Kwik Krimes

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Gerald Elias is an internationally renowned musician and an award-winning author. A former violinist of the Boston Symphony and associate concertmaster of the Utah Symphony, Elias has concertized, conducted, taught, and had his own compositions performed on five continents. Elias is also author of the Daniel Jacobus series, murder mysteries that take place in the murky corners of the classical music world, which have achieved popular and critical acclaim.

  WOLFE ON THE ROOF

  * * *

  * * *

  Loren D. Estleman

  Lyon was angry, I think.

  You never can tell whether the little butterball is seriously miffed or just emulating Nero Wolfe, his role model and life’s obsession.

  Then again, it might have been disgruntlement over having to spend two hours playing with his tomatoes, which never need more than ten minutes’ attention even in crisis; orchids are another thing, but tending to them is beyond his green thumb, which isn’t green at all, but almost as fat as his torso.

  Too bad. If you’re going to keep a greenhouse on your roof instead of a swell patio, you reap what you sow.

  But he may just have been primping for our guest, whose Prada bag and Chanel suit indicated money, and whose blonde head suggested the opportunity of my selling her the Triborough Bridge. She’d arrived unannounced, but I didn’t want to risk alienation by asking her to wait, and as anyone knows who knows even one-tenth of what Claudius Lyon knows about Wolfe, nothing is more vexing to a fat genius detective than entertaining a client in his plant rooms.

  “I cannot help you now, Miss—?”

  “Alexandra Pring.”

  “I hope to cross this plum with that beefsteak and create a tomato that is both delectable and substantial. If you wish to consult me, you must wait until eleven o’clock, when I’ll speak with you in my office. Mr. Woodbine knows that, but has chosen to ignore the rules of this house.” He favored me with the gassy-baby’s face he thought petulant.

  The fake. He was tickled pink over having a client. The one thing he can’t pull off about his masquerade is a convincing show of pique at the chance to flash his brain before an audience. Since he’s a rotten horticulturist, and can burn a salad in the kitchen, solving mysteries is the only thing he has left.

  “But it can’t wait! I’ve lost my job, and my rent is past due. Please make an exception this one time!”

  I was batting only .500. I’m sure there are plenty of blonde PhDs, but I’d sized this one up right. I flied out on the rest. In bright sunlight, the bag and suit were knockoffs; and now I was the one who was miffed.

  Lyon hid his delight under a gruff litany of made-up Latin, fingering ordinary vines while drawing her out on the reason for her visit.

  “I run errands for an eccentric millionaire in Queens,” she said. “That is, I did. He was always complaining that he couldn’t reach me because I keep forgetting to charge my cell.” She opened the phony bag and showed him a cheap no-contract phone. “I admit I’m absentminded. I keep forgetting to pay my rent, and by the time I think about it, the money’s spent. But I’m very efficient once I’m given an errand. Mr. Quilverton must know that.”

  “Ronald Quilverton, of the Boston Quilvertons?” I perked up. There might be money in the thing after all, if she was as reliable as she claimed and Quilverton was grateful to have her back.

  “Yes. I said he’s eccentric. That’s why he lives in Queens, New York, instead of on Beacon Hill back home.”

  Lyon scowled in earnest, wiping black loam onto his apron.

  “The solution is hardly worthy of my abilities, Miss Pring. Tie a string to your finger and remember to plug in your mobile.”

  “I’ve thought of that, of course. But how can I correct my behavior if my former employer won’t take my calls asking for a second chance?”

  “My dear young lady, you need an advice columnist, not a detective.”

  “Hear me out, please. The last time I spoke with him, I was walking down Junction. He was giving me an assignment when my phone beeped, warning me my battery had run out and the call was about to be dropped. He heard it. What I can’t figure out is why he said what he said then.”

  “If it was ‘You’re fired,’ I think I can educate you.”

  “‘Steak and eggs.’”

  “Once again?”

  “I’m quoting. Well, I lost the signal before the second s, but it was definitely ‘Steak and egg,’ and of course no one says it that way in a restaurant, even if all he wants is one egg. What did he mean?”

