Read Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 Online
Authors: Dell Magazines
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 (26 page)
“What’s the matter with you, kid? You going to let that poor girl suffer?”
Charlie waited for Patrick to act. When he didn’t, Charlie walked over to the girl and shot her once in the temple. She stopped moving then. Patrick must’ve gone into shock, because everything became dreamlike after that. Charlie taking his gun from him, the two of them leaving the house, Charlie giving him the car keys and telling him to drive, saying that he was to drop Charlie off at the strip mall in Paterson where he had left his Escalade and then lose the car at an address in Newark. It wasn’t until Charlie had taken a flask from his jacket pocket and made Patrick drink from it that the world snapped back into focus. He started shivering then, his arms shaking as he gripped the wheel. Charlie had him take another swig of the bourbon that was in the flask.
“Kid, you must’ve figured out by now that I did more than just muscle in my younger days,” Charlie said, his voice flat, a weariness softening it. “The thing is, it don’t matter if you become a bestselling crime novelist, once you’re in you’re in, and you stay in until they nail the coffin lid shut on you.”
They sat in silence while Patrick drove. After several minutes of this Patrick muttered under his breath, calling Charlie a lousy stinking bastard.
“What was that?”
“You’re a lousy stinking bastard,” Patrick repeated, his voice louder, but sounding odd, as if it weren’t really coming from him. “You drag me to a mob hit?”
“Kid, you better watch your mouth. I like you and I’d rather not knock those pearly whites out of your mouth.” Charlie pushed a thick hand across his eyes and let out a heavy sigh. “About dragging you to this hit, I’m sorry about that, kid, but it couldn’t be helped. Somehow I lost track of the date. You’ll see when you’re my age. That stuff happens. But the hit had to go down tonight and I needed backup and didn’t have time to arrange anything else. You did a crappy job shooting that broad in the stomach like that, but here, for your troubles.”
Charlie tried to hand Patrick the roll of bills he had taken off the second man he had shot inside the house. When Patrick wouldn’t take it, Charlie shoved the money into Patrick’s jacket pocket.
“There’s over two grand there,” Charlie said. “Don’t be a schmuck. Yeah, I know, you’re upset about that broad. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else in the house except for those two mooks I took out. In a way it’s a shame she was there. That broad had a nice rack on her. But in another way, it was a damn lucky break. If she wasn’t there and things didn’t go down the way they did, I would’ve had to leave you in a landfill tonight with your brains leaking out of your skull, and I like you, kid, and I’m glad I don’t have to do that.”
They didn’t say another word to each other after that until Patrick pulled up next to Charlie’s Escalade at the strip-mall parking lot where they had earlier left it. Charlie put a hand on Patrick’s arm. He said, “Kid, be over at the house tomorrow at seven. I’ll have Eunice make a lasagna the way you like it with chopped up sausage. Afterwards I’ll introduce you to some guys. Whether you like it or not, you’re in now, but I’ll take care of you and make sure you get treated properly. And this is what your writing needed. I’m sure of it. You’ll see that I’m right.”
Charlie nodded to Patrick and left the car. After the car door closed, Patrick headed off towards Newark without looking back at the other man. For a long time all he could feel was sick to his stomach as he replayed in his mind what went down in that house. He kept seeing the faces and the gaping wounds of the people they had killed. Especially that girl’s. She was so young, and even when he squeezed his eyes closed he’d see her as she lay on the floor with her guts leaking out of her stomach. At some point before he reached Newark his thoughts had shifted away from those killings and to his novel. Almost as if a light switch had been flipped on, he saw clearly how he needed to rewrite the bank heist scene so that it would have the same type of realism that he loved so much in Charlie Valtrone’s novels. He started getting excited over the prospect of doing this. By the time he ditched the car at the address he was given, all he could think about was getting home and working on his novel. He also found himself salivating over the thought of Eunice’s lasagna with chopped sausage.
AUTHOR’S DEDICATION
: I’d like to dedicate this story to the memory of David Thompson, of Busted Flush Press and the Houston mystery bookstore Murder by the Book. It is so rare to find someone as enthusiastic about anything as David was about crime fiction, and even rarer in this industry to find someone championing the lesser knowns and underdogs as tirelessly as David did. David will be sorely missed.
