Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

I touched her cheek gently and then I set off, walking quickly into the darkness.

Armstrong was a pretty typical midwestern town, four blocks of retail area, fading brick grade school and junior high, a small public library with a white stone edifice, a courthouse, a Chevrolet dealership, and many blocks of small white frame houses that all looked pretty much the same in the early morning gloom. You could see frost rimed on the windows and lonely gray smoke twisting up from the chimneys. As I walked, my heels crunched ice. Faint streetlight threw everything into deep shadow. My breath was silver.

A dog joined me for a few blocks and then fell away. Then I spotted a police cruiser moving slowly down the block. I jumped behind a huge oak tree, flattening myself against the rough bark so the cops couldn’t see me. They drove right on past, not even glancing in my direction.

The address I wanted was a ranch house that sprawled over the west end of a cul-de-sac. A sweet little red BMW was parked in front of the two-stall garage and a huge satellite-dish antenna was discreetly hidden behind some fir trees. No lights shone anywhere.

I went around back and worked on the door. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Kenny had gotten himself one of those infrared security devices. I tugged on my gloves, cut a fist-sized hole in the back-door window, reached in, and unlocked the deadbolt, and then pushed the door open. I could see one of the small round infrared sensors pointing down from the ceiling. Most fool burglars wouldn’t even think to look for it and they’d pass right through the beam and the alarm would go off instantly.

I got down on my haunches and half crawled until I was well past the eye of the infrared. No alarm had sounded. I went up three steps and into the house.

The dark kitchen smelled of spices, paprika and cinnamon and thyme. Dawn had always been a good and careful cook.

The rest of the house was about what I’d expected. Nice but not expensive furnishing, lots of records and videotapes, and even a small bumper-pool table in a spare room that doubled as a den. Nice, sure, but nothing that would attract attention. Nothing that would appear to have been financed by six hundred thousand dollars in bank robbery money.

And then the lights came on.

At first I didn’t recognize the woman. She stood at the head of a dark narrow hallway wearing a loose cotton robe designed to conceal her weight.

The flowing dark hair is what misled me. Dawn had always been a blonde. But dye and a gain of maybe fifteen pounds had changed her appearance considerably. And so had time. It hadn’t been a friend to her.

She said, “I knew you’d show up someday, Chet.”

“Where’s Kenny?”

“You want some coffee?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

She smiled her slow, shy smile. “You didn’t answer mine, either.”

She led us into the kitchen where a pot of black stuff stayed warm in a Mr. Coffee. She poured two cups and handed me one of them.

“You came here to kill us, didn’t you?” she said.

“You were my wife. And we were supposed to split everything three ways. But Kenny got everything — you and all the money. And I did six years in prison.”

“You could have turned us in.”

I shook my head. “I have my own way of settling things.”

She stared at me. “You look great, Chet. Prison must have agreed with you.”

“I just kept thinking of this night. Waiting.”

Her mouth tightened and for the first time her blue eyes showed traces of fear. Softly, she said, “Why don’t we go in the living room and talk about it.”

I glanced at my wrist watch. “I want to see Kenny.”

“You will. Come on now.”

So I followed her into the living room. I had a lot ahead of me. I wanted to kill them and then get back on the bus. While I’d be eating up the miles on a Greyhound, the local cops would be looking for a local killer. If only my gun hadn’t dropped out and Polly seen it. But I’d have to worry about that later.

We sat on the couch. I started to say something but then she took my cup from me and set it on the glass table and came into my arms.

She opened her mouth and kissed me dramatically.

But good sense overtook me. I held her away and said, “So while we’re making out, Kenny walks in and shoots me. Is that it?”

“Don’t worry about Kenny. Believe me.”

And then we were kissing again. I was embracing ghosts, ancient words whispered in the backseats of cars when we were in high school, tender promises made just before I left for Nam. Loving this woman had always been punishment because you could never believe her, never trust her, but I’d loved her anyway.

I’d just started to pull away when I heard the floor creak behind me and I saw Kenny. Even given how much I hated him — and how many long nights I’d lain on my prison bunk dreaming of vengeance — I had to feel embarrassed. If Kenny had been his old self, I would have relished the moment. But Kenny was different now. He was in a wheelchair and his entire body was twisted and crippled up like a cerebral palsy victim. A small plaid blanket was thrown across his legs.

He surprised me by smiling. “Don’t worry, Chet. I’ve seen Dawn entertain a lot of men out here in the living room before.”

“Spare him the details,” she said. “And spare me, too, while you’re at it.”

He whispered a dirty word loud enough for us to hear.

He wheeled himself into the living room. The chair’s electric motor whirred faintly as he angled over to the fireplace. On his way, he said, “You didn’t wait long, Chet. You’ve only been out two weeks. You never did have much patience.”

You could see the pain in his face when he moved.

I tried to say something, but I just kept staring at this man who was now a cripple. I didn’t know what to say.

“Nice setup, huh?” Kenny said as he struck a stick match on the stone of the fireplace. With his hands twisted and gimped the way they were, it wasn’t easy. He got his smoke going and said, “She tell you what happened to me?”

I looked at Dawn. She dropped her gaze. “No,” I said.

He snorted. The sound was bitter. “She was doin’ it to me just the way she did it to you. Right?” he said and called her another dirty name.

She sighed, then lighted her own cigarette. “About six months after we ran out on you with all the money, I grabbed the strongbox and took off.”

Kenny smirked. “She met a sailor. A goddamn sailor, if you can believe it.”

“His name was Fred,” she said. “Anyway, me and Fred had all the bank robbery money — there was still a couple hundred thousand left — when Kenny here came after us in that red Corvette he always wanted. He got right up behind us, but it was pouring rain and he skidded out of control and slammed into a tree.”

He finished the story for me. “There was just one problem, right, Dawn? You had the strongbox but you didn’t know what was inside. Her and the sailor were going to have somebody use tools on the lock I’d put on it. They saw me pile up my ’vette but they kept on going. But later that night when they blew open the strongbox and found out that I’d stuffed it with old newspapers, the sailor beat her up and threw her out. So she came back to me ’cause she just couldn’t stand to be away from ‘our’ money. And this is where she’s been all the time you were in the slam. Right here waitin’ for poor pitiful me to finally tell her where I hid the loot. Or die. They don’t give me much longer. That’s what keeps her here.”

“Pretty pathetic story, huh?” she said. She got up and went over to the small wet bar. She poured three drinks of pure Jim Beam and brought them over to us. She gunned hers in a single gulp and went right back for another.