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FICTION
AFTER CANA
by Terence Faherty
Art by Ron Bucalo
Owen Keane, Terence Faherty’s first series character and protagonist of his debut novel Deadstick, has appeared in EQMM a number of times over the years, always in thought-provoking cases. In December 2011, The Mystery Company published a twentieth anniversary edition of Deadstick that includes a new afterword and a Keane chronology. It’s available as a trade paperback and in e-book formats. This new Keane short story is characteristically reflective and revealing.
1.
“We all know what happened to Jesus after the Wedding Feast of Cana, where he performed his first miracle. He began his public ministry. But John the Evangelist doesn’t tell us what became of the young people who were married that day. We can only assume that they had the same chance that every newly married couple has: the chance to make a happy life.”
Two seats to my left, Mary Ohlman squeezed her husband’s hand. They were no longer a newly married couple—they had a five-year-old daughter—but Harry and Mary still held hands. My date for the afternoon, a young woman named Beth Wolfe, didn’t reach for my hand, nor I for hers. We’d been set up a few months back by Mary, and though the match had failed to ignite, we’d become friends and occasional escorts for one another. At the moment, I was the one providing the service. We four were seated in a crowded church, witnessing the wedding of a teacher friend of Mary and Beth’s. As usual on those rare times when I found myself inside a house of God, my mind was wandering in the past. Then the minister, a guy so young his complexion had yet to settle down, said something that caught my attention.
“We here gathered today are a community. A unique community. As a group, we’ve come together to celebrate Kit and Emile’s wedding. If they hadn’t fallen in love and decided to pledge their lives to one another, this particular congregation would never have existed. Their love has created a couple from two separate human beings, but it has also created a new community of friends and family. As we join together to share their joy, let us also pledge to work together to support this beautiful union.”
He then returned to his earlier point about the Wedding Feast at Cana, wondering at the luck of a couple whose love had created a community that included Jesus Himself. When he took it one obvious step further, pointing out that this Wedding Feast at Basking Ridge, New Jersey also had Jesus as a guest, I drifted off again.
I started by asking myself if the minister’s theory of community could apply to a solitary man like me. Was there an Owen Keane community, made up of the people I’d interacted with in a meaningful way over the years? If so, it wasn’t a tightly packed group, like the one around me now. It was a crooked, straggling line with one member barely in sight of the next.
Later I thought of that linear group again, while standing in the receiving line, watching the bride fuss over a gray-haired man in a wheelchair. Mary and Beth were discussing homeschooling and Harry was out running the air conditioner on his new BMW and probably sneaking a cigarette.
In addition to being thin on the ground, the trail of people I’d left in my wake was less homogenous than the happy, well-dressed throng jostling for space in the vestibule of the church. My troop was occasionally seedy and often strange. I was, for my sins, an amateur detective, an impulsive inquirer into things that didn’t concern me. Or rather, things that shouldn’t have concerned me but did. At a time in my life when I’d needed answers badly, they hadn’t been around to find. Now, a dozen years on, I still searched for them, turning over every oddly shaped rock I came across. Some remarkably odd.
I was yanked back to the present by a subtle elbow to the ribs from Mary. Then I was shaking the hand of the groom, a kid still so pale from his ordeal that the black stubble on his chin stood out like the studs on his shirt front. The bride, petite but lovely with glistening eyes and a stray sprig of baby’s breath hanging down from the floral wreath that anchored her veil, took my hand next and squeezed it as Mary had squeezed Harry’s.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, as though she actually knew who I was. “Thank you for being part of our community.”
2.
The reception was held at Killdeer Country Club, a small place near the church. Small and old, its golf course tree-choked and the wood paneling of the room where we had our cocktails dark and well scarred.
Harry looked the worm holes over approvingly and even smiled down at a worn spot in the carpet. “These old-money guys know how to squeeze a nickel,” he said.
He wasn’t exactly new money himself, being the descendant of a sturdy grove of Boston lawyers that had sent out shoots as far south as New York City. Harry was now the head man of that southern outpost, and it was getting harder to remember him as the college roommate who’d often had to borrow beer money from me. For one thing, he looked quite different, the dark hair he’d had at Boston College now as thin and as lovingly preserved as Killdeer’s ancient carpeting. The face beneath it had also changed, too many expense-account lunches having both widened it and softened its regular features.
Mary, another college friend, looked more like her old self, though she’d also sacrificed in the hair department, in her case to the gods of fashion. Her honey-colored hair, once long and incredibly straight, was now short and curled. There was a subtler difference too, one that fell under the category of behavior. She’d never been much of a drinker at Boston, but she’d already reduced her first Killdeer Manhattan to a glass of musical cubes.
She noticed me noticing that and spoke before I could comment. “My bad back is acting up. That church pew must have been designed by Cotton Mather.” And then, before I could comment on her comment, “So Kit’s family is old money?”
“Emile’s too,” said Beth, whose family had a little bit of their own socked away. As usual, she was barely sipping her champagne cocktail, the better to preserve a figure that was elegantly thin.
