Perri O'Shaughnessy - Sinister Shorts

(с) 2006

MY SISTER MARY AND I BEGAN collaborating on writing legal suspense novels twelve years ago, using the pen name of “Perri.” From the first book, we found that Perri had a distinct style: optimistic, fast-paced, no-nonsense, and seldom given to fanciful literary gestures. However, we both knew that Perri had another side: a darker, more divided self aching to appear.

In fact, just before our first novel was published, Perri had published her first short story, “The Long Walk,” a paranoid tale about a murder investigation that takes place on a hike in the Berkeley Hills, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. This first outing earned Perri an encouraging award from the Mystery Writers of America and begins this collection.

Many short stories followed over the years. Like Perri's novels, they were always about crime, but we experimented with many different writing styles and explored the grotesque, the hidden, and the frightening rather than the legal landscape of our Nina Reilly novels. We published some of them in Ellery Queen, online, and in literary journals, but others lay moldering in a box in my humid Hawaiian garage, or stashed in the back of Mary's file cabinet in California. The stories often seemed to write themselves or fall from dreams.

With our short stories, we each felt free to imprint an individual style. When Mary presented me with a new story, like “The Furnace Man,” about a housewife whose obsession with keeping her husband's love leads to bizarre consequences, I gave it a light once-over, but knew better than to touch the style. The same went for my story about a man in a wet suit going over a waterfall, “Dead Money.” I dreamed the whole story one night, plot point after plot point, and Mary checked it over and let it go.

Only one story in this book was a fifty-fifty collaboration like our novels: “Juggernaut,” maybe because Nina Reilly, the lawyer in our legal novels, makes an appearance. We'll let you guess which one of us was the main writer of “Tiny Angels,” “The Second Head,” “To Still the Beating of Her Heart,” “The Couple Behind the Curtain,” and “The Young Lady.” Then see if you can guess which one of us wrote “Sandstorm,” “Chocolate Milkshake,” “A Grandmother's Tale,” and “Lemons.”

Two of the stories are stylistic homages to far better writers. “His Master's Hand,” in which Peter the Gravedigger goes looking for Mozart's grave in Vienna, bears more than a passing resemblance to the style of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground . “Gertrude Stein Solves a Mystery” is a mostly true recounting of a strange incident in the great writer's life, written in my personal version of Steinese.

Other figures important to us blew into stories like “Success Without College,” in which Paul van Wagoner, the investigator in our series, helps a victim in a shooting come out ahead, and “O'Shay's Special Case,” inspired by the stories our late brother, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, a lawyer who represented injured workers in Salinas, California, used to tell us.

In all, these stories represent a different kind of collaboration between Mary and me. We egged each other on, helped each other, and played around. We hope you enjoy the result as much as we enjoyed writing them.

Oh, and Perri, who of course will get all the credit, thanks you for reading, from the bottom of her black little heart.

Best,

Pam and Mary O'Shaughnessy for “Perri”

At eleven the phone buzzed. Fleck had been dreaming, gazing out the window at the busy Atlanta street scene four floors below. He punched the conference button and heard the loud tinny voice of Franklin Bell calling from California. “Hey, John,” Bell said. “You are a hard man to track down.”

“You found me now,” Fleck said. He had been relaxed; now he was uneasy. He straightened his back and the action down there snapped into sharp focus.

A woman pushing a stroller paused to extricate an angry child while Bell talked through the speakerphone.

“I got a job for you,” he was saying. “The firm has a problem.”

“I'm listening.” His eyes stayed with the mother on the sidewalk. The child struggled out of her arms, made a break for the street.

“Just how tied up are you in Atlanta?”

“Depends,” Fleck said. “What have you got?” By now he was standing, watching the woman tear after her kid.

A roaring semi blasted through Fleck's sight line. The woman launched herself into a tackle, arms out. When the truck had passed, his eyes searched for her again and found her dragging her child across the sidewalk. She picked him up, smacked his butt, and tethered him back into the stroller, tears streaming down her cheeks. Fleck sat down, turning to face the wall.

Bell said, “Pete was talking about you the other day. He liked your work on the Ibanez fraud case. I told him you were in Atlanta. He said call you. Confidentially, of course.”

Law firms were like that. Discretion was the big virtue, even bigger than turning misery into money. Fleck didn't like Franklin Bell, but he liked Pete Altschuler, Bell 's boss, a senior partner at Stevenson Safik & Morris, Berkeley 's best-known law firm. Pete had represented him in the divorce and taken his middle-of-the-night calls, calls he was ashamed of now.

So he waited while Bell moseyed through the Berkeley weather report-hot and sunny-and talked about the fraud case, and Pete's mild heart attack, and the latest craziness on Telegraph Avenue, a shoot-out at one of the college bars, until he got back around to the reason for his call, which was to ask Fleck to catch the Delta red-eye Sunday night and meet him and Pete Monday morning to look into something important.

“I've got four more weeks on contract here,” Fleck said.

He was working a temporary security job at one of the Peachtree Plaza skyscrapers. He had been in Atlanta for several months, and he liked it, the jazz, the bars, the style. In fact, he was thinking about moving here. In Atlanta, people of color could feel comfortable, could forget the race issue much of the time. In Berkeley, his hometown in California, it would always be black folks in the flats and white folks in the hills, white guilt and condescension, black rage. His ex-wife had been white. She still lived in their house on the old Grove Street, on the borderline.

“Interrupt it for a couple weeks,” Bell said. He kept talking, wheedling, persuading.

Fleck let him talk. His mind returned to the memory he had been caressing. Last night in the candlelight, and Charisse in his bed.

In his small apartment for the first time, shy with each other, they had moved together to a slow song, bodies slick with heat where they touched. Charisse had started it, dancing him toward a blowing curtain and then past it, to the door of his bedroom. He had forced himself to follow her, lighting the candles by the bed, lifting her onto the pillows. He meant to hold back his emotion, but he couldn't help himself. Groaning, he had buried himself in her soft flickers.

Toward morning, brief thunder and lightning filled the sky off his balcony. Fleck admired Charisse's body with his hands. She stirred, mumbling something. Thick drops splashed against the glass. She sat up in bed, reached over to the bedside table for her glasses, wrapped her arms around her knees, and peered out, unself-conscious.