EQMM, September-October 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "You were part of a tontine, I understand?"

  "Yes . . . my idea . . . security for old age. It was Tom who proposed lending the money to Collum, my idea was to create a tontine so that the money would be repaid in full. We are at an age where the hereafter beckons, Sergeant . . . sorry, Yellich, did you say?"

  "Yes, sir, Yellich."

  "Didn't think it would beckon two of us so soon, and so close together. And not naturally."

  "It means that you and Alf Noble will receive the money that should have been repaid to Tom Street and Phil Arrowsmith."

  "Yes. Yes, it does at the moment, but it seems that our Mr. Collum has a way of avoiding his debts. It means Alf Noble and I are not safe."

  "Why?"

  "Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Collum bumping off his creditors. Borrows a hundred thousand at twenty-five percent from each of us and then murders us, one by one, as a means of avoiding his debt. No wonder he was keen to sign the agreement. He had no intention of even trying to pay if off."

  "That's what you believe?"

  "Well, it seems obvious, like I said."

  "We'll certainly be speaking to Mr. Collum, but could you tell me where you were yesterday morning?"

  "Why? Am I under suspicion?"

  "Yes."

  Moss's face hardened. A look of anger flashed across his eyes. Yellich saw a dangerous man. “I am?"

  "Yes. You are because everybody is under suspicion."

  Moss visibly relaxed. “That's all right."

  "So where were you yesterday, forenoon?"

  "At home."

  "Not here, a working day?"

  "At home. I came here in the afternoon. I work at home sometimes."

  "Anybody with you? Anybody who can alibi you?"

  "I was home alone. I live alone, divorced, you see."

  "Ah . . . so no one can substantiate your alibi?"

  "No,” Moss shrugged. “No one can."

  * * * *

  Hennessey drove to Selby, to Longmarsh Business Park. Henry Collum, he found, was the antithesis of what he had been expecting. He was young, but not the clean-shaven, well-manicured, smartly dressed young businessman he anticipated meeting, but a jovial, long-haired, bearded, bespectacled, jeans-and- T-shirt-wearing man who smiled at Hennessey and said, “Wotcha, man."

  "Mr. Collum?” Hennessey was nonplussed.

  "The one and only. How can I help the police?"

  He sat in his office, which looked out onto the shop floor of his electronics factory. Below were scores of white-coated workers operating machines. On the wall of his office were photographs of Collum holding two infants; of Collum with his arm round a young woman; of the same woman holding the same two infants. Hennessey felt that he was not in the presence of a personality who was capable of murder.

  "We are investigating the deaths, the murders, of two of your creditors."

  "Phil Arrowsmith and Tom Street? Yes, I read of their murders. Am I a suspect?"

  "Yes."

  "Weak motive, don't you think? You see, they've wrapped me up in something called a tontine. It means that whatever happens, I still have to pay half a million quid back, even if only one of them is alive. I could murder all four, but the chances of getting away with it are slim to zero. I'm still young, I don't want to spend the rest of my life in jail, not when I have a beautiful young family and I'm also confident of paying back the loan.” He glanced out of the window. “Busy, as you see. Micro-engineering. Computer chips so small that an ant can pick them up in its jaws, yet containing thousands of bits of information. It's the future, Mr. Hennessey, and I've got a share of it, with the massive capital injection that the loan meant, I have expanded and am able to meet orders. I'll be able to pay back the loan. If somebody is murdering my creditors . . . well, it may be connected to the tontine, it may be incidental. Either way, it still leaves me with a half-million-pound debt."

  "Where were you yesterday morning?"

  "Here. From eight-thirty onwards."

  "Any witnesses?"

  Collum smiled and pointed to the factory floor. “About forty-five."

  * * * *

  "Of the ones I have met in the course of this inquiry, I'd say he was the least pleasant.” Yellich swilled his coffee round in his mug. “What was Collum like?"

  "Eccentric.” Hennessey turned and looked out of his office window as a group of excited-looking Japanese tourists walked the ancient walls of the city at Micklegate Bar, where the head of Harry Hotspur had once been impaled and left for three years as a warning to any other who would betray the king.