“Then why Quebec for a honeymoon?” Harry asked. “I heard somebody talking about that outside the church. If they’re loaded, why not the French Riviera?”
“Why not the Buick Riviera?” I said, just to be saying something.
“One of them has family in Quebec,” Beth replied. “Emile, I think. And, as you said, you don’t get to be old money by spending it.”
An hour or two after the best dinner I’d had in months, I worked up the nerve to ask Mary to dance. To earn that privilege—and to limber up—I’d danced several times with Beth, acquitting myself okay, though we hadn’t exactly moved as one. Dancing with Mary, on the other hand, was as comfortable as walking beside her. We’d been more than friends back at Boston College, prior to Harry’s ascendancy, and we’d had more than our share of awkward moments since, but the club’s small dance floor seemed to be neutral ground.
“You’re not counting,” Mary observed. “You used to count when we danced to keep time.”
“Now I say the rosary.”
“That’ll be the day.”
I told myself that we’d reached a new plateau, courtesy of the passage of time. In five or six years, we might even be confidants again.
Mary’s next words made that goal seem closer and less desirable. “Do you think Harry’s happy?”
“If he’s not, he’s losing more upstairs than his hair.”
“Maybe he’s just been married too long. Maybe he’s in a rut.”
“It can’t be that,” I said.
I was saved from saying more by a collision with a couple of dancing bears. I moved us to a neutral corner, but awkwardly.
“Sorry, Owen,” Mary said. “I’ve got you counting again.”
The other dancers all seemed to be following our example and moving away from the center of the dance floor. I understood the trend when the bride and groom took that place of honor. He’d lost his tuxedo jacket and she her veil and shoes, but they were both st
ill smiling like happy newborns.
“I wonder how they’ll be feeling in ten years,” Mary said, a little wistfully.
“You and Harry can ask them then,” I said.
3.
Two days later I was at my day job, sorting packages for an express shipper that had several acres under roof near the Newark airport. It was the latest in a long series of jobs I didn’t care about, but one of the pleasanter ones, as the place was clean and dry and well lit. The work was steady and usually kept my mind from wandering, which might have been a bigger benefit than the dental plan. My supervisor, Martha, around whom the place had been built, had a soft spot for me. She was flexible about my shifts, which was important on those rare occasions when I had a case to investigate.
I’d just taken my place on the line that morning when Martha tapped me on the shoulder. One of her assistants was at her elbow, ready to cover for me. Martha led me away from the noise of the machines.
“Telephone for you, Owen. Some kind of emergency.”
I took the call in her office, wondering which of my dwindling list of relations would be on the other end. It turned out to be Harry Ohlman.
“Owen, sorry to be bothering you at work. Mary was so upset I promised her I would.”
“Amanda okay?” I asked, naming their daughter.
“Yes, she’s fine. It’s about Kit and Emile Derival. Owen, they’re dead. They were mugged on some street in Quebec last night. Robbed and shot. Mary’s sick about it. I am myself.”
I sat down heavily at the little table where I got my performance reviews. “What do you know?”
“That’s most of it. They’d gone out to dinner and a play. They were walking to some nightclub district when it happened. I guess Quebec’s a city where you feel safe at night.”
I never would. “I’m sorry, Harry. And I’m sorry Mary’s upset. You said you had to promise her you’d call me?”
“You know why, Owen. She still thinks you’re Sherlock, Jr. She thinks you’ll figure out why this happened, when there isn’t any deeper reason than some drug addict needing a fix. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to find the guy who did this and fix him for good. If I thought there was a chance of that, I’d drag you up to Canada myself. I tried to tell Mary there wasn’t anything anyone could do, but she wouldn’t listen. Sorry to lay this on you. Call me if you think of anything.”
“I will,” I said.
4.
I assumed Harry had meant that I should call if I came up with anything useful, so I didn’t bother him with the thoughts that spoiled the accuracy of my sorting for the first hour or so after his call. Those thoughts included the memory of Kit Derival’s last words to me, “Thank you for being part of our community,” and some reflections on grief. Did it help the family, I wondered, if the grief over these senseless killings spread out as far as possible, so far that they affected the work of a package handler none of them even knew? Did that make the pool of grief they were drowning in the slightest bit less deep? I decided it didn’t.
Still, the idea that I was a member of a community, a grieving community, haunted me. And it made Mary’s suggestion that I should do something about this senseless crime a little less absurd. The minister had called on the people at the wedding to support Emile and Kit. Our duties might be stretched to making sense of their deaths, if that were only possible.
But did that community even still exist? The minister had said that Emile and Kit’s love had created us, a single unit where there had previously been separate families and an assortment of friends and acquaintances. Now that those two were dead, was the bond broken? It would last a bit longer, I decided. Long enough for the community to gather again. This time for a funeral.
That thought made me sit down hard on the little stool at my station. For a moment, the familiar boxes from Land’s End and Pottery Barn slipped by unobserved. I was seeing something else, only in outline, but no less mind-seizing for that. Then the next person in the line threw an empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup at me, bringing me back.
