Блейк Крауч - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, No. 5. Whole No. 813, May 2009

When Don realized the cherry sours weren’t Mary’s — he wasn’t sure how he knew, but he knew — he stood up too quickly, the taste of whiskey rising in his throat and leaving him feeling sick. He noticed Mary’s bedroom door was closed. Who would she close the door to?

“What’s going on, Mary?” Don’s sense of out-of-placeness grew. “Is somebody here?”

“What do you mean?” she answered from the kitchen. “Of course not, Don.” She steadied herself against the kitchen counter.

“Good Lord, Mary, if you’re lying to me,” he said and went looking, determined, nearly delirious with the sureness of finding something he hadn’t expected.

From the moment Don found his only son in Mary Hooks’ closet, all felt like a memory just out of reach, fuzzy and quick, a confusion he couldn’t quite sort out, as he watched himself from the outside: the quiet and determined rage that settled over his body — this was God’s punishment, he understood; a cool sweat and a subtle ache in his bones that left him feeling later as if he had come down with a cruel summer cold — drained; to the car, dragging the boy by his arm, leaving a bruise like a three-fingered plum; and home where he sat Donny down in the kitchen, holding him in the chair with one remarkably strong hand as he tied his son’s arms and legs; the hunt for scissors — in the gift-wrapping drawer, Dale answered, confused and sleepy from a nap — and the way Donny’s fine hair fell to the ground in great crescent-moon glides, piles of it scattered across Dale’s spotless linoleum; the screams of a mother; the silent but sure wrath of a father; and the dark red blood of a boy that spilled to the floor as scissors met flesh.

What Dobs Found Where the Cul-de-sac Met the Railroad Tracks

What Dobs found where the cul-de-sac met the railroad tracks was so twisted and bruised it no longer looked human, he told anyone who asked. Cut clean in two by a Southern, I suspect. Dobs found Donny Palmer as the rest of Lake Claire listened on the radio to the Atlanta Braves play baseball. And that included most of the boys in Lake Claire. They were supposed to be out searching for Donny; but it would have to wait for the game. There was no sense of urgency even after he had been missing a full day. Many figured Donny-Mop, the nickname he had been given for his over-the-ears and curled-at-the-neck hair, not to forget the bangs all the way beyond his eyebrows and nearly so he couldn’t see at all, had left town altogether, already an unbalanced teen driven by the whims of a changing nation. Always a quiet boy, most figured he had simply wandered off to Atlanta or worse. When Dobs found Donny, it felt like a run of bad luck through a good place. And a week later the people of Lake Claire found themselves a villain in Carmello the Barber.

Inside Carmello’s Barbershop the forty-six-year-old barber bent over the head of a frightened teen. Carmello’s giant hairy hand held him still in the chair, a leather strop fitted across his legs, while the other hand gripped electric shears that brought down the girlishly long locks like a thresher across a field of hay. The teenager wailed like a little boy, his father watching with a mixture of satisfaction and alarm as the giant Italian yelled, Boys is boys is boys is boys ... as if to convince himself as well as others. From across the street citizens of Lake Claire saw a large immigrant barber standing anxiously in the doorway watching and waiting for adolescent heads to cut, business slow and passions aroused.

It Was No Surprise to Anyone

No one thought much about the haircut — Donny’s hair was freshly shorn when they found him — including Sheriff Gerdts, who didn’t even note the detail in his report. Until two days later when King Roper pointed out that Donny had been seen in front of Carmello’s refusing to have his hair cut just a day before he disappeared. And it came as no surprise to anyone in Lake Claire, including, once again, Sheriff Gerdts, that Carmello DeNino had been griping up a storm about the boys of Lake Claire who no longer came for his chair, his scissors, and his razor. Carmello DeNino, a foreigner, and who knew what went through the mind of an Italian with the face of Stalin and a head like a pumpkin.

“Don’t you find that surprising?” King Roper asked Don Palmer.

