Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 (10 page)

Beneath the bridge, the man’s clothes are ragged, soiled, from living on the streets, in dumpsters and under bridges. Living in the dark, dirty places of society. One of the feral humans who live below the radar. Below the surface.

He’s on his back, lying perpendicular to the railroad tracks that run beneath him, one rail under his shoulders, the other under his knees. His face is dark, covered by a matted beard and skin that has been leathered by sun and wind. A black stocking cap remains on his head, having somehow managed to survive the fall in place, nearly blending into a shiny halo of blood. His arms are out to the sides, as if he had tried to fly. Black lines look like tethers on his wrists.

3:28 A.M.

Legs splayed.

Back aching.

Head to the side, arms surrounding it in a broken halo.

I lift myself up to my elbows. The room is dark except for the red numbers on the clock and a gray glow bleeding around the edges of the curtains. I wipe sweat from my forehead. My T-shirt collar is wet, my pillow damp. I can smell lilacs.

Phelps answers on the fourth ring, his voice a nearly unrecognizable croak. “Phelps.”

“I’ve seen another one.”

He clears his throat. His bed creaks from movement. Him or someone else?

“Professor.”

“Yes. This one is on the railroad tracks under the Dinkytown Bikeway Connection.”

“The what?”

“The old Northern Pacific Bridge that runs between the east and the west banks at the U. It’s a bike path now.”

“Which bank is the body on?”

“The east bank. On the railroad tracks below it.”

“Do you recognize him?”

“He looks homeless.”

“Are you sure he’s dead? Those guys can sleep anywhere.”

“His wrists were bloody. Just like the others.”

Phelps hesitates. He wants to stay in bed. “Are you sure about this one?”

“So sure I can smell the lilacs.”

The piano, a Baldwin Acrosonic spinet, was my mother’s. She was a music teacher. I was her student. McKenna was learning to play, too. She was my student.

By eight years old she was better than I had been at that age.

I loved sitting in the other room listening to her practice. The mistakes. The breakthroughs. The moments of near perfection. The innate challenge of it. The will to succeed. To prevail.

The lessons of life found in something as simple as “Chopsticks.”

An hour after I called him about the third one, Phelps was at my door. This time without Lewis. I offered him some coffee. He held the mug with both hands, as if he needed its heat. He was out of uniform, wearing running shoes, navy blue athletic wind pants with three white stripes down the legs, and a navy blue baseball jacket with white leather sleeves. His skin looked pale under the fluorescent kitchen light. A light that buzzed like a fly caught in a mason jar.

“Just as you described it,” he said.

“How long ago did it happen?”

“An hour or so.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do.

“Mr. Enright, we need you to see these things before they happen. That would really help us.” He wasn’t smiling.

Neither was I.

“What’s odd,” he continued, “is that the bodies are under bridges that seem to be progressing in this direction. First, the Short Line Bridge. Then, the Washington Avenue Bridge. Now, the Great Northern. All moving upstream. Icarus seems to be moving this way.”

“I know. I think he’s coming for me.”

Phelps’s eyes widened. “Do you know who he is?”

“No.” I hesitated, not sure he would understand. But I had to tell somebody. “I think he knows that I can see what he does.”

Phelps nodded with unconvincing concern, then gave me a pat on the shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, there may not be a pattern here. He missed the Franklin Avenue Bridge.”

“That’s true,” I said, “but it may have been too busy there. The others aren’t open to car traffic.”

Phelps nodded again, his concern more real this time. Then he tried to smile. “You have quite an eye for detail, Mr. Enright. You should be a cop.”

I struggled to smile back, wondering why it was that a detective would need my insight. Weren’t detectives the ones who were supposed to be trained to think like killers?

“Man Dies in Fall from RR Bridge”—
Star Tribune,
April 8, 2008.

“U Student Dies in Fall” –
Star Tribune
, April 15, 2008.

“Transient Falls to Death”—
Star Tribune,
April 23, 2008.

“Icarus Strikes Again”—
Star Tribune,
April 29, 2008.

The fourth one:

He wears a royal blue polo shirt with a logo on the left breast. It’s an employee shirt, the kind worn at a gas-station convenience store. It’s raised up, showing the man’s belly. Not a big belly, but more than should be there. A college beer belly. Below that, khaki pants and sandals. It’s an unseasonably warm night.

His body lies at an unnatural angle, his back broken sideways from hitting a bridge abutment before hitting the ground. No blood this time, his injuries all internal. All except for the bloody rings around his wrists.

3:28 A.M.

Arms over my head.

