Donny came bursting in, shouting, “I got a reproduction 1969 New York Times moon landing page. Debbie’s gonna think it’s real fun.” When he entered, Bertine caught sight of him and she froze, staring.
Donny came to a stop next to the photo of Pete, age probably twenty-seven.
For a second, Bertine looked back and forth between the photo and Donny.
Bertine tried to ask June something, but the words caught in her throat. It was something like “no motive.” June made a small whimpering sound. Then she turned in fear to Donald.
When she saw the expression on his face, she started to scream.
Geary Danihy
Jumping with Jim
From Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
I’m looking for a parking spot. I’m also laughing at myself. I feel like a character out of a novel written back when honor was still a believable, even compelling, motivation, and I’m not sure if I want to feel this way, or even if it’s safe to, given my line of work.
Yesterday, after I had my last lunch with Nora Davison, I went home, sat down, and just thought. What she had said, especially about the captain on the ship, kept coming back to me. All I could think of was a book I had read back in college called Lord Jim. It was mainly about a guy, an officer on a freighter, who tries to live down something he’s not even sure he actually did.
He thought the ship he was on was sinking. There were all these pilgrims on board, trying to get to Mecca, and one moment this guy Jim’s up on the ship and the next he’s down in the lifeboat with the rest of the crew, and he’s not sure how he got there. Did he jump? Did he fall over? Was he pushed? He just doesn’t know. Bad enough, but then the ship doesn’t sink. When the crew finally gets into port there’s their ship, already back and safe. Jim gets cashiered or something, and he goes off and tries to atone, to get his honor back. People did that back then.
I finally find a place to park my car. I lock it, then open the trunk and pull out the briefcase. I slam the trunk closed and head for the office complex where Mr. Bradley Davison works. As I walk, swinging the briefcase, I can feel the weight of the gun inside shift back and forth. I start to laugh at myself again.
I normally don’t handle maritals. Too messy, often too confusing. Insurance fraud I understand. People running away, not wanting to be found, as natural as the sun rising and setting. Industrial espionage? Hey, it’s the American way. But maritals, well, they just take too many zigs and zags; no one’s ever sure what’s happening or why, least of all me.
However, this one was different. This time the wife didn’t want to nail the husband, she wanted to protect him. Different. Enough so that after several moments of listening to some part of my brain scream, “Don’t do it. Don’t do it!” I agreed to take the case.
The fact that I really liked how Mrs. Bradley Davison looked and spoke, how her eyes seemed to absorb what I was saying, as if she truly believed I had something interesting or important to say, might have had something to do with it. Some women look at a man and calculate the quickest way to make him feel small. Other women make their men feel they can go one-on-one with Michael Jordan, and maybe even win. Later, when I thought about our first meeting, I realized she had stirred something in me that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I wasn’t sure exactly what that was, but it felt good.
After I agreed to take the case, I let her tell her story. It appeared Bradley Davison was being blackmailed, or at least that’s what Nora believed. She had found a briefcase hidden in the garage when she had gone looking for some paint thinner. She had opened the briefcase and discovered a lot of money: hundred-dollar bills, banded, neatly arranged.
“It frightened me at first, like I’d just found a dead rat, or something that had plague virus spread all over it,” she said, rubbing her hands against her skirt. “All that money in our garage. It was like I was an actress in this weird movie, standing there with the briefcase open, all that money just pulsating, and meanwhile in the background I can hear Rosie O’Donnell on our TV, making wisecracks. And I can hear the audience laughing. It was surreal.”
She didn’t ask me if I knew what surreal meant. I was liking her more and more.
She had put the briefcase back where she had found it, then debated the rest of the day whether to question her husband. Undecided, she had let it slide that evening. The following morning, after Bradley had left for work, she had gone back out to the garage. The briefcase was gone.
“I think he’s in trouble, Mr. Taylor, and I want you to help him. He’s been a good father, a good provider. I don’t want to see him hurt.”
She didn’t complete the thought. Nothing about him being a good husband, or about her loving him. I had a feeling Nora Davison had learned not to lie about things that were really important to her.
I’m sure Bradley Davison started out a good man. We all do. Where we end up, well, that used to be determined by character. These days, I’m not so sure what it’s determined by. Maybe the Fates, maybe the Dow Jones. Who knows.
Bradley Davison was a senior vice president of an international communications company, one of those high-profile, charm-the-investors-with-technology kind of companies that barged into second-, third-, and tenth-world nations and helped them upgrade their internal phone systems from the can-and-string level so drug dealers and arms traders could communicate more efficiently.
He traveled a lot, mostly to Eastern Europe, which meant that his mind had been broadened and that he’d probably also had a lot of opportunities to dip his paw into many of the lucrative polluted streams that flowed over there. Chaos always breeds opportunity, and more chaos.
Given the fact that we’re all now global villagers, people in my line of work need to know other people in the same line of work all over the world. We do things for each other, saving on travel expenses and the embarrassment of ordering the wrong dishes in foreign restaurants. I had contacts in South America, the Far East, Australia, and Europe; all very helpful, plus their phone numbers made my personal phone book look very sophisticated.
I placed a call to Frère Jacques (Jacques Chevalier, my very own Continental Op) and gave him the particulars on Mr. Bradley Davison and his company. Jacques was busy, but he said he would look into it as soon as he could. Merci, mon frère. Then I started the process of checking up on Mr. Davison back home in the good old U.S. of A., my stomping grounds.
Ah, sweet information. Today it’s all available, if you know the right people (most of them nerds you wouldn’t have spoken to when you were in high school) and are liberal with your checkbook (in this case, Nora Davison’s checkbook). It turned out that Mr. Davison had made three recent visits to his hank, where he had a safe-deposit box in (significant point) his name only. Each visit had been made (another significant point) on the fifteenth of the month. Today was the thirteenth (a significant possibility immediately arose).
More information. Mr. Davison’s phone book (or, most likely, his electronic organizer) was apparently even more sophisticated than mine. His phone records showed that he had a lot of acquaintances in Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, and a couple of the “-stans” that hadn’t even existed several years ago. These acquaintances apparently preferred being called in the morning, while they were chomping on goat cheese and dunking their peasant bread in cups of ox-blood tea, or else Bradley suffered from insomnia. He had made most of these calls from his home between two and four in the morning. I faxed the permanent phone numbers to Frère Jacques and then set out to get a better look at Mr. Bradley Davison.