  "Very eccentric. Not a murderer, me thinks."

  "Moss has a Mercedes Benz."

  Hennessey raised his eyebrows. “Why didn't you tell me that earlier?"

  "Wrong colour. His is yellow."

  "Oh . . . there's no mistaking yellow for black, even on a dark night, so fair enough."

  A pause.

  Yellich leaned back in his chair. “You know, Skipper, I don't think it is fair enough. It's just occurred to me..."

  "What has?"

  "You don't see yellow Mercs."

  A second pause.

  "You don't, do you, Yellich?” He reached for the yellow pages and turned to Car Dealerships. He found a number for a Mercedes Benz agent. He phoned the number, identified himself. After a few minutes of conversation, he thanked the person to whom he had been speaking and said, “Only the SLK model is offered in yellow. That's a sporty two-seater. The witness to the Arrowsmith hit-and-run was adamant that it was a saloon which ran him down. Possibly with a spoiler on the boot."

  "Moss's car has a spoiler."

  "It was Moss's idea to form the tontine. With the others dead, the loan would be repaid to him."

  "Loan a hundred thousand, get half a million in return. That's what I call interest."

  "That's what I call motivation.” Hennessey picked up the phone again and redialled the Mercedes Benz dealership. “Sorry to bother you again, police here. Tell me, where would a wealthy businessman go in the York area to have his Mercedes Benz resprayed?” Hennessey paused and Yellich watched as he wrote a number on his notepad. “Thanks again,” he said and replaced the phone.

  "Only one place in the Famous and Fayre Citie of Yorke that can do resprays up to Mercedes Benz specification,” he said, as he dialled the number that had been given to him. Yellich, listening, caught the gist of the ensuing conversation but Hennessey edified him anyway. “Mr. Moss had his black Mercedes painted yellow two weeks ago; he also had dents to his front mud guard and bonnet, which he explained away as vandalism, attended to."

  "He's got some explaining to do."

  "Hasn't he just."

  The phone on Hennessey's desk rang. Hennessey picked it up and listened, then said, “Thanks, we'll be there directly,” and to Yellich he said, “That's the front desk, Mrs. Outram . . . “

  "Tom Street's home help?"

  "The very same. She's at the front desk. She's remembered something else from yesterday."

  * * * *

  "He nearly knocked me off my bike, driving like that. Didn't actually see him leave Mr. Street's driveway, otherwise I would have said so, but he wasdriving away from the direction of his house, going too fast, big yellow car, bald head. Seen him before at Mr. Street's, one of his friends, I thought."

  * * * *

  Later, Moss arrested, cautioned, charged, and full of “no comment,” Hennessey returned home, fed and exercised Oscar, and then packed an overnight bag. He drove to the prosperous village of Skelton, with its tenth-century church, to a half-timbered house. He walked up the drive and rang the doorbell. It was opened by a smiling, slender woman who invited him into her house.

  "Quiet.” Hennessey said.

  "The children are exhausted,” said Louise D'Acre. “They went to bed and went out like lights. We can go straight up."

  Copyright © 2010 Peter Turnbull

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  Reviews: BLOG BYTES by Bill
Crider

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  * * * *

  At some point in the writing of this column today, I'll have written about more than one hundred blogs and webpages since I took over for Ed Gorman. I hope you've taken a look at each one of them, and I hope you'll be sure to check on the ones I'm writing about this time.

  One of the most entertaining continuing features in blogdom these days is the discussion of planners and pantsers going on at Timothy Hallinan's Blog Cabin (www.timothyhallinan.com/blog). A planner, as if you didn't know, is a writer who outlines a book before writing it. Some writers have long outlines, going so far as to outline not only the book itself but the individual chapters. The pantsers are a different breed. They're seat-of-the-pants types who might have a vague idea of where a book is going when they begin it. Or not. Sometimes all they have is an opening line or a main character. If you'd like to see who's doing what, Hallinan has had posts from a diverse group, including Jeremy Duns, Gar Anthony Haywood, Helen Simonson, Jamie Freveletti, and lots of others. Even me. The writing process is always interesting, and if you've ever wondered about it, you shouldn't miss these posts.

