EQMM, January 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  ©2008 by Susanne Mischke; translation ©2008 by Mary Tannert

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  Novelette: PRISONER IN PARADISE by Dennis Richard Murphy

  Dennis Richard Murphy had his fiction debut in EQMM in 2003, won an Arthur Ellis Award for the 2006 EQMM story “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” and became a friend to us all at Dell Magazines. It was with great sadness that we learned of his premature death in June 2008. The following is the last new Murphy story we know of, but the Canadian author's first novel, Darkness at the Break of Noon, will appear posthumously from Harper Collins Canada (February ‘09).

  It didn't add up. Snake didn't add up. Snake Kettering in downtown Nicoya certainly didn't add up. But to Terry Doran, neither did a hot December midday in a Costa Rican Chinese restaurant with a white plastic Christmas tree flashing like a cruiser rack at a crime scene.

  Slumped beside the hyperactive tree, Doran was a large man, mid fifties by the creases on a face as yellowed and worn as a word-game dictionary. An athletic man once, by the size of his arms. Sweat stood out on his brow and collected in his deep laugh lines and the thick wrinkles of his neck, stained the collar and stretched the armholes of his grey tank top as the downdraft of sluggish ceiling fans fought the steam rising from deep-fried egg rolls and scalding plum sauce.

  Wrinkling his brow, grasping for a lost thought, Doran stared at the table holding his lunch, two empty long-necked bottles of Bavaria Negra, and a collection of condiments. He toyed with the objects as he stared through them, unwittingly nudging them into a nativity scene of salt-and-pepper-shaker shepherds, soy-sauce sheep, and salsa picante cattle. Beer-bottle Magi hovered over a cylindrical stainless-steel Baby Jesus that prevented cheap napkins from escaping the matching manger, limiting the sins of the world from littering its streets.

  With the back of his big-knuckled hand he plowed the scene aside, tipping the soy bottle and wiping his wet fingers on his faded board shorts. Doran bit into one of the egg rolls but it was still too hot. He gutted them with chopsticks to let the steam escape and absently scratched his belly. Twists of grizzled grey hair stuck out of his ears and from under a grimy Argonauts ball cap with a curved peak. He wore a pair of black rubber flip-flops with rainbow-colored straps he'd found on the corner for less than two thousand colones.

  He'd spotted Snake Kettering from the line at the bank. Doran had driven the thirty miles to Nicoya with two weeks’ worth of cash sales weighing down his shorts. As he waited under the watchful gaze of unsmiling security guards in crisp blinding-white shirts he saw a flash of orange hat through the window, a swatch of long, blond, dirty hair partially hidden by a high rucksack with a sleeping bag tied below. The turn of a head, the profile of a thin face, and spotty facial hair and maybe a bad tattoo ... Doran was sure it was Kettering. Dead sure.

  But it didn't add up. Of course Terrence “Terry” Corcoran Doran here didn't add up either. An ex-cop with a capital X, imagining he saw the ghost that caused him to be here in the first place. Shake your head, Doran. It's the beer talking. Last night's beer. Or this morning's.

  If he gave up his place in the bank line he wasn't sure the guards or the permanently smiling woman behind him would let him in again, even if he had the Spanish to explain what he wanted. It was an interminable twenty minutes before his deposit was made and he walked outside. The midday air hit like Nam napalm after the air conditioning. He scanned the town park but saw no one he recognized, no tattooed arm, no orange flash like the briefly exposed underwing of a parrot. No dirty blond hair. He drove to pick up supplies in the northwest of town, slowing to check everyone he passed before returning to the park in the town center. The shop windows were crammed with cheap toys, plastic Christmas tree lights in the shape of oranges and poinsettias, table centerpieces with candles melted by the heat, lying limply between brassy Christmas ornaments like spent erections. He covered some blocks on foot, looking in every shop, until he broke a sandal and bought the rainbow-strapped flip-flops. It was too damned hot for this.

  No Ticos walked the Nicoya streets at noon. A German couple came through the door wearing sensible hiking shoes and expensive daypacks, lured—like Doran—by the bogus sanctuary implied by strings of dusty paper international flags looped between ceiling fans. They dragged a petulant teenaged boy, embarrassed by having parents, blue-white legs capped by skimpy Euro-soccer shorts.