  “He was instructing you to bring him breakfast.”

  “Mr. Quilverton is a vegan. He wouldn’t touch either item with a ten-foot fork.

  “I tried calling him back from a landline, but he never answered. Maybe he had a stroke. I’d call 911, but if I’m wrong, he’d never forgive the intrusion. I’m as worried about him as I am about myself. He’s a recluse and lives alone; he may be lying on his floor, with no one to help.”

  “Steak and egg; you’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  I was thinking the eccentric was just plain nuts when Lyon surprised me by foraging in one ear with a finger. That was his answer to Wolfe’s puckering his lips in and out, indicating he was near a solution. Either that or the food talk had him thinking about lunch.

  “Miss Pring,” he said, wiping wax onto his apron. “Did it occur to you Mr. Quilverton was imploring you not to think about a hearty morning meal, but to stay connected?”

  “Stay connect—? Oh!”

  “We’re increasingly an aural society. ‘Steak and eggs’ and ‘Stay connected,’ the latter cut off abruptly when your cell lost power, would sound identical.”

  She pouted. “But I’m still out of a job.” Then she brightened. “Perhaps—”

  “No. Bringing a woman into this household would be like…” For once, the vocabulary he’d filched from Nero Wolfe failed him.

  “Like crossing a plum with a beefsteak,” I suggested.

  Loren D. Estleman has published seventy books in mystery, Western, and mainstream fields. He’s received four Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America; none, to his regret, for a Claudius Lyon story. His latest novel starring Detroit PI Amos Walker is Burning Midnight.

  HIT ME

  * * *

  * * *

  Christa Faust

  Spanking is cheap. You want to hit me in the face, it’s fifty dollars more. A hundred if you want to use a closed fist. That’s not even counting the fee for marks. I charge a flat rate for parts of my body that can be covered by clothing. Double for my face, neck, and hands. When I say marks, I’m talking bruises, contusions, hematomas, burns, cuts, welts, ligature marks, or any other visible injury that takes more than six hours to heal. Try something you haven’t paid for, my guard dog’ll show up and treat you to a little nonconsensual role reversal. Don’t like it, you can try your luck in trendy nightclubs.

  Bottom line, you get what you pay for.

  In retrospect I guess $800K is a fair price for a gunshot wound.

  Mr. Tak was one of my best customers. He was the kind of guy who always needed something to do with his hands. When he wasn’t using them to rough me up, he would fidget compulsively with a deck of cards. He and I were almost exactly the same size, but when he really let me have it, I felt it for a week and remember who’s talking here. I get hit for a living.

  I’m pretty sure that Mr. Tak wasn’t his real name, but that’s what he told me to call him. What do I care? Filthy Fucking Whore isn’t my real name either.

  Mr. Tak’s scenario was real simple. The usual drill. He paid for fists and made me earn every penny.

  That night I could tell something was wrong as soon as he walked in the door. He was antsy, eyes all over the empty waiting room. There was a maroon leather briefcase on the floor beside him. The endless flow of cards between his hands was jerky and awkward. I watched him on the monitor in the security room as he fumbled and dropped a card.

  Da
nny, that’s my guard dog, he shot me this look like he was asking if I was sure I wanted to go through with it. I gave him one back to let him know I was. I guess I should have known something was up, but it was Mr. Tak. I trusted him. Even liked him a little. As much as it was possible to like a guy who pays to beat the shit out of me.

  I could see that Danny was less than thrilled. See, Danny was in love with me. I knew he went home at night and jacked off to fantasies of rescuing me and taking me away from all this. I let him. That hopeless kind of love made him a really good guard dog.

  What happened next happened so fast I’m still not sure exactly how it went.

  I went into the playroom, and Mr. Tak was there. He wasn’t alone. There was another guy. The other guy had a gun. That’s pretty much the only thing about him that I remember.

  “Fuck you,” Mr. Tak said to the guy with the gun.

