Jerome looked at the picture, then back at me. “Hell yeah, dawg.”
“One more thing. It can’t happen until tomorrow. Okay?”
“I’m straight.”
I left the jail and cabbed it back home. In my room I did more coke, ate some codeine, and stared at the eighty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy I’d taken out on Lyle Tibbits, which would become effective tonight at midnight.
Eighty grand would buy a lot of pain relief. It might even be enough to help me forget.
I drank until I couldn’t feel Earl anymore, and then I drank some more.
When Monday rolled around I cashed my policy and met Jack at Joe’s Pool Hall and whipped her butt with my new thousand-dollar Balabushka custom-made pool cue.
Collective Noun for Blackmailers
by Stephen Ross
Copyright © 2006 Stephen Ross
Stephen Ross makes his living as a data-systems programmer for an IT company, but he has worked as both an English teacher and a technical writer, and he has a passion for music that has found an outlet in scores he’s composed for theater, a couple of short films, and a TV documentary. For the past couple of years, however, fiction-writing has been his consuming interest.
It happened two years ago at ten o’clock in the morning.
(1) A guy walked into a bar.
(2) He tossed some nuts into his mouth.
(3) He pulled out a gun.
(4) He shot the solitary drinker seated at the end of the bar.
(5) He strolled out again.
The case became known as the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves Murder. It was one of the less noteworthy cases of 1950.
No one knew the dead man and no one got a good look at the shooter. The bar was not in the kind of neighborhood where people took notice of those who came and went. In fact, in that neighborhood, people went out of their way not to notice.
The bartender had never seen the dead man before that morning. The dead man was drinking gin, and apart from asking for the gin, he hadn’t said a word.
The bartender had seen the shooter come in, but he was busy answering the phone in the office at the time and he didn’t pay any attention.
There were no clues, apart from some nuts on the floor. The bullet passed clean through the man’s neck and lodged in the jukebox on the back wall — number one with a bullet, like they say. The slug was from a .45 and the nuts were roasted.
The bartender was grilled. His name was Merkon. He owned the bar and had bad breath. The phone call he was answering had been from the young woman he employed mornings as a waitress. She was an hour late and had called in sick.
The waitress was also grilled. Her name was Nancy. She wasn’t sick. She had spent the night arguing with her boyfriend and didn’t feel like working that day. The boyfriend was spoken to. His name was Bruno, he was a saxophone player — he had a bruise on his forehead where a dinner plate had hit him.
The dead man was about fifty-five. He was of medium build, had tidy hair, and was clean-shaven. He was dressed in a near-new suit and his shoes had recently been shined. There was nothing unusual about him except for his right eye — it was made of glass.
The dead man had no personal identification on him. He had a wallet — inside were two quarters and a dime. He had smoked, wore aftershave, and his fingernails were immaculate. In sum total, he was not the kind of guy you’d expect to find dead in that neighborhood.
The old man who had shined the shoes was located two days later, six blocks away. The old man didn’t know the face in the morgue photo, but he recognized the shoes; he’d shined them the morning of the shooting. Imported. Good-quality leather. The dead man’s English had been broken. He had had an accent. He had seemed impatient and he didn’t tip.
The killer was never identified and neither was the dead man — they couldn’t even trace the glass eye, although it was probably of European origin. The case had never been closed.
Anderson leaned back in his chair. The look on his face was one of bemusement. “So, why are you telling me all this, Wilson? This was two years ago. I wasn’t even the editor here then.”
Wilson stubbed his cigarette out. “I’m telling you all this because Nancy Stillwater’s photo just made page seven of today’s edition.”
“Nancy? The waitress?”
Wilson nodded. “She had an accident. She backed over a poodle coming out of her driveway. The poodle belonged to the sister of the mayor.”
“Mayor Guthrie’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“She’s the sister with the six Picassos and the house up in the hills?”
“The very one.”
“Wrong lady’s poodle to flatten.”
Wilson nodded. “And she’s suing.”
Anderson echoed the nod. “I’ve no doubt.”
Wilson dropped a newspaper onto Anderson’s desk. It was opened out at page seven. “Nancy was photographed coming out of court. It seems Nancy and the mayor’s sister are neighbors. This is not the first time they’ve had trouble.”
Anderson stared at the picture. Even in black-and-white, Nancy Stillwater looked like the kind of woman his heart surgeon had warned him about — tall, cool, blond, dressed in a fur, with a look on her face suggesting she owned, if not the world, at least you.
Anderson grew skeptical. “Just how does a two-dollar waitress get to live in the same street as the mayor’s sister?”
“Nancy owns the house next-door,” Wilson explained. “It has eight bedrooms, and there’s a tennis court out in the back.”
There was a stunned look on Anderson’s face. “Did she come into money?”
Wilson nodded. “Two years ago, Nancy Stillwater lived in a one-room above an appliance store.”
“Okay, I see your point,” Anderson said. “Investigate it.”
Wilson smiled.
“But I want receipts this time.”
Wilson Hills was a short, punchy little man. Barely five-four in height, he had a round face and a cheerful smile. He always wore the same tie — lime green, with stripes — and favored a loose-fitting suit.
Nancy Stillwater and the mayor’s sister lived up in the hills on Delshaw Drive. It was the kind of street where nobody cut his or her own lawn, and every other house had a swimming pool. And if you didn’t have a pool, you had a tennis court.
Wilson parked his car at the curb. Nancy’s house was white stucco. It had two floors and balconies. There was casualness to its design, as if it was something Frank Lloyd Wright might have sketched up on a sunny afternoon over coffee and witty repartee.
The front door was open — wide open. Wilson rang the bell and stepped inside.
The interior of the house was Art Deco. The floor tiles were white. There was a sweeping staircase — to the left of which stood the statue of a woman. The woman was silver, taller than Wilson, and wearing an expression of unobtainable demureness.
“Hello?” Wilson yelled. His voice echoed in the entranceway.
No one was answering the door, not even a maid.
“Nancy Stillwater?”
The house was devoid of life. The faint hum of air conditioning purred in the background.
Wilson followed a hallway leading to what looked like a living room. The walls of the hallway were lined with photographs of Nancy. Some photographer had decided Nancy was a work of art, or she had paid one to make her think that.
It was a living room. There was an acrid smell in the air. It hung. There was a palm tree in the corner of the room. A grand piano stood in another corner, an acre of framed photos stood on top of its closed lid.
At the center of the room was a wooden area large enough for a tango — of a very fine dark wood. Polished. The furniture surrounding it was all white. Plush. Seating for thirty.