AHMM, April 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Neither Mrs. Diehl nor the doctor moved.

  "You see,” the woman said.

  "Yes, I see.” Wendt's hand dipped into his black bag. “Take her arm, Mrs. Diehl."

  The big woman came around the wheelchair, and Tamar retreated. She bumped the worktable, scrambled around it. Diehl approached from the left, Wendt from the right. Tamar searched the table for a weapon. A palette knife would be nice. She lifted a small bottle of brush cleaner and pitched it at Diehl's head. The woman evaded the missile. Wendt rushed her, stabbing a syringe at Tamar's thigh. He wasn't a very big man. She grabbed his wrist, swung him toward Diehl, hoping the syringe would find another victim, but he was practiced at administering shots to unruly patients. The needle held aloft, Wendt recovered his balance. Fleetingly, Tamar wondered if Ted Baldwin had received one of those shots. And Jean Ann, who had known some of the truth...

  They came at her, and Tamar hurled the next bottle. They ducked, and it flew harmlessly past.

  There was a crash, and the room burst into flames. The bottle of flammable solvent had struck the electric heater.

  Tamar turned and ran. She grabbed the handles of Jasper Kohl's chair and pushed him ahead of her, through the door, down the wood ramp. After fifty feet, she looked back. The outbuilding was burning. Paul Wendt was sprawled in the yard as Mrs. Diehl slapped his smoldering back. He struggled onto his elbows. “Get her!"

  Tamar pushed the chair off the ramp. The ground was frozen, but it was still hard going across twigs and matted leaves. She headed for the road. Her car was only a quarter mile down the blacktop. If she could keep pushing, and running, and if Brunhilde didn't reach her with a syringe—

  She hadn't even made the road when a car appeared, moving slowly as the driver checked mailboxes. The driver saw a madwoman pushing an old man in a wheelchair, the stomping Valkyrie twenty feet behind her, and the flaming building behind both of them.

  Cal Hoover leapt out of his unmarked car. “What the hell are you doing?"

  * * * *

  "I got your message after lunch,” Cal said. They were in Cal's office. “The name Ted Baldwin clicked. A forest ranger found a body this morning in a wrecked car near the Massachusetts border."

  "They'd better check him for barbiturates,” Tamar said. “Or whatever Wendt had in his syringe for me."

  "I don't get it. Who would hire an artist and then kill him over a few pictures?"

  "These pictures were worth more than two million, as long as everyone thought they were by Jasper.” Hands shaking, she sipped police station coffee. Two hours had passed since he had wrestled Mrs. Diehl to the ground and handcuffed her. Diehl and Wendt were in custody. Before demanding a lawyer, the caregiver had said Edgar Bean had set the fraud in motion by introducing them to Ted Baldwin. Tamar knew she was going to have to find a new gallery.

  She was worried about Jasper Kohl, who was at the hospital for observation. His conversation had been lucid at times the other night. If the drugs Wendt had been using were cleared out of his system, to what extent might Jasper recover? She knew the answer might not be the one she wanted. But there was one thing she could straighten out right now.

  "Are you going to release Bruce Arnold?” she demanded.

  Cal settled back, looking too comfortable. “Why would I do that?"

  "Because he's innocent! It's obvious what happened to Jean Ann. She knew about Ted Baldwin doing the paintings. If they killed Baldwin, they had to kill her. Diehl could break anyone's neck."

  His head shook. “Bruce Arnold is staying in jail. He tried to poison his wife, but it was taking too long. She phoned him from the pond. He took a half-hour hike through the woods. When he reached the pond, he crushed her neck with a rock and threw her into the water."

  "How do you know all that?"

  "Jean Ann was having an affair. Arnold couldn't stand it. This afternoon we showed him his wife's cell phone records, and he confessed."

  Tamar pushed away the coffee. She glanced at the wall clock. It was early for hospital visiting hours, but if she insisted, they might let her see Jasper. If he asked about his paintings, she didn't know how she would answer.

