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

I pulled myself from the barstool, lurched towards the door, decided I was too drunk to drive, and then stumbled back to the bar. I dug around in my pocket for my cell phone, finally found it, and squinted at the number of the cab company that was pinned over the cash register. One of the cocktail waitresses, a haggard-faced brunette who was twenty-five going on fifty and who’d once offered to sleep with me if I’d pay her past-due electric bill, put her hand on my shoulder and her mouth next to my ear. I shivered a little, wondering if she had more utilities that needed paying and if I were drunk enough to take her up on the offer this time.

“That little red light blinking on your phone means you have a message,” she whispered in my ear.

“Oh,” I said, feeling like an idiot. “Right.”

Then she patted my shoulder and moved away, her hips twitching beneath her cutoff denim shorts. I squinted down at my cell phone, finally managed to push the button to listen to the message. It was from Koskov. He didn’t sound any happier, and he wanted me to call. I thought about letting it wait until morning, but then I figured I might as well find out the bad news while I was drunk enough not to care.

“What did you say to Mark McAllister when you went to see him,” he said instead of hello. “The kid hung himself in his cell. You know how that looks? It looks like a confession.”

“McAllister’s dead?”

“He might as well be. He’s at Baptist Memorial, ICU, and if the little jerk survives, a jury’s going to hang him.” He coughed into the phone and then the coughs gave way to curses. “So far the only thing he’s been able to say is ‘I want Charlie Raines.’ Go down there if you have to, but for God’s sake, try hard not to make things worse than they are.”

After he hung up, I called a cab. But I didn’t go home.

Gil Brewer, rumpled, red-eyed, and coffee-stained, and a young patrol officer stood guard outside the ICU door. The patrol officer’s presence wasn’t a surprise, but Brewer’s was, and I didn’t like it.

“New jail policy,” Brewer said, scratching a red smear on his chin that might have come from a jelly doughnut. “One of ours leaves the jail, one of us has to go with him.”

“I thought you worked the day shift.”

“Rodriguez called in sick, menstrual cramps or some such nonsense, so I had to pull a double shift.” He hooked his head toward the ICU. “Then this asshole decides to hang himself on my watch, so guess who gets to stand on his feet all night?”

“Tough world,” I said, stepping past him.

He followed me into the ICU ward and parked himself beside Mark McAllister’s door. The kid looked as small as a ventriloquist’s dummy in the hospital bed. A half-dozen tubes and wires were connected to his nose, his mouth, and his arms, but he was awake.

“Charlie,” he said, his voice a ragged hiss coming from his damaged vocal cords. “Didn’t do it. Not my old man.” He hissed and coughed, and the machines beeped crazily. Still, he managed to lift a hand and touch his swollen throat. “Not this, either.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not this.”

“Take it easy.”

I didn’t have to tell him twice. He shut his eyes and went to sleep.

The next morning I woke on my living-room floor, hung over, stiff, stinking like a skid-row bum. By the time I’d left the hospital, taken a cab back to the Refugee for my car, and driven home, I was sober, a condition I’d remedied by finishing the last eight beers in my refrigerator and then breaking into a bottle of Ten High bourbon. I’d sat at my kitchen table, drinking, chain-smoking Kools, my brain chasing itself in circles. Something about the day had stuck and was grating at my consciousness but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Like most people who drink too much, I told myself that booze helped clarify my thinking, but I’d worked so hard at achieving clarity that I’d passed out.

Now, I smoked my first cigarette of the day while I waited for coffee to brew. When it did, I took a cautious sip, gagged, sipped again. I closed my eyes, letting everything run through my brain — the missing camera equipment, Blake Roberts’s passionate defense of his friend, the photographs I’d seen in Don McAllister’s portfolio, Mark McAllister’s insistence that he hadn’t tried to commit suicide. Then I squeezed my eyes tighter. It was the last photograph in Don McAllister’s portfolio that was still bothering me. Kids on the playground. A family having a picnic. The towheaded boy, a figure of longing and desperation. But it was the faces in the background that came back to me. They were unimportant to Don McAllister. His focus and the composition made that clear. They were just faces, men and women in the park, irrelevant to him in his obsession. He was a good photographer, and his picture demanded that you follow his eye, his focus. Now, I shut my eyes, tried to pry my mind free of what McAllister had wanted the picture to capture. I focused on the background, saw a heavyset black woman in a bright orange blouse, an elderly man walking a terrier, a man staring at the camera with a look that was either fear or surprise. I opened my eyes. I hadn’t recognized the figures in the background because I’d been too quick to latch on to the subject matter. The belief that McAllister was a pedophile had blotted everything else out. I made a phone call to an old friend who worked as a fact checker for the Commercial Appeal and when I hung up, I knew I’d made a mistake.

Blake Roberts had stopped crying, but it looked as if he might start again. He was sitting behind his desk with a USA Today open in front of him. His glasses had slipped down his nose, and his eyes were bloodshot and watery.

“You’re not welcome here,” he said, his voice raw but his words precise. “I made that clear yesterday.”

I held up a hand to stop him. “I’ve come to apologize,” I said, which was at least partially true. “I jumped to a conclusion I shouldn’t have.”

He wasn’t a man accustomed to being angry and didn’t seem very good at it. Still, he tried to hold on to his hostility for a little while before he gave up and slumped back against his chair.

“I can see why you thought what you did, Mr. Raines. But I can guarantee you that it was wrong.”

“You cared a lot about him.”

His expression grew wary. “We were friends.”

“You were lovers.”

He lowered his eyes. “I’m married. I have children.”

“And you were in love with Don McAllister.”

“No.” He sagged a little further into the chair and then waved his hand dismissively. “He was a good man, courageous.” He took a gulp of air. “More courageous than I could ever be. He loved his family, loved his son, but he left them because he couldn’t live as someone else. I’ve never lived anything but a lie. You want to know how much of a coward I am?”

“It’s not necessary.”

He wasn’t listening. “I didn’t even go to his funeral. I loved the man for ten years, and I was afraid to attend his funeral because my wife might suspect that there was something between us.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hands. “He was dying. Did you know that?”

“He wrote his son.”

“Don missed his family like a part of him that had been amputated. That’s why he took the pictures. He was trying to capture what he’d lost when he left his son.” He lifted his glasses, rubbed at his eyes. “Don was an artist, and if the world had been different, he would have been a great father. I knew he didn’t want to die without reconciling with his son. That’s why I encouraged him to write the letter.” His shoulders completely crumbled and his chin bobbed to his chest. “And I got him killed, didn’t I?”