Kwik Krimes (20 page)

Having myself celebrated Halloween on Lincoln Road several times, I could easily picture the scene. Tom looked so miserable that I felt the need to help him a bit. “So, what happened then?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know,” he repeated. “That’s what I came to you to find out.”

“Why do you need my help with that?” I didn’t understand his dilemma. He was with three other people. “Why not just ask your friends?”

“They can’t help. We split up at around midnight. I never saw them again, and Scott said he had no idea where I ended up.” Tom got up and started pacing around my office. “I really need your help. You have to look into what happened to me after I went off on my own. What I did.”

“I’m not sure I understand why you are so worried. I mean, you don’t seem to have anything wrong with you—you’re not hurt. Is there something you’re not telling me?” I wasn’t buying the story, but then I was used to my clients lying to me—at least in the initial interview.

Tom paced some more. “You remember I told you I was wearing a pirate costume?” I nodded. “Well, when I woke up the next morning in Scott’s apartment, I was wearing a Little Bo Peep costume—two ratty things that looked like sheep tails in the right pocket.”

“Little Bo Peep?” I wanted to make sure I heard right. “Like the nursery rhyme?” I’d had some strange cases, but Tom was beating them all.

“Yes. A man-size costume; it fit perfectly. I looked like some kind of drag queen.” Tom shuddered. “I have no idea where the pirate costume went—or the knife.”

I could see why he was worried. “Okay. I’ll start the investigation first thing tomorrow. Before you leave, I need you to write down everything you can recall about Halloween night. Everything. Don’t leave anything out.”

That night back home, I had just begun looking through the dozens of takeout menus crammed in one of the drawers in the kitchen when Oliver walked in.

“You look exhausted. Rough day?” I greeted him with a kiss.

Oliver opened the door of the refrigerator and took out a beer. As a senior detective in the homicide division in Miami, Oliver was responsible for a very heavy workload, and with the cutbacks, he was sometimes overwhelmed. Still, that night he looked especially beat up.

He took a long pull of the beer. “I swear, Marisol, you know I come across a lot of weird murders, but even for Miami, the one I worked today was memorable.”

“Yeah? What was it?”

“You’re not going to believe this.” He finished his beer and got another. It must have been some case. “I have two dead girls in sheep costumes. Throats slit, tails missing.”

The room went around for a minute. “Chinese okay tonight?”

Cuban-born, Miami Beach–based Carolina Garcia-Aguilera is the author of ten books as well as a contributor to many anthologies, but she is perhaps best known for her Lupe Solano mystery series. Her books have been translated into twelve languages. Garcia-Aguilera, who has been a private investigator for more than twenty-five years, has been the recipient of many awards.

Gregory Gibson

H
er name was Darlene. The way I got to know her was that I dated Pam, her niece, in high school. We were going hot and heavy there for a while, but finally Pam dumped me. I guess I wasn’t exciting enough. Then she got knocked up by a kid with a Camaro whose father owned a plumbing company, which I thought was pretty amusing. Then they moved to Georgia.

By this time I’d gotten my job at the post office so I could keep track of her by the Christmas cards she sent to Darlene, who was on my route downtown. After five or six years, Pam must’ve broken up with the plumber because the cards had a different return address and she’d changed her name back to the original. It was too late for me then, anyway. I had a wife and two kids. I looked Pam up on Facebook once. She must’ve weighted two thirty.

Darlene, on the other hand, kept her figure. And she kept her smile. She wasn’t particularly good-looking—“sweet” would be the most flattering description—but she had a body, and a kind of energy. What would you call it? Not exactly sexy. More like when you were around her, you felt good. A smile from her could make your day.

She worked in the kitchen at the Head Start program, and the kids loved her. And she volunteered at Animal Aid, and they loved
her there, too. Saturday nights, when my wife and I went out, I’d see her at one bar or another—lots of people around her, but she always had time for a chat with me. Everyone loved Darlene.

Her only problem was she had bad taste in men. As the years went by and she got knocked around by one loser after another, black-and-blue became a permanent part of her look. And it didn’t come from Helena Rubenstein.

Finally the long train of bad men was too much even for her, and she settled down with one bad man. His name was Bill, and he always referred to her as “the Old Gal,” so, for some reason, we all started calling her that, even though he was a rat and we shouldn’t have listened to anything he said. He beat her up on a regular basis, but since she never complained or pressed charges, even when neighbors called the cops, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

At first we thought it was because she was too nice. She’d taken care of her niece and all those kids at Head Start, and helped so many other people around town just by her good nature and kindly spirit. We assumed she just didn’t have the backbone to stand up to a creep like Bill. But after so many years of the same routine, we realized, or at least I suspected, that she dug it. She stayed with Bill because the way he treated her turned her on.