Broken halo.

Legs splayed.

Back aching.

Sweat.

Fear.

Nausea.

I reach for the phone.

“The Tenth Avenue Bridge this time,” I tell Phelps. “North end, near the Amoco.”

“I’m going to send Detective Lewis over. Is that okay?”

“He won’t believe me.”

“He’s a good cop, Mr. Enright.”

I hear the bed squeak, then a voice.

A woman’s.

Soft.

Pleading.

Lewis was not happy about being up at four-thirty in the morning. He stood on the doorstep with a large paper cup of coffee from a gas-station convenience store. It wasn’t for me. It had been two weeks since I’d seen him. After the second murder. Four weeks since the first day. The day they searched my house.

“Phelps told me to come.”

After I let him in, he strolled slowly around the room, his tired eyes searching, only glancing at me now and then to make sure I was still there. As if he thought I might flee. He didn’t say anything as he moved. Finally, he came to a stop in the center of my concrete room and leaned against the back of the wing chair. I stood in the kitchen behind the elongated island. The steam from his coffee cup rose between us.

His eyes settled on me and stayed there. It was the look of someone whose natural inclination was to intimidate.

Suspects.

Witnesses.

Coworkers.

Spouses.

Psychics.

But I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me. I had nothing to hide.

“I’ve watched you,” he said before taking a relaxed sip from his cup.

“Excuse me?”

“I tried to get the department to put a twenty-four-hour surveillance on you, but they wouldn’t. Couldn’t afford the overtime. Too many budget cuts. Apparently in this economy the budget is more important than four lives.”

He walked up to the island that stood between us and set down his coffee cup. “So I did it myself. Sat outside all night for six days straight, watching this place. On my own time.”

“And you never saw me kill anyone, did you?”

“No. But the seventh night I fell asleep in my car.” He hesitated, his eyes on me, but his focus inside. “I fell asleep. And what happened? A body was found under the Washington Avenue Bridge.”

“That’s not evidence of anything. That’s a coincidence.” I felt the heat building inside me. Then a thought struck me. “Maybe you’re Icarus.”

He ignored me. “I still watch you. Not every night, but most nights.”

The heat intensified. “You can blame me for the killings if you want, Lewis. You can blame me for your bad career or your bad kids or your bad marriage or any other bad things you have in your life, but it doesn’t make me guilty. I have a . . . I don’t know what to call it. A gift. A curse. Whatever it is, I can see things that have happened.” Tears followed in the wake of the heat. “And I hate it. And on those nights you’re sitting outside, I’m sitting in here fighting sleep, fighting to avoid what might come when I wake up. And it’s killing me. Can’t you see that? Icarus is killing me, too.”

I turned away from him, the tears streaming down my face, my breath coming in fitful waves.

When I turned back, I expected scepticism.

What I got was nothing.

Lewis was gone. But he’d left his coffee cup, still steaming, on the edge of the island.

I heard the front door click shut.

Neither hard nor soft.

Just a door clicking shut on a lingering darkness.

It has been roughly twenty hours since Lewis left. It’s pushing two in the morning. I’m battling sleep.

I played a note on the piano. The first note I’d played since August.

Since the collapse.

Thought it might help me stay awake.

Pressed one key.

The most basic key.

Middle C.

The point between treble and bass.

The tipping point of the piano.

It was soundless. The ivory key stayed down.

No tension in the string.

Dead.

I feel the urge to check it. To fix it. To give it sound again. To bring it back to life.

But the shrine sits on top of it. I’d have to move my family to get to the vertical strings. To get at the problems inside.

I’m hesitating.

Should I touch the shrine? Move it? Remove it? What would that mean? Was I beginning to heal? Beginning to move on?

I’m afraid.

Afraid to touch something of my own creation. Something that has become a sacred space. Afraid of what trespassing into that sacred space will bring.

The Egyptians feared curses; the Lakota, angry gods.

What do I fear?

The silent key haunts me.

Music has always been in my soul.

The thought of a quiet string—a broken string—distracts me. Has its own hold on me. Creates another kind of fear in me. Fear of silence.

Silence where beauty once was.

Silence that whispers to me.

Whispers I haven’t heard in eight months.

Has something changed in me? Is the old me still there?

But they’re not the whispers I used to hear eight months ago, before the collapse, whispers of hopes and dreams.

What I hear now are whispers of silence.

Whispers of trouble.

I have to fix it.

I have to move the shrine and see what damage lies inside . . .

Icarus has come for me . . .

I found him in the silence of the piano . . .

