Donna Andrews: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

“Yeah? What kind of deal. I mean, since we ruled out sex. Much to my dismay.”

“Oh, c’mon, Jason. You don’t really think I just go around sleeping with people do you? That’s in the movies. This is straight business, what I’m proposing. I’ll clean your apartment here and fix it up if you’ll convince your two friends not to let anybody know who I am or where I am.”

“Spence won’t be any trouble.”

“Is he the good-looking one?”

“That’s Bill.”

“He looks like trouble.”

“He is.”

She sank back on the couch and covered her face with her hands. I thought she was going to cry. But no sounds came. The only thing you could hear was Churchill, my cat, yowling at cars passing in what was now a downpour.

“You okay?”

She shrugged. Said nothing. Hands still covering her face. When she took them down, she said, “I left L.A. for my own reasons. And I want to keep them my reasons. And that means making a life for myself somewhere out here. I’m from Chicago. I like the Midwest. But I don’t want some tabloid to find out about me.”

“Well, like I say, Spence won’t be any trouble. But Bill—”

“Where’s he live?”

I was thinking about what Bill had said about screwing a scream queen. Even if she wasn’t a scream queen anymore. It didn’t make much sense to me but it sure seemed to make a lot of sense to him.

“Why don’t I talk to him first?”

She looked relieved. “Good. I’d appreciate that. I’m supposed to start this job next week. A good job. Decent bennies and from what everybody says, some real opportunities there. I want to start my life all over.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

She was all business. Grabbing her coat. Sliding into it. Standing up. Looking around at the stained and peeling wallpaper and all the posters, including the latest scream queen, Linda Sanders. “She’s a nice kid. Had a real shitty childhood. I hope she can beat the rap — you know, go on and do some real acting. I saw her at a small playhouse right before I left L.A. She was really good.”

I liked that. How charitable she was about her successor. A decent woman.

Churchill came out and rubbed his head against her ankle. She held him up and gave him that smile of hers. “We both need to go to Weight Watchers, my friend.”

“He stays up late at night and watches TV and orders from Domino’s when I’m asleep.”

She gave him a kiss. “I believe it.”

She set him down, put out her hand and shook, that formal, forced way people do in banking commercials right after the married couple agrees to pay the exorbitant interest rates. “I really appreciate this, Jason. I’ll start figuring out how I’m going to fix up your apartment. I live in this tiny trailer. I’ve got it fixed up very nicely.”

“You didn’t screw her, did you?” Bill said when he came into the store.

He’d been hustling around the place, getting the displays just so, setting up the 50 % OFF bin of VHS and DVD films we hadn’t been able to move, snapping Mr. Coffee to burbling attention. When I told him she’d come over to my place last night, he stopped, frozen in place, and asked if I’d screwed her.

“Yeah. Right on the front lawn. In the rain. Just humping our brains out.”

“You’d better not have, you bastard. I’m the one who gets to nail her.”

At any given time Bill is always about seven minutes away from the violent ward, but I couldn’t ever recall seeing him this agitated about something.

“She isn’t going to screw anybody, Bill. Now shut up and listen.”

“Oh, sure,” he said, “now you’re her press agent? All the official word comes from you?”

“She’s scared, asshole.”

“Listen, Jason. Spare me the heartbreak, all right? She’s been around. She doesn’t need some video geek hovering over her.” Then: “That’s how you’re gonna get in her panties, isn’t it? Be her best friend. One of those wussy deals. Well, it’s not gonna work because she’ll never screw a pus-face like you. You checked out your blackheads lately, Jason?”

I swung on him then. When my fist collided with his cheek, he gaped at me in disbelief, then sort of disintegrated, started screaming at me real high-pitched and all, as he stumbled backwards into a display of a new Disney family movie. Most surprisingly of all, he didn’t come after me. Maybe I’d just stunned him. He’d always seen Spence and me as his inferiors — we were the geeks, according to him; he wasn’t a geek; he was a cool dude who pitied us enough to hang out with us — and so maybe he was just in shock. His slave had revolted and he hadn’t had time to deal with it mentally yet.

“She’s afraid you’ll tell somebody who she is,” I said. “And if you do, you’re going to be damned sorry.”

And then I couldn’t believe what I did. I hit him again. This time he might have responded, but just then the front door opened, the bell tinkled. The first customer of the day, a soccer-mom with a curly-haired little girl in tow, walked in with an armload of overdue DVDs. Mrs. Preston. Her stuff was always overdue.

I had just enough time to see that a pimple of blood hung from Bill’s right nostril. I took an unholy amount of satisfaction in that.

Michele didn’t want to see me. She was nice about it. She said she really appreciated me talking to Bill about her and that she really appreciated me stopping by like this but she was just in a place where she wanted to be alone, sort of actually needed to be alone and she was sure I understood. Because that was obviously the kind of guy I was, the understanding kind.

In other words, it was the sort of thing I’d been hearing from girls all my life. How nice I was and how understanding I was and how they were sure, me being so understanding and all, that it was cool if we just kind of left things as they were: you know, being just friends and all. Which is what she ended up saying.

As usual, I’d gotten ahead of myself. By this time, I had this crush on her and whenever I get a crush of this particular magnitude I start dreaming the big dream. You know, not only having sex but maybe her really falling in love with me and maybe moving in together and maybe me getting a better job and maybe us — it could happen — getting married and settling down just as the couples always do in the screwball comedies of the ‘thirties and ‘forties Bill and Spence always rag on me for liking so much.

Over a three-day period I must have called Spence eight or nine times, always leaving a message on his machine. He never called back. I finally went over there after work one night. He had a two-room apartment on a block where half the houses had been torn down. I was just walking up to the front door when Spence and Bill came out.

They were laughing until they saw me. Beery laughter. They’d both been gunning brew.

Bill was the one I watched. His hands formed fists instantly and he dropped back a foot and went into a kind of boxer’s crouch. “You got lucky the other day, Jason.”

“I don’t think so, Bill. I think you got lucky because Mrs. Preston came in.”

Spence’s face reflected the disbelief all three of us were probably feeling. I couldn’t believe it, either. I’d stood up to Bill the other day, but I think both of us thought it was kind of a fluke. But it wasn’t. I was ready to hit him again.

The only difference between the other morning and now was that he was half-drunk. Brew makes most of us feel tougher and handsomer and smarter and wittier than we really are. Prisons are packed with guys who let brew addle their perception of themselves. Or dope. Doesn’t matter.

He came at me throwing a roundhouse so vast in scope it couldn’t possibly have landed on me. All I had to do was take a single step backward.