“I did warn him. Didn’t I tell you?”
“You missed that part,” the cop said.
“When I was here the first time. I told Palke that the Stricklands had been murdered, that Abe Hartman probably arranged it and that Hartman was probably after him, too.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me I was mistaken. He said he couldn’t imagine that Abe Hartman had anything against him or the Stricklands. I told him to have it his own way and went to see Abe.”
An hour later Rachel called. She spoke breathlessly, her voice pleading. “I need you. Please come.” I went.
I reached her home in fifteen minutes, driving at speeds that invited arrest. The sun had set by the time I pulled in at the curb. There were lights on in the house but I could see no one through the windows. Vern Miller was seated on the concrete steps leading to the front door. I was walking toward him when I heard the scream: loud, piercing, a female sound of great anguish.
Miller was up and through the door. I ran toward it. I had just reached the steps when I heard another scream, this one even louder. It was followed by the multiple, sharp “cracks” of a semi-automatic handgun, something heavy—three shots fired. Almost immediately a single, hollow explosion responded. Shotgun. Another scream. Then another. I was through the door, down the hall and into the living room before it faded into a low, aching moan. I found Rachel Hartman kneeling there, cradling the head of her step-father on her lap; her arms and clothes were drenched with blood. The Glock was on the floor next to them. Across the room Vern Miller held the body of Abe Hartman close to his chest. A sawed-off Mossberg pump was nearby. Rachel was pleading with her step-father, “Don’t die, don’t die.” Miller didn’t say a word to his employer. He wouldn’t have heard anyway. Both Palke and Hartman were dead. Take my word for it.
“The Hennepin County Attorney’s gonna love this,” the homicide cop sighed. “Old-time mobster and nouveau-riche financier slaughter each other for love of the daughter they both shared. Forget the local guys, this is the kind of thing that goes national. 20-20 might even pick it up. Just what I need.”
He was pissed and I didn’t blame him. Nobody wants the media looking over their shoulder while they work.
“At least it looks open and shut,” he added.
“Think so?” I asked him.
He stared at me for a good six beats before answering: “Let’s see if your story matches what the kids have to say.”
Neither of us was surprised that it did.
Rachel buried Abe “The Cleaver” Hartman in Calvary Cemetery on the north side of St. Paul because that’s where Dapper Dan Hogan was buried and that’s the way Hartman wanted it. Only there were hundreds of mourners to bid adieu to the man who first organized crime in St. Paul and just a handful to salute Hartman. Like he said, his time had passed. Even the media had lost interest; a single camera crew shot the funeral and it departed before the finish.
Three people lingered at the grave after the rabbi muttered the final good-bye: Rachel Hartman, Vern Miller, me. Miller was the first to leave. Rachel smiled weakly and thanked me for coming; she said it was thoughtful. I cut that off right away.
“I don’t like being used,” I told her.
“I don’t understand,” she said but I knew she did.
“It looks like the Hennepin County Attorney bought your story,” I told her.
She smiled slightly and looked off toward where Vern Miller was waiting next to a black limousine.
“You mean our story, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I mean our story,” I told her. “Did I tell it right; just the way you wanted me to?”
The smile never left her face but there was an edge to it now.
“I have no complaints,” she said.
“There’s a hole in it, you know. A big one.”
“Is there?” she asked, real coy.
“Big enough so the rest just won’t fit.”
“What?”
“You told me the Stricklands’ had new carpeting, new tile in their kitchen...”
“And so they did,” Rachel said.
“Yes, but it was new two weeks ago, not last November when you claimed they kidnapped you,” I told her. “I saw the receipts.”
Rachel closed her eyes, smiled slightly, opened them again.
“My mistake,” she said calmly.
“You hadn’t been to the Stricklands’ home until you went there to kill them,” I added. “There was no kidnapping.”
“You can’t prove that,” she told me.