  Copyright (c) 2007 John C. Boland

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  DISHES by STRINGFELLOW FORBES

  When you are a child, the watershed times are stronger. You have spent all your few years learning how things are supposed to be and when those certainties, so dearly settled, all change, the adjustment is hard. We don't forget those times, they become markers in the family, events that other things came before or after, always mentioned. Such a time happened to us when I was ten and Luke was eight.

  Work had been plentiful where we lived, but then layoffs hit, and my father was suddenly home all the time. He couldn't find anything else that paid enough, and he was not the kind of man who could be without work to do. There was a lot of crying and shouting in our house for a while, and then he heard that they were hiring down South, and before we children knew what was happening, we had moved, and everything was different.

  That was back in the fifties, and I can see plainly now that what we moved into, going from up North to down South, was culture shock. We were still in our own country, we thought, and such a term would not have occurred to us, but that is what it was. Life on that street of small houses out on the edge of town was not at all what we were used to, and we had brought with us our own ideas of how people behaved.

  It wasn't that we were churchy, just that so much drinking and yelling and public drama alarmed us. In summer, when all the windows were open, the whole street heard when a kid got yelled at or a wife suddenly screeched and ran from a threat. There were outdoor noises that we thought nothing of, like men working on their pickups and playing radios, cutting the grass with loud machines, or the littler kids dancing around in the sprinklers, or in the evenings after the worst of the heat was gone, boys bouncing basketballs dapp dapp on the cement aprons to the garages. That was not what upset my mother, that was all normal stuff to us.

  Normal to them was the couple who ran after each other with a loaded paintbrush or a frying pan or a saw—sometimes she pursued, sometimes he did. Normal to them was the daughter who finally came home in the afternoon and was thrown out of the yard by her grandmother; she then turned on the old woman, calling her names and breaking her arm by twisting and her ribs by kicking, and went back in the house, leaving the fat old lady lying on the grass in her apron. My mother called the police about these things. Usually our dad was at work, piling up overtime, leaving Mother to do it. The cruise car would come with revolving lights, and the neighbors would stand on their steps as the cops got out slowly, looking around at all the watchers, hefting their guns up on their hips and strolling over to give a warning or to threaten jail; finally, the two lethal persons who so hated each other would be put back into their house together, or the old woman, sitting up by now and screeching for her son to beat that girl, would collapse so the ambulance men could do their job and take her away. The last thing that happened always on those police evenings was that all the neighbors would turn to eye us before they went back inside to the television. Who were we to call the police?

  This went on for the whole first summer, all of us watching each other. There were other kids in the neighborhood, but they never came into our yard, and we took a stiff-necked attitude in defense. The whole place was kind of loose to us, all the yards running together, no fences, and not even a sidewalk, just grassy ditches on both sides for water to run in and little rocking bridges of boards across. The others our age ran everywhere, but we were never included.

  September came and Mother was glad to get us off to school. I had to be the big sister and walk Luke both ways. This was the worst time of our childhood, for both of us. We weren't yet very adept at the accent, and we couldn't understand the teachers, that was one thing. And the neighbor children told all the others about us and—well, it was miserable. It hit Luke so hard that he would even ask to pl
ay with me, but I was always reading. I wasn't any better off, but I was stubborn and pretended not to care.

  Our mother thought that now she would begin to fit in, that she'd join the PTA and help them make cookies and go along on trips to be sure we all behaved. Our mother thought that maybe now she would have some friends.

  There were some high school boys three doors down from us. Luke and I were afraid of them, but we never said. We had a Frisbee we liked to skim back and forth in an empty field nearby, but one day a big boy ran in and caught it. He was the one we called Pewie Hughie, a huge heavy kid who played football. He held the bright green disk up high and laughed at Luke jumping to grab it. I had sense enough not to try taking it back, but I didn't run, I stood there and defied him. I was thinking that I could call the police, if I had to, like Mother did. And then he just stuck his cigarette on it all over, burning holes and watching me. He had made Luke cry; he was satisfied with that. Me, though, he eyed with a backward glance as he left. He would have to work harder on me.

