EQMM, June 2007 Read online

  "Felder's a good man, too,” declared Rene Baron, smiling at Twist. “He helped me pick myself up, too. The longed-for peace turned out to be as brutal a shock as the start of war. After all those years of anguish, the permanent state of alert, the sudden warnings, and the murderous aerial combats, peacetime seemed lifeless and insipid. One never becomes used to danger, but one can become dependent on it. I was heading in the same direction as Charles when I too met Mike again. And thanks to him I've regained my grip on life."

  "You're all decent types,” said Dr. Twist with a touch of emotion in his voice. “Those of us who've lived through terrible nights during the Blitz owe you all a great debt. That's why I'm determined not to reveal your little secret."

  After a moment of silence Felder repeated, in astonishment: “Our little secret?"

  The detective looked him straight in the eye. “Yes, your secret: I mean the trick you played on that troublemaker Evans who threatened to destroy the peace and quiet of your village. You, the firebrands, who had found life again by realising that simple things—the peaceful existence of daily routine—are just as satisfying and infinitely more durable than living at a hundred miles an hour, drunk with danger."

  There was another silence, after which Felder replied, imperturbably: “Do you have any proof to support your statement?"

  "Oh, I can't prove you were all in it together, but I'm sure the trickster was one of you."

  "I must insist,” continued Felder, “have you identified him?"

  "Yes."

  "And determined the method?"

  The detective nodded his head in assent, smiling the while, then turned to the innkeeper. “Have you any pastis, Mr. Baron?"

  "Pastis?” exclaimed the owner, wide-eyed. “What for?"

  "Why, to drink, of course! It's so long since I've tasted any."

  "Well, yes, I do have a bottle, but after the whisky and the beer, I'm not sure it's advisable."

  "The whisky,” replied Twist mischievously, “was to warm me up. The beer was to quench my thirst..."

  "And the pastis?"

  "For intellectual stimulation."

  Baron brought the visitor's drink over.

  "But you forgot the ice, Mr. Baron,” said Twist in astonishment, taking the glass and the pitcher of water.

  "Of course,” replied the owner, scuttling away. “What was I thinking?"

  "In fact,” declared the detective, after having tasted the drink at the desired temperature, “I didn't really want it, but it was necessary for my demonstration, and it was that above all that tipped me off by reminding me of one of my own youthful escapades. You'll understand shortly when I explain it to you. Now, since I don't believe in flying carpets, I had to retrace my steps. The solution, in the present case, is actually both earthbound and airborne.

  "But let's start from the beginning: How would one spread weed-killer in an area so inaccessible? Answer: by throwing it as a compacted object like a ball."

  "Throwing it over a high yew hedge?” said Rene Baron. “That would seem to be rather difficult."

  "True, but there was also the gap in the hedge the size of a small door which was, if I've understood correctly, astride the path leading to the gate."

  "The gate which was locked and guarded."

  "Certainly, but at night our trickster wouldn't have been noticed, particularly if he'd taken advantage of the dogs’ barking; he might even have provoked them."

  "In short,” observed Felder, “someone could have thrown a block of dried powder twenty yards from behind the gate."

  "It was feasible, given that the guards made their rounds around the wall, so our man had intervals of time in which to act."

  "Right. But it's the actual throwing that seems too risky. A block of dried powder could be blown off course by the slightest wind, not to mention the precision necessary in the first place. At one time or another, it would have landed in the wrong place. And how would the powder have been spread evenly across the grave?"

  "With the help of the rain."

  "We have more than our share of it around here, agreed, but still it doesn't rain every night. And someone would be bound to notice the next morning."

  "You're right,” agreed Twist. “We have to find another method.” His eye fell on the bowl of ice brought over by the innkeeper. “What if our man had thrown a large block of ice made with a heavy dose of weed-killer? It would have had time to melt during the night and spread evenly in a pool over the grave."

  "There's still the question of accuracy,” observed Felder.

  A mischievous look glinted behind the detective's pince-nez.

