EQMM, December 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  ** Hailey Lind: Brush with Death, Signet, $6.99. In her third adventure, art restorer Annie Kincaid investigates the claim of a graduate student that the alleged reproduction of Raphael's La Fornarina hanging in an Oakland columbarium is actually the original. This is very much the mixture as before, with chapter epigraphs in which Annie's forger grandfather replies to quotations from real-life artists. The slowly unfolding plot includes touristy visits to the Getty Center and San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. The lively and humorous first-person style does its best to hold reader impatience at bay until the slapstick climax.

  If you're looking for holiday gifts, Charles Ardai's The Good-Neighbor Policy: A Double-Cross in Double Dactyls (Midsummer Nights Press, $6.95) is an offbeat stocking stuffer (literally, it's small enough): a clever and remarkably successful detective poem (66 verses in 22 pages) by the novelist, EQMM contributor, and editor/publisher of the Hard Case Crime paperback line.

  The publishers of Akashic Books seem determined to spotlight every major American city and many foreign ones in their noir series of original anthologies, now up to 15 volumes with at least another dozen projected. The two most recent additions ($15.95 each) are Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton, and Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan. On the basis of my sampling, the East Coast collection may have a slight edge, but both offer a variety of crime stories with a sharp sense of place. Bronx has strong entries in Joanne Dobson's post-WWII era “Hey, Girlie,” Ed Dee's early-1960s “Ernie K.'s Gelding,” and especially Thomas Adcock's pointedly present-day “You Want I Should Whack Monkey Boy?” L.A. leads off with “Mulholland Dive,” Michael Connelly's semi-procedural tale of an auto accident reconstructionist, and includes a fine James M. Cain-style study in conscience and criminality, “Roger Crumbler Considered His Shave” by Gary Phillips. Major surprise is one of the few real detective stories in either book: the very funny (if not truly noirish) Beverly Hills tale “Morocco Junction 90210” by L.A. Times columnist Patt Morrison.

  (c) 2007 by Jon L. Breen

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: PARTY'S OVER by Patricia Smiley

  Patricia Smiley makes her EQMM debut this month, but she is not new to the genre. She's the author of two mystery novels that have made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, False Profits and Cover Your As-sets, and a third released just months ago, Short Change. All of the titles feature her financial planner amateur sleuth Tucker Sinclair. Ms. Smiley lives in California, where her books are set.

  Homicide detective Tom Bonner sat hunched over his desk in the squad room of the Ladera Bonita Police Department, in-haling the aroma of Chinese takeout left over from lunch. Watch had changed and most of the patrol officers were now out in the field. The nine-to-fivers were packing up to leave the station as well. In less than an hour he'd be leaving, too. For the last time. The thought squeezed his chest like a vise because Bonner loved his job almost as much as he hated it.

  He shifted his gaze to the desktop where the flier announcing his retirement party lay. He studied the caricature in the middle of the page, reluctantly acknowledging the resemblance. The so-called artist had used his least attractive features to make him look ridiculous. He stared at the cartoon walrus moustache and horse teeth and wondered how he was going to make it through the night.

  He hadn't wanted a party, didn't feel much like celebrating, but his partner had organized the event. He was obligated to go. At times like these he regretted being single. Still, being alone would make it easier to slip away early without being noticed.

  Bonner had worked with many partners in his career. Matthew Quinn would be his last one. They had all moved on for one reason or another—retired, promoted, transferred to other divisions, or they had abandoned Homicide because all that death had started to mess with their heads. Quinn was young but one of the best detectives Bonner had come across. The kid had an uncanny knack for reading people's thoughts, as if he had some kind of sixth sense. If Quinn could keep his shit together he'd be great one day.

  Greatness had eluded Tom Bonner. After thirty-two years on the job, twenty-five of them working Homicide, the party was over. In a few hours it would be the end of the line for him. He'd be officially put out to pasture. The lieutenant would reassign his cases and close the file on his career. It was with mixed feelings that Bonner acknowledged it was time to close the file on Lindsay Hamilton as well.

