In reality, he had given up hope of seeing her again during the two years that had passed since the last time he saw her leaving a women’s clothing store. He imagined, in his fantasy, that she had finally gotten tired of the putative millionaire lover and had left him, or that her sick mother or father had died and that she had finally decided to live her life freely, after putting it off for so long. Later he thought, more realistically, that the laws of chance were just playing their own mysterious games. After his second divorce, he never committed the imprudent act of getting married again. A few relatively short-lived relationships served to alleviate his loneliness and to satisfy the sexual needs of a man approaching his mid forties. I wonder how old she is? he sometimes asked himself, when he thought of her at all. Thirty? Thirty-two? She wouldn’t be as fresh and attractive as before. Beauty was fleeting by nature, that’s what made it so special.
So that when he saw her again, he felt a tremendous urgency, because this could easily be the last chance encounter he would have with this woman whom he had seen growing from adolescence to the fullness of womanhood in widely separated bursts, and who was now beginning her inevitable decline. He ran inside the building and headed for the elevators, but decided to take the stairs instead, figuring he wouldn’t miss her that way, no matter what floor she was on.
He climbed the steps eyeing every female shape going up or down, hoping to find the woman he was looking for. Panting for breath, he reached the top floor, which wasn’t really a floor but an empty terrace made of lumpy concrete that was crumbling in spots. She must have gone into one of the building’s many offices, and trying to find her by checking each of the offices would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. He decided to go back down the stairs and wait by the entrance. She had to leave the building at some point.
He still had a number of business matters to attend to that morning, but he shrugged his shoulders and resigned himself to spending a few hours waiting for her. He was prepared to spend the whole morning waiting outside the building if need be. But as he rushed downstairs, he grew worried about the possibility that the woman might have left the premises while he was looking for her on the upper floors. In the end, he planted himself by the doors like a nervous spy on his first day on the job and began to scrutinize the people leaving the building.
After a good three-quarters of an hour, it occurred to him to ask the uniformed doorman if there was another exit to the building. He answered that yes, there was another exit on the side street. All hope of seeing the woman vanished in an instant: She could have left by the side door. And he might never see her again, he thought. That day’s chance encounter with the rare milestone in his life that she represented could have been the last. But he didn’t lose heart. If she entered the building and he didn’t see her leave, it was possible that she worked in one of the offices, or at least had some reason to visit one of them. Studying the directory of the building’s occupants, he saw that it listed all kinds of businesses: legal counseling, doctors and dentists, several real-estate agencies, consulting services, even an employment agency. Where to start? Even though he was falling behind in his work, he decided it could wait while he conducted his investigation. If only he knew the woman’s name, at least, he thought that night when he got back from the pub where he usually ate. If he knew her name, it would be as easy as pie: He’d simply ask for her by name in all the businesses and offices in the building. Or even better, look her up in the telephone directory. But identifying someone whom he knew absolutely nothing about was really a job for a professional investigator, way too much work for a man who was actually pretty lazy when it came to doing anything beyond the demands of his day job. Maybe he should trust his luck and hope that he might run into her again someplace? He shook his head and decided to make himself a cup of weak coffee so it wouldn’t keep him awake. He had run into her at least seven or eight times by chance, and he was sure that the laws of chance or coincidence wouldn’t help him anymore regarding the woman he had carelessly allowed to slip past him for so many years.
He decided to begin his investigation at the employment agency, and immediately realized how ridiculous or suspicious he must have looked walking into the place and asking about a person whose name he didn’t know who fit such-and-such description. After recovering from this momentary embarrassment, he snuck a peek at all the women working there, another waste of time, since they were all wearing uniforms, and the woman he was looking for wasn’t wearing one when he saw her enter the building the day before. They told him that a lot of people came by the office every day to drop off photos and resumes, looking for work. Could he possibly see the applicants’ photos? he dared to ask, and immediately regretted it when they answered, with some disdain, that it was impossible: That information was confidential.
He limited himself to a few timid glances at the female employees working in the offices and waiting rooms next to the employment agency. And with a heavy heart, he realized that this method was getting him nowhere. Describing a woman’s physical appearance fifty times over in every office in the building was complete idiocy.
