Kwik Krimes

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  He studied her openly as she ordered a tea and told her his name was Jean-Guy Melville. She gave a shrug and turned her back to him while she added sugar, but only so that his eyes might linger on her bare shoulder, her exposed bra strap, the curve of her waist. He waited patiently. She had expected an over-practiced pickup line, but none came. He asked if she had seen Àbout de souffle. She told him it was her favorite film. They talked about Vivre sa vie and Jules et Jim. She said she was seeing Les diaboliques tonight, and he offered to accompany her. After, they discussed it in a café that felt French apart from the menu. There were checked tablecloths and candles in wine bottles and accordion music played on a transistor radio.

  Jean-Guy explained that he had worked as a croupier in Marseilles but a problem with a colleague had forced him north. He had settled in Clignancourt and set up a business importing black-market foie gras from Perigord to Paris. Sheila could not understand what he was doing in such a town as this, and his inability to explain excited her.

  He had left his wallet on the dresser in his rented room, so she paid the bill. They lingered so long in the café that she missed the last bus home, so he walked with her in the rain. When it fell too hard, they sheltered beneath the red-and-white awning of a butcher’s shop, and he placed his jacket around her shoulders. He smelled of strong coffee, wine, cigarettes, and something indefinably fleshy, as if the plenitude of engorged geese lingered on his skin.

  They reached the part of town where the roads split from littered ginnels to wide suburban wastes. Knowing that the rundown boardinghouse where she lived with the keening old lady would disturb the delicacy of their shared dream, she told him she would see herself the rest of the way. He elicited her promise to join him next Friday to see Judex.

  She sold dresses in a store that owed little to the umbrella shop in Les parapluies de Cherbourg, but it had a place at the window from where she could watch the falling rain, and if she fixed her blonde hair in barrettes she could at least feel like Deneuve for a moment. On Friday Jean-Guy collected her and they ran through the neon puddles to the Roxy. In the café afterward he closed his hand over hers as he lit her cigarette. In the candlelight he looked a little like Jean-Paul Belmondo. She wore a dress similar to the one Anna Karina had worn in Vivre sa vie and tried not to cough as she smoked.

  For a month she shut out the sound of her complaining mother and lived only for the cinema, the café, the walk home. As they watched Contempt, his hand settled in hers like a cuckoo curling into another nest. After, they drank house red and smoked, watching the rain-chased windows, and he told her he was returning to Paris. There was a deal that was too good to miss. She waited for him to ask, and waited.

  Finally he said, “I thought you might consider coming with me. But I must tell you, my past is full of lies.”

  And she quoted Karina from Vivre sa vie, telling him “Shouldn’t love be the only truth?”

  There was no English timidity in his kiss.

  As they were leaving, the café door opened and a grizzled man in a tweed flat cap bustled in from the drizzle.

  “Blimey, Charlie, you gave me a fright,” he said with a laugh. “I thought you was still inside for desertion. Then Chalkie told me you was up to your old tricks. This a new little chickie for your henhouse?”

  A small boy fishing for eels in the canal snagged the Givenchy-clad body with his line. In 1958, Sheffield had made an aircrew release knife that had become popular in the French underworld after the end of the war. Such a knife was found buried in the man’s heart.

  Sheila’s mother said she had no daughter, and if she did the foolish girl was probably living in Paris.

  Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of more than thirty novels and twelve short-story collections, including ten Bryant & May mysteries. Red Gloves, a collection of twenty-five new stories, marks his first quarter century in print, and his memoir, Paperboy, won the Green Carnation Award, with a sequel in the works.

  DAVID TO GOLIATH

  * * *

  * * *

  Matthew C. Funk

  Didee Fuller looked about half his age, slumped across from me in his pajamas with the specter of a black eye floating above one cheek. Looked about six. Small, skittish, and unafraid.

  “You know who I am, Didee?” I gave him eyes as unblinking as my star tattoos under them.

  Didee chuckled. Maybe more of a giggle. “Yeah. You’re Jurgis.”

  “Why’s that funny?”