  "But suppose the large block of ice was in the form of a ball, like, say, an orange? It would be almost the same weight as a boule as you call it.” He turned towards the photos behind the bar. “Any boule player worth his salt can deliver a series of strikes placed close together; I shouldn't have to explain that to a professional like yourself, Mr. Baron. The boule would go over the gate, roll along the path, and go through the gap in the hedge to reach the grave. With half a dozen throws of carefully prepared ice projectiles, there would be no trace left in the morning except some moisture which would be attributed to the early morning dew. No need to do it every night, just after each fresh load of earth."

  The smile seemed to be frozen on the face of the man from Marseilles. Pointing to the photograph over the bar, he asked: “Is that how you tumbled to it?"

  "Let's say it helped."

  "Then congratulations for the deduction, monsieur," said Rene Baron, bowing slightly. “But you know, nobody in the village wanted a huge hotel blocking their view. And all I did was help destiny along a bit. Before Evans appeared, neither I nor anyone else had ever acted that way."

  "I don't pretend to have solved the whole mystery, gentlemen,” said Twist solemnly.

  "So I think it's just as well if we forget the whole thing,” said Felder, draining his beer.

  "I agree,” said the detective. “I know how to hold my tongue, particularly since I had to use a similar scheme myself once. That's why it wasn't too difficult to work out what happened here. There was a neighbour of mine once who used to chase away the local cats with a pitchfork. I was angry and told him that if he didn't cease his barbaric habits, lightning would strike his house and the lawn which he tended so lovingly. He had brought in an especially rich, red-coloured soil from another county just for the lawn."

  Dr. Twist plunged his hand into the ice bucket and brought out several blocks. “So, Mr. Baron, like you, I put a strong dose of weed-killer in the ice tray and when night came I sprinkled dozens of ice fragments on the torturer's lawn. A few days later, it looked as if it had caught measles!"

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  HEAT OF THE MOMENT by James Lincoln Warren

  James Lincoln Warren's historicals regularly appear in our sister publication, AHMM. For his EQMM debut, he penned his first contemporary crime story. “The last thing the fiction world needs is more P.I.s based in L.A.,” he says, “but I live in L.A. and it seemed that not to take on the daunting task of continuing the tradition would be an act of cowardice.” Here's his splendid addition to the P.I. canon!

  "I tell you what I think,” Tarkauskas said, leaning back in his chair. It was an expensive chair, like everything else in his office. The view of the Hollywood Hills from the picture window behind him was expensive. His golden tan was expensive. His perfectly coiffed blond hair and fit physique were expensive. He stopped to light a cigar. It, too, was ex-pensive: a Ramon Allones from Havana. It was also illegal, which I guess must have made it all the more savory.

  "Do they allow smoking in here, Mr. Tarkauskas? Not that I mind, of course."

  Tarkauskas took a deep drag. The circle of ash at the end of his corona was uneven, burning quicker along one side than the other.

  He blew the smoke toward my face.

  "Who's going to tell me different?"

  I shrugged. “You were saying..."


  "That's right. I was saying. I was saying that I think you're nothing but a slick spick in Armani. Fifty years ago you would've been a pachuco in a zoot suit with a switchblade on the end of a long chain and thought it was classy, but now you read GQ and pack a Sig Sauer in a suede shoulder rig and think you really got class."

  "I'm unarmed. And Ferrari isn't a Spanish name, it's Italian. Like the car."

  "So you're a Guinea greaseball instead of a beaner greaseball. Either way, you're a cheap thug dressed up like a pimp on Easter."

  It's times like these I wish Malone were here instead of me.

  "Right,” I said, making a point of not raising my voice. “And you're a bohunk neo-Nazi who should be wearing a white sheet with a pointed hood to fit his head. What of it? And let me tell you, moron, you don't smoke a fine cigar like that as if you were some dumb dopehead bogarting a joint."

  He leaned forward and pressed a button on his desk. “I didn't get rich by being a moron."

  "No, you got rich by being a thief."

  Two minutes later I was being shown the sidewalk by two oxen with shaved heads managing to walk upright in cheap suits. Summer can be brutal in Los Angeles.

  That interview went well.