After work that day, while sitting in his armchair by the picture window staring at the cold, flickering light outside and pondering the situation, he remembered that when the police are looking for an unidentified suspect they sometimes use an Identi-Kit or a sketch artist. That could be the answer. The next morning he impatiently went about his normal routine, but at lunchtime he didn’t go to his usual pub, he went to the park where all the street artists go who specialize in drawing portraits of the passersby. A skinny guy with long hair who was making a charcoal drawing in the shade of a tree seemed just right for the job. He approached the artist and told him what he wanted. The guy ran his hand through his long, stringy hair and said that it would be a bit complicated, but he’d give it a try. The man had to pay in advance for the portrait of the mystery woman, and spent the next half-hour trying to recall her features as accurately as possible. The artist sat there patiently changing the details that didn’t square with the man’s memory, until he ended up with a drawing of a face that only looked a little bit like the woman he was looking for. Out of curiosity, the artist asked if this was a case of a missing person, or if the subject of the drawing had died. No, it was just for sentimental reasons, the man answered with a lazy smile that he figured must have looked phony to the other man. He took the portrait and went back to work.
Have you seen this woman? He repeated the question over and over on each floor of the building he had seen her enter. The answers were always vague. Some of the people he questioned even tried to avoid speaking to him and quickly moved away. They must think I’m from the police, he thought. A few shook their heads doubtfully: They thought they might have seen a woman who looked like the one in the portrait, but that was it. Even the doormen and janitors couldn’t offer more specific details. A drawing isn’t as good as a photo, one of them said to him. He looked at the portrait for the millionth time and saw that it was true. The portrait captured the features of someone he had brought forth from his imagination. Frankly, it could have been anybody, or nobody.
But the failure of the people in that building to recognize the sketch didn’t discourage him completely. Maybe somebody else would recognize her, and so—his hope surging like the brief, weak flame of a single matchstick—by some stroke of luck he might still meet her, and he wasn’t going to miss that opportunity.
He had the portrait laminated in plastic so it wouldn’t get damaged, and started to carry it with him wherever he went, along with the folders containing his professional documents. Sometimes, in some of the places he went, he ventured to show them the portrait to see if any of his business contacts might know the woman. He would explain that it was a distant relative who had disappeared, but the family hadn’t given up hope of finding her. A photo would be much better, they invariably told him. Didn’t the family have a photo of her? Sometimes when he showed the portrait to people he had alr
eady talked to, their reactions were more confused: They looked at him as if he were touched in the head, an eccentric old fool who wandered around showing everybody a woman’s portrait and asking if they knew who she was.
But his determination never wavered. And when a successful business deal brought in some extra money, he decided to spend the money on a bunch of classified ads in all the big newspapers, reproducing the woman’s portrait along with a brief notice asking anyone who could provide information about her to contact him by phone. He used his office number because he wanted to be absolutely sure that he wouldn’t miss any calls, and he started to neglect his work, staying glued to the phone in case the next ring brought some news that would finally bring him face-to-face with the mystery woman.
And it worked. He started getting calls. But to his great disappointment, most of them came from liars and jokers. Some of them even tried to wheedle money out of him in exchange for some supposedly useful piece of information. He dismissed them out of hand. Others provided him with a street address where they said he would find the woman, and he went to the places in question, taking the laminated portrait with him. At one address, he came across a half-crazy woman who claimed that she was the woman in the portrait; she also thought that he was a theatrical agent offering her a contract. In the remaining cases, people gave their opinions about how this neighbor or that acquaintance looked something like the woman in the portrait. They treated him like someone important, someone trying to solve a mystery that was worthy of column space in the newspapers because of an urgent need to identify the person in the enigmatic portrait. Holding on to a slim hope, he followed up on all their suggestions, but nothing came of it: The women in question didn’t look anything like the one he was looking for. And so the sketch proved useless. He had wasted his money trying to find her with it.
Time flowed on, and coming to grips with this reality, he gradually resigned himself to the fact that he would never see the mystery woman again. He had tempted fate by trying to find her, given that all of his encounters with her had been the result of pure chance; although it had happened many times, in the end each one was by pure chance. He couldn’t bring himself to tear up the portrait or get rid of it, which had been his intention when the search he had undertaken led him nowhere. He simply left it in a drawer and forgot about it. He had been obsessed with that woman, but in the end he understood that there was no possibility of having any kind of relationship with her. She would remain forever what she was: a mystery.
