Tom wasn’t much more fit than she was and it took them longer than she’d expected to walk up the hill to the disused quarry. Since her time they’d put up a fence and a couple of notices saying it was unsafe. It wasn’t as deep as she’d remembered.
“That’s where she is,” she said. “Under that pile of rubble at the bottom of the cliff. That’s where you’ll find Heather Mather.”
“So,” he said. “The scene of your first crime.”
“Oh no.” She was offended. “Heather was an accident. Not like the others.”
She liked Tom. He was her named officer at the prison. She’d refused to speak to the detectives and the psychiatrists who’d tried to persuade her to tell them where Heather Mather was. Her first victim, as they called her. The first of four before she was caught. All pretty girls who simpered and pouted and made up to older men.
Tom spoke into his radio and she could already see the police officers who’d been waiting in the van coming through the gate. She let him take her arm and steer her down the hill. He’d be ready for his dinner.
Blog Bytes
by Ed Gorman
Copyright © 2007 Ed Gorman
From the cozy to the hardboiled:
The following Agatha Christie site is one of the best organized and laid out I’ve seen. Christie’s output was so prodigious it requires skill to present it in a simple coherent fashion. The types of mysteries and suspense novels she chose to write, her various triumphs as a playwright, her characters, her familiar themes — it’s all here. Her history and her output are presented with such vitality that you think Dame Agatha may still be with us — hiding behind the curtain and sneaking a peek at us now and then. This site demonstrates the kind of important and impressive scholarship one can do on the Internet. www.twbooks.co.uk/ authors/achristie.html
The Gumshoe Site, written and edited by Jiro Kimura, is filled with current news about the field in virtually every aspect, from awards to conventions to notable obituaries. Jiro also writes a column called “What’s Cool” that points us to books and stories we might otherwise miss. Great information and a fun tour through the mystery world. www.nsknet.or.jp/~jkimura
Black Mask Magazine. “The namesake of this site, Black Mask Magazine is the pulp magazine that launched a thousand pulp-fiction dreams. This site will also incorporate Dime Detective, Dime Mystery, Strange Detective Mysteries, Terror Tales, Horror Stories, Adventure, and Famous Fantastic Mysteries, but great as they all were, Black Mask Magazine still reigns supeme, holding a unique place in our hearts and in American popular culture.” Publisher-editor Keith Alan Deutsch has created a site not just for noir lovers but also for fans of pulp fiction in general. Interviews with the men and women who wrote for the pulps, stories from the era itself, and Deutch’s enthusiastic promotion of Black Mask make this essential reading for pulp fans. www.black maskmagazine.com/blackmask.html
Ed Gorman’s own blogs appear on www.mysteryfile.com.
Brothers
by Ed Gorman
Copyright © 2007 by Ed Gorman
Ed Gorman is not only one of the mystery field’s foremost authors, he’s also one of its premier critics and publishers. Co-founder of Mystery Scene magazine and for many years its editor and publisher, he’s been involved with many other publishing ventures, including Five Star Press. Currently he’s contributing a new column, Blog Bytes, to EQMM. A new novel in his Sam McCain series, Fools Rush In, has just been released (Pegasus Books).
1.
When I rolled into the precinct just before eleven that humid August night, I saw my brother Michael walking out the west door.
I’d been able to get him on the force seven years ago, despite a still-ongoing hiring freeze, and he was generally doing well. It didn’t hurt that at the time I’d just received an award for stopping a man who’d just killed three people in a convenience store. I’d chased him in my car, warning him in the dark alley to stop running. He had turned around and put three bullets in my windshield. I ran him over and killed him.
I’d asked the commander a few times before about hiring Michael. He knew about Michael’s past and problems. He’d always said, “Let me think about it.”
Since joining the department, Michael had become a dutiful cop. On other matters, which he insisted weren’t my business, he wasn’t doing well at all.
He worked the same shift I did but he was already in civvies: a crisp white short-sleeved shirt, dark slacks, and a brisk, slightly wood-scented cologne.
He must have been lost in his own thoughts, because he didn’t see me until I almost walked into him.
“Hey,” he said, looking up. “Didn’t see you.”
“I wanted to apologize for the other night.”
He grinned the grin that had won him a hundred hearts. My little brother got the family’s blond good looks. I got the family’s work ethic. Or, as our mother always put it, “Little Mike got the looks, but Chet got the maturity.” In her maternal way, she tried to pretend that both attributes were equal. Maturity, in case you hadn’t noticed, has yet to get even one female into a bed.
He clapped me on the arm. “Hell, Chet, we’re brothers. You were just looking out for me the way you have since Mom died.”
When I was sixteen and Michael was twelve, Mom drowned in the YMCA pool after suffering a stroke. Freak accident. The news reports called it that, the Y called it that, the coroner called it that, the priest at the burial site called it that, everybody at the wake called it that. Even seventeen years later I wince when I hear that term.
Dad took over. Or tried. But he’d always been a better cop than a father. It was from his side of the family that the blond good looks came. For twenty-one years of marriage, Mom had been able to pretend that all the nights Dad spent carousing with other cops were spent bowling and playing nickel-dime poker. The only time I’d ever heard them argue about those nights was when a drunk lady called at two A.M. and demanded to talk to my dad.
Other cops, male and female, walked around us now, good-nights and goodbyes on the air thick as the fireflies.
“I’m not mad, Chet. I just want to run my own life. You don’t need to play Dad anymore.”
And I had been his dad all the way through high school. Made sure he got a B average, made sure he wasn’t into drugs or alcohol, made sure he wasn’t hanging around with the wrong boys, made sure he honored the curfew hours I set for him.
Dad spent more and more time away from the house. He got himself what he called a “woman friend” and half-ass moved in with her. One night when he was home and puke-drunk, I heard him sobbing — literally, sobbing — in the bedroom he’d shared with Mom all those years. I went in and dragged him to the bathroom and got him cleaned up and then ripped the covers with the vomit on them off and got him settled in. He grabbed my hand and gripped it hard, the way he used to. He didn’t seem to realize that these days my grip was a lot harder than his. Before he passed out, he said: “You gotta watch Michael. He’s gonna turn out just like me. And I was such a shitty husband to your poor mother, Chet.” He started sobbing again. He wouldn’t let go of my hand. “I’m goin’ to hell, Chet, the way I treated that woman, always sneakin’ off for some strange broad. You got to know that I loved her. She was the only woman I ever truly loved. Those bitches I ran around with didn’t mean nothing to me. They really didn’t.”