  Then several things happened at once. Danny came screaming through the door. Mr. Tak clutched his briefcase to his chest. The guy with the gun used it.

  I hit the deck, covering my head with my arms. On my way down, a bullet slammed into my left calf. It hurt, but I didn’t scream. I never scream unless the client requests it.

  There was noise and more shots and then long, ringing silence. When nothing happened for several minutes, I looked up through my fingers. Danny was dead. So was Mr. Tak. The guy who used to have the gun didn’t have it anymore. He was on the floor, trying to reach the gun with one hand, but he couldn’t seem to make his fingers work right.

  There wasn’t as much blood as you’d think.

  Mr. Tak’s briefcase was open on the ground. It was full of money. Of course I took it. The way I see it, I earned it.

  I still feel bad about Danny, though. Maybe I should have fucked him after all.

  Christa Faust is the author of several award-winning novels, including Choke Hold, Money Shot, and Hoodtown. She worked in the Times Square peep booths as a professional dominatrix, fetish model, and adult filmmaker. Faust is a film noir fanatic, an avid reader of classic hard-boiled pulp novels, and an MMA fight fan. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

  BENEATH THE BRIDGE

  * * *

  * * *

  Lyndsay Faye

  Metal trash cans dot the dark ledge, their fires flickering with colors of piss and ash. Faint human outlines surround them. The bridge looms above, and beyond the graffiti-covered shelter the rain falls into the East River, relentless. It’s always raining these days, Marion thinks, pulling her rail-thin legs closer into her body.

  “Doesn’t seem like he’s coming,” Jason says. He likewise sits on the fine layer of traffic grit covering the ledge, back resting against tags done in violent sprays of yellow and red over the concrete.

  “He’s coming,” Marion says. She shifts dull blonde hair away from her eyes. She’s eighteen, and, though she wants to be here, she thinks she might be sick.

  He does come, five minutes later. Appearing as if the drizzle had parted like a curtain. The Postman is thinly menacing as ever, hunched over as if he carried a shell on his back. A cigarette glows between his weakly shivering lips.

  “I heard about Sam,” he says. “That sad little bastard. You can’t let it get ahead of you like that, let it own you. Like I always said.”

  Marion nods, tugs at a lace on her filthy green canvas shoe. Both feet are covered in writing from a Sharpie she stole from a shelter last winter. Friends’ signatures. Crude flowers. A quote her brother, Sam, had liked, before the powder and the needles got to be too much and they found him open-eyed and lifeless down by the shore. Had we but world enough, and time. Marion doesn’t know where her brother heard that. She likes it, though. She’d liked everything about Sam.

  “Who’s the new boyfriend?” the Postman asks, jutting his chin at Jason.

  Marion glares. The Postman takes too much interest in her, but, despite being brittle and glassy as a Midtown high-rise, Sam had always told him to fuck off. Now Sam is gone and all the daylight with him, and Marion doesn’t feel like arguing.

  “He’s a customer,” she says, pushing up the wall. Jason rises behind her, slouching with his cap pulled low.

  The Postman cocks an eyebrow. Marion sees his sour breath when he exhales a drag from the cigarette, and she could gag on his peculiar reek of lowlife skittishness from yards away. The higher-ups smell of well-oiled power no matter the situation, she imagines. The casual dealers sweat paranoia.

  “Figured you’d have moved along since Sam,” the Postman remarks. Beyond, the trash fires flicker, and the hiss of a bottle opening snakes through the gloom.

  “Where would I go?” Marion asks.

  And fuck if she doesn’t wonder as she asks it. Every piece of her is stitched up with Sam. It has been since they left home, because, well, they had to leave, didn’t they, once belts and fists were replaced with boots and memorably a tire iron, but Sam rode too close to the sun, didn’t he, wanted to touch the stars and feel their hard edges slice into his skin, and ever since the Postman’s last delivery killed him dead, it doesn’t really matter anymore where Marion goes.

  “What’s on offer?” Jason asks.