But the unexpected happened, and how. He bought a car, which he was driving one rainy afternoon on a busy street. His brakes failed and he started to skid and before he knew it he felt the shock of crashing into a smaller car that had swerved out of its lane and come zooming towards him. His car was knocked sideways by the impact. It spun around several times before coming to a halt, leaving him bruised by the impact, with an absurd, otherworldly feeling that he couldn’t possibly be alive. Although his seat belt was still attached, he let himself be carried off by a lazy indifference to his fate. He closed his eyes, took stock of the situation, and, gradually realizing that the various injuries he felt from the multiple impacts were actually minor, he let someone help him out of the car. Then he heard the wailing sirens of several ambulances rushing to the scene of the accident. And he realized that he had been sitting there, dazed but calm, for quite a while. Supported by the person who had helped him out of his car, he saw in the leaden twilight and the slashing rain that the paramedics were carrying stretchers from the car that had crashed into his, which had been reduced to a twisted pile of scrap metal giving off the pungent odor of leaking gasoline. Then the stretchers passed by and he was thunderstruck: In spite of the semidarkness, he recognized the unmistakable face of the woman he had fruitlessly searched for after having so many chance encounters with her throughout his life. It was her. Still slightly dazed, and trembling, he approached just as the stretcher was about to be loaded into an ambulance. One of the paramedics asked if he knew the victim.
Still reeling from his devastating encounter with her, he confirmed that he knew her with a vague gesture.
“She’s dead, and her companion too,” said the paramedic, shutting the rear door of the ambulance.
A pair of policemen emerged from the crowd of spectators gathering in the rain to gawk at the accident and asked him to go with them. Overwhelmed by all the commotion, and his painful bruises, he let himself be led away, quietly, all the while thinking about how the laws of chance are part of the strange architecture that destiny designs for us.
Copyright © 2012 by Eliécer Cárdenas;
translation Copyright © 2012 by Kenneth Wishnia
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
NEVER ENOUGH
by Ralph Ellis
Crime fiction, Ralph Ellis told EQMM, hooked him when he was a college student and accidentally picked up The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett. He went on to work for newspapers across the Southeast,...
PASSPORT TO CRIME
INFORMATION
INFORMATION
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
NEVER ENOUGH
by Ralph Ellis
Crime fiction, Ralph Ellis told EQMM, hooked him when he was a college student and accidentally picked up The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett. He went on to work for newspapers across the Southeast, often reporting on crime, and now lives in Atlanta, where he is the editor for an online news organization. This is his first published work of fiction, but he has already completed a mystery novel about a police reporter and is at work on another.
Joe Kenner leaned down and examined the dead woman’s feet, being of the belief that shoes reveal a person’s character. One tan sandal had slipped off to reveal the brand name. Chanel. A thin gold bracelet encircled the narrow ankle of the same shapely foot, which looked so soft and supple Kenner had the urge to squeeze it. Brenda, his wife of thirty-seven years, had feet hard as hoofs.
The woman had been shot in the waiting room at the Honda dealership on the Millerton bypass. Kenner hoisted himself upright with a groan and walked in a semicircle around the body. He registered tan slacks and pressed white blouse, unlined olive complexion, and slender but curvy figure. Somehow, he knew, her good looks got her killed.
“Tell me what you know,” he said to Tim Brownlee, his protégé. Brownlee was the mayor’s nephew, a smooth-faced twenty-five-year-old with no discernible skills other than knowing how to get along.
“She brought her Escalade in two days ago for valve work and came to pick up the car,” Brownlee said. “But when they gave her the car she complained they didn’t wash and wax it. So they went to work and she sat down in the waiting room.”
“I don’t need to know that unless she died of boredom.”
“A man walked into the waiting room and said something about having a baby and then he shot her. He walked out and drove away. Nobody stopped him because they were freaking out. I mean, things like this just don’t happen around here.”
Kenner glanced at the body. “She doesn’t look pregnant. What’s the description of the shooter?”
“Slim, blond, about forty, wearing khaki pants and a blue polo shirt. And a baseball cap.”
“Great,” Kenner said. “He looks like all the white guys in town. Let’s go down to the country club and find some suspects.”
The manager of the dealership walked up shaking his head and said the video cameras had been malfunctioning for a few days. Kenner gave him a disapproving look and the manager handed over the woman’s work order without being asked. Her name was Kimberly Collins and she lived in Henry Plantation, a new, high-dollar subdivision. Kenner guessed she was in her mid thirties.
“What’s her husband’s name?”
“She didn’t say she was married,” the manager said. He was a tubby guy in a short-sleeved white shirt and a black tie. The nametag said Nick Glass.
“She’s wearing a big rock. How could y
ou miss it?”
“We just talked about the car.”
“So you hit on her,” Kenner said. “You asked her out, didn’t you?”
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 Page 31
