that he was getting closer to St. Paul worried him.

  "You didn't think things through very well, which doesn't surprise me,” he wrote. “You had enough to get a goo
d start somewhere else, but you're essentially a bum, so no line of work suggested itself. You spent the money foolishly, and rather quickly, I might add. Doing nothing must be damned expensive, given your lack of intellectual curiosity."

  She sighed. “He knows Frank better than I do, and I've been stuck with him for three years."

  The letter ended with a warning. Arthur told him that if he was thinking of showing up again and resuming life with Francine, he should think again. “If you ever show your face here I'll see to it that you spend the rest of your life in the penitentiary,” he wrote. “I'd have you arrested now, but Francine tells me that you never mistreated her, so I'm willing to call that your one redeeming quality and write the whole thing off. It would break her heart if she knew the truth. Just stay buried.—Arthur."

  She tucked the letter in her pocket. “I gather that Arthur is Frank's father-in-law, and Francine is that sylph he married,” she said. “She doesn't know how lucky she is."

  I shook my head in wonderment at the tricks life plays on everybody, especially me. “You don't have somethin’ to drink, do ya?” I asked.

  "Maybe I do."

  On the way back to the cabin we stopped at the cooler—a pit in the ground with a heavy wooden cover, and a boulder on top of that “to keep the bears out.” She instructed me to roll the boulder off, and took out a crockery jar.

  "Home brew,” she said. “I wouldn't touch it myself, but you're welcome to it."

  We sat in the kitchen, at a rough-hewn wooden table. She told me her name was Jeannie Halgren. She grew up near a lake in Minneapolis. “You know, a beach, a boulevard, an ice-cream stand. That's what I thought a lake was."

  I told her about our previous meeting.

  "Did I do that?” she said. “I oughta be ashamed."

  There were books everywhere—on the floor, piled on chairs, a bookcase full of them. She said she read everything she could get her hands on, but especially novels and books about accounting. “There's nothing else to do,” she explained, “and besides, I'm trying to educate myself so I can make a living when the idyll is over."

  I asked how a nice girl like her got mixed up in a sting.

  "I wasn't mixed up in it,” she protested. “Frank just asked me to run away with him. I figured what the hell, it's that or another day at Schuneman's Department Store. I didn't know about the scheme until we were on the train."

  They'd been to Paris, Miami, and New York. She wanted to stay in Paris, but Cavanaugh missed American food. “I'd have stayed in New York too,” she said, “but Frank was already talking about the great fishing on the lake where his pal Jimmy lived, so I knew I was doomed."

  "Was Jimmy in on it?"

  "Not really. Frank gave him a few bucks to find a car thief and plant that story."

  I explained that the story was what made things unbearable for Francine, and told her Arthur wanted me to say he'd been shot trying to escape. “He thinks that will help her get over it."

  I'd been sipping the home brew right along, but about then I gave up in disgust. “I'm not fussy, but I'd call this stuff undrinkable."

  "Frank and Jimmy don't even drink it. They use it for bait."

  "Bait? What are they hunting?"

  "Squaws.” She tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn't. We laughed, and I told her I had to get started if I was going to get back in time to rent a cabin.

  "You could stay the night,” she said.

  I'd been hoping for that. Nevertheless, I was pretending to give it some careful consideration when she stood and dropped the coveralls. She was wearing a belt around her waist with a pistol tucked into it, nothing else. My jaw must've fallen.

  "Don't have a stroke.” She took off the belt and put the pistol on the table. “I'm gonna take a dip in the lake, freshen up a bit. You might wanna do the same."

  Next morning she kissed me goodbye on the dock, and gave me some advice. “Don't tell the dryad that Frank was shot and dumped in the river. That's too depressing.” She closed her eyes and thought for a few moments. “Say he was being held by gangsters up at Crane Lake. . . . Tell her that bank robber who comes up here was behind it—what's his name—"

  "Dillinger?"

  "No, the little psycho who expects ya to pretend he's six feet tall."

  "Baby Face Nelson?"

  "Yeah, him. Say Frank got away, and Baby Face and his dropper friends looked for him but couldn't find him. The bears might've eaten him—or maybe, just maybe, the Indians are holding him captive."

  That had a gentler ring to it, I had to admit.

  She watched me row until I was well under way, then waved once. We'd promised to look each other up in the nebulous future, but I never saw her again.

  I told Arthur the good news first. “You were right,” I said. “A skirt was behind the whole bunko.” Then I explained that I'd given the skirt in question the letter, and before I could object she opened it and read it out loud.

  He didn't pretend to like that. “I knew in my bones Frank was the real culprit,” he said, “but I didn't contemplate anyone else knowing."