  The detective reached for his wallet and slid Lindsay's photograph out of the bill compartment. The image was crinkled and worn from an unintentional soaking it had taken a few years back when his fishing boat had capsized on Clear Lake during a storm. The picture had survived with minimal damage. He was grateful, because in the past twenty years he'd looked at Lindsay's high school yearbook photo nearly as often as he'd looked at his own face in the bathroom mirror. Her hair was long and layered. The bangs were pushed away from her face, exposing a broad forehead, wide-set eyes, and lips parted in a smile. He couldn't draw worth a damn, but sometimes when he lay awake in bed at night staring at the ceiling, he could paint every detail of her face in his mind's eye as if he were some kind of Picasso.

  Lindsay had been a good kid, smart, and cautious. She'd played by all the rules, which should have given her a free pass, but it hadn't. One lazy August afternoon, just shy of her sixteenth birthday, a monster had crawled through her bedroom window in her parents’ modest home. He'd tied her arms and legs to the bedposts and raped her. Afterwards, as she lay helpless on her pink floral bedspread, he'd fired three rounds from a .38-caliber revolver into her chest.

  It had been eighty degrees outside that day. Kids out of school for the summer played in the street. Gardeners mowed lawns. Neighbors walked dogs. Somebody should have seen that something was amiss at the Hamiltons’ house, but nobody did. The body wasn't discovered until Lindsay's mother returned home from a manicure appointment, her acrylic fingernails freshly painted with deep crimson polish.

  Bonner had attended Lindsay's autopsy. He would have been crazy not to go. The body told a story. It was his job to unravel it firsthand so he would have command of the facts when he nailed her killer in court. He was already a seasoned homicide detective by then, inured to death, but this had been his first case involving the murder of a child.

  When he saw Lindsay's naked body laid out on the medical examiner's table with ligature marks bruising her wrists and ankles and three evenly spaced bullet holes spoiling her chest like a grotesque row of buttons, it hollowed out his insides. White-hot anger burned deep in his chest, reminding Tom Bonner that if a monster could get a girl like Lindsay Hamilton, he could get anybody, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.

  Over the past twenty years, Bonner's anger had mutated into a dull ache that never left him. In some dark corner of his mind, he knew that he deserved the pain, because after all his years of investigating leads and interviewing potential witnesses—over a hundred of them—he had not been able to bring Lindsay Hamilton's killer to justice.

  More than once Bonner had been close to breakthroughs only to see promising evidence fade into the ether. Extractor marks on the bullets recovered from the scene could have identified the weapon, but the .38 was never found. A partial fingerprint on the doorjamb was too smudged to identify. A couple of years later, when DNA testing became readily available, Bonner learned that crucial evidence had inadvertently been destroyed. Bonner's hopes had eventually faded, too, replaced by a profound sense of impotence. The case was now just one of a thousand homicides that had remained unsolved since that hot August afternoon so long ago.

  As Bonner's retirement approached, he had begun to sense that his entire career as a cop had been a failure. Sleep now came with difficulty or not at all. Food no longer appealed to him. He had begun to look haggard. He'd tried but failed to shake off the feeling that he was plunging down a black hole from which there was no escape. It no longer mattered that he'd cleared hundreds of other cases. It was the ones he hadn't solved that consume
d his thoughts, and Lindsay Hamilton was the poster child for them all.

  Bonner took a deep breath and forced himself out of his chair. He slipped Lindsay's photograph into the breast pocket of his jacket and headed toward the storage room. The nylon shoulder holster that held his 9mm Berretta was silent as he moved. As a rookie in patrol he'd hated the way his leather Sam Browne belt creaked with every movement. Noise took away the element of surprise.

  Bonner felt weary as he ambled down the stairs to the basement where the detectives kept their case files. Once inside the room, he walked toward a row of open metal shelves, pulled down the first of ten boxes that held his records from the Hamilton investigation, and set it on a nearby table. As he removed the lid, a stale odor rose from the box and closed in on him like a bad dream.

  He put on his reading glasses and for one last time he flipped through the pages of the murder book, even though he felt as if he could recite the entire record from memory: names, addresses, telephone numbers, alibis, and false leads.

