He was never charged. His blood test mysteriously disappeared from the hospital.
“Something so convenient arouses my hunter’s instinct,” said Eve. “So I checked the background of Jeff Cobb. Found out that he worked at Midlothian in maintenance while he was studying for his master’s. Same time as McKenzie’s accident. He quit the job the day after. McKenzie’s sister-in-law and her husband petitioned the court for custody of Melissa, but were turned down. This data is useless now. He’s got everyone so charmed that no one will care about the accident.”
The knowledge of the accident and Melissa’s mother’s death would have impelled me to don my oppo hat and interview police, EMT responders to the scene, and hospital personnel and have them swear Greg was drunk. Machiavellian Mama would have vaporized his chances, but she was otherwise engaged.
Aside from Eve, my only other visitor was Will Stafford. He believes I’m innocent, but he chuckled in admiration at the “best damned oppo dirty trick” he’d ever seen. He’s paying for my lawyer, who raised both eyebrows when I told him my story.
“Look, you say you went all those places with McKenzie and his daughter, yet no one’s come forward who saw you with them. There’s not one phone call from his cell or home phone to your cell or home. And there’s only one call from you to him, from your cell to his home phone on the night of the kidnapping.”
“Alleged kidnapping,” I snapped. “We made arrangements when we were with Melissa. And he did call my office twice, once to set up our first date and again the day I picked up Melissa. I know the last call was from a pay phone. Isn’t there a record of either call?”
“Yes, but there’s no proof the pay-phone calls came from him. There’s no proof of any connection with him or with the child, and she can’t testify. Give me something concrete.”
He called for the guard, then opened his briefcase and handed me some books.
“My wife went to your condo and picked up those books you asked for.”
Wondering why I even asked for them since they belonged to the day before, I tossed them onto the bed in my cell. Ruefully, I watched as the volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese hit the floor. I had actually been reading those poems on the day before when my fatal romantic side held me captive. A white card bookmarked a particular poem. Masochistically, I picked up the book to read what I had once considered so meaningful.
I smiled. “Something concrete, you said. How about fingerprints?”
The card that marked my place was much more interesting to me than the poem. It was literally my ticket to freedom and perhaps Melissa’s return ticket to relatives in Colorado who wouldn’t manipulate her. It accompanied the roses sent by Greg as an apology for spilling wine on my skirt, asking me to lunch at McDougal’s. And even better, silly old starry-eyed me had clipped a memento to the card. It was the receipt from McDougal’s that Greg had left on the table. I had taken it for insertion into a future scrapbook to be labeled “Our First Meal Together,” a romantic lunch consisting of one adult McDougal burger, one adult garden salad, and one child’s Fun Meal.
The Jury Box
by Jon L. Breen
Copyright © 2007 by Jon L. Breen
The great days of the post-World War II paperback original are the subject of much recent celebration, including old and new books in the style and format. The most prolific reprinter has been Stark House, which offers at $19.95 each two-novels-to-a-volume trade paperbacks by three writers who flourished in the ’50s and early ’60s and whose career crises in the late ’60s and early ’70s had varying outcomes: Harry Whittington, who made a strong comeback writing historicals as Ashley Carter; Peter Rabe, who became a college psychology professor; and Gil Brewer, who never stopped writing but lost a battle with alcoholism.
Whittington lives up to his reputation as one of the great noir storytellers in both A Night for Screaming [and] Any Woman He Wanted, a 1960 wrongly-accused-fugitive variation and a 1961 honest-cop-in-corrupt-city tale, respectively. A new introduction by David Lawrence Wilson and a re-printed essay by Bill Crider illuminate the prolific Whittington’s career. Rabe’s My Lovely Executioner [and] Agreement to Kill, from 1960 and 1957, show him the finest stylist of the three. Both man-on-the-run variants begin with the protagonist leaving jail, one by reluctant breakout, the other having completed his sentence, both headed for trouble. The first is a gem of pace, plot, and prose, the second much less compelling. A brief recollection by agent Max Gartenberg is joined by George Tuttle and Donald E. Westlake essays that recur from previous Stark House volumes of Rabe’s work. Brewer was a lesser practitioner, but Wild to Possess [and] A Taste for Sin ($19.95), from 1959 and 1961 (the latter much the better), are not the soft-core porn their titles and cover illustration suggest, but rather studies of crime and obsession in the James M. Cain vein, often effective despite clumsy plot machinations and improbabilities. Publisher Gregory Shepard’s new introduction is joined by previously published pieces by Bill Pronzini and Verlaine Brewer.
John Lange’s 1970 Edgar-nominee Grave Descend (Hard Case, $6.99), a Jamaica-based nautical thriller with echoes of James Bond and The Maltese Falcon, offers crisp, fast-paced storytelling. (Though the book and accompanying publicity keep it under wraps, Lange was an early pseudonym of Michael Crichton.)
Meanwhile, the paperback noir tradition lives on, albeit mostly in hard covers.
**** Richard Stark: Ask the Parrot, Mysterious, $23.99. On the run following a bank robbery, career criminal Parker first becomes part of the posse searching for him, then aids a disaffected racetrack employee in a plan to loot the track’s take. Stark (the best-known of Westlake’s pseudonyms) began the Parker series in 1962. After a twenty-year-plus hiatus be-tween 1974 and 1997, the series is stronger than ever. Stark/Westlake is a consummate master of crime fiction who can get a character in a couple of paragraphs better than many authors with a twenty-page dossier and can surmount any challenge, including writing one short chapter from the convincing view-point of a caged parrot.
**** Bill Pronzini: The Crimes of Jordan Wise, Walker, $23.95. To win the heart of a beautiful woman who wants to live on the edge with the finer things, San Francisco accountant Wise engineers a complex embezzlement scheme that allows the couple to escape to a new and carefree life in the Virgin Islands, until complications en-sue. This is an extraordinary piece of pure storytelling, with the noirish mood, pounding narrative impetus, and unsparing character insights of the best 1950s Gold Medal paperbacks.
*** Max Allan Collins: The Last Quarry, Hard Case Crime, $6.99. Quarry, the first professional killer for hire (with the possible exception of some spy types) to front a series of novels, returns in a typically dark, funny, and compulsively readable adventure based in part on two previously published short stories, “A Matter of Principal” and “Guest Services.” Is Quarry so amoral he will carry out his assignment to kill an attractive and well-liked young librarian? Added inducement: a great cover by iconic paperback artist Robert McGinnis.
*** Lawrence Block: Hit Parade, Morrow, $24.95. Another series hit man, John Keller, returns in a darkly comic short story collection disguised as a novel. At least some of these nine droll and sometimes oddly moving stories first appeared in Playboy or original anthologies, including several from Otto Penzler’s sports-themed collections.