Gary Alexander - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 6. Whole No. 511, December 1985

He went to the Sheriff’s Office, third floor Courthouse, and got word from a deputy to call Milt Josten at the D. A.’s office. He crossed the hall and Josten asked what he had on Frank Reese. He told him.

Josten sighed. “Not this time, then.”

Weare called the jail and said to cut Reese loose, adding, “Tell him I’ll be in the basement restaurant.”

He sat at a far table with coffee. Reese strolled in, looked around, spotted him, got coffee, and ambled over. “Morning, Mr. Weare.” He patted his hip. “They gave me my knife back.” Weare hadn’t thought they wouldn’t — it was his, and more or less legal.

“What do you want to talk about?” He slouched at ease across the table.

“Your first ticket in five years, you said.” Reese nodded, gave him a slice of wry through the bear. “Poor time to get one.” Reese said anytime was a poor time. It would cost him forty dollars.

Weare said, “Five miles north of CooCoo’s is the bridge turn. Cross the bridge and 80 East goes toward the Sierras.”

Reese looked puzzled. “So?”

“The cop stopped you. I got involved, Gale went to Chope, you went to jail — nobody went to the Sierras.”

Reese scratched his beard. “What about the Sierras?”

“I’m just improvising. This is a scene in your TV show. You’re just out of jail, we’re having coffee, I’m asking some roundabout cop questions — okay?”

Reese shrugged a hand.

“What if last night you hadn’t been stopped, had kept driving, no plan, just a feeling that the game was expanding? You don’t know why, but you feel excitement, like maybe something big is going to happen. You’ve crossed the bridge and you’re on 80 East. A while later it’s the mountains, darkness, steep cliffs — nobody but you with your knife and little Gale taped up in back.”

Reese licked hi lips and watched Weare witheyes that had got somewhat cloudy.

“Suddenly you know why you’ve come. The three or four other times you played this game were rehearsals, dry-runs for tonight. This is the night you’re going to find out the hard and bloody way if you have inside you what it takes to be a real-life star.”

The clouds were darker. Weare said mildly, “I’m improvising is all.”

Reese’s voice was thick. “This is crazy.”

“What is?”

“What you’re hinting. It was a game. All right, a sick game — I won’t play it again. But that’s all. It wasn’t going to turn into anything vicious.”

Weare said, “A power game. Manson played power games. So did a guy named Leopold and his friend Loeb. Sometimes without realizing it, the guy loses control, the game takes charge. One move on the board — the game says make it. The guy makes it.”

He let that hang a half minute, sipping coffee and gazing at the cloudy eyes. Then, “Near CooCoo’s, did you feel you were starting to lose control? Did you say, I’ve got to stop this, now! — and cut in front of the cop?”

“You’re saying I did it on purpose?”

“Asking.”

Reese muttered, “I never say him. I don’t think I saw him.”

Weare got up. Reese held up a hand and Weare waited. Reese said, “If you hadn’t showed up he’d have ticketed me, let me go — what then? What about the game then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’d have been back in control. Or maybe the game would have gone on to wherever it was going — Sierras, maybe?”

Reese said slowly, “You’re a scary guy, Mr. Weare.”

“Am I? Or is that just a good line to finish this scene?”

He gave a farewell knock on the table, walked to the elevators, didn’t look back.

A couple of minutes later, he was at his desk, going over the scene. Maybe Reese had got a ticket on purpose. Or maybe he’d never seen the cruiser.

Maybe if the cop and then Weare hadn’t got involved, the game would have played itself out a few miles from the Nut Haven, Reese stripping the tape from Gale and the two having some laughs about hos shook-up she’d been.

Or maybe it would have carried on into the Sierras or some other remote place and ended with Gale’s remains left there, and Reese, blooded, on the threshold of the career he’d maybe always yearned for — a real-life bad dude, a killer for pay.

If that wasn’t already his career.

Maybe, maybe, maybe — Weare gave a low moan. He was sick of Reese, of himself — questions, more questions, footless speculations, no answers. He knew no more about Reese now than he had two months ago in the donut shop.

Instead of the unerring detective in Dial M, he was the inept detective in The Frank Reese Show, if that’s what it was.

He told his mind to drop Reese. His mind complied, chanting dopily, “Father was a lizard, we lost him in a blizzard.”

That gave him a little lift and a smile, both welcome. He’d stop stewing about Reese, pick up the problem of Gale.

He needed background facts, meaning another talk with her. She might balk, probably would — but at worst he’d pick up some hints he could work with.

Ten minutes later he was on the freeway northbound, feeling better, remembering how last night had started, with him keying on Reese’s fixed look in the side mirror, and following up. If he hadn’t, how would the night have ended?

He didn’t know. But one thing he knew — the small, brown-haired girl, Gale or whoever, was at Chope right now, not elsewhere.

Did that make him not completely inept?

Maybe.

She strode along the King’s Road in knee-high oxblood boots, denim trousers tucked in, satin baseball jacket sporting a number on the sleeve, her hair streaked gunmetal to shoulder length, her big face vacant as she turned her eyes to the traffic. Tony Logan set down the bricks he was holding and stopped pretending he was doing anything else but watching her pass by.

“Take a look at that,” Logan said to Ernie Colman, who was mixing cement on a sheet of plywood.

Ernie gave the girl his blue-eyed assessment. “She’s not all there,” was his comment.

“Notice the way she looks only at bus drivers and guys in lorries. She’s checking the reaction of the working class.”

“Better invite her to the meeting, then,” Colman said.

Logan left the building site and ran after her in plaster-patterned trousers and broken boots. He stood just behind her at an intersection waiting for the light to change. He heard a humming sound coming from her — not a tune, only random notes. The head turned slowly from side to side, observing the occupants of passing vehicles and people walking by. Her smile was transient, like sunlight on a day of patchy cloud.

The light changed, and when she stepped forward her boot missed the curb, giving Logan an opportunity to take her arm. “Nearly a nasty accident,” he said.

“Sorry, I’m not concentrating.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Stand over here, out of the flow.” He guided her into a doorway. “Been in the pub?”

“I wish it were only that.” She showed him the face of a troubled child. “I can’t remember who I am.”

“Have you got identification in your handbag?”

“Yes, but that isn’t the point. I can look and discover who I am and where I live. I want to know without doing that.” She drew herself up. “Have we met? You could be an acquaintance and I wouldn’t know.”

“Afraid not. My name is Tony Logan. My partner and I are working on that house across the road. Converting it into flats. We saw you walk by and took an interest.”

She closed her eyes and slumped against the wall. “Forgive me,” she said. “These blackouts leave me weak.”