  Siesta. That's where the Ticos were. Nodding off on some shaded porch or spread-eagled under a slow-moving fan. Doran still couldn't do siestas. He was no napper. He spent the hours drinking at Jesse's, thinking about things. Like what Snake Kettering was doing in Nicoya. The scumbag punk belonged in prison back home, freezing his butt off with his biker buddies until they died from frostbite or old age.

  The egg rolls wouldn't cool. Doran felt anxious. He threw some bills on the table and walked out to where the Land Cruiser roasted in the sun. He'd bought the turquoise truck two years before from an American surfer who needed money to stay in Costa Rica. Everybody who came here wanted to stay. The Se Vende sign was still stuck to the back window in case anyone was interested in a 1987 four-door, four-by-four five-speed with a 4.2-liter inline six and Aussie “roo bars.” He checked the stability of the condiments and oil jugs in the back and drove the dusty block to avoid the main-road bridge repair, under construction since before he arrived.

  On the road back to the village he drove the speed limit, dodging lazy iguanas and potholes the depth of armadillos, watching herds of dozy rabbit-eared cattle languidly stand under solitary trees as if they'd forgotten their long-term plans in mid cud. He slowed for the metal-studded speed bumps that regularly announced school crossing areas, driving around groups of children holding hands to walk home in clean, pressed uniforms. It was a good life here if you had a little money. You didn't need much. The temperature was perfect year round on the coast, the beer cold and cheap if you knew where to drink, the locals generally diffident and polite. Even in what the tourist hustlers called “the green season” it only rained hard for a predictable hour every afternoon and even vehicles lower slung than the Land Cruiser could ford the backcountry rivers most of the year.

  Doran had landed in Liberia with a small bank account in his pocket and a large chip on his shoulder about a wasted lifetime as a cop. About getting tossed off the force for being the cop he was. About losing Donna Logan, about losing his badge. Three years later he owned a two-room apartment with a terrace a block from the beach. He had an unplanned business that was unexpectedly profitable, a girlfriend of sorts if Rita would just relax and enjoy the moment, and an expatriate collection of odd, itinerant people who served as friends. Not bad for a northern failure.

  Doran fiddled with the radio dial, trying to find some music that wasn't guitars racing each other to the end of a song. He turned right in a well-kept village where a group of small children and their minders sat quietly in the heat beneath trees, watching men with dark complexions and high cheekbones drowsily assemble small midway rides on a shadeless soccer field. Indians maybe, over the Nicaraguan border for seasonal work. In front of the church, lighter-skinned local men with fat faces, black moustaches, and white teeth laughed and teased each other as they jiggled ladders and applied fresh aluminum paint to a free-standing cross. Watching the preparations for the weekend village fiesta, Doran missed the bump for the school and the truck and his 200 pounds went airborne.

  He was halfway home, halfway from Nicoya to Doran's Beachfront Fish and Chips—Pescado y patatas fritas—Abierto 4-8 p.m., the chip shack that, to his amazement, more than paid the bills. Javier did most of the work, anyway. Not a job that weighed on you like being a cop did; it was a vacation, not a vocation. He snorted, as if he'd expressed himself out loud and had to agree in kind. If Detective Sergeant Terry Doran as a fry chef was a joke, Snake Kettering being here was a laugh. Except that Donna Logan wasn't laughing. She was colder than the by-the-book bastards Doran had left behind, deader than the job he'd been stripped of after thirty-thre
e years. Thirty-three years, he thought, with two gongs for investigator of the year, one for bravery under fire, the other for being shot in the shoulder. After three houses, three dogs, and two wives.

  Cop divorces are obvious long before they transpire. You could say they begin at the altar, at least for real cops, not for the upwardly mobile office staff more attuned to overtime and retirement planning than case files. Both the separations were amicable, meaning there was nothing at stake except escape—no investments, no kids, nothing much to share except holiday snaps of better times. And pets. He'd won custody of a shepherd, lost a beagle, and given a mad mutt named Enforcer to Steve Bidalki when he left the cold.