  And the Postman launches into his vague, reedy pitch. Marion knows his entire inventory, of course. She and Sam started coming to him over a year ago. Smack and oxy are a two-minute transaction, and if they want crank, he can get it, though that’s a walk to a den in Alphabet City. Jason’s eyes glitter from under his cap brim. Marion reads her shoes upside down.

  Shivering, Marion stares at an iron girder thrusting through the shadows like a giant’s spear and wonders where Sam is buried. She’d called the police from a pay phone. But she hadn’t talked to them, had watched from up by the highway. She wonders if they’ve found out who he was.

  Now Marion also wonders if, wherever he is, Sam is angry with her.

  Jason is talking and the Postman is pulling out little bags full of dreams and racing hearts and Marion has never wanted to go home but she feels as if she can’t breathe until she is somewhere else other than beneath this goddamn bridge.

  “Fifty dollars covers it,” the Postman says to Jason. “First-time discount.”

  The Postman assumes Marion wants eighties, so she pays him for the pills without saying anything. Her lips feel numb. The smack he’d last sold her brother had been poison-laced, cut with God knows what. He as good as put a gun to Sam’s head.

  “Hope to be seeing more of you,” the Postman says to Jason.

  “You will be,” he answers.

  When Jason’s gun comes out, the acid light gleams along its barrel as if it’s a sword, and Marion backs away. The Postman is outraged, shrieking a metallic whine that pierces her eardrums.

  Marion shoves her hands in her pockets when Jason snaps the handcuffs over the Postman’s thin-boned wrists. Her empty gut churns as the cop talks to his prisoner. Jason is bigger suddenly, filling out his ratty sweatshirt, and it occurs to her that he’s good at this. She’d wondered.

  The Postman screams at her now, calling her a whore and a rat bitch and worse, but he’s fading into the background as she fades into the shadows. Jason will be angry that she’s not going to the station house as promised. That she won’t be testifying. Jason will be furious that she lied to him, she thinks, as she slips from the ledge and lands in a crouch on a wet hill littered with shredded plastic and beer cans.

  But the Postman will do time for possession if nothing else, and Marion doesn’t live here anymore. She heads north, squeezing past chain-link guarding weed-choked lots. The rain needles to earth from the place where her brother Sam watches her now, high above the silent bridge.

  Lyndsay Faye is the author of the critically acclaimed The Gods of Gotham, the first in a series of historical thrillers featuring New York copper Timothy Wilde, as well as the Sherlock Holmes pastiche Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings. Her short story “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness” was selected for inclusion in Best American Myste
ry Stories 2010. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and cats.

  THE GIRL WHO LOVED FRENCH FILMS

  * * *

  * * *

  Christopher Fowler

  Sheila grew up in Sheffield, a northern English town that had once been famous for the magnificence of its cutlery and the bravery of its air force pilots. By the time she was seventeen, its glory had faded, and the grand Victorian lady had become a disappointed drab. It still had eleven cinemas, the smallest of which showed weekly French films after the town’s remaining students turned Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman into a surprise success.

  Sheila had been taken on the ferry to Boulogne when she was seven, a day trip with her father before he was put away for running a disorderly house. Now she lived in a sooty boarding house with her mother, and her life was closer to depressing English dramas like A Taste of Honey. Every Friday she fled to the Roxy to watch Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, and Simone Signoret. She learned to smoke Gitanes and Gauloises, and spent her earnings on red lipstick, high heels, and bare-shouldered blouses. She knew the Montmartre backstreets better than the alleys of her hometown. In her mind’s eye, the gangs on the banks of the canal were replaced by lovers on the banks of the Seine. Looking down into fetid water filled with shopping carts, she saw only the reflected towers of Notre Dame.

  She saw him sheltering from the rain, leaning against the coffee-stall counter outside the Roxy. He was wearing a gray fedora, a crumpled Givenchy suit, and a narrow tie of midnight-blue silk. He had a pencil moustache and was chewing a matchstick. He seemed to have stepped down from a Gaumont picture. Perhaps he needed his dreams just as much as she needed hers.