Felicia smiled contentedly, gazing out the windshield at the road ahead as it led them home. “It all starts with the script.”
© 2007 by John Morgan Wilson
The Saga of Sidney Paar
by Jon L. Breen
“Jon L. Breen is so important as a reviewer that we forget how good a novelist he is,” writer and critic Ed Gorman said of Mr. Breen’s latest novel Eye of God (Five Star/September, 2006). We can also easily forget how good a short-story writer he is in the years that usually pass between his short-story submissions to this magazine. This year EQMM has three Breen stories—one still to come in the autumn.
“Are you Gus Twining?”
“Yes,” I said.
“May we come in? We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
As soon as I heard the first news reports about the murder of my old sports editor, I knew the police might come calling, but I was surprised to find them at the door of my beachfront condo that same day. They were a male-female team, Detectives Nakamura and Ortega. Neither one could have met the departmental height requirement in the old days. They both looked trim and formidable, though, not likely to be the butt of many donut jokes, and in well-cut business suits they were better dressed than the plainclothes stereotype.
I showed them into my study and invited them to sit down. They obviously liked the room. Nakamura, the guy, appreciated the wood grain on the paneling and furniture and the wide-angle ocean view. Ortega was drawn to the pictures lining the walls, showing me with people like Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Annika Sörenstam, them with golf clubs in their hands, me with a microphone. I had my dust jackets framed, too, with pride of place to the bestseller that had paid for the condo and the view.
“You have a beautiful place,” Nakamura said.
“Thanks. Wish I were here more. I travel a lot.”
“I enjoy your work on TV, Mr. Twining,” Ortega said with an almost subliminal smile.
“They say I bring a unique perspective to golf coverage.” I winked, one of my TV trademarks. “I never played the game professionally or even well.”
“Millard Glass was your editor when you worked for the Chronicle?” Nakamura asked.
“Yeah. It was years ago.”
“You heard what happened to him, I guess?”
“It was on the news. Not many details, though. Shot in his office at the paper after hours, late Monday night, right?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody around when he was shot?”
Ortega glanced at her partner. “Somebody was around.”
“Have you found the weapon?”
“I think we’ll ask the questions, Mr. Twining,” Nakamura said.
“Sure. Shoot. I mean, go ahead.” I smiled. They didn’t. I must have seemed nervous, but I had no reason to be.
“Can you account for your movements on Monday night?”
“Yes, sure, I mean, sort of.” I tried to gather my thoughts. “I can tell you where I was and what I was doing, but it’s not precisely an ironclad alibi.”
“You think you need an alibi, Mr. Twining?” Nakamura said.
“I didn’t think so until just now. Are you saying I’m a suspect?”
“Should you be a suspect?” Ortega said, poker-faced as her partner. Oh, they were quite a team.
“No, I shouldn’t.”
Nakamura said, “We have to ask a lot of questions of a lot of people on any murder investigation, but it’s just routine. You’re not a suspect, Mr. Twining.” The “yet” hung in the air unspoken.
The journalist in me wanted to ask precisely what cops meant by the word suspect—use it too loosely and it becomes a synonym for the guy who did it, even if he has no face and no name. But rather than question their semantics, I gave them a quick account of my Monday night. I’d never married and lived alone, so it was nothing anybody could vouch for.
Finally I blurted out, “Why would you suspect me? I haven’t worked for Glass in ten years and I haven’t even seen the guy in five. I had no reason to kill him.”
“He fired you,” Nakamura pointed out.
“Yeah, he fired me. Everybody gets fired at some point. Haven’t you ever been fired? No, I guess not.” God, I was babbling. It’s unnerving to be a not-yet suspect, even when you know they have nothing on you. “Look, losing that job he fired me from put me on a course that led to all this. I couldn’t have afforded this condo writing for the Chronicle.”
“We understand you were pretty angry at the time,” Ortega said.
“Sure I was. I didn’t know what was in my future. All I knew was I was out of work. Looking back, Glass did me a favor. By a month after he fired me, I wasn’t mad anymore. Look, if you’ll tell me a little more, maybe I can help you figure out who really offed him.”
The pair looked at each other and apparently agreed on a course of action through some kind of cop telepathy.
“Glass didn’t die right away,” Nakamura said. “He managed to call nine-one-one, in fact, and he told the dispatcher something very interesting. He said, ‘Sidney Paar killed me.’ Then he spelled it: ‘P-a-a-r.’ Dispatcher said he kind of laughed, like it was ironic. By the time the paramedics got to him, he was dead, with his head on the desk and the phone still in his hand.”
“Who else was in the building at the time?”
“A few people scattered around, but nobody close to Glass's office.”
“Didn’t they hear the shot?”
“Sure, but they didn’t know what it was or exactly where it came from. The insulation’s pretty good in that building.”
“When I worked there, you had to sign in with a security man in the lobby when you entered after hours.”
“You still do. The watchman, old guy named Frank, didn’t sign in anybody we haven’t accounted for, but he was away from the lobby a few times. Stomach flu, he said. People told us he’s usually very reliable.”
“He was when I was there, but he must be getting on. Anyway, couldn’t the killer have been somebody in the building who did sign in?”
“If so, they did a good job of losing the gun.”
“And I gather Sidney Paar hadn’t signed in,” I said, trying to be as poker-faced as they were.
“No, and he wasn’t on the roster of Chronicle employees or in the phone book either,” Ortega said. “But then some people there told us Sidney Paar could only refer to you.”
I shrugged. “I see their point. Okay, I’ll tell you the whole story.”
When Millard Glass took me on at the Chronicle, it was a big step up for me. After working on a series of small-town weeklies, a medium-sized city daily looked like the New York Times. He was a fierce-looking little guy, usually soft-spoken but intimidating, with a reputation for periodic tantrums. For the first few weeks, he didn’t have a lot to say to me; then one day he called me into his office. Dominating the room on the wall behind his desk was a huge poster of four long-ago Notre Dame football players on horseback, with the famous Grantland Rice line below the photo: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again...” Amid the clutter on the desk, I saw books by Jim Murray and Damon Runyon.
“Gus,” he said, “you do good work. I like to see a writer with a sense of style for a change. That’s how sports writing is supposed to be. Accurate’s important, sure, but so’s colorful. I don’t say you’re Red Smith reincarnated just yet, but you have a touch of the poet to you, know what I mean?”
“I had no idea I was so touched, but thanks, Mr. Glass.”