“The late Ms. Hull — Jasper’s mother — had nothing of value in her room,” Lyon continued; “otherwise, I’m sure Jasper would have noted that something was missing and included that fact when he reported the events of that day to me. Mr. Otto left her room empty-handed.”
Jillian said, “I’d brought home her personal effects the day before. She wasn’t expected to recover, and I’ve heard stories about watches and purses disappearing from hospital rooms.” She didn’t elaborate. Apparently she hated to interrupt his story, however briefly.
“A footpad, surprised in the midst of his pillaging, will say anything to deflect suspicion long enough for him to make his escape. Unfortunately, Ms. Hull assisted him unwarily by asking if he was there to visit her sister. He seized upon that, and when she asked his name, he gave her the first thing that suggested itself.”
Jasper hadn’t given up yet. “That don’t make sense! He could’ve said Tom Smith or John Jones. How do you come up with William Thew out of nowhere?”
“You don’t. When you said he’d looked out the window before identifying himself, I decided to send Mr. Woodbine to Brooklyn General to photograph the view through the window.”
I was still standing. He opened his top drawer and handed me two of the pictures I’d taken. I gave one to Jasper. It was one of the shots of the advertisement painted on the wall of the brick hardware building. The legend read:
A picture accompanied it, showing a can of paint spilling its contents onto the globe.
“I don’t get it.” The boy passed the photo to his aunt, who looked at it, then at Lyon with her eyebrows lifted.
Lyon said, “The conditions were somewhat different from when Randolph Otto looked out on the same scene. It was spring, as I said, and tree leaves obscured parts of the sign. I’ve created an amateur artist’s rendition of the scene as it would have appeared to him. Arnie?” The fat little exhibitionist was excited, I could tell; he only forgot to address me formally in company when he could barely contain himself.
I handed Jasper the picture Lyon had doctored with his Sharpie, blacking out the portions that would have been covered by leaves:
The boy looked up, his pinched little face pale. “He said he was an artist!”
“Inspiration from the same source. An artist uses paint. He wasn’t your father. At the time you were born, he’d been in prison in New Jersey for more than a year. That was his first offense.”
Stoddard snatched the photo from Jillian, flung it to the floor, hurled himself at Lyon’s desk, and brought him up to date on his opinion of word puzzles and Lyon. He laid a blazing trail to the exit, leaving Lyon white and shaken. Jasper wasn’t any more pleased, but his aunt restrained him from kicking a chair and thanked Lyon for putting an end to the business. She was a pretty good sport. I wondered how she felt about semi-reformed felons.
He handed her an envelope from his drawer. It bore his letterhead and a name addressed in his childlike hand.
“It isn’t sealed,” she said.
“I wouldn’t presume. As the boy’s guardian you’d naturally want to know what it contained before you delivered it.”
She left, resting a hand on one of Jasper’s hunched shoulders. Lyon and I spent the rest of the evening quietly, he reading the Hardy Boys in an E. Phillips Oppenheim dust jacket, I making marks in The Habitual Handicapper. I didn’t tell him I’d caught a glimpse of the name he’d scribbled on the envelope, and when I found out later it belonged to the director of an art scholarship program at Brooklyn College, I didn’t tell him that. The program had been endowed by an anonymous benefactor. Nothing about it sounds the least bit typical of his role model. I figure I’ll needle him with it when I frame and hang Jasper’s caricature of him.
Which I may not for a while. Today at lunch, Claudius Lyon leaned on his elbow and held up a tired-looking lox drooping on the end of his fork.
“Arnie,” he said, “how long have you been working for me?”
Between the Dark and the Daylight
by Tom Piccirilli
© 2008 by Tom Piccirilli
A four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, Tom Piccirilli makes his EQMM debut here with a tale involving one of the most unusual scenarios for murder we’ve ever come across. He’s also the author of 17 novels. Of one of them, Headstones, the New York Times said: “beautiful and funny... a hardboiled hallucination... it gives you the distinctive shiver all good writing provides: the certainty that the writer’s own ghosts are in it.”
His face was so anguished it was writhing. That was Frank Bradley the first time I saw him, about sixty feet off the ground.
His feet twined above me while we both dangled from the safety-line ropes. His forlorn moans echoed across the front-range hills, and he’d bitten through his bottom lip. Blood misted on the wind and flew down against my forehead.
The balloon smacked broadside into a pine tree and shook the other two guys on the ropes loose. Neither of them screamed on their way down. One landed on his back, and the impact drove him three feet underground. The other smacked a boulder that shattered his pelvis, severed his spinal column, and saved his life. He pinwheeled off the rock and came to rest on his face along the dog walk, in front of an elderly woman clutching a Pomeranian.
I held on, just like Frank Bradley, who shrieked at me, “Don’t let go! My son, my boy! Johnny!”
I wasn’t letting go. You can make decisions in an instant that will forge the direction of the rest of your life. You can perform acts that will curse you with a hellish mark forever. You can sell your conscience by making a single mistake. You can do your best and still not make things right.
Spinning in the wind, I couldn’t see the kid in the basket, but I could hear him crying. He sounded terrified and very young. Maybe only six or seven. Too damn young to work the controls and hit whichever valve had to be pressed to lower the thing. I thought, What kind of father takes a child that young up in a hot-air balloon? And how the hell did the idiot get outside of it on the ropes with the kid still in the basket?
A lot goes through your mind when you’re six stories in the air and rising.
Despite his misery, I wanted to beat the hell out of Bradley — whose name I didn’t know then — all across the park meadow speeding by below us. Except I was still holding the line, and we were running out of acreage fast.
The balloon caromed into another stand of pine, and thick branches brutally scraped across Bradley’s back, breaking his grip. His fists opened and he flailed, slipping fifteen feet until he was side by side with me, holding the other rope. He screamed, “Don’t let go!”
I’d hold on as long as I could, but eventually I would have to let go. We’d both have to, and the idea scared the hell out of me. I had the rope in a death grip and didn’t want to wind up like the guy who’d be found planted half as deep as his casket would be. They were going to have to dig him up just to bury him again.
“There’s no way to do it!” I shouted.
“Don’t let go!”
“Listen—”
“Don’t let go!”
I wanted to shout, Stop saying that!
The balloon bounded from pine to pine, nothing slowing it. You’d think maybe the branches would’ve pierced the silk, but somehow — miraculously, really, if you could call it that — they didn’t. We had about another couple thousand feet of parkland forest to go and then there’d be nothing but empty fields until the first break of front-range stone ridges. After that, there were the canyon cliffs and brutal mountain winds working up for another fifteen miles until we’d be high in the Rockies.