“Ha! Maybe that mistake. I let Pacho shoot you, I no have to.” She wore a natural-colored raw silk tunic and black silk pajama pants. She looked just as arousing in that getup with a gun in her hand as she had last night in the kimono.
“You don’t have to shoot me, Bao-yu.” I put the receiver down easy on the desk, but didn’t break the connection. I stepped to my left and held my hands out to the sides. “Here’s what we can do. We’ll have some law out here. This morning, Pacho broke Karin’s neck. Then he shot Maldau. Now Pacho’s dead. The law’s not going to waste time on him.”
“I should go. Get away from here.”
“Nix. Here. Have one of Miss Karin’s cigarettes. Let’s talk.” I took out the pack of Old Golds. There were a couple of cigarettes left in it, and I shook them partway out in offering.
“Silly man. Those smokes loaded.”
I smiled at her, took one between my lips, and put the deck back in my pocket. She was letting the barrel of the Luger droop down and slightly away from my chest. “So, how did Pacho know I was out here last night with the Mercury?”
“Mr. Maldau call him.”
“Maldau was in Half Moon, Bao-yu. How would he know? Do you think Karin called and told him?”
“How I know? You ask her?”
“Didn’t have to. I know who called him. You were the only other party here last night, Bao-yu. You weren’t Karin’s maid. You were her keeper. You watched her for Maldau. You were his partner. This is good reefer, Bao-yu. Where’s it from?”
“Indochine.” She said it the French way. The Luger came up, but while we were chinning, I had moved into position. I sidearmed a cushion off the couch at her with my left. She tracked it with the tip of the Luger as if it was a clay pigeon, and she blasted it. I sprang at Bao-yu and I was on target, too. She went down on her back hard and her head bounced on the wooden floor.
I pinned her arms and straddled her, sitting on her stomach. My right arm was still weak, but I had good control of her gun hand with my left. She wiggled like a snake in a sauté pan of hot oil under my spread legs.
“Overby,” I yelled out, “are you still on? This is Frank Swiver.”
His voice came over the line like an old recording on a weak radio station. “Swiver. I thought I recognized that voice. Yeah, I stayed on.”
I yelled out the address. “I’ve got three homicides here. Mr. and Mrs. Agustin Maldau. They’re the owners of the house. Mr. Maldau was bringing in marijuana and selling it wholesale. Pacho Valdes of Oakland, one of his big customers, killed them both. Yan Bao-yu, Mrs. Maldau’s maid, shot Pacho.”
“You holding the maid?”
“She got away.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” said Overby, and I could hear him hang up.
I took the gun from her hand and sat up on my heels.
“You shoot Bao-yu now?”
“No. Too many have died.” It wasn’t my line; it was Hammett’s, but I liked it. “Besides, you saved my life.” I hung up the phone, went out to the living room and got the keys to the Merc off Maldau, and walked out to get it. Some fog was rolling in, but the wind had abated a bit. When I got back, there was no sign of Bao-yu. Maldau’s Jaguar was gone.
I carried Karin in and laid her beautiful cold body out at the foot of the stairs, which seemed to be as good a place as any. If they looked closely, they’d know she was killed somewhere else, no matter where I put the stiff. I was counting on them not looking too closely. I wiped the luger off and dropped it in the sand out back off the deck.
The weed was good. I took a brick of it from Pacho’s trunk and covered it with sand. I could come back and dig it up later. For now, I sat on the deck in the fog and listened to the Pacific Ocean wash in. There’d been a jug of Sardinian wine on the kitchen counter. I waited for the buzzers, drank from the bottle, and thought about the tall blonde who’d come to me about the hot boiler.
Snowman Stew
by James Powell
James Powell’s stories are always full of interesting references. In this one, his allusion to the silent movie version of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables comes from Montgomery’s diaries, which were published a few years ago. “It stayed with me,” he says, “because the Regent, the movie theater where she saw it, was one of my boyhood haunts.” Mr. Powell is the recipient of many honors for his stories, including a nomination for the 2010 Arthur Ellis Award for his story “Clowntown Pajamas.”
Mattie Claussin arrived at Toronto’s Union Station in late October, 1944, a plump, middle-aged woman in a stout overcoat with a striped fiberboard suitcase in each hand. The four pinch-faced little boys crowded around her wore imitation leather helmets with fur-lined earflaps buckled under their chins. All five looked like they’d come from a colder place.
With much to be done, she quickly found an office on Queen Street East near Sherbourne, a third-floor front over a notions and sundries shop. In this down-at-the-heels part of town many storefronts stood empty. One or two had windows draped in black with gypsy women sitting at the door inviting people in to have their fortunes told. Any color came from the metal streetcars on Queen and the poster-sized photographs of men with upper bodies, arms, and faces ravaged by venereal diseases placed in vacant shop windows by Saint Michael’s Hospital, which had a clinic treating such disorders. Well, the public expected shabby for people in her line of work.
Mattie’s office was up two narrow flights of stairs — “I wish you people lived in pleasanter climes,” the telephone installer had remarked — and down a dusty corridor to a door whose opaque glass would soon read “Claussin Private Investigations.”
As part of Mattie’s divorce settlement the North Pole had given her the annual naughty-or-nice contract, the job of separating the world’s good little boys and girls from the bad. Contrary to popular legend, these naughty-or-nicing elves did not wear uniforms with lug epaulettes so one could stand on the other’s shoulders to peer through keyholes. In fact, they dressed in children’s wear with headgear to hide their pointed ears. Nor were there enough of them to do the whole world. Much of the work was farmed out to private detectives and national police agencies like Scotland Yard and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
So Mattie and her loyal elf assistants, Nutkin, Hopkin, Timkin, and Bodkin, who’d followed her into exile, busied themselves arranging the files sent on ahead and working the phones with subcontractors all around the world.
It was seasonal work, of course. Afterwards Mattie’d have to find clients to support the detective agency. But she planned on keeping her elves in children’s clothes. “Stick close behind the guy you’re tailing,” she instructed them. “If he looks back over his shoulder, chances are he won’t look down, and if he does, he’ll see a kid.” For the places where children weren’t allowed she taught the elves the trench-coat-for-two trick. A large one like Timkin, who was nicknamed Tiny because he was big for an elf, would carry a wee one like Bodkin on his shoulders and they’d share a trench coat, Bodkin wearing a fedora ingeniously designed to hide his ear points.
The elves slept in the spare office filing cabinets and used the washroom down the hall. Fortunately, the odor of stale elf which the office quickly developed resembled dried lavender.
Mattie found herself a rooming house around the corner on Moss Park Crescent facing a bleak little park. She shared a gas stove in the second-floor hallway next to a window on which an orange crate had been nailed to serve as a common icebox in winter.
Walking home late that first night, Mattie saw a policeman on horseback beneath a streetlight on Sherbourne just above Queen. He wore a greatcoat against the weather and a tall hat of gray Persian lamb in place of the bobby helmet worn by Toronto’s constables on foot patrol. Sitting at the curb across from him, as if they were his flock and he their shepherd, were a dozen men who’d missed closing time or were too drunk to be admitted to the Salvation Army hostel up the street, the Sally Ann, as it was called. They sat quietly, arms or head or all three between their legs.