  * * * *

  At least I didn't have far to go. The interview had been in West Hollywood at a highrise on Sunset, and our office is on Pico Boulevard in Beverly Hills. As luck would have it, my partner, Custer Malone—yes, his real name, so let's just say that his parents weren't very racially sensitive, a flaw I'm glad to say he didn't inherit, but please, no “Old Cuss” jokes—anyway, Malone was waiting for me there and I had to fill him in on my spectacular performance. He sat at his desk, wearing Levis and a guayabera (evidence he had been doing field work someplace where a suit and tie would have made him conspicuous), his feet wrapped in his shiny oxblood Lucchese boots. I never tire of telling him Lucchese is an Italian name.

  "Shucks, Red—” he calls me “Red” not because of my coloring, which is dark, but because my first name is Carmine—"he played you like a Cajun on a fiddle."

  "What do you mean? He's a jerk."

  "'Course he's a jerk,” Malone said sagely in his Texas drawl. “That's the point. Didn't they ever teach you to play poker back at the old Fifth?"

  He meant my old precinct. “In Chinatown, it's Pai Gow. In Little Italy, they play Scopone."

  "Well, no wonder. I'm talkin’ poker, son.” Malone is only about eight years older than I am. When he gets paternalistic like this, I think of him as the Senator, an image that isn't hurt by his snow-white hair. “Now, I'm not talking about that no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em so popular on TV these days. A real poker player varies his game, and when he hooks a fish, he keeps coming back for more."

  "So what are you talking about?"

  "Your real professional poker players don't usually play in casinos, Red. They play privately and keep below the radar. They seek out folks with more money than sense, and then they got a guaranteed income for life. So what do you think happens when another good poker player shows up at a game that's already somebody's goose?"

  "Goose?"

  "As in the laying golden eggs variety."

  "Why don't you tell me?"

  Malone nodded in that laconic way of his. “The player already there does everything in his power to drive the other guy out. It's your basic alpha-male bull hockey: ‘These milk duds belong to me.’ He looks for a weakness, tries to piss off the newcomer and get him off his game. Racial slurs usually work pretty well. No matter how well the newcomer does, he's not likely to come back."

  "Damn.” I suddenly felt like a fool. “Tarkauskas saw me coming."

  "Yep. But don't worry. I put Zavala on his tail. Something'll turn up."

  Jessica Zavala's one of our ops. She's a heart-faced knockdown-gorgeous Latina, and nobody's fool. If anybody could finesse a smartass bigoted gangster, it was her.

  "You knew something like this was going to happen.” I tried to keep any hint of admiration out of my voice. Sometimes I think Malone has the second sight.

  "Bound to. He's a player.” He tapped a file on the desk marked “Darryl Tarkauskas” in a Sharpie scrawl. “Son of a gun sure makes for an interesting read."

  * * * *

  Tarkauskas came to the attention of our company, California Operatives, Inc. (more colloquially, “Cal Ops"), when a chubby twenty-four-year-old computer geek was missed by his mother.

  His dad, Barry Pincus, was a fifty-two-year-old attorney who specialized in family law. “Family law” sounds very wholesome, but believe me, it isn't. It's like being a divorce lawyer, only your clients are more vicious and less civilized. We had done a few background checks and some other routine investigative work for Pincus, and when his son Buddy hadn't been heard from in over a week, Barry's wife Helene called Cus Malone, mainly I guess because he was the only private detective she'd ever heard of. Barry wasn't too thrilled that she called us in, but he knew better than to cross Helene.

  Malone and I decided to send Stanley Stowicz, one of our more experienced ops, to interview Helene Pincus, because he has a very reassuring way about him and always manages to have a good rapport with nice middle-aged Jewish ladies. This time, it was a mistake. She sent him packing. By the time Stowicz got back to Cal Ops, he was fuming.

  "She called me a clerk,” he said. “Twenty-six years a private detective, never a complaint, and you know before I came here, I worked for Continental, and Pinkerton also?—and yet she has the chutzpah to call me a clerk. Me! Says she'll only deal with the boss."