  Acme Authors Link (acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com) is a group blog that offers “writing, networking, and everyday tips from the Masters.” It's conducted by these masters: Debra St. John, June Sproat, Terri Stone, Morgan Mandel, DL Larson, Rob Walker, Margot Justes, Austin S. Camacho, and Tony Burton. In recent posts, Rob Walker speculates about “the relationship between psychology and writing the novel, and being a novelist.” DL Larson writes about creating point of view in a story, and Morgan Mandel presents a writing exercise on the five senses in fiction. There's lots more where that comes from, and it's always fun.

  If you're more interested in reading than writing, look up Joe Barone's Blog (joebaronesblog.blogspot.com). Barone is a mystery writer, but his blog is about his reading. He says that “all the books I review are books I've either bought or borrowed from a library.” Since he's not looking for new books all the time, some of his reviews are of older novels. Barone reads all kinds of mysteries, and he writes about them in a way that makes me want to read them, too. Some writers he's reviewed in the last few weeks include M. C. Beaton, Robert B. Parker, and Walter Mosley. On Sundays, he doesn't review a book but gives a quote of the week. Take a look.

  Copyright © 2010 Bill Crider

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  Fiction: MR. ALIBI by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Last year Kristine Kathryn Rusch's EQMM story “The Secret Lives of Cats” received an Anthony Award nomination for Best Short Story. The author is also a past EQMM Readers Award winner. But mystery isn't the first literary field in which she showed her talents. A former editor of TheMagazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, she is a celebrated science fiction writer and this past spring she won the readers award of one of our sister publications, Asimov's Science Fiction, for her novella “Broken Windchimes."

  Will you be my alibi?” asked the man at the end of the bar.

  He wasn't an attractive man and this wasn't the kind of seedy bar where you'd expect to find someone trolling for an alibi. In the eighties, we would've called this a fern bar, by which we meant a yuppie bar, something all woodsy brown and forest green with fake Tiffany lamps over each booth and actual windows which let in actual sunlight.

  The guy was exactly the kind of guy you expected to find in a fern bar, a no-neck former high-school jock with too much fat around the middle and a face that had settled in on itself. He looked like the guy central casting would've put into the fern bar as wallpaper, and honestly, until he spoke to me, the wallpaper thing worked. I had seen him, but only as the stock character at the end of the bar.

  He moved a seat closer to me, leaned across the bar—which was polished so heavily that its surface could act as a mirror—and said, “Miss?” in that tone which meant Excuse me, but I asked you a question and I really really really need an answer.

  Still, I glanced over my shoulder to see which miss he was referring to. I'm not the kind of woman people would call miss, not even when I was young. Back then, I had one of those faces that I had to “grow into,” and then, everyone promised me, I'd be considered “handsome."

  Like a girl wants to be told that she's going to be handsome, which is a boy word and code for Jesus, she's ugly now, but maybe she'll gain a little character as time goes on.

  Time went on, and I gained character, but not enough to keep my face from resembling decades-old shoe leather. Don't suppose I helped it any by living in Southern California and going without sunscreen for my entire life.

  "Yes, miss, I meant you,” the guy said, interrupting my train of thought. He smiled to take the edge off his words, because the edge had taken him from Excuse me, but I asked a question to Hey, stupid, I'm talkin’ to you.

  "What do you want?” I asked, and instantly regretted it. I had a rule: Don't engage in bars. Generally, the rule only applied near last call, when the guys got so drunk they'd sleep with anything that walked.

  The anything-that-walked category included me. It was damn near the only sexual category that included me. I was the woman all your hard-drinking friends referred to as the roadkill they had to chew their arm off to escape from on the morning after.

  "I was wondering if you would be my alibi,” the guy said. He probably thought it was a cute pickup line, and he probably thought he'd try it on the ugly broad first. That way, if she poured her drink all over him, he wouldn't be out anything and he was free to try another lame-ass question with a slightly prettier woman.

  "What the hell do you need an alibi for?” I asked, expecting him to answer Tonight, with a bit of a twinkle in those too-sharp brown eyes.