But Don hardly grunted a response, his mind, to King Roper and others, at least, lost in grief, his only son so brutally taken. Only Mary Hooks wondered at the coincidence of Donny Palmer’s death to the events at her house. And she didn’t do that long, keeping her thoughts to herself, because Mary took to the road with a young rock-’n’-roll band from Macon, leaving Don Palmer and Lake Claire, Georgia, for good.

Four days after Donny Palmer’s body was found, word spread that Sheriff Gerdts had gone to Carmello DeNino with questions. And then it took less than twelve hours before a posse of fathers, mothers, and those who had simply quickened at the flurry of righteousness blowing through Lake Claire gathered at King and Jane Roper’s house to make sure no evil went unfound or unpunished. These were their children. From the Ropers’ house it took less than two minutes in a steady rain to ride in cars and trucks to the DeNino home, where Caterina DeNino listened to her husband’s booming protests in Italian about the ridiculous questions Sheriff Gerdts had asked him in regard to the poor boy who had fallen under the wheels of a Southern locomotive.

“ No accident , he says. Murder , he calls it. These boys no longer come for my chair. So what if I complain nobody wants a haircut like boys should have? Why does this Mr. Sheriff Gerdts ask me? Carmello DeNino is a barber. I cut hair, not little boys.”

Caterina heard the rumble of cars outside and knew why they had come. She had wondered when this day would arrive and here it had. Her husband refused to recognize himself as a foreigner in this dull place, but they hadn’t. Carmello opened the door to see what caused such noise outside his home. His beefy body filled the doorframe; with the light of the house behind him and a curtain of rain in front, his silhouette stood like Frankenstein’s monster, the right of his barber’s hands holding out the day’s newspaper he read each night to practice his English. He raised his arm and opened his mouth to speak to the crowd that had gathered on his lawn and in the street.

Sheriff Gerdts closed the case of Donny Palmer’s murder just as he did the case of Carmello DeNino’s murder. It was simple. In his mind, in everyone’s mind, it all added up, and Lake Claire settled back into the summer of 1966. The citizens of Lake Claire who were present at the shooting all insisted Carmello DeNino had pointed a gun, or at least something that looked like a gun, when someone, no one was saying who, fired a shotgun from the street that cut the big Italian barber in half and left buckshot in the pale green armchair behind him. Don Palmer was remembered for his own pleas for calm outside Carmello’s house, his cool head in the midst of such grief and anger. Pastor Avery pointed out Don’s willingness to forgive, as God asks of us, while others noted Don’s own modesty in the wake of his heroics. Hank Aaron hit forty-four home runs by the close of September and Tony Cloninger threw twenty-seven wild pitches. A few teenaged boys left town for college and university and only then grew their hair out long. A few others wound up fighting Communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia, Lake Claire losing three boys to the conflict in Vietnam. Caterina DeNino returned to Italy a widow, where she learned to speak again and forgot the people of Lake Claire, Georgia. Mary Hooks left her Georgia rock band for San Francisco, where her pacifist boyfriend accidentally beat her to death only two days into the new year. As a New Year’s resolution to settle sins of the past, Mary had written a letter of confession and apology to Dale Palmer. It began, I suppose it was the sweets at first... And Dale Palmer, who never read Mary’s note, scrubbed at the linoleum of her kitchen floor from morning to night each day until her husband finally had her admitted to the state hospital in Milledgeville. In the fall, Don Palmer led the Stamp Out The Beatles campaign in Lake Claire, just as he had promised, a renewed fervor in his convictions. A ghostly glaze over his eyes suggested to Lake Claire residents that this ordinary man made extraordinary by unimaginable loss had replaced grief with a profound faith in God’s goodness, with a selfless devotion to service in God’s name. Nobody’s bigger than Jesus , he preached again, convincing twenty-four kids to contribute their board games, records, pins, stickers, stamps, plates, and photographs to a bonfire that rose roof-high.