Copyright © 2011 by Dave Zeltserman
Poetry
Mystery Sonnet: Agatha Christie
by Shawn Matthew Hannigan
O dear deceptive Dame Agatha Christie, Mistress of the mis-direction; Master of the clue so misty— Unequaled in mystery detection; It is a mystery cliché But one must suspect the unsuspected; Like an early snow that will not lay Upon the ground melting unmolested; From And Then There Were None To...
Mystery Sonnet: Agatha Christie
by Shawn Matthew Hannigan
O dear deceptive Dame Agatha Christie,
Mistress of the mis-direction;
Master of the clue so misty—
Unequaled in mystery detection;
It is a mystery cliché
But one must suspect the unsuspected;
Like an early snow that will not lay
Upon the ground melting unmolested;
From
And Then There Were None
To
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Like an elaborate web that’s spun
By a suspenseful spider of the heavens—
Many times I’ve been entangled
On a sticky plot that she has dangled!
Copyright © 2011 by Shawn Matthew Hannigan
Black Mask
by Tim L. Williams
After a stint working on screenplays, Tim Williams is back to writing fiction and has produced a fine new entry in a series that was nominated for the 2010 Shamus Award for Best Short Story. Charlie...
Half-Lives
by Tim L. Williams
After a stint working on screenplays, Tim Williams is back to writing fiction and has produced a fine new entry in a series that was nominated for the 2010 Shamus Award for Best Short Story. Charlie Raines is the protagonist; “Suicide Bonds” the story recognized by the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award judges. Here is Raines again, in a story that is more ambitious and disturbing than any of the previous cases. His creator lives in western Kentucky and teaches at a local college.
When I tracked Terrell Cheatham’s grandmother from her last known address to the subsidized apartment she’d moved into after her husband’s death, she didn’t do any of the things I expected. Instead of slamming the door in my face or denying that her grandson lived with her, she invited me in for a cup of coffee and then added a shot of bourbon to my mug, “just to keep the cold out of my bones.” This was a long way from the reception a private investigator usually gets when running down bail jumps in southwest Memphis, where the average annual income is a few dollars higher than it is in Calcutta and even the most law-abiding residents see a white face as an intrusion from an alien and hostile world. I was so shocked I wanted to believe her when she insisted that her grandson was a “fine young man” who wouldn’t cause me “an ounce of trouble.”
Frances Cheatham seemed like a decent woman. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, still trim and attractive but with deep worry lines around her mouth and eyes, and I could tell she loved her grandson. From what I’d read in his jacket, Terrell Cheatham didn’t seem like the kind of kid who belonged in jail. At twenty, he had a single blemish on his record. It had been two years since his arrest for breaking into the video-game store, and he’d kept clean since then. He’d completed a semester of college, earning a spot on the honor role before he dropped out to take a full-time job in the kitchen at a Tops Barbecue on Elvis Presley Boulevard. If he’d shown up for his court appearance a week and a half ago—in Memphis a trial two years after the offense is considered swift justice—Terrell would have faced no more than six months’ probation.
“Terrell’s momma left him when he was just a baby,” she said now, blowing at the steam rising off a fresh cup of coffee and then shrugging. “Our son Marcus Junior gave Terrell to us to raise, but he came to visit Terrell every weekend up until the time he was killed in a car wreck outside of Jackson, Mississippi.”
Her husband, Marcus Senior, had passed away less than a year ago. He was a good man, she said, one who’d worked for twenty-seven years as a night watchman at the West Parrish Industrial Park to put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads.
“Bone cancer. He went fast, but don’t let anyone tell you fast and easy are the same thing.” Her smile was tired, maybe a little bitter. “I bet you hear your share of sad stories, don’t you, Mr. Raines. Probably get sick of them.”
I told her to call me Charlie and said how sorry I was about her loss. And she thanked me for that even though we both knew words were little comfort.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so we sat in silence for a few minutes before Frances Cheatham forced a smile and said it looked like both of us needed a refill. While she was in the kitchen, I went to look out the front window. The last of the light was seeping from a January sky. When you say Memphis, people think blistering August heat, but there are days in January and February when the skies are mold-gray, a slanting, almost-frozen drizzle falls from dawn to midnight, and a wind whips across the Mississippi that makes you wonder if you haven’t been transported unaware from Beale Street to Boston. I was still standing at the window, dreading going back out into that cold when a tall, scrawny kid dressed in a parka, sock cap, and sneakers crossed the street and headed into the parking lot.
