Bill Crider: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 1. Whole No. 797, January 2008

Sonny opened a napkin to tuck into his collar the way his grandmother taught him. He saw the wet wrinkle first, and realized that this was a used napkin. Somebody had already swiped their dirty mouth on it. Then, unfolding the napkin further — he saw the writing.

He recognized the penmanship right off. He knew it from the court papers. Sonny read the girl’s name and then his eyes lost focus.

Everything went bland as he wondered how that goddamn cop got to his food. The rumbling in his stomach continued, but the wanting was like a distant thunder now. He had cotton all wadded up in his mouth. His eyes were wide and blank as he faced the green-painted wall, on the other side of which was the last room he would ever see.

The detective drove home, his gut full, the rare meat roiling. A wave of nausea raised a sheen of sweat over his skin like condensation forming on glass. He kept swallowing to put out the fire. He would keep the burger down. He had to.

Prostate cancer had turned him into a vegetarian. Nuts and grains and kale and okra. Three-plus years without red meat, until today. Three-plus years cancer-free.

The meal burned like a cancer in his belly. It bloated him, his stomach acids hitting it with everything they’d got. Turmoil and torment: his gut the final circle of hell.

Tomorrow he would deliver it where it belonged and be done.

He went into a sort of trance as he drove. Something like a fever dream — only, it was real. A memory. One he returned to willingly now.

He was inside the girl’s bedroom again. The mother had left it untouched, as grieving mothers do. He asked for a minute alone. She went out without questioning it and he gently closed the door. He pulled on his gloves and looked around. Everything was in pink and yellow — a dead girl’s room decorated in fringe and frill. He scrutinized every windowpane. He breathed on the mirror glass, raising prints, none of them pristine. He had to be very careful now. He had just found Mossman’s abandoned car in the woods. Nobody else knew yet. He stood underneath the still ceiling fan, full to bursting with this knowledge, eyeing the soft toys, the dolls, the figurines. He needed a surface that was flat and hard and smooth. He found a china tea set on the top shelf of her bookcase and pulled it down. Tiny little finger cups done in a fine, glassy finish. Using a prepared strip of tape, he lifted one perfect print. He held it to the sunlight. Graceful hairpin whorls, unbroken by crease of injury or wrinkle of age. It would transfer faintly yet true. He then selected a hair bow from a drawer full of ribbons and clips and used tweezers to unwind from it two strands of fair hair. He slipped them into a manila coin envelope, which he then slipped inside his jacket pocket. He did this lovingly. He made the case. He did his job.

Sam, the grill man, lay on his side on the back-room cot, listening to Conway Twitty on the clock radio. His shift had ended at ten, but the diner stayed open all night, the grill never going cold. Sam was back on the clock at six A.M., and it was easier just to crash there than drive all the way home and back.

He felt weird about the detective. That was what had him still awake near midnight — that and his empty stomach, for which the smell of the burgers cooking suggested no cure. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. Did the detective blame Sam for having served somebody he didn’t know was a killer? Sam didn’t feel real good about having fed a guy who had a little girl locked up in the trunk of his car — but then, who knew what the detective had locked up in his? Who knows what anybody has locked away?

Okay — tonight he knew. He had figured out what that takeout burger was, who it was for. He supposed he could’ve spit on it. Would that have made the detective like him better? He could’ve not finished cooking it. Thrown it into the trash — made a great big show.

But he did cook it. He wrapped it up and sold it to the man from the prison. He put the money in his cash register.

And he served the detective his. Grilled it for him and served it up like his own enemy’s heart.

A killer would die tonight with one of Sam’s burgers in his belly. Be buried with it in the morning. Packed up together with his earthly remains in a to-go pine box.

Sam rolled onto his back. He pictured the detective finishing his burger, wiping the juice off his empty hands. Sitting still awhile at the counter, disappearing into himself. Then standing, laying money next to the empty Coke, heading home. The bell jingling on his way out the door.

The radio cut out first, before anything else. Going to static — a disruption over the airwaves.

Then the lights flickered. The rattling air conditioner unit outside the back door clicked off, shutting down.

Lights dimmed, surging off and on for ten seconds... fifteen seconds... twenty seconds. A deep draw on the grid. Sam imagined an aerial view, lights dimming all across the county in one long, complicit blink.

They flickered once more, then came back on. The air conditioner kick-started again, whirring back to life, and the static cleared and the radio music resumed playing, the same song, the glowing red digits of the clock now blinking 12:00 like a sign urgently advertising midnight.

Two thousand volts.

Sam rolled over and hoped his appetite would return in the morning.

(c)2007 by Chuck Hogan

Black Mask , greatest of the twentieth-century crime-fiction pulps, published over half the fifty-plus stories in Otto Penzler’s huge trade paperback anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (Vintage, $25), an admirable collection of mostly unfamiliar material. Covering the 1920s through ‘40s, its three sections — crimefighters, introduced by Penzler; villains, introduced by Harlan Ellison; and dames, introduced by Laura Lippman — were published separately in Britain. Three selections each by Dashiell Hammett (including the powerful and previously unpublished “Faith”), Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Cornell Woolrich join novel-length works by Carroll John Daly and Frederick Nebel and stories by Horace McCoy, Thomas Walsh, Richard Sale, George Harmon Coxe, Frank Gruber, and James M. Cain. Among the more obscure items are a pair of enjoyable (if implausibly plotted) stories about D.B. McCandless’s Sarah Watson, a tough, chubby, and middle-aged female private eye, who antedated Gardner’s Bertha Cool.

Black Mask’s most significant innovation was the hardboiled private eye. Joining Hammett and Chandler in the P.I. pantheon, and believed by iconic critic Anthony Boucher the greatest of the three, Ross Macdonald came on the scene after the great days of the pulps had passed. His reputation has been kept alive through the efforts of Tom Nolan, first with his 1999 biography and most recently with The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, $45 hardcover, $25 trade paper), which gathers all the previously published short stories about Lew Archer. Nolan’s excellent introduction gathers the surprising range of biographical details on the Southern California shamus scattered through the novels and stories. A selection of tantalizing openings to unfinished Archer cases are not throw-away false starts but scenes as polished and memorable as the author’s finished work.

Among the Archer novels in reprint from Vintage/Black Lizard is the 1951 case The Way Some People Die ($12.95) — although not as fine as the work Macdonald would do in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was deemed by Boucher the best of its kind since Farewell, My Lovely or even The Maltese Falcon .

As the following examples show, the condition of the private eye today remains healthy.