  The divorce from the department was not amicable. He still liked to think he'd told Muller where to shove the Logan case and his entire department, but the truth was that the inspector had canned him on charges ranging from assaulting a civilian to interfering in the proper conduct of an investigation. Thirty-eight-year-old real-estate agent Donna Logan had been brutally raped and beaten before being dumped like a bad camper's garbage off the logging road that runs from Fox Creek to the Park. Her attacker didn't kill her. She froze to death on the side of the road in January. A trapper found her body in the spring, two and a half months after she'd gone missing from Fox Creek and Doran's bed, ravaged so much by animals that any postmortem forensic examination was a waste of report forms.

  Doran knew that Kettering had killed her. He tasted it. Everything that had made him a damned good cop for so long told him he was right. It was just a matter of time. Meanwhile the punk had taunted him, whispering innuendos to his pals, sneering in Doran's ear one late night in the bar of the Auberge Voyageur until the detective lost it and beat him unconscious, leaving him to Donna's fate on the black ice of the parking lot. If only. Inspector Muller's reaction to the formal charges laid by Kettering was to haul Doran off the case. Of course he should never have been on it in the first place. He knew that, too. But only his partner Bidalki knew Donna was his girl.

  The suspension snuffed a lifetime of devotion for Doran and the media vultures loved it. Newspaper guys he'd refused to tip or provide with sound bites condemned him on the front pages as a dysfunctional bully and mewed sympathy for a petulant Kettering. Cops with whom he'd refused to get drunk, play Friday-night cribbage, or share the spoils that fell off a truck reveled in his collapse. Sour-faced young men with expensive suits and thin briefcases came from Toronto to sneer at the local restaurants and study his file.

  While he awaited their decision Doran still worked the case from home. It engrossed him. It owned him. With Steve Bidalki's reluctant inside help he came closer and closer to proving Kettering's complicity in Donna Logan's rape and murder. But not close enough. And not in time. He gambled his career to prove Kettering guilty, and lost. Until today.

  Jesse Rubin used a torn T-shirt to wipe bat guano off the bar speakers over which a Bob Marley CD played. “You sure it was this Snake guy you saw, Terry?” he said. The surf was high-tide loud behind Doran, who sat on a rattan barstool and picked with his thumbnail at the wet label of a Negra. Jesse always introduced himself as “just Jesse” but Doran had seen an envelope months ago with a surname on it and committed it to memory. He wasn't being nosy. He was a cop. He collected stuff. Stored it away. Brought it forward when it was relevant. He had a filing cabinet for a brain, stuffed with random details that might add up to something someday.

  "Nope. Couldn't be sure with the crowd and the backpack and the reflections on the bank glass and all. Looked like him, though. Scrawny punk. Little beard—one of those right here.” Doran pointed a broad fingernail under his bottom lip. “Orange net hat, high above the brim like a trucker's or a hick's. Blurry tattoo on his left arm and shoulder. Ring in his right ear—at the top, not the earlobe..."

  "Christ, every kid born since nineteen eighty has ink and rings, Terry.” Jesse shook his gray ponytail. “I think Sunset was born with pierced ears, man. Had her first tattoo when she was three. Didn't cry a bit.” Sunset was Jesse's daughter. They were over forty now, Doran thought, all those nineteen-sixties kids named Sunrise and Morning Star and Peace and Psychedelia ... “Or is that how you cops work? Jumping to conclusions, seeing things where there ain't nothing to see? Damn bats...” He swiped at the tiny droppings with the rag.

  "Count your lucky stars, Jess. If the cops back in your hood had jumped to a few obvious conclusions, you'd still be wearing orange as the cellblock sweetheart of San Quentin."

  Jesse laughed, a forced laugh. He nodded, raised his eyebrows. “We're not that much different, Terry my man. We took different roads to get here, but we're now podners in paradise, man.” He wiped black pellets off the counter again. He looked up to where the vampire bats slept in the dark corners of the bar's thatched roof.

  "You shine some lights up there, the bats won't come,” said Doran. Jesse nodded as if he'd heard that before. “Look pretty at night, too."

  ” ‘Nother beer?” Doran shook his head, studied his watch as if it was broken. “Nah, gotta go. Change the oil over today. Ready for the Christmas rush.” He dug in his pocket for some brass change and counted out a thousand colones. He still did the exchange math when he bought something. He couldn't let himself give it up. A buck a beer, he thought. Some people's definition of paradise.

