Doug Allyn: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

Lindsey looks at Marble. “Do you know what it’s like to live with people who don’t care about you? People the state pays to house you? Before I visited Sidewinder, I could stand my life. I didn’t know any better. But afterwards the foster world was like this huge weight holding me down. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Some mornings I couldn’t get out of bed at all. I wrote to you every day for three months. I stole stamps from my foster mother’s purse so I could mail them, but you never wrote back.”

“I’m sorry.”

“After I finished high school, I had nowhere to go. Gardner found me living in Mission Park. He got me a room and helped me find a job. When he suggested the lawsuit, I felt like I owed him and I figured you had so much money, you’d settle out of court and never miss it.”

Marble looks at her. “Do you have any idea how much damage you’ve caused? My team’s suspended me, my endorsements have been cancelled, and my own sister won’t let me take my niece to the zoo.”

A woman opens the door at the back of the waiting room. “Lindsey Stillwell.”

Lindsey rises and limps towards her. Marble and I stay behind.

Marble and I are drinking Balkan beer in his vaulted living room when his picture appears on the ten o’clock news. Marble turns up the volume. In a strange twist of events today, Marble Melendez’s ex-security guard, Phillip Gardner, allegedly abducted Lindsey Stillwell and her companion Jason Lightfoot.

I choke on my beer. “Companion?”

The two of them escaped and Stillwell was treated for minor injuries at St. Luke’s Hospital. Stillwell recently filed a lawsuit against Melendez claiming that he had seduced her when she visited his ranch three years ago, at age fifteen. This afternoon Stillwell reported that she is withdrawing that suit.

Lindsey, standing outside St. Luke’s, answers a reporter’s questions. “The lawsuit was Gardner’s idea. He twisted my memories of a gentle, caring man into something ugly. After Jason talked me out of filing the lawsuit, Gardner went crazy.”

I put down my beer. “I need something stronger.”

Marble pours me a double shot of mescal.

I spend the next two nights at Sidewinder. On the third day, the police release my van. When I pull up in front of my apartment, I wonder whether there’s been a murder. Reporters, photographers, and cameramen mob the sidewalk. The moment I climb out, they surround me.

“How long have you and Lindsey Stillwell been lovers?”

“Is it true that you and Marble played on the same team in high school?”

“Did Marble ask you to date Lindsey so you could talk her out of the lawsuit?”

Before I can speak, Marble’s sedan skids to a stop in the middle of the street. He opens the rear door. “Jason!”

I shove my way through the reporters and climb into the back. “What the hell is going on?”

“Lindsey was on Good Morning America. She’s sold the movie rights to her story for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Her story?”

“Growing up in foster care, her life on the streets, how you two met, the kidnapping.” He pauses, then asks, “Did you sleep with her?”

“No.”

I imagine what it would have been like if I had. As we reach Highway 54 and put El Paso behind us, I think out loud. “I guess she got what she wanted in the end, a nice fat check and lots of attention to make up for being ignored as a child. I just wish she wouldn’t share all that attention with me.”

Marble leans back in his seat. “Welcome to the club.”

“What club?”

“The club where delicate young women prey on strong, virile men.”

“And truth is auctioned off to the highest bidder?”

“Some days I think the world is turning into one big reality show.” He leans forward and tells the driver to floor it.

I glance over my shoulder at the van that’s tailing us. A man hangs out the window and aims his camera at the back of our sedan as we pick up speed and zoom off into the desert.

Copyright ©2006 by Terry Barbieri

Copyright ©2006 by Barbara Mayor