Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Everyone stood silently, sweating, until Rose returned. When she did, she was carrying a wrinkled paper sack and smiling. She gave Laker a glance. “It’s all right now,” she said. “I called the police.”

As she spoke, her back to the three security men, she withdrew from the sack three nine-millimeter, semiautomatic handguns she’d gotten from the jackets of Laker, Andrepinino, and Fink, left behind the counter in the tie shop. It took her only a few seconds to hand them out to their grateful owners.

Stunned, everyone but the three women pointed a gun at someone. The situation was, in a precarious way, neutralized.

“I don’t get it, Miss Knifer,” Ice-eyes said. His gun was aimed at Laker.

“I think I do,” Laker said. He’d come to know Rose well enough to figure it out. She smiled her appreciation. “My partners and I got a tip that someone might be tunneling into the bank, and we’ve had this tie shop staked out for weeks. You three—” he nodded at Lugar and the other two security chiefs — “are under arrest for attempted bank robbery.”

Security looked collectively astounded. “You’re cops?” sputtered Little-and-dangerous.

Fink, who carried his shield in his hip pocket, removed it and flashed it at the three men.

Lugar looked imploringly at Rose. “Miss Knifer!”

“Oh, I’m not here,” she said. “This is strictly a guy thing.”

And she led Donna and Corinne from the tunnel.

A few minutes later came the muted wails of sirens. They might have been in the street right above.

“This isn’t going to fly,” Lugar said.

“We always worked with gloves on,” Laker said. “Your fingerprints are all over the tools you gathered up. And, of course, there’s the strongest evidence.”

“Which is?”

“You’re here, in a tunnel, beneath the vault of Sixth National Bank.”

There was noise from the mouth of the tunnel, voices. The cops had arrived.

The other cops.

“I advise you to drop your weapons,” Laker said. “It might be dangerous to hold on to them.”

The three security chiefs had no choice but to obey. They were all staring at Laker in a way that made him queasy even though he held all the high cards.

“Anything you say can be held against you,” he said.

“And won’t be believed,” Fink added.

And it wasn’t believed. Because Rose, Donna, Corinne, Laker, Andrepinino, and Fink testified otherwise.

The three security chiefs were convicted of attempted bank robbery and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Their respective employers made it clear that they were safer inside the walls than out.

Donna stamped her foot, Corrine cried, and their families forgave them for their kidnap prank and secret trip to Belize.

Rose never really convinced her father there wasn’t more to what happened than he knew, but he knew better than to try to pry more information out of her. Besides, everything had turned out all right. Nothing had been lost but an incompetent and disloyal chief of security.

Laker, Andrepinino, and Fink received commendations.

Corrine and Andrepinino began dating. As did Donna and Fink. But they were the kinds of relationships that devolved to warm friendships and nothing more.

Not so with Laker and Rose.

One morning, when they were lying side by side in bed in their resort hotel room in Belize, Rose proposed marriage. After all, she was independently wealthy, now that her novel, Dirt, Love, and Money, was on all the bestseller lists. No one suspected it was fact rather than fiction.

Well, almost no one.

“I can’t promise I’ll go straight,” Laker said candidly. “You wouldn’t want a husband in prison.”

She laughed. “Silly! You can be legal and not go straight.”

Still, he hesitated. “I don’t know if it’ll work, Rose. We’ll always have that bank job between us.”

“I’ll tell you something Donna and Corinne never knew,” she said. “My father owns Sixth National Bank.” She laughed. “If you want, I can see that you become bank president.”

Laker lay back on the bed and laughed with her, thinking of what he could do with a whole bank.

What they could do, he and his new bride.

Funny the way things can fall into place, he thought. It’s all so easy when the author is on your side.

© 2008 by John Lutz

Kate Barsotti is an illustrator and non-fiction writer who lives in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. The inspiration for her story “Dirt,” her first fiction sale, was her own garden, which she describes as a Midwestern “weed crop” that she attempted to turn into a butterfly nursery. While doing her best to learn the intricacies of composting, she says, she was sidetracked by garden philosophers, and thus, her story’s Maxwell Rimmer was born.

It is curious that the leaf should so love the light and the root so hate it.

Maxwell Rimmer gazed through the warped glass of old windowpanes, letting his eyes settle on rain-cloud washiness and green-leaved wet. It was ridiculous, this weather. An early spring tempest with ambitions to be a full-fledged cyclone had, instead, lowered its expectations and become a persistent storm. It spun in place off the New Hampshire and Maine coasts, near the Isles of the Shoals, too strong to blow itself out and too weak to return to the sea. TV weather-persons waned from jocular to worried to apologetic, as if the storm were a delinquent child that no one could control. Rimmer half believed it was.

Under the persistent rapping of rain on his roof, he sipped his morning coffee to the voice of Reverend Ansel Peach on the Christian radio station W-EVE. Reverend Peach spoke of God’s judgment, of signs and revelations: “Verily, I say unto thee, woe to the man who repenteth not, for God will drown his disgrace in a flood of judgment. Sin not. That is the word of our Lord.”

Repentance, evidently, was the remedy to rain. Rimmer liked Preacher Peach’s voice, steady as drops on the eaves. He was pleased that the sermons rarely made much sense, but were stern and comforting in a King Jamesian sort of way. The reverend’s voice was pure, unsullied by doubt, he was only slightly surprised at the stupidity of his listeners, who seemed determined to head straight to hell. For each continuous day of wet, Rimmer sent a donation to the ministry, a check for exactly one dollar. It was the least he could do, since the minister’s predictions of the next great flood seemed to be correct. Rimmer’s bank account was less thirty-seven dollars and counting.

It was becoming personal, this rain. While Rimmer pitied his few neighbors with cesspool cellars and dripping ceilings, his problem was lack of inspiration. Over the past forty years, Rimmer had built a voracious following of amateur green thumbs who gobbled his weekly columns, devoured his books, and sucked in his interviews as if their Wild Blue Yonder roses depended on it. He didn’t solve problems such as root rot or blight. Discussion of compost or organic weed control was beneath him. Sheltered on Appledore Island, Maxwell Rimmer was the poet of the garden, the sensitive soul who appreciated the inner lives of pansies and the arousal of bees in the honeycomb. He was not looking for backyard converts (weedies, he called them). Rimmer was happy to continue preaching to his choir, devoted gardeners who wrote fan letters with dip pens in calligraphic hand, pressing flowers between the pages. Sometimes they sent knitted mittens, although Rimmer never quite understood why, but he always instructed his agent’s secretary to send a thank-you note, along with a notice about his upcoming book.