“Palke struck it seriously rich and made you his heir,” I continued. “But that didn’t satisfy you. Like a lot of kids today you want it all and right now. So you invented the kidnapping...”
“Mr. Taylor, you make me sound so... calculating,” Rachel interrupted, enjoying the sound of her own voice.
“You killed the Stricklands. Why? Because in your story, your step-father required accomplices and who better than the business partners who would directly benefit from the alleged kidnapping. As for Abe... He had been out of it for a long time but his reputation lived on. You were counting on that. Who would doubt that Abe ‘The Cleaver” Hartman would kill the people who kidnapped his daughter? Not me.
“So, you coerced Abe to your house; you had Vern wait outside while he and your step-father spoke privately. Then you waited for me to arrive, the white knight riding to aid the damsel in distress...”
“Nice metaphor,” Rachel interrupted again.
“When you saw me arrive, you shot your father with Palke’s gun then killed Palke with the shotgun. I rushed in and found you cradling Palke’s body. Course, at the time I didn’t realize you only wanted to stain yourself with blood so the cops couldn’t prove you fired the guns.
“And me? I was merely the narrator, the disinterested third party who put all the pieces together for the cops: you were kidnapped, Abe killed the kidnappers outta revenge, getting himself killed in the process. You have to admit, I made a helluva corroborating witness.”
“You earned your money,” Rachel agreed.
“How much to do you stand to inherit? Fifty-six million?”
“Closer to sixty-five,” Rachel said. “So what happens now? Blackmail?”
I told her: “You confess to the cops. Confess or I’ll rat you out.”
“To who?” she wanted to know. “With what evidence?”
I gestured toward where Vern Miller stood next to a black limousine. “The code, remember? Miller won’t like it that you murdered his friend and mentor. He might decide to do something about it.”
“Think so?” she asked softly. And then louder, “Vern, could we have a moment, please?”
He walked toward us.
“Vern,” Rachel said when he was within earshot. “Mr. Taylor says if I don’t confess my crimes to the police department, he’s going to tell you all about them. I assume he expects you to punish me.”
Miller smiled broadly.
“And I will, too,” he said. “As soon as I get you home.”
“Promise?” she asked.
“You’re in it together?” I asked. “The two of you?”
“The three of us,” admitted Miller.
“Abe?”
“Mr. Hartman had nothing but hard dying to look forward to,” Miller said. “He wasn’t happy about that...”
“And he wasn’t happy that the business he and Isadore Blumenfeld had spent their lifetimes building had disappeared while he was in prison,” Rachel added.
“He set it up so we would have the resources to rebuild the combination,” Miller said.
“It was his plan,” Rachel said. “One last great heist. The perfect crime.”
“He went out on top,” Miller concluded.
“Yeah, with you carrying him on your shoulders,” I said.
“It was his plan!” spat Rachel, outraged. “Don’t you dare take that away from him. We helped, sure. He was too weak to get around. We had to shoo
t the Stricklands for him and in the end, I had to shoot my step-father; Abe couldn’t hold the gun steady. But it was his idea; his plan.”
“Yeah, I figured that all along,” I said. “I just wanted to hear you say it.”
“What?”
“I knew he was in on it,” I confessed. “He claimed he kicked in half a million for the ransom; he didn’t have it. And you two...”
“What?” Rachel repeated.
“You two don’t have the wit for this kind of caper.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Too young. Too inexperienced.”
Miller smiled. “Maybe so,” he said. “But we have fifty-six million dollars.”
“Sixty-five,” Rachel corrected him. “And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it,” she told me.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
“Yeah? What are you going to do?” Miller wanted to know, clenching his fists like he wanted to pop me one.
I reached inside me shirt and removed the microphone that was taped just below my rib cage. I held it for them to see.
“I’m going to testify at your trial,” I told them.
A moment later, a swarm of police officers led by the Minneapolis homicide cop crossed the cemetery to take them.
