Barbara Callahan: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007

Didn’t take me long to figure out that there would be no opportunity to confront her during the day. Meetings all over town with her various important clients. I couldn’t afford to brace her in any sort of public way.

Nothing to stop me wearing my uniform on my night off, though.

I had to make sure she was alone. I sat across the street from her fifteen-story condo. She swept her Jag — what else? — into the underground parking garage just after nine that night. She was alone.

I pulled in four spaces down from her. I reached the elevator before she did.

In the shadowy light, she wasn’t able to see even my faint resemblance to Michael.

“Did something happen here tonight?” she said.

She looked especially fine this evening in a silver suit, her golden hair pulled into a loose chignon.

“Happen?”

“When I saw your uniform, I thought maybe something had happened in the building tonight.”

“Oh, no, ma’am. I’m here on my own. I’m just going to see somebody in the building.”

She smiled. “Well, I love having a police officer around. Makes me feel safe.”

The elevator door opened. We climbed in.

Then she said: “That’s funny.”

“What is?”

“Why aren’t you in the lobby getting checked in by Lenny? He checks everybody in. Even cops.”

I had been demoted from police officer to cop. She was smart. She knew there was something wrong with this situation.

I said, “I’ll bet you said that to my brother.”

“Your brother? What’re you talking about?”

A bit of panic — just enough to be gratifying — shone in those azure eyes.

She didn’t know it, but she’d already lost control of the situation. It was almost disappointing. I thought she’d be a lot tougher.

After she’d brought us whiskey sours, she sat on the divan across from my chair and said, “I hope you realize that all I have to do is pick up the phone and call my friend the police commissioner and your days as a cop are over, sweetie.”

“And if that happens, ‘sweetie,’ then I’ll get somebody to help me get a computer file of some of your messes we’ve had to help you with — especially a certain group of pissed-off wives — and I’ll send that file straight to a friend of mine who’s a reporter at KBST. And I’ll do the same thing if you don’t agree to break it off with my brother right away.”

She smirked. “You’re going to blackmail me out of seeing your brother?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I can’t believe you two are brothers. Michael’s so handsome and intense and you’re so—” She hesitated. “I may as well be up-front with you. You scare me.”

“Good. I should scare you. You’ve got good instincts.”

She exhaled harshly. I tried not to notice the way her long sleek legs were stretched out on the divan or the sheer blouse she wore now, having discarded the jacket to her suit. She kept a single shoe on a single big toe, dangling there. Like my brother’s future.

“You’ll dump him someday, anyway.”

“I’ve been dumped, too, you know.”

“Any tears go with this story?”

“It’s true, you bastard, whether you believe it or not. I was dumped — twice, in fact — and I got hurt just like anybody else would. You make me sound like some sort of professional heartbreaker. I have parents I see three times a month and I have a daughter I love very much.”

“So much you put her in boarding school.”

Her eyes narrowed. She just watched me for a time, as if she was observing something in nature she’d never seen before. “Michael told me you were like this. So goddamned judgmental. He calls you The Pope.”

“I’m judgmental about women who break up marriages.”

“Michael told me you had an affair when you were about his age. Aren’t you a little hypocritical here?”

I felt my cheeks burn. “I made up for it. I’ve never put a hand to another woman since.”

“Mass three times a week? Confession every Saturday? Coach a Little League team? The perfect husband and father.”

I finished my drink and set it down. “Thanks for the drink. I want to hear Michael tell me that you’ve broken it off.”

“What if I don’t?”

“We’ve already discussed that.”

“You’ll ruin me.”

I waited until I was on my feet. “I’ll sure give it my best shot.”

“I really do love Michael.”

“You’re not what he needs. Laura is what he needs.”

“I’ve never claimed to be anything other than what I am — a selfish, spoiled woman. But this time — with Michael — I really do love him. I never thought I’d do it again.”

“Do what again?”

“Let somebody get me pregnant. I didn’t want to be owned by a man or by a child. But with Michael — I stopped taking my birth control. I went to the doctor’s last week. I haven’t even told Michael yet. I want this child. I want Michael, too. But if I can’t have him, at least I’ll have his child.”

I shrugged. I was trying to make sense of all this. But there was no sense to be made of it, none of it. A little fling, every man did it once in a while. Back when it started it had seemed nothing more than that. But now I was listening to her tell me that she was carrying Michael’s baby.

All I could think of was poor Laura and the kids. I turned the knob on the door leading to the hall. I wanted to say something nasty. But then an old man’s weariness overcame me. I didn’t seem to have any strength left at all. Then words came: “I’ll pay for an abortion. And Michael doesn’t have to know about it.”

She laughed. “You won’t believe this, Mr. High and Mighty, but I don’t believe in abortion. I may be a slut in your eyes, but I’m still a good little Catholic girl.”

I turned my eyes back to hers and with the last of my strength, I said: “Then walk out of his life. He doesn’t have the strength, but you do.”

“That’s the terrible thing,” she said. “I don’t have the strength, either.”

The next afternoon I tried to find my brother before his shift started. Sometimes he had coffee down the street at a luncheonette. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the precinct locker room, either.

“You didn’t happen to see my brother, did you?” I asked Keller, who was spelling the watch commander, who was in Vegas at a police convention. Don’t think there hadn’t been a lot of jokes about holding a cop convention in Vegas.

“Bad sore throat and fever. Home sick.”

“He call in himself?”

He gave me a sharp look.

“No, his wife did. Man, you gotta give the kid some breathing room, Chet. He calls in or Laura calls in. What’s the difference?”

“Just curious.”

He shook his head and walked on. It was clear that Michael had done a good job with the other cops at the precinct, letting them know that I was always interfering in his life.

There was no answer at his house. I didn’t leave a message on his machine. If he’d actually told Laura about his affair, this wasn’t a good sign. A number of paranoid ideas shook me, the one that kept repeating being where the wife, the kids off at school, goes insane and kills her unfaithful husband. It happens.

At the end of my shift, I got in my car and drove out there. A lone lamp lit the house, downstairs, the family room. Michael’s car was gone. I went to the front door and knocked.

I could see her through the glass slat in the door. She was curled up in the corner of the couch. She wore a pair of faded pink cotton pajamas. With her short dark hair and sweet face, she could have been a college girl. The TV was on but the sound was off, and she wasn’t watching it anyway. Screen colors flicked across the living room.