In the silence of the cruel subconscious . . .

Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet:

If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,

And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,

Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.

Who does it, then?

2:28 A.M.

Phelps didn’t answer. His phone was off.

I left a message. Told him where he would find Icarus.

The last one:

The body will lie within the confines of Hennepin Island Park, at the base of the fourth abutment of the Stone Arch Bridge. Time of death will be 3:28 A.M.

The body will be on its back, legs splayed, face turned to the side, arms encircling the head like a broken halo. His back will be broken. The wrists will be bleeding, still tied with a D string from an old Baldwin Acrosonic piano. Icarus will have left the string tied on because there will be no reason to hide any more evidence. Now that his identity has been uncovered.

A Schwinn mountain bike will be resting against the railing on the bridge decking directly above the body. The piano strings used by Icarus—a C, an A, a G, and an E—to bind the wrists of the other victims will be dangling from the handlebars next to a fanny pack. Inside the fanny pack will be a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson, the gun Icarus used to persuade his victims to submit.

Revelations from inside the heart of a silent spinet piano
.

There you go, Phelps. I saw one before it happened. Like Auden’s expensive delicate ship, I saw Icarus fall.

And like that ship, I had somewhere to get to and—stepping from the railing of a bridge that did not collapse—sailed calmly on . . .

“Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden, currently collected in
Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright ©1938 by W. H. Auden, published in print throughout North America and electronically by permission of the Wylie Agency L.L.C.

Copyright © 2011 by C. J. Harper

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Fiction

Method Murder

by Simon Brett

Simon Brett’s latest mystery set in the fictional village of Fethering, Bones Under the Beach Hut, has just been published by Five Star Press. The previous book in the series, The Shooting in the Shop, earned this remark in Booklist’s starred review: “. . . with the talented Brett, the character clash and the amazingly high homicide rate for a tiny village come across as both brilliant and perfectly reasonable. The secret is in Brett’s range. He moves effortlessly from sharp, pitiless physical description . . . to flashes of compassionate insight.”

As an actor, Kenny Mountford yearned to be taken seriously. Since finishing at drama school, he’d done all right. A bit of theatre work, but mostly television, which was good news, because it paid better. However, a continuous round of small parts in The Bill, Heartbeat, and Midsomer Murders had left him, by the time he reached his early thirties, with a deep sense of dissatisfaction. It wasn’t celebrity that he craved, it was respectability. He wanted to be able to hold his head high amongst other actors when the discussion moved on to the issues of the “truth” and “integrity” of their profession.

And really that meant doing more theatre. For the more obscure and impenetrable the theatre work, the higher the integrity of the actors involved. This meant, in effect, working with one of a small list of trendy directors, directors who didn’t pander to the public by making their work accessible or simply entertaining. So Kenny Mountford set out to meet and ingratiate himself with such a director.

It was a good time for him to make the move. A stint playing the barman on a successful sitcom had bolstered his income to the point that he had paid off the mortgage on his Notting Hill house. And, besides, his live-in actress girlfriend, Lesley-Jane Walden, was not only a nice bit of arm candy to satisfy the gossip columns, she was also making a good whack as the latest femme fatale in a long-running soap opera. Her hunger for celebrity was currently satisfied, and they weren’t in need of money, so Kenny Mountford was in a position where he could afford to pursue art for art’s sake.

The latest enfant terrible of British theatre was a director called Charlie Fenton. Like many of his breed, he had a great contempt for the written word, rejecting texts by playwrights in favour of improvisation. In the many television and newspaper interviews he gave, he regularly pontificated about “the straitjacket of conformity” and derided “the crowd-pleasing lack of originality demonstrated by the constant revival of classic theatre texts.” One somewhat sceptical interviewer had asked if this meant Charlie Fenton considered one of his improvised pieces to be better than a play by Shakespeare and, though hotly denying the suggestion, the director made it fairly clear that that actually was his view.

What Charlie Fenton was most famous for was his in-depth approach to characterisation. Though claiming to have developed his own system, he owed more than he cared to admit to the pioneering work in New York of Lee Strasberg, the originator of the “Method.” This was a style of acting which aimed for greater authenticity, and its exponents had included Meryl Streep, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, and even, surprisingly, Marilyn Monroe. Rather than building up a character from the outside and assembling a collection of mannerisms, a “Method actor” would try so to immerse himself in the identity of the person he was playing that he virtually became that person.

