She did think that the turnip was her most inspired “sign.”
Knowing Charles, she had suspected there would come a tipping point at which too many signs began to mean bad news instead of good, especially considering that the stories they pointed to were so tragic and grim. She had no way of knowing it would be the telltale dates that did it, the ones she had cleverly — if she did think so herself — camouflaged as grocery prices. She just knew it would be one of them, once they all piled up on him. It had never been a completely sure thing, her plan.
But it had worked, oh my, had it ever worked well.
Alone in the backseat, imagining many years of sprawling on her sofa at home, reading and analyzing delicious popular novels, Lenore Lowery smiled. The cabdriver, seeing her smile in his rearview mirror and taking it as meant for himself, grinned back at her.
At the moment of taking his eyes off the road, his hands jerked the wheel.
In the instant after that, when he turned around to speak to her, she opened her mouth to shout, “Look where you’re driving!” But between the time she started to yell and the time when he looked back at the road, a second car had pulled out of a side street in front of her taxi and smashed through the door where she sat.
Horrified, she had only a split second to flash on Charles’s familiar warning against tampering with fate.
Red lights! her brain screamed. They warned you to STOP!
As the impact hurled her across the backseat, her terrified brain registered the last thing she ever saw. On the back of the seat, right in front of her frightened eyes, was the driver’s ID card with his name spelled out in bold black letters: Richard Parker.
Copyright © 2006 Nancy Pickard
Dead Even
by Clark Howard
A multiple EQMM Readers Award winner whose stories are almost always non-series, hardboiled crime tales rather than mysteries, Clark Howard took a different turn when he created P.I. Lon Bradford. Not only was Bradford Mr. Howard’s first fictional P.I. (in a long career), but with this second story we’ll call him a series character — and one who solves mysteries to boot!
Memphis private detective Lon Bradford was sitting in his cubbyhole office, feet up on his secondhand roll-top desk, reading the early edition of the Commercial Appeal, when Elmo Keel, the area’s letter carrier, knocked and walked in with the morning mail.
“ ’Morning, Brad,” said Keel. “Any good news about this weather?”
“ ’Morning, Elmo. Not much. Hot and humid today, hot and humid tonight, hot and humid again tomorrow. Hot and humid forever, I reckon.”
“Well, hell, I guess that’s the price we pay for living in this paradise on the ol’ Mississippi River.” He handed Brad several pieces of mail. “Lots of folks ain’t lucky enough to live on the ol’ muddy Miss and have catfish for supper ever’ evening.”
“You make a good point, Elmo. A steady supply of catfish makes up for a lot of shortcomings in the weather.”
When Elmo left, Brad started slitting open his mail with a switchblade he’d taken off a drunken black man he arrested for disorderly conduct years earlier when he was sheriff in Kennant County, some fifty miles north. Being a Thursday morning, the mail was scant, but Brad was pleased to find a check from Goldsmith’s Department Store for services having to do with an employee in the shoe department who was knocking down on the register. Fellow had a clever way of doing it: Instead of ringing up $10.05 for a pair of $9.95 shoes and the dime sales tax, he’d simply push down the 5-cent key and ring up a nickel. If anybody said anything about it, he’d just say he probably didn’t push down the $10 key hard enough, and he’d correct it by ringing up the ten dollars — which made the cash drawer contents match the white roll of paper in the register that recorded all the sales. But if nobody noticed, then the cash drawer would have an overage of ten bucks — and sometime before closing, the salesman would palm a ten-dollar bill for himself.
That was the kind of work Lon Bradford did: dishonest employees, surveillance, insurance-fraud cases, some divorce work, a little missing-persons stuff, background checks for the West Tennessee Banking Association’s bonding company, and so on. Nothing heavy. A few years back, he’d become involved in a murder case up in Kennant County, as a favor for an old judge who’d been a mentor of his — but that had been an exception. Brad had ended up helping a convicted murderer get out of prison, which had cost him not only the old judge’s friendship, but the good graces of nearly everyone else in Kennant County. He had never gone back.
One of the pieces of mail Brad opened that morning had a return address for the county jail in Temple, Mississippi, the county seat of Yoakum County. From the envelope, Brad removed a single sheet of lined notebook paper. In neatly printed, penciled letters, it read:
Dear Mr. Bradford,
My name is Edward Bliss and I am currently on trial for murder here in Yoakum County, Miss.
I am innocent of this crime, but the evidence is such that I am certain to be convicted.
To prove my sincerity in this matter, I hereby confess to you that I am guilty of a killing that took place there in Memphis some years ago. I was acquitted of that crime, even though I was guilty. However, I am not guilty of this one, and I need someone to help me prove it before it is too late and I end up in the Miss. electric chair.
I read about you in True Detective magazine, about how you helped a man named Billy Clyde get out of prison after being convicted of murder. I need somebody to help me the same way. I have $1,600 in a savings account in the Farmer’s Union Bank of Temple and I will pay all of it to you if you will help me.
Yours sincerely,
This, Brad thought, had to be the damnedest letter he had ever seen. Man says he was acquitted of a killing he did, now might be found guilty of one he didn’t do.
Staring down at his desk, Brad concentrated hard and tried to recall the Edward Bliss murder trial there in Memphis. He pulled up a vague memory of it from back when he’d been so deeply involved in doing what he could to help unjustly convicted murderer Billy Clyde get his sentence commuted to time served. Because Brad himself had been the one to track down Clyde, who was accused of murdering a young Kennant County girl, and had brought him back to Tennessee from Claypool, Texas, he had felt responsible for the disabled World War Two veteran not receiving what Brad considered adequate legal representation at his trial. Little wonder with what was on his mind at that time that he hadn’t paid too much attention to a local murder trial of someone named Edward Bliss.
Best to know who I’m dealing with here, the detective thought, before I decide what to do about this letter.
Taking his feet off the desk, Brad unfolded his lanky frame, took his blue seersucker coat off a hook, locked up his office, and walked down two flights of shiny-worn wooden stairs to the muggy Memphis street outside.
At the Shelby County Library a few blocks away, Brad filled out a form for the reference librarian to look up the murder trial of Edward Bliss. Ten minutes later, the librarian, a spidery little old Southern lady, led him into a musty back room filled with shelves of newspaper-size, leather-bound volumes of past Memphis Commercial Appeals. Pointing to one of the volumes, she declared in what was almost a challenge, “You’ll have to get it down your own self. I cain’t lift these heavy archive books anymore. You can put it on that table there.” She indicated an ancient but obviously sturdy maple reading table. “What you want starts in the October tenth issue. Put it back up on the shelf when you’re finished. Don’t leave it for me to do.”