  Bonner paused for a moment to glance through the notes from his initial interview with Mrs. Hamilton. He recalled Lindsay's mother as a narcissistic piece of work. She'd remained composed during questioning even with her daughter's violated body lying in a pool of blood in the next room, surrounded by the cherished possessions of a child who had not yet transitioned into adulthood—a Barbie doll, a stuffed monkey fashioned from a gray wool sock, a pink feather boa that looked as if it had once been part of a Halloween costume. Mrs. Hamilton had signed her statement using only her thumb and index finger, as though she was afraid she might spoil her new manicure. That had raised the hairs on the back of Bonner's neck.

  Mr. Hamilton was a sales rep for a clothing manufacturer. At the time of Lindsay's death, he claimed he'd been caught in traffic on his way to visit a client. He sweated like a pig all though his interview. His story seemed rehearsed and there weren't any tears. In a perfect world, fathers didn't kill their daughters, especially not in the way Lindsay Hamilton had been murdered, but Bonner knew that the world in which he lived was far from perfect.

  The monster had subdued Lindsay by tying her wrists together with a constrictor knot. Then he lashed her wrists and ankles to the bed. From the beginning Bonner thought the knot that the killer used was an important clue. He'd interviewed anyone who might know about such things—fishermen, truckers, and longshoremen. He'd even gone so far as to call ex-wife number two, because she was addicted to a slew of crafty endeavors that involved knots like knitting, crocheting, and macramé. Bonner referred to her hobbies as “the dark arts” because she'd nearly ruined his credit buying all that crap. The marriage had eventually collapsed under the weight of her careless spending. Or perhaps the union had failed because he'd been a bad husband who had shown more passion for his work than he had for his wife. Bonner couldn't remember which it was. He supposed it didn't matter anymore.

  As the Hamilton investigation progressed, Bonner had learned more than he ever wanted to know about the bowline, figure eight, and trucker's hitch. He found that cavers, climbers, and kayakers commonly used constrictor knots. Some considered it the best of the binding knots, because it was difficult if not impossible to untie, and it gripped like a boa constrictor. Because of that, Bonner began referring to Lindsay's killer as the Snake. He had a hunch there was a connection between the knot and the Hamiltons. He just had to find it.

  At the beginning, there was no shortage of suspects. Lindsay had a thirteen-year-old brother named Brian. The kid was a Boy Scout for a while. Mr. Hamilton was the leader of his troop. Brian had earned a merit badge for knot-tying, but neither father nor son could remember if the troop had learned the constrictor knot.

  Lindsay went to school with a punk named Gavin Jenkins who'd pursued her until she told him to take a hike. Classmates claimed he wasn't happy about the snub. At sixteen the kid already had an impressive rap sheet. Detectives in Juvenile suspected he was the ringleader in a wave of burglaries that had plagued the neighborhood. In at least one of the break-ins a couple of handguns had been taken, including a 9mm Glock and .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. The Glock was later used in a bank robbery in New Mexico, but the .38 was never recovered. Bonner suspected Jenkins was capable of almost anything, even murdering Lindsay Hamilton.

  Bonner tracked down a man who'd been seen in the neighborhood that day selling magazines door-to-door. He also interviewed the driver who delivered water to the neighbor across the street and the Hamiltons’ mail carrier, an odd duck named Ed Mason, a second-generation Postal Service employee. Mason piqued Bonner's interest after the detective learned that the constrictor knot was related to bag, sack, and miller's knots, all of which are used to seal a variety of cloth containers, including mailbags. Mason also had guns, but they were all registered and none was a .38. His neighbor once accused him of stealing a pair of her red panties from the clothesline. Both Mason and his wife had denied the accusation. The neighbor's account had been further discredited after Bonner discovered that she was taking medication for some kind of mental disorder.