  "Guess she wants the best,” said Malone drily, quickly adding: “I'm kidding, Stowicz.” He pulled out his PDA, checked it, and frowned. “I'm booked solid the rest of the afternoon—appearance downtown. How about it, Red? Feel like visiting the old yenta?"

  "I'll go,” I said. “Don't take it personally, Stan. We all know what an asset to the firm you are."

  "You're welcome to it,” he replied. “Yenta is right. Give me somebody polite, instead, like a hopped-up biker on crank, maybe."

  But Mrs. Pincus didn't want to meet me at her Fairfax District condo. When I called, she asked me to meet her in the Palisades at her son's home. A lot of the streets in Pacific Palisades are as tangled as a can of bait as they switch back on themselves up the hills north of the Pacific Coast Highway. It took me longer than I expected to find the house. It was one of those flat-roofed modern things painted a startling white with glass bricks and steel rails everywhere.

  There was a spectacular two-story ocean view from the living room. A loft bigger than my entire apartment overlooked the room itself. In spite of its size, the house had the appearance of a bachelor's place, like a set from a James Bond movie—all steel, chrome, and glass. Spare and clean.

  Helene Pincus was an expensively dressed woman in her forties, her hard blue eyes unsoftened by liberally applied makeup. She had probably been extremely handsome in her twenties.

  Her first words to me were, “You look like a Vegas lounge singer. Where's the cowboy?"

  "Mr. Malone had to be in court and couldn't make it. I'm Carmine Ferrari. Stan said you wanted the boss, and Mr. Malone and I are partners."

  "What's your background?"

  "Six years as Cus Malone's partner here in L.A., eight years with the NYPD before that. Bachelor's and master's from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York."

  She nodded curtly. “Come upstairs. I want to show you something."

  I followed her up a series of carpeted steel slats coming out of the wall to the loft. She led me into what was obviously the master bedroom suite. It was very nice, with a 42-inch LCD HDTV mounted on the wall, a domed skylight big enough for Mount Palomar, and sliding doors leading to a teak deck. The king-size bed was made up. The walk-in closet contained jeans, black dickies, aloha and hip polo shirts, one cheap blue Men's Wearhouse suit, and an assortment of expensive sneakers and Doc Martens. From the clothes, I judged Buddy to be about five eight, weighing somewhere aro
und two hundred and twenty pounds. There were framed science-fiction-film 1-sheets and colorful travel posters of the Grand Canyon on the walls. The whole setup was fussily neat.

  "I hate this room,” she said, crossing her arms. “It has all the charm of an operating theater. So, Mr. Ferrari, you're a detective. What do you make of it?"

  "He likes Star Trek."

  "Buddy is twenty-four. His idea of a nutritious meal is a pizza with extra cheese and a six-pack of light beer."

  "You're saying that it's too clean."

  She nodded. “He was nineteen when he graduated from Stanford, summa cum laude. After he was accepted to do his master's at Caltech, he moved back in with us, before he dropped out and got this place. Don't think I'm just being a Jewish mother when I say he's a genius. Brilliant, math whiz, and all that, but a pig, much as it pains me to admit it. He wouldn't pick his briefs up off the floor where he dropped them unless he ran out of underwear."

  "He probably has a cleaning lady."

  She frowned. “As I said, he's twenty-four—a young twenty-four. When he was a teenager, he was the kind of kid who put a ‘Keep Out’ sign on his door. He doesn't have a girlfriend, at least not that I know about. Somebody cleaned up here, all right, but I don't think it was any cleaning lady."

  "Then who?"

  She turned on her heel and I followed her back out to the loft. She sat down in a Danish leather-and-chrome settee in front of a glass coffee table and I sat opposite her. She pulled out a case from her purse, deftly removed a cigarette, and lit up.

  "He's been gone over a week,” she said, sucking on her cigarette. “The message on his business phone says he's away on business.” She gave a sharp little bark of a laugh, totally without mirth. “What Buddy knows about business would fit in a thimble. When he says he's taking a business trip, it usually means he's schlepping to Las Vegas or Hawaii with one of his friends to get away from it all. But he's never been gone this long before. Not a whole week."