Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

“Naughty, naughty,” Amber said, as if I were some toddler. She squatted beside me and pointed the Beretta in my face. “Time to say goodbye, lover.”

I heard a shot.

Then I remember swinging in the air. The chop of moving helicopter blades percussed in the far distance. Hands eagerly grabbed me and pulled me into a small room, where it was mercifully cool. Shade at last. I passed out again.

“Dang, son, you’re alive.” No mistaking that voice. I opened my eyes.

“Hello, Malone.” I was in a Flagstaff hospital bed.

“The correct phrase is, ‘Howdy, pardner’,” he said, smiling. “Gave me quite a scare. What the Sam Hill were you thinking, going off like that?”

“I was following your lead. The backpack. I knew they had to go get the backpack.”

He shook his head. “Now that’s just plain ignorant, Red. Why do you think they would want to recover evidence at that very moment?”

“Because — because—” and then suddenly, I knew. My Italian ire rose. “Because you sent them after it.”

“Right in one. I set them up, Red. As you know, Buddy was found dead of heat stroke and without his backpack. Where was the water he should have been carrying in his saddlebags? Somebody must have taken it away, knowing he couldn’t survive the canyon’s heat without it.”

“How do you know he couldn’t have survived?”

“ ’Cause I’m from Texas, and I’ve spent a little time out in the desert now and again. I don’t think there’s too many deserts in New York, so you probably wouldn’t know what it takes to survive in one. Well, it takes a human body at least two solid weeks to acclimate to a desert climate. Buddy certainly didn’t do that. I also told you I thought it was interesting that Tarkauskas had a home in Palm Springs.”

“So you told Tarkauskas that the authorities were looking for the backpack, that they suspected foul play.”

“Didn’t tell him, just let it be known. I was pretty sure he’d try to keep it from the law. So I baited the trap and he fell for it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I was pretty angry by then. After all, I’d nearly lost my life on the most moronic of quixotic quests.

“How was I to know you were going to gallivant off to Arizona? I thought I had the operation under control. It’s not like this is our only case — I expected you’d stay in L.A. until you heard from me. You could have knocked me down with a flour tortilla when we — the park rangers and me, that is — saw you tailing our quarry. You were too close behind them for us to risk pulling you off. We had to wait.”

“Until I was half-dead from heat stroke,” I said. “Thanks a lot, pardner.”

“Now don’t be like that. You got them to confess.” He slapped my thigh. “Good work.”

“Confess?”

“Parabolic listening dishes recorded everything. I’ve done stuff like this before, you know, back in Lone Star country. But when that Gerhardt girl put your gun in your face, I knew it was time to call the game, so I put a shot right across her scrawny-ass bows.”

“So everything’s wrapped up nice and neat.”

“It is now. I don’t know that they ever would have found the backpack, anyway, so your intervention was well timed. And to prove it, I brought you a get-well present.”

He pulled out a portable CD player with a set of light headphones. “Enjoy, son.”

So do you think it was Sinatra, or Caruso, or anything by Puccini? Hell, no. It was The Best of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Cus said he wanted me to learn to appreciate real music.

If I could have gotten out of bed, I’d have killed him. But by the time I got back to L.A., I was feeling a bit more generous. So I got tickets for the opera and gave them to Brenda, and she made him sit through an entire production of Madarna Butterfly. She wept like a teenager for Cio-Cio-San’s troubles while he had to stay awake the whole time or face her implacable wrath.

We Italians get revenge.

© 2007 by Kate Ellis

A two-time nominee for the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain’s Short Story Dagger Award, Kate Ellis is also the author of a series of novels that each combine an intriguing contemporary murder mystery with a parallel historical case. In the U.S. the most recent book available in that series is A Cursed Inheritance (Piatkus 2004); in the U.K. The Shining Skull is hot off the press.

I felt his tight grip on my arm as I slumped into the passenger seat and when my hand went up to the blindfold he ordered me not to touch it. I did as I was told and clung to the soft leather of the seat, trying to work out where we were heading.

We travelled for hours on a fast, straight road and I guessed that we must be well out of London. When the roads started to wind I sensed that we were out in the country somewhere and we seemed to drive for miles before I felt the car swing sharply to the left. I heard the crunch of gravel beneath the tires as though we were on some sort of driveway, and when we stopped he told me to take the blindfold off. I could see my surprise at last.

I untied the blindfold and sat there blinking as my eyes got used to the light. I’m sure I swore when I realised where I was. But then I saw the excitement on Paul’s face — like a little boy at Christmas — and I forced my mouth into a smile until the muscles began to ache. I think I managed to say what he wanted to hear. I could hardly have let him know the truth.

I managed to keep the smile in place when he told me the house was called the Old Rectory, and I rushed up to the front door, forcing out enthusiastic oohs and aahs as he pointed out each new desirable feature. He expected excitement and that’s what he got. He had the Merc, the million-pound apartment in London, and now he had the place in the country he’d been promising himself for years. To have poured cold water on his triumph would have been like snatching away a kid’s birthday present... and I couldn’t have done that to him. Not when I saw how thrilled he was.

He was twenty years older than me and too many business lunches meant that what he’d lost in hair he’d gained in weight. But I was fond of him — I suppose I might even have said I loved him if I believed in love, which I don’t. We stayed in a hotel in Exeter that evening and he ordered a bottle of champagne to toast our new country life. After the bubbles had booted some of my inhibitions out of the window I asked him if he realised what life was really like in a place like Manton Worthy. But he just laughed and said he’d bought the best house in the village so the peasants could kiss his arse. People in the restaurant looked round and I felt myself blushing. Paul never worried about what people thought... unless he was doing business with them.

Looking back, I couldn’t complain about the house itself. It was like an oversized doll’s house to look at... symmetrical with long, square-paned windows painted in gleaming white. Paul said it was Georgian and it had a long gravel drive and a shiny black front door you could see your face in, with bright brass fittings. It had belonged to a TV executive from London who had spent a fortune on the place and only used it on weekends. Inside, the previous owners had kitted it out with gold and silk drapes and thick cream carpets. It hadn’t always been like that, of course — once it had been a draughty, rambling place where the old vicar lived; where the parish bigwigs held their long, boring meetings and where the vicar’s skinny wife organised her fetes and good works. But times change.