  He slid on a wry smile. “We got similar interests.”

  “You know why I’m here, then.” I flipped open my notepad.

  “Mhm.” The smile dawned big. “You want to know how a twelve-year-old could take down Giant.”

  I clicked my pen. Didee got talking.

  Didee spent Saturday mornings busy. When other kids were shoveling cereal in front of cartoons, Didee had already cleaned his room and sorted his comic collection.

  He liked Teen Titans the best. Robin was his hero.

  “Robin’s ten times as brave as Batman,” Didee told me. “Batman’s a grown dude, spent all his life training how to mess somebody up. Robin’s just a kid. Not much training. Not even a pair of pants. Takes a special bravery to run around, getting in fights, without pants.”

  Didee would be out helping charities in the Desire district by nine.

  Giant came by Didee’s house Saturdays at noon. Didee didn’t even know why his mother was crying until he asked three months in.

  He had come back from gathering strays for the animal shelter that morning, bouncy with a job well done, and asked her with a grin, “Mama, why you got to be so down on such a beautiful day?”

  She told him. Not everything at first, but he kept pressing.

  Didee was a curious kid. He’d stick Mentos in a Diet Coke two-liter to prove they’d blow up. Made baking soda volcanoes out at Edith Sampson Playground just to see the smaller kids goggle in wonder.

  “What Mama told me,” Didee said, “it was the first thing I ever learned that I didn’t want to know.”

  “You know why Giant was shaking her down for money?” I set the pen down.

  “And sex,” Didee added. The word sounded like even more of a crime coming from a kid.

  “Right. Why?”

  “Way Giant had it, my uncle had ripped him off when he was just coming up in the game.” Didee shrugged. “Stole his bike. Beat him up. Crippled his brother.”

  “This was payback?”

  “No,” Didee said “That was an excuse.”

  He told the rest of the story with his fists clenched pale.

  It took a month of spying to get Giant’s routine memorized.

  “I didn’t take no pictures, didn’t write nothing down,” Didee said. “Never write nothing down.”

  Then two weeks to steal enough animal tranquilizer from the kennel.

  “A bit at a time, they don’t notice,” Didee said. “Never take nothing they’ll notice.”

  Then another two weeks of watching Giant park his F-150 outside his last drop-off, a crack house on Law Street. Timing how long Giant visited, averaging it, doing practice runs. Checking no one was on the street. No one looking out a window.

  “Had to be patient,” Didee said. “Never rush nothing.”

  Then August 13 arrived with the 100 percent humidity of a Crock-Pot and not a soul on Law.

  Giant came out to the F-150 and tried to start it. The sugar Didee put in the gas tank worked a charm. Giant cussed a few minutes and then went under the hood.

  Didee came from behind the trash cans in the alley and put the syringe of ketamine in Giant’s femoral.

  “He went down like a pit bull,” Didee said with a smile white as his knuckles. “Growling.”

  Giant crumpled into four hundred pounds of watery muscle. Didee hunched by his head. He took out his mama’s kitchen knife.

  “Never take no chances,” Didee told me as I wrote another bullet point.

  Didee made sure Giant’s ey
es saw him, slid the metal through the tight tube of his jugular vein and was back in the alley by the time Giant bled out.

  “So how’d you get caught?” I asked, pen poised for the last entry.

  Didee’s eyes and smile went somewhere else. He hugged himself. Straightened up in those orange jail pajamas.

  “Told Mama,” Didee said to the parish prison window. “She got in an argument on the street and said it to scare someone. Might as well have used a bullhorn. All Desire knew by dinner time.”

  I flipped the notepad closed.

  “You forgot the last note,” Didee said, looking back at me. “Never get close to nobody.”

  I didn’t have to write that down to live it.

  “How’re you holding up?” I pointed at his black eye as I stood.

  “Good,” he said, smiling tight again. “Just got jumped into the Grubs up in here. My reputation preceded me; ain’t that how it goes?”

  “That’s how it goes.”

  “Word has it, Giant’s brother’s looking for payback.” Didee gave up on smiling. We both had. “We’ll see who gets who first.”

  THIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN SHOTGUN HONEY.

  Matthew C. Funk is a digital marketing manager, an editor for Needle: A Magazine of Noir, and a staff writer for Planet Fury and Criminal Complex. Winner of the 2010 Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story on the Web, Funk has work featured at dozens of sites and in printed volumes indexed on his website, MatthewFunk.net.

  THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY

  * * *

  * * *

  Jim Fusilli

  He hadn’t forgotten her—what kind of moron could forget who turned him into a bum?—but now that he was laid up in the hospital, bandages wrapped around his head, she appeared in his dreams: angry, sweating, wagging a sausagey finger as she declared him useless and unwanted; in the mist he was a little boy again and she was his terrorizing fourth-grade teacher. Not that he was some kind of all-star, but he was at worst a second-rate bully, and always his classmates were asking for it, being little and laughing all the time. He taunted, he teased, he took. He didn’t kill nobody.

  Okay, he thought back then, I’ll be through with her when the school year ends and good riddance; also I hope she dies. But then they made Sister Ellen Francis principal at St. Matthew the Apostle, and the torture continued through the eighth grade. He could hear her foghorn voice now: “Joseph Anthony!” Stomping across the schoolyard toward him, the other kids parting like swinging doors, she grabbed his ear, smacked the back of his head. Or later, taken a ruler to his palms because he was slow, no good with the books.

  But not so slow that he didn’t use the time in the hospital to come up with a first-rate scheme, one guaranteed to give him enough cash to get him a new start—and a shot at embarrassing the church too, seeing as they retired Sister Ellen someplace, wherever they put nuns past their prime, so he couldn’t go right at her. On his back, he refined the plan. A nurse’s aide brought him a map.

  Finally, they discharged him, telling him the lifting hook that struck his head at the shipyards didn’t do nothing but split the skin, twenty-one stitches. “Good luck, Joe,” they said as he signed the release papers. He walked into a frigid cold, the second day of January 1948, on his way to a place where no one would see him as crude, dim-witted, and luckless.

  Claiming he was an actor, he bought a priest’s getup in Midtown, close enough to Broadway so the lie took.

  A week later, Joseph Anthony Triviani boarded a bus headed north into Pennsylvania, his ticket on the cuff courtesy of the line’s policy toward the clergy. Everyone on the bus nodded as he made his way along the aisle, his black fedora set to conceal his new scar, his plump chin dented by the starched white collar. “Good morning, Father,” an old woman said. As the bus zoomed through the Jersey countryside, she offered him her liverwurst sandwich.

  Three hours later, a priest robbed the First National Bank of Scranton. Ninety minutes after, a priest hit the First National Bank of Dunsmore. Then, back in his own clothes, Joseph Anthony Triviani bought a Ford Tudor sedan, paying cash, from a cheery Ford salesman who offered to help set him up in town. He then took down the First National Bank of Dickson City, management on the lookout for a renegade priest. With about $96,000 in the trunk, Joseph Anthony Triviani headed toward the Kittatinny Mountains of northwest New Jersey, figuring a warrant don’t cross state lines. So far, so good.

  The old nun teetered into the police station, a young visiting novice at her elbow, fresh snow on their black galoshes, their cheeks red from the snapping wind. A three-man squad, so they had a neighborhood woman work the desk, and she trotted around to settle the old nun. “How can I help you, Sister?”

  The old nun was out of breath. Seventy-six years old, hunched and arthritic. They wanted to send her to Arizona to rest, but no, give me one last task, allow me to serve again. A distance from the Delaware Water Gap, with only a filling station and a poultry farm in sight, the old school had twenty-two students—fewer than in a single class at St. Matthew the Apostle in Narrows Gate, and she knew each one by name. She made sure their hair was combed, their shoes shined; “Good morning, Sister Ellen Francis,” they sang in unison.

  A sergeant came from the back of the station.

  The novice handed Sister Ellen a newspaper a few days old.

  The old nun sagged with disappointment. Pointing to a grainy photo, she said, “This is Joseph Arthur Triviani.”

