AHMM, March 2010 Read online

  Eddie's place was a low-rent crackerbox. Brown battens nailed over white stucco, faux-Bavarian style, a postage stamp of a lawn surrounded by a white picket fence, two-car garage. The whole place needed a coat of paint.

  Eddie's wife didn't, though. Marge Martinson answered the door in her robe, but her hair was neatly combed, and her makeup was lathered on, not quite so neatly. She was still a bottle blonde, attractive enough if you liked the type. She definitely looked better than Eddie.

  From the car, Murph couldn't hear what Morales was saying. Marge's face was a mask, stiff with makeup and suspicion. He expected Morales to go inside, maybe take a look around, but Marge stepped out on the porch instead. Closing the door firmly behind her, she stood with her back to it. Frowning. Then she folded her arms across her bosom.

  To hell with this! Opening the door, Murphy piled out of the prowl car, stalking angrily up to the picket fence.

  "Tell your boyfriend to get out here."

  Both women turned to him, equally shocked.

  "Murphy, what—?” Morales began.

  "Come on out, chump!” Murph roared. “Or we're coming in!” In the stunned silence, he heard a crash from somewhere inside.

  "He's going out the back!” Murph yelled, vaulting the fence, sprinting down the narrow gap between the row houses.

  "Noooo!” Marge shrieked, tackling Morales off the porch, wrestling her down with her greater weight. Murph lost sight of them as he raced alongside the house, rounding the corner just as a burly figure came charging out the back door.

  A big guy in cowboy denims, with shoulder-length hair and wild eyes. He clutched a nine-inch bowie knife in his fist. For a split second, the two men eyed each other in utter surprise. Weighing the odds.

  The yard was fenced, with only one gate, and Murph was blocking it. But the cowboy had a blade. No contest. No hesitation either. He came charging straight at Murph, swinging the knife in front of him like a scythe.

  Backing away from the blade, Murph grabbed a garbage can lid as a shield. Metal rang on metal as the cowboy tried to slash past the lid to get at Murph.

  Desperately, Murph held his ground, blocking the arbor gate like a Spartan at Thermopylae. With the same outcome. He was losing ground as some of the wild slashes struck home, slicing across his forearms, laying them open.

  With a maddened bellow, the cowboy grabbed the lid and tore it out of Murph's grasp, leaving him defenseless against the knife, with both arms streaming blood.

  And still, Murph didn't back off. Stood his ground in the gateway instead, facing the psycho and his ten-inch blade, his fists raised like a boxer. Waiting. And smiling.

  Baffled by Murph's grin, the cowboy hesitated. Then flinched, his eyes widening as Morales jammed the barrel of her automatic between his shoulder blades, freezing him in his tracks.

  "Drop the knife, stud,” she said quietly, “then get down on the ground. I won't tell you twice."

  * * * *

  "That was bar none the dumbest stunt I've ever seen,” Morales said, dropping into a seat across the table from Murph. They were in the coffee nook at Beaubien Station. “Going up against a bowie knife, unarmed? What the hell were you thinking?"

  "That you'd show up. Which you did. Thanks for saving my neck."

  "But not your arms. Are you going to be okay?"

  "It looks worse than it is,” Murph said, holding up his bandaged wrists. “Your EMT buddy said I won't need stitches. Maybe the bandages will punch up my act."

  "You're lucky that psycho didn't punch your ticket. I told you to wait in the damn car."

  "Guess I missed the memo that said I take orders from you, Morales—"

  "Rose,” she said.

  "What?"

  "My name is Rose. Since you can't seem to remember my rank, Murphy, at least try to get my name right."

  "No problem. Rose is a much prettier name than Sergeant. It suits you. But you were losing your crowd. Rose."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I've been reading audiences since I was fifteen. Eddie's wife was wired way too tight. Holding herself in. She wasn't grieving, she was scared stiff that you were there. When she folded her arms, it was like holding up a giant stop sign. She didn't want you inside. It wasn't a stretch to figure out who she was hiding."