“You see Terrell coming?” Frances Cheatham asked, handing me my coffee.
Before I could answer, a black Tahoe fishtailed into the lot, nearly slammed a row of parked cars, and then skidded to a stop. Peering over my shoulder, Frances Cheatham said, “Good Lord, they almost run right over Terrell.”
Outside, the SUV’s passenger door was slung open, and a man, fiftyish, white, not much bigger than an oak tree, got out. Terrell tried to run.
Tried
was the operative word. He didn’t even get started before the guy in the overcoat raised a sawed-off shotgun and squeezed the trigger.
“Oh sweet Jesus!” Frances Cheatham screamed in my ear.
I pulled my .45 from beneath my jacket and ran for the door. I’d just opened it when the shotgun roared again. I knew it was too late for Terrell Cheatham, but I ran anyway, taking the stairs two at time and nearly slipping and falling halfway down. His grandmother ran behind me, calling on the name of the Lord with each step she took.
Just as we reached the lot, the Tahoe screeched away. I caught a glimpse of the driver—white, older than the shooter, thick, curly gray hair and glasses—but then the Tahoe was gone, heading northeast towards the interstate. Cursing, I stuffed my .45 back into my holster without having fired a shot.
Frances Cheatham hunkered beside her grandson, screaming his name again and again. Now that the shooting was over, a few faces had emerged from the apartments, staring at the scene, some of them whispering their prayers.
“I’ve called an ambulance,” a pretty girl about Terrell’s age shouted.
An ambulance wasn’t going to help. The first blast from the shotgun had caught him just below the kidneys; the second, fired point-blank, had taken off most of the back of his head.
“A PlayStation 3,” Frances Cheatham said when I touched her shoulder. “That’s why he robbed that store. That’s all my baby wanted. And just look at what someone done gone and did.”
Four days later, the homicide detective who’d caught Terrell Cheatham’s case finally got tired of dodging my calls and ducking down the backstairs and agreed to meet me for a late lunch. Ray Pardue was a stoop-shouldered man with thinning, sand-colored hair and a nervous grin that never quite made it to a full-blown smile. Now he pushed aside a platter of Neely’s barbecue spaghetti and gave me a pained expression.
“I feel as bad as you do for the kid’s grandmother. But Jesus Christ, Raines, where have you been living the last ten years? Kids in south Memphis get murdered every day. The Chamber of Commerce don’t advertise it in their See the River City brochures, but we both know the way it is.”
He was right, of course, but Terrell Cheatham’s murder was the only one I’d witnessed. “So you’ve got no leads.” I said.
“You were a cop. You know how it goes. You’re a day into one case when two or three more fall in your lap, so what do you do?”
“You focus on the easiest to solve.”
“It’s not that one victim’s more important than another, but a bird in the hand . . .” He paused while the waitress set fresh beers on the table. “You take a gang-related murder like Cheatham’s. Eventually someone will get pinched and want to make a deal. Until then, I got two other homicides to worry about.”
Gang related. Terrell Cheatham’s murder hadn’t rated a lot of coverage. The local news stations were too busy covering the latest scandal in the mayor’s office and the groundbreaking for the Michael Montesi North Memphis Children’s Health and Recreational Center, a multimillion-dollar complex that was being built by Vincent “Little Vinnie” Montesi, head of the Italian mob in southwest Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, in honor of his son. The news anchor talked a lot about the tragedy of nine-year-old Michael Montesi’s death from leukemia and about the generosity of his grief-stricken father. They failed to mention all the kids who’d died from the drugs Montesi and his crew brought into the city, or the ones he’d orphaned during his reign at the head of the Montesi family. When you donate a few million dollars to a local charity, people tend to overlook the things you’ve done to make that money. The death of yet another black kid in a Memphis project didn’t have the same appeal to the public imagination, but during the terse, thirty-second spot that the murder had been given, the news anchor had used the same phrase. Gang related. Unless south Memphis street gangs had started recruiting late-middle-aged white men, someone was making a serious mistake.