“A guy like Abe spends a lifetime learning how to act, what to do when push comes to shove,” I told the homicide cop later. “But kids today, they don’t know how to behave and they refuse to take the time to learn.”
“I hear that,” the cop replied.
“They don’t even know enough to keep their mouths shut. Think Abe would have spoken so freely about murder?”
“Not in this lifetime,” the cop agreed.
“Kids,” I said contemptuously.
“Yeah, kids.”
“Kids Today” Copyright ©1999 by David Housewright. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1999.
Back to TOC
Author’s Note: I had the great pleasure of teaching a writing seminar with the marvelous Tami Hoag a few years back at the legendary Once Upon A Crime Mystery Bookstore in Minneapolis. Tami, of course, is best known for writing crackerjack thrillers. She started her career, though, as a romance novelist. I made the obnoxious comment that “Any moron can write a romance”—yes, alcohol was involved. Tami disagreed, quite vehemently, as I recall. So I wrote a story and sold it to True Romance Magazine which printed it under the title “How To Trick A Woman Into Having Sex.” The editor liked it so much she called and asked for more stories because mine “was like real literature.” I took a copy of the magazine to Tami the next time she was in town. She looked at it and said, “I guess you’re right. Any moron can write a romance.”
The Sultan of Seduction
The self-proclaimed Sultan of Seduction bounced into the hotel conference room and mounted the low stage to thunderous applause—or at least as much thunder as thirty white guys could manage. He pumped his fist, hopped up and down and raised his arms in triumph while his audience danced with him. The ovation lasted a full minute, with “The Believers,” as the guys labeled themselves, chanting “Sultan, Sultan.” Toward the end of it, the Sultan winked at me and smiled as if to say, “See, I told you so.”
I shrugged in reply. Maybe if I hadn’t seen the hotel’s blonde desk clerk blow him off just minutes before, I might have been more impressed. I wondered how The Believers would take it if I told them the truth about their guru. Coming from the only woman in the room, they probably wouldn’t believe it. I was the enemy, after all, and that’s what the seminar was all about—defeating the enemy.
Still, it wasn’t my job to sully the Sultan’s reputation. I was there to keep him alive.
I had met the Sultan at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and was surprised by his appearance: lanky and without muscle tone, thin face, sallow complexion, short and prematurely gray hair, thick black-rimmed glasses, white button-down cotton shirt, black polyester slacks, white socks and black wingtips. Not exactly the “babe-magnet” that had been described to me.
“You were expecting a movie star?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
“That’s the whole point,” he claimed. “The Believers see me and they know that if I can seduce women, they can, too.”
I didn’t say a word, but my expression must have told him something. The Sultan glared at me.
“Wait here,” he said, and went off to prove himself, accosting the attendant who had worked his flight, stopping her as she rolled her suitcase toward a shuttle bus.
At first, she seemed uncomfortable, yet she visibly relaxed as he spoke softly to her, wonderfully pleasant and sincere as he gazed into her green eyes. She was listening quite intently to everything he had to say, and I began to think, Hmm, maybe he is a babe magnet, right up until she balled her fist and whacked him on the chin. She would have bashed him again, but he looked so pathetic with his head tucked beneath crossed arms that she gave it up and moved on.
“You’re supposed to protect me,” he wailed when I reached his side.
“Next time I’ll shoot.”
I hustled the Sultan to my car and we proceeded to follow his agent’s carefully crafted itinerary. First, he would have interviews at a couple of Twin Cities’ radio stations, followed by two newspapers and a magazine. However, to the Sultan’s chagrin, not one of the Cities’ seven TV stations would put him on the air.
It was the agent’s idea that a female private investigator be assigned to protect his client from evil feminists. He said there was poetry in it. Yeah, I thought. Like the kind you read on bathroom walls.
I begged the boss not to assign me. I told him it wasn’t a bodyguard job anyway; more like chauffer for the day. But he pointed out that I was his only female operative and besides, the customer is always right. Personally, I think he considered the assignment to be just one big practical joke on me and I vowed to get even.