  "His name is Zack Timmons. He's got a rap sheet as long as your arm for armed robbery, assault, and now murder. He gave up a full statement, hoping to cut a deal. But there's one twist."

  "What twist?"

  "Timmons never heard of the Haight tapes. Eddie told his wife he'd discovered an incredible stash that would make them rich as kings. He was hoping to change her mind about the divorce. But he never told her what he'd found."

  "What did she think it was?"

  "The same thing I did. Dope. And that's what she told her idiot boyfriend. Timmons thought he was hijacking a briefcase full of coke."

  "Sweet Jesus.” Murph shook his head slowly.

  "Imagine his disappointment when he popped the case open and found a few reels of moldy audio tape. He was so ticked he tossed them off an overpass into River Rouge. Sorry."

  "Me too. You said a few reels. What about the rest?"

  "Timmons obviously didn't know about them, or he wouldn't have tossed the ones he had."

  "Does Eddie's wife know?"

  "I haven't talked to her yet,” Rose said, watching his face. “Since you nearly got killed trying to help me out, I thought you might like to sit in."

  * * * *

  The interview room was barren as a tenement basement. Tiled walls and a cement floor, a drab, institutional green. An observation mirror set in one wall, a video camera in the opposite corner. A metal table in the middle of the room with four chairs, bolted to the floor.

  Marge Martinson was sitting at the table, her bleached blonde hair a shambles. She was red eyed from crying. There'd been no tears for Eddie, but she'd found a few for herself. She glanced up hopefully as Morales and Murph sat down across from her.

  "How much trouble am I in?” she asked the detective.

  "Your boyfriend's in a lot more."

  "My boyfriend,” Marge spat. “That moron. I told Zack it was probably bogus."

  "What was?"

  "Eddie's big discovery. Jesus, he was always bragging about the stuff he found in abandoned houses, dope stashes, meth labs, hot guns. But all he really got excited about was finding old record albums. Our basement is full of Kurve albums and a million other not-shit bands nobody ever heard of. They stink up the whole damned house."

  "Only records?” Murph said carefully. “How about tapes?"

  "You mean ... like cassettes?"

  "Actually I was thinking more of the old-fashioned kind. Reel-to-reel?"

  Her blank look told him more than he wanted to know.

  "He never brought home any junk like that. He knew better. I told him no more moldy albums in our basement, to leave that crap where he found it. So that's what he did. He set up secret stashes in a dozen different vacant houses."

  "Stashes?” Rose asked.

  "Hidey holes. He was a meter reader, knew every loose floorboard, loose brick, and false ceiling in every tumbledown tenement in this rathole town."

  "Do you know where any of them were?"

  "Are you kidding? There's a million empty dumps in Detroit. Why are you asking me this crap?"

  "It's possible Eddie actually found something valuable in one of those houses,” Rose said carefully.

  "Yeah, right. That's what my genius boyfriend thought. Eddie was raving about hitting the mother lode, Zack thought he'd turned up a freakin’ meth lab or something. Well, whatever he found, I'm entitled to my share. We're still married, so it's half mine!"

  "You're absolutely right,” Rose said, rising, with a tight smile. “I'll do my best to see you get everything you've got coming to you, Mrs. Martinson. I promise.” She jerked her head at Murph, who followed her out of the room. In the tiled hallway, the door closed behind them wi
th a final, icy click.

  "Poor Eddie,” Murph sighed, shaking his head. “He loved that woman to death. Literally."

  "The heart wants what it wants,” Rose quipped. “What about the Haight tapes?"

  "That depends. How many empty houses do you think there are in Detroit?"

  "I doubt that anybody could give you more than a ballpark figure. With the auto plants going belly up, line workers have been walking away from their mortgages by the thousands. The banks are so buried in worthless paperwork they quit foreclosing on them years ago. Twenty thousand empty houses? Thirty? Maybe double that. Who knows?"

  "Thirty thousand?” Murph whistled. “And Eddie could have stashed the tapes anywhere. My god. They're lost all over again, aren't they?"

  "I'm afraid so. Unless someone else stumbles across them the way Eddie did."