That was the theory I’d invented, anyway, as I delivered her mail to Liberty Street. Bill moved in, sponging off the money she made at Head Start. She’d keep “bumping into doors” and “falling down.” Sweet lady, but a fucked-up masochist underneath.

Then after she retired from Head Start, she moved to senior housing and left Bill out on the street.

It was pretty amazing. By that time she’d been getting Social Security checks for three years at least, so depending on when she started collecting, she would’ve been in her late sixties, anyway.
And she’d finally broken loose. Poked up into the sunlight like weeds through the asphalt.

Then old Bill started coming around again, to senior housing, just to give her a weekly beating. It was a very discouraging development.

I’ve got three hundred thirty people on my route, and as the years went by, I’d had something to do with nearly every one of them. Once I saved Mrs. Alves, who’d fallen in her living room, even though her family thought I should’ve let her die there. I witnessed the fatal heart attack of Cummings, the ward councilor. I knew where Sammy the Rat slept it off and could follow Sammy’s slime trail at eight a.m. down to the Dugout for the first of his trembling drinks with the night-shift fish packers who were just getting off work. I never delivered a baby, but I watched Dicky Lufkin get born in the backseat of a car that never even started for the hospital. After a while connections reached across the gaps and the whole route became like a spiderweb. When a gnat hit the sticky, the spider knew, and when the spider moved, the gnats knew.

I thought I’d seen everything the route had to offer. But the day I found Bill beat all.

He was in the parking lot behind senior housing, next to the Old Gal’s Chevy, lying in a puddle of frozen blood with his head caved in.

I got the cops there right away, but of course there was nothing they could do except remove the stiff and clean the concrete.

The cops in our town aren’t particularly nice people—maybe that’s just the way cops are—but I’ll say this for them. They handled the investigation of Bill’s death just right.

They interviewed everyone, took notes, and gathered evidence, and, after a week or so, declared that a chunk of ice had slid off the roof of senior housing and found its way to Bill’s skull.
A tragic accident. The fact that the Old Gal’s car was parked in the middle of the lot never made it into their report.

The Old Gal knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew we knew, and nobody said anything. Social workers, newspaper guys, the people at Animal Aid and the bars, her neighbors in senior housing, even the cops. Nobody said a thing.

Ever.

Gregory Gibson is an antiquarian book dealer living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is the author of three nonfiction books. His first crime novel,
The Old Turk’s Load,
was published in April 2013.

Ed Gorman

—Damn it, Daryl, they’re just gonna send ya to back to prison for this.

—My name ain’t Daryl. Now hand over all the money in that cash register or I’ll be usin’ this gun.

—You think just because you’re wearin’ a stupid gorilla mask I don’t know who you are?

—You get with it, lady, I’m warnin’ ya.

—An’ I can hear your voice plain and clear.

—I want the money NOW!

—What if I say I won’t do it?

—Then I blast ya.

—Please quit waving that stupid gun around, will ya, Daryl? Damn thing might go off accidentally and hurt somebody.

—I’m countin to five and then—

—Tell ya what I’ll do. You turn around and walk out of here and I’ll forget this ever happened.

—Four—three—two—

—You dumb sonofabitch. With your record, this’ll get ya seven, eight years.

—ONE!

—There, ya happy now? Register’s open!

—Put it all in this bag.

—Yessir, Mr. Robbery Man.

—And no smart talk.

—Nosir, Mr. Robbery Man. There ya go. Close to six hundred bucks.

—You don’t move till I’m clear of the door. And stop callin’ me Mr. Robbery Man.

—Sure thing, Mr. Robbery Man.

—You—!

—Billy, ya need t’hurry. Daryl actually went through with it. He’s probably on his way back to our trailer park. Take three minutes to get there. He’s on the end of our lane, so it’ll be easy to hide.

—I kinda feel bad sendin’ him back ta prison.

—I give him every chance I could tryin’ to talk him out of it.

—Stupid son of a bitch.

—That’s exactly what I told him. And we need the money bad as he does. Worse. He ain’t married or nothing, and we got three little ones.

—I worked at that factory twenty-two years, and then they come in here and shipped all them jobs overseas.

—I tole yah, Billy. You got to let it go. You wake up in the middle of the night and sit on the edge of the bed, and I know you’re stewin’ about that job.

—Now even my unemployment’s run out.

—Please, Billy. Just get goin’.

—You sure this’ll work out right?

—Sure. He robbed me, you robbed him, and we keep the money. He sure ain’t gonna tell nobody what happened. He never shoulda made that dumb-ass joke to you about maybe robbin’ a convenience store. This town’s so small there’s only one of them, and that’s where I work.

—Yeah. He sure is a dumb ass.

—Just go next door and ask Jemma to watch our kids for half an hour or so. That’s all you’ll need. Then go get him.

—I sure love yah, hon. Thanks for workin’ them long hours when I know ya’d rather be home with the kids.

—I love you too, Billy. Now hurry.