  The Hamiltons’ gardener, Ernie Sanchez, had done time in state prison for both armed robbery and sexual assault. He'd joined a prison gang called La Nuestra Familia. While he was incarcerated his family moved back to Mexico, leaving him with nothing but an old truck. As soon as he was released he rehabbed the junker, bought a lawn mower, and started servicing clients. The first thing Bonner noticed when he interviewed Sanchez was that his hedge trimmer was tied to the metal frame of his rig with a rolling hitch. It wasn't a constrictor knot, but it was close. There was no way of confirming if Sanchez owned a .38 revolver. Ex-cons don't leave a paper trail by buying weapons at Wal-Mart. They get them on the street and they're generally stolen. Sanchez hadn't been arrested since getting out of prison, but Bonner suspected that was simply because he just hadn't been caught yet.

  Bonner had interviewed others close to the family, including friends, neighbors, classmates, Mr. Hamilton's clients and coworkers, and members of the upscale gym where Mrs. Hamilton spent three afternoons a week maintaining her size six figure. Everyone painted a picture of a perfect, happy family like the ones you used to see on 1950s TV shows. To Bonner, the Hamiltons seemed too perfect. There had to be a crack in the facade somewhere.

  As Bonner mused over the box of records in the storage room, the sound of footsteps startled him back to reality. He glanced down the hallway and saw Matthew Quinn walking toward him. Quinn was over six feet tall, a good-looking kid who had played college football and still ran every day to stay in shape. He'd attracted his share of admirers at the station, from women working in administration to female officers, but he'd never given any of them a reason to hope. He was married and the straightest arrow in the quiver.

  As Quinn approached, Bonner quickly slipped Lindsay's photograph out of his jacket pocket and into the murder book. Then he returned the book to the box and closed the lid.

  "Hey, partner,” Quinn said. “Need a ride to the party?"

  "Nah. I'll meet you there. Have to take care of a few loose ends first."

  "I see you're going in uniform."

  Tom Bonner smiled, something he rarely did these days. He often got ribbed about his wardrobe, which was always some variation of what he was wearing today—black slacks and shirt, a charcoal sports jacket, and a black-and-grey necktie. He'd been accused of dressing like an undertaker, but he didn't care. When you're at a crime scene crawling around on your hands and knees looking for a hair or a cigarette butt or anything that could help you crack a case, you don't want to be wearing a white linen suit.

  "Can't change my stripes this late in the game,” Bonner said.

  "Let me guess where you'll be tomorrow,” Quinn went on. “Fishing."

  Bonner wasn't sure how much time had passed since his partner had spoken, but at some point he looked up and noticed that Quinn was staring at him. Bonner didn't want to arouse his partner's suspicion, so he gave himself permission to lie.


  "Yup. Heading to Mammoth first thing in the morning."

  Bonner watched as his partner's gaze slowly shifted toward the boxes marked “Hamilton.” Quinn frowned. Tom Bonner knew the kid worried about his dark moods. He'd tried to get Bonner to talk about what was bothering him. A couple of times, he'd even stopped by Bonner's house—unannounced—to check on him.

  Quinn gestured toward the box. “You trying to solve the Hamilton case before you go?"

  Bonner tried for an ironic chuckle, which he suspected fell short of its goal. Everybody in the station knew he had solved the Hamilton case. He knew the Snake's identity, knew in his heart after all these years that the guy was guilty. The problem was, not all truth could be proven. That knowledge, more than any other, was propelling him toward that deep, dark hole.

  Quinn put his hand on Bonner's shoulder. “Don't worry, Tom. Something will break eventually. When it does, you'll be the first person we call."

  Bonner appreciated the sentiment, but knew it was bullshit. Once he retired, nobody was going to waste a dime calling him for help with anything, especially since the decision he'd recently made would render that sort of call impossible.

  Bonner nodded, and the tension in Quinn's facial muscles eased.

  "I'll see you at the restaurant in a few,” Quinn said, “and try not to look too happy."

  Not a problem, Bonner thought. He hadn't felt happy in a long time.

  As soon as his partner left, Bonner replaced the box on the shelf. The party wasn't scheduled to start for another half-hour, but there was nothing left for him to do here. No reason to stick around the station any longer. He returned to the squad room and loaded the few personal items he kept at his desk into a trashcan liner. Maybe he'd drive to the restaurant and have a Coke at the bar before making his grand entrance.