  "It'll have to be soon. The tapes are fading. The snippet Eddie left on my machine was distorted from oxidation. Another year or two and the Haight tapes will be gone forever. But if they were going to surface, even for a little while, then I'm glad it was a fan who found them. Eddie probably got more pure joy from that music than the guys who made it."

  "Are you going to search for the tapes?"

  "I wouldn't know where to start, and I've got my own music to make,” Murph said, glancing at his watch. “I should have been on the road six hours ago. Are we done here?"

  "You're free to go, Mr. Murphy. Thanks for your help."

  "No charge, Sarge. Can I offer you some friendly advice?"

  "As long as it's free."

  "Don't mention the tapes in your report. They really had nothing to do with Eddie's death, and if the story gets out, you'll have whacked-out treasure hunters crawling through every vacant house in this city."

  "The tapes are already in the report. The nurse's statement about Eddie's last words."

  "But she thought he said h-a-t-e tapes. Why not leave it that way?"

  "That might be for the best,” she conceded. “Fair enough, hate tapes it is. Anything else?"

  "One more favor. I still have your card. I'd like to call you sometime."

  "What for?"

  "Just to talk."

  "I don't think so. My mother warned me about guitar players."

  "She sounds like a wise woman. But since I'm a bass player ... Did your mom mention anything about bass players?"

  "Not specifically,” Rose admitted, shaking her head.

  "See? There you go. Look, I'll be out on the road, a thousand miles from nowhere. How much trouble can you get into just talking?"

  "With you? A whole lot, I think."

  "I certainly hope so,” he said, flashing a tired grin. “Tell you what, Rose, I'll call, we can talk or you can hang up. Either way, it's been an interesting night. Maybe we can do it again sometime."

  "Be careful what you wish for,” she said.

  Copyright © 2010 Doug Allyn

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: BURNING TWILIGHT by Kenneth Wishnia

  When rubles fall from heaven, there is no sack.

  When there is a sack, rubles don't fall.

  —Russian proverb

  * * * *

  We will meet again under the stars, the old woman had said. But by the time Kassy reached the village, it was too late. The old woman was gone.

  Now she sat alone, hunched by the campfire, wrapped in a long black cloak, trying to keep warm until her supper was ready.

  The wind blew the flames of the campfire low and ruffled the gamecock's feathers. The proud creature flapped its wings and pecked at the length of twine tethering its leg to a tree.

  Although it kept her fed, Kassy worried that if the mountain folk kept paying her with live animals, she wouldn't be able to afford to buy another book as long as she lived.

  But some sense of obligation to the spirit of her one-time guide and mentor had driven her to spend the past three days teaching the old woman's apprentice some of the secrets of their trade. The girl's name was Paulina, and thankfully she was a quick learner, because Kassy had been banished from the imperial city and expressly prohibited from entering any village or town of more than five hundred souls, and from practicing her herbal remedies in any one place for more than three days at a time, a sentence that doomed her to being a perpetual stranger in her own land.

  Her practice had been destroyed. The bottles smashed. The books and papers burned. She had to start all over with nothing but the clothes on her back and a crude bundle of supplies that her friends had rescued from the flames.

  And of course, no man wants a woman who's been publicly gagged and pilloried—especially if she's unrepentant about it and doesn't care who knows it.

  By the morning of the third day, some of the villagers had taken to calling her Kassy the Wise, but others weren't so fond of her wisdom. They came for her with that icy look in their eyes that said her time was up, and that nobody needed the services of a traveling female apothecary.

  "Leave our village,” they said, as the menfolk stood in the roadway squinting into the afternoon sun and made sure that Kassy ran the gauntlet of their stares and left the village by sundown.

  Kassy watched the fading orange glow in the western sky. The last rays of the setting sun brought out the green in her eyes and highlighted the blonde streaks in her long brown hair.

  Once upon a time these mountains had been her home, and she knew them well. So she was not surprised when the sound of early springtime revels reached her from the nearby village, where they would soon be dancing around painted maypoles and making hasty love matches.