On I-35W heading north into downtown Minneapolis, the Sultan asked, “You’re a private eye?” as if he couldn’t believe it.
“Yep.”
“Ever shoot anyone?”
“Not recently.”
“You have nice legs.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Nice body, too.”
“I never get involved with clients,” I announced, cutting him off at the pass.
“If I looked like a soap opera actor, I’ll bet you would.”
I didn’t reply, keeping my eyes on the road.
“‘Give me ten minutes to talk away my ugly face and I will bed the Queen of France.’ Know who said that?”
“Voltaire.”
He muttered a word rarely printed in the better magazines and turned away. I smiled. It’s like my mom always said: “If you hide your intelligence so boys will like you, you’ll find that the only boys who like you are stupid.”
Most of the people who interviewed the Sultan did so with a straight face, even when he spoke of a conspiracy of “hysterical feminists” who would stop at nothing—including murder—to silence him. As proof that his life was in danger, he produced a letter threatening bodily harm if he should return to the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
I read it over his shoulder: Stay away from Minnesota. You’ve done enough damage here. It was printed in block letters with red ink on a single sheet of typing paper. It was unsigned.
The bad boys at one of rock stations wondered aloud if the letter was nothing more than a publicity ploy. The Sultan insisted it was authentic and that he was frightened; that’s why his agent hired a bodyguard—albeit a female—to protect him during the duration of his stay.
The bad boys wouldn’t let it go, however, and asked me on the air, “Does anyone really want to kill the Sultan?”
“You mean besides me?”
The Sultan didn’t like my answer and during the commercial break, he told me so at decibels just below that of a 747. For four hundred bucks a day plus expenses, he felt
he deserved better and he was right. But it was hard to take a man seriously who was pushing a book called Scoring for Putzes.
The Sultan of Seduction was in the sex business. Specifically, he sold, at exorbitant prices, books, ebooks, CDs, DVDs and admission to seminars that taught homely men how to get beautiful women onto bed—guaranteed. His first book, How To Trick Any Woman You Want into Having Sex, was a Top 25 on Amazon and his second babe-getting tutorial, Scoring, was moving up fast.
“I give men power and choice,” he proclaimed proudly. “Before, a man might be in a crummy relationship with some over-weight dog because he couldn’t get anyone better. But with my technique, he can dump his partner and move up. Even a regular guy can shag the most beautiful, most desirable women. He doesn’t have to settle for second best.
“That’s why the feminists are threatening my life,” he added. “Because I’m disrupting the status quo.”
The reporter for one of the newspapers compared the Sultan to William Hartman. It was Hartman, the reporter noted, who wandered the streets of Manhattan with a tape recorder in 1970 asking attractive women what it would take for a guy like him to score with a woman like her. He printed the answers in a book, How To Pick Up Girls, and made a fortune.
The Sultan bristled at the comparison.
“I’m light-years ahead of Harman,” he insisted. “Have you read his book? Do you know what it says? It says if you want to pick up women just talk to them. Talk to them? Learn what they’re about? Get real! I’m not dissing Hartman, okay? The man was a pioneer; you gotta recognize that. But he was only interested in meeting women and dating them. I don’t care about that. Men today don’t care about that. They want to know how to get women in bed with the least amount of effort. That’s what I teach ’em.”
What the Sultan taught his disciples was actually a little-known discipline called neurolinguistic programming. By the seventh time I heard him explain it, I had it down pat.
Neurolinguistic programming was developed in the early ’70s by a couple of professors specializing in linguistics and theoretical psychology. They hit upon the radical notion that conventional therapy was unnecessary, that emotionally disturbed patients didn’t need to work through past traumas to become healed. Instead, the professors argued that through an artful use of language, all those terrible “subjective human experiences” that ruin people’s lives could be quickly and easily transformed in the unconscious mind into something less painful and less important.
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