When my break came, I hurried to the pay phone near the lavatories. Harry must have given instructions about my possible call, because his secretary, the original immovable object, put me right through.
In place of hello, Harry said, “So, we going to Quebec?”
“It’s coming to us, maybe. I need you to find something out for me, if you can.”
“Now I’m doing your legwork?” This was a reference to a time in the not very distant past when I’d worked for him as a researcher.
“Mary’s legwork,” I said.
“Right. What is it?”
“I want you to identify a guest at Emile and Kit’s wedding. He or she will be a recluse, probably very wealthy, who lives in some kind of high-security environment.”
“Like a prison?”
“More like a castle with an extra-wide moat. It’ll be somebody closely associated with one of the two families, the Derivals or the Le Clares. You’ll have to find someone from each family who isn’t in shock and ask. Say you’re trying to help, but don’t promise too much.”
“Who is this recluse?”
“A long shot. And maybe an alternative to a senseless killing.”
“Assuming I trace him or her, what do we do then?”
“We storm the castle.”
5.
The castle turned out to be a Beaux-Arts tower with a beautiful view of New York’s Central Park and security like the U.S. Mint’s. Harry and I were actually patted down between the first set of guarded lobby doors and the second. After that indignity, we had a moment to ourselves.
“They have a lot of doormen to tip at Christmas,” I observed while we waited.
“These aren’t doormen, Owen. I’ve never seen security like this. They must have an ex-president living here.”
“Lincoln, I hope.”
As that remark suggested, I was feeling a little nervous. For one thing, my best suit, still wrinkled from the wedding reception, looked shabby next to Harry’s. And even his was no match for the opulent inner lobby, which reminded me of one of the quieter galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“My dad never heard of this Crevier guy,” Harry said, “which is pretty amazing.” It was. Harry Ohlman, Sr., now retired, was a famous collector of gossip. “I still don’t know how you suddenly turned into Nero Wolfe, Owen. How you figured out from your armchair that this guy existed. That’s not your style. You usually go door-to-door bothering people until one of them knocks you on the head.”
That wasn’t a fair description of my investigative technique. But Harry’s Nero Wolfe allusion was apt. I had made the kind of deductive leap that gentleman specialized in. And, like him, I’d been reluctant to explain myself to my Archie Goodwin, Harry. It had been more than wanting to hold on to a slight advantage too. I’d found the line of thinking that had led to my leap too disturbing to discuss.
My hand had been forced by the speed of events. On the evening of the day when I’d given Harry his impossible assignment, he’d called me at my apartment to say that the person I’d hypothesized not only existed but wanted to see us the next morning. I’d confessed all then. Harry now knew as much as I did, though he seemed reluctant to believe that.
One of the lobby elevators opened its doors. The car contained two large men, neither a born smiler. They motioned us inside.
“Here’s where I get knocked on the head,” I whispered.
Our escorts neither hit us nor spoke to us. I guessed that we were bound for the penthouse, but we actually stopped halfway up the tower.
There we were greeted by a man of about five foot six who seemed to be trying to make it to six even by stretching his neck. Something about his rigid posture made his plain brown suit resemble a uniform, though that suggestion might actually have come from the old scar tissue on one of his cheekbones. He looked like he badly wanted to pat us down again. Instead, he showed us into an apartment.
Based on the lobby, I ex
pected it to be a scaled-down Versailles. It turned out to be very ordinary and even underfurnished. The man who lived there didn’t need much furniture, as he took a seat with him wherever he went. I saw the marks it had made on the hallway carpet as we entered, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by the identity of our host. It was the wheelchair-bound man Kit Derival had fussed over in the receiving line.
“Mr. Ohlman?” he said. “Mr. Kane, is it?” The gravel in his voice had come right out of the river Seine.
“Keane,” I said.
“Pardon. My name, as I believe you know, is Anton Crevier. Please sit down, gentlemen. I once enjoyed having men stand in my presence. Those days are gone.”
In those bygone days he’d been broad-shouldered, I decided, basing my guess on the amount of padding some nostalgic tailor had put in the shoulders of his suit coat. Under the shock of gray hair I’d noted at the wedding, Crevier had a jowly, drooping face that seemed to be suspended from his straight, unkempt brow. His small black eyes moved from one of us to the other as he extracted a cigarette case from his pocket. He offered the case to us first, and we both declined, Harry with visible regret. The scarred lackey lit the cigarette Crevier had selected and then placed himself behind the wheelchair, ready to jump on any grenades that happened by.
“My good friends the Le Clares called me with terrible news yesterday,” Crevier said. “The most terrible news. Their beloved daughter and her husband dead, murdered for their traveler’s checks. A few hours later, they called me back. They had been contacted by a friend of Kit’s, who told them that I might have something to do with the killings. They were most upset, as was I. I have passed a bad night, gentlemen. I am hoping you will be able to explain this business to me before I have to pass another.”
Harry said, “We were looking for an alternative explanation for the crime. Owen—Mr. Keane—may have come up with one.”
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 Page 18