  So Dad was never home, Mother was just surviving being a housewife in a strange town, trying new recipes to give her something to do, and Luke and I were turned out into the streets twice a day with a high schooler laying for us. Mother had called the police so many times that all the other mothers laughed at her. We knew that right away from the kids at school. Most of those mothers worked anyway, so there was really no company around for her to visit with, and she began to change.

  At first, after the weather cooled down, she had been a demon for housework. She thought those PTA women would maybe meet in our living room. She even unpacked Grandmother's china and put the little thin cups and piles of sharp-edged plates that sat up from one another on the open shelves near the kitchen. We had never used those plates with the green and pink flowers. They were real china from France, she said; we would set the table with them at Thanksgiving and have a nice meal, even if it would just be us four and not the usual crowd of family we had left behind. Meanwhile, we could see those dainty dishes there on the shelf, and they would remind us of where we came from. They reminded me of Grandmother, whose entire little apartment smelled of her Coty perfume and was neat and fresh from one end to the other, a place I loved to be. Order, when you are a child, is reassuring.

  After a few weeks, Mother realized that there was practically no PTA at our school. Nobody ever came into our house, and it started to look like a place that wasn't cared for. We didn't even have to pick up our underwear off the floor, though she one time hit Luke because he hadn't made his bed, then she spent the rest of the day crying. It was a while before we understood that she wasn't drinking pure ginger ale out on the screened porch off the kitchen, where she spent most of her time, even when it rained. We became uneasy. Luke got into a fight at school and was sent home. I made up a word and wrote it on the blackboard every day and got sent to the principal because the teachers didn't know what it meant. We had never been in trouble before, and it scared us and thrilled us and cut us loose from ourselves, which scared us worse.

  The street was still the same. Kids still got yelled at and sometimes the murderous couple got policed, or Mrs. Green's mother-in-law ran away past our house, complaining about Mrs. Green, with Mr. Green patiently plodding behind her and saying “Come back.” But we were actually becoming more like the others.

  We had the Thanksgiving dinner on the pretty china, and my father didn't have to go in to the plant, and because there was candlelight we thought it was an okay time, and Mother didn't even cry. Then it was the Christmas season, and Mother went uptown and got herself a job. She'd never had a job, but we were in a money-making time, and she saw her chance.

  Supper was always late then, and even if Dad managed to get home for it, he'd have to go back with a sandwich in his hand, slamming the door and wondering why he had let Mother go to work, though I don't think she ever really asked him. We kids didn't care about supper. We ate a lot of cheese and bagels or thought up new combinations for peanut butter. The housekeeping got worse.

  One evening Mother came home early and found Pewie Hughie standing in her kitchen. Luke and I hadn't heard him because we were watching the Mouseketeers on TV, and he had just walked right in by the front door behind our backs. He had Dad's guitar under his arm, Grandad-that-died's walking stick in one hand, and a pillowcase—an actual pillowcase off our parents’ bed—drooping with some jewelry and watches and a radio in it. Mother began to scream, and he pulled a gun, holding it right in front of his chest and trying to aim it, though it was so heavy it sagged. We came running, of course. You should have seen him grin.

  Mother backed away. “You. You put all that stuff down, and you just get out of my house. I'm calling the po-lice.” (We'd learned to say it that way since we came down South.)

  "Cain't,” he said, and the grin got bigger. “I cut the wahr,” (wire in English).

  Hughie felt real big, waving that gun barrel side to side.

  Mother had backed up toward the phone, which was on the bookcase where we kept the good china, out where she could see it every day and think that maybe she should get the rest of the house up to the level of that pretty old Haviland. Luke and I were in the doorway behind her.

  She moved so fast the crash took us by surprise. Flip! One of those plates hit Hughie in the forehead and bounced off and broke against the edge of the counter behind him. It made a lot of noise. Pewie Hughie had his hands full of our possessions and the gun and couldn't tend to the blood that ran into his eyes. The gun went off and made a hole in the floor, but then he dropped it and put his hand up to wipe his face and fend off the hail of plates. And Pewie Hughie began to cry like a fat baby.

