There were more cries, of terror mixed with pleasure.
Perhaps their hands had touched the body.
Skip made his way back to his house. It was worse than the police. Every child was going to tell his parents what he had found. Skip knew he had reached the end. He had seen a lot of men in business reach the end. He had known men who had jumped out of windows.
Skip went straight to his gun. He put the end in his mouth and fired. When the children came running back across the field to the road, Skip was dead.
Andy heard the shot from his room over the garage. He had also seen the children crossing the field, and heard Skip shouting. He understood what had happened.
He began walking toward the house. He would have to call the police. Andy decided to say that he didn’t know anything about the body in the scarecrow’s clothes. He had been away that weekend, after all.
1984
STEPHEN GREENLEAF
IRIS
Stephen Greenleaf (1942-) was born in Washington, D.C. He received a BA from Carleton College in 1964, and a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, three years later. While serving in the Army (1967-1969), he was admitted to the California bar. He practiced and taught law, but didn’t like the profession very much, and studied creative writing at the University of Iowa (where he also taught, from 1995 to 2000).
His first novel — sold “over the transom,” without his having publishing experience, connections, or an agent — was Grave Error (1979), which introduced his series hero, the lawyer turned private detective John Marshall Tanner. “Marsh” is an exceptionally moral figure, a middle-aged loner who is drawn into cases because he discerns an injustice being done and wants to correct it. The series, set in San Francisco, is noted for Greenleaf’s reasonable, understated way of tackling complex social issues through his protagonist. Among the controversial subjects with which Tanner becomes involved are radical politics, the misuse of technology, legal insanity, and surrogate motherhood. Greenleaf’s nonseries books, written with the same literary grace as the Tanner series, are The Ditto List (1985) and Impact (1989). Greenleaf was nominated for the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association’s Dilys Award, for Book Case (1991); for two Shamus Awards by the Private Eye Writers of America, for Flesh Wounds (1996) and Ellipsis (2000); and for an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, for Strawberry Sundae (1999). He won the Falcon Award for the best private eye novel published in Japan, for Book Case.
Although private eye stories seldom fall into the noir category, the following John Marshall Tanner tale is a rare and stunning exception. “Iris,” the author’s only short mystery story, was first published in the anthology The Eyes Have It (New York: Mysterious Press, 1984).
The buick trudged toward the summit, each step slower than the last, the automatic gearing slipping ever lower as the air thinned and the grade steepened and the trucks were rendered snails. At the top the road leveled, and the Buick spent a brief sigh of relief before coasting thankfully down the other side, atop the stiff gray strap that was Interstate 5. As it passed from Oregon to California the car seemed cheered. Its driver shared the mood, though only momentarily.
He blinked his eyes and shrugged his shoulders and twisted his head. He straightened his leg and shook it. He turned up the volume of the radio, causing a song to be sung more loudly than it merited. But the acid fog lay still behind his eyes, eating at them. As he approached a roadside rest area he decided to give both the Buick and himself a break.
During the previous week he had chased a wild goose in the shape of a rumor all the way to Seattle, with tantalizing stops in Eugene and Portland along the way. Eight hours earlier, when he had finally recognized the goose for what it was, he had headed home, hoping to make it in one day but realizing as he slowed for the rest area that he couldn’t reach San Francisco that evening without risking more than was sensible in the way of vehicular manslaughter.
He took the exit, dropped swiftly to the bank of the Klamath River, and pulled into a parking slot in the Randolph Collier safety rest area. After making use of the facilities, he pulled out his map and considered where to spend the night. Redding looked like the logical place, out of the mountains, at the head of the soporific valley that separated him from home. He was reviewing what he knew about Redding when a voice, aggressively gay and musical, greeted him from somewhere near the car. He glanced to his side, sat up straight, and rolled down the window. “Hi,” the thin voice said again.
“Hi.”
She was blond, her long straight tresses misbehaving in the wind that tumbled through the river canyon. Her narrow face was white and seamless, as though it lacked flesh, was only skull. Her eyes were blue and tardy. She wore a loose green blouse gathered at the neck and wrists’ and a long skirt of faded calico, fringed in white ruffles. Her boots were leather and well worn, their tops disappearing under her skirt the way the tops of the mountains at her back disappeared into a disk of cloud.
He pegged her for a hitchhiker, one who perpetually roams the roads and provokes either pity or disapproval in those who pass her by. He glanced around to see if she was fronting for a partner, but the only thing he saw besides the picnic and toilet facilities and travelers like himself was a large bundle resting atop a picnic table at the far end of the parking lot. Her worldly possessions, he guessed; her only aids to life. He looked at her again and considered whether he wanted to share some driving time and possibly a motel room with a girl who looked a little spacy and a little sexy and a lot heedless of the world that delivered him his living.
“My name’s Iris,” she said, wrapping her arms across her chest, shifting her weight from foot to foot, shivering in the autumn chill.
“Mine’s Marsh.”
“You look tired.” Her concern seemed genuine, his common symptoms for some reason alarming to her.
“I am,” he admitted.
“Been on the road long?”
“From Seattle.”
“How far is that about?” The question came immediately, as though she habitually erased her ignorance.
“Four hundred miles. Maybe a little more.”
She nodded as though the numbers made him wise. “I’ve been to Seattle.”
“Good.”
“I’ve been lots of places.”
“Good.”
She unwrapped her arms and placed them on the door and leaned toward him. Her musk was unadulterated. Her blouse dropped open to reveal breasts sharpened to twin points by the mountain air. “Where you headed, Marsh?”
“South.”
“L.A.?”
He shook his head. “San Francisco.”
“Good. Perfect.”
He expected it right then, the flirting pitch for a lift, but her request was slightly different. “Could you take something down there for me?”
He frowned and thought of the package on the picnic table. Drugs? “What?” he asked.
“I’ll show you in a sec. Do you think you could, though?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, I’m kind of on a tight schedule, and …”
She wasn’t listening. “It goes to …” She pulled a scrap of paper from the pocket of her skirt and uncrumpled it. “It goes to 95 Albosa Drive, in Hurley City. That’s near Frisco, isn’t it? Marvin said it was.”
He nodded. “But I don’t…”
She put up a hand. “Hold still. I’ll be right back.”
She skipped twice, her long skirt hopping high above her boots to show a shaft of gypsum thigh, then trotted to the picnic table and picked up the bundle. Halfway back to the car she proffered it like a prize soufflé.