  Instead, he said, “Yesterday afternoon,” and moved one seat closer.

  * * * *

  Yesterday afternoon, I was on a dirty side street in a dilapidated neighborhood, trying to take down a tweaker who'd accidentally kidnapped the wrong little girl. That little girl was in my car, crouched against the floor mats, covered in a blanket despite the heat.

  I told her she could sit on the seat and wait for me, but she was too scared to sit, and frankly I didn't blame her. I was a little scared myself.

  The tweaker was one of those scrawny, pus-faced bastards with rotating pinwheels for eyes. His brain had become as mushy as five-week-old bananas, and his hands shook as he trained a gun on me.

  The gun looked rusted. It looked old. But there was no way I was going to let him pull the trigger. I had no idea if the damn thing was loaded. I also had no idea if the damn thing would explode if he rattled it too much.

  He was shouting at me to Back off, bitch, back off, and I was backing. I wanted to get the kid the hell out of there, but I also didn't want to attract this dude's zombie tweaker buddies.

  They had all cooked up this scheme together, the scheme to kidnap the mayor's daughter, after they had sold all the scrap metal they could find, including (but not limited to) the manhole covers from nearby streets, statues from one of the nearby parks, and copper wire from every air-conditioning unit in the county.

  Only they hadn't kidnapped the mayor's daughter, they'd kidnapped the mayor's daughter's best friend, a little girl with the unlikely name of Karma Maggerty. Once I got her home to the idiots who named her, I was going to tell them to start calling her Kammie before I used my own gun on someone's kneecap.

  But that was all in my future—if I had one.

  And you always had to doubt that you had a future when a pie-eyed tweaker shook a gun at you from less than fifty feet.

  "I'm just going to leave,” I said, backing up. I had already called 911, begging them to come and arrest these assholes. Of course, the minute I gave the address, the 911 dispatch hung up on me.

  She didn't really hang up, of course. She just went to another line—"Oops,” she said in that fake-competent voice they require from 911 operators, “looks like we have another emergency."

  And they were going to have an
other emergency when I got through with them. If I got out of here. If the mayor's daughter's best friend survived.

  I had to hang up and call again, becoming that other emergency myself, and this time, I told them that I knew where Karma Maggerty was and they'd better get their asses over here before she got killed.

  This time, the dispatch stayed on the line with me. She was nattering at me from my back pocket, where I had stashed the phone after the tweaker demanded that I put the damn thing down.

  I wasn't about to get rid of my only lifeline, so I pretended to set it down as I tucked it into my back pocket. The tweaker pretended to be satisfied, or maybe he didn't notice.

  If he'd been by himself, I would trust that he didn't notice the thing, but from inside the house, three other pus-faced tweakers with pinwheels for eyes watched me like I was Triple-X pay-per-view. I didn't know if any of them had shotguns or semiautomatic weapons or even a simple old-fashioned pistol of the rusted variety now facing me.

  "You can't leave!” the original pus-faced tweaker shouted at me.

  "And why not?” I asked in my most reasonable voice (prompting all kinds of alarmed noises from the phone in my pocket).

  "Why not?” the pus-faced tweaker asked. “Why not?"

  Any reasonable person would then have added the very adult line, Because I said you couldn't, that's why. But he didn't. He actually tried to think about it, with that banana-mush brain of his.

  As I knew he would.

  I backed away, one step at a time.

  "I said you can't leave!” he screamed at me.

  I stopped backing.

  "Why not?” I asked. Note I did not tell him I'd already asked that question. I'd dealt with enough tweakers to know that their memory was as porous as their skin.

  "Why not?” he asked. “Why not?"

  Only this time, he turned toward the house, as if he were going to consult with the other pus-faced tweakers, and I chose that moment to get the hell out of there.

  I sprinted to the car, pulled open the driver's door, said, “You there?” to the poorly named kid in the backseat, and as she managed a shaky yes, I turned the keys in the ignition, thanked Almighty God that the engine roared to life, and floored the damn accelerator, pulling out like Starsky and Hutch in the only stupid scene anyone ever aired of that television show anymore.