  Mother was throwing plates one after the other, and then Luke and I got into it, skimming those flowered dishes like Frisbees. We put Hughie to beating on the closed back door, but he couldn't manage the latch. Still we threw china, cups now, and the little bowls.

  "No, sir!” Mother said. “You just stay right there, and I think pretty soon you're gonna find yourself in jail!"

  Sure enough, the neighbors were delighted to call the cops on us, hearing such a racket of breaking dishes and gunfire from our kitchen, and sure enough, Pewie Hughie was soon bleeding all over the back seat of a squad car. He had forgotten the gun, and Mother threw it at the car as it pulled away, and that made the police stop and give her a lecture about guns, and then they took Hughie in. (We never told how Hughie cried, but he got put off the football team anyway because of the gun.)

  All this cleared the air for our family. Mother and Luke and I got rid of a lot of pent-up emotion, anger we hadn't known was there. Dad came home and found himself wading through a mess of china fragments and laughed so hard he fell into the middle of them and cut his knees and his hands and his behind. Mother came down from the impossible standard of those china dishes (and they, every one, got thrown and broken). She made friends at the store where she worked and didn't need to clean house to go to lunch with them at the drugstore.

  We weren't naturally a noisy family, but now we sometimes let rip, if we felt like it. Mr. Green's mother said she'd rather help out at our house than sit and watch that trashy TV all day. She knew a hundred casseroles she could make in our kitchen. Our father got a raise and didn't have to take so much overtime and was home more. And Luke and I finally became part of our grades at school and of the gang of kids we lived among.

  Around the street Mother was known after that as Old Breakup. She never let on, but such a nickname had a certain strength to it, and Luke and I took status from it.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Stringfellow Forbes

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  DRAWN FROM DEATH by LLOYD BIGGLE, JR.

  Ron Chironna

  * * * *

  The three police officers exchanged puzzled glances and shifted their feet bewilderedly. A victim of a crime was supposed to make the police welcome, but this victim greeted them as though they themselves were the burglars, returned for a sec
ond go.

  Max Beerbohm faced them irritably. As the man of the house, his mother had summoned him to deal with this unexpected complication. Max did not like complications. Also, he still wore evening dress, having not long since returned from the theatre. It seemed somehow inappropriate to confront a police sergeant and two constables wearing the tails of formal evening dress, but the unpleasant events of the evening had begun so soon after his return home that he had not had time to change.

  He said sarcastically, “In Montagu Square, which is only two squares away, a sensational murder occurred several days ago, and according to the newspapers, there is no solution in sight. A disgusting potpourri of lesser crimes are inflicted on the citizens of London every day, and yet the Metropolitan Police are still able to spare a sergeant and two constables to investigate a burglary that didn't happen. Why three of you?"

  Sergeant Ashburn said apologetically, “It's the address, sir."

  "Surely Upper Berkeley Street is an eminently respectable address!"

  "Exactly, sir. We ‘ad a report of a burglary here, and at one of these ‘ouses that usually means plate, jewellery—a considerable poke. If we gets onto it quick, like, we ‘as a chance of recovering what was stolen and also coming down on the thief."

  "You keep saying you had a report of a burglary at this address. To the best of my knowledge, there was no burglary and no report. Where did this ‘report’ come from?"

  "One of the maids, sir, screamed to Constable Price, who chanced to be passing by, that you'd ‘ad a burglary, and ‘e summoned help."

  Max turned his gaze from one expectant police countenance to another.

  "Two points,” he said. “First, address or not, the members of this household belong to a very special class, the impoverished rich. We are regarded with contempt by those who are richer as well as by those who are poorer, but we enjoy certain advantages, one of them being that our homes don't get burgled. A burglar expecting to acquire sudden wealth here is a silly optimist. As for the second—follow me."