  I told him his secret was safe with me, but he must have had his doubts. That was obvious from the way he stood in the background wringing his hands a few weeks later when he finally got Francine and me together.

  I told her in some detail about Frank's ordeal. Baby Face kept him tied up at first, but ultimately his charm prevailed and his bonds were loosened. Soon he was playing cards with his captors, then going fishing with them. One day they put him ashore to pee and he seized the opportunity to take it on the Arthur Duffy. Death by bears is a possibility, I explained, but the bears around there are well fed on berries and fish, and rarely avail themselves of the human alternative.

  "The palookas at Crane Lake tend to believe that Frank was captured by Indians,” I said, “and the local people I spoke to are almost certain that's what happened."

  Her eyes teared up, but I could see the wheels turning behind them. “Thank you so much, Mr. McDonough,” she said. “You've been very brave and resourceful.” She offered me her hand, and gave me the tiniest of squeezes.

  The following May I was invited to the first of many garden parties. The widow's “poim” took me by surprise, so I caught most of it. Something about a wild man, “imprisoned by warriors and maids, plotting to return to his sweetheart, ere her beauty fades.” I've stayed out of earshot since, but based on a stray verse or two over the years I believe the wild man is still in the redskins’ cooler, scheming his getaway.

  I know why Arthur is apprehensive when we meet. He finds the garden parties just as painful as I do, and wonders why I'd put myself through it year after year unless I had ulterior motives. Next spring I'll tell him he doesn't have to worry. I'm not a blackmailer, or the kind of hoocher who gets blotto and does unforgivable things. I come for the same reason he does. I don't want to disappoint his sweet, guileless daughter.

  Copyright © 2010 Bruce Rubenstein. Black Mask Magazine title, logo and mask device copyright 2010 by Keith Alan Deutsch. Licensed by written permission.

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  Fiction: DEATH BY MISADVENTURE by John Buchanan

  In 1964 EQMM published John Buchanan's story “Direct Hit,” which was subsequently chosen for inclusion in the Mystery Writers of America anthology for that year, as was another of the author's stories, “The Journeymen,” in 1965. He then turned his attention to nonfiction works on the Revolutionary War and Andrew Jackson. He has finally gotten back to fiction and we're very pleased that he chose to kick off this new phase with a short story for EQMM.

  Her mother's looks and my brains, Jake thought, as he watched his sixteen-year-old daughter Kate wave goodbye before getting into the day-camp van that would take her and her sister Mimi, who was ten and nicknamed Ditto, upstate on a special Saturday outing to Bash Bish Falls. Kate was still a bit gawky, but the promise of becoming a long-legged beauty like her mother was definitely there, and she already had that sweet swee
p of neck that had first attracted Jake to Lucy, who stood beside him as they waved to their girls.

  "Watch out for Mimi,” Lucy called.

  The door closed and the van pulled away from the house and down the circular driveway. Jake and Lucy waved again just before it drove out of sight on the winding, wooded, suburban road. People often remarked on what an attractive contrast they made. Jake lean, dark-eyed, and craggy; Lucy fair, blond, blue-eyed.

  Jake looked at his wife and said, “Why don't you come with me."

  Annoyance crossed Lucy's face, and she turned away and walked toward the house. “I told you, Jake, there are things to do around the house, and the garden needs weeding."

  Jake followed her. “C'mon, Lucy, this tour promises to be—"

  She stopped and spun around, blue eyes icy as she snapped at him. “I said no. I've been on the go all week. I don't feel like tramping around the woods all day."

  He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay. You don't have to take my head off. Is it so terrible that I love having you with me?"

  Her features softened. “I'm sorry, Jake. I didn't mean to snap. It's just that I'm a bit tired and I'd like to stay home."

  He smiled. “Okay, honey, I understand. Look, how about if I pick up a pizza on the way back? The girls would love that."

  "They'll love even better what I've made,” Lucy said, as she turned and continued on to the house.

  "What?"

  "Lapin a la moutarde."

  On their honeymoon, crisscrossing France in an old Citroen, they had lingered in Lyons to sample its bistros, and for the first time Jake had eaten rabbit in mustard sauce. Lucy had charmed the chef-owner with her looks and Middlebury French and he'd given her the recipe.

  "Great. When did you make it?"

  "Yesterday, while you were in the city telling all those boring Wall Street types what they should already know in the first place."

  "That designer dress you wore to the Costume Institute shindig this year was paid for by boring Wall Street types willing to fork out my hefty fees."

  "I don't need to be reminded what a wonderful provider you are,” she said tartly, over her shoulder, as she entered the house.