  "You mean you actually change that stuff?” said Jesse. “I don't believe it.” Doran hiked up his shorts, put his money on the counter, and gave Jess the finger.

  "Every three years, Jess. Needs it or not. Like your keg lines.” Jesse waved and flicked his rag at the countertop. Terry Doran laughed, turned the finger into a wave back, and shuffled through powdered gray sand to the palm-thatched wooden shack. The sign showed a painted strip of white sand and a fishing boat too high out of the water. Sunset had painted it for him for ten thousand colones. Less than twenty bucks. He'd strung a length of multi-colored Christmas lights over it last year and left them up. He undid the padlock on the back door and listened to the geckos scurry for cover when he turned on the lights. He was okay with the small green lizards and the iguanas and turkey vultures that roamed the town. They ate bugs and roadkill and earned their keep. He supposed the bats did too, but he'd never like them—some midnight memory of his mother screaming and holding a magazine over her long brown hair while his father, pissed as ever, swung wildly at the bedroom air with a newspaper until he fell over and passed out.

  The tide was almost in now, the wash only twenty feet away, where in a few hours it would be a long hike to the water. Doran pottered around with the plastic pails, draining one fryer into an empty bucket, then scraping out the gritty residue of burnt batter before pouring in the clean yellow oil. There was something satisfying about the process, about refreshing a system, about starting over. Maybe refreshing Terry Doran was that simple. Changing his oil. He had to let Steve know about Kettering in any case. He'd check out the state of things back there. Maybe some memories were shorter than his. Maybe Snake Kettering was his key to finding out.

  It was dark and stuffy in the chip shack, but he knew if he opened the flaps to let in light and air the line would begin and he wasn't ready for customers. He never was. That's why he hired Javier, who'd taken this week off to visit his family in lieu of Christmas when the crowds from San José would build. Doran drained the second fryer into the newly empty bucket, cleaned it, and refilled it. He hauled both containers of dirty oil to the truck and hefted them into the back. He tugged out the striped plastic bags of supplies purchased in Nicoya—Heinz Ketchup for the Americans, Crosse and Blackwell Malt Vinegar for the Brits and Canadians, Hellman's Mayonnaise for the Europeans, salt for all of them. It had been a smart idea to open a chip wagon. Not his. Steve's wife Martha—no, “Marta"—had come up with it. They'd come down to visit after a few months. Steve liked the rustic village but Marta was an all-inclusive resort-package girl and it had been her frustration with the food and facilities that had her loudly wishing for just one good chip truck.

>   "With all this damned fish, it should be easy. And how difficult can frying potatoes be? They fry everything else here."

  Detective Constable Steve Bidalki was the only one who figured DS Doran was right about Snake killing Donna. Bidalki had worked with him long enough to know Doran's hunches paid off, but even Steve knew the Donna Logan case was too close to home. Doran wondered how Steve would react if he could get Kettering to talk after all this time—you scored big points closing cold cases these days. Maybe it would give the kid the boost he deserved. Get him his sergeant's stripes or at least a commendation.

  Sitting in the cool dark of the chip shack sipping a warm Imperial liberated from the beer-batter supply, Doran's stomach growled. He should have eaten the egg rolls. Tourists outside muttered, wondering why the business wasn't open at four o'clock when the sign said it opened at four o'clock. He waited until they left before he tied on a greasy apron and pushed open the flap for business.

  It was seven o'clock before he could take advantage of a lull and close the flap. The local kids’ pickup soccer game on the hard wet sand had come with the sunset and gone with the dark. Doran had kept an eye focused beyond their skinny silhouettes and fast footwork, looking for an orange hat and blond hair. Backpackers didn't come to this part of the world to stay in market towns like Nicoya. You went there to bank, to the hospital or the pharmacy, to buy supplies. Backpackers came here for the beaches and cheap hostels or campgrounds. Serious surfers traveled the rutted roads south over the headlands, past Playa San Miguel and Coyote to Santa Teresa and Mal Pais. The wealthy settled in the gated resorts and on the golf greens north toward Tamarindo.