“The shooter and the driver were white,” I said. “I told that to the on-scene detective.”
“She noted it in her report, but we got a half-dozen other witnesses who say the perps were young black men, late teens or early twenties.” He stifled a belch with the back of his hand. “Acid reflux,” he said. “I chew Tums by the dozens, take this prescription medicine that costs a fortune, sleep with my bed propped up on bricks so that I got a crick in my neck all the time. Doesn’t do a damn bit of good.”
“I saw them. They were white.”
“And other people say they were young black men. What do you want me to tell you?” He pulled a five and a one from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “That should cover the tip.”
“A kid whose only criminal record comes from stealing a couple of video games gets his face blown off and y’all decide it’s gang related, put it in a file and forget it?”
He took a deep breath. “Look, Raines, I shouldn’t be telling you this, because it’s information that you got no right to have, but Terrell Cheatham was running with gang kids, two in particular. Demond Jones and Bop-Bop Drake. Drug dealers, pimps, suspects in a half-dozen robberies and a couple of murders. The way I figure it, either Cheatham got targeted by a rival gang or he had a falling out with his good pals Bop-Bop and Demond.”
“Your other witnesses tell you that?”
“Surveillance tape, witnesses, informants.” He stood up, took his coat from the back of the chair. “And a guy who matched Cheatham’s description is a suspect in an attempted murder.”
“You’re serious?”
“A forty-six-year-old truck driver for a company called Mid-South Transport. He was making a delivery in the neighborhood and had engine trouble. The guy was sitting behind the wheel, trying to get the ignition to fire when three black kids, we’re figuring Cheatham, Jones, and Drake, threw a Molotov cocktail at his truck.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and his eyes were hard and angry. “I guess they figured blowing up a white guy was a fun way to spend a Friday night. Maybe you ought to drive down to Southaven, take a good look at the burn scars and then ask Don Ellis what priority he thinks this Cheatham kid’s murder ought to get.”
“Don Ellis? From Southaven?” I said. “I think I know him.”
“Well, you won’t recognize him if you do.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, but it didn’t matter. Pardue had already turned on his heel and was headed for the door.
Don Ellis’s house was a small, two-bedroom ranch in a neighborhood that had probably been nice ten years ago. I sat on a beer-stained sofa in his living room, asking myself why in the hell I was here. No one had hired me; I hadn’t been a cop in over ten years, and Terrell Cheatham’s life and death were none of my business anyway. But for two days I’d been worrying it like a bad tooth. I couldn’t get Frances Cheatham’s raw, wounded voice out of my head, couldn’t stop hearing her say, “A PlayStation 3, that’s all my baby wanted,” and couldn’t get a handle on Terrell Cheatham himself. Who was he? An honor student, a hard worker, and a loving grandson or a gangbanger who’d tried to burn an innocent man alive? Finally, I’d given in, looked up Don Ellis’s address and number, made a call. Now I was waiting for him to identify Terrell Cheatham as one of his attackers so I could call the kid’s murder karma or justice and get back to the serious business of repossessing cars.
But it didn’t look as if it was going to be that easy. Don Ellis studied the photograph for a second, laid it back on the coffee table, and shook his head.
“He could have been one of them. But it was after midnight and the streetlights down there don’t ever seem to work.” He glanced at a picture of his ex-wife and his sons on the end table beside his wheelchair. “The truth is, the pain’s been so bad and I been so doped up that I’m kind of hazy about that whole night.”
I smiled and said sure, I understood. It was a lie, of course. Understand? I couldn’t even imagine. The burns were less than six weeks old—he’d only been out of the hospital for three days—and his face resembled a rubber Halloween mask that someone had snagged from a bonfire. The skin was bubbled and shiny, bright pink in most places but splotched with patches of bleached-out white just below his cheeks. The damaged facial muscles made it seem as if his lips were twisted into a permanent sneer, and he spoke with the halting slur of a stroke victim. It didn’t take a psychic to see his future: long hospital stays, multiple skin grafts, lots of pain.
“We should have kept in touch,” he said. “After we graduated, I mean. You get so busy you don’t realize you’re losing touch with all your friends.”
I said that’s just the way it was, but we were never really friends, just classmates on friendly terms. I hadn’t thought of him in years.
