“A woodentop?” I thought I hadn’t heard properly, but she smiled, a great huge smile that showed off her perfect white teeth. Mine aren’t like that: crossed over at the front and a nasty grubby colour like stale clotted cream. Ugh.
“Magistrate,” she said, laughing. She had a lovely laugh, too, and none of us had laughed for ages, not happily like that. “No one calls us that these days, but in the old days they did and I like it. Now, you’re glass-free. You’d better have something hot. Tea? Coffee? God! I sound like an air hostess, don’t I? Shall I put the kettle on?”
And so she made herself at home. I liked it, which I’d never have let myself do if it hadn’t been for the brick and the blood. I sat on the beanbag, looking at the jagged great hole in the window, and thought about the violence of South London and how much I hated it and how scared I was even though I couldn’t afford to be. They say it’s changed now, but in those days it was pretty rough. So there I was, thinking how amazing it was that she was there, and perhaps even in South London there would be people to meet and like and talk to. Damn! I’m forgetting the copyediting again. But I can’t stop once I’ve started. Sorry. I don’t often talk as much as this. Well, I do, actually, but it feels new each time I do it and I always mean not to afterwards.
There was one little bit of glass she’d missed. Even she’d managed to miss one and it lay on the scrubbed board just near a stickying puddle of my blood, glinting. It was a sunny day. All the days that summer were sunny. It seemed unfair in a way.
She came back with the tea, very strong tea-bag tea. It tasted like her, strong and warm and helping. Then we just talked. She was still there when the woman who was doing the school run to the local comprehensive dropped my two off and she stayed to tea and made them laugh and helped with their homework. Then she went, giving me her number and telling me she’d drop in again. She only lived round the corner.
It wasn’t for weeks that I got round to asking her for supper so that John could share in it all. I suppose in a way I’d wanted to keep her as my treat. But then it seemed selfish, so I fixed it so that he could meet her, too.
When he took one look at her and said, “Sophie?” in that surprised but blissful voice, I suppose I knew what was going to happen. I was angry with her for not telling me she knew him, but when I looked at her I saw that she was just as surprised as he’d been. She knew my married name, of course, but I never talked about John because it would have been disloyal and so she’d never made the connection; she’d been married, too, for about ten years, and so he hadn’t recognised her name when I’d talked about her.
That was it, really. They tried not to, I think. They really did try, but she was just so much better at making him feel all right than I was. I understood that. She did it for me, too, when he could only make me feel miles worse. In a way it wasn’t what they did that made me so angry. It was what he said when he’d made his decision, as though I’d be pleased to hear it, as though he was giving me something again after all.
“If it wasn’t for everything you’ve taught me I’d never have been able to love Sophie as she deserves. I couldn’t do it when I first knew her because I didn’t know enough. It was you who taught me how to know people and let them know me. It’s all your doing, Penny. You’ve shown me how to be all the things she wanted me to be then and I couldn’t. We owe it all to you and we’ll never forget it.”
I won’t either. Not ever. You see, that was when I did want to kill him. But even then, if I hadn’t been jointing the chickens when he said it and had a sharp knife in my hands, we’d still have been all right. I know we would.
Copyright © 2006 Natasha Cooper
“Sorry, regime change.”
Karaoke Night
by David Knadler
A 2003 Department of First Stories author, David Knadler continues to write intelligent fiction, full of keen observations and with evocative settings. This is his third story for us, in a series in which crimes are solved not through the use of science but through the use of science but through the detective’s insights into character.
The body was just inside the bar, surrounded by a puddle of blood and beer. Four guys were thoughtfully regarding the dead man in the same stance they might take around the open hood of somebody’s new pickup: one hand in a jeans pocket, the other holding a drink.
“About time,” George Wick said. “Christ, I’m surprised they ain’t had the funeral yet.”
“Yeah? I’m surprised you’re not going through his pockets yet. Get back. Ever hear of a crime scene?”
Deputy Sheriff John Ennis stepped gingerly in next to the body. The bloodstain was huge, black in the bar light, blooming across the right half of Dean Jackman’s snap-button shirt, merging the vertical stripes. Jackman himself stared at the ceiling, looking slightly amazed at the way the evening had turned out. Ennis could have pronounced the big realtor dead from twenty feet away, but he checked for a pulse.
“Sandy already tried CPR,” Wick said. “I think he was dead when he hit the floor.”
Sandy West, the barmaid, was seated behind him on a barstool, rubbing at her hands with a stained handkerchief. She had been crying. The knees of her jeans were wet, and there was blood on her blouse.
Ennis leaned in and examined the bullet wound: big slug, a few inches below the left armpit. The bullet had come through the Cadillac’s door. Couldn’t have struck the heart directly or Jackman wouldn’t have made it in from the parking lot, but the bullet had definitely torn through something vital. Ennis was slightly relieved. He’d been caught on the wrong side of a Montana Rail Link freight train when the call came and it was probably better that the five-minute delay would not have made the difference between life and death.
There was a chiming sound, which resolved itself into a tune Ennis recognized as the opening bars to “La Bamba.” Startled, he looked around, then realized it was coming from the little phone clipped to the dead man’s tooled leather belt. He looked at Wick and his friends, who were looking back at him. Two more rings. He reached for the phone, but by then it had gone silent. Ennis flipped it open and made a note of the local number.
He stood, keyed his shoulder mike: “No hurry on the ambulance, Debbie. 10–55. Call Libby; coroner and crime scene.”
Wick and company had repaired to the bar to refill their glasses from a new pitcher of beer. Ennis stared at them.
“George? What I said about the crime scene? The bar is closed. Now what happened?”
Wick scowled, tilted his glass toward the body. “Only thing we saw was this dipshit diving onto our table.”
Ennis had his notebook out. “He say anything?”
Wick nodded. “Music was pretty loud, but it sounded like, ‘Bitch shot me.’ Then he kind of twisted to one side and knocked over my table. Two pitchers gone. Pissed me off. I was going to kick his ass, but then...”
“He said ‘bitch’? Who do you think he meant by that?”
Wick smirked. “Well, he’s been boinking Alana Winnett.”
“Works at Ace Hardware?”
“Used to. Heard she got her real-estate license.” Wick nodded at the dead man. “Went to work for Dean. Seen ’em in here a couple times.”
“She’s married, right?”
“Yep. So’s Dean. That ain’t considered a big obstacle to romance in these parts.”
Wick and his friends chuckled at that, but their smiles faded in the presence of Jackman’s cooling corpse. Maybe they were remembering they were married, too.