  “The bank robber?” the sergeant said. The amateur snapshot was a miracle, an invaluable aid to the two-state investigation. He had a copy on his desk.

  She nodded.

  “Forgive me, Sister,” the cop said gently, “but he’s not a priest, is he?”

  “Far from it,” the old nun replied.

  Being a moron, Triviani kept up his shenanigans, even though he had a lifetime’s worth of cash in his trunk. Wearing the priest’s suit, he went to diners for meals on the arm, and they didn’t charge him at the movies. He walked into a bar, figuring a priest took a drink now and then, and the cops were waiting. They took him down hard, from the stool to the floor with a thud, and they cuffed him, though not before removing the black suit. The newspapers, including the Jersey Observer down in Narrows Gate, showed him in his boxers wading through the snow toward the police station.

  The old nun waited in the lobby.

  Without ceremony, they put Triviani in front of her.

  “That him, Sister?”

  It took a minute, but Triviani recognized the withered stick figure in black. She was a danger to nobody.

  She told the cops. Yes, that’s him.

  To Triviani, she said, “I’m sorry, Joseph Arthur. I’m sorry I failed you.”

  He took those words with him to the penitentiary. They kept him awake. They echoed throughout the night.

  Jim Fusilli is the author of seven novels and is the rock and pop music critic of the Wall Street Journal. His most recent novel, Road to Nowhere, was published in November 2012 by Thomas & Mercer.

  HALLOWEEN

  * * *

  * * *

  Carolina Garcia-Aguilera

  “You want me to find out what, exactly, you did on Halloween night?” I was slightly hungover—my longtime boyfriend, Miami homicide detective Oliver Gutierrez, and I had partied a bit too much the night before, and the two Cokes and four Advils I’d had for breakfast had not kicked in yet. “This past Halloween, on Monday, two nights ago?”

  The man sitting across from me kept shifting around in the worn brown leather chair where my clients sat. I normally only took referrals, but business was slow, real slow, so I agreed to meet with him. Over the phone he had said he had found me on Google when searching for a private investigator in Miami. Although he was casually dressed in jeans, short-sleeved cotton shirt, and sneakers, his short haircut and erect bearing told me he either was or had been in the military.

  “Well, you’re a private investigator, right? On your website, Marisol Martinez I
nvestigations, you list all the services you provide, and one of them is that you conduct discreet investigations. I need discretion—lots of it.” He looked me straight in the eyes as he spoke, almost as if he was challenging me, sending a slight shiver down my back.

  When he had called to make the appointment, he had given his name as Tom Smith, but I would have bet one of the three twenty-dollar bills that I had in my wallet that that was not it. Well, at least he hadn’t chosen John Smith, as others had done before him in the fifteen years that I’d worked as a private investigator.

  “It’s kind of embarrassing, really.” Tom looked down at his lap, then, a minute later, began speaking slowly, the words coming out as if it pained him to get them out. I was used to that, since individuals never came to see me for happy reasons. “I’m not from here—I live in Tampa—but one of my buddies, Scott, who moved down here a couple of years ago—we were in the marines together, served in Iraq—invited me down for the weekend, and Monday being Halloween, he convinced me to stay over, that Halloween on South Beach was wild and crazy, and I couldn’t miss seeing it.”

  “Yes, Halloween on South Beach is crazy,” I agreed.

  “Well, my friend insisted that we had to wear costumes; it would be more fun that way. The plan was that two women, ones he had met here recently, would be joining us.” Tom took a deep breath. “Scott got us costumes—he went as Dracula, and I was a pirate. The costumes were pretty good. I even had a real knife, too, very sharp, so sharp that I had to be careful holding it. The girls—Tanya and Maria were their names—went dressed as baby sheep. They looked really cute—I remember that. We met at a bar on Lincoln Road and started drinking right away. It was very crowded.”

  Having myself celebrated Halloween on Lincoln Road several times, I could easily picture the scene. Tom looked so miserable that I felt the need to help him a bit. “So, what happened then?”