“And will they go after you?” asked Neil, because he saw this, too, in the looking glass: the reason for Craig’s confession, the logic behind Anthony Brooks’s court performance, his own surprising role as unwitting collusionist. Saw all the careful but necessary card-stacking Craig, Barbara, and Brooks had craftily undertaken in order to protect Christine.
“All they have is your testimony,” said Craig. “And they can’t convict me on that. Not when there’s so much conflicting evidence. Thanks for looking after Christine. She really likes you.”
“She does?”
Craig looked away. “We did it for Christine,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you?”
Yes, he did. What he didn’t understand was how he could have been so obtuse. How he could have been duped.
“What about the jurisprudence of the thing?” asked Neil, still uncomfortable.
Craig shrugged apologetically. “Christine’s going to have her life,” he said. “Isn’t that jurisprudence enough?”
The calm returned. But it wasn’t like the old calm. Neil sat in his studio trying to find that deft stroke or two, the elusive brushwork that would render his family of mallards with the color and form his collectors had come to expect from him. Not like the old calm, because Paul Gatt was dead. He tried a dab of cobalt blue to darken the green, but that just made the drake look like a gander. And never had he seen a gander in the marsh. Putting mallards in the marsh had been a stretch in the first place. He shook his head, his brush poised, and thought of Paul. Nothing would change the terrible but commonplace sequence: he and Craig out with the Gatts, those vulgar shooters, and the simmering inclinations of Craig toward Barbara. Nothing would stop those deadly dominoes from falling: Paul like a bull, his daughter like a Jersey Devil, and the Wiltshire Staysharp like a Turkish thrust.
He put his brush down. He stared at his picture. And he knew he was going to have to start over. He liked the marsh. But the mallards didn’t go. He unclamped the watercolor from his easel. He would do the marsh again. But this time he would do it in darker tones. Tones that would capture the hidden meaning of... of all this. He pinned a fresh sheet to his easel, the best, Arches 300-lb. hot-press, knowing that doubt would remain an unwelcome guest in his Bohemian sanctuary from now on. He lightly penciled a sketch of the marsh. He raised the water level. But the problem of the empty space in the lower left corner remained. He quickly sketched in the great blue heron. And took solace in knowing that he had at last solved the problem.
The great blue heron, she of the Payne’s gray and cerulean blue, had come home to the reeds, lilies, and shallows of the marsh. And in his rendering of the bird, he again found the soul-sustaining satisfaction of a pure and simple labor. Christine Gatt was a killer, Paul Gatt was dead, and Craig would remain forever changed. But at least in his own inner world, the world of the studio, where the rhythms of life were slow, measured, and certain, and potential found its form in the soft illumination of the north light, he could weather any gale, sweeten discord to harmony, and carry his new doubt not as a personal sorrow but as a way to better understand his own personal cosmos.
Whatever It Takes
by Benjamin M. Schutz
Edgar Award winner Benjamin M. Schutz described his latest story for us this way: “It is a day in the life of two young private eye/process servers — Hardy Boys for the nineties. It is the product of a summer listening to my sons, two young private eye/process servers, learn bow the real world operates as the bearers of bad tidings.”
“Wake up, Sean, Mickey called. We’ve got work.”
His brother, Matthew, prodded him with a toe.
“You need a shower, too. You’ve still got paint in your hair.”
Sean Ellis grunted but didn’t move. He entered each day with the ease of a twelve-pound breech birth.
“You better get a move on. I’m not waiting. I’ll take all the work myself.”
“Like hell you will.” He rolled over, swung his legs over the side, and followed his brother out of the bedroom. He went into the shower and watched his brother go into the kitchen.
Matthew Ellis opened the refrigerator and took out two bagels and a block of cream cheese. Dropping a bagel into the toaster, he reached up and got down two coffee mugs and poured a cup for himself and one for his brother. He carried his cup, milked and sugared, into the living room.
His mother lay asleep on the sofa. Matthew walked around the living room chairs and turned off the television. More and more often he found her asleep in her clothes in the living room, as if she had only enough energy to get inside the front door.
Chris Ellis was a petite woman, barely over a hundred pounds. Her son thought she was slipping from lean to frail but hoped that he was wrong. Her blanket had slipped down to her waist and her book was open on her chest.
He sipped his coffee and looked at himself in the mirror over the sofa. Stocky and muscular, he was dressed in khaki shorts and a dark blue T-shirt from his stint at the medical examiner’s office. Across his chest ran the unofficial motto of that office:
Homicide?
Suicide?
I decide.
He looked down at his mother’s tiny fists, clenched in her sleep like a baby’s. Her thumbs were tucked inside her fingers. He wondered if she had been fighting in her sleep and hoped that she had won. He wanted to cover them but knew that if he adjusted her blanket, she’d startle and waken.
The phone in the kitchen rang and he rushed to answer it.
“Hello,” he said.
“Matthew, boy. Is that you?”
“Yeah. Who is this?”
“It’s your dad. Don’t you recognize my voice?”
He did, but denied it so that his father would have to identify himself. Every little bit of distance helped. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to see you and your brother. Talk about things. See where we stand.”
“Not a chance. You made your choices, now five with them. We sure as hell had to.”
“Look, Matt, I know you’re angry...”
“Angry? I’m homicidal, you bastard.”
“Put your brother on.”
“Sorry, I can’t hear you. You seem to be breaking up.”
He hung up the phone and began to massage his temples with his fingertips.
“What’s up, Matt?” his brother asked as he walked into the kitchen.
“What else? That was Dad with his Monday-morning overture. Let’s talk, boys, let’s start over, let’s forget everything that happened. I’m a changed man. I’ve found Jesus.” He squeezed his eyes shut and began to use his palms. “I get such a headache talking to him. You gotta take the next one, man.”
“Whatever.” He fixed his coffee, handed Matt the bagel from the toaster, and put one in for himself.
He was as long, lean, and fair as his brother was short, wide, and dark. Like his brother, he’d dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. August around D.C. made anything else unbearable without air conditioning.
“Sean, let me ask you a question.”
“Okay.”
“Have you noticed how gray Mom is getting? She’s only forty. Do you think stress can do that to you?”
“I don’t know, man. I’m the art major, remember. I didn’t take psychology.”
They ate in silence, washed their cups and plates, stacked them to dry, and turned out the lights before they left the apartment. Matt stood by the door, his hand on the light switch, looking at his mother’s shape on the sofa.