W. Blain - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 5. Whole No. 855, November 2012

“Thanks for acknowledging my genes,” I said. “This is Sam.”

“How do you do, Sam.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr.... Mozart?”

“Just call me Wolfgang.” He turned to me. “I thought you told me your daughter is a police officer.”

“She is.”

He stared at her. “Okay, I can see it now. But there’s something... more. You’re an unusual person, Ms. Samson.”

“Is that unusual-good or just unusual-different?” Sam asked.

“Good. Definitely good. You will do things in your life.”

“No need to butter her up. She’s not here to arrest you,” I said.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Sam said. “No promises.”

I said, “They’re complaining about you out there. They say you should be trying to get more morphine out of them.”

“It’s only pain,” Wolfgang said.

“There have been developments since I was here yesterday.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably not, but there will be consequences for you.” I sat beside Sam to tell the story of the previous evening. As it went on, Wolfgang looked increasingly weary. Weary and unbelieving.

“Elaine is responsible for what happened?”

“I don’t know how the law will interpret it, but hers was the big bang from which the rest of yesterday’s universe followed.”

“But why? I took her in. I fed her. Her and her child.”

“It was about her, Wolfgang, not you.”

He absorbed this. “Okay. I can see that. I’m thinking narrowly.”

“She was desperate to get rid of her boyfriend. She never intended for anyone to get hurt. And, like yourself, she hasn’t had a good experience with the police.”

He glanced at Sam, who said, “So she went to her best friend. She got the friend to ask Harvey, the boyfriend, what it would take to get him to leave Elaine alone once and for all. Harvey said money.”

Wolfgang shook his head slowly, sad about the way human nature plays out. Maybe he was wishing his dad had taken him along to Planet Other.

“So Elaine and the friend hatched up a plan,” I said. “The friend told Harvey that you keep a lot of money around the house. Elaine thought he’d go to your place alone and that between you and the women there you’d subdue him and he’d be arrested.”

I paused while Wolfgang revisited what had happened in his house the previous day. “When I saw the four masked men,” he said, “I shouted for all the women to get out. Everyone ran out the back door.”

Except for Nicole. I said, “Maybe Harvey smelled some kind of rat when Elaine’s friend became cooperative. But for whatever reason he recruited some friends of his own for the visit to your house. Friends willing to rough you up for some easy money.”

“All wearing those terrorists’ masks.” Wolfgang shook his head, looking wearier and wearier.

Sam said, “We have Harvey in custody, Mr. Mozart. I hear that he gave up the rest of the ‘terrorists’ in about five seconds.”

“They’re sad, silly men,” Wolfgang said. “I’ve been thinking about how they acted when they had me in their car. They were childish and squabbly. And if they needed money so badly, they should just have asked. I’d have given them some.”

“That’s not how things are expected to work on Planet Earth,” I said. “And chances are it was greed rather than need anyway. For which they’ll all go down, for assault with deadly weapons.”

“I won’t press charges.”

“What?”

“I won’t testify against them. I should have talked more with Elaine. I should have learned more about her problems. I should have worked out some way to help her. I could have talked with this Harvey.”

“Had him hold your stone and let it make him see the light?”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“I’d say you are otherworldly, but you’d just agree with me,” I said.

Sam said, “Your refusal to testify won’t keep them from being charged, Mr. Mozart. They’ll testify against each other. The medical records here will establish the injuries. They’ll plead out. And they will go to jail. They’re dangerous and they need to be prevented from hurting more innocent people.”

I said, “Why wouldn’t you help punish idiots who are willing to stab people to get a few bucks?”

“Because jail is not the answer. We have a higher percentage of our population in jail than any other country in the world and things like this still happen.”

“You could ask the judge to give them twenty-five years of community service.”

Wolfgang sat up in his bed. “I want to talk to them.” He looked at me but then settled on Sam. “Can you make that happen, Officer Samson? I need to talk to them. All of them.”

Sam and I stood in the parking lot before we went our separate ways. “Weird guy, your friend Wolfgang,” she said.

“He’s not my friend.”

“Why does he want to talk to Harvey and the other idiots?”

“I think he believes he can spread peace on earth, one peace at a time.”

“Is he a megalomaniac?”

“He’s got this piece of limestone that he thinks has his extraterrestrial father’s handprint on it. Wolfgang believes that people who touch the stone feel better. Maybe even become better people.”

“If they do let him talk to Harvey,” Sam said, “they won’t let him take a lump of stone into the interview room. They’d be afraid your Wolfgang would just whack him on the head with it.”

“That’d make us feel better, in his place,” I said. “But then again you and I are not extraterrestrials.”

“I suppose I should be thankful that you’re human, no matter what Mom says.”

“She was never that beautiful,” I said. “It was her brains I went for. But then they ran out.”

“Why didn’t you tell Wolfgang that he can’t run his house as a refuge anymore?”

“Maybe he’ll pass his handprint around Children’s Services and they’ll sign him up and everyone will live happily ever after.”

“You think?”

“With him, I don’t know what to think,” I said. “Will Elaine face charges?”

“She and Laurie didn’t tell Harvey ‘Go stab,’ but they provided information knowing it was likely to result in a felony crime. Most judges won’t like that much, especially in an election year.”

“Maybe Wolfgang will want to fund a high-priced lawyer for her.”

“Has he got a lot of money?”

“I have no idea.”

“Will you go back in there now and tell him that Elaine might be in trouble?”

“Do you think I should?” I said.

“Maybe for Nicole,” Sam said.

“Yeah, all right. Good kid, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

“Like you,” I said. And she didn’t even smack me for calling her a kid.

Copyright © 2012 by Michael Z. Lewin