So if an actor were playing a milkman in a Charlie Fenton production, the director would send the poor unfortunate off to spend three months delivering milk. Someone with the role of a Muslim terrorist would be obliged to convert to Islam. An actress playing a prostitute would have to turn tricks in the streets around King’s Cross (and almost definitely service Charlie Fenton, too, so that he could check she was doing it properly). And one poor unfortunate had once spent three months in a basement blindfolded and chained to a radiator for a proposed production about hostage-taking. (It would only have been three weeks, but Charlie Fenton neglected to inform the actor when he abandoned the idea.)

Once his casts had immersed themselves in their characters, weeks of improvisation in rehearsal rooms would ensue, until the director edited what he considered to be the best bits into a script. After the production had opened, this text, based on the actors’ lines, would then be published in the form of a book, for which Charlie Fenton took all the royalties.

The carefully leaked details of his rehearsal methods only added to the director’s mystique, and very few people realised that ordering actors around in this way was just part of Charlie Fenton’s ongoing power trip. The lengthy build-up to his productions was nothing to do with the quality of theatre that resulted; it was all about his ego. Also, the total control he exercised over his companies proved to be a good way of getting pretty young actresses into bed. (He had a wife and family somewhere in the background, but spent little time with them.)

Awestruck accounts of the director’s procedures, tantrums, and bullying ensured that any actor in search of theatrical respectability was desperate to work with Charlie Fenton. And so it was with Kenny Mountford.

They finally met after a first night of a National Theatre King Lear. The play wasn’t really Lesley-Jane Walden’s cup of tea, but it was a first night, after all. Any occasion when there was a chance of her being photographed and appearing in the tabloids suited her very well indeed (though she had been a little disappointed by the lack of paparazzi down at the South Bank). As soon as the final curtain was down, Charlie Fenton was at the bar, surrounded by toadies, who hung on every word as he proceeded to list Shakespeare’s shortcomings as a dramatist. Kenny and Lesley-Jane had gone to the performance with one of their actor friends who had once spent six months picking tomatoes and learning Polish in order to take part in a Charlie Fenton production about migrant workers. And the friend effected the coveted introduction.

The director, who sported a silly little goatee and grey ponytail, favoured Lesley-Jane with a coruscating smile. “I’ve seen some of your work,” he said. “It’s amazing how a really good actor can shine even amidst the dross of a soap opera.”

She blushed and smiled prettily at this. Which wasn’t difficult for Lesley-Jane Walden. She was so pretty that she did everything prettily.

Kenny Mountford felt encouraged. If Charlie Fenton had recognised his girlfriend’s quality in a soap opera, the director might look equally favourably at his work in a sitcom. But that illusion was not allowed to last for long. Looking superciliously at him over half-moon glasses, Charlie Fenton said, “Oh yes, I know your name. Still paying the mortgage rather publicly on the telly, are you?”

“Maybe,” Kenny replied, “but I am about to change direction.”

“Towards what?”

“More serious theatre work.”

“Oh yes?” the director sneered. “That’s what they all say.”

“No, I mean it.”

“Kenny, I don’t think you’d recognise ‘more serious theatre work’ if it jumped up and bit you on the bum. You have clearly been destined from birth for a life of well-paid mediocrity.”

“I disagree. I’m genuinely committed to doing more serious work.”

“Really?” The director scrutinised the actor with something approaching contempt. “I don’t think you could hack it.”

“Try me.”

Charlie Fenton was silent for a moment of appraisal. Then he said, “I bet you wouldn’t have the dedication to work with me.”

“Are you offering me a job?”

“If I were, I’m pretty confident you couldn’t do it.”

“Again I say: Try me.”

Another long silence ensued. Then the director announced, “I’m starting work on a new project. About criminal gangs in London.”

“What would it involve for the actors?”

“Deep cover. Infiltrating the gangs.”

Kenny was aware of the slight admonitory shake of Lesley-Jane’s head, but he ignored the signal. “I’m up for it,” he said.

“I’ll phone you with further details,” the director announced in a magisterial manner that suggested the audience was at an end.

“Shall I give you my mobile number?”

“Land line. I don’t do mobiles.” Clearly another eccentricity, which was indulged like all Charlie Fenton’s eccentricities. He flashed another smile at Lesley-Jane, then looked hard at Kenny, his lips curled with scepticism. “If you can come back to me in three months as a member of a London gang, you’ve got a part in the show.”

“You’re on,” said Kenny Mountford.

Lesley-Jane wasn’t keen on the idea. If Kenny was going to go underground, he wouldn’t be able to squire her to all the premieres, launches, and first nights her ego craved. Their relationship was fine while he too had a high-profile television face, but she didn’t want to end up with a boyfriend nobody recognised. She also knew that her own work situation was precarious. Young femmes fatales in soap operas had a short shelf life. One of the scriptwriters had already hinted that her character might have a fatal car crash in store. There was a race against time for her to announce that she was leaving the show before the public heard that she’d been pushed off it. And then she’d need another series to move on to, and there weren’t currently many signs of that being offered. At such a time, she’d be more than usually dependent on the reflected fame of her partner. (She had always followed the old show-business advice: If you can’t be famous yourself, then make sure you go to bed with someone who is.) The last thing she wanted at that moment was for Kenny to disappear off the social radar for some months while he immersed himself in gangland culture.

But Lesley-Jane’s remonstrations were ignored. Her boyfriend’s mind was now focused on only one thing: proving his seriousness as an actor to Charlie Fenton.

And to do that he had to infiltrate a London gang. Which actually turned out to be surprisingly easy. He didn’t have to hang around Shepherd’s Bush Green for long before he was approached by someone with a heavy Russian accent and asked if he wanted to buy drugs. After a couple of weeks of making regular purchases of heroin (which he didn’t use but stockpiled in his bathroom cabinet), he only had to default on payments twice to be hustled into a car with tinted windows, blindfolded, and taken off to meet the organisation’s frighteners.

They didn’t have to hurt him to get their money. Kenny Mountford had the cash ready with him and handed it over as soon as his blindfold was removed. He found himself seated on a chair in a windowless cellar, loomed over by the two heavies who’d snatched him and facing a thin-faced man in an expensive suit. From their conversation in the car, he’d deduced that his abductors were called Vasili and Vladimir. They addressed the thin-faced man as Fyodor. All three spoke English with a heavy accent from somewhere in the former Soviet Union.

“So if you had the money all the time, why didn’t you pay up?” asked the man in the suit, whose effortless authority identified him as the gang’s leader.

“Maybe he enjoys being beaten to a pulp,” suggested the heavy who Kenny was pretty sure was called Vasili.

“Maybe,” said Kenny Mountford with a cool that he’d spent three years at drama school perfecting, “but that’s not actually the reason. I just thought this was a good way of getting to meet you, Fyodor.”

“Do you know who I am?” the man asked, intrigued.

“I only know your name, but it doesn’t take much intelligence to work out that you’re higher up this organisation than the two goons who brought me here.”

Kenny felt the men on either side of him stiffen and was aware of their fists bunching, but he remembered his concentration exercises and didn’t flinch.

Fyodor raised a hand to pacify his enforcers. “You are right. I control the organisation.”

“And am I allowed to know what it’s called?”

He smiled a crooked smile. “The Simferopol Boys. From where we started our operations. Do you know where Simferopol is?” Kenny shook his head. “It is in the Crimea. Southern Ukraine. Near to Yalta. I assume you have not been there?” Another shake of the head. “Well, we did what we could over there, but the pickings were small, and there were a lot of . . . entrenched interests. Turf wars, dangerous. In London our life is easier.”

“And how many are there in the Simferopol Boys?”

“Twenty, maybe thirty, it depends. Sometimes people become untrustworthy and have to be eliminated.”

Kenny was aware of a reaction from Vasili and Vladimir. Clearly elimination was the part of the job they enjoyed.

“And do you just deal in drugs?”

Fyodor spread his hands wide in an encompassing gesture. “Drugs . . . prostitution . . . protection rackets . . . loan-sharking . . . The Simferopol Boys are a multifunction organisation.” Then came the question that Kenny knew couldn’t be delayed much longer. “But why do you want to know this? Curiosity?”

“More than just curiosity.”

“Good. If it was just curiosity, I think Vasili and Vladimir would have to eliminate you straightaway.” The gang boss smiled a thin smile. “They may well have to eliminate you straightaway, whatever the reason for your enquiries. You could be a cop, for all we know.”

“I can assure you I am not a cop.”

“But that’s exactly what you would say if you were a cop.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Mr. Mountford, I am not here to chop logic with you. I am a busy man.” He looked at his watch. “I have a meeting shortly with a senior civil servant in the Home Office. He is helping me with some visa applications for members of my extended family in Simferopol. Now please, will you tell me why you are here? And why I shouldn’t just hand you straight over to Vasili and Vladimir for elimination?”

Kenny Mountford took a deep breath. There was no doubt that he had put himself in very real danger. But, as he had that daunting thought, he couldn’t help also feeling a warm glow. Charlie Fenton would be so impressed by the lengths he had gone in his quest for authenticity.