  Her only companions on this cold evening were the arrogant gamecock and a battered copy of Paracelsus that had been readable when she had gotten it at the flea market a few months back in exchange for curing the bookseller's child of a high fever. But now the cover was gone, along with the last three sewn signatures, which meant that she was missing at least forty-eight pages. Still, she drew inspiration from the alchemist's most ambitious theories, even if they ended in mid sentence, especially his unrealized dream of being able to refine plants and minerals to the point that their “active principles” could be applied more effectively, possibly by boiling their essences down to a thick syrup that would cure all manner of ailments and illnesses.

  All things were possible, at least in our thoughts. Our bodies, the frail mortal shells that briefly house our eternal souls, were not in the least bit godlike. But our minds, illuminated by the divine secret of the knowledge of good and evil, were close to godlike. It said so in the Book of Genesis.

  The dusky path of exile had taken Kassy north and east, toward the Catholic lands. She was a Hussite, like the majority of Bohemians, but she had also learned something from the Jews of Prague. A book by one of their rabbis, now lost to the ashes, had proposed that each day that a person devotes to righteous acts translates into one more luminescent stitch in the celestial garment worn by their soul in the World-to-Come. Under such a system, Kassy figured that she might manage a loincloth at best if she didn't increase her righteous days, and quickly too. It simply wouldn't do to be uncovered for all eternity in the Garden of Paradise.

  The gamecock scratched around in the dirt, preening and searching for its mate.

  By now the sky was darkening, and Kassy could just make out the angry red star in the Hyades that marked the heavenly bull's unblinking eye, and the bright cluster of stars a few degrees to its west.

  Most people in the city could barely make out the six brightest stars in the Pleiades. Those with the sharpest eyes saw seven. But on a clear, moonless night like this, she could usually see at least nine, with the distinct impression of still more lying beyond them, a glorious cluster of stars drifting in a cloudy haze.

  She drew her cloak close around her. It wasn't dark enough to see the stars clearly yet, but the curtain of night fell quickly in these mountains, which lay at the crossroads between the two mighty kingdoms of the Teutons and the Poles.

  A gh
ostly sparkle caught the corner of her eye, and she turned reflexively. A pair of fiery marbles glowed in the dark just beyond the circle of firelight. The cock squawked and pecked at the disembodied spheres, but Kassy saw right away that it was only a cat straying from the village, her feline eyes catching the light in the way cats’ eyes sometimes did that caused them to flash like two tiny mirrors floating in the darkness.

  In spite of this knowledge, her heart had still jumped for an instant, and she understood how some of the backward mountain folk could easily be terrorized by the sight. What could possibly cause such an eerie effect? Everyone knew that cats could see well in the dark, but how did their eyes glow like that? What was the mechanism? She shivered, and lost the next thought before it even had a chance to form. She would have to look into the matter some other time, after she had finally settled somewhere and could begin attracting regular customers and restocking her laboratory.

  The cock squawked and kicked up a minor dust storm, metamorphosing into a swirl of red and black feathers, but Kassy placed a burlap sack over its head, and it quieted down. Then she dipped a wooden stirrer into the pot simmering over the fire, fished out a tasty morsel of chicken, blew on it, and held it out with her long, delicate fingers. The cat's whiskers twitched, her muzzle a shiny black mask ringed with a mane of bright orange fur. She was a genuine calico, a real mixture of everything. She padded toward Kassy's outstretched fingers, keeping low and wary. Kassy kept still as the cat crept closer. Its whiskers twitched, then twitched again, then it lunged, teeth flashing, and the bit of meat vanished from Kassy's fingers.

  Kassy could hear the cat purring.

  "Looks like I've made a new friend,” she said to the pine needles and the stars above.

  Suddenly the cat's ears pricked up, and she sprang off into the underbrush.

  Leaves rustled as someone came running through the forest from the direction of the village. Kassy steeled herself for the worst, then a sturdy young woman pushed through the branches and stumbled into the clearing. It was Paulina, who had been drafted to be the midwife's new assistant. She stopped, breathing hard, her round